I just got back from DC after a whirlwind trip (Saturday to Tuesday). I hate flying cross country; it really bothers my injury. But I thought it would be interesting to go to the Dept. of Treasury with a bunch of bloggers and kick it with a host of Treasury officials including Tim Geithner. It was an "off-the-record" meeting and I think that made the participants more relaxed to speak freely, but did they say anything they might not have because it was supposed to be off the record? I doubt it.

I brought up the fact that they were losing their political capital on the CFPA if they move it to the Fed because the public wants it to be an independent agency with actual power. Unfortunately, they seemed to think that as long as it had the teeth they wanted, they weren't--and the public shouldn't be--concerned where it was housed. And then of course some members brought up that the Senate (Dodd and Corker) still had to work out their issues first anyway and they intimated how problematic the Senate has been. I pushed the point that it does matter where it's housed, especially to the American public.

Another issue brought up is one many bloggers have talked about: Republicans do an incredible job with messaging. And the Obama White House has been terrible framing their priorities. The Treasury officials admitted that they weren't very good at getting their message out there. Some seemed resigned to it, while others admitted there was a pressing need to get better at it.

Felix Salmon of Reuters has a very good piece up about the meeting:

I can’t quote what anybody said, even anonymously, but I can tell you that the message from Treasury was that financial reform is not dead in the Senate, and that in fact on some matters, including derivatives reform, there’s real hope that the Senate can put something together that’s even stronger than what the House passed. I’ll believe it when I see it, but the general idea seems to be that so long as something gets out of committee, the final bill might actually have some teeth.

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More generally, I came away with the impression that life at Treasury is not much fun, on a day-to-day basis, and that the stresses of trying to set economic policy in the face of strong opposition from both the banking lobby and the Republican party are wearing on the officials there.

We really need to keep the pressure up on this issue. The CFPA is too important.

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Everyone (except Shep Smith) at Fox News, including various reporters, spent the day yesterday whining about how mean the White House was being to them, telling everyone that they're a propaganda arm of the Republican Party. Guess the truth hurts. (More on that in a bit.)

It's funny they should say that. Because that same day, every single one of Fox's prime-time "opinion show" anchors devoted time and energy to running down President Obama -- and the Nobel committee -- for his just-announced Peace Prize.

Sean Hannity was so worked up, he devoted two whole segments to the subject, featuring the gnome who lives under the bridge Dick Morris and Mark Steyn. (You'll love Hannity's definition of "peace.") Bernie Goldberg ran through their comparable records of non-accomplishment and announced that he would win the prize next year. But the real corker, of course, came from Glenn Beck, who was able to figure out just what Obama's Nobel Peace Prize really meant:

It may be more revealing on how Europe and the rest of the world views Obama. He [Obama] is dismantling the United States one piece at a time.

And doing so, evidently, at the behest of his European masters. (But wait! I thought he was born in Kenya!)

This really is getting unseemly. A little carping could be expected, but for God's sake, can't any of these people get some perspective? The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the world's great honors, and it's an honor for it to go to an American.

Hannity, for instance, harps on the fact that Obama's nomination came only 12 days after he was inaugurated. But the committee keeps reviewing nominees -- including their current activities -- up until the final vote, which took place not long ago. So Hannity's point is a nonsequitur.

What never seems to occur to any of them is the obvious, simple and clear reason that Obama won the Nobel: He won the Presidency of the United States -- and in so doing, ended conservative-movement rule in America.

The entire world could see that the Bush administration, enabled by a Republican Congress, and fueled by an increasingly bellicose and irrational talk-show was the greatest threat to global peace since the fall of the Berlin Wall -- outpacing even the terrorist disturbances of Al Qaeda, particularly in lives lost. Nor would conservatives give up their hold on power readily; defeating them was no mean feat.

Entertaining such thoughts, though, would paralyze any well-trained right-winger in a fit of cognitive dissonance, so it never comes up on places like Fox.

Michael Moore may have put it best:

The simple fact that he was elected was reason enough for him to be the recipient of this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

Because on that day the murderous actions of the Bush/Cheney years were totally and thoroughly rebuked. One man -- a man who opposed the War in Iraq from the beginning -- offered to end the insanity. The world has stood by in utter horror for the past eight years as they watched the descendants of Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson light the fuse of our own self-destruction. We flipped off the nations on this planet by abandoning Kyoto and then proceeded to melt eight more years worth of the polar ice caps. We invaded two nations that didn't attack us, failed to find the real terrorists and, in effect, ignited our own wave of terror. People all over the world wondered if we had gone mad.

And if all that wasn't enough, the outgoing Joker presided over the worst global financial collapse since the Great Depression.

So, yeah, at precisely 11:00pm ET on November 4, 2008, Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. And the 66 million people who voted for him won it, too. By the time he took the stage at midnight ET in the Grant Park Historic Hippie Battlefield in downtown Chicago, billions of people around the globe were already breathing a huge sigh of relief. It was as if, in that instant, one man did bring the promise of peace to the world -- and most were ready to go wherever he wanted to go to achieve that end. Never before had the election of one man made every other nation feel like they had won, too. When you've got billions of people ready, willing and able to join a cause like this, well, a prize in Oslo is the least that you deserve.

It's also worth noting that the Peace Prize historically has gone to those -- like Martin Luther King -- who have produced important transformative steps in the furtherance of civil rights and the healing of the racial divide, which has produced so much misery and inflicted so much violence in America alone. Obama's election as the first African-American president represents just such a moment, and he deserves recognition for that alone as well.

The Fox folks need to get a grip. And if they wonder why the White House sees them as reflexively opposed to everything and anything Obama does, they should just play the above video as a reminder.

Kos:

Head on over to MSNBC and vote for the funniest, dumbest, and meanest ads of the cycle. For meanest, I voted for that racist Corker ad. They've got some Chris Murphy (D) ad on there that they must've added for "balance" sake. Yet it's being freeped by the other side. And since the "winners" get shown on the Today Show friday, don't let the NRCC get a free last dig at our guy.