Usually, when Max Baucus tries to craft a grand bargain, oversized legislation starts by getting progressively worse, at which point the legislation finally dies. But he has finally succeeded in getting a grand bargain, with a deal to extend Trade Adjustment Assistance in exchange for votes on the Korea, Colombia, and Panama trade deals. Baucus [...]

Update: As Dday corrects me, both these lessons in negotiation describe the same confrontation that took place on June 2. DDay linked to this story describing Henry Waxman confronting President Obama because he had given the Republicans the impression he would cave on debt negotiations. One Democrat who was there said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) [...]

The website for the US Trade Representative still has a link to the inadequate–but nevertheless improved–labor protections that the US had demanded from Colombia to support a trade deal with the country. But according to Sander Levin–who just announced his opposition to the deal–Obama has agreed to a Republican demand to drop such protections from [...]

Sorry to be AWOL for most of Netroots Nation. bmaz says I’ve been offline for the last few days because we’ve been drunk and busy, but it seems to me I’ve just been incredibly busy for five days straight. There were a lot of conversations, but the overall theme seemed like a desperate conversation on [...]

The Senate Armed Services Committee is trying to investigate how allegedly counterfeit parts get into the military supply chain. But China won’t give visas–or promise freedom of movement without minders–to its investigators. Two key US senators on Tuesday accused China of hampering a congressional probe into how counterfeit electronics end up in the US military [...]

Usually, the apparent purpose of hacks is fairly banal. To steal defense secrets. To profit organized crime. To embarrass a political opponent. But a reported sophisticated hack on the IMF is far more intriguing. Because the fund has been at the center of economic bailout programs for Portugal, Greece and Ireland — and possesses sensitive [...]

Chris Savage (Eclectablog) continues to track what the Emergency Financial Managers have been doing around Michigan. In new developments, the EFM for Pontiac MI, Michael Stampfler, broke the Police Dispatcher’s union contract, dissolved the Planning Commission, fired the water and wastewater department, and outsourced the latter function to a private company, United Water Services. Now, [...]

DDay already noted Peter Diamond’s op-ed withdrawing his nomination as a Fed Governor. But I wanted to emphasize one thing: It is time for me to withdraw, as I plan to inform the White House. It appears that this very public complaint was how Diamond informed the White House he was withdrawing–not a discrete phone [...]

I was going to write about this story–about a confrontation between Henry Waxman and Barack Obama over the latter’s ineffective negotiating strategy–yesterday. The president has heard the complaint before. Democrats have accused Obama repeatedly of ceding too much ground to the GOP, especially on health care and the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for [...]

Jared Bernstein (whose blog I still recommend) has responded to his 2-day PEPCO power outage by posting the crummy infrastructure report card the US got in 2009: Check out the 2009 Report Card from the American Society of Civil Engineers:Aviation D Bridges C Dams D Drinking Water D- Energy D+ Hazardous Waste D Inland Waterways D- [...]