The health care overhaul effort may be sputtering in key Senate and House committees, but White House senior adviser David Axelrod told House Democrats today to focus how far Congress has already come — and on the potential for a “historic” breakthrough after the August recess to pass badly needed fixes to the health care system.

After a two-hour meeting with the House Democratic caucus, Axelrod played down the fights in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where the conservative Blue Dogs have forced changes to the bill and some liberal Democrats think their leaders have given away too much. Instead, he said the White House and congressional Democrats will be able to deliver the same message over the recess — uniting over the need to end insurance practices such as denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and limiting how much they’ll pay to cover serious illnesses.

“We’re very close to doing something historic that will give stability and security to people who have health insurance now as well as people who don’t,” Axelrod said. “And we need to go out and make an aggressive case over August. And we just talked that through.”

The Blue Dogs aren’t the only House Democrats who can derail a health care bill. This afternoon, several members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus held a press conference to complain about all the concessions Democrats have made to the Blue Dogs — and threatened to vote against the House bill if it doesn’t have a stronger government-run health plan option.

“Many of us favor a single-payer system. We have compromised,” caucus co-chair Lynn Woolsey of California said to applause from health care activists. “We can compromise no more.”

The caucus has released a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and the chairmen of the three House health care committees — signed by 57 liberal House Democrats — threatening to vote against a bill that includes the changes to the “public option” that Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry A. Waxman of California made to win the support of four of his committee’s seven Blue Dogs.

President Obama plans to huddle with his Cabinet and top advisers on Friday and Saturday to review lessons learned from his first six months in office. There's bound to be some gnashing of teeth over the pace of the health care overhaul, and also some satisfaction over signs the economy is staggering back.

But based on his remarks at Wednesday's town halls in Raleigh, N.C. and Bristol, Va., don't expect a major recalibration of the administration's message.

Obama continued to strenuously defend economic relief efforts launched in the aftermath of last fall's financial crisis and lay some blame at the feet of former President George W. Bush. And he eagerly portrayed himself as a responsible steward of taxpayers' money, to deflect persistent Republican charges that he's incapable of controlling federal spending.

Just weeks ago, President Obama characterized a public insurance option as an almost essential component of any health care overhaul and an important tool with which to discipline insurance companies. Nevermind that a government-sponsored alternative to private health plans was already emerging as a stumbling block to serious health care overhaul. The president, at a June 23 White House press conference, said an government-run plan that isn't profit-driven, provides quality care and keeps down administrative costs simply "makes sense."

"The notion that all these insurance companies who say they're giving consumers the best possible deal, if they can't compete against a public plan as one option, with consumers making the decision what's the best deal, that defies logic, which is why I think you've seen in the polling data overwhelming support for a public plan," Obama said.

Fast forward to today. With health care talks bogged down in the House and Senate, the administration appears more receptive to fallbacks to the government-run option, including a consumer-owned "co-op" health plan that's being discussed in the Senate Finance Committee. But aides don't appear to be in a rush to learn all the messy details.

Somehow, the House got 158 Republicans — including nearly all members of the leadership — to vote for a resolution last night that declares President Obama was born in Hawaii. But it appears that the resolution wasn’t intentionally aimed at the fringe movement plaguing the Republican Party these days: the people who insist Obama isn’t actually a citizen of the United States.

Instead, aides to Democratic Rep. Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii — the sponsor of the resolution — say the impact on the “birther” movement was just an amusing sideshow to a resolution that was just supposed to be a simple celebration of the 50th anniversary of Hawaii’s statehood.

“When we realized that it might stir them up, we just kind of smiled,” said Abercrombie spokesman Dave Helfert.

The resolution, adopted last night on a vote of 378-0, notes that “the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961.” To Abercrombie, who was friends with Obama’s father and knew the president when he was a toddler, any resolution celebrating Hawaii’s anniversary would naturally mention Obama because “it is a matter of great pride in Hawaii that Barack Obama is a native son,” Helfert said.

Back in 1999, the administration of Bill Clinton strictly limited the use of cookies on federal government Web sites, heeding the concerns of privacy advocates who worried the small data files could be deployed to build profiles of user activity.

The policy has remained in place ever since, in spite of the persistent use of cookies that's developed on most commercial, state and local sites and criticism from groups such as the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, which maintains the concerns are overblown and that the policy limits the government's ability to embrace customized Web applications.

The Obama administration apparently agrees. This week, the Office of Management and Budget proposed revising the guidelines so that any federal agency could use web-tracking technologies, so long as it posts a notice to that effect.

Some days, it's difficult to tell what's more distracting for the Obama administration: awkward remarks by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., or questions about whether the remarks are distracting.

The loquacious Biden -- already known for issuing ad hoc travel warnings and critiquing Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s bungling of the presidential oath -- stirred the pot again over the weekend, telling the Wall Street Journal that Russia's economy is "withering" and that its problems will force it to make concessions on a wide range of national security issues, including loosening its influence on former Soviet republics and shrinking its nuclear arsenal.

"Russia has to make some very difficult, calculated decisions," Biden said at the conclusion of a four-day trip to the Ukraine and Georgia. "They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they're in a situation where the world is changing before them and they're clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable."

President Obama, a politician not given to backtracking, clearly regrets the way he weighed in Wednesday night on the controversy surrounding the arrest of Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr.

For good reason. Obama's comments on what the incident says about race relations in America drowned out his health care campaign for two days and had the White House press operation conveying varying degrees of frustration and presidential contrition.

So on Friday, the president unexpectedly appeared at the beginning of the daily White House press briefing to announce that he had spoken to the white policeman who arrested the African-American scholar and told reporters, ''I could've calibrated those words differently.''

Obama had said Cambridge, Mass. police "acted stupidly" when they took Gates into custody July 16 during the investigation of a report of a break-in at Gates's home. He added a long history of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately "still haunts us" and "casts suspicion even when there is good cause."

Now we know how much energy President Obama can spend on eliminating those wasteful federal programs that he expects to reduce the government’s ocean of red ink. With health care, climate change and stimulus questions all competing for his time, the answer is: not much.

In May, Obama proposed killing the Even Start family literacy program, just as President George W. Bush had tried to do. It was one of the highlights of his budget hit list. The Obama administration argued that studies show Even Start didn’t work, just as the Bush administration had claimed. The Obama team even used the same studies the Bush administration had used, which meant they were really, really out of date.

So today, the House is considering its spending bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. And guess what? Even Start survives. In fact, in its committee report on the bill, the House Appropriations Committee “strongly recommends” the $66.5 million the program would receive in the bill (the same amount it got last year).

Even if he really did turn down secretary of State for the vice presidency, Joseph R. Biden Jr. hasn't been discouraged from engaging in diplomacy. Consider the politically sensitive four-day tour of Georgia and the Ukraine he just completed.

The former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman is well-acquainted with the terrain and key players -- so much so that he allowed his seemingly incurable loquacity to get the better of him by expounding on the virtues of Ukrainian women during an unscheduled stop in a Kiev pub Tuesday with President Viktor Yushchenko.

But in the Georgian capital of Tblisi on Thursday, Biden delivered a more measured message, expressing support for Georgia's goal of joining NATO but warning its leaders not to try to reclaim the breakaway territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia that were lost in a war last year with Russia. Biden also met with leaders of opposition parties, who brand President Mikheil Saakashvili a despot.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid doesn’t seem to be on the same page as President Obama on the importance of sticking to a deadline. This afternoon, he said he doesn’t mind giving the Senate Finance Committee more time to work out a health care bill that can win the support of three key Republicans, even if it means the full Senate won’t be able to pass a bill before the August recess.

Obama’s call for the House and Senate to pass bills before August may have been necessary to keep the pressure on lawmakers; as he said at last night’s news conference, “if you don’t set deadlines in this town, things don’t happen.” But it also guaranteed that the media would become fixated with the deadline for its own sake, and as it inevitably slips, it creates the impression of failure even though lawmakers are grappling with real and complicated health care issues.

Reid doesn’t seem to share the view that a delay could kill the health care effort by losing crucial momentum. The Nevada Democrat says the three Finance Committee Republicans who are trying to strike a bipartisan deal — Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, and Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming — are serious senators and deserve time to work something out with Finance Chairman Max Baucus of Montana.

If they can do that, he says, he’ll spend the August recess trying to work out a merger between the Finance bill and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee bill, which are likely to be substantially different.

President Obama is starting to reach that moment of truth, where the things that sounded good on the campaign trail don’t actually work out in reality. He seemed to promise that he wouldn’t use signing statements the way George W. Bush did — to ignore provisions of bills he had signed into law — but he hasn’t actually been able to avoid all signing statements, as House Democrats have noticed.

And at Wednesday night’s press conference, Obama got called out for not televising the health care negotiations on C-SPAN, another campaign promise that probably sounded better to the communications strategists than to people who actually know how Congress works.

Obama pointed out, correctly, that the White House forum on health care he held in March was televised on C-SPAN. It included all kinds of health care stakeholders as well as members of Congress from both parties, and yes, you could listen to some initial discussions of ideas and concerns various people wanted to address.

President Obama generally downplayed the issue of race during his historic presidential campaign and his first months in the White House. But at the end of Wednesday's prime-time news conference, he offered some unvarnished views about the controversy surrounding the arrest of Harvard African-American studies professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who was taken into custody July 16 during the investigation of a report of a break-in at Gates's home in Cambridge, Mass.

Obama is friends with Gates and responded to a question about what the incident says about race relations by first saying, "I might be a little biased here." The president then recounted reports about how Gates had jimmied the lock on his door and remarked that if he tried the same thing at the White House, "I'd get shot."

But his tone quickly turned serious.

Sure, the president's consumed with health care, climate change and plans to re-regulate the financial markets. But the series of cyberattacks that shut down some government and financial Web sites this month exposed what many experts believe to be an Achilles' heel in the federal bureaucracy: a shortage of qualified workers who can fend off hackers, virus writers, criminal groups and even terrorist organizations intent on commandeering specific cybernetworks.

The Obama administration began to address the threat in May, creating the as-yet-unfilled position of cybersecurity coordinator to better synchronize agencies' efforts and assure they have the budgets to improve defenses. But though Obama declared cybersecurity "one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation," experts say his biggest challenge might be building a well-trained work force to counter the threat.

The Partnership for Public Service detailed the extent of the manpower shortage in a new report it released on Wednesday, citing the cumbersome federal hiring process, the lack of government-wide certification standards and low salaries as reasons.

President Obama campaigned as someone who wouldn’t use signing statements to get around provisions of new laws. But this morning, four top Democratic lawmakers accused him of doing exactly that — in a recent statement rejecting conditions on funds for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — and warned that he might not get any more money for those institutions unless he stops.

The letter from House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, House Appropriations Chairman David R. Obey of Wisconsin, and Rep. Nita M. Lowey and Gregory W. Meeks of New York — who chair the two subcommittees that deal with international financial institutions — is a strongly worded rebuke of Obama’s continued use of the signing statements after he criticized President George W. Bush for using them to thwart the will of Congress.

Although the Obama administration has assured the lawmakers that it will comply with the funding conditions, “we request that you no longer assert the right to ignore provisions that Congress adds through the normal legislative process for funding for the international financial institutions,” the letter stated. If the lawmakers see that the administrations isn’t respecting the conditions imposed by Congress, they warned, “it will make it virtually impossible to provide further allocations for these institutions.”

The Obama administration basked in the achievements of space exploration Monday, as the president met with the crew of Apollo 11 in the Oval Office and Charles Bolden Jr. was sworn in as the new NASA administrator on the 40th anniversary of the first manned lunar landing.

The future? Well, that's a subject for another day. Though Obama has vowed to return U.S. astronauts to the moon by 2020 and maybe even lay the groundwork for missions to Mars, the fiscal 2010 NASA budget the White House sent to Congress sets aside no money for such efforts. Officials are awaiting the outcome of an independent study of manned space flight that is expected to be completed next month. The review panel has been hearing competing proposals to replace NASA's aging shuttle fleet, including contracting more work to private firms.

NASA is placing its bets on Ares I, a next-generation rocket under development that it hopes can deliver astronauts to the International Space Station by 2015. But in an era of trillion-dollar budget deficits, with the country mired in a deep recession, skeptics are questioning whether the space agency couldn't get more bang for the buck launching unmanned missions, or at least partnering with other nations in ambitious manned space flights.

When Barack Obama served in the Senate, Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina didn’t think he was too bad of a guy. That was in the days when Obama would listen to DeMint on the floor and vote for one of his amendments, to the chagrin of his leadership.

Those days have been over for a while, but the door slammed shut for good last week, when DeMint observed on a conference call organized by a conservative group: “If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” Today, at an event at Children’s National Medical Center, Obama quoted those words right back and used them as a rallying cry against Republicans who oppose his health care overhaul plans.

“Think about that. This isn’t about me. This isn’t about politics,” Obama said. “This is about a health care system that is breaking America’s families, breaking America’s businesses, and breaking America’s economy.”

When the same political party controls both the White House and Congress, oversight of the executive seems suddenly to vanish from the list of urgent congressional priorities. And that usualy increases pressure on Congress’ minority party to be more innovative in the way it pushes for oversight.

So lately, House Republicans have been making more use of what’s known as a “resolution of inquiry,” a way for the minority party to try to pry information out of the White House. Just today, in fact, the Financial Services committee approved one such request. That might look surprising coming from a Democratic House. But when you dig a little deeper into how these resolutions actually work, you realize that’s probably as far as it will go.

The resolution was sponsored by House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio, and it asks for various documents about the federal government’s aid to General Motors and Chrysler, the workings of President Obama’s auto task force, and the dealership closures both companies have announced. The closures have angered House members from both parties, but Boehner has a special stake in the issue, since GM closed a dealership in his district.

Lest anyone think Team Obama is rattled by new Congressional Budget Office analyses concluding the health care plans Congress is drafting will drive up, not reduce, long-term health costs, think again.

Following an address to the Peterson Institute for International Economics on Friday, the president's top economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, gently dismissed the evaluations as the work of number-obsessed accountants who can't take into account behavioral changes the administration wants to bring to the health care marketplace.

Never mind that one of the administration's point men on health care, Budget Director Peter R. Orszag, is himself a former CBO director. Summers said the findings -- articulated on Thursday by current CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf in testimony to the Senate Budget Committee -- don't take into account wellness programs, preventive care, health information technology, research into the effectiveness of treatments and other improvements he said will deliver meaningful, if as-yet-unquantifiable cost savings.

Grim news Thursday for backers of the foreclosure prevention program (PL 111-22) that the Obama administration promoted and Congress enacted in May. Midyear statistics compiled by the online marketplace RealtyTrac found a total of 1.9 million foreclosure filings were reported on more than 1.5 million properties across the country -- a 9 percent increase over the previous six months and a 15 percent jump over the first half of 2008.

The numbers were further proof that the real estate downturn hasn't ended, and that the administration's economic relief efforts have yet to tamp down a dramatic rise in default notices, auction sales and bank repossessions. The numbers were particularly disturbing because big lenders including Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and Bank of America Corp. had agreed to suspend foreclosures while the administration worked out its plan to modify mortgages for troubled borrowers.

The program attempts to aid homeowners on the brink of foreclosure by helping them refinance into 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration. It changed the yearly insurance premiums that participating homeowners must pay to the FHA from 1.5 percent of the value of the mortgage to "up to 1.5 percent," essentially giving the government the flexibility to lower the premiums. And it extended through Dec. 31, 2013, an increase in deposit insurance coverage by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and National Credit Union Administration.

Talk about mixed messages. On the same day that President Obama met with four Senate Republicans to hear their concerns on the health care bill, his team has been arguing that it doesn’t really matter if the bill gets any Republican votes, since they can call it a bipartisan bill as long as it has some Republican ideas in it.

Administration officials have been trotting out this line all day, but perhaps the most forceful advocate has been White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. He told Bloomberg that “at the end of the day, the test isn’t whether they voted for it. The test is whether the final product represented some of their ideas.” That might explain why Obama, at a White House event today, made such a big deal of the fact that the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee health care bill — which didn’t get a single Republican vote when it was approved today — included 160 Republican amendments.

Well, yes, but they were all technical amendments, Republicans say — nothing of any significance. So the new talking points brought a bit of a chill to Obama’s meeting this afternoon with Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, and Bob Corker of Tennessee. Their main message: Don’t rush through something this big. Take the time to get more people on board.

Organizing for America, the mass mobilizing drive that started with President Obama’s campaign and is now part of the Democratic National Committee, is running a new television ad in several states urging viewers to “call your senators” and needle them to vote for the health care overhaul Obama wants. And if you look at the states, it’s pretty clear who they have in mind.

The ad features four people telling their stories of how the health care system has failed them — either not giving them full coverage or dropping them completely. And at the end, they all declare that “it’s time” for a health care overhaul. One version will run on national and Washington, D.C. cable stations, but the version that tells people to “call your senators” — and includes the phone number of the Capitol switchboard — will run in Arkansas, Indiana, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, North Dakota, Nebraska, and Ohio.

Most of those states, not surprisingly, are the homes of the centrist Democrats who are most likely to object to the cost of an overhaul or the inclusion of a government-run plan to compete with private insurers, or both. But since Maine and Ohio are on the list, Democratic mobilizers also appear to be targeting three moderate Republican senators who could make the difference in a close vote: Olympia J. Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, and George V. Voinovich of Ohio. (Sherrod Brown, the other Ohio senator, is a Democrat who is a vocal supporter of the government-run plan and isn’t really on the fence.)

President Obama frequently portrays health care and clean energy as pillars of any sustained economic recovery. But he used his first presidential trip to economically devastated Michigan on Tuesday to dwell on a third component: education, specifically to role community colleges can play in retraining the U.S. work force.

Obama used the occasion to unveil a $12 billion initiative designed to spur enrollment in the two-year schools and prod high-school graduates to commit to at least one year of higher education. Of the total, $9 billion would be devoted to grants for innovative programs, including efforts such as performance-based scholarships aimed at preventing students from dropping out of college. Another $2.5 billion would go toward construction and renovation projects on community college campuses. And $500 million would be applied for online education.

"Some of the jobs that have been lost in the auto industry and elsewhere won't be coming back," Obama said in remarks to be delivered at Macomb Community College in Warren, Mich., a state where unemployment is 14.1 percent, the highest in the nation. Likening his effort to Abraham Lincoln's establishment of land-grant colleges and Franklin D. Roosevelt's championing of the G.I. Bill, Obama said, "Time and again, when we have placed our bet for the future on education, we have prospered as a result - by tapping the incredible innovative and generative potential of a skilled American workforce."

House Democratic leaders already are trying to head off the inevitable Republican charges that they’re going to ram the health care bill through the House without giving lawmakers enough time to read it. The strategy seems to be two-fold: promise more time to review the bill, and if that doesn’t work, just argue that the issue already has been talked to death.

Those were the two responses House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland gave at different points during a briefing for reporters this morning, a few hours before the scheduled unveiling of the complete House Democratic health care bill. That unveiling will give everyone their first look at a draft of the bill.

But the measure will change when it goes through three House committees — Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, and Education and Labor — and there’s a pretty good chance that the leadership will have to make more changes on the floor if the centrist House Blue Dog Democrats aren’t satisfied by then.

President Obama devoted part of Monday's schedule to sketching out an urban policy to help cities and metropolitan regions become more effective drivers of economic growth. It's the first time Obama has waded into this area publicly since February, when he appointed former Bronx, N.Y. borough president Adolfo Carrion to the new post of White House Director of Urban Affairs and gave him responsibility for coordinating transportation and housing initiatives and helping to funnel federal aid to economically hard-hit municipalities.

Obama was scheduled to deliver remarks to an urban and metropolitan policy roundtable late this afternoon at the White House. His vision, aides say, departs from the long-held practice of using urban policy as a tool to fight crime and poverty and embraces the argument of mayors and other local officials that metropolitan areas are primary economic drivers in the country and should treated as assets instead of problems.

Obama and other administration officials are expected to prod cities and their suburban counterparts to collaborate for federal funds and private projects, instead of competing against each other.

President Obama is back in the country, and today he made sure that everyone involved in the health care debate knows it. When he summoned the press this morning to announce his nomination of Dr. Regina Benjamin as the next surgeon general, Obama opened with a lengthy monologue about the importance of getting a health care overhaul done.

“I just want to put everybody on notice, because there was a lot of chatter during the week that I was gone: We are going to get this done,” Obama said. “Inaction is not an option. And for those naysayers and cynics who think that this is not going to happen, don’t bet against us. We are going to make this thing happen, because the American people desperately need it.”

Obama was trying to tell Congress that his attention hasn’t wandered from health care just because he was out of the country, on visits to Russia and Africa. But the forceful rhetoric still leaves a host of specific question unresolved — like whether the president now intends to get more involved in the process, and whether he’ll ask the centrist House Blue Dog Democrats if they’re really prepared to sink a health care bill that doesn’t meet their specifications.

Every once in a while, Congress remembers things it can do when an administration tries to ignore laws Congress has written. But it must be weird for President Obama, the former constitutional law professor, to see it happening on his watch.

Yesterday, the House voted almost unanimously — 429-2 — to negate a signing statement Obama issued that rejected restrictions Congress had placed on funding for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Obama had claimed the restrictions in the June supplemental spending bill “would interfere with my constitutional authority to conduct foreign relations” and declared that “I will not treat these provisions as limiting my ability to engage in foreign diplomacy or negotiations.”

That an amendment by a Republican — Kay Granger of Texas — would pass a Democratic House with only two dissenting votes was striking in itself. But the Obama administration also got a broader warning during the floor debate, as House Appropriations Chairman David R. Obey of Wisconsin and Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank of Massachusetts said Congress might simply refuse to fund the administration’s requests in the future if it wants to make a fuss about the strings that are attached.

President Obama dropped a few hints about how he intends to lobby Congress on health care during a news conference Friday following the G8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy. And if we're parsing his remarks correctly, lawmakers can expect firm prodding through the August recess, flexible timetables on a final agreement and one barnburner of a House-Senate conference.

Obama indicated he would continue to put cost on an equal footing with expanded coverage, by emphasizing that any health plan be budget neutral.

"Whatever bill is produced has to be paid for, and that creates some difficulties because people would like to get the good stuff without paying for it," Obama said.

Aides believe focusing on the dollars-and-cents aspect expands the health care debate beyond the approximately 48 million uninsured Americans, to those who have health coverage but are concerned about losing benefits during the economic downturn. The administration is wagering that economically stressed workers will appreciate a bottom-line approach that squeezes new efficiencies out of the health delivery system and doesn't reek of expensive social engineering.

It's never too early to think about sensitive White House personnel appointments that lie on the horizon. Which is why speculation is building inside and outside the administration over whether President Obama will reappoint Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke when his four-year term expires on Jan. 31.

This is a particularly delicate decision in light of the sometimes fierce criticism of the Bernanke that's emanating from some quarters of Congress.

Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Chairman Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., among others, has been critical of Bernanke's stewardship at the central bank and is fighting portions of a White House draft overhaul of financial regulations that would give the Fed responsibility for overseeing "systemically risky" financial institutions whose collapse would threaten the broader economy. The Hill generally is divided among skeptics who question the Fed's ability to to spot bubbles in housing or other sectors, and others who believe the economy melted down because of a failed regulatory structure, not incompetent regulators.

For a president who promised to create “a new era of openness,” Barack Obama sure is putting up a fight against a House proposal to open up intelligence briefings to lawmakers. But his veto threat against the bill is also a sign that maybe — just maybe — the chairman of the House intelligence committee could have spent a little more time talking through the proposal with the Obama administration.

The House intelligence bill essentially would get rid of the “Gang of Eight” process, which restricts briefings on covert operations to just the top four congressional leaders and the top for Intelligence committee members from both parties. Instead, as House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes of Texas explained last month, the administration would have to brief the full intelligence committees, unless the committee members themselves decide it’s okay for certain information to be shared only with the Gang of Eight.

The idea of briefing Congress more widely isn’t particularly controversial, either among Hill Democrats or among top Obama administration officials. So it’s a bit surprising that the Obama administration would threaten to veto the entire intelligence bill over that provision — until you realize just how much control over the briefings would be shifted from the executive branch to Congress.

Though Republicans portray climate change legislation as a costly energy tax that would cost families thousands of dollars a year, the worsening economy and budget woes in dozens of states are increasing chances the Senate will enact a bill this year.

The White House is hoping billions of dollars worth of free emissions allowances that would be part of a cap-and-trade system will persuade undecided senators to support the bill, which is one of its top domestic priorities.

The climate change bill (HR 2454) the House passed on June 26 would distribute allowances from 2012 to 2025 to each state to protect consumers from energy price hikes, help utilities and other industries transition to clean energy and to spur conservation efforts and new technologies.

Analysts say if the allowances are incorporated into a House-Senate compromise, they could deliver between $120 billion and $330 billion worth of assistance to states, which would have substantial leeway to spend the money as they see fit. The largesse could prove to be a potent enticement at a time when national unemployment stands at 9.5 percent and many states are experiencing even higher jobless rates.

Responding to a series of food-related health scares that killed several people and cost producers hundreds of millions of dollars, the Obama administration on Tuesday outlined a series of regulatory steps aimed at preventing outbreaks of E.coli, salmonella and other pathogens.

The recommendations from the Cabinet-level Food Safety Working Group are designed to dovetail with efforts in Congress to streamline and strengthen federal food regulation, which now has 15 separate agencies administering at least 30 laws addressing food-safety issues.

"Our food safety system must be updated. One in four people get sick every year due to food-borne illness, and children and the elderly are more at risk," Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said at a midday news conference during which he outlined the new steps with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

President Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev on Monday signed a framework for further nuclear weapon cuts that increases the likelihood their nations can finalize an accord to replace the Strategic Arms limitation treaty that expires on Dec. 5.

But the tight timetable could prompt the Obama administration to take the highly unusual step of bypassing the Senate and not seek the chamber's formal ratification before enforcing key portions the pact.

Administration officials are weighing a backstop that would allow them to authorize key inspection provisions by executive order, then submit the complete agreement to the Senate some time in 2010.

"We'll have to look at arrangements to continue some of the inspection provisions, keep them enforced in a provisional basis, while the Senate considers the treaty," Gary Samore, Obama's coordinator for weapons of mass destruction, told reporters at a briefing prior to the leaders' meeting in Moscow.

If you’re a Republican, reacting to today’s jobs report is the easiest task in the world. The economy lost 467,000 jobs in June, far more than expected — which means Republicans now have a strong reason to ask what we’re getting out of the $787 billion stimulus package.

“Spending, taxing, and borrowing with reckless abandon is no way to create more jobs,” House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio said in a statement this morning. Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said the numbers prove that “the stimulus package is not a ‘Recovery Act.’ ” Boehner even released a video featuring bloodhounds trying to find any jobs created by the stimulus. (Get it?)

But what do you do if you’re a Democrat? Your spin job is a lot harder. Finally, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California showed her party how it’s done. You sympathize with those who lost their jobs but say it would have been worse without the stimulus. And — still — you blame George W. Bush.

The Obama administration today released an annual report to Congress on the White House staff.

Publicly released, that is. Administration officials posted 487 names, titles and salaries spanning 29 pages on the White House web site as part of their much ballyhooed commitment to transparency.

The listing shows top presidential aides like senior adviser David Axelrod, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and press secretary Robert Gibbs make $172,200 a year. But don't get too excited. On his second day in office, Obama froze senior aides' salaries at $100,000 in a nod to tough economic times.

The White House staff list is customarily sent up to Congress in confidence, after which details are leaked to the press. Feeling just a bit superfluous, we return you to your Web browsing.

Al Franken’s win in the Minnesota Senate race presented a challenge to everyone who follows Congress closely: how to explain that, no, this doesn’t really mean the Democrats have 60 votes for everything. In a caucus that now spans the ideological spectrum from Franken on one end to Arlen Specter on the other, the Democrats can’t actually do whatever they feel like doing.

But we’ve explained all this before, at great length. If only there was someone who could give us a fresh quote that really proves the point.

Thank you, Joe Lieberman.

In an interview with the New Haven Independent, Lieberman said he’s “skeptical” of the Democrats’ plans to include a government-run health program to compete with private insurers in the health care overhaul bill. Technically, Lieberman is an independent now, but he still caucuses with the Democrats, which is why they (allegedly) will control 60 votes once Franken is seated.