As a two-year-old, so the family story goes, I would ask my mother to hang a map on the wall behind me while I shuffled papers in my small hands at a desk, pretending to be Walter Cronkite. Around that same time, maybe a little later, when I was visiting my grandfather's farm implement store in the Bible Belt, one of the mechanics in the shop was left dumbfounded when he asked me what my favorite TV show was, and I said, apparently without hesitation, "Walter Cronkite."

I'll stipulate that those anecdotes, which I have no direct memory of, probably say more about what a hopelessly geeky kid I was than they do about Cronkite or his influence. But it does give you a sense of his place in the American home in the 1970s.

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Remember this?

President George W. Bush signed into law Thursday the first major piece of legislation of his presidency, a $1.35 trillion tax cut over 10 years.

Of the six senators begging President Obama to slow down health care reform, four of them -- Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), and Susan Collins (R-ME) -- voted for those huge Bush tax cuts.

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Everyone who's yapping about the CBO chief's comments about health care costs, should read this piece by Jon Cohn. Another one of those cases where -- shockingly -- it really helps to understand the policy details and not just the political atmospherics.

Yesterday in 100 Seconds: Welcome To Canada

Obits from the Times, CBS, the Post ...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS): If health care covered abortions, Obama's mom might have aborted him.

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) twitters on Obama's White House remarks:

Obama speech on healthCareReform Absolutely nothing new Waste of time saying we are going to get that done Baucus and I know that But doRITE

Worries me that Grassley and Baucus think they have it all figured out.

4:07 PM ... Obama laying out broad range of agreements and what he describes as emerging consensus in place prior to appearance of letter requesting delay from six senate wankers this morning.

4:09 PM ... "Health insurance reform cannot add to the deficit over the next decade."

4:12 PM ... Miscellaneous race metaphors, "now is not the time to slow down" in re senate wanker six.

Blitzer calls Obama afternoon remarks on health care a "hail mary pass" to save health care reform.

Big, big, big step backwards for the Kindle book platform. And even with a poetic twist.

It seems Amazon snuck into people's electronic libraries overnight and deleted their George Orwell books. (I'm not clear what happened in cases where people had also saved their electronic copies to the computer in addition to their Kindle -- if anyone knows, lemme know.)

The technology and execution is amazing, as I've noted before. But it really seems like Amazon Inc. might be too craven to make it work.

House intel committee chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) announces his committee will investigate the failure to inform Congress of the secret CIA assassination program.

Gibbs briefing cancelled today; Obama speaking himself ... about health care.

Late Update: We checked with the White House and President Obama will not be taking questions.

Gov. Mark Sanford's communications director decides to move on to a less humiliating line of work.

I was pretty stunned to see the beginnings of a compromise coming into place this morning that would have the 'card check' provisions pulled from the Employee Free Choice Act. At least in the superficial debate, the two have been treated as more or less synonymous, though that's clearly not case -- I don't think anyone would disagree that there are a number of other very important provisions in the bill.

Here's what TPM Reader JS has to say ...

I'm a labor attorney that has spent most of my career on management's side. If you Google my name, that's what you'll find. Recently, I've started doing some employee-side work. Fwiw, my opinion is that this EFCA compromise is really what organized labor wants and has always wanted. Business took the bait with the card check issue and thought they had won.

Michael Fox, a labor attorney and blogger, says that card check has always just been a stalking horse for the other planks of EFCA. In fact, what gives angst to some conservative legal scholars more than the card check is the forced arbitration. Someone wrote an article (it was in the WSJ, I think) that the arbitration provision would be unconstitutional. The quickie elections are important to. I don't agree with "stalking horse" exactly. To me it was more of a bargaining chip they were willing to sacrifice if needed.

The reason for this is clear to me: card check has not had a statistically significant impact on organizing success rates in jurisdictions where it has been tried. There are studies out there on Canada that show that. Getting a union recognized doesn't matter if they union can't negotiate a contract before people give up on them. Businesses will just hold out on a contract. This bill won't let them do that. As for the quickie elections, it doesn't give management enough time to wage their campaigns to be as effective in changing the vote.

If those two provisions pass, it's probably the biggest labor law reform since Taft-Hartley in 1948, and unlike that law, it's a huge win for labor.

If you look at Brian's update from this morning at TPMDC, there does seem to be a basic cleavage in the responses from the AFL-CIO and Andy Stern/SEIU. In any case, I know there are a lot of labor movement readers we have. So I'm very curious to hear what people think of today's developments.

Palin promises "less politically correct" tweets once she formally bails on governorship.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) on the stakes in delaying a health care vote past August: "If we're able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

President Obama:

We have talked and talked and talked about fixing health care for decades. And we have finally reached a point where inaction is no longer an option -- where the choice to defer reform is nothing more than a decision to defend the status quo. And I will not defend the status quo.

Watch.

The commission created to investigate the structural causes of the financial collapse may be designed to fail -- but even if a few well-intentioned commissioners and staff try to make a real go of it, they'll have former Rep. Bill Thomas (R-CA), the commission's co-chair and a legendary partisan knife-fighter, standing in their way.