On the healthcare front, action moves to the Senate side with the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee due to finish work on and present its version of the healthcare bill . The Senate Finance Committee is still hammering out details on how to pay for a massive healthcare overhaul and holds a closed door meeting before it presents its version of the bill next week.

President Barack Obama will increase his pressure on lawmakers to reach agreement with a Rose Garden address at 1:05 pm EDT/1705 GMT on the need for health care reform. Obama, who has made the healthcare overhaul his top legislative priority, on Tuesday voiced support for a House of Representatives proposal that would pay for the reform by levying a new tax on the wealthy.

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor heads back to face the Senate Judiciary Committee at 9:30 EDT/1330 GMT for the second day of questioning in her nomination hearing.

Republicans will likely keep grilling her on issues they see as signs of her “activist” tendancies. In a series of calm and measured responses on Tuesday,  Sotomayor promised to rule on law, not racial bias and explained some controversial comments made in the past.

The Democratic majority in the Senate means Sotomayor’s lifetime appointment on the high court is all but assured. But Republicans are seizing the moment to question Obama’s first nominee, who could influence the direction of the Supreme Court.

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Photo credit: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst (Experts testify before Senate health committee)

Photo:A compilation by Reuters of pool photographs and images provided by North Korea's KCNA news agency showing North Korean leader Kim Jong-il from 2004 to 2009. The photograph in the lower right was released this week by KCNA

By Jon Herskovitz

The image the world once had of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, with a trademark paunch, platform shoes and a bouffant hair-do, is gone and may never come back. He has now become a gaunt figure with thinning hair who has trouble walking in normal shoes, let alone ones with heels 8-10 centimetres (3-4 inches) high like he used to wear.

A look at photographs the North’s official media has released of Kim over the past few months indicate he is not a healthy man. There has been an enormous amount of speculation about what is wrong with Kim, 67, including a report from South Korean TV network YTN this week that he has life-threatening pancreatic cancer.

Kim’s health is one of the most closely guarded secrets in the highly secretive North and his actual condition is likely known by a handful of people in his inner circle who risk death or prison camp for themselves and their families if they ever whisper a word about Kim’s problems.

It is a state crime in North Korea to make any comment that questions Kim’s god-like status in the communist dynasty he has ruled since 1994 when his father and state founder Kim Il-sung died.

The most likely way that the outside world will ever receive any reliable information about Kim’s health is if his hermit state invites in foreign doctors to treat him. This appears to have happened about a year ago when he was widely suspected of suffering a stroke. U.S. and South Korean intelligence sources were then able to leak to the media information about what was ailing Kim.

Intelligence sources Reuters spoke to in Seoul would not confirm the latest reports of pancreatic cancer. They did agree on one thing, Kim is still sick.

Kim’s declining health has led to questions in the outside world if the man known at home as the “Dear Leader” still has his iron grip on power over the state he and his father have run since its inception more than 60 years ago.

Within North Korea, images of a weary Kim can actually help him win support among the public.

The North’s state propaganda has built an image of Kim as a person who works tirelessly to better his struggling state. The North's propaganda says Kim gets little sleep as he travels the country by day and forms its policies at night.

Kim rarely is seen in state media presiding over major state functions or greeting foreign dignitaries. That is mostly left to Kim Yong-nam, the North’s nominal number two leader and its head of state.

If Kim Jong-il looks weak and sickly, it arouses sympathy and support among the North Korean public who feel he has put his own well being at risk working for them.

In the weeks and months ahead, there will likely be more speculation as to what is physically wrong with Kim. Some of the reports will be more reliable than others. But the actual state of Kim’s health will not likely be known until a time the foreign doctors visit again or those nearest Kim feel safe to reveal the secret.

“I’m telling him, ‘Follow through,’” said Willie Mays.

The 78-year-old Giants Hall-of-Famer traveled on Air Force One with Obama from Michigan to St. Louis, where the president threw out the first pitch.

“He’s gonna do fine, I guarantee you. He’ll be fine. I just want to make sure he follows through,” said the Say Hey Kid.

Mays was an appropriate guest for Obama to take to the game. Ted Williams once said, “They invented the All-Star Game for Willie Mays.” He played in 24 of them.

The baseball legend, who said he was making his first flight on Air Force One, had kind words for the president.

“I dreamed about this day, not being on Air Force One, but dreamed about someone in my race being president. Not knowing that anyone would be. But I reminded him that I cried for most of the night in Chicago,” Mays said, referring to Election Day last November.

Mays, who faced prejudice and discrimination as one of the early black players in Major League Baseball, said he stayed up all night following the vote.

“I was so proud. So that tells me all the things I went through, it was for good things,” Mays said. “So I’m just proud of him, you know. He may be proud of something else. But I’m proud of him, what he stands for.”

Obama was apparently concerned enough about his pitching responsibilities to get in a little practice at the White House ahead of the game. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama had been throwing a ball around with an aide.

Asked about it after an Oval Office meeting on Tuesday morning with Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende of the Netherlands, the president said, “Well, I think it’s fair to say that I wanted to loosen up my arm a little bit.”

Although Obama tossed an opening pitch once as a senator, the All-Star Game was his first outing as president.

“You know, my general strategy the last time I threw a pitch was at the American League Championship Series and I just wanted to keep it high,” he said.

“There was no clock on it, I don’t know how fast it went — but if it exceeded 30 mph, I’d be surprised,” Obama added. “But it did clear the plate.”

The president, dressed in a Chicago White Sox jacket and greeted by cheers as well as a considerable number of boos, cleared the plate again on Tuesday night.

Or perhaps more accurately, he got close enough that Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols, who did the catching honors, could lean out and grab it.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Larry Downing (Obama throws opening pitch at All-Star Game; Obama and Mays descend steps of Air Force One)

Per his normal practice, Greenspan declined to tell reporters what he told the lawmakers behind closed doors, but that did not stop a few senators from spilling the beans.

New Hampshire Republican Senator Judd Gregg said the former Fed chief talked mostly about the need to address the long-term budget deficit, specifically the Medicare healthcare program for the elderly and those with disabilities. The U.S. deficit is expected to crest at more than $1.8 trillion in fiscal 2009 which ends Sept. 30.

On the economy, which has been in a recession since December 2007, Greenspan apparently offered a slightly brighter picture. That would match  what more and more economists are saying — that the recession is in the process of bottoming out and look for a recovery to take root in the current quarter.

“I think he thinks things are improving,” Gregg told reporters.

Greenspan offered some “encouraging thoughts, banks are better off than they were six months ago,” said Nebraska Republican Mike Johanns. “On housing, if I remember correctly, (Greenspan offered) some indication that things were bottoming out, but again I think that’s reflective of what others are saying.”

One senator who has been pressing to boost transparency at the Fed, South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, said he was unable to corner Greenspan and ask him about efforts to give authority to the Government Accountability Office to audit the central bank’s operations.

DeMint’s effort earlier this month to attach a provision that would give the GAO such oversight was blocked in the Senate.

“We ran out of time, and there were or six or eight guys who jumped in front of me asking questions” of Greenspan, DeMint said. He said Greenspan’s presentation focused on the unsustainable debt level and if that was not dealt with, “we are on a collision course with disaster.”

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- Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque (Greenspan testifying to Congress in 2008)

After a day spent mostly silent, looking on as senators in the Judiciary Committee made their formal opening statements and others lauded her accomplishments, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor will be peppered with questions today about her qualifications for the life-time appointment.

Sotomayor likely will face tough questioning as the lawmakers seek to find out where she might take the country on issues such as abortion, guns and race. Though Republicans have conceded that Sotomayor will most likely win confirmation in the Democrat-dominated Senate, they likely will use the opportunity to focus on what they call her “activist” history.

Also on Capitol Hill, other lawmakers continue to work on legislation to revamp the healthcare industry after President Barack Obama “put everybody on notice” on Monday and and vowed to overhaul the system.

“Inaction is not an option,’ he said at the White House on Monday, amid talk by lawmakers that the healthcare plan could not be completed by August. “For those naysayers and cynics who think that this is not going to happen, don’t bet against us. We are going to make this thing happen.”

Today Obama travels to Michigan, where he will announce a $12 billion initiative to boost community colleges and increase the number of college graduates.

Then he heads to St Louis, where he will get one of the perks that comes with being the president: He will throw out the first pitch at the Major League Baseball All-Star Game.

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 Photo credits: REUTERS/Jim Bourg (Sotomayor is sworn in by committee chairman Patrick Leahy); REUTERS/Mike Stone (Busch Stadium in St Louis).

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Photo credit: Reuters/Larry Downing (Obama speaks with one teleprompter after the other fell and broke at the Urban and Metropolitan Policy Roundtable on Monday.)

Sworn in as a senator less than a week ago, there were no jokes when Franken faced a packed house in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room and expounded on the loftiest of government institutions – the U.S. Supreme Court — and President Barack Obama’s nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

It was a life-immitating-art moment. Franken had played a senator on the Senate Judiciary Committee on television comedy show Saturday Night Live during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.

But there were no jokes this time, barely a smile.

“Last Tuesday, I swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and to bear true faith and allegiance to it,” Franken said.

“I take this oath very seriously as we consider your nomination, Judge Sotomayor.”

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Photo credit: Reuters/Richard Clement (Franken at

Sotomayor hearing)

They batted around the words of Chief Justice John Roberts from his own confirmation hearing four years ago when he told the same committee: “Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them.” (For more umpire analogy discussion see The New York Times).

Democrats sought to portray Sotomayor as a better court umpire than Roberts, who was a nominee of  Republican President George W. Bush.

Senator Charles Schumer said there was debate about whether Roberts has “actually called pitches as they come or whether he tried to change the rules.”

But Sotomayor, Schumer said, ”has simply called balls and strikes for 17 years far more closely than Chief Justice Roberts has during his four years on the Supreme Court.”

Senator Richard Durbin used the baseball analogy to strike at conservatives. ”We have observed, unfortunately, that it’s a little hard to see home plate from right field.”

The only ones who were called “OUT” at the hearing were a couple of anti-abortion rights yellers who were ejected from the room.

Republican Senator John Cornyn chose football: “A lower court judge is like the quarterback who executes the plays, not the coach that calls them. That means many of your cases don’t really tell us that much about your judicial philosophy or what it would be in action if confirmed to the United States Supreme Court.”

Other Republicans chose not to put a spin on the ball but to talk about the heart.

Senator Lindsey Graham said: “I have no way of knowing what is in your heart any more than you have knowing what’s in my heart. So that to me is an absurd, dangerous standard.”

The only thing missing was the apple pie…

Photo credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder (Bat boy holds baseballs for home plate umpire)

The top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee wasted no time in setting the battle plans for the debate over the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to become the first Hispanic justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

After all is said and done,  she is expected to be confirmed to the highest court in the United States — a lifetime appointment.

But to get there, she must listen to senator after senator talk about whether she is qualified for the job, with her family sitting behind her in the hearing room, and in full public view on televised proceedings.

Senator Patrick Leahy, committee chairman, described Sotomayor as a “success story” in which “all Americans can take pride.”

He pointed out that in past confirmation hearings, other justices were subjected to questions based on their ethnicity or religion.

Thurgood Marshall was asked whether he was prejudiced against Southern whites,  Louis Brandeis was asked about “the Jewish mind,” and a Catholic nominee (we believe Leahy was referring to Roger Taney) had to overcome an argument that his views would be dominated by the Pope.

“We are in a different era,” Leahy said. “Let no one demean this extraordinary woman.”

Senator Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the committee, politely layed out his concerns about Sotomayor. And she, in turn, politely sat in her peacock blue jacket and listened to his list with a smile.

“I believe our legal system is at a dangerous crossroads,” Sessions said. He expressed concern with “this empathy standard” that President Barack Obama set in choosing his first Supreme Court nominee.

It took Senator Charles Grassley to become the first to refer to Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” comment that stirred so much controversy for weeks before the hearings began.

But perhaps Senator Lindsey Graham summed it up the best: “Unless you have a complete meltdown you’re going to get confirmed.”

There are still days to go…

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Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed (Sotomayor greeted by Leahy and Sessions at confirmation hearing)