Ezra Klein

Rather than a bunch of reconciliation links today, here's Mark Bittman demonstrating a smarter way to cook a Thanksgiving turkey:

And here's what to do if you need to cook a turkey and you only have an hour. Then, of course, there's carving to be done:

Have a good holiday. I'll be back on Monday.

In the past two days, there have been three stories suggesting ways Democrats might go back on the offensive in health-care reform.

The first was the McClatchy poll showing that the majority of voters want the bill left alone or expanded. That lends itself as much to a defensive strategy, in which Democrats fight repeal, as to an offensive strategy, where Democrats force Republicans to take difficult votes on the sort of populist, anti-insurer policies that were sacrificed to get Ben Nelson aboard the bill. Given that no legislation forcing insurers to spend 90 cents of every premium dollar on actual medical care is going to pass, you might see Democrats dare Republicans to vote against it -- and many other items like it.

Speaking of difficult votes, Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) has announced his intention to introduce six different bills repealing various consumer protections in the law. The package is called the Health Insurance Protects America -- Can't Repeal IT Act, which gets shortened to, yes, "HIPA-CRIT." Are Republicans really comfortable voting against the prohibition on discriminating against preexisting conditions, or the coverage for dependents up to age 26? As John Boehner has promised to allow open amendments in the House, and Democrats still control the Senate, you may see a lot of these targeted repeal bills emerging in the coming months, as Democrats realize that their Republican colleagues are split between a base that wants repeal no matter the cost and a public that doesn't.

That split is behind this survey from Public Policy Polling showing that Republican voters wants their congressmen to decline the health-care insurance they're offered as federal employees (Democrats, interestingly, disagree). This all started last week, when Rep. Andy Harris, an incoming Republican who supports health-care repeal, pronounced himself astonished that his federal benefits wouldn't kick in for a full month. Democrats quickly pounced on the gap between Harris's deep concern for his family's benefits and his disregard for the country's 50 million uninsured. Now it turns out that the GOP's voters agree with the Democrats on this one, and Republicans who ran as outsiders are going to find themselves in the unwelcome position of deciding whether to keep the mantle of the insurgent or seem like they're hypocritically accepting government benefits the moment they get to Washington.

None of these three are game-changers, of course. But Republicans are about to go from sniping on the sidelines while Democrats make the unpopular compromises necessary to get things done to getting sniped at from the sidelines while they make the unpopular compromises necessary to get things done -- or, given that the GOP doesn't control the presidency or the Senate, necessary to show they're base that they're trying. They're not going to enjoy it.

Kevin Drum doesn't buy Justin Fox's argument that multinationals and financial companies are driving corporate profits, and he's got a graph that makes his point:

It's strictly domestic profits (i.e., it doesn't include overseas profits from multinationals), and although it doesn't say so, I assume it shows pretax profits, so it's not driven by differences in how companies play games with the tax code. And what it shows is a pretty similar trajectory for both financial and nonfinancial profits: they're both up sharply, and they're both just slightly below their 2006 peaks. There's no breakdown in the chart between big and small nonfinancial companies, but there's also no special reason to think the numbers are wildly different.

The numbers Fox was using to show the decline of domestic, non-financial, corporate profits went all the way back to the '40s, and the peaks he pointed out were in the '40s, '50s and '60s. So though it might be true that the country is now more dependent on profits from financialized and internationalized firms, those firms are not necessarily recovering from the recession any quicker than more traditional firms.

The long-running trend of financialization and internationalization is, in that telling, interesting, but not a viable explanation for business's tense relationship with the Obama administration. For a stab at that, see the end of this post.

It's common enough to say our political system is polarized. But is our world polarized, too? I've been reading Farhad Manjoo's “True Enough,” and early in the book, he references an interesting Pew study suggesting that political polarization is leaking into non-political spheres -- and, perhaps more to the point, that this is a new phenomenon.

The Pew survey in question was taken in 2006, shortly before President Bush's State of the Union. It tested, among other things, voter perceptions of the economy. And what it found doesn't sound very surprising, but perhaps it should: "Public views of the economy are deeply split along political lines. Republicans generally see an economy that is thriving; 56% judge it as excellent or good. Democrats and independents see it much more negatively; just 28% of independents and 23% of Democrats say the economy is doing well."

You could assume that this reflects differences in the two groups. Republicans, after all, are somewhat richer than Democrats. But Pew looked at that, too. "Even among those with household incomes of at least $75,000, more than twice as many Republicans as Democrats express a positive view of the economy (65% vs. 31%)."

"Think about this for a minute," wrote Manjoo. "Here were people living in the same economy as one another, folks with a roughly equal likelihood of finding a job or seeing wealth in the housing market or hitting on hard times. They were swimming in the same pool -- but half of them thought the water was lovely, while the other half were dying of chill."

What caught my eye, however, is that it wasn't always thus. "During Clinton's first term, positive views of the economy rose gradually, and at about the same rate, among both Democrats and Republicans," Pew notes. So something actually changed.

There will be blood -- in 60 seconds, and 16 bits:

Super There Will Be Blood from Tomfoolery Pictures on Vimeo.

Peter Duffy has a convincing piece arguing that whatever Glenn Beck's faults, he's no Father Coughlin. But the point I'd make off of it is that for all the hand-wringing about today's polarized age with its awful talk radio personalities and its eccentric political movements, things used to be much, much worse:

Coughlin was a giant in the history of radio, both the prototypical televangelist (he raked in the bucks) and the first political loudmouth with a mass following: He drew 40 million listeners in the early thirties to his Sunday afternoon program, double the 20 million that Rush Limbaugh has claimed for his audience. But he didn’t just talk; he urged action — illegal and terrifying. By1938, increasingly unhinged and openly anti-Semitic, Coughlin was using his radio pulpit and his 200,000-circulation newspaper, Social Justice, to advocate for the creation of a violent hate group, the Christian Front. The group soon boasted members numbering in the thousands throughout the cities of Northeast. It has largely been forgotten that Coughlin’s “platoons,” as he called them, were responsible for a months-long campaign of low-level mayhem in New York City: They attacked Jews with fists and sometimes knives. They boycotted Jewish-owned businesses (guided by a “Christian index” of shopkeepers) and sometimes smashed their windows in the German fashion. This ugly episode culminated when 17 Coughlinites were arrested by the FBI in January 1940 and charged with planning acts of terrorism against Jewish individuals and institutions (and those deemed their allies).

Although he didn’t have a role in orchestrating the plan, Coughlin, after a brief hesitation, gave his full-throated support to the “Brooklyn Boys,” saying in a January 21,1940, broadcast that “I take my stand beside the Christian Fronters … [and] … reaffirm every word which I have said in advocating [the Front’s] formation.”

You still have crackpot theories about the Federal Reserve and unfortunate racial sentiments, of course. And it's hard to say what sort of lunacy would emerge if we actually fell into a 1930s-style Great Depression. But for now, our disputes have mostly been confined to the realm of peaceful politics.

As mentioned in Wonkbook today, the news stories saying that corporate profits have set a new record use nominal dollars -- that is to say, they don't adjust for inflation. So as the Harvard Business Review's Justin Fox says, using corporate profits as a share of the economy is probably a better measure. Here's what that looks like:

"The third-quarter 2010 profit share, at 9.46%, is slightly below the peak of 9.58% in the third-quarter of 2006," writes Fox. "But it's still quite high by historical standards." Compare that to employment, or wages, which are not anywhere near their all-time highs.

So why are businesses so annoyed? Well, not all corporations are pulling in near-record profits. "Pre-tax domestic nonfinancial corporate profits" -- that is to say, corporations that sell stuff here and that don't make their money from Wall Street -- are much further from their all-time high. Their profits account for about 7 percent of national income, which is well below their past high of 15 percent. Fox concludes:

So the reason that corporate profits are near their all-time highs would appear to be that financial corporations (mainly big financial corporations) and multinationals are making lots of money and paying less of it out in taxes. Hmmmm.

The corporate profit picture would seem to mirror what's been going on in income distribution for individuals for the past few decades. The money is increasingly going to a select group at the very top of the economic food chain, who are able to reap the rewards of global growth, play the financial system astutely, and avoid taxes. You can spin this in a moderately positive way: These are very dynamic economic times, and the rewards are going to those companies and individuals who position themselves to take advantage of this dynamism. But there are an awful lot of negative ways you can spin it, too.

Between 2001 and 2008, the public overwhelmingly believed that it was the federal government's "responsibility" to guarantee all Americans health-care insurance. Then, in 2009 and 2010, President Obama and the Democrats tried to make it the federal government's responsibility. You can guess what happened next:

Sometimes, the public gets mad at Washington because politicians never do what they say they're going to do. And other times, the public gets mad at Washington because politicians do exactly what they say they're going to do. From the perspective of the politicians, it must be quite confusing.

I've seen a lot of commentary arguing over whether GM's IPO shows the auto rescue was "really" a success or a failure. Perhaps predictably, opinions tend to split on partisan lines.

Part of the problem here is that "success" and "failure" are fuzzy concepts. Did we succeed in saving the companies? We did, at least for now. Did we succeed in saving most of the jobs? We did. Did the government manage to resist the temptation to take over the entities and make them state-run corporations? Absolutely -- in fact, the government got out as quickly as possible. Those are three pretty significant victories, and it would be good for Glen Beck to spend some real time reflecting on the implications of the third.

But did we turn America's auto industry into a newly competitive behemoth? That's harder, and the real answer is that we just won't know for awhile. But if you're looking to keep score, Business Week asked a bunch of "auto industry insiders, investors, and analysts" what they're looking to see and came up with six broad measures we can use to judge GM's health going forward. Among other things, the company needs to do a lot better in Europe.

Photo credit: AP Photo/Mark Lennihan.

If you were watching cable news yesterday, you probably caught wind of a poll showing President Obama running a point behind Mitt Romney in early-2012 match-ups. Ignore it. The forecast that matters -- both political and substantively -- is the one that came out of the Federal Reserve yesterday. The Central Bank is lowering its expectation for growth and employment in 2012. They now expect unemployment to remain above 9 percent in 2011, and above 8 percent in 2012.

It's not impossible that Obama could win with those numbers, but it's not a sure thing, either. The most common comparison for Obama is Ronald Reagan. At this point in the cycle, both presidents had approval ratings in the low-40s, and both presidents had just suffered large midterm defeats. But the recession facing Reagan was the product of tight Fed policy meant to break stagflation When the Fed loosened the reins, the economy roared back to life. By November of 1984, the jobless rate had fallen from a high of 10.8 percent down to 7.2 percent. If Obama gets those numbers, Romney doesn't stand a chance. But if the Fed's projection proves optimistic -- and that's already happened once this year -- the White House could be facing a serious uphill climb.

Top Stories

The Fed is lowering its economic expectations for 2011, reports Neil Irwin: "Top Federal Reserve officials project that the unemployment rate, now 9.6 percent, will fall only to about 9 percent at the end of 2011 and about 8 percent when the next presidential election arrives, in late 2012. The central bankers had envisioned a more rapid decline in joblessness in their previous forecasts, prepared in June. The sober economic forecast comes despite signs that the recovery is picking up slightly. The Commerce Department said Tuesday that gross domestic product rose at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the three months ending in September, not 2 percent as earlier estimated. And there have been solid readings in recent weeks on job creation, manufacturing and retail."

Corporate profits are at an all-time high, report Luca di Leo and Jeffrey Sparshott: "U.S. companies' profits rose in the third quarter to an annual rate of $1.66 trillion, the highest on record, reflecting the divergence between the recovery for the corporate sector and American households...The corporate-profit figures, which aren't adjusted for inflation, accompanied the government's latest estimate for overall economic growth in the third quarter. The U.S. economy expanded at a faster pace than previously thought during the quarter, in part because of stronger consumer spending and exports. But growth remained too weak to cut the high unemployment rate."

Matthew Yglesias notes that those numbers aren't adjusted for inflation, and if you do make the adjustment, corporate profits aren't at an all-time high: http://bit.ly/f6uhGV

Most voters want to keep or expand health care reform, reports Steven Thomma: "The post-election survey showed that 51 percent of registered voters want to keep the law or change it to do more, while 44 percent want to change it to do less or repeal it altogether. Driving support for the law: Voters by margins of 2-1 or greater want to keep some of its best-known benefits, such as barring insurers from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions. One thing they don't like: the mandate that everyone must buy insurance."

A poll suggests voters want anti-health care reform Congressmen to decline health benefits: http://politi.co/g5pgrL

The Obama administration is working on replacing Larry Summers, report Jackie Calmes and Michael Shear: "Mr. Obama has interviewed several people, including Roger Altman, an investment banker and a former deputy Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. Also under consideration is Gene Sperling, who was a National Economic Council director under President Bill Clinton and is now an adviser at the Treasury Department. But officials said the president would interview other people for the job and was not likely to make a choice until next month."

Got tips, additions, or comments? E-mail me.

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Indie video interlude: Sufjan Stevens' "Too Much".

Still to come: Two-thirds of TARP money now repaid; GOP splits on ethanol; for-profit colleges are posting poor graduation rates; Dem group looks to use Citizens United to its advantage; and the most stylish squirrel you've ever seen.

Recap: Rapiscan may yet help air travel; Rick Perry wants more uninsured Texans; and your health care costs too much -- in charts.

Elsewhere:

1) South Park takes on foodies.

2) Are Android phones really more open than iPhones?

3) The creator of the Web on its most pressing threats.

4) I'll be talking Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Countdown about 8:20 Eastern.

Recipes of the day: Vegetarian Thanksgiving ideas.

There are a lot of complicated explanations for why American health-care costs so much, but there are also some simple ones. Chief among them is "we pay too much." And I don't mean in general. I mean specifically. Mountains of research show that for every piece of care you might name -- a drug, a doctor visit, a diagnostic -- you'll pay far more in the United States than in other countries. That's why seniors head to Canada to buy drugs made in the United States. In Canada, the government negotiates one low price. In America, insurers with much less bargaining power negotiate many higher prices.

But it's one thing to say that that's true. It's another thing to see it. Here are four graphs from the International Federation of Health Plans tracking what people in other countries pay for various medical services and items, and what we pay. Note that the American number manifests as a range, while the others don't: That's because in other countries, the government gets one price, while in our country, an array of insurers get many different prices.

The most positive spin you can give this data is that we're paying too subsidize innovation for everyone, and though that's not ideal, it's better than that innovation not happening. The less positive spin is that we're just getting ripped off.

Many more charts here. For an analytical take -- and a good look at the political economy of the problem -- read Alec MacGillis's October article on the subject.

I know this is just supposed to be a funny gotcha, but my strong hunch is that the post-9/11 security apparatus surrounding the president of the United States of America and his family is vastly more annoying and disruptive than anything that happens when I go to an airport.

One of the weirder stories in the health-care sphere right now is that a handful of conservative states are threatening to pull out of Medicaid and instead free ride on the Affordable Care Act. I don't think there's much chance that this'll happen, largely for the reasons that Edwin Park outlines here: First, it's not actually clear that states can free ride on the new health-care law, and second, doing so would mean losing an enormous amount of federal funds.

Consider the case of Texas, which with 25 percent uninsured, leads the nation in not providing for its residents. If the state pulls out of Medicaid, as Gov. Rick Perry (R) is suggesting, that would put it at 40 percent uninsured, as Medicaid covers 15 percent of the state. Texas might try some other form of coverage, but it will have lost hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funding. You can occasionally do less with more, but when you have a lot less, you generally just do less. Whatever the state tried next would cover fewer people with less-comprehensive insurance, and it's a safe bet that the rate of uninsured would ultimately settle above 30 percent. Some legacy.

Conversely, if Perry does nothing, the federal government is going to come in and pick up most of the cost of a massive coverage expansion. Texas, in fact, will be one of the biggest winners from health-care reform, as its huge pool of uninsured residents means the state will get an uncommonly large amount of subsidies to bring that down to manageable levels. Texas "can expect to see Medicaid enrollment rise by 46 percent while state spending on Medicaid rises by about 3 percent.” Pretty good deal.

And it's not that different for other states. The new Medicaid costs are being almost entirely borne by the federal government. As Park says, the Feds will pick up "96 percent of the cost over the next ten years," which means "the expansion will add just 1.25 percent to what states were already projected to spend on Medicaid over that period in the absence of health reform."

There is nothing that states can do that would cover residents at a lower cost to their budgets than simply letting the new health-care law take effect. Any governor that is even vaguely interested in covering the uninsured should be celebrating the federal government's willingness to pick up 96 percent of the tab. Of course, as these trial balloons over Medicaid show, plenty of governors don't care about that at all. You'd think Perry, who runs a state where one out of four residents don't have health insurance, would be obsessed with figuring out ways to cover more Texans. Instead, he's leading the way in concocting schemes to cover fewer of them.

If you've not downloaded the new album from mash-up wizard Girl Talk, you really should. It's free, and it's awesome. And for added fun, head here to listen to the album while seeing the component songs visualized on your screen.

McClatchy's new poll testing attitudes toward health-care repeal is just more evidence that repeal, like reform itself, is going to get a lot harder when its advocates are forced to get more specific:

For now, Republicans have been talking about which policies to repeal. They want the 1099 tax gone, or the individual mandate reversed. But when they actually have to repeal anything, they're going to have to talk about what functions they want repealed. Repeal the individual mandate, for instance, and you make it possible for the irresponsible to freeload on the system, and impossible for the responsible to get insurance at low rates. You also make it impossible to end discrimination based on preexisting conditions. And do Americans really want that repealed?

Poll after poll shows that they don't, of course. And Republicans know those polling results as well as Democrats do. That's why Republicans have fallen back to purposefully misleading descriptions of their policy on preexisting conditions. But though that sort of thing works when you're writing a campaign pledge, it won't be enough if Republicans actually force the political system to focus on what they're trying to do.

I don't know enough about the situation in Ireland to offer any particularly smart thoughts. But these folks do. First up, the Economist's Charlemagne argues that Ireland tipped over the edge when Europe suggested that bondholders should lose money during bailouts:

On October 29th, leaders of the European Union agreed that they should re-open the treaties “to establish a permanent crisis mechanism” that would include “the role of the private sector”. The markets took this as a sign that bond-holders would be made to pay for future bailouts of troubled euro-zone members, and duly dumped the debt of the most exposed countries, notably Ireland and Portugal.

That mechanism, Charlemagne notes, still isn't in place. That leaves the question of what to do now -- and that's a hard one to answer. Ireland can walk away from some of its debt, though the cost would be a long period in which few would loan to the country. At least, that's what most think. Others note the examples of Russia and Argentina, both of which defaulted, and both of which were forgiven by the markets. The New York Times has a nice distillation of those arguments here.

Tyler Cowen rounds up some theories as to what went awry in Ireland, and Jon Chait has some fun pulling together conservatives who thought Ireland an inspiring free-market success story when it was on the rise ("rapid growth has been driven by increases in economic freedom") but are managing to blame big government now that it's in freefall ("It’s only in the last year that they finally stepped on the brakes and began to rein in the burden of government spending. But that may be a case of too little, too late.").

Lisa O'Carroll's Ireland business blog has lots of information, and it looks like Ireland's political system is cracking under the stress. Meanwhile, Europe might get worse before it gets better:

Call it the shortest relief rally on record. Anyone expecting the markets to rebound on news of the Irish bail-out would have been sorely disappointed on Monday.

Shares, bond yields and the euro all responded positively initially but after only a few hours gave up their early gains. Markets instead remain haunted by the fear of contagion: that Europe’s debt crisis could spread from the relatively small, so-called peripheral countries of Greece, Ireland and Portugal to the bigger names of Spain and Italy.

Chris Beam describes the coming "debate" over lifting the debt ceiling:

The looming "debate" over whether to raise the debt ceiling beyond $14.3 trillion is not a debate in the typical sense, in which one side argues for the wisdom of a policy and the other argues against it. Rather, it's a debate like that between a hostage negotiator and a suicide bomber. Unless the negotiator agrees to the bomber's demands, the bomber will take out the negotiator and everyone else with him.

To put this in simpler terms, the need to lift the debt ceiling gives the GOP leverage. To get a negotiated settlement here, Democrats need leverage of their own. They have that in the Bush tax cuts, which the Republicans desperately want to extend, and which clearly increase the deficit and so could be reasonably paired with a vote on the debt ceiling. We can have less debt and higher taxes or more debt and lower taxes, but not both.

If Democrats extend the Bush tax cuts without lifting the debt ceiling, however, their leverage vanishes and they're at the GOP's mercy when February -- and the debt vote -- rolls around.

This comes from the Strengthen Social Security Campaign, and it lists the impact of all of the various deficit-reduction plans on a medium-income Social Security beneficiary (click for a larger version):

It's worth noting that the "current law" line is looking at what Social Security promises to pay out under current law, not what it can afford to pay out under current law.

Philip Stephens:

At first, the vigour with which Dublin wielded the spending axe won plaudits from bond markets. But the deflationary impact of the cuts has since seen the deficit widen.

Kevin Drum has an anti-anti-TSA rant, of which I think this is the most persuasive paragraph:

Maybe you think that even if TSA's procedures are slightly useful, they aren't useful enough to justify all the intrusion. Instead, we should just accept the risk of an occasional plane falling out of the sky. Think again: if a plane comes down, you can just kiss your civil liberties goodbye. Today's TSA procedures will seem positively genial compared to what takes their place with the full and eager support of the American public. Given that reality, if you're really worried about civil liberties you should welcome nearly anything legal that protects air travel from explosives, even the things that are really annoying and only modestly useful.

There's really something to this, and it's why, with apologies to Homer Simpson, Rapiscan might be the cause of, and solution to, all of air travel's problems.

The bureaucratic incentives of airport security all point in one direction: toward more of it. You can't be the director of homeland security who decreed that passengers could keep their sneakers on and then watched a terrorist finally get a shoe bomb to work at 33,000 feet. You can't be the director of homeland security who knows that three terrorists tried to mix a liquid explosive on a flight and then did nothing to stop them from trying it again. It's bad to be blamed for annoyances. It's much worse to be blamed for deaths. And the voters can't credibly promise to hold the security state blameless for an actual terrorist attack. So the security state, and the people who run it, won't take the chance.

The answer to this? Rapiscan, maybe. Annie Lowrey* visited their headquarters the other day, and their basic message was that this is still the paleolithic period for security scanning. As the technology gets better, so will air travel. The company is working on shoe scanners that will let you keep your shoes on, that can detect whether your liquids are benign, and that allow for constant flow rather than the stop-and-start rhythm of current units. This won't make the security state less invasive, of course. But it might make it less of a hassle. And this will depress my civil libertarian friends, but I think it's the hassle that people are really objecting to here.

Photo credit: Charles Rex Arbogast/AP.

One of the less-noticed -- but more popular -- parts of health-care reform was the promise to force insurers to spend 80 percent every premium dollar on actual health-care services. Yesterday, that promise became policy, as the administration issued the actual regulations making it so. But those regulations have some catches: In the individual insurance market, for instance, states can ask that the rule be waived if they believe it will cause insurers in that market to stop offering their products.

There are a shocking number of these rulemaking processes underway right now. The financial-regulation bill, for instance, needs regulators to write 243 rules and conduct 67 studies. As you might imagine, this has been a bonanza for lobbyists who work on such matters, with the number being hired to influence the SEC rising by more than 40 percent this year.

The conventional wisdom is that Washington isn't going to get much done for the foreseeable future. But by "Washington,' the CW usually means "Congress." The next year will be an incredibly busy one for the regulatory agencies as they scramble to define and implement health-care reform, financial regulation, and more. And though many are watching the Republicans in Congress and the conservatives on the Supreme Court to see what the ultimate fate of these bills will be, the decisions the regulators make in the coming months will probably end up being more decisive to the success -- or failure -- of the Obama White House's signature achievements.

Top Stories

Insurers will have to spend 80 percent of every premium dollar on patient care, reports Amy Goldstein: "The Obama administration issued rules on Monday defining a promise to consumers in the new federal health-care law that insurers will spend at least $4 out of $5 they collect in premiums on medical services and other efforts to improve patients' health. The rules say that, starting in January, insurers must reveal far more information than required in the past about how they allot their money. The rule is intended to curb the proportion of their income that insurers devote to administrative costs, their executives' salaries and profits...The regulation is the kind of important fine print that will determine how the sprawling law enacted by Congress in March will play out in practice."

Lobbying around FinReg is picking up, reports Amanda Becker: "Work has begun on drafting 243 rules and on 67 separate studies by the likes of the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commerce Department, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and other regulatory agencies, according to one estimate by the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell...During the third quarter of this year, the number of corporations, associations and other interests that hired lobbyists to influence the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act within the SEC and the CFTC rose by 45 and 22 percent respectively over those that hired such representation during the previous quarter, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis of lobbying disclosure forms."

Two of the Obama administration's top economic advisors are leaving, reports Damian Paletta: "White House National Economic Committee Deputy Director Diana Farrell and Treasury Department Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions Michael Barr are both planning to leave within weeks, people familiar with the matter said... Ms. Farrell had a broad range of responsibilities within the White House. She was part of the White House's auto task force that worked on the restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler, and played a key role in the administration's efforts to address the housing crisis. Ms. Farrell and Mr. Barr played central roles early in the Obama administration by mapping out the new financial regulations Mr. Obama proposed in June 2009."

The Fed is trying political messaging tactics to defend quantitative easing, reports Sewell Chan: "Caught off guard by accusations from Congressional Republicans, Sarah Palin, Tea Party activists and conservative economists, the central bank and its chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, are pushing back, making their case on substantive grounds but also haltingly adopting the tactics of Washington battle, like strategically placed interviews, behind-the-scenes assuaging of opponents and reaching out to potential allies on Wall Street and Capitol Hill...Fed officials concede that they left an opening for their detractors by timing their latest move -- the decision to resume the asset-purchase strategy known as quantitative easing -- for the day after the midterm elections."

Brit-pop cover interlude: Gorillaz plays "Crystalised" by The xx.

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Still to come: Republicans are targeting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; a new report suggests NAFTA hurt workers; the Obama administration has announced regulations restricting how insurers spend premiums; new reports indicate the federal government was unprepared for the Gulf oil spill; and a piglet and baby tiger cuddling.

Sorry for the slow blogging today. Bunch of other projects and meetings all piled up. More normal schedule will resume tomorrow.

Ta-Nehisi Coates sums up the underlying reality behind the TSA hubbub in a single sentence:

It's worth remembering that the goal of the terrorist is to terrorize, and from that perspective, they've been really successful.

Google chats with Rainn Wilson, better know as the Office's Dwight Schrute: