Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have stories today saying the Obama Administration is planning to overhaul the bank bailout program to bring in private investors to work alongside the federal government. This sounds like an idea that I first heard floated last year by Warren Buffett, in a presentation he made at Fortune …

More than 5,300 people were killed last in Mexico’s horrific ongoing drug war. And now this. It’s nearly impossible to envision an end to the madness. But it would help if we at least had a new drug czar.

Goldman Sachs’ chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, has penned a confessional essay in the Financial Times explaining some of the lessons learned from the financial implosion. It is notably frank, detailed, and self-flagellating, and it also offers a clear argument against Republican attempts to loosen “mark-to-market” accounting rules. He …

Via the Associated Press, the word on the street is that the Obama Administration is no longer going to “beat up on hippies” by busting their medical stashes. At issue is the contradiction between laws in states like California, which allow pot for medical purposes, and federal law, which does not. For years, the Drug Enforcement …

A couple of weeks ago, I marveled at the fact that Congressman Pete Hoekstra was twittering from inside what was supposed to be a private session with President Obama. Now, CQ Politics tells us:

A congressional trip to Iraq this weekend was supposed to be a secret.

But the cat’s out of the bag now, thanks to a member of the

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A number of Swampland commenters in the post below note that that really ugly chart does not take into account the fact that the country’s population is bigger than it used to be–and, therefore, wonder whether job losses of this size aren’t as significant as the raw numbers would suggest. Justin Fox pondered the same thing, particularly …

I say yes.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz0bnyQRocI&hl=en&fs=1]

Obama’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast yesterday morning struck me as a little meh. There were some nice touches–as in his Inaugural address, he gave a shout-out to those “who subscribe to no faith” and to “humanists,” an encouraging break from the you-can’t-be-moral-without-being-religious rhetoric of the past eight years. And …

This bad, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office shows us:

If you are having trouble reading the fine print: The blue line shows job losses in the 1990 recession; the red line is 2001, and the green line is the path we are on now.

UPDATE: To clarify, these are not projections. This is actual job-loss data.* Pelosi’s office …

Diana Butler Bass makes a smart point about the grumbling about whether Obama is being sufficiently bipartisan in these early days of his Administration: Obama never promised bipartisanship. He vowed to end partisanship, to move beyond partisanship. You can argue he’s not doing a good job of post-partisanship either, but they’re not the …

The debate this morning, according to members of the Gang of 18, is about size and scope. The group is meeting in Senate Minority Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office as I type this. Ben Nelson, whom I profiled this morning, and Claire McCaskill both expressed optimism heading into the meeting. As did Reid on the Senate floor this

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