The Wonk Room

“At least 25 people were killed in a series of bombs in Iraq and the northern city of Kirkuk, a day after 41 people died when a car bomb exploded near a group of restaurants in a Shia district of north-west Baghdad.”

Four men were “arrested Wednesday night in what the authorities said was a plot to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military planes at an Air National Guard base in Newburgh, N.Y.” The men appeared to be acting alone.

CATO’s Leon Hadar writes in Foreign Affairs that President Obama “must recognize that the main threat to Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state is not Iran but its conflict with the Palestinians — a conflict that will continue to serve as a catalyst for growing anti-Israel and anti-American radicalization in the region at large unless and until it is resolved.”

$16,771: the cost of health care for an American family of four in 2009, according to the Milliman Medical Index. “If the median family income in 2008 was about $67,000, then health care costs represent about 25% of the annual household paycheck.”

CBO Director Elmendorf told the Senate Finance Committee “he expects fewer Americans would migrate from private health insurance to a public plan than projected by the oft-quoted study by nonpartisan policy experts at The Lewin Group.”

Health Care for America NOW has issued a report on how “completely non-competitive the private insurance industry is in nearly every market in the U.S., how that monopoly ties directly to the higher costs of both insurance premiums and health care in general.”

“U.S. business leaders told President Obama Wednesday that the nation lags in developing good jobs out of clean energy” and that “passing a global warming bill that sets a price for carbon emissions will give businesses a much-needed sense of the rules they must follow.”

“Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have enough votes to approve historic legislation to cap and reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions” (H.R. 2454) in a “final committee vote by early Thursday evening”

Other committees are waiting to take a crack the climate legislation: Natural Resources chair Nick Rahall (D-WV) “wants to add language to the climate bill that would allow new oil and gas production”

The Federal Pension Guaranty Corp., which is the federal agency that guarantees corporate pensions, “was $33.5 billion in the red at the end of March, triple its deficit six months earlier.”

Today, Democrats in Congress “wrote to President Obama urging him to delay implementing a trade pact with Panama until that country signs an agreement to give U.S. authorities access to records on finances held there by U.S. citizens and firms.”

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) plans to introduce legislation today “that would be the first to make paid vacation time a requirement under federal law.”