>Congress Reaches Historic Deal, But Fiscal Battles Loom on the Horizon

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A series of spending battles await Congress following the expected passage of the 2011 budget bill next week, as Democrats and Republicans will continue clashing over the nation’s fiscal responsibilities moving forward.

With a last-minute budget deal, Congress averted a federal government shutdown Friday night.

On Saturday, President Obama signed a short term spending deal that will allow the government to pay for federal operations through Friday.

The measure was needed to keep the government open long enough for Congress to sign off on the budget deal reached just before the midnight deadline Friday by Obama, Republican House Speaker John Boehner and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Obama made an unannounced trip from the White House to the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday to make clear that the country’s national parks and monuments are open for business. The sites would have been closed in a government shutdown.

“Because Congress was able to settle its differences, that’s why this place is open today and everybody’s able to enjoy their visit,” Obama told tourists on the steps of the memorial.

The Friday deal included $38.5 billion in spending cuts while leaving the more contentious policy matters, such as blocking funding for Planned Parenthood, for a later debate.

But the epic clash between Democrats and Republicans was just the first of a series of fiscal fights as two more battles loom on the horizon — the national debt ceiling and then the 2012 budget.

“We’re gonna have a fight in a couple of months over the debt ceiling. We’re gonna have a fight over the 2012 budget,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill, told Fox News Saturday. “This is not basically the last fight here. This is the first opening salvo in a real attempt to bring back the size of government and start living within our means.”

The Treasury Department has told Congress it will hit its $14.3 trillion borrowing limit no later than mid-May and Republicans hope to use the issue to force President Obama to accept long-term deficit-reduction measures.

“The president’s asked us to raise the debt ceiling and Senate Republicans and House Republicans, and I hope many Democrats as well, are going to say, Mr. President, in order to raise the debt ceiling, we need to do something significant about the debt,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor Friday night.

The White House has warned that not lifting the debt ceiling could lead to a default on the national debt and harm the economy, which appears to be picking up steam. If there is a stalemate, the Treasury could avoid defaulting for several weeks by using a number of tricks but it would eventually run out of options.

Lifting the debt ceiling is never easy and in this political environment, where Tea Party activists are pressuring Republican leaders to slash federal spending, a rough fight is all but guaranteed.

The fight over the 2012 budget won’t be a picnic either. The budget deal that Republicans and Democrats negotiated Friday night is for 2011 and funds the government through the end of September with $38.5 billion in spending cuts.

But House Republicans intend to pass a 2012 budget next week that would cut $6.2 trillion in spending over the next decade calls for sweeping changes in the Medicare and Medicaid health programs.

Democrats have already called House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s plan an attack on the elderly and the poor.

But in the Republican radio address, Ryan warned of a coming crisis.

“Unless we act soon, government spending on health and retirement programs will crowd out spending on everything else, including national security. It will literally take every cent of every federal tax dollar just to pay for these programs,” Ryan said Saturday.

House Speaker John Boehner has said that the fight over the 2011 budget is likely to repeat itself in the next coming months.

“It’s taken us some time to get acquainted with each other and to work our way through this, because understand that this process that we’re in is likely to be repeated a number of times this year,” Boehner said.

>Obama Says He’s Confident Libya Operation Command Issues Will Be Resolved

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President Barack Obama said yesterday that he is confident the coalition of nations involved in Libyan military operations will be able to resolve their command disagreements as he defended U.S. involvement in the strikes.

Speaking to reporters in El Salvador, where he met with President Mauricio Funes, Obama said a command transition orchestrated by members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will be done “over the next several days.”

“I have absolutely no doubt that we will be able to transfer control of this operation to an international coalition,” Obama said at a press conference with Funes in San Salvador.

Obama also said U.S. involvement in the operation to establish a “no-fly” zone in Libya to protect civilians and opposition forces fighting troops loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi is in the nation’s vital interest to stop a “brutal dictator.”

“At the end of the day, the American people are going to feel satisfied that lives were saved,” he said. “Very shortly we’re going to be able to say we’ve achieved the objective of a no-fly zone.”

Obama linked the fighting in Libya to demonstrations that toppled autocratic regimes in Egypt and Tunisia. He said a victory for Qaddafi in Libya could imperil progress in those nations.

National Interest

“We have a huge national interest in making sure that those are successful,” he said. “They become models for peaceful transitions.”

About a dozen countries, including the U.S., France, Italy and the U.K., are involved in the fifth day of military operations in Libya, and are split over what command role to assign to NATO.

The U.K. and Italy want NATO to take over the leadership of military operations in Libya, a step resisted by France and other members of the alliance, including Turkey, and some of the Arab nations backing the air campaign.

Obama said the U.S. took command at the start of the campaign because of the “unique capabilities” of its military for the attack on Libyan air defenses. France, Italy and the U.K. are among other nations involved in the operation, which was authorized by a United Nations Security Council resolution.

Domestic Pressures

While he deals with a dispute within the international alliance, the president is also being pressed by Republicans and some Democrats in Congress to provide a clearer explanation for the U.S. action in Libya and to address concerns about whether there is an exit strategy.

Obama said that the U.S. won’t bear all the costs of the campaign and that so far the U.S. contribution is “relatively modest.”

“We’re confident this is something we can budget as part of our overall operations,” he said.

The U.S. has spent at least $168 million during the first stage of the campaign, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Obama spoke yesterday with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, and the three agreed that NATO should have a “key role” in the command of the air campaign, Ben Rhodes, the U.S. deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, told reporters.

Steering Committee

The allies are considering a proposal, backed by France, to create a political steering committee that would oversee military operations using NATO’s command structure. It would consist of the 12 nations that have committed to participating, according to a Western diplomat familiar with the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Sarkozy, one of the most vocal proponents of the no-fly zone, said full command by NATO risked prejudicing non-NATO Arab forces. Germany and Turkey, two NATO members, have opposed putting the alliance in charge.

Turkey may be key in the debate. Obama and Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke by telephone yesterday and “reaffirmed their support” for the UN mandate, the White House said in a statement. Still, the Turkish leader was noncommittal about future support of the operation, Rhodes said.

The coalition arrayed against Libya includes non-NATO countries, and “not every single NATO ally is going to be participating in the enforcement of the no-fly zone,” Rhodes said.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in Moscow yesterday that “the question is if there is a way we can work out NATO’s command-and-control machinery without it being a NATO mission and without a NATO flag.”

Libyan Rebellion

The strikes were launched in response to gains by forces loyal to Qaddafi in putting down a rebellion aimed at toppling his government. Qaddafi’s forces last week had closed in on the rebel stronghold of Benghazi after recapturing almost all the towns they lost during the uprising.

The turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East, triggered by the revolt that ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia on Jan. 14, led to the removal of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt as well as protests in Saudi Arabia and Syria and an uprising against the Sunni monarchy in Bahrain.

The situation in Libya has overshadowed each of Obama’s stops on his five-day visit to Latin America. He arrived in El Salvador yesterday from Chile and was in Brazil over the weekend. He returns to the White House this evening.

The trip is aimed at deepening trade ties with the region, including openings for U.S. companies in the region’s energy development and infrastructure-building.

>President Obama trades friendly barbs at Gridiron Club dinner

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It took three attempts, but the Gridiron Club – a hokey, hallowed vestige of swampland-era Washington – finally got President Obama to show up for its annual dinner Saturday night. And yet, what did the members get? No respect, we tell you – no respect!
The president told the 650 guests at the downtown Renaissance Hotel that they were meeting at a time when “a powerful spirit of change is tearing down old regimes, decaying institutions, remnants of the past.”
Pause. “So, look out, Gridiron Club. . . . I mean, look at this get-up. Forget about winning the future. How about entering the present?”
By that point, though, Obama had already been serenaded by a gang of Gridiron members, impersonating the GOP House leadership while dressed as Hells Angels, about how they’re “gonna block Barack around the clock,” to the tune of the old Bill Haley song.
We’re gonna move Obama to the right
We’re gonna mock mock mock his election fight
We’re gonna talk, gonna talk, and then we might indict!
Yes, America, it’s one of those Washington dinners: where leading politicians and media elite dress up in their finest – white tie, in this case – to eat, drink and lob passive-aggressive jokes at one another, in a way that seems pointed and mean but only serves to feed the beyond-the-Beltway suspicion that They Are All in Bed Together.
Such as: Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels joking that he got his duds from “the bearded guy at Men’s Wearhouse. Anyone else notice, you never see him and Wolf Blitzer in the same place at the same time?” Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Mitt Romney: “We have more in common than our hairstyles; we both used to think health-care reform would advance our careers.” Al Hunt of Bloomberg feigning surprise that the absent Sen. Chuck Schumer would miss a chance to schmooze reporters: “It’s like Charlie Sheen missing a hookers’ convention.”
Only among friends, right? They kid because they love. Right?
In the D.C.-as-high-school metaphor, where the 3,000-person White House Correspondents’ Association spring dinner is fondly known as “prom,” Gridiron is something like the Student Council Follies. The 126-year-old group is a relatively exclusive cadre of the Washington press corps – limited to 65 active members, most of them well over age 50 – whose preferred method of entertainment in 2011 remains Broadway-style current-events song parodies.
But we confess: Some of it is kinda funny. Worthy of a 12:52 a.m. slot on “Saturday Night Live,” even. In the Act 2 finale, “Karl Rove,” dressed as a mad scientist, sang to the Johnny Cash tune “I’ve Been Everywhere”: “I’ve seen every one, man . . ./They all wanna run, man/Egos by the ton, man . . .” (Rove was played by the Marine Band’s Kevin Bennear – like many of Gridiron’s best voices, not a full member but a ringer enlisted for the occasion.)
And with that, a parade of 20 Gridiron members traipsed across the stage, goofily costumed as the 2012 GOP hopefuls: Romney in a hospital gown, Rick Santorum as an altar boy, Haley Barbour as a Confederate soldier, Michele Bachmann in thigh-high red boots, Rudy Giuliani in a pink ball gown and so on. (Don’t get the jokes? Then you’re not as politics-consumed as this audience.)
I’ve seen Huckabee at his weekly weigh-in
Sarah Palin out surveyin’
Eye of Newt and chin of Romney
Guy in drag, that’s Giuliani
Mitt, he’s drivin’ fast and far
With man’s best friend strapped to his car
Maybe you had to be there – not that we were. The oddity of this journalist-hosted dinner is that it’s on the record yet off-limits to any non-member journalists writing about it – forcing us to beg for details from wine-bleary colleagues inside the room. (We gleaned much of the musical entertainment from a Friday afternoon dress rehearsal.) Once again this year, C-SPAN begged the Gridiron, in the name of “openness and transparency,” to admit its cameras into the dinner, and once again it was rebuffed. We get it, though: Would the president have brought the same edge to his routine with cameras there?
Like the one about how before Rahm Emanuel joined him as chief of staff, his approval ratings were above 60 percent and unemployment was below 8 percent – so “Good luck, Chicago!” And how he’s grateful for Barbour’s support of the first lady’s anti-obesity campaign, but “Haley, when Michelle said you need to run, she didn’t mean for president!” (Because he’s fat – get it?) As for Jon Huntsman, his former ambassador to China who’s now pondering his own 2012 Republican bid: “The next GOP nominee for president. Love that guy!” If Huntsman runs, Obama said he’d be the guy in New Hampshire holding the “Honk for Huntsman” signs on the side of the road; if he has an Iowa fish fry, Obama said he’d be there to cook. “He is truly the yin to my yang, and I’m going to make sure every primary voter knows it.”
John Boehner jokes were big, of course. The president said he used to think the House speaker was tan, but after seeing him tear up so much, he realized: “That’s not a tan – that’s rust!” A Gridiron skit had Fake Boehner singing “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to,” Lesley Gore-style. (“I’m try’n to show them some leadership here/Some gravitas and some guts/How did I end up in bed/With all these tea party nuts?”)
By all accounts, Daniels, the official Republican speaker of the night, slayed the room with a routine that was both self-deprecatory and snarky. On his own presidential prospects, “all this favorable press I’ve been getting . . . it’s hard not to let it go to your head: ‘small,’ ‘stiff,’ ‘short,’ ‘pale,’ ‘unimposing,’ ‘unassuming,’ ‘uninspiring.’ . . . It’s destiny!” About that sling on his right arm: “Rotator cuff surgery was really a cover story. The truth is I broke a rib traveling to last month’s governors’ conference. I drew a middle seat between Haley Barbour and Chris Christie. . . . I couldn’t get up to go to the bathroom. Their tummies were stuck in the full upright and locked position.”
Sebelius, the night’s Democratic speaker, recommended the president “consider folding the TSA into our department. We could make life a lot easier for the businessman on the go – by allowing him to get a boarding pass and a colonoscopy at the same time.”
Ah, good times. Sorry none of us was there for Gridiron’s age-old closing ritual, in which all guests linked arms to sing “Auld Lang Syne.” A more memorable musical moment may have come when the Marine Band struck up “Hail to the Chief” to welcome the president.
Obama waved them off: “Play that song we talked about,” he ordered.
And they did: “Born in the U.S.A.”
“Some things just bear repeating,” he said.

>U.S. readies relief for quake-hit ally Japan

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President Barack Obama sent condolences to the people of Japan on Friday and said the United States would provide any help its close ally needed after a massive earthquake and tsunami killed hundreds.
The Defense Department was preparing American forces in the Pacific Ocean to provide relief after the quake, which generated a tsunami that headed across the Pacific past Hawaii and toward the west coast of the U.S. mainland.
The U.S. Air Force transported “some really important coolant” to a Japanese nuclear plant affected by the quake, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said.
Authorities said hundreds of people were killed in Japan and the toll was expected to surpass 1,000.
“This is a potentially catastrophic disaster and the images of destruction and flooding coming out of Japan are simply heartbreaking,” Obama told reporters.
Obama was awakened by his chief of staff, Bill Daley, at about 4 a.m. EST (0900 GMT) and called Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan later in the morning.
“On behalf of the American people, I conveyed our deepest condolences, especially to the victims and their families, and I offered our Japanese friends whatever assistance is needed,” Obama said at a midday news conference.
Obama said Kan told him that so far there were no signs of a radiation leak at the nuclear plant hit by the quake, adding the United States sent the coolant as a precaution.
‘HUGE DISASTER’
Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters traveling with him in Bahrain that U.S. troops and military facilities in Japan were in good shape and willing to help.
“It’s obviously a very sophisticated country but this is a huge disaster and we will do all, anything we are asked to do to help out,” he said.Daley told a meeting of the President’s Export Council it appeared Hawaii was spared serious impact from the tsunami.
There is still some risk to the U.S. west coast, “but I think the enormous fears that were there hours ago, for some of us hours ago, have diminished greatly, which is quite a relief for all of us,” he said.
The U.S. military effort included at least six Navy ships, Pentagon spokeswoman Navy Commander Leslie Hullryde said.The State Department said U.S. embassy operations in Japan were moved from Tokyo to another location as a precaution.
There have been no reports of Americans killed or injured in the quake. A State Department travel alert strongly urged Americans to avoid nonessential travel to Japan.
“Strong aftershocks are likely for weeks following a strong earthquake such as this one,” it said.

>Dollar slips ahead of jobs report

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The Australian dollar slipped on Tuesday, as the spectre of Libya weighed on markets while currency traders awaited official local jobs figures.

At the local close, the dollar was trading at 101.16 US cents, down from Monday’s local close of 101.27 US cents.Commonwealth Bank currency strategist Joe Capurso said there was little action on the local currency market with no market moving data released during the trading day.

He said traders were awaiting official national employment data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Thursday.

‘‘Probably there’s a little bit of holding back until the jobs data and some guidance on Libya,’’ he said.

Australia’s unemployment rate is expected to remain steady at 5.0 per cent in February, unchanged from the previous month’s result, the median of 11 economists surveyed by AAP shows.

Thursday’s ABS figures are also expected to show total employment rose by 20,000, while the participation rate is expected to remain at 65.9 per cent.

On the global stage, international pressure is mounting against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who has been violently suppressing protests against his rule for about a month.

US President Barack Obama warned on Tuesday the US and its NATO allies were still considering military options to stop what he called ‘‘unacceptable’’ violence by Gaddafi’s regime.

NATO decided to boost the number of surveillance planes over Libya from 10 to 24 hours a day, the US Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder said.

Before the upheaval, Libya produced around 2 per cent of the world’s oil.

>Romney seeks to address health care woes

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Call it an attempt to address an obvious political vulnerability.

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on Saturday derided President Barack Obama’s health care law — modeled in some ways after one the ex-governor signed in Massachusetts — as a misguided and egregious effort to seize more power for Washington.

“Obamacare is bad law, bad policy, and it is bad for America’s families,” Romney declared. “And that’s the reason why President Obama will be a one-term president.” He vowed to repeal it if he were ever in a position to do so, and drew hearty cheers from his Republican Party audience.

Then, raising the Massachusetts law, Romney argued that the solution for the unique problems of one state isn’t the right prescription for the nation as a whole, and he acknowledged: “Our experiment wasn’t perfect — some things worked, some didn’t, and some things I’d change.”

“One thing I would never do is to usurp the constitutional power of states with a one-size-fits-all federal takeover,” Romney said, again earning applause. “The federal government isn’t the answer for running health care any more than it’s the answer for running Amtrak or the post office.”

With that, he used his first appearance before New Hampshire Republicans since the midterm elections to start addressing head-on the issue that’s certain to be a hurdle in his all-but-certain presidential campaign.

Romney’s states-rights pitch is one that GOP primary voters are likely to hear over the next year as he tries to persuade them to overlook his flaws because he alone is the strongest Republican to challenge Obama on the country’s top issue — the economy.

The failed candidate of 2008 is expected to formally announce a second candidacy later this spring. Campaign signs posted along the road leading to the hotel where he was speaking may have gotten a bit ahead of him. They said “Mitt Romney for President” and suggested that the theme would be “True Strength for America’s Future.”

Romney and his aides insisted they were old signs.

Among Romney’s biggest challenges: explaining to GOP primary voters why he signed a law that became the foundation for Obama’s national overhaul. Passed by Congress last year, Obama’s health care law has enraged conservatives who view it as a costly government expansion and intrusion into their lives because it mandates insurance for most Americans.

Romney all but ignored the topic in his last major public appearance last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

But, since then, the similarities with Romney’s 2006 law in Massachusetts have increasingly been dogging him.

Obama praised the efforts in Massachusetts during a meeting with governors at the White House, saying: “I agree with Mitt Romney, who recently said he’s proud of what he accomplished on health care by giving states the power to determine their own health care solutions. He’s right.”

Also, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, an Obama friend, said Romney deserves a lot of credit on health care. “One of the best things he did was to be the co-author of our health care reform, which has been a model for national health care reform,” he said.

The praise from Democrats provides fodder for Romney’s Republican primary opponents; some are already heaping on the criticism.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee says in his new book: “If our goal in health care reform is better care at lower cost, then we should take a lesson from RomneyCare, which shows that socialized medicine does not work.” It was a play on the word that conservative critics use to describe the national law: Obamacare.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who is likely to run for president against Romney, took a shot at Romney when he testified before a House committee reviewing Obama’s health care overhaul. He lumped Romney in with a late liberal icon and an Obama friend in saying: “Senator (Edward M.) Kennedy and Governor Romney and then Governor Patrick, if that’s what Massachusetts wants, we’re happy for them. We don’t want that. That’s not good for us.”

A GOP rising star, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., also weighed in, saying of Romney’s law: “It’s not that dissimilar to Obamacare. And you probably know I’m not a big fan of Obamacare.”

All that was the backdrop as Romney took the stage at the Carroll County Lincoln Day Dinner at the Attitash Grand Summit Hotel in northern New Hampshire.

First, he poked fun at the criticism that seems to be coming from all sides, saying “you may have noticed that the president and his people spend more time talking about me and Massachusetts health care than Entertainment Tonight spends talking about Charlie Sheen.”

Then he turned serious and provided an explanation, emphasizing states’ rights to a crowd from the “Live Free Or Die” state.

His coming candidacy may hinge on whether they buy it.