Each month when I get the official unemployment figures from the US government, I quickly search in my inbox for a note from former cable network CEO and senior economic adviser in the John Edwards and Barack Obama campaigns Leo Hindery who sends me the "effective unemployment" figures that many economic commentators from Joseph Stiglitz to Mort Zuckerman to Bob Herbert are begninning to use...

A lot of people who normally don't take much notice of railroads were startled over the weekend when Warren Buffett, "the sage of Omaha," announced that he spending $26 billion to buy that last 77 percent of Burlington Northern Santa Fe shares he doesn't already own. Buffett described his investment as a big bet on the U.S. economy generally, and on BNSF, the nation's second largest railroad, in particular...

David Rogers, now with POLITICO, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, may be the least chatty reporter in Washington (trust me, I sat about 5 feet away from him for 12 years in the Senate Press Gallery... although I suppose if you averaged his taciturnity with my extroversion, you would have had two average chat-ers). He's also one of the best and clearest-thinking. He has institutional memory and historical context often lacking in the 24/7 rush-rush of much of the media today. So while so many people are hyperventilating about whether two off-year GOP gubernatorial wins will spell doom for health reform, David comes up with this reassuring and well-reported story, "Dems want to seize historic moment."

Health care is big for House Democrats: big like Social Security in the '30s and civil rights in the '60s, big like the war stories retold now in party caucuses as lawmakers grapple with the floor vote that is just days away.

All politicians live in the present -- or risk perishing, as seen Tuesday night. But history also sits on the shoulders of Democrats these days, and having failed to act on health care in 1994 -- and then having lost power -- they feel an almost inexorable push to seize this moment before it slips away.

Minnesota's capital city, St. Paul, is the latest American city to adopt Instant Runoff Voting for local elections, according to news reports from Minnesota.  IRV had a big day in the Twin Cities--Minneapolis' first instant runoff election was conducted today and went off without a hitch.

The news that Matteo Fontana, a former high-ranking official at the U.S. Department of Education, has pleaded guilty to charges that he lied to the government about his ownership of stock in a student loan company he was in charge of overseeing provides a timely reminder of why the student loan industry is in such hot water now.

During the Bush administration, the loan industry went virtually unregulated. Top officials at the Education Department did not just look the other way while widespread abuses occurred in the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) and private student loan programs. They actually helped lenders skirt federal laws and regulations so the companies could maximize their profits -- often at the expense of students and taxpayers.

The government's case against Fontana provides the most glaring example of the type of conflicts of interest that were rife within a Department heavily staffed by former student loan industry officials. As Higher Ed Watch first revealed in April 2007, Fontana, the general manager of the Financial Partners Division of the agency's Federal Student Aid office, held 10,500 cut-rate insider shares of stock, worth over $100,000 in the parent company of Student Loan Xpress for nearly a year after he joined the Education Department in the fall of 2002. At the time, we did not know whether Fontana had fully disclosed his stock holdings to his superiors at the agency.

According to federal prosecutors, Fontana repeatedly lied about his stock holdings on financial disclosure forms -- falsely claiming, for instance, that he had sold his Student Loan Xpress stock in December 2002. In fact, he didn't sell his stock -- including an additional 1,400 shares he purchased while at the Department -- until 2004 and 2005, for a total of around $219,000.

An early draft of the House Republicans' health care bill is available at BNA. The Republican bill is much more limited in scope than the current House health reform bill, and is focused primarily on cost -- which represents only one aspect of the problems plaguing our current health care system.The bill repackages a lot of the conservative ideas that have been floating around for years -- and which didn't even get enacted when the Republicans were in control of Congress and the White House.

The bill will not end insurance company discrimination against high risk individuals nor will it provide subsidies to help the uninsured purchase coverage, according to Politico:

Boehner hasn't released the full details of the bill but has said that it would make it easier to buy insurance across state lines, impose strict limits on medical malpractice lawsuits and allow individuals and small businesses to pool their resources to buy insurance as a group. That is designed to boost their purchasing power to help lower individual premiums.

If voters had been feeling a little differently a year ago, Doug Holtz-Eakin (former Congressional Budget Office director and chief economic policy advisor to Senator McCain's 2008 presidential campaign) would be spearheading the McCain health care team.

And, if voters had been feeling differently a year ago, Holtz-Eakin would still have employer-sponsored health coverage.

But instead of a position with the McCain Administration, he is unemployed -- and the clock is ticking on his current health coverage. He will soon join the scores of Americans who are having difficulty obtaining affordable, comprehensive health insurance. "I worry about where I go next in the way many Americans do," he told the Washington Post.

Holtz-Eakin walked away from the 2008 presidential campaign without a job and therefore without employer-based health care. Since then, he has been able to keep the private health insurance plan he had during the campaign through COBRA (the acronym for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, a 1986 federal law that allows individuals to temporarily extend group health coverage to people whose health benefits otherwise would be terminated). 

In April 2007, Higher Ed Watch revealed that Matteo Fontana, a former high-ranking official in the U.S. Department of Education's Federal Student Aid office, had held at least $100,000 of stock in a student loan company he was in charge of overseeing. Last week, the Justice Department filed criminal charges against Fontana on two counts: lying to federal officials about his ownership of stock in the company Student Loan Xpress and illegally using his position to help the corporation expand its business.

According to the Washington Examiner, which first reported on the Justice Department's action, the charges against Fontana are misdemeanors that each carry a maximum penalty of imprisonment for up to a year. However, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported this afternoon that Fontana has agreed to plead guilty to the charges and to pay a fine of up to $115,000. If the federal judge hearing the case accepts the plea agreement, Fontana will not have to serve any prison time, the Chronicle states.

We will have more details and commentary on this case tomorrow. Stay tuned...

One day after the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that the U.S. had returned to GDP growth, the Obama Administration released new numbers about the job-creation effects of the Recovery Act. The federal stimulus program has saved or created just over 640,000 jobs through a combination of aid to state and local governments, infrastructure spending, and federal loans and grants to private businesses. (640,239 jobs to be exact, Joe Biden said this morning.)...

California's state budget gap was about $40 billion this year. New York's some $50 billion. Every state in the Union is struggling with drastically lower revenues and higher costs for services of every kind, washing state capitals with red ink. At the polls next year, governors who are facing elections - - including Governor David Patterson of New York - - may find themselves politically drowned by such gargantuan deficits.