He doesn’t call. He doesn’t write. He doesn’t drop by for a visit. That’s what some of the most senior Democrats in Congress are experiencing from President Barack Obama these days. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) is trying to cut a deal on the nation’s fiscal crisis, but he can’t recall the last time he talked to the president. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) is in charge of one of Obama’s top priorities — preventing a rate increase on student loans — but he hasn’t talked to the president in months. And Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) is the go-to guy on high gas prices, but the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee hasn’t spoken to the president much since the previous Congress. – Politico

In an interview earlier today, I asked her what motivated her to take the risk for the fist time to go undercover and attend this event for the Observer?. “I was personally curious,” she said. “I have gone places where I wasn’t supposed to be and attended events under false pretenses, but I don’t think I have never gone undercover in disguise before. I was definitely nervous.” In order to avoid confrontation or be recognized before the event was over, Jeffries says, she tried convincingly to avoid getting into conversationsby looking down at the ground, giving one-word answers and keeping her face in her phone, pretending to speak to a voiceless entertainer. Read More by Jacob Kornbluh

(Related: PHOTO: The Female Reporter Disguised as a Male Before Going to CitiField Asifa)

NYDN Reports: Timothy Cardinal Dolan is turning to a higher power to squash President Obama’s  mandate that religious employers provide workers with birth control  coverage.

FT Via CNBC Reports: There has been no official announcement. No terms or conditions have been disclosed. But Greece’s banking system is being propped up by an estimated €100 billion or so of emergency liquidity provided by the country’s central bank — approved secretly by the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. If Greece were to leave the eurozone, the immediate cause might be an ECB decision to pull the plug.

Extensive use of “emergency liquidity assistance” (ELA) to help banks in the weakest economies has been one of the less-noticed features of the eurozone crisis. Separate from normal supplies of liquidity and meant originally as a temporary facility for national authorities to use when banks hit problems, ELA proved a lifesaver for the financial system Ireland and is now even more so in Greece. As such, it has given the ECB — which has ultimate control over the facility — considerable power to determine countries’ fates.