Lots of interesting things to be said about Governor Romney's "I like to fire people" slip.  These two from James Fallows (1, 2) are characteristically fair and thoughful.  Here's one from Professor Krugman that strikes me as especilaly valuable:

Who Fires Whom?

Aaron Carroll has an excellent analysis of Mitt Romney’s faux pas on firing people. No, Romney didn’t actually say that he enjoys firing people — but what he really did say, that competition works in health care because you can fire your insurance company, was actually worse. Carroll:

The real issue, unfortunately, is that very, very few people have the luxury that Gov. Romney is endorsing. Let’s say that you are self-employed, and lucky enough to have found a company to provide you with health insurance. Then, let’s say you develop cancer. You suddenly find out that your insurance company stinks. So you fire them, right?

Of course not. You’re screwed. Now you have a pre-existing condition. There’s not an insurance company out there that wants to cover you. So you don’t fire them. You scream, and curse, and cry, but you’re stuck. Only healthy people have the luxury of picking and choosing.

Let’s also not forget that most people don’t find out that they’re not getting “good service” until they’re sick. Healthy people don’t make much use of their insurance, so they don’t know how bad it is. They only find out after they’re ill, and then it’s too late. It’s only fun to fire the insurance company if you’re sure you can go to another company to get what you need. Almost no one can.

Why, it’s as if Romney doesn’t understand his own health reform, which was in large part about ensuring not that you can fire your insurance company, but rather about ensuring that your insurance company can’t fire YOU.

And this is a bit subjective, but isn’t it awesome how Romney’s lack of empathy shines through? He evidently has no sense of what it’s like NOT to be the very wealthy son of an already wealthy father; no idea how the fear of unemployment or medical bills afflicts ordinary Americans.

In his typical clarifying way, James Fallows provides the context for Obama's recess appointments today.

The Nullification Chronicles: At Last Obama Strikes Back

Last month I mentioned that the refusal of Senate Republicans to allow a vote on Richard Cordray's nomination to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau amounted to modern "nullification." As a reminder:

- The CFPB is the post-financial scandal regulatory agency whose inspiration is often credited to Elizabeth Warren;

- Obama shied from naming the "controversial" Warren to run it, which in turn has freed her to challenge Scott Brown this fall for the Senate seat once held by Teddy Kennedy in Massachusetts;

- Republicans have made clear that they have nothing against Cordray, the former attorney general of Ohio, himself as a nominee. They just don't think the agency should be allowed to function, and by preventing a vote on his nomination they can essentially nullify the law that created it. That is because the law's provisions don't come fully into effect until a permanent CFPB director is in place.

Having hesitated through much of last year to call out Senate Republicans on their historically unprecedented reliance on the filibuster, or the nullification strategy being applied at the CPFB and also the National Labor Relations Board (and in a different way, at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), President Obama has now used the main tool available to him. He has given Cordray a recess appointment to his CFPB role. 

Good.

As James Warren explains about the merits of Cordray's choice and Ezra Klein about the procedural issues, Obama is using the powers available to a president, in the face of minority "nullification," to operate the government and also to make his political case. If Scott Brown in Massachusetts and Republican candidates nationwide want to argue that the (modest) financial reforms enacted after the 2008 meltdown should be repealed -- fine, let them make that case on the stump this year. If they prevail, they can overturn this law and replace it with what they would like. But until and unless that happens, the CFPB is a legimately enacted organ of government and should be allowed to function. It is nice to see Obama responding to the realities of today's divided government and clarifying, for both sides, the choices that voters will make this year.

UPDATE. Obama has followed the Cordray news with three more recess appointments, all for members of the National Labor Relations Board. This too was an anti-nullification move, for in refusing to consider any NLRB nominations the Republicans were intentionally denying it a quorum for operations. 

Several good posts lately from Krugman on Governor Romney's loose adherence to facts, justifying the "Says Anything" moniker attached below and elsewhere.  Here's one on the things the governor pretends are true about jobs over the last three years.  (And here's another on the generally fact-free accusations he routinely hurls at Obama.)

Obama, Romney, Jobs

Greg Sargent is rightly outraged by Romney’s claim that Obama is a job destroyer:

Romney’s claim that two million jobs were lost under the Obama presidency is based on the idea that there’s been a net loss of jobs since he took office. In other words, Romney is taking into account the fact that the economy continued hemorraghing jobs at a furious rate after Obama took office — before Obama’s stimulus passed. But the figures show that once it became law, monthly job loss declined over time, and turned around in the spring of 2010, after which the private sector added jobs for over 20 straight months, totaling around 2.2 million of them.

I think this benefits from a figure:

Does this look to you like a president who “lost jobs”, or like a president who inherited an economy in free fall? You can accuse Obama of not doing enough to promote recovery — and I have (although the biggest villain here was Romney’s own party). But to claim that Obama caused the job loss is indefensible.

By the way, that wiggle in the upward climb represents the temporary hiring of Census workers.

Now, if you wanted a more credible case of a president who presided over job losses at this point in his administration, how about this?

And the truth is that I did give Bush a hard time over his job record — although I’m pretty sure I never accused him of destroying jobs, or even of bearing responsibility for the recession that began on his watch.

The Iowa caucuses were last night and finally gave us a result we can write into the books.  Turns out the Des Moines Register poll results (encapsulated here) were close, but missed a last-minute surge.

Using the more useful naming conventions I first saw here...

• "Says Anything" came out on top (by the skin of his teeth) at 25%, followed closely by
• "Man on Dog," also with 25%.
• "Newsletter" was a healthy third (21%) and
• "Three Wives" a more distant fourth (13%).

...in my in-box the other day.

Remember: Small donations now set the stage for a strong performance up and down the ticket in November.

Steve --

This was never going to be easy.

We set out to do big things -- and we haven't finished the job yet. Everything we've achieved together, and all that we still need to do, is at stake in 2012.

The end of this year is an important moment for this campaign.

Will you make a donation of $15 or more today?

I go to work every day knowing that millions of Americans like you are bound by the belief that we have a stake in one another and in this country.

But our challenge for 2012 is much different than it was in 2008. And the story of this campaign can't just be about what we've already accomplished, but about the fights to come -- because the winner of this election will have to make choices that define our country for a generation.

The question we have to answer today is simple but urgent:

Will we choose to defend and build on our progress -- or will we watch the other side dismantle everything we've done, tell the middle class "you're on your own," and let America fall behind?

In a grassroots campaign like ours, the answer to that question is never going to be up to me. It's up to you.

We're just four days out from 2012. Donate $15 or more today:

https://donate.barackobama.com/End-of-Year

Thanks,

Barack

P.S. -- Michelle and I are excited about the upcoming dinner with three supporters like you and your guests. Any donation you make today automatically enters you to win two seats at the table.

I read this from Steve Benen and followed his link to David Roberts, who writes (emphasis added):

Finally controlling mercury and toxics will be an advance on par with getting lead out of gasoline. It will save tens of thousands of lives every year and prevent birth defects, learning disabilities, and respiratory diseases. It will make America a more decent, just, and humane place to live.

Yet another reason I love it when I wake up in the morning and Barack Obama is President.

Here's Roberts' whole piece:

The mercury rules announced today are a bona fide Big Deal

Today, at long last, the EPA is unveiling its new rule covering mercury and other toxic emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants.

Anyone who pays attention to green news will have spent the last two years hearing a torrent of stories about EPA rules and the political fights over them. It can get tedious. After a certain point even my eyes glaze over, and I'm paid to follow this stuff.

But this one is a Big Deal. It's worth lifting our heads out of the news cycle and taking a moment to appreciate that history is being made. Finally controlling mercury and toxics will be an advance on par with getting lead out of gasoline. It will save save tens of thousands of lives every year and prevent birth defects, learning disabilities, and respiratory diseases. It will make America a more decent, just, and humane place to live.

A couple of background facts to contextualize what today means:

First, remember that the original Clean Air Act "grandfathered" in dozens of existing coal plants back in 1977, on the assumption that they were nearing the end of their lives and would be shut soon anyway. Well, funny story ... they never shut down! There are still dozens of coal plants in the U.S. that don't meet the pollution standards in the original 1970 Clean Air Act, much less the 1990 amendments. These old, filthy jalopies from the early 20th century, mostly along the eastern seaboard and scattered around the Midwest, are responsible for a vastly disproportionate amount of the air pollution generated by the electricity sector in America, including most of the mercury. They have been environmentalists' bête noire for over 30 years now.

Second, mercury rules get directly at these plants in a way no other rules have. There's no trading system for mercury like there is for SO2 (the Bush administration tried to set one up, but the court struck it down). There are no short-cuts either. Every plant that's out of compliance has to install the "maximum available control technology." There is some flexibility -- more than industry admits -- but there's no getting around the fact that this is going to be an expensive rule. It's going to kick off a huge wave of coal-plant retirements and investments in pollution-control technology. That is, despite what conservatives say, a good thing, since the public-health benefits will be far greater than the costs. Every country on earth is modernizing its electric fleet. Even China's ahead of us. These crappy old plants are an embarrassment and good riddance to them.

Third, this has been a long time coming. (Nicholas Bianco has some good history here.) An assessment of mercury was part of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. EPA stalled and stalled, got sued, and finally did the assessment. Sure enough, as had been known for years, they found mercury is harmful to public health. Then more stalling and more stalling until the Bush administration's malformed 2004 proposal, which instantly got caught up in (and struck down by) the courts. So when the mercury rule finally goes into effect in 2014, 24 years will have passed since Congress said mercury needs regulating. It's been a fight for enviros every step of the way.

So anyway, this is an historic day and a real step forward for the forces of civilization. It's the beginning of the end of one of the last of the old-school, 20th-century air pollution problems. (Polluters and their rented conservatives will try to kick up dust about this, but check out this letter to Congress [PDF] from a group of health scientists, which says "exposure to mercury in any form places a heavy burden on the biochemical machinery within cells of all living organisms.") Long after everyone has forgotten who "won the morning" in the fight over these rules, or what effect they had on Obama's electoral chances, the rule's legacy will live on in a healthier, happier American people.