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This morning's Face the Nation was an interesting contrast in style. Bob Schieffer led off with Haley Barbour in what can only be a softball interview about Republicans, their chances in 2012, and the current field of candidates. In the second half, he suddenly got a bit more strident in his questioning of Nancy Pelosi, but she managed to place responsibility where it truly belongs. Here's the money moment:

Schieffer: The fact is, the Congress has been in session since January and it's done basically nothing.

Pelosi: Well you can talk to Mr. Boehner about that.

Schieffer: So it's all their fault. It's not your fault.

Pelosi: Well no, they set the agenda. We have said every day that they're there another day goes by and there's no jobs agenda or jobs bill that has come to the floor. But again, it's about how we can work together to go forward. These issues are bigger than politics, they're bigger than elections. They're about the country that we will live in. And what we will see as we go forward is one vision of America that's encompassed in the Republican budget plan that abolishes Medicare, that makes college unaffordable for nearly ten million young people in our country, that takes us deeper into debt and does not create jobs, or you can talk about an agenda that talks about making it in America, investing in American education, innovation and that's what campaigns are about.

The opener on this conversation drives me a little crazy. Blaming a President for the economy without holding Congress' feet to the fire is disingenuous, given Congress' responsibilities with regard to appropriations and setting the national agenda that the President must then act upon. Yet in this current session of Congress, we've seen numerous votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act, legislate a woman's right to choose into oblivion, the defunding of agencies like NOAA and the EPA, and an overall agenda that kills jobs in the public sector at the very least. So what exactly does the President have to do with any of that?

And Pelosi delivers that message quite effectively. Bothered about the jobs report? Talk to Mr. Boehner, because he's the guy who has set the agenda for this session of Congress. Democrats should be running with this message and asking Americans whether or not they understand Congress' role in the economy and what this crazy Republican House of Representatives is doing to tank it.

Schieffer pushes back on her

Also, the $900 billion this deal will add to the national debt increases the pressure on Obama and Congress to undertake the kind of tough-love budgetary changes outlined by the presidential commission on deficits.

Y'hear that? Giving billions of dollars to the rich will be a good thing because it will force us to focus more on cutting Social Security! I mean, you cannot make this stuff up. This is almost as good as the Dean's previous musings about rebooting the American economy by starting a war with Iran.

Here are some more goodies:

The divorce from the Pelosi Democrats has been brewing for a long time, but it came visibly into view when so many House members whined about the tax-and-budget deal with the Republicans.

If this wasn't a Sister Souljah moment, it was at least comparable to Bill Clinton's decision to sign the 1996 welfare reform bill passed by a Republican Congress - a step that sank Bob Dole's presidential campaign before it really began.

Obama's tax cut compromise will shower the rich with more money. Clinton's welfare reform bill tore up key pieces of the social safety net. You're starting to get a picture of what Broder's vision of "bipartisanship" looks like: People from both parties coming together to help the rich at the expense of everyone else.

As much as people like Broder love to position themselves as The Adults in the Room, they will happily throw fiscal responsibility out the window if it interferes with their ideological hobby horses of giving more money to rich people and starting wars. When they talk about making "tough choices" what they're really referring to is slashing spending on programs that have benefited the American middle class for generations so that Paris Hilton can afford a new pool. This headline from ABC captures the dynamic perfectly:

Sen. Conrad: Extend All Tax Cuts; Time to Get 'Serious' About Deficit

Of course, as anyone who can perform basic arithmetic knows, the first thing you should do to "get serious" about the deficit is to let all of the Bush tax cuts expire. But Conrad (who is begging, begging, begging for a primary challenge btw) and his ilk won't do that because they aren't serious about the deficit. Rather, they're serious about slashing whatever remains of our tattered safety net and unleashing a glorious age of neo-Social Darwinism.

Ain't politics grand?

Anyway, on to some of yesterday's key economic news:

• Tim Carney notes that former Obama administration officials are predictably strolling through the Washington-to-Wall-Street revolving door:

  Obama budget chief Peter Orszag is now a VP at Citigroup, where his new bosses praise the "tremendous amount of knowledge as well as key private sector and government experience" he will bring, and the Financial Times hears he will be in a position "dealing with clients and top government officials."

  Greg Craig, Obama's former White House counsel is at Goldman Sachs.

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Hullabaloo: Accountability is for the little people

TPMDC: Pelosi: Bush administration officials barred officials from briefing congress on the impending financial crisis in the fall of 2008

MAL Contends: AP: VA makes it too easy for veterans to file claims...seriously

Oliver Willis: Conservatives now spamming Twitter

World-O-Crap: CSI: White House Special Victims Unit

The Reid Report: Fla. lawmaker caught viewing soft porn attacks reporter

Anyone who thinks Newt Gingrich isn't positioning himself for a run at the Republican nomination isn't paying attention. He's clearly doing exactly that, and with his usual Newt-like sense of the bizarre and insulting. While firing up Republicans by speech exhorting them to be the "Party of Yes", he's playing the "say outrageous things that make no sense but sound scary" game too:

“To win in 2010 and 2012, it's not enough to say no to the radical agenda of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid,” said Gingrich. “Tonight's speech will explain why real leadership requires Republicans to offer a compelling vision of safety, prosperity, and freedom that stands in vivid contrast to Obama's secular, socialist, machine now running Washington.”

That would be the secular, socialist machine that just dumped the public option or a Medicare expansion in favor of keeping health insurance private? The secular, socialist machine that paid homage to capitalism by expanding private insurance coverage provided by private insurance carriers? Alrighty, then.

In the past year, American Solutions for Winning the Future (Newt's 527), has banked 3 times what any other organization has. Granted, much of that money pays for Newt's private jet, chauffer, and PR consultants, but there is no question that he's a contender for 2012.

His new book will be out May 17th. Can you guess the title? Bingo. "To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine" I wonder how much he paid Frank Luntz for that.

Meet Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy Company. Blankenship is also on the Board of Directors of the US Chamber of Commerce. In this speech above, he denies climate change, derisively refers to Speaker Pelosi, Senator Reid, and others as "greeniacs", and calls them all crazy. Watch the speech, you'll see. In his mind, "the greeniacs are taking over the world."

Massey Energy Company, Blankenship's highly successful strip-mining and mountaintop removal operation is the parent company of Performance Coal Co, where a tragic explosion occurred on April 5th. As of this writing, 25 miners have died and 4 more are still missing. Twenty-five families are without a loved one. Four more may discover they have lost someone they love too. 29 families in all, forever changed by one single, violent event in a coal mine. One single violent event in a coal mine run by a company so obsessed with profit it runs roughshod over employees' and neighbors' health and safety.

Here's something else about Don Blankenship and Massey Energy Company: Blankenship spent over $1 million dollars along with other US Chamber buddies like Verizon to sponsor last year's Labor Day Tea Party, also known as the "Friends of America Rally." Here's Massey's pitch. Note how he makes it sound like he isn't one of the corporate enemies of America.

The Friends of America Rally featured such notables as Sean Hannity, Ted Nugent, and Hank Williams, Jr., and was graced by Blankenship himself going off on a diatribe that seemed strange at the time, but has come to be commonplace these days. It concerned President Obama, Democrats, and any one who doesn't salute God, coal, and apple pie. Oh, and we're also going to 'steal their jobs,' if Hannity is to be believed.

Blankenship and Massey Energy spend millions to defend unsafe workplaces

Even while coal dust settles on nearby schoolchildren, there are lessons to learn from this disaster about Massey Energy in general, and Don Blankenship in particular.

It seems that Performance Coal's safety record is spotty, at best. From the Mississippi Business Journal:

Massey ranks among the nation’s top five coal producers and is among the industry’s most profitable. It has a spotty safety record.

The federal mine safety administration fined Massey a then-record $1.5 million for 25 violations that inspectors concluded contributed to the deaths of two miners trapped in a fire in January 2006. The company later settled a lawsuit naming it, several subsidiaries and Chief Executive Don Blankenship as defendants. Aracoma Coal Co. later paid $2.5 million in fines after the company pleaded guilty to 10 criminal charges in the fire.

Massey and Blankenship also settled a lawsuit brought by the Manville Trust in 2007 with regard to workplace safety and environmental compliance.

The Manville Trust filed the case in July 2007 against company Chairman, CEO, and President Don Blankenship and certain other current and former officers and directors. The plaintiff sought several corporate governance reforms, specifically regarding environmental compliance and worker safety. Citing several incidents involving Massey Energy, including a major federal water pollution lawsuit, penalties for two coal miners' tragic deaths and other safety and environmental compliance problems, the lawsuit claimed that a "conscious failure" by the defendants to ensure compliance with federal and state regulations and other legal obligations posed a "substantial threat of monetary liability for violations."

Keep unions out, let teabaggers in

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A thank you from Speaker Pelosi to everyone who joined the Daily Kos community in sending her flowers for her birthday. She kept some and sent the rest over to Walter Reed Medical center for the troops.

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I'd like to point out that in the middle of all the praise for Obama, we're missing an obvious truth: It was Nancy Pelosi who dragged this bloodied carcass of a health bill across the finish line and got the job done.

I've had my problems with Speaker Pelosi (lack of BushCo accountability for war crimes is just one) but she believed in a broad bill when all the party pragmatists--like Rahm Emanuel--had given up. C&L readers know I've been critical of the way Obama has handled reform and even though it's not the bill I wanted to see, it really is the beginning of something historic. And for that, Madame Speaker, I salute you:

The knock on Pelosi was simple: To anoint a “San Francisco liberal” as a party icon would simply affirm the caricature of Democratic leaders that Republicans had been peddling for years – to devastating effect. Better to pick her less strident, more pragmatic rival, Maryland’s Steny Hoyer, their thinking went. But Pelosi had the votes and won what remains the longest leadership campaign in House history (more than three years of starts and stops) by a 118-95 count.That verdict led directly to Sunday night. Because the ideological ambition that separated Pelosi from Hoyer is probably what saved the concept of wholesale healthcare reform when it seemed destined for the trash heap just two months ago.

Pelosi, we have learned in recent days, was instrumental in prodding the White House to press ahead with its push for large-scale reform after January’s special Senate election in Massachusetts – even as Rahm Emanuel, once a House man himself, urged the president to radically pare back his vision. And it was Pelosi who then somehow struck a deal with the Senate and found a way to convince 219 of her fellow Democrats to vote “yes” on a bill they hated.

It’s impossible to know for sure how Hoyer, had he been the speaker, would have responded to Scott Brown’s Massachusetts triumph. But his political history shows him to be much more of an incrementalist than Pelosi. It’s hard to imagine his instincts would have been any different from Emanuel’s – and that Democrats, under a Speaker Hoyer, would on Sunday night have been able to boast of expanding coverage to more than 30 million uninsured Americans.

Fittingly, just minutes after the final vote, Hoyer himself hailed Pelosi as “the single most responsible person for this night’s success.”

The passage of healthcare reform is not just a triumph of Pelosi’s liberal idealism, though it is partly that. It’s just as much a triumph of her underappreciated legislative savvy – mastery, really. In the ’01 leadership race, Hoyer was supposed to be the skilled tactician. Pelosi was supposed to be the clueless ideologue. But as speaker, she’s adeptly mixed her idealism with the deft touch of a seasoned congressional insider.

You need look no further than the healthcare saga for confirmation of this. Who else could have pulled off what Pelosi just did? For more than a year, she carefully balanced the wildly disparate interests of her caucus’ various coalitions – the progressives who demanded a “robust” public option, the Blue Dogs who cared mainly about deficits, the pro-lifers who made abortion their make-or-break issue, and on and on. She gave away just enough to each group to keep reform alive – without sacrificing her own bottom line of near-universal coverage.

She also went to war with the Senate after the Massachusetts special election – and won, forcing that chamber’s leaders to embrace the reconciliation process they’d been shunning.

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Michele Bachmann and Hannidate had a wankfest over the mere thought that reconciliation might be used to pass health-care reform. Isn't it part of America's legislative process? Maybe Bachmann was talking about herself when she said members of Congress were anti-American.

Hannity: So, is the San Francisco Speaker, is she off-script, or is the bipartisan meeting that the president is orchestrating just a sham?

…

Hannity: Can we believe them? Are they just being disingenuous?

Bachmann: Well, that’s the question that we need to have addressed, because the president only let John Boehner, the Republican leadership, know that he wanted a health care summit just an hour he went on national TV with Katie Couric to announce this is what he wanted to do. No heads up, in effect. Then John Boehner sent a letter to President Obama, asking questions, ‘Are we going to start over? Or are we working off of your Democrat plan?’ The president was real clear – he said he plans to pass the Democrat plan, Robert Gibbs went to the microphone, said the same thing. And then as you said, Speaker Pelosi’s Number One health-care negotiator in the House said they’ve got a legislative trick, and they know exactly how they’re going to pass their plan. That’s after the president’s invitation. If they’re already saying they’re going to pass their bill, then what is this for, this summit?

…

Hannity: All right, so are you looking specifically for a promise? In other words, Mr. President, do you promise – and I saw the letter that John Boehner and Eric Cantor sent to the president – do you need a promise or a commitment that he will not use the reconciliation process before it would be wise enough to sit down?

Bachmann: I think the best negotiation would be one where the president says, ‘I will not use the reconciliation’ – the legislative trick, in the Democrats’ own vernacular. And where he says we’ll start from scratch, we’ll start over with a blank sheet of paper, and we’ll start new with our ideas and we’ll truly come together, with cameras, both sides, and come to a discussion. That’s really what the American people expect and that would be the best outcome.

Maybe Congress should just pass Paul Ryan's whacked out budget too.

IOKIYAR. Isn't that always the case? Ronald Reagan used reconciliation along with Clinton. George Bush used it to pas his tax cuts. And another of the wanker elitists is Judd Gregg who attacks it now but used it in 1994 for Newt and wanted to use it against ANWAR.

In 1994, he was a freshman Senator using budget reconciliation to move pieces of Newt Gingrich's Contract With America through the Senate. In 2005, he argued that budget reconciliation should be used to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

And of course, George W. Bush made great use of the procedure with the help of Ben Nelson.

On May 26, 2001, Nelson was one of a dozen Democrats to support president George W. Bush's Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001: the massive tax cut package that defined the administration's plans for job growth. The bill was passed using reconciliation -- meaning it wasn't subject to a Democratic filibuster -- and received the support of 58 Senators. Two years later, Bush had introduced a second tax-cut package, this one entitled The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003. That too was passed through reconciliation with Nelson's vote proving even more critical.

My name is Noelle Cigarroa Bell, and I've been working for the past year on health care reform as a grassroots advocate. I would like to announce exciting news--we're working with Darcy Burner on the FixItAndPassIt! Project. Here's what our project is about:

Healthcare Reform: Fix It and Pass It! is a project of the Progressive Congress Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization dedicated to connecting the progressive movement, ideas, and Congress.

I've started this movement with Eve Gittelson, a noted health care activist, and Darcy Burner, the Executive Director of ProgressiveCongress.org. We're starting a massive push to make 1,000,000 calls to Congress on February 24th and February 25th around the time of President Obama's bipartisan summit to push for a reconciliation fix to the Senate bill. Will you please help join us to fix the bill and get it passed?

Democracy For America is onboard with us for our effort, and we're working on an even bigger push next week to get this job done. Speaker Pelosi has it right when she says she doesn't have the votes for the Senate bill. She's whipped her caucus, tried to get them to a "yes" vote, but they're not going to do it because the Senate bill is political poison because of the lack of a public option, the Medicare buy-in, the excise tax, the sweetheart deals with PhRMA, and the Nebraska Cornhusker Kickback deal.

We're pushing to fix this bill by calling for these items in the reconciliation fix--the public option, the Medicare buy-in, excising the excise tax, increasing the subsidies, drug reimportation, and kicking the Nebraska cornhusker kickback deal out of the Senate bill. The votes won't materialize otherwise. It's the harsh reality. This just doesn't stop here, because truly, this Senate bill even if it gets passed by an Act of God, isn't enough. We will continue to fight for better health reform. Let's get this done and leave it all on the road on February 24th and February 25th.

Thank you for joining us at FixItAndPassIt.org! You can also follow us on Twitter @ProgActionNow.

I extend my sincere thanks to the editor team at Crooks and Liars and to John for allowing this guest post through.