DC snub could be Bay State gain

President Obama today announced his nomination to head-up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- and it isn't, unfortunately, the woman who had the original idea for the agency and has been overseeing its set-up. Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor, is smart and tough, with unquestionable integrity, and you would think that these qualities would make her a no-brainer for the top spot in the CFPB, which is supposed to provide information to consumers and to keep an eye on banks, credit-card companies and other financial institutions -- all with the goal of protecting all of us from lies, schemes and predatory practices.

The Republican Party, of course, has a problem with any tactic that prevents their friends, and themselves, from getting richer. GOP senators made clear that Warren would not pass confirmation, so the president nominated an underling, Richard Cordray (whose nomination, it appears, will also be held up). While, again, I wish that Obama would fight back against the morons in Congress, there may be a bright side to this for those of us who live in Massachusetts. Warren's name has been tossed around as a possible Democratic challenger to Senator Scott Brown in the 2012 election. Warren said today that, with her work in DC done, she is returning to Massachusetts "to do more thinking" about a possible Senate run.

Warren would be an excellent candidate, and she would immediately have my support. I'm hoping she throws her hat in the ring.

Ron Paul tells it like it is

Ron Paul deserves credit. No matter how much I disagree with many of the Texas Congressman's positions, mostly on domestic policy, there is much overlap in his libertarian ideology and the uber-liberal viewpoint that I come from -- and he is never afraid to stand up and say what he thinks.

Yesterday Rep. Paul was on the floor of the House offering a vastly different assessment of WikiLeaks than most other Republicans, who are calling for the web site's public face, Julian Assange, to be either prosecuted for espionage or taken out like a terrorist.

"Is this not an example of killing the messenger for bad news?" asked Paul. He also had nine questions that we should be asking ourselves:

Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?

Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?

Number 3: Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?

Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?

Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?

Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?

Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?

Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?

Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?

The ayes have it

The House of Representatives appears poised to pass health care reform tonight, effectively ending a yearlong melodrama and bringing to fruition a dream of progressives for eons. I am sure there will be many kinks in this legislation -- the old sausage-making analogy comes to mind -- but the status quo would be worse and that is unacceptable. Give President Obama credit for sticking with something he's been advocating since the campaign, despite the likely high political cost.

And remember, the bill that the Democrats "rammed through" (after a year of attempts to bring in some Republican votes) is less ambitious that what President Nixon proposed during his second term -- but that was when there were some in the GOP who were not completely insane. Ezra Klein, blogging on The Washington Post site, wrote:

If I'd told you that the Obama administration was going to release a health-care bill that would attract every Senate Democrat -- from Bernie Sanders and Barbara Boxer to Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman -- and either endorsements or neutrality from the American Medical Association, the hospital industry, the pharmaceutical industry, AARP, labor, and much of the insurance industry (though they're press releases have become more oppositional recently), you'd have thought that was a pretty moderate, consensus-oriented bill. Which it is! But most Americans don't think that because the Republicans decided to treat it as the second coming of fascism.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman at The New York Times offers a reminder as to why the health insurance industry needs to be reformed:

Right now, we have a system that creates huge incentives for bad, one might say demonic, behavior [by health insurance providers]. We can end all of that — not in some indefinite future, but with a single vote right now.

Count the votes!

Democracy woes

There's quite a bit of anger at Washington these days. The citizenry appears to be up in arms and the voices getting the most media play are those associated with the libertarian-leaning Tea Party movement. After President Obama was able to get a stimulus package passed by Congress a year ago, everything seems to have ground to a halt. Have we come to a point where the structures of government have completely failed?

First, it's important to remember that all of this is nothing new. Mark Twain, writing in the late 19th century, took frequent shots at Congress -- "Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can," and Congressmen are "the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes," and "there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."

Going back further, the nation was so divided by 1861 that more than one-third of the states opted out of the union, resulting in the Civil War. Go back more than two centuries -- when the Founding Fathers were still running the show -- and there were political games, savage personal attacks and governmental dysfunction. Don't forget that Aaron Burr, then the sitting vice president, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton (and was indicted for murder in two states) in a duel precipitated by attacks on Burr's character and politics.

The country has always had its political tensions, its unhealable divisions, its calculating demagogues, its divisive leaders, its obstructionist blocs, its fringe elements, its existential threats. The names and faces have changed -- as have the speed and breadth of communication channels -- but the machinations of those in elected office and the fickleness, and sometimes foolishness, of the general public remain intact.

While no one is happy that the nation's unemployment rate is hovering close to double-digits, a look at the dramatic slowing of job losses in the past year would seem to indicate that Obama's economic policies are on the right track, yet polls show people increasingly unhappy with the president. The mainstream media allows the discussion to be dominated by cranks like Sarah Palin, who seems absolutely incapable of rendering even a single truth constructed as a complete sentence, and Dick Cheney, who is clearly wishing, hoping and praying for a massive terrorist attack on American soil so he can say that he told us so. (Oh, and what was his job during the last massive terrorist attack on American soil?)

As for what the people want -- Who can tell? I agree with a recent piece in The New Yorker by James Surowiecki, which says:

...this new populism has stitched together incompatible concerns and goals into one “I’m mad as hell” quilt. The people may have spoken. It’s just not clear that they’re making any sense.

Americans want good schools, trash picked up on time, roadways that are well maintained, more cops on the beat, a booming economy, a strong national defense, and on and on, yet they want their taxes reduced or eliminated. (The image above is from The New Yorker story, and I think it illustrates the situation wonderfully.) What's worse is that our politicians have to promise to do all of that -- despite it being impossible -- or face the wrath of an angry electorate.

Into this dynamic comes Obama, who has said that difficult decisions need to be made to fix the problems that "have been kicked down the road" for generations. The legitimate attempt at reforming health care was just the first step, yet it was politicized, sabotaged, bastardized, vilified and now, apparently, euthanized in a process that played out for months and consumed much of the good will and political capital that the president came to Washington with.

The Democrats -- who still have big majorities in the House and Senate, as well as the White House -- are cowering, just a little more than a year after the reported death of the Republican Party. The GOP stands to remake Congress in November, much as they did after Bill Clinton's first two years in office -- and then they went on to demonstrate new levels of corruption and hypocrisy. They're in the process of drawing up a new "Contract with America," which will undoubtedly advocate better schools, a booming economy, a strong national defense, etc., and lower taxes. They will fail and the Democrats will return and the pattern will repeat itself ad infinitum.

Is this the best that democracy has to offer?