A lot of the fate of climate change and health care legislation this year will come down to whether the Democrats decide to push this legislation through using budget reconciliation. That will determine whether the Dems need 50 votes or 60 votes to get the legislation passed — in other words, whether the Republicans can filibuster. Today, 8 Democratic senators joined Republicans in a public statement saying the Dems should not try to push that legislation through on the 50 vote rules, which makes it much less likely that either will pass.

Greg Sargent has an interesting little scoop here. SEIU’s Andy Stern is hinting that that SEIU might endorse Arlen Specter next year if he supports EFCA. And reps from the AFL-CIO have suggested the same.

In one respect this isn’t that surprising. Specter has a decent relationship with labor. He actually voted for EFCA back in 2007. And they’ve endorsed him before. But implicit in Stern’s statement is that that they will most definitely not be endorsing Specter if he ends up pulling his support from EFCA. And these are not ordinary times for Specter.

Specter only barely managed to secure the Republican nomination in 2004. And that was with the strong support of a then popular (at least with Republicans) president. The GOP has now taken a hard turn to the right — especially on fiscal policy. And Specter has either made his bed or his grave (depending on your point of view) by providing the crucial vote for the president’s Stimulus Bill. Though he’d probably be the favorite in a general election match-up Specter now faces an uphill struggle to get the Republican nomination. It’s even been credibly argued that switching parties is the only credible chance Specter has to remain in the senate.

So there’s definitely a ‘make your choice, choose sides’ push behind Stern’s comments. If Specter has intense opposition on his right and committed opposition from labor at the same time, it’s really hard to see how he gets through.

Closing arguments just finished up in the Minnesota election contest trial. Eric Kleefeld reviews the Franken closing. More soon on Coleman’s closing.

Late Update: Kleefeld runs down the closing Norm’s lawyer gave. My experience is that lawyers use adolescent flattery on judges when they don’t have much of a case (which always struck me as just reinforcing to the judge that they have no case). Lot of that going on in the Coleman closing argument.

We’re all talking a lot about CNBC today after the boffo drubbing Jim Cramer took last night on the Daily Show. As an aside, as big of a clown as Cramer has been and as wildly hyperbolic as many of his recent comments have were, I’ll give the guy props for agreeing to go on the show where he certainly knew he was going to get sliced and diced, though perhaps not that sliced and diced. But back to CNBC.

As the economy has moved front and center, probably all of us are reading and watching a lot more financial news. It now runs regularly on our bank of TVs here at TPM HQ, whereas we used to be more focused on the regular cable news nets and the CSPANs. But there are somewhat unique advantages CNBC operates under. To the best of my knowledge CNBC is not part of the news division at NBC. It’s part of the division that runs cable broadcasting. MSNBC is also one of their cable channels; but they report up through the news division. As you can see here, CNBC President Mark Hoffman reports to NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker, not Steve Capus, the president of NBC News. So they’re in with Bravo and the rest. And they’re under no pressure from the News division to provide editorial objectivity or balance or any editorial standards at all (*). And I mean, half of it is Jim Cramer and Larry Kudlow. So that’s pretty obvious.

The other point, which is both obvious and worth stating, is that CNBC’s business model is not reporting news for average folks or even average investors. While the channel makes good money, it ratings are actually pretty low. The whole model is based on who the audience is — brokers, financial professionals and folks with big money on Wall Street. So of course it’s heavily biased toward that viewership.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Big dollar investors deserve their own cable channel too. But as more of the ‘news’ moves into CNBC’s ‘space’, it’s worth considering how deeply skewed their reporting is.

(ed.note: * — Obviously, this does not mean that they don’t apply their own editorial standards. Just that they’re on their own in that regard and not on any kind of leash from the news division which might provide some push back to their right-wing tilt or singular focus on Wall Street as the determiner of what’s good or not for the economy.)

Announcement just out from the Justice Department:

In a filing today with the federal District Court for the District of Columbia, the Department of Justice submitted a new standard for the government’s authority to hold detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility. The definition does not rely on the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief independent of Congress’s specific authorization. It draws on the international laws of war to inform the statutory authority conferred by Congress. It provides that individuals who supported al Qaeda or the Taliban are detainable only if the support was substantial. And it does not employ the phrase “enemy combatant.”

If you remember, not long after President Bush became president, we had that incident with the US spy

plane hugging Chinese airspace, which was bumped by a Chinese jet intercepter and forced to make an emergency landing on Chinese territory. Then just days ago we had a strangely similar incident at sea. Again, just a few months into the tenure of a new president.

Now we have Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao publicly worrying about the safety of the almost $1 trillion of US Treasuries China owns. That they’d have some concern isn’t surprising. But having the head of government sound the warning bell is hardly the best approach to preserving confidence in US debt.

This strikes me as all of a piece, pretty unsubtle signaling of a shifting balance of power.

Certainly, it is worth noting that China’s export driven economy and massive build up of capital reserves were the fuel behind the US housing bubble. And China’s own continued growth is dependent at least for now and for some time into the future on a very receptive US market for its goods. We’re in a toxic but mutual embrace.

Republicans complain about partisanship when Obama says he’s inherited problems from the previous White House. That and other political news in today’s TPMDC Saturday Roundup.

I’ve been highly critical of the government bailout of AIG. But the new spectacle of the company paying $100 million in bonuses to executives, even over Secretary Geithner’s objections is an example of what’s wrong with it.

First, lest there be any confusion, we’re not talking about bonuses for executives at the conventional insurance providing divisions of AIG. We’re talking about $100 million in bonuses for executives at the company’s Financial Products division, the shop in London that wrote almost half a trillion dollars of credit default swaps (in effect, unfunded de facto insurance policies on wildly overvalued assets) — the ones that caused the company’s death spiral and put taxpayers on the line for what will likely eventually be a quarter trillion dollar price tag.

So Secretary Geithner told AIG CEO Edward Liddy that the these bonuses would not fly. Liddy said: sorry. We’re contractually obligated to pay these bonuses. And if we don’t we could open ourselves to legal liability. We could get sued.

Now, as a narrow legal matter, I don’t doubt there is a contractual obligation. But bankruptcy disrupts contractual obligations. I’m actually not sure where employees with contractual bonuses come in line in a bankruptcy proceeding. But I bet it’s really far toward the end of the line. And in business terms AIG was bankrupt. Not just bankrupt but driven to bankruptcy entirely by the division that these execs work at. It is only because — rightly or wrongly — the government believes that allowing AIG to founder would threaten the entire economy that we have agreed to let the taxpayer take the hit for all these reckless actions.

So on the business merits, they’re bankrupt. But we decide it’s in the national interest to prevent formal bankruptcy. And these sharks — not everyone at AIG, but the execs that created this mess — use that as a lever to get paid the money they never would have seen if we’d let (market) nature take its course.