The Wonk Room

In an interview with Kaiser Health News, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) said he would stop a health care bill if he thought it was “too expensive.”

Three top committee chairmen — Reps. Charles Rangel (D-NY) of the House Ways and Means Committee, Henry Waxman (D-CA) of Energy and Commerce, and George Miller (D-CA) of Education and Labor — will brief the full caucus of House Democrats today on efforts to develop a health care bill.

State employee health plans are no public plan compromise: A 2002 study by two policy research groups concluded that state employee plans have been no more effective at controlling costs than private insurers.

The Obama administration is reportedly “backing away from seeking a major reduction in the number of agencies overseeing financial markets…suggesting that the current alphabet-soup of regulators will remain mostly intact.”

Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz at VoxEU write that the slowdown in America’s level of educational attainment “caused much of the recent rise in economic inequality.”

Mother Jones’ Andy Kroll looks at the next wave in mortgage profiteering: “What’s most disconcerting is that some of these companies allegedly pass themselves off as part of the government’s much needed home affordability programs.”

“New York could create as many as 50,000 jobs by converting 45 percent of its electricity needs to renewable energy sources by 2015,” Governor David Paterson said on Monday.

“Environmental groups are urging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to work with them on increasing the renewable electricity mandate in her chamber’s climate and energy bill to reach at least 20 percent by 2020 and to include more efficiency requirements, as well.”

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) expects his drilling amendment to “shrink the no-leasing zone around Florida’s gulf coast to 45 miles from shore” — “less than half the current buffer” — to be approved by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee today.

Commenting on the Lebanese elections, Juan Cole writes that the victorious March 14 coalition “is likely to avoid any further confrontations with Israel and to try to rein in Hezbollah or at least to impress on it the necessity of avoiding adventurism. So at least Obama won’t have to worry about the Levant as a distraction in his peace plans.”

The first detainee from the Guantanamo Bay detention center to arrive in the United States, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, has been moved to New York City to face criminal charges.

Reuters reports that the “relatives of two U.S. journalists sentenced to 12 years hard labor in North Korea called on the reclusive state to show compassion, while Pyongyang threatened to use nuclear weapons to defend itself.”