Sen. Max Baucus says he will tweak his health care bill to mollify critics. (WSJ)

But Sen. John D. Rockefeller takes a stand on making concessions on health reform just to get bipartisan support. (NYT)

President Bill Clinton weighs in on health care reform, saying Obama will get the overhaul he wants and may even garner some Republican support. (Bloomberg)

The House will conduct an ethics investigation into Rep. Maxine Waters for helping a bank she had ties with to get a meeting with the Treasury Department. The bank eventually received a $12 million bailout. (WSJ)

Obama Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg will make eight speaking appearances in the next two months before he testifies to Congress about reigning in executive pay. (Reuters)

Wile E. Coyote, long the victim of Road Runner’s more agile gait, is the quintessential antihero. He represents the chase: you can plot, plan and hope to catch that bird, but eventually you fall off a cliff and get slammed on the head with an Acme anvil. LittleSis analyst @WileECoyote — who is from the Southwest — believes in this power structure metaphor. “There is a point for each of us when being handed what seems to be a prize actually causes the ground beneath our feet to crumble into nothingness. Not to push the metaphor – but I hope to be careful to always build from the ground up,” he says.

Coyote found us through a Google search and says the site appealed to him because of the user-generated approach. Sites that aggregate information frustrated him and required additional research, rather than having it all in one place to begin with. “LittleSis has real promise as an open source of well documented research on the connections between individuals,” Coyote says. “My hope is that there will be hundreds of people adding information on a daily basis, and I’m always pleased when someone has gotten to something before I have!”

Read more…

Sen. Max Baucus revealed his health bill yesterday, which contains no public option. (NYT)

Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker says there is still a long road ahead until the economy returns to pre-recession levels. (Bloomberg)

President Obama will reassure world leaders of Wall Street reform at next week’s G20 summit in Pittsburgh. (Reuters)

Assistant Treasury Secretary Michael Barr is fighting to eliminate loopholes for financial institutions setting up niche industrial banks that aren’t subject to routine scrutiny by the Fed. (NYT)

AIG’s Board has reportedly given CEO Robert Benmosche a slap on the wrist for wanting to use the company jet for personal use. (Bloomberg)

Sen. Max Baucus will unveil his health plan in full today, hoping to quell rumors and speculation about its contents. (Reuters)

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, Sen. Baucus says the Senate will act swiftly to pass health reform that puts “real choices back in the hands of consumers.” (WSJ)

As Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke reassures us the recession is “very likely over,” Rep. Ron Paul leads a movement to abolish the Fed. (NYT and WSJ)

Representatives voted along party lines yesterday to slap the wrist of Joe Wilson, who shouted out “You lie!” during the president’s speech in Congress last week. (Reuters)

Citigroup Chairman Richard Parsons will step down to become an adviser to Providence Equity Partners. (NYT)

We’ve gotten two great mentions of our health care research this week in Politico and The Huffington Post.

Politico congressional reporter Manu Raju names Liz Fowler, Sen. Baucus’ current health adviser and former WellPoint lobbyist; Mark Hayes, Sen. Grassley’s health counsel who is married to a health care lobbyist; Frederick Isasi, Sen. Bingaman’s health policy adviser and former lobbyist at Powell Goldstein; and Kate Spaziani, senior health policy aide to Sen. Conrad, also a registered lobbyist at Powell Goldstein.

Raju writes:

And according to the group Public Accountability Initiative, which tracks politicians’ ties to various interests, more than 500 former congressional aides have gone on to become health care lobbyists.

Both lobbyists-turned-aides and aides-turned-lobbyists say they offer unique expertise and experience as lawmakers try to rewrite the nation’s health care laws.

“It gave me a very different perspective, leaving the Hill,” said Debbie Curtis, who spent two years as a lobbyist for the consumer advocacy group Consumer Action during the Clinton-era health care debate. Curtis is currently the chief of staff for Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), the chairman of the powerful health subcommittee on the House Ways and Means Committee.

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In a speech to Wall Street execs yesterday, President Obama scolded previous excesses and spoke of an “ambitious overhaul” of the financial system. (FT)

Sens. Chuck Grassley and Michael Enzi sent a letter of concern to Sen. Max Baucus yesterday about his draft of the health bill. (NYT)

The cost of the Senate’s health bill has now been pared down to $880 billion. (Bloomberg)

Vice President Biden will make his third tour to Iraq while in office to meet with Iraqi leaders. (Reuters)

Senior Vice President Cheronda Guyton at Wells Fargo was fired for throwing “lavish” parties at a company-owned home in Malibu. (Reuters)

In a “60 Minutes” interview, President Obama says he will join with Republicans on the issue of medical malpractice suits. (WSJ)

Sen. Max Baucus says he’ll make one last push to reach out to Republicans before joining his party’s line to pass a health care bill. (Bloomberg)

In an interview on Sunday’s “Face the Nation,” Sen. Olympia Snowe says successful health reform will mean taking the public option off the table. (NYT)

South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson refuses to publicly apologize for shouting out “You lie!” during President Obama’s address to Congress last week. (WSJ)

John J. Sweeney will step down as president of the AFL-CIO and current Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka will take over. (NYT)

Still more evidence that Wellpoint wrote the Baucus plan: the insurance company’s lobbying efforts in DC are headed up by Senator Mike Enzi’s former chief health adviser at Senate HELP, Stephen Northrup. Enzi is a member of Baucus’s so-called “Gang of Six” shaping the bipartisan compromise bill.

In fact, key provisions in the Baucus plan apparently draw on industry-inspired legislation first introduced by Enzi in 2006, while Northrup was still his chief health aide.

Consumer Watchdog first called attention to the similarities, particularly with respect to a part of the plan that would help insurance companies avoid state regulation:

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Last week, we featured @ddwriter, the winner of our Lobbyist Editing Challenge. This week, we’re featuring @Priscilla, our second-place winner. It wasn’t officially her prize, but she did a lot of good research on congressional-staffers-turned-healthcare-lobbyists and deserves to be recognized for it.

@Priscilla is really Morgan Rauch of Houston, Texas. Upon first look, her profile picture looks like it could be Virginia Woolf or a young Georgia O’Keeffe. But in fact, it’s Jeannette Pickering Rankin, the first female in Congress, elected to the House of Representatives in 1916. She chose the name Priscilla as a tribute to her favorite teacher in high school.

Rauch is retired and lives in Houston, Texas. She has to contend with hurricanes, most recently Ike, which devastated nearby Galveston, but loves living there. Houston is home to the Texas Medical Center, one of the largest medical facilities in the world. The complex is constantly covered in the local news and is a giant slice of the local economy. It recently made headlines when local lawmakers visited the campus to speak with doctors there, who denounced the public option. See the video on Verum Serum here.

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I’m going to start posting a locality-specific version of the NameWire (let’s call it SFNewsWire) in order to shed light on recent activity and happenings affecting the Bay Area organizations we’re researching with Spot.us.

• AAA Northern California, Nevada & Utah partners with IBM for Green Data Center (Routers.com)
• Lloyd Dean, CEO of Catholic Healthcare West, expressed optimism about upcoming healthcare reform. According to Dean, the mostly favorable reception from business, the buy-ins on access and costs from insurance and drug companies are among the “evolutionary” forces that have come to outweigh the “minority opinions” – dissenting voices from the GOP and elsewhere. “Look how far we’ve gotten,” he said. (SFGate.com)
• San Francisco’s Sunday Streets program is now a permanent weekly event, Mayor Newsom pronounced. (Twitter.com/andrewross)
• Chevron backs ‘Energy Citizens’, an oil industry movement aimed at derailing climate-change legislation. (SFGate)
• Robert Lloyd, most likely successor to Cisco CEO John Chambers goads channel partners to wallop HP ProCurve (NetworkWorld – thanks to JZukfor the link)