Braking Government

After eight years of secrecy, incompetence, indecency, and a belief that government is inherently bad and the free market is inherently good, America elected Barack Obama whose philosophy begins with a different assumption: that government should serve the interests of the people. As a brilliant politician with an ambitious agenda to set the country right again, Obama has attracted to government some especially bright, and qualified, personnel.

According to CQ Politics, President Obama has been making these essential appointments at record speed. However, confirmation by the Senate is necessary to place these top officials in the bureaucracies that need to be functioning in order to move the ship of state. And the Senate is dragging its feet. Even though the Senate is now controlled by Democrats.

Obama is filling these vacancies faster than any recent president, but the pace isn't fast enough, especially after the debacle of the Bush administration.

A tally by the White House Transition Project, a group of academics funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, found that after 160 days in office, a mark that came during the July Fourth congressional recess, less than 40 percent of the most plum political jobs had been filled and that Obama had sent nomination papers to the Senate for slightly more than half of the jobs.

Finally Harold Koh, former dean of Yale Law School, was confirmed by the Senate to become Legal Counsel to the State Department. A more worthy choice would be hard to find, but the Republicans managed to question this amazing scholar's credentials because he is also an activist.

And also troubling is the delay of the confirmation of Dawn E. Johnsen to be the Director of the Office of Legal Counsel, the same office that under Bush-Cheney authored the infamous torture memos that might, hopefully, send some people to prison for violating domestic and international law. Those memos are a perversion of legal analysis and should be used in every legal ethics class to illustrate how professionalism means standing up to power and saying no when asked to rationize illegality. Because Professor Johnsen testified before the Senate about just how much the Office of Legal Counsel had been derailed, Republicans have branded her a radical.

With Obama's popularity slipping, in the wake of Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase's announcement of record quarter profits after taxpayers bailed them out (under the Bush administration, remember, not by Obama) while unemployment continues to rise and foreclosures do, too, we need to get government seats filled with the best and the brightest. Now. There is so much to do and not a lot of time to do it.

Hypocrisy in High Places, Oh, Gosh, Not Again!

So now the illustrious senator from Nevada, Republican John Ensign, is screwing his aide's wife, despite his public outcry that Bill Clinton should have resigned back then because of Monica, that Christianity prohibits adultery, and all of the other bullshit that goes along with this ultraright agenda. Human frailty is not a capital crime.

Most disturbing however is the report that forty major news organizations kept the kidnapping of New York Times reporter David Rohde quiet for seven months, fearing that any publicity might risk his life and the lives of his companions who were also held by the Taliban.

How are these stories connected? In both instances, news organizations made decisions not to publish accounts.

Frankly, I'm sick and tired of the hypocrisy of these politicians who claim a higher ground and then we find out they are corrupt, actually more corrupt than we are because most of us don't claim to judge everyone else for their human failings, and don't get paid with taxpayer money to rail against their enemies. I'm also sick and tired of these diversions. Who sleeps with whom doesn't interest me.

I want the senate to do the work of the senate, to get these nominations through: Dawn Johnsen, Harold Koh, Sonia Sotomayor. I want the senate to pressure the White House to investigate the use of torture as part of our national security, a practice that might not have ended with the change of administration. And I want the news media to regain our confidence by doing some investigative reporting again, not about affairs, I don't care about affairs. I care about the money, where the money flows and how decisions are made. Like in financial bailouts, TARP, banking regulation, and the home mortgage industry. There seems to be a lot of work to be done on these issues.