Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has received plenty of ink - including a New York Times editorial page endorsement - for his "Buffett Rule" bill, named after the mega-rich investor Warren Buffett.

Buffett has argued that wealthy investors like him, who face a 15-percent tax under current law, should pay at the same rate as middle-class folk - roughly 30 percent.

There are, clearly, rewards for bold, blunt leadership in times of crisis.

Last year, Providence Mayor Angel Taveras declared a "category 5 hurricane" on the city's books and was able to wrangle significant savings from municipal unions and push through a tax hike.

Treasurer Gina Raimondo, meanwhile, made a very methodical case for an unsustainable state pension system and won an overhaul that landed her breathless national press.

Forbes was in attendance today in new York as Treasurer Gina Raimondo accepted an award from the right-leaning Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research for her work in overhauling the state pension system.

The magazine's Tim Ferguson noted that Raimondo preached transparency: an unrelenting effort to educate the public on the nature and depth of the pension crisis, such that a broad constituency would "own the problem" and embrace reform.

Ian Donnis over at WRNI chats with Senator Jack Reed, who remains hopeful that Congress, afte the failure of the supercommittee, can work out a deficit-cutting deal before automatic defense and social services cuts take hold in 2013.

Other observers have suggested that the deal will come after the 2012 elections - perhaps in early 2013 - when one party or the other can claim the upper hand in Washington and steer matters to a conclusion.

Last week, I sat down with Governor Chafee for an interview on several topics. I've written, in this space, about his comments on medical marijuana. But there were other quotes of note, too.

Last month in a story on organized labor I reported that reamortizing the state's pension obligation - refinancing and kicking some of the problem down the road - was still part of the behind-the-scenes conversation on pension reform, even if the idea had largely disappeared from the public discourse.

Amid the unending agita over the pay and benefits for Rhode Island's public workers, Reuters reports:

Local and state governments axed more than 200,000 jobs in 2010, according to U.S. Census data released on Tuesday that showed the growing threat of public employee layoffs to the economic recovery.

According to the Census, local and state governments had 203,321 fewer full-time equivalent employees in 2010 than in 2009 and 27,567 fewer part-time employees.

I was talking with former Brown University political science professor Darrell West a few days back when hopes for a grand debt-limit deal, if dimming, were still alive. He offered, perhaps, the best explanantion I'd heard to date for Washington's failure to go big. And now, with the capital's ambitions shrinking by the day, that explanation seems even more insightful.

As Washington lurches inexorably toward a lesser budget deal, Congressman David Cicilline must be thanking his lucky stars.

The broader deal that President Obama and Speaker of the House Boehner were discussing not long ago called for substantial cuts, including some in entitlement programs like Medicare, in exchange for a significant but far smaller growth in tax revenues.

The high-stakes budget showdown in Washington, which has the Obama Administration and Congressional leaders working to cut a major deficit-reduction deal before the federal government hits the debt ceiling, has put Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse in the spotlight. And it could have real implications for Rhode Island Congressman David Cicilline's long-term political prospects.

The death of Governor Chafee's two-tiered sales tax proposal and the gay marriage bill he advocated have prompted more than a few declarations of irrelevance.

But with Smith Hill Democrats set to caucus today, and a formal budget proposal expected in the coming days, it may be time to re-evaluate.

That budget, by most accounts, will include some sort of sales tax expansion.

Providence Mayor Angel Taveras' top-to-bottom review of city finances, which revealed a two-year, $180 million structural deficit, has badly damaged the reputation of his predecessor, David Cicilline, who stands accused of covering up the capital's fiscal problems while running a successful campaign for Congress last fall.

At the height of the David-Cicilline-left-Providence-bankrupt story, it was hard to imagine him ever escaping its harsh glare. But veteran political observers noted that the year-and-a-half until the next election is the proverbial "eternity in politics" and that attention would inevitably shift elsewhere - especially as the Taveras Administration began the painful process of cutting.

Now that Treasurer Gina Raimondo has laid out some options for substantial pension reform, the hard part: getting meaningful legislation passed.

Last year, the Pew Center on the States released a report titled "The trillion dollar gap" that took a nationwide look at the pension challenge (see pages 7-11, in the executive summary, for an overview of reform efforts across the country).

The New York Times had a piece this weekend on Rhode Island's Medicaid experiment - and the GOP's push to trumpet it in the sale of its Medicaid block grant proposal:

With Republicans pushing to rein in Medicaid costs, an experiment in Rhode Island is drawing the attention of some conservatives who say it has led to substantial savings without reducing care for the state’s poorest patients.

A letter from Congressman Cicilline to supporters, taking on the messenger:

I’m sure by now you’ve heard about the report issued today by former senior Carcieri Administration official Gary Sasse at the request of the Providence City Council, and I’d like to take a moment to set the record straight. The idea that the individual who led the charge for Governor Carcieri in making devastating cuts to cities and towns across Rhode Island would now criticize how we managed through these difficult cuts is just too much.