Oil suspected to be coming from BP’s Deepwater Horizon gusher is now washing up on the white-sand beaches of western Florida, scrambling clean-up crews who hope to prevent the disaster from fouling the state’s $60 billion per year tourism industry.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Officials on Thursday afternoon spotted an oil slick within 3 ½ miles of the Pensacola coast, and a stretch of Pensacola Beach contained dozens of gooey, oil-like clumps Friday morning. Locals and tourists poked at the gobs with sticks and took photos of them with their cellphones. Few ventured into the water, although area beaches remained open.

Earlier Friday, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist said officials already have some of the tools they need to battle the incoming oil, but “we want to get more boom.”

“We’ve got about 250,000 feet of boom already dispatched through the Panhandle,” Crist said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program. “We have about another 66,000 boom that is staged nearby, ready for us to be able to utilize and disperse. But in addition to that, we’re just going to keep asking and asking and asking for more.”

Meanwhile, BP engineers were successful in capping the seafloor well-head Friday, though a great deal of oil was reportedly still escaping into the Gulf.

The economy added 431,000 jobs last month, dropping the national unemployment rate from 9.9 percent to 9.7 percent, the Department of Labor Statistics announced Friday morning.

But Republicans, who a month ago were saying that they’d recognize progress when the jobless rate fell, aren’t impressed. Indeed, Republican U.S. House Whip Eric Cantor just issued a statement blasting the stimulus programs that are propping the numbers up.

[M]uch of what the Administration touts as a ‘jobs recovery’ has caused – and will continue to cause — the deficit to soar. Let me be clear – during challenging times, a job is a job. Yet government jobs that are paid for by taxing small business people and borrowing from the Chinese are not signs of a healthy economic recovery.

He has a point: 411,000 of those 431,000 new jobs are related to the 2010 Census and therefore temporary. Still, any new job creation is good news relative to the hundreds of thousands of jobs the economy was shedding a year ago. And, of course, the idea behind stimulus spending all along has been that the short-term hit to the deficit will be a tiny cost relative to the consequences of federal inaction.

The vote was 215 to 204.

The bill — which also extends a number of tax breaks set to expire shortly — now moves to the Senate, which will take up the proposal after lawmakers return June 7 from their Memorial Day recess. In the meantime, the filing deadline for UI benefits will expire June 2.

In a separate vote, House lawmakers also passed a bill to prevent Medicare doctors from receiving a 21 percent pay cut at the end of the m

It’s pretty certain, at this point in the discussion, that Congress will leave Washington today for a week-long Memorial Day break without passing legislation to extend a number of tax breaks and emergency unemployment benefits.

Not only have House Democrats — who’d hoped to have their bill wrapped up and delivered to the Senate by Wednesday — failed to rally the support of the budget hawks in their own party, but whatever the House does send over to the upper chamber, “Senate Republicans will not allow us to pass [this week] and maybe not ever,” said one Senate Democratic aide familiar with the negotiations.

As a possible Plan B, Senate Democratic leaders might offer a much smaller proposal Friday: a $4 billion package to provide a 14-day extension of the programs scheduled to expire next week while Congress is gone, including unemployment benefits, COBRA health benefits, payments to Medicare doctors, SBA loans and flood insurance. (None of the proposals under consideration would create new tiers of unemployment benefits.)

Trouble is, the Democrats don’t intend to pay for the short-term extensions with offsets elsewhere in the budget, meaning that Republicans will almost certainly object. (GOP leaders don’t reject the policies, but they want them paid for with unspent stimulus funds — a notion that Democrats oppose.)

There, in a nutshell, is the source of the stalemate — a stalemate that will allow these benefit provisions to expire, and force Democratic leaders to try to forge a deal that can pass both chambers quickly when they return to Washington June 7. The bill they produce, said the Democratic aide, will likely be retroactive.

Officially, U.S. House leaders are saying they’ll have the support to pass an enormous jobs proposal that would extend the deadline to file for additional unemployment benefits (but not create new benefits) through the end of the year.

“We will have the votes,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., told reporters Tuesday.

Unofficially, though, they’re struggling to rally the majority they need.

Why? Well, for one thing, the bill isn’t fully paid for, leaving the Blue Dogs reluctant to support it for fear of adding to the nation’s growing debt. On top of that, the proposal would also raise the tax on “carried interest” from 15 percent to 35 percent. The provision is anathema to Wall Street, where investment managers who take a percentage of their clients’ earnings have been taxed at the lower rate for years — meaning that some of these billionaires are paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries.

Still, the thought of any tax hike in an election year has given pause to some moderate Democrats facing tough contests in November.

And that’s just in the House. The bill will be an even tougher sell in the Senate, where 60 votes will be required to pass the measure, and conservative Democrats are already wary of the country’s enormous reliance on deficit spending. Complicating passage, Congress is scheduled to begin its week-long Memorial Day vacation on Friday.

“I don’t know that it’s going to get resolved this week,” a senior Senate Democratic aide told Roll Call yesterday.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told reporters Tuesday, however, that lawmakers will stay in Washington until the bill is passed. “We must pass the new jobs bill this week, in the next few days,” Reid said.

That assumes, though, that the House can pass it first.

The National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group, noted the consequences of congressional inaction Monday, estimating that 1.2 million jobless Americans would exhaust their benefits in June alone if the deadline isn’t extended.

“Here we are, five days out from the Memorial Day recess, and Congress has yet to act on one of the most crucial pieces of legislation affecting the unemployed in 2010,” Christine Owens, NELP’s executive director, said in a statement Monday.

Under current law, unemployed folks have access to 26 weeks of state-sponsored insurance benefits before four separate tiers of emergency federal benefits kick in. Confusing the arrangement, recipients must exhaust their current benefits before filing for the next tier. Yet that option disappears at the end of May, when the filing deadline for all tiers arrives.

Complicating the timeline, Congress is scheduled to leave town at the end of this week for their Memorial Day recess, which puts them out of action until at least June 7. NELP estimates that 300,000 jobless folks will exhaust their UI benefits by June 12, the Friday after Congress returns.

Owens, for her part, thinks lawmakers should prioritize the UI extension legislation over their scheduled vacation.

“Unemployed Americans are pulling their hair out — and they are looking to Congress for help,” she said. “Even if it means staying in Washington as the Congressional recess approaches, the unemployment bill must move forward. Taking a break without extending the unemployment program will break faith with the millions of jobless workers Congress is leaving behind.”

It’s not the permanent fix they were looking for, but the American Medical Association, the nation’s largest lobby of doctors, said Thursday that it supports the Democrats’ proposal to postpone a pay cut for Medicare doctors until 2014 — a temporary solution that kicks the problem down the road rather than solving it.

“An intervention to delay a looming Medicare physician payment cut will provide temporary stability for seniors and their physicians,” AMA President J. James Rohack said in a statement. “[B]ut the AMA is deeply disappointed that Congress will once again fail to permanently correct the Medicare physician payment formula that Republican and Democrat members of Congress, President Obama and policy experts have said should be repealed.”

Under current law, doctors treating Medicare patients will, on average, see a 21 percent pay cut beginning June 1. Yesterday, Democrats in the House and Senate introduced an enormous jobs package that also includes funding to prevent that cut from happening. (Many doctors have said that they couldn’t afford to see Medicare patients if the reduction was to take effect.)

Under the Democrats’ plan, Medicare doctors would see “reasonable” payment updates for the remainder of 2010 and through 2011. Then, in 2012 and 2013, “rates would continue to increase if spending growth on physician services is within reasonable limits, with an extra allowance for primary and preventive care,” according to a summary of the bill. Doctors would not see pay cuts in those years.

But in 2014, the current formula that’s dictating the 21 percent cut would go back into effect — a problem of which the AMA is only too well aware.

“Lawmakers must realize that the underlying policy problem will return larger than ever in 2014,” Rohack warned. “The pending Medicare proposal treats the symptoms – it’s not a cure for the disease.”

Of course, 2014 is several elections away. A number of these lawmakers may not even be around to have to deal with it.

U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., who heads the Senate Finance Committee, announced that an unemployment extension bill will be released Thursday.

The bill would extend the filing deadline for the existing tiers of emergency unemployment benefits — not to be confused with the creation of additional tiers — through the end of 2010. Under current law, that deadline will arrive at the end of May, threatening to lock hundreds of thousands of jobless Americans into their current tier of benefits without the option of reaching the next level.

The Baucus bill — which will be released jointly by the House Ways and Means Committee — also includes emergency funding to extend COBRA benefits, to prevent Medicare doctors from being hit with a huge pay cut June 1, and to extend a tax credit encouraging mining companies to promote worker safety.

Additionally, the bill would “increase or eliminate” the cap on the Oil Spill Liability Trust fund, which is currently $1 billion.

Democrats will want to pass this package quickly (and the June 1 deadline on some of these provisions begs their urgency). But the bill has a long road ahead, as the appetite for deficit spending, particularly in the Senate, is at an historic low. And if U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett’s primary loss in Utah offered any warning to lawmakers up for re-election this year, it’s that voters — at least in some areas — have lost that spending appetite as well.

Care of the office of U.A. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who’s among the most vocal critics of the White House plan to expand offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic coast.

The gap between the wealth possessed by white and black families grew more than four times larger between 1984 and 2007 — and federal policy is only exacerbating the trend, according to a study released today by researchers at Brandeis University’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy.

Not to be confused with income, wealth is a measure of what you possess minus any debts you owe. In the 23-year span under review, researchers found, the median value of assets among whites jumped from $22,000 to $100,000, while the median value of holdings among blacks rose from $2,000 to just $5,000. And the researchers say that’s no accident.

Instead, they argue, the quickly growing racial wealth gap “reflects public policies, such as tax cuts on investment income and inheritances which benefit the wealthiest, and redistribute wealth and opportunities.

“Tax deductions for home mortgages, retirement accounts, and college savings all disproportionately benefit higher income families,” they write.

And income levels can be deceiving. Indeed, researchers discovered that middle-income white households are much wealthier than upper-income black families.

[B]y 2007, the average middle-income white household had accumulated $74,000 in wealth, an increase of $55,000 over the 23-year period, while the average high-income African-American family owned $18,000, a drop of $7,000 That resulted in a wealth gap of $56,000 for an African-American family that earned more than $50,000 in 1984 compared to a white family earning about $30,000 that same year.

The findings “make it clear that higher income alone will not lead to increased wealth.”

Consumers of color face a gauntlet of barriers — in credit, housing and taxes — that dramatically reduce the chances of economic mobility.

The findings, researchers warn, have real-world repercussions.

“Even when African Americans do everything right — get an education and work hard at well-paying jobs — they cannot achieve the wealth of their white peers in the workforce, and that translates into very different life chances,” IASP Director Thomas Shapiro, author of “The Hidden Costs of Being African American” and the co-author of “Black Wealth/White Wealth,” said in a statement announcing the study.

“A U-turn is needed,” he added. “Public policies have and continue to play a major role in creating and sustaining the racial wealth gap, and they must play a role in closing it.”

Food for thought as Congress considers how strong to make its Consumer Financial Protection Agency, and whether all the Bush tax cuts merit extension.