Evidently fed up with Republican stalling on the appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick as director of CMS, the Obama administration announced its intention to use a recess appointment to bypass the roadblock.

From the White House blog:

But with the agency facing new responsibilities to protect seniors’ care under the Affordable Care Act, there’s no time to waste with Washington game-playing. That’s why tomorrow the President will use a recess appointment to put Dr. Berwick at the agency’s helm and provide strong leadership for the Medicare program without delay.

Cue Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Betsy McCaughey, who will step forward to say the "death panels" will now become reality. It just drives conservatives crazy to see their worst nightmare -- health care reform -- come to pass, even as opposition to it drops away.

Ezra Klein also points out the foolishness of Republican obstruction with regard to Berwick:

But conservatives are making a serious mistake by forcing the administration to rely on a recess appointment for Berwick. Ultimately, what weakens Berwick weakens them, as Berwick, whether they know it or not, is one of the best friends they could have in the administration. That's because insofar as Berwick is a radical, he's a radical in favor of a patient-centered health-care system -- a position that has traditionally been associated with conservatives, not liberals.

This has escaped notice because political activists don't pay much attention to questions of delivery-system reform. Of the three legs that balance the health-care reform stool -- cost, access and quality -- cost and access have traditionally been at the forefront of the issue, and are both politically polarized topics. Quality, however, is a demilitarized zone: Conservatives aren't for high rates of post-operative infections, and neither are liberals.

The New Yorker has a great profile of Sheila Bair, the populist Republican who's at the helm of the FDIC. (h/t Riverdaughter)

As you may already know, Bair is not well liked by the Wall St. crowd that's running the White House show. (Apparently she has this bizarre idea that her job is to look out for working folk. Crazy talk!) Well, she's very popular with regular people - the administration wouldn't get rid of her, it would make a stink. Instead, they've just neutered her:

These debates entered into the Administration’s discussions about building a new regulatory architecture. In late March, Geithner previewed for Congress some of the key concepts that Treasury wanted. The outline seemed to match the Bair camp’s ideas. [Ladies, has this ever happened to you?] A new authority with the power to take over large financial institutions that posed a systemic risk to the economy was modeled on the F.D.I.C., which, Geithner suggested in his testimony, would be an equal partner with Treasury in resolving such firms if they failed. He seemed to be saying that although he and Bair may have disagreed about how to handle the current crisis, there was much more consensus about how to deal with a future one.

But in the white paper detailing the new legislation, which the Administration released on June 17th, all the new authority to regulate firms that posed systemic risk was vested in the Federal Reserve. During Geithner’s testimony before the Senate, Jim Bunning, of Kentucky, echoing Bair, was incredulous. “It took fourteen years for the Fed to write one regulation on mortgages after we gave it the power to do that,” he said. “What makes you think that the Fed will do better this time around?” In addition, while the March plan said that the “Secretary and the FDIC would decide” how to resolve a failing firm, the new plan said such power should “be vested in Treasury.” Geithner could appoint the F.D.I.C. to do the technical work of cleaning up the firm, but between late March and mid-June — when Bair’s aggressive ideas about how to handle Citigroup leaked to the press — Bair’s agency had been downgraded from Treasury’s equal partner to a sidekick.

The senior Treasury official said that stripping authority from the F.D.I.C. had nothing to do with pressure from the banks. “Making a group decision on something that must be done really quickly is not easy,” he said. “At the end of the day, someone has to have the ability to make a call, and it’s better to have that authority vested in one person.”

When I asked Bair about the plan, she said, “I think it reflected a lot of input from a lot of different agencies, and the private sector, and insurance and consumer groups. It’s a very difficult task to try to balance all the different perspectives and come up with a package, and every compromise is going to have people who are unhappy about various parts of it. So I think it’s a starting point.” I said that she sounded disappointed. “I don’t know if ‘disappointed’ is the right word,” she replied.

by Karen Kwiatkowski from Military Week

Believe it or not, "Leadership Matters" is a key theme of the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign.

As a political slogan, it is very nice. Highly paid political consultants, advertisers and Extremely Smart People in Washington picked a fine one. Pithy, eye-catching, looks sharp in red, white and blue.

For people who serve in the military, leadership is beyond important; it takes on an almost mystical and compelling value, becoming a holy grail of sorts. Officers and NCOs seek to be known as leaders, to embody leadership qualities, to be seen as those with leadership potential. We spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about it, reading about it, talking about it.

We know it when we see it. We talk about it when we don't see it. In fact, knowing what leadership is not is a key part of our professional education.

Leadership is rarely seen in the senior officer who doesn't know his core skill area, whether that is flying airplanes, killing the enemy in ground combat, whether engineering or accounting. Incompetence can, of course, be remedied by the ability and willingness to learn. Incompetence without an observable ability to learn was bad news. Any sign that the suspect officer had simply no clue that he might be in severely bad kimshee and hence might possibly need to learn something was even worse news.

Some smart person ought to have mentioned this to George W. Bush when they approved the "Leadership Matters" theme.

An absence of leadership qualities in our military leaders gives rise to terms like "Seagull" Colonels and Generals, a species known to swoop in, make a lot of noise, crap all over everything, and then fly away. But our seagulls had an advantage over Bush and Cheney. Regardless of the mistakes made and not remedied, regardless of the illogic, stupidity and sheer idiocy of our present unit's existence under a seagull commander, at least we could be 100% sure they wouldn't be around for long.

High level incompetence seems to be the natural sea-state of our militarized foreign policy, launching forth with the proud Guardsman George W. Bush at the helm and Dick "Other Priorities" Cheney as navigator. More

Dear President Obama,

All the good you've done (and all the goodwill many have for you) is about to be undone and forgotten by this mess in the Gulf of Mexico. It's a President's worst nightmare, no doubt. A combination of the wrecked mess of the Louisiana wetlands and the bogeyman of Big Oil at the helm is a nightmare, especially when the aforementioned Big Oil Company has been cozily sleeping with its guards.

The thing is, you're not helping things much. Your weekly video message this week was as much an apologetic for the plan to continue risking our coastline as it was a lukewarm reassurance that everything that could be done was being done. It left me -- someone frequently referred to as an Obama apologist, fangirl, and blind-eyed supporter -- cold. My sense of things was that YOU didn't even believe the line about making sure this never happens again.

Making a promise like that is akin to saying you'll make sure the sun doesn't rise and if it does, it'll rise in the west. It cannot be done. Mr. President. Yet, this is an opportunity for you. A big one. Avail yourself of it. Here are some suggestions:

1. Quit putting BP in the front. If ever there was a time for the government to take charge and look like it was taking charge, it's now. If ever the "fierce urgency of now" applied, it's now. If this were a melting-down nuclear plant, you'd be right in front of it. At least, I think you would. [UPDATE: Under the law, government cannot "take over". Oversight is the limit of government's reach.]
2. Select a press pool and give them full access to the area. When the press is turned away (particularly a high-profile network like CBS) and told those are "BP rules", I promise you the perception of the general public is that a cover-up is underway. I don't care what your concerns are over security or organization. Transparency is the only hope you have for exposing the danger BP has wrought on our nation. Don't spare them; let the press have full access to report the good and the bad.
3. Start talking about what the government IS doing. I don't want to hear half-hearted apologetics for the future. I want to know about the NOW. I've been watching the White House updates, the NOAA updates, the EPA updates, and the Coast Guard updates, so I fully understand that the government has been on it at the start and remains so. Most people don't, even people who support you.
   

Continue reading »