President Barack Obama hits the road again today to stump for healthcare reform.

In a throwback to the presidential campaign, he will hold town-hall style meetings at a high school in Raleigh, North Carolina and at a supermarket in Bristol, Virginia.

Obama will try to explain and drum up support for his top legislative priority — an overhaul of the healthcare system. He wants to end discrimination and close coverage gaps that currently exist in the current health insurance system.

The president had originally wanted to see a deal before lawmakers left for their month-long August recess but that is appearing unlikely. Members of the Senate Finance Committee, who are working on the financial details of a proposed deal, have made some progress and are hopeful of reaching agreement soon.

On the business front one of the biggest stories out today is that Microsoft and Yahoo reached a deal on a Web search partnership that aims to compete with market leader Google. Yahoo dropped in pre-market trading but what will happen to Microsoft and Google shares?

And for your morning laugh — check out the perils of relying on GPS when you misspell the name of the town you’re aiming for.

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Photo credit: REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton (Norma Fuller tends to her daughter Ashley while waiting for treatment at a free health clinic held at a fairgrounds in Wise, Virginia)

Colin Powell says some “adult supervision” could have kept an altercation between Henry Louis Gates, a black Harvard University professor, and Sgt. James Crowley, a white policeman, from blowing up into a “federal case” about race in America.

The former U.S secretary of state, who says he has been racially profiled “many times,”  weighed in on the arrest of his friend “Skip” Gates on Tuesday evening, telling CNN’s Larry King that it was a fascinating story that unfolded in several acts.

Gates was arrested at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and charged with disorderly conduct. Crowley had responded to the call when a neighbor reported a possible break-in at Gates’ home. Gates had just returned home from a trip to China and found his door jammed. This is how the two men came face-to-face.

“This is where act two begins. We’re not quite sure what the nature of their conversation was, but apparently it disturbed Sgt. Crowley and apparently Dr. Gates was disturbed by being challenged in his own home,” Powell said.

“Then it becomes a federal case when the president feels obliged to say something about it, ” Powell said.

The charges against Gates were quickly dropped, but Powell says the incident might have been resolved in a different manner had cooler heads prevailed.

“I’m saying that Skip, perhaps in this instance, might have waited a while, come outside, talked to the officer and that might have been the end of it,” Powell said.  “I think he should have reflected on whether or not this was the time to make that big a deal.”

And the police could have handled things differently too, Powell said.

“Once they felt they had to bring Dr. Gates out of the house and to handcuff him, I would have thought at that point some adult supervision would have stepped in and said, OK, look, it is his house… Take the handcuffs off.  Good night Dr. Gates.”

Dr. Gates and Sgt. Crowley will meet again on Thursday at the White House, this time over beer with President Barack Obama.  Who’s bringing the adult supervision?

Over the decades, we’ve had ping-pong diplomacy, shuttle diplomacy and cowboy diplomacy. And now we’ve got beer diplomacy.

President Barack Obama is going to sit down for a beer on Thursday night at a picnic table outside the Oval Office with the two main players in a racially charged case — Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge, Massachusetts, police Sergeant James Crowley.

The first diplomatic task may be in selecting the beer for each attendee.

Crowley told Obama he wants Blue Moon, a Belgian-style white beer brewed by Molson Coors. Gates is said to prefer either Red Stripe or Beck’s. Nothing fancy for Obama, who was criticized on the campaign trail for musing about the price of arugula. He is sticking with the good old American brand, Budweiser.

Obama said last Friday that he hoped the episode will be a “teachable moment” about why can’t all of us just get along with each other. Crowley was called to Gates’ home on July 16 to look into a possible break-in and arrested the Harvard scholar, who forced open the door of his own home because he didn’t have a key. Words were exchanged.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama hopes to have an informal discussion.

“I would not construe this as formal discussions. This is about having a beer and de-escalate,” Gibbs told reporters.

“I think the president wants to continue to take the temperature down a bit, look more for constructive things that can come out,” he said.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Molly Riley (Obama with beverage at a basketball game)

Presidents are never afraid of beating the same drum twice.

Today, President Barack Obama continues his quest to boost support for healthcare reform with a “tele-town hall” at AARP. Then he talks about relations with China, just like on Monday.

With Obama’s drive for healthcare reform stalled in the Senate and the House — even though both chambers are controlled by his fellow Democrats — the president is looking to ordinary Americans to push harder for an overhaul of the system.

Democrats have backed away from a vow to take a vote on the legislation before the month-long August recess but lawmakers in both chambers are still working on the bill. This afternoon, Obama heads to AARP headquarters to take questions from senior citizens about health insurance and his proposed reforms.

Then he heads back to the White House for talks with the leaders of the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue.

Obama is expected to talk with the top Chinese officials about the need for the two economic powers to work together for global economic recovery and also discuss issues like North Korea and global climate change.

After meeting with Obama the top U.S. and Chinese officials will hold back-to-back news conferences to give their own versions of what happened.

Will they announce similar results?

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Photo credit: REUTERS/Larry Downing (Obama shakes hands with Chinese State Councillor Dai Bingguo (c) and Vice Premier Wang Qishan on Monday)

President Barack Obama’s peacemaking efforts with a Harvard professor and a Massachusetts police sergeant are still up in the air, but the drink orders are in.

Obama invited Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley and Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates to the White House for a beer last week as he tried to make amends for inflaming a dispute between the two men.

Crowley, who is white, arrested Gates, a prominent black scholar and documentary filmmaker, after going to the professor’s home on a report of a possible burglary in progress.

Gates had arrived home from a trip to China to find his door jammed and had difficulty entering. The two men got into a dispute and Crowley arrested Gates on a charge of disorderly conduct – touching off a debate over whether the incident involved racial profiling. The charge was later dropped.

Obama inflamed the situation at his news conference last week by saying he thought the police “acted stupidly” by arresting in his own home his friend Gates, a 58-year-old man who uses a cane to walk because of childhood injury.

Obama called Crowley and Gates last week to try to calm tempers. At Crowley’s suggestion, he agreed to invite the two to the White House for a beer.

Spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Monday the White House was trying to organize the meeting for this week, but it hadn’t been set yet.

The timing may be up in the air, but the drink orders are apparently known.

Asked what beer the president might have, Gibbs observed that Obama drank a Budweiser at the baseball All-Star Game a couple of weeks ago.

“Sgt. Crowley mentioned when the president offered this on the phone Friday that he likes Blue Moon,” said Gibbs. Blue Moon is a Belgian-style white beer brewed by Molson Coors.

Gates told the Boston Globe he was a fan of Red Stripe, a Jamaican lager, and Beck’s, a German lager.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young (Obama at White House Friday after calling St. Crowley); Reuters/Brian Snyder (Crowley and Sgt. Leon Lashley, who was present when Gates was arrested, at a news conference July 24)

Instead of a cultural icon, well-known author or scholar, President Barack Obama sought the advice of … a basketball player as he talked of the importance of strong U.S.-Chinese economic ties.

In a speech opening the Strategic Economic Dialogue between the United States and China, Obama — an avid basketball fan and player — quoted China’s most popular sports star and Houston Rockets center, Yao Ming.

Obama said he and Chinese President Hu Jintao both agreed the two nations needed to hold “sustained dialogue to enhance our shared interests.”

Then he went for the analogy.

“As a new President and also as a basketball fan, I have learned from the words of Yao Ming, who said, ‘No matter whether you are new or an old team member, you need time to adjust to one another.’”

“Well, through the constructive meetings that we’ve already had, and through this dialogue, I’m confident that we will meet Yao’s standard.”

Wonder if it makes a difference that the seven-time All Star just had foot surgery which will rule him out for the whole next NBA season?

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Photo credit: REUTERS/Danny Moloshok (Yao plays in basketball game in May)

Topics of the day today: more healthcare and U.S.-Chinese relations

President Barack Obama speaks at the beginning of a two-day U.S.-Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Washington, then top Chinese and U.S. officials will work on developing a new framework for U.S.-Chinese relations.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner are among the high-level officials taking part in the meeting. The duo wrote an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal talking about the need for working with China.

Congress is still working on healthcare reform, although Obama has eased up on his August deadline for working out a deal. Democratic lawmakers will be working on ironing out differences within their own party. Obama has learned that although both the House and the Senate have big Democratic majorities, that’s not always enough to get legislation passed.

Democratic Senator Kent Conrad, a key player in bipartisan Senate Finance Committee negotiations on healthcare, said on Sunday Senate Democrats don’t have the votes to pass healthcare reform without Republican support and would not predict whether the panel would be able to produce a bill before the August recess.

But Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said he is confident a bill will pass by the end of the year.

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Photo credit: REUTERS/Carey Gillam (Healthcare reform supporters rally in Overland Park, Kansas)

If you thought the Obama administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus program was meant to provide one big jolt to the economy, you’ve got it all wrong, Vice President Joe Biden says.

“The act was intended to provide steady support for our economy over an extended period — not a jolt that would last only a few months,” he wrote in an op-ed piece in Sunday’s New York Times.

More than a third of it is tax cuts for 95 percent of working Americans, he says. Another chunk of it goes for extended unemployment insurance and healthcare for those hardest hit by the recession.

“The bottom line is that two-thirds of the Recovery Act doesn’t finance ‘programs,’ but goes directly to tax cuts, state governments and families in need, without red tape or delays,” Biden says.

The final third of the funds goes for infrastructure projects, including what the vice president calls the “largest investment in roads since the creation of the Interstate highway system.”

So no big economic jolt — more of a big long-run infusion.

But hang on, says Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. That’s not how the Obama administration sold the package to the public.

President-elect Obama said in November there was consensus among conservative and liberal economists that “we need a big stimulus package that will jolt the economy back into shape.”

At the end of March, Biden told a gathering in Chile the recently passed Recovery Act “provides a necessary jolt to our economy to implement what we refer as ’shovel-ready projects.”

And as late as June, he was telling business leaders in New York the stimulus package was “an initial big jolt to give the economy a real head start.”

Stewart suggests the vice president’s op-ed is aimed at resetting “the purpose of the trillion-dollar stimulus bill, I guess to help explain why unemployment continues to go up.”

But Biden isn’t the first to say the stimulus was a longer-term program. The White House back in May referred to the Recovery Act as a two-year program.

And Obama said in his weekly radio address a couple of weeks ago it “was not designed to work in four months — it was designed to work over two years.”

So what do you think? Is the administration changing its tune on how fast the stimulus was expected to work?

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Photo credit: Reuters/David Mdzinarishvili (Biden speaking to the Georgian parliament in Tbilisi July 23)

The sky is not falling, but President Barack Obama is running into a bit of a poll problem.

Six months since he entered the White House on a tide of giddy support and even jokes that he walked on water, opinion polls are starting to turn on him.

In the latest Rasmussen Reports survey, Obama’s overall approval rating dipped below 50 percent – to 49 percent — for the first time among likely voters, compared with a 51 percent disapproval rating.

Most of the survey was conducted before Obama’s Wednesday press conference where he pressed for healthcare reform.

Rasmussen Reports will release a poll based entirely on post-press conference interviews on Sunday.

Other recent public opinion polls have shown declining approval of Obama’s handling of the healthcare issue.

But of course a few polls do not a longterm trend make.

The stock market is on the rise and that may help bump up the numbers in the future.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque ((Obama leaves White House for healthcare reform forum in Ohio)

President Barack Obama is pretty smart, but can he really achieve the impossible?

Extend healthcare coverage to 47 million uninsured people without rationing coverage to the rest of the country, while at the same time actually reducing healthcare inflation.

Finance the whole thing without hurting the middle class or pushing up the budget deficit. Achieve one of the biggest reforms in American history, something that so famously eluded his Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton — and get it all done without any pain.

Millionaires might have to pay more tax, and insurers might be kept “honest” by a government-run insurance option, but what’s surprising about this debate is that more people aren’t squealing.

When he was asked this week what the American people might have to sacrifice to get all this through, Obama had what might seem an unlikely answer.

“They’re going to have to give up paying for things that don’t make them healthier,” he said.

Reuters correspondent Steve Holland wrote an analysis  about the master salesman’s struggle to sell this particular reform to the American people.

Kevin Sack in The New York Times wrote a piece which nailed the public’s reaction pretty well too.

Is painless healthcare reform really possible? Or is someone somewhere not telling us something?

The beauty of Obama’s strategy so far is that he has kept everyone “inside the tent.” By keeping his own cards close to his chest, he has kept everyone else in the game. But is it time for Obama to show a little more of his hand?

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Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed (Obama listens to five-year-old boy at healthcare meeting in Cleveland)