The WonkLine: February 11, 2009

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said yesterday “that a flurry of radical programs aimed at busting through debilitating credit clogs are showing promise and pledged to keep Americans better informed about efforts to battle” the financial crisis.

Gov. Ted Strickland (D-OH) has joined with other governors to back the House stimulus bill; state aid in the House version would save 300 youth services jobs, keep as many as 8,000 children in state-supported child care and save 500 corrections jobs in Ohio alone.

Kevin Carey writes that, in light of the cuts to education in the stimulus package, “we need a comprehensive new federal plan to help community colleges.”

Top Democrats and health care advocates are pressuring the White House to move quickly on health reform. In a letter sent to the President, the lawmakers stressed “the symbolic importance of budgeting for health reform.”

Maggie Mahr recalls this warning from economist Uwe Reinhardt: There is a real danger, Uwe Reinhardt confides, that politicians will settle for universal coverage that continues to ration care according to ability to pay…This, Reinhardt confides, is what he thinks will happen, “unless we, the more affluent, step forward to tax ourselves.”

Ezra Klein and Tim Foley explain why the House version of the stimulus is better on health care.

“More than a third of native California bird species could vanish from a wide swath of their current range” in decades “wholly or in part by the effects of climate change,” according to a new study by Audubon California.

The “raging infernos that have left more than 160 people dead in southern Australia” are a “climate change wake-up call“: “We knew what the scientists had predicted and we’ve actually seen it in action.”

“I think that the votes are present in the Senate to pass a renewable electricity standard. I think that they are present in the House,” Sen. Jeff Bingaman said at a hearing of his Energy and Natural Resources Committee yesterday.

At least 19 people were killed and 54 wounded when attackers stormed the Justice Ministry in central Kabul, Afghanistan. “[T]he attacks displayed the apparent ease with which Taliban insurgents…can also breach the defenses of the heavily-fortified capital.”

Commenting on the Israeli elections, Chaim Watzman predicts that “whether Livni or Netanyahu forms a government, it will be a weak and divided one. New elections, within a year or two, seem a likely bet.”

With Secretary of State Clinton scheduled to visit Beijing next week as part of her first foreign trip, “the Obama administration plans to realign the United States’ relationship with China by putting more emphasis on climate change [and] energy and human rights.”

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