Something amusing has happened on the way to the June 8 runoff election in Arkansas. Blanche Lincoln, who started her campaign with an ad touting her votes against Democratic agenda items, from the public option to cap and trade, has now metamorphosed into a staunch Democratic reformer. Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln is shifting her campaign [...]

There’s a bit of unfinished business happening in the Senate on the financial reform bill today. Senators will vote on two nonbinding “motions to instruct” conferees of the conference committee ironing out differences between the House and Senate versions. These nonbinding instructions would offer the sense of the Senate on how the conferees should proceed, [...]

The point that I am surprised that the bill, given the Congress we have and the political influence of the banks, is as good, relatively speaking, as it is, didn’t seem to me to be a very controversial one. But I got challenged on it and spent most of my time on Dylan Ratigan’s MSNBC [...]

(I’ll be on the Dylan Ratigan Show today at 4pm ET talking about Wall Street reform.) This is an amazing ad by Blanche Lincoln. Amazing in that she’s almost entirely clueless about what’s really going on with her own bill: “It’s why I’m taking on Wall Street, with the toughest reform bill of anyone in [...]

I’ve written plenty about the potential derivatives loophole in the Senate Wall Street reform bill, which Maria Cantwell felt concerned enough about that she tried to block a cloture vote on the entire legislation (although she did give consent to waiving the Budget Act at the last minute, which also could have held up the [...]

I tend to agree with the position that anti-Lincoln votes in the first-round primary on Tuesday won’t morph into pro-Lincoln votes in the runoff. I also believe that it’s harder to get voters for an incumbent excited to vote for them the second time in three weeks. Therefore I see Bill Halter with a slight [...]

Karen Ackerman, the political director of the AFL-CIO, just held a conference call/victory lap touting their success in a number of primaries last night, particularly PA-12 for Mark Critz and AR-Sen, where Blanche Lincoln was held to 45% and a runoff. Labor came out strongly in support of Bill Halter and against Lincoln during the [...]

If Blanche Lincoln thinks she can rally in three weeks and win a runoff election against Bill Halter, she simply is blind to the import of what happened last night in the US Senate. Among the Republican obstruction, the Democratic facilitation through a cloture vote, etc., Chris Dodd brought up a weakening amendment to Lincoln’s [...]

Just a quick word on the primaries last night, because most of what needed to be said has been said, and it all happened while I was watching the astonishing crumbling of financial reform (more on that in a minute, and how it ties into all this). By now you know the basics: Joe Sestak [...]

Ben Bernanke went after the swaps trading measure in the Wall Street reform bill again yesterday, joining the establishment carping that it would weaken financial stability. Paul Volcker, Sheila Bair and others have made variations of this argument in recent days. Bernanke, in a May 12 letter to Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, said [...]

Earlier today I mentioned that the Senate club was working to protect Blanche Lincoln, first by allowing her to offer up a kabuki derivatives bill which was strong enough for her to counteract claims of being too tight with Wall Street, then by delaying the eventual watering down of that piece in the overall bill [...]