Okay, here's the latest on the ongoing mini-drama over the Senate climate bill. Earlier this morning, the Environment and Public Works committee met to begin marking up and amending the bill, and Republicans carried out their early threat to boycott the session—only George Voinovich showed up, to lodge a complaint. Voinovich asked committee chair Barbara Boxer to postpone the markup until the EPA had done a full analysis of the initial Senate draft. (This would delay the mark-up by about five weeks, since it takes time for the agency to run its different models.)

While Congress slogs through the final months of the health reform debate, the American people remain focused on the economy. With good reason: We’re in a very deep hole, and it’s not clear how we’re going to get out. 

Organizing for America is a complicated beast, and my story yesterday couldn’t quite contain some of the interesting things about it. For all the activism geeks out there, here are some outtakes.

After years of stalemate, negotiations over Iran's controversial nuclear development program seemed to progress last week when an Iranian delegation in Vienna agreed to the export and modification of its low-enriched uranium. The resulting optimism did not last. Officials in Tehran demurred, insisting that they needed more time to study the proposal and could not meet Friday's deadline to ratify the agreement. While Iran's stonewalling came as a disappointment to the United States, it did not come as a surprise. Over the past month, the White House has signaled that it is preparing a new, more severe round of sanctions in case current negotiations fail. 

Standish, Michigan

It's two p.m. on a workday, and the casino parking lot is completely full. Hundreds of people have come for the $20 gambling coupons offered to those willing to donate blood. Turnout for the drive was "above and beyond" expectations, says Frank Cloutier, a spokesman for the Saginaw Chippewa Indians, who run the 800-slot complex. The nurses are already turning people away two hours before closing, and they will soon run out of blood bags.

The big question looming over reform negotiations in the Senate is how to pay for expanding insurance coverage. The Senate Finance bill calls for an excise tax, to be levied on plans with generous benefits. But many Democrats don't like the idea. So will they scale it back? And, if so, can they will come up with an alternative? Senator Tom Harkin, new chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, seems to think the answers are "yes" and "yes."

When the world last left Wesley Clark in early 2004, he was a streaking meteor of a presidential candidate. Still fresh from leading NATO in the Kosovo war, he arrived as a savior for the left, who saw a bulletproof patriot that the rest of America could believe in; hero of the netroots, beloved by Michael Moore and Madonna; hope of the Clintonites, delighted by such a clean ideological slate.

Rob Shapiro is the chair of the NDN Globalization Imitative and chairman of Sonecon, LLC.

Policymakers and pundits who finally are worried about a "jobless recovery" should consider this: Our actual prospects are worse than that term suggests.   The initial expansion we may already be experiencing will be notable not for a lack of new jobs, as the phrase "jobless recovery" suggests, but for substantial, continued job losses.   Total employment will continue to decline for many months and perhaps as long as two years, as it did after the 2001 recession.   Nor will it be enough to aim for simply "recovery," if by that is meant a return to the conditions that preceded this recession, including unstable capital markets and stagnating real wages in the face of strong productivity gains.

The stimulus passed last February has helped to slow job losses--without it, we might well shed an additional one-to-two million more jobs.   But fiscal stimulus is a much weaker lever for creating jobs than it used to be, because of changes in the relationship between increases in economic demand (that’s what stimulus does) and creating new jobs to satisfy that demand.   In the 2002-2007 expansion, private employment grew at less than half the rate, relative to growth, as it did in the expansions of the 1980s and 1990s. So, Washington boosting demand and growth today has less than half the impact on jobs that it once did.

Maurice Bowra: A Life

By Leslie Mitchell

(Oxford University Press, 385 pp., $50)

As warden of Wadham College in Oxford, president of the British Academy, the author of well-known books on ancient Greek literature, and a conversationalist of legendary brilliance, Maurice Bowra seemed, in the middle of the last century, the very embodiment of Oxford life. Enjoying a huge international reputation as a scholar, a wit, and an administrator, he was duly elected into prestigious academies and awarded honorary degrees in both Europe and America. George VI knighted him in 1951. Yet few who were not alive at that time know his name today. For those of the younger generation who are aware of him at all, his career conjures up the Oxford of Brideshead Revisited, and it has been said that he was the model for Mr. Samgrass. A few of his bright remarks linger on among the chattering classes: "Buggers can’t be choosers," or "Where there’s death there’s hope," or "He is a man who has no public virtues and no private parts." But for the most part Bowra has sunk into oblivion, to emerge from time to time in an obituary or in the voluminous correspondence of Isaiah Berlin.

Hillary Clinton has become the president's secretary for women's affairs, and she's done a good job at it--within the severe limits of what realistically can be done to protect females from sexual violence in war zones.  On Wednesday, the U.N. Security Council met, with Hillary in the chair, and as the Associated Press put it, "adopted a resolution ...

The congressman is nearly in tears--his face crumpled and voice cracking. This was hardly the response that I anticipated when I asked freshman Democrat Alan Grayson a banal question about adjusting to life in his new job. "Personally, it's extremely difficult for me to be away from my family," he started. That's when he started to swell. As he came unglued, I cast a nervous glance at his aide. The least she could do was hustle him from this awkwardness. But she just fidgeted with her PDA, as if this wasn't his first outpouring.

Nicely explained by Lacy K. Ford, the chair of the University of South Carolina history department, on the NYT's Room for Debate blog. The rage of Wilson and other South Carolina Republicans is what happens when the majority party in a one-party state realizes it's the minority party in the rest of the nation:

Now that Chris Dodd has decided to keep his chairmanship of the Senate banking committee, it looks like Tom Harkin will leave his agriculture post to go take Ted Kennedy's former spot atop the HELP committee. To the dismay of a lot of food-policy reformers, this means the more conservative Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas will be next in line for the Ag Committee gavel (there are more senior members on that committee, but they all have other, more powerful chairmanships already).

It's not unreasonable to ask if this will really make a big difference as far as agricultural policy's concerned. After all, Harkin was a corn man from Iowa who always had a kind word for Monsanto; the farm bill during his tenure was as subsidy-laden as ever, and, more recently, he was praising House Ag Chair Collin Peterson's extortionist moves on climate-change legislation, even suggesting that Peterson didn't go far enough in his attempts to immunize farmers from the effects of the bill. How much worse could Lincoln be?

Tomorrow, the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency will release a controversial report about Iran's nuclear program. This report nearly marks the end of 12 years of service by director-general Mohmaed ElBaradei, who, in a few months, will pass the torch to Yukiya Amano. But, curiously, there is little out there about Amano.

This Boston Herald story, via Ben Smith, seems to suggest as much:

I finally have a friend in high places. Last week, President Barack Obama announced that he is appointing Ruth Goldway, who has served on the Postal Regulatory Commission since 1998, to be its chair. And I have to say that it’s a good appointment. Ruth, known years ago as the mayor of the People’s Republic of Santa Monica, has been a voice for reform on the commission.

As the protests in Iran continue and reports of violence in the streets proliferate, we started to wonder what could make members of the Basij and other paramilitary groups abandon their ties to the regime and back the opposition. So, we called founding chair of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, Peter Ackerman, to see if he had any advice. First, he stressed just how important it is to flip the troops: "If loyalty shifts don't occur, ultimately the movement will sort of dissipate and vanish.

In advance of a meeting scheduled for Thursday, the Senate Finance Committee has released a 62-page description of policy options for expanding health insurance coverage. It is a revealing document, because we can glean from it the outlines of where the process now stands in the Senate--the body that will determine whether President Obama's top domestic priority lives or dies. Here is some of what we learn:

1. There is a substantial amount of bipartisan common ground, at least between committee chair Max Baucus and ranking member Charles Grassley.

The first hundred days of any presidency rarely go off as planned, but, for now, Barack Obama seems to know what's at the top of his to-do list.

Tomorrow, the national forecast, particularly in battleground states, looks overall to be pretty nice--sunny in Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Florida, and Ohio--which should bode well for Obama and other Democrats.

Mark Feest is doing all he can to get John McCain elected. Unfortunately, the McCain campaign hasn’t always made that easy. Feest is the chairman of the GOP committee in Churchill County, a rural region of some 26,000 people in northwestern Nevada. Feest complains that the campaign doesn’t seem to understand the nature of rural areas.

Anyone who dug my post from last night should check out the op-ed in this morning's Wall Street Journal from former SEC Chair Arthur Levitt and former SEC Chief Accountant Lynn Turner. They do a much better job than I could of explaining the importance of mark-to-market accounting in reviving investor trust: "It's like your personal balance sheet," they write.