We sort of knew already that the Obama administration is taking a harder line than it used to against potential Republican health care filibusters.

But if you want an official barometer, compare what President Obama’s two nominees for Health and Human Services secretary — Tom Daschle in January, and Kathleen Sebelius today — have said about using a procedural manuever to prevent filibusters.

The issue is whether the Democrats should use the budget reconciliation process to advance their health care overhaul plan later this year, which would make it possible to pass the legislation with 51 votes rather than needing 60. Republicans hate the idea (even though they’ve used the reconciliation process themselves), House Democrats love it, Senate Democratic centrists think it’s unwise, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won’t rule it out.

After President Obama's auto task force ousted General Motors Corp. Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner (before it approved writing the automaker another bailout check), questions began swirling about whether the administration was ready to administer frontier justice to some Wall Street and bank executives.

After all, Obama has routinely chastised them for excesses that amplified the financial crisis. And didn't the president just recently encourage Americans to vent over bonuses paid to executives of American International Group Inc., lax government regulators and lawmakers who turned a blind eye to greed?

The Pakistan aid bill President Obama endorsed in his new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy stalled out in the Senate last year, so it’s worth looking at what happened and whether the same thing could happen again this year.

The idea of the bill is pretty simple: triple the amount of non-military aid to Pakistan, to the tune of $1.5 billion a year over five years, to help build schools, roads, and clinics and make sure all U.S. assistance isn’t military aid. It will be introduced this year by Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry of Massachusetts and Republican Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, but last year’s version was sponsored by Lugar and then-Foreign Relations Chairman Joe Biden — one of their last collaborations before Biden became Obama’s vice president.

So there you have it: nice, bipartisan bill, seemingly no big problems with it. So why didn’t the Senate just pass it last year? Because Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma blocked it — and might try to do so again this year.

The Obama administration's much-touted commitment to science took a bit of a hit this week, when the Interior Department ruled on whether the yellow-billed loon deserves protection under the Endangered Species Act.

The Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday declared the bird a threatened or endangered species, essentially acknowledging that available studies suggest it's in danger of becoming extinct. But the agency also announced that it would indefinitely delay listing it as such so it could focus on higher-priority actions.

This didn't go over well with environmentalists, who had grown weary of similar "precluded" rulings issued by the Bush administration's Interior Department.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn’t hedging on her budget strategy in any way: She thinks preventing Senate filibusters is the only way to get a decent health care overhaul package later this year.

The issue is whether to include “reconciliation” instructions for health care in the budget blueprint that’s moving through Congress right now. If they’re included, Republicans can’t filibuster whatever health care package moves through Congress later on, and the Senate can pass it with a simple majority. Right now, the House version has the reconciliation instructions, and the Senate version doesn’t.

The House, as you may have gathered, hates Senate filibusters. They also hated it when Senate Democrats had to give concessions to moderate Republicans to win passage of the stimulus bill. So Pelosi, D-Calif., and other House Democratic leaders are hammering away at their arguments about why reconciliation is the key to a non-watered-down health care package.

After igniting a nearly 500-point surge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average with details of the Obama administration's bank rescue plan on Monday, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner roiled currency markets in quite a different way Wednesday with remarks about China's call to replace the dollar with a new global reserve currency.

During an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Geithner appeared receptive to a proposal from People's Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan to change the basic role of U.S. currency, saying, "as I understand his proposal, it's a proposal designed to increase the use of the IMF's special drawing rights. And we're actually quite open to that suggestion."

Oops.

President Obama likes to tell his audiences that “I did not run for President to pass on our problems to the next generation — I ran for President to solve them.” What he’s getting from the budget committees in Congress, though, is a budget that passes on problems to all the other committees.

That’s the bottom line after hearing Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad describe his approach to preserving Obama’s budget priorities as the deficit projections got worse and moderate Democrats started to balk at Obama’s health care and cap-and-trade proposals.

Conrad, mobbed by reporters after Obama’s meeting with Senate Democrats this afternoon, tried to explain how his budget blueprint doesn’t actually rule out Obama’s priorities. But the way he explained it, over and over, was that Congress “can” do lots of things under his budget. It might not, but it could.

The official White House line is that the draft budgets being considered by the House and Senate budget committees are pretty close to President Obama’s budget proposal, despite all the ways in which they’re clearly not.

It was in that spirit that Vice President Joe Biden, arriving at the Capitol a little while ago for lunch with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was full of optimism that the budget will turn out just fine.

“I am confident that with the leadership of the speaker and with Harry Reid, we’re going to get our budget with all the major elements intact,” a cheerful Biden said. “I feel very confident that we’re going to get a budget that is totally consistent with and reflective of all we’ve asked for in the budget we submitted to Congress.”

President Obama is starting to show a pattern in his dealings with Congress: propose a set of principles rather than a complete bill, defend those principles when they’re questioned, but keep them broad enough so he can still claim victory when Congress does some heavy rewriting.

That’s how he dealt with questions about his budget plan at Tuesday night’s press conference, as he braced for the likelihood that the budget committees — and especially Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad of North Dakota — will scale back his plans substantially.

The suspense at the moment is that, as CQ’s David Clarke and Paul M. Krawzak report, the Senate budget blueprint Conrad will unveil Wednesday won’t preserve Obama’s middle-class tax cuts or his reliance on a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions.

President Obama is said to be close to issuing a directive aimed at loosening the government's system for classifying national security information -- a sticky issue that puts his vows of openness and transparency on a collision course with homeland security efforts and intelligence gathering.

Earlier this month, the congressionally appointed Public Interest Declassification Board strongly urged Obama to address a backlog of 400 million pages of information housed at the National Archives and Records Administration that's inaccessible to the public.

The volume of classified records "produces extended delays, decisions that often fail to reflect a comprehensive understanding of an issue, and indiscriminate processing of records without regard for their historical significance," acting board chair Martin Faga wrote in a March 6 letter to Obama.

In another potential vetting embarassment for the Obama administration, White House urban policy czar Adolfo Carrión is being targeted in a probe of whether he received a cut-rate deal on the renovation of his home on City Island, N.Y.

Carrión paid $24,400 for a $50,000 project in which a contractor built a new porch and installed a balcony on his Victorian-style home, according to the New York Daily News. The newspaper reports that the Bronx district attorney is looking into reports that Carrión had yet to pay his architect.

President Obama is getting more specific about what he thinks of the House AIG bill, and sure enough, it seems that Obama the constitutional law professor doesn’t like what he sees.

Here’s how Obama sized up the bill on “60 Minutes” last night when Steve Kroft asked if he thought the legislation was constitutional:

“Well, I think that, as a general proposition, you don’t want to be passing laws that are just targeting a handful of individuals. You want to pass laws that have some broad applicability. And as a general proposition, I think you certainly don’t want to use the tax code to punish people. I think that you’ve got a pretty egregious situation here that people are understandably upset about. And so let’s see if there are ways of doing this that are both legal, that are constitutional, that uphold our basic principles of fairness, but don’t hamper us from getting the banking system back on track.”

In another gentle scolding of Congress, Obama also declared that “we can’t govern out of anger” and that “we don’t want to cut off our nose to spite our face.” Of course, legislating in the heat of the moment is what the House does best. It’s the Senate that generally has to walk things back a few steps.

That doesn’t settle the question of what kind of measure will get signed into law. But we can be pretty sure now that it won’t look like the House version.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner was oozing confidence Monday morning as he outlined more details about the Obama administration's plan to sweep toxic assets of bank balance sheets.

Not that the public actually saw his performance. The off-camera briefing for reporters filled in details of the government response Geithner first unveiled to a media horde in the Treasury Building's ornate Cash Room on Feb. 10 -- an appearance widely criticized for its lack of specificity that sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeting 382 points.

Before all of those angry crowds of AIG haters get too excited about taxing all of those obnoxious bonuses away, they might want to consider that President Obama hasn’t actually said he’d sign the House-passed bill into law.

And from the way he and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs are talking about it, it’s not clear that he will.

One of the most critical questions that has been raised about the House bill — and not just by Republicans — is whether Congress can single out the AIG bonuses for taxation without violating the Constitution. The issue is whether the approach would amount to a bill of attainder, which singles people out for punishment (though usually in the case of a crime).

Does a videotaped new year's greeting with an embedded foreign policy message constitute soft power? Smart power? Just good manners?

President Obama used the Persian new year of Nowruz, which falls today, to deliver a pleasant yet no-nonsense videotaped message to the government of Iran, reminding the regime of "the common humanity that binds us together" then urging leaders not embrace terror, arms or the capacity to destroy.

This much we know: David Plouffe’s mobilizing drive has generated some calls to urge Congress to support President Obama’s budget. Not every lawmaker has noticed an increase, but a few have.

Still unsettled, though, is whether it will make a difference with the lawmakers Obama most urgently needs to get on his side.

Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia — a prominent moderate from a swing state — said his office had received a noticeable increase in calls to support Obama’s budget. In fact, his staff said his office had received about 500 calls over the last two days, all of which closely followed the script suggested by Plouffe’s group, Organizing for America. During that time, they only got about 30 calls against Obama’s budget.

It wasn’t that long ago — less than three years ago, in fact — that the Democrats came to power as the party of oversight. The Republicans didn’t seem interested in it, especially when it concerned the Bush administration, and the Democrats campaigned as the party that would start asking tough questions again.

So it has been hugely entertaining this week, thanks to the AIG scandal, to watch the Republicans suddenly rediscover oversight. Especially as the Democrats un-discover it.

The Republicans have been calling for investigations into how, exactly, the language was slipped into the stimulus conference report declaring that no executive bonuses would be banned until after Feb. 11. After all, they say, no Republicans could have written it, since they weren’t in the room (except for the moderate Republicans who were negotiating on a narrow set of issues).

“Part of our job in Congress is to do oversight,” Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, told reporters yesterday. “We should be delving into what happened in that conference committee and who put that Feb. 11 date in.”

Facing an intensifying outcry over the bonuses paid to employees of American International Group Inc. and the way his administration is overseeing efforts to stabilize the finanicial system, President Obama will hold a prime-time news conference next Tuesday, March 24, at 8 p.m., administration officials said on Wednesday.

It will mark the president's second nationally televised go-round with members of White House press corps, following Obama's maiden bow on Feb. 9. During that session, the president's lengthy, multi-part answers only permitted him to take 13 questions from pre-selected reporters. Based on his remarks the past few days, expect him to sharply chastise Republicans calling for the scalp of Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and to portray the administration of George W. Bush and its Republican allies as the ones responsible for creating the financial mess.

Some daily tracking polls show Obama's favorable ratings slipping, but that his support holding in the high 50-low 60 percent range. A few well-time slaps at corporate greed and indifference should bump those numbers.But it's doubtful the news conference will draw the kind of ratings Obama is likely to get on Thursday, when he's scheduled to appear on the Tonight Show

Add one more to the list of Democratic factions President Obama will have to keep happy.

Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, Tom Carper of Delaware and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas have formed a group of 15 centrist Senate Democrats who will push for fiscal conservatism and a variety of centrist domestic policies. The Moderate Dems Working Group, which will meet every other Tuesday, will be able to form a strong enough bloc that they can cause trouble for Obama and the Democratic leadership if they think the policies are veering too far to the left.

Their list of issues includes the deficit, health care, climate change, education, and energy policy. In other words, any health care plan they think is too expensive — or a cap-and-trade plan they consider too costly — could be at risk of dissenting votes at a critical time.

The mass mobilization drive that President Obama’s team developed for his campaign — and is trying to convert into a powerful tool for pressuring Congress to pass his agenda — is about to be put to the test.

This morning, Organizing for America, the organizing drive created by former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, e-mailed a video of Obama asking his supporters to help him build support for his budget proposal. That’s no small task, considering that key Democrats are skeptical and Republicans are already uniting behind the talking point that it “taxes too much, spends too much, and borrows too much.” (Get ready to hear that phrase beat into the ground.)

Still, Obama is asking his supporters to canvass their neighborhoods this weekend to make his pitch for the budget, and follow up by calling their House members and senators to try to win their support.

Don’t get us wrong — President Obama is mad about those AIG bonuses. That’s why he asked Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner yesterday to “pursue every single legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole.”

But why, then, did the White House object to the executive compensation limits Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut slipped into the stimulus bill last month, worrying that they went too far and might even cause a “brain drain” of top talent?

For that matter, why did Congress completely strip out another measure from the stimulus bill — written by Republican Sen. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon — that would have forced financial institutions to repay bonuses over $100,000 if they got bailout money? (Dodd’s ban on bonuses doesn’t apply to any contracts written before Feb. 11.)

It seems that no matter how much outrage the White House wants us to believe Obama has now, it will never match the outrage spewing forth from the Hill. And that could make it more complicated for the administration and Congress to agree on what, if anything, they can actually do now that the AIG bonuses are being paid out.

The Obama administration may have angered evangelical Christians by overturning President Bush's curbs on embryonic stem cell research and prohibitions on sending aid to groups that support abortion overseas.

But that doesn't mean the White House is shutting out its adversaries.

Joshua DuBois, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, on Tuesday will host representatives of evangelical groups, including the Family Research Council and Concerned Women of America in an effort to find some common ground, White House officials confirmed on Monday.

President Obama's decision to create a Food Safety Working Group is heating up speculation in public health circles about the possibility of splitting off some of the Food and Drug Administration's functions and parceling out oversight and inspection duties to the Department of Agriculture or a new government agency.

The working group, which Obama announced over the weekend in his radio address, is to advise the president on how to update food safety laws and better coordinate agencies' response to incidents like the peanut butter scare. That presumably includes deciding whether to add resources to the FDA, an agency that's come under intense criticism in recent years for its slow response to health risks associated with popular painkillers like Vioxx, lax oversight over vitamins and dietary supplements and failure to head off outbreaks caused by contaminated lettuce, peppers and spinach.

One of the clauses in President Obama’s first signing statement suggests he might resist lawmakers on a provision aimed at protecting whistleblowers — a suggestion that is drawing fire from a top Senate Republican and prompting a closer look by a leading whistleblower defense group.

If Obama’s statement really is an indication that the administration might not comply with the whistleblower language in the omnibus appropriations bill, it would add a new level of irony to the signing statement he issued Wednesday. Not only did Obama criticize President George W. Bush for issuing such signing statements in the first place, but watchdog groups specifically criticized Bush for allegedly trying to kill other efforts to protect federal whistleblowers from retaliation.

In a letter to Obama released this afternoon, Republican Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa — who has kept administrations from both parties on their toes with his aggressive oversight efforts — blasted a line in the signing statement that singles out a provision blocking pay for any federal official who “interferes with or prohibits certain communications between Federal employees and Members of Congress.”

President Obama has given a sneak preview of how he’ll explain to centrist Democrats and Republicans why they should support his budget. So far, the entire pitch seems to be: Because I have the right priorities, and I won.

In an interview with regional reporters yesterday, Obama was asked how he’ll make sure moderate Democrats and Republicans don’t just pick the budget apart. Obama argued that the way his budget has been discussed so far “overstates the degree to which there’s some massive transformational shift.” But he also insisted that, particularly on his decision to let President George W. Bush’s tax cuts expire, he’s just doing what he was elected to do.

“I campaigned during the election and was not shy about it that we needed to restore some balance to our tax code,” since most workers’ wages stayed flat for the last several years while upper-income people became wealthier, Obama said.

It looks like the Obama administration is going to have to work harder to sell Congress on the $634 billion health care overhaul fund in his budget plan.

Not because Republicans aren’t buying it, but because centrist Democrats aren’t sold on the idea either.

This morning, at a hearing on the Obama budget, Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad of North Dakota said he was nervous about spending that kind of money (over 10 years) when so much health care spending is wasted already.

“This is an area that gives many of us great pause, because we are already spending one in every six dollars in this economy in health care,” he said. “Some of us have — have a real pause about the notion of putting substantially more money into the health care system when we’ve already got a bloated system.”

Naturally, that last quote has been happily e-mailed around by Republican operatives. But Conrad isn’t the only centrist Democrat who wonders about the wisdom of setting aside so much money for health care, especially after all the money Congress has already spent trying to goose the economy — and especially since President Obama says it’s only a “downpayment” on what a complete health care overhaul might cost.

Not long before he left office, President George W. Bush established a review board to study the way the government guards, studies and categorizes biological agents that could be used in a terrorist attack.

For much of his administration, Bush and homeland security officials said the threat of rogue scientists or al Qaeda sympathizers cooking up terror bugs like anthrax or plague was as great as that posed by a nuclear attack. The high-profile case of Bruce Ivins, the government researcher charged with masterminding the 2001 anthrax mailings, only heightened such concerns.

It seems that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t totally trust Vice President Joe Biden to watch how the stimulus dollars are spent.

On the very same morning that Biden is hosting a conference on the implementation of the stimulus — President Obama put him in charge of watching out for wasteful spending — McConnell wrote a letter asking the Government Accountability Office to “conduct regular audits to ensure that tax dollars are well spent.”

Wasn’t McConnell there at Obama’s speech to Congress last month, where the president declared that “nobody messes with Joe”? Even the Republicans stood and applauded. That’s because House Minority Leader John A. Boehner stood up first, signalling the Republican rank-and-file that it was okay to clap for Biden.

On March 9, President Obama ordered federal agencies to consult with the Justice Department before they rely on President George W. Bush's "signing statements" and outlined the circumstances under which he would issue such declarations, which assert limits on Congress' power over the executive branch.

It didn't take him long to find an occasion.

On Wednesday, Obama signed the fiscal 2009 omnibus (HR 1105) and promptly issued a list of grievances with the catchall spending law, citing provisions he said encroach on his power to conduct foreign affairs, direct military missions and make spending decisions.

Parceling out money from the economic stimulus law (PL 111-5) is a little like selling tickets for a Bruce Springsteen tour, at least insofar as coping with a computer-crashing volume of requests.

Nervous Obama administration officials already are making contingencies to make sure the billions of dollars flow quickly to all those shovel-ready projects, by fortifying the web site Grants.gov -- the central portal through which localities and individuals can find and apply for grants -- and making contingencies in case the site crashes.

A memo from White House Budget Director Peter R. Orszag says heightened interest in stimulus funds already is stressing the government's servers and is expected to increase application volume by 60 percent between April and August.

For someone who is aiming for headlines that he’s cracking down on earmarks, President Obama sure put a lot of caveats in his speech to soften the blow against his own party in Congress.

And if you’ve been listening to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talk about earmarks lately, you know exactly why.

Yes, Obama called for more changes to prevent the abuse of earmarks. But he also insisted there are plenty of legitimate ones. “Done right, earmarks have given legislators the opportunity to direct federal money to worthy projects that benefit people in their districts, and that’s why I’ve opposed their outright elimination,” Obama said.

And, bending over backwards to make congressional Democrats feel better, Obama pretty much called most Republicans hypocrites for criticizing the earmarks in the omnibus spending bill the Senate passed last night. “I also find it ironic that some of those who rail most loudly against this bill because of earmarks actually inserted earmarks of their own — and will tout them in their own states and their own districts,” Obama said.

Here’s one more sign that it was probably wishful thinking for the Obama administration to rely on revenues from a “cap and trade” system in the budget outline it released two weeks ago. House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, whose job is to know these kinds of things, told reporters today that it would be “a heavy lift” even among Democrats to get that proposal passed.

The budget outline assumes that Congress, with its newly expanded Democratic majorities, will pass the cap and trade legislation, which would limit carbon emissions by selling emissions credits to polluters. It predicts that the legislation will bring in more than $645 billion in revenues over the next 10 years, and relies heavily on them to make President Obama’s “Make Work Pay” tax credit permanent, as well as to pay for the development of “clean” energy technologies.

As Obama administration officials ponder how to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, they might want to take note of the prison's singular contributions to greening the planet.

Say again?

Thanks to a partnership between the Pentagon and the Energy Department, one-quarter of the base's electric supply is generated by a $12 million wind turbine project that's reduced sulfur dioxide emissions by an estimated 26 tons and nitrous oxide releases by another 15 tons.

The construction of four 260-foot turbines wasn't entirely driven by environmental considerations; Gitmo is unique among U.S. military bases in its refusal to take power and water from local sources -- a policy long directed at Fidel Castro's Cuba. But in the process, the base has provided a small but noteworthy model of environmental stewardship. The Energy Department says by reducing the need for diesel-generated power, the wind farm saves taxpayers $1.2 million in energy costs each year and only requires one part-time worker to check on the turbines each day.

Perhaps the administration will relocate a smoke-belching U.S. business to the island, then commoditize the emissions savings as part of a cap-and-trade system. Hat tip to grist.

Making another break with his immediate predecessor, President Obama on Monday issued a memorandum ordering federal departments to consult with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. before using Bush administration signing statements as a legal justification to bypass certain federal laws.

The statements are a prerogative presidents have used for more than two centuries to reserve the right to ignore provisions or implement them only in ways they believe are constitutional. Former President George W. Bush used them to object to more than 1,000 provisions of laws he enacted, according to a Congressional Research Service report, reasoning it was expedient to selectively interpret new laws.

There may be plenty of reasons for Senate Democrats’ surprising failure last night to finish up last year’s federal government funding needs. But among other things, the White House has been strangely disengaged from a debate that has now put the Democrats on the defensive over all of the earmarks in the omnibus spending bill.

Case in point: As of yesterday, Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, one of the leading critics of the earmarks in the bill, told me President Obama hadn’t called him to see what could be done about Coburn’s concerns. And neither had anyone else at the White House.

Why does that matter? Because Coburn is one of the few senators Obama worked with on significant issues during his short time in the Senate. Yes, their views are in direct conflict on most issues, but Obama did work with Coburn a lot on good-government issues — not just the 2006 law creating a database of federal spending, but contracting issues as well, such as cracking down on non-competitive contracts.

There may not be a wide range of senators who developed real working relationships with Obama, but Coburn is one of the ones who did. If there ever was an antagonist whom Obama should be able to just pick up the phone and call, Coburn should be one of them.

The financial crisis and security in Europe will dominate President Obama's first overseas trip, with stops planned over six days in England, France, Germany and the Czech Republic, the White House confirmed on Thursday.

The president, accompanied by first lady Michelle Obama, first touch down in London on March 31 for a major powwow with leaders of the G20 group of industrialized and emerging nations about the financial crisis. You'll recall that President-elect Obama sat out a similar gathering that former President George W. Bush organized in Washington in November, saying there was only one president at a time. In London, Obama's likely to pitch a new regulatory regime akin to Bretton Woods to avert future catastrophes -- assuming conference participants can agree on what caused the current crisis.

Afterward, Obama is to meet with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel and participate in observances in Strasbourg, France, and Kehl, Germany on April 3 and 4 during which NATO leaders will mark the 60th anniversary of the alliance. He continues on to Prague on April 4 and 5 to meet with Czech officials and with leaders of European Union member states and the European Commission for more talk about the financial crisis.

The president can expect rock star treatment from the locals. The last time Obama traveled through Europe, during last year's presidential campaign, he drew throngs and invited inevitable comparisons with John F. Kennedy. It's unclear, however, whether his personal popularity will dispel sentiment in some quarters that capitalism and overreliance on the dollar triggered the crisis.

President Obama just gave a rare acknowledgement that the health care overhaul isn’t going to be everything liberal Democrats hoped and dreamed of. In fact, he says, they might have to accept a bit of pain to bring costs down.

In the closing session of today’s health care summit at the White House, Obama told lawmakers and health care stakeholders that the “moral component” of the effort is important — noting that on any given day, three of the 10 letters he asks his staff to show him are about problems with health coverage. But he also issued this warning: “If we don’t address costs, I don’t care how heartfelt our efforts are, we will not get this done.”

Ah, yes. Costs. The one part of the health care system no one really wants to talk about.

For 90 minutes on Wednesday, a Brookings Institution panel of scholars and policy experts dissected the organizational chart of the Obama White House with a special focus on all the czars, senior advisers and envoys the administration has tending to policy problems at home and abroad. Finally, came the question, "What about Vice President Biden?"

Oh, yeah, him. Fact is Biden's portfolio is somewhat open-ended and lacking in definition. One day he's selling the already enacted stimlus plan (PL 111-5) in Miami, the next he's heading to Brussels to consult with NATO allies. Longtime Washington hands aren't sure whether the button-downed, disciplined president isn't comfortable giving his somewhat spontaneous and often verbose running mate a clear-cut role, or just plans to turn to him for quiet advice when the mood strikes.

How do you work with President Obama, try to give him more power, and needle him at the same time? If you’re John McCain, you can do all of these things without tripping yourself up in the slightest.

Today, McCain was up at the White House, lending his support to his former rival’s effort to change the federal government’s contracting process to squeeze out some of the cost overruns and fraud. In turn, Obama put in a good word for a bill McCain and House Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin are co-sponsoring to overhaul the way the government buys weapon systems, saying he wants to work with them to “get this done as soon as possible.”

And just before he headed to the White House, McCain held a press conference with Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold and Republican Rep. Paul Ryan about a bill they’re introducing to give Obama a form of the line-item veto.

It was probably only a matter of time, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tried to hang Rush Limbaugh around the necks of Senate Republicans today by suggesting they, too, want President Obama to fail.

“The Republicans have made a decision just to say no to everything. It’s very clear they’ve made a decision that they want President Obama to fail,” Reid told reporters this afternoon as he discussed GOP criticisms of the omnibus spending bill. “And this smoke that they’ve thrown up for this bill is only an effort to kill the bill, not to improve the bill. It’s simply to damage the bill.”

How do we know Reid was talking about Limbaugh? Read on: “I’m not going to name individual Republicans, but I think it’s very clear, as a result of the actions, since Obama was elected, that people want him to fail. Some have said so, others have just acted accordingly. And I think that as a result of what’s been going on in the press the last few days, we know that there’s a significant number of Republicans out there who want the president to fail.”

With President Obama busy filling out his health care team in time for Thursday's summit at the White House, speculation is building about the administration's still-to-be-named nominee to head the Food Drug Administration -- a high-profile post given the peanut butter scare, concern over the agency's oversight over vitamins and dietary supplements and assorted other safety issues. White House officials in late January said they hoped to fill the post quickly in order to restore the public's confidence.

One finalist is said to be Baltimore health commissioner Joshua Sharfstein, a former aide to current House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif. during Waxman's high-profile press to give the FDA authority to regulate tobacco products.

President Obama not only moved to fill a key Cabinet vacancy on Monday by selecting Kathleen Sebelius as his nominee for secretary of health and human services.

He also found someone to fill the somewhat vaguely defined post of "health czar," naming Clinton administration veteran Nancy-Ann DeParle to head the White House Office of Health Reform.

You'll recall both of these positions were supposed to be taken by ex-Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle before he withdrew his name from consideration amid questions about tax problems and potential conficts-of-interest.