The main difference between a Bush administration Easter egg roll and the Obamas'? Equal opportunity to throw up on the White House lawn. For the first Easter egg roll of the Obama presidency, the First Family distributed several thousand tickets to DC public schools, ensuring that the enormous crowd on the White House lawn was among the most diverse in modern history, and also the largest. (The White House gave out 30,000 tickets in all.) It wasn't an entirely terrible consolation prize to the school system that the Obamas rejected for their own kids.

At 6:30 a.m. this morning, my little DC neighborhood elementary school sent a small fleet of cheese buses down to the Ellipse to join the fray. We took off with the excitement of people who'd won the lottery, only to arrive at the scene with 6,000 other people who'd also hit it big. Not only did the Obamas invite local school kids, but they offered tickets to the rest of the country to ensure that the egg roll was no longer an exclusive event for Washington insiders and those willing to camp out overnight in the rain. All that democracy, though, meant a lot less egg rolling and a lot more standing in line. This year, black kids, white kids, kids from Alaska, kids from Anacostia, kids with two mommies, kids with no mommies, all had multiple, if not unique, opportunities to stand in line and freeze together in the shadow of the White House.

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What does it mean that Matt Yglesias, a 20-something blogger, has a more astute take on political messaging and the leveraging of political power than David Broder, a man in his 70s who was considered for many years to be the dean of the Washington press corps? Two quick lessons: (1) Age and experience aren't everything, apparently. (2) Trying to shoehorn every new development into a worldview you're exceedingly well known for, as Broder is, will inevitably lead you to say some silly and misguided things from time to time.

Your conclusions, of course, may vary.

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Earlier this week, I wrote about the government’s long-overdue move to cut back  subsidies to private Medicare Advantage plans, much to the chagrin of the insurance companies that have profited so handsomely from this setup. As reported by the Medicare Rights Center, these insurers are already threatening to pass on the cuts to the old and disabled people who subscribe to their private plans:

The lobbyists for the insurance companies say the subsidy cuts could mean sharp premium increases and reductions in the extra benefits provided to enrollees in these plans. It is up to the companies offering these plans to decide whether to pass through the subsidy reductions to plan members. There is another option, of course.

Insurance companies can become more efficient at providing services. Universal American, a company with over 240,000 Medicare Advantage enrollees, spent just over 83 percent of its premium income on medical services for its enrollees last year. The other 17 percent went toward administrative costs and agent commissions (13 percent) and profit (4 percent).

Original Medicare spends about 3 percent on administrative costs. It does not make a profit. If Universal American and the other insurance companies could reduce their administrative costs, or even their profits, then their plan members might see little, or no, premium increase or reduction in benefits. Such a strategy, of course, puts the interests of people with Medicare ahead of the financial well-being of shareholders and insurance agents, whom Universal American recently enlisted to fight the subsidy reductions.

Actually, Universal American is trying to enlist more than just insurance agents in the struggle to hold on to their sweet deal. It's trying to bring Medicare Advantage subscribers and other ordinary old people into the fray, through a PR initiative misleadingly named The Coalition for Medicare Choices.

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The Center for Investigative Reporting on Rennison Vern Castillo, a U.S. citizen and veteran held for months after immigration officials mistakenly took him for an undocumented immigrant:

After domestic disputes with a girlfriend, he was convicted in 2005 of felony harassment and violating a no-contact order, and was sent to Pierce County Jail in Washington state for eight months. He was in a holding area with inmates about to be released when a corrections officer held him back.

Castillo was handcuffed and whisked off in a van to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. A federal officer said records showed he was an illegal immigrant.

[Snip]

Castillo went before an immigration judge, who appeared via video conference, a common procedure in the crowded immigration court system. Again, he claimed citizenship. The judge didn't believe him. He was ordered deported on Jan. 24, 2006.

ICE says cases like Castillo's are extremely rare; human rights organizations say otherwise. But the real value of a story like Castillo's lies in the picture it paints of how clumsy, disorganized and overburdened our immigration courts can be—just one indication of the need for immigration reform. A database of all legal citizens and legal aliens doesn't exist, and those suspected of being an undocumented immigrant don't have the right to an attorney during their hurried hearings.

This week, the Obama administration outlined, albeit broadly, its proposal for immigration reform, which would include a national database to check the immigration status of workers. That would, at the very least, be a start; cases like Castillo's would probably diminish completely if such a database were created. But it's only one of the problems of our broken immigration system.

Obama says he wants to take on the issue this year, a move one anti-immigration advocate said would be "politically disastrous." But the question of what to do with our undocumented immigrants—a bloc whose population shrank last year but still numbers 12 million people—is so contentious I doubt there's ever a good time to tackle it. The looming census complicates the issue even further: Parts of the right have already accused Obama of wanting to pass immigration reform before 2010 to create new Democrat-friendly districts with heavy Latino populations. They forget, though, that Latinos aren't a Democratic monolith.

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