Welcome to The WonkLine, a daily 10 a.m. roundup of the latest news about health care, the economy, national security and climate policy. This is what we’re reading. Tell us what you found in the comments section below.
Health Care
Should she decide to run for the Senate, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D-KS) would have a ten-point lead over her Republican opponents. The poll, which suggests that Democrats have a strong shot at winning the seat, may be the best case against nominating Sebelius to head the HHS.
The Washington Post reports on the “clash over competing visions of how to protect the privacy of patients’ electronic medical records.”
Gov. Phil Bredesen (D-TN), one of the top contenders for the HHS job, may be campaigning for the nomination. Bredesen and his aides have been defending the governor’s record on health care in the national press and Bredesen used his state of the state address to call for a “national solution for health insurance.”
Economy
The stimulus package debate “has delayed budget action in some states while governors and legislators wait to see how much federal relief they can expect for their cash-strapped programs.”
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that the $39 billion in aid to states proposed in the Senate stimulus bill is “not nearly as much as we need“; Duncan said a forthcoming University of Washington study estimated that “almost 600,000 education jobs are at risk of state budget cuts.”
Justin Lin, the World Bank’s chief economist, said yesterday that “the world economy can recover in 2010 if developed countries can coordinate on stimulating their economies and contribute to a $2 trillion fund to help low-income countries.”
Climate
An Audubon Society report has found that, as the planet has warmed, “more than half of 305 birds species in North America” migrate an average of 35 miles farther north than 40 years ago — the purple finch more than 400 miles north.
Reuters reports that “until so-called clean coal technologies that can capture carbon work and are affordable for utilities, NV Energy won’t build coal plants,” leading to the cancellation Monday of a coal-fired power plant near Ely, Nevada.
David Wake, the author of a study that finds salamanders are “falling off the map in tropical forests throughout Central America,” says global warming “makes perfect sense” as the culprit.
National Security
Counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen posts a transcript of his Feb 5 statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “In Afghanistan, we have an immediate crisis to deal with. We need to stop the rot and regain the initiative before we can hope for long-term progress.”
Glenn Greenwald compares the rise of right-wing Israeli nationalist Avigdor Lieberman to that of Austria’s Jorge Haider.
Alan Wolfe examines liberal interventionism in the wake of Iraq: “By bungling the war in Iraq so badly, George W. Bush let liberal hawks off the hook of reconsidering the obstacles that an occupation throws up in the path of good intentions.”
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