WASHINGTON -- The Democratic-controlled Senate voted down a House Republican budget resolution on Wednesday, a day after the GOP lost a special House election in New York that largely revolved around the budget's proposal to overhaul Medicare. The GOP-controlled House approved the budget last month and Republicans have since had to defend plans to turn Medicare into a voucher program. The Senate vote was 40-57.Copyright © 2011 MarketWatch, Inc. aghi said that small banks "have expanded their business both outside their territory and with large customers, but they must now make their governance arrangements, organizational structures and credit risk control systems adequate to their larger shares of intermediation." In March the Bank of Italy finished an over seven months investigation into Italian mutual bank Banca Popolare di Milano (PMI.MI), urging the lender to strengthen its capital ratios and forcing it to announce a EUR1.2 billion capital increase. It also changed its governance structure to reduce the power of trade union representativn to declare, “I think if a Republican president called the Democratic proposals on something like this un-American, I think the press would be up in arms.”  But, lamented the fair-minded Halperin, since it’s a Democrat saying it, the media are silent. After denouncing other Ryan budget cuts--in energy, education, and transportation--Obama then locked in on Medicare: It’s a vision that says America can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors. It says that 10 years from now, if you’re a 65-year-old who’s eligible for Medicare, you should have to pay nearly $6,400 more than you would today. It says instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy the insurance that’s available in the open marketplace, well, tough luck--you’re on your own.  Tough talk from Obama that was, throwing scary numbers and summoning up visions of heartless Republicans throwing Granny into the snow. Democrats rallied to Obama, forgetting months of their own stinging criticism. Those in politics and in the media had been complaining that he wasn’t tough enough; back in December, for instance, he had agreed to the two-year extension of the Bush-era tax cuts, and his January State of the Union address was regarded as a nothing-burger.  Moreover, his fiscal year 2012 budget had been dismissed by just about everyone as not credible. Obama was doing well enough in the polls, but as a president, he was looking weak--and it’s hard to win the White House if you look weak. Indeed, just the day before the April 13 speech, a headline on CBSNews.com had asked, “Is Obama a leader or a follower?”  But all that changed on his lucky 13th day of April. Finally, in that Ryan-bashing speech, Obama tapped into a main cable of Democratic thinking. After all, the legendary Franklin D. Roosevelt, rousing the nation in his “four freedoms” speech of 1941, had essentially endorsed national health insurance as part of a comprehensive “cradle to grave” welfare state.  World War Two intervened to thwart his liberal domestic agenda, but just a few months after the war ended, his successor, Harry Truman, put forth a proposal for an expansion of the nation’s “compulsory social insurance system,” an expansion that would include health care. Truman never could get his bill enacted, but two decades later, in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed Medicare through Congress, the 36th president flew to Independence, Missouri, so that he could sign the Medicare bill in the beaming presence of the 33rd president, then in his 80s. So today’s Democrats are happy Medicare warriors, keeping faith in their past while pummeling Republicans in the present. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), for instance, declared that the Ryan budget would “have us walk away from our commitments to seniors and the most vulnerable.” She continued: This proposal ends Medicare as we know it, increasing costs and cutting benefits for seniors while abandoning the promise of health care made to Americans who spent a lifetime paying info a system. In fact, under their plan, out of pocket health care costs for seniors 65 years or older could double.  As Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the political arm of the House Democrats, announced,   We are going to use the budget to prove to Americans that every time Republicans choose to protect oil company profits while privatizing Medicare for seniors, seniors will chose Democrats.”  In other words, Democrats, by protecting the Medicare status quo, will be the winners. But are Democrats really so smart to be fired up about defending Medicare? Or are the Republicans the ones who are smarter? After all, it’s a $500 billion program, growing twice as fast as the economy --can we afford that? Is it possible that the American people are thinking that the Ryan-Republican message of fiscal restraint is actually what’s needed? Yet some Republicans, still bearing scars from previous Medicare batt