The Commentariat -- January 18

President Obama & President Hu Jintao of China begin their working dinner in the Old Family Dining Room of the White House. White House photo.

R. Sargent Shriver. Undated photo, 1960s, by Life magazine.New York Times: "R. Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy in-law who became the founding director of the Peace Corps, the architect of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty, the United States ambassador to France and the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1972, died Tuesday. He was 95." ...

... Former Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy remembers Sargent Shriver, who died today.

New York Times: "Senator Joseph I. Lieberman will announce on Wednesday that he will not seek a fifth term, according to a person he told of his decision. Mr. Lieberman, whose term is up in 2012, chose to retire rather than risk being defeated, said the person, who spoke to the senator on Tuesday. 'I don’t think he wanted to go out feet first,' the person said." ...

    ... Update: Here's a more extensive Times article on Sen. Lieberman's decision not to seek re-election.

Ben Smith & Byron Tau of Politico: "American Muslim leaders, who have struggled to present a clear public voice or organize politically in the decade since Sept. 11, are increasingly apprehensive about the direction Rep. Pete King will take when he convenes hearings next month on the threat posed by radical Islam in America. King, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, plans to focus on the Times Square bombing attempt and the Fort Hood shooting, both involving American-born Muslims, as well as other incidents and on what he sees as the failure of Muslim leadership to combat extremism."

Manu Raju of Politico: Rand Paul, the junior Senator from Kentucky, will present "his own sweeping budget plan that would result in a $500 billion cut in just one year — about five times more than what the House GOP has promised to do."

Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of the AP shows how Republicans turned the CBO's slight labor loss estimate into an untrue "job-killing" claim about the healthcare law. The labor loss: the CBO assumes that some people will retire early because they don't have to work for health insurance -- their jobs will still be there for others to fill. Ezra Klein made the same point last week in a post titled "There's no 'job-killing health-care law.'"

Pre-existing Conditions. Amy Goldstein of the Washington Post: "As many as 129 million Americans under age 65 have medical problems that are red flags for health insurers, according to an analysis that marks the government's first attempt to quantify the number of people at risk of being rejected by insurance companies or paying more for coverage. The secretary of health and human services is scheduled to release the study on Tuesday, hours before the House plans to begin considering a Republican bill that would repeal the new law to overhaul the health-care system." ...

     ... Update: here's the report from HHS. It's very readable. Here's a more readable blogpost from HHS covering the study's findings (the report isn't that bad).

... David Herszenhorn of the New York Times has more on what Democrats will do today to make the case for the Affordable Care Act.

Michael Grunwald's cover story for Time on gun control is now available online.

Philip Rucker & Dana Hedgpeth of the Washington Post: "A statute buried in [Arizona] state law says that if a public officeholder ceases to 'discharge the duties of office for the period of three consecutive months,' the office shall be deemed vacant, and that at such time, a special election could be called to fill the opening." The law could endanger Gabrielle Giffords' hold on her seat, though at least one Constitutional lawyer said it was up to Congress, not the state, to determine if a vacancy has occurred, & those close to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said it was unlikely she would call a special election under the circumstances.

David Nakamura, et al., of the Washington Post: "A team of 250 federal investigators and 130 local detectives trying to understand why Jared Lee Loughner went on his alleged killing spree has conducted more than 300 interviews with family, friends and neighbors since the shooting. But they remain stumped about what ultimately prompted the 22-year-old's descent into violence." ...

... A. G. Sulzberger & Jennifer Medina of the New York Times: "No one has suggested that [Jared Loughner]'s use of a hallucinogenic herb or any other drugs contributed to ’s apparent mental unraveling that culminated with his being charged in a devastating outburst of violence here. Yet it is striking how closely the typical effects of smoking the herb, Salvia divinorum — which federal drug officials warn can closely mimic psychosis — matched Mr. Loughner’s own comments about how he saw the world, like his often-repeated assertion that he spent most of his waking hours in a dream world that he had learned to control."

The speaker says that here in Washington we're all friends after 6. -- President Ronald Reagan, to Chris Matthews. Matthews has a nice remembrance in the Washington Post on the cordial relationship between Reagan & Speaker Tip O'Neill, for whom Matthews worked. ...

... Rick Hertzberg: We have experienced "a two-year eruption of shocking vituperation and hatred, virtually all of it coming from people who call themselves conservatives — not just from professional radio and television propagandists but also from too many Republican officeholders and candidates for office. The portrayal of the national government as a sinister tyranny and President Obama and his party as equivalent to Communists and Nazis — as alien usurpers bent on destroying the country and the Constitution — spawned a rhetoric of what a Nevada candidate for the Senate approvingly referred to as 'Second Amendment remedies.'"

In a situation like we have just faced in these last eight days of being falsely accused of being an accessory to murder, I and others need make sure that we too are shedding light on truth so a lie cannot continue to live. If a lie does live, then of course your career is over and your reputation is thrashed and you will be ineffective in what we intend to do. -- Guess Who ...

... And while we're on distasteful subjects, T. Bogg has a good post which explains why "Erick Erickson is Sarah Palin with slightly smaller tits." CW: Feminists, give me a break please; I'm one of you. And I have slightly smaller tits.

Elizabeth Williamson of the Wall Street Journal: "President Barack Obama plans a government-wide review of federal regulations, aiming to eliminate rules that stymie economic growth. In an article published in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Obama said he intends to issue an executive order initiating a review to 'make sure we avoid excessive, inconsistent and redundant regulation," focusing on rules that "stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive.'" ...

     ... Here's the WSJ op-ed by President Obama.

White House Revolving Door. Ken Vogel of Politico: "Candidate Barack Obama repeatedly pledged on the campaign trail that working in his administration would not be 'about serving your former employer, your future employer or your bank account.' But with his administration at its midpoint, a traditional time for personnel turnover, it’s clear that despite Obama’s avowals, a longtime truism of Washington life — that a prestigious-sounding administration post can be a lucrative career enhancer — remains unchanged."

Ben Pershing of the Washington Post: "For all the ink spilled on the success of the conservative-leaning tea parties and their chosen candidates, the winners last Election Day included a host of centrist GOP lawmakers" who are moderates. We'll learn how many of the new crop are moderates "when the Tuesday Group -- the House GOP's centrist coalition -- has its first meeting of the 112th Congress."

Brady Dennis of the Washington Post: the "'resolution authority' created under the landmark financial regulation bill enacted last year, gives the government broad powers it didn't possess two years ago when companies such as Lehman Brothers and American International Group spiraled toward bankruptcy. Back then, federal officials faced an unenviable choice -- allow the firms to collapse into bankruptcy, possibly dragging others down with them, or put billions of taxpayer dollars at risk to bail them out."

Ben Protess of the New York Times: "J. Bradley Bennett, over the last two decades, has defended financial advisers, brokerage firms and corporate chieftains accused of everything from insider trading to accounting fraud. Now, he’s switching sides. On Jan. 3, Mr. Bennett became the top cop at Wall Street’s self-policing organization, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra.... During the financial crisis, critics say, the organization missed the forest for the trees, cracking down on small boiler rooms in Florida while ignoring big warning signs on Wall Street." CW: no kidding. Wall Street self-policing? Bennett sounds like a Wall Street dream -- a guy who was defending the same miscreants he is now supposed to "police." How dumb do they think we are?

AP: "... as the House prepares to vote on repeal this week, public support for that has flagged. Only about 1 in 4 respondents said they wanted to do away with the law completely. Even among Republicans, repeal draws markedly less support than it did a few weeks ago: 49%, compared with 61% after the November election." And, as this pdf of the poll demonstrates, a plurality wants the law to do more. Or, as Peter Wade, the Brooklyn Mutt, puts it, "Americans Want More Job-Killing Health Care."

Adam Hochschild, in a New York Times op-ed I missed, gives a brief history of U.S. culpability in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba & the installation of craven dictator Joseph Mobutu in the Congo.

Los Angeles Times: "The dramatic shrinking of Arctic sea ice and the Northern Hemisphere's glaciers and snowfields has reduced the radiation of sunlight back into space more than scientists previously predicted, according to a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience. As a result, the ocean and land mass exposed by the melting ice and snow have absorbed more heat, contributing to global warming."

Local News

Florida, at the Forefront of Education. "Classes without Teachers." Laura Herrera of the New York Times: more than "7,000 students in Miami-Dade County Public Schools enrolled in a program in which core subjects are taken using computers in a classroom with no teacher. A 'facilitator' is in the room to make sure students progress. That person also deals with any technical problems. These virtual classrooms, called e-learning labs, were put in place last August as a result of Florida’s Class Size Reduction Amendment, passed in 2002. The amendment limits the number of students allowed in classrooms, but not in virtual labs."