On the heels of last month’s domestic spending bill defeat, CongressDaily (sub. req’d) has this news:

Negotiators seeking about $45 billion in five-year budget savings appear likely to drop proposed reductions in the federal food stamp program, with GOP opposition firming up as the Agriculture committees work to meet a $3 billion savings target.

They are also likely to drop House-passed welfare overhaul legislation, sources said. [...]

Frist declined to comment on other provisions, and final decisions will not be made until House-Senate negotiators meet this week. But sources said GOP leaders are leaning toward dropping House language trimming almost $700 million from food stamps.

How bad are those proposed cuts?

Joan Entmacher of the National Women’s Law Center called the welfare changes “the ugliest set of recommendations inflicted on low-income women and their families that”¦we have seen.” And the Congressional Budget Office estimates the House bill would cut food stamp benefits for 225,000 people and that “40,000 children would lose their eligibility for free meals at school.”

Even after several minutes of debating Frist, “Byrd did not let up. Majority Whip [Mitch] McConnell (R-KY) took the floor and interjected that having votes on nominees follows an important precedent. ‘I’ll be glad to take you on both,’ Byrd said, and continued his verbal assault. Each time Frist tried to sum up, Byrd added another comment. Finally, a smiling Frist walked over to Byrd, shook his hand, and backed off the floor.” (CongressDaily, sub. req’d)

Stephen Hadley told Karl Rove about Valerie Plame’s identity “as sort of just chatter inside the office, but [Rove] had learned it earlier from some other place and we still don’t know where that is.”

UPDATE: VandeHei says he “misspoke,” and meant to say Libby rather than Hadley.

Lawmakers from the House and Senate are now finalizing negotiations over this year’s budget bills.

Most of the criticism has focused on how these bills push the government’s checkbook further into the red, while delivering tax cuts to the wealthy and cutting programs for the poor. But another crucial aspect of this year’s budget battle has received little attention: the conservative efforts to slash programs that provide incentives for work, by offering poor working Americans benefits like health care and child care.

As Robert Gordon and I argued in a column last week, progressives would be better off in our budget battles if we focused on how encouraging hard work and self-reliance is no longer a conservative principle.

Many of the right’s proposed cuts — to Medicaid, food stamps, and child care, for starters — punish working Americans by undermining incentives to hold down a job, or by essentially classifying them as “too rich” to collect assistance. Read more