He's the perfect guy. He opposed health care reform and financial reform. He's the architect of the passage of NAFTA under Clinton. Together with Gene Sperling, who missed the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble and helped to remove the Glass-Steagall wall between commercial and investment banking and other post-depression safeguards and who will chair the council of economic advisors, this appointment will help Obama move to the center and thereby gain confidence and support among business leaders. Now if you will excuse me I need to go vomit.

Much like football teams that think if they can just hire the next Vince Lombardi everything will be ok, the Obama administration thinks if they can just get the right personnel in place everything will be ok.

They seem to fail to realize that it is policy not personnel that is determinant, and a policy of continually trying to accomodate an opposition that will not be accomodating is failing them, the Democratic Party and the country.

Ah, the truth comes out.

So, where's the 'CHANGE'?

This is just another Slick Willy.

What do you expect, apparently Obama doesn't know/trust anyone outside Chicago (yeesh!)

Then again, when your total experience is what, 1 year, on the national level, don't expect much.

Man, I thought leaving Portland was enough, maybe I should leave the country.

Looks like the new boss is the same as the old boss. I guess we are seeing what hope and change looks like after one wins an election.

This just proves that the Liberal side of the Democratic Party has been making the wrong strategy of pragmatism.

The Right has been totally intransigent and have been slowly making steady progress to get their way.

It is time, well past time, to stop trying to play nice and just be plain dig-in-your-heels a**holes.

If the Moderate sellout rats want my support they have to come over to my side or lose out totally.

What did I think?

I thought he was bought within hours of clinching the Democratic Party nomination. This is just clear confirmation.

Here's what John Kass of the Chicago Tribune has to say:

"Yet what is truly amusing about the Bill Daley story is the reaction of the Washington media.

'Using Chicago's early history as bare-knuckled politics and back-room dealmaking is a favored tactic among those outside the region seeking to tarnish the reputations of local Illinois political leaders who rise to the national stage,' admonished the Christian Science Monitor.....

Early history? You mean like Thursday, when the federal grand jury indicted the former business partner of the mayor's son over that city sewer contract deal?

The Daley boys are adept and skillful and ruthless in the pursuit of power and treasure. The family has controlled Chicago for more than half a century. The Daleys are without doubt the best politicians on the planet.

And Billy and Rich are easing former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel into the mayor's job. It might look like coincidence. But there's nothing coincidental about the Daleys. They're not fools. They're not dreamers. They're planners.

Washington reporters hoping to maintain favor with the Chicago gatekeeper would be advised to stay away from the following topics while researching the glowing puff pieces to come.

Don't ask about Billy at Fannie Mae and his little buddy Rahm at Freddie Mac in the 1990s, or how that huge SBC deal went through in Illinois in 2003 when Billy was SBC president.

Don't ask about those meetings back in Chicago, in the early 1990s, when Billy and family adviser Tim Degnan and others helped create those City Hall patronage armies — which were later involved in illegal hiring — to keep Rich Daley in power and elect allies like Emanuel to Congress.

And for Pete's sake, never ask about the Chicago Way.

Just stick to the script as Obama begins the 2012 campaign with Billy and Dave and Rahm and Rich behind him.

It's all about moving to the center. It's all about moving to the center. It's all about …

(And lo, the Daley women found the infant Barack floating in a reed basket along the banks of the Chicago River. And they lifted the crying babe from the river, and nurtured and wrapped him in swaddling clothes. They watched him grow to manhood, where he performed great miracles. Soon he was ready to transcend the broken politics of the past, just as long as it was in Washington, and not in Chicago, where the Daleys eat and play.)"

full link: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-met-kass-0107-20110107,0,7721720,full.column

This article deserves reading:

http://www.slate.com/id/2280296/

And then we have dim bulb Jeff Merkley:

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/01/republicans-giddy-about-one-proposed-filibuster-reform.php?ref=fpblg

Raleigh, the Slate piece is good for a start, but it left out AG Eric Holder's intimacy with Wall St. Consider, for a start, this excerpt from James Lieber's Voice piece (Oct 27, '09), "We Bailed out the Banks. When Do We Go After the Crooks Behind Our Financial Collapse?":

"...the nation's new top prosecutor, Attorney General Eric Holder, has a history of preferring that deviant corporations be held to no more than a 'voluntary cooperation' system in which they investigate themselves privately.

Under the 'Holder Memo,' which he wrote in 1999 as deputy AG in the Clinton administration, bad-boy executives and their corporations who turn over evidence to the government qualify for lenient sentences and fines and, sometimes, for settlements without even indictments. The consequences of their crimes often amount to only the cost of doing business.

After leaving government, Holder followed the mandates of his own memo and made a lucrative living by conducting internal probes for companies and negotiating outstanding results for white-collar clients. He was public about it: Holder's 2002 op-ed 'Don't Indict WorldCom' in The Wall Street Journal argued on behalf of the corporate perpetrator of one of the sleaziest frauds of the past decade."
http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-10-27/news/we-ve-bailed-out-the-banks-when-do-we-go-after-the-crooks-behind-our-financial-collapse/2/

"Inside Job" director Charles Ferguson noted, in a NYT interview last November, that, curiously, no one has been prosecuted in connection with the recent financial crisis. There have been some distracting prosecutions -- Bernie Madoff, the alleged insider trading by hedge funds, a Goldman Sachs rap-on-the-knuckles -- but no one directly responsible for the crisis has been indicted: no CEO heads have rolled. None is likely to be indicted or even investigated as long as Holder remains AG.

Now comes Wm Daley, who is not just any banker:

"Mr. Daley now oversees Midwestern operations for J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., serving as the bank's public face in Chicago. He also works a lot in Washington helping Chief Executive James Dimon navigate the political landscape, especially during the debate last year over financial regulation that will cut the bank's bottom line by billions."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704415104576065812983056374.html?KEYWORDS=JP+Morgan

JPM, in September of 2008, it should be recalled, "obtained" $307B of WaMu's assets, including $188B in deposits, when it was solvent and well-capitalized, for $1.888B via a deal with the FDIC's defensive Sheila Bair that many have deemed collusive.

But JPM, which will now sits at the President's ear every day, has not limited itself to purloining other financial institutions. Consider the machinations by former NY gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio during his JPM tenure:

"Within Hours of George Bush's May 3, 2007, announcement that he was naming Charles Millard head of the $64 billion Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), Rick Lazio got an e-mail about it from a fellow JPMorgan Chase executive.

'Assume you know Charlie Millard,' wrote Tom Block, the bank's top in-house lobbyist, attaching the White House press release.

'I do know him well,' Lazio replied.

Lazio would boast in subsequent internal Morgan e-mails obtained by the Voice that he was 'very friendly with the head of PBGC.'

How friendly? Lazio and Millard would soon start down the path of a near-billion-dollar deal that eventually ensnarled both in multiple federal probes that looked into their apparent efforts to game a government bidding process, as well as subsequent attempts by Lazio to get Millard a job."
http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-08-18/news/inside-rick-lazio-s-biggest-wall-street-deal-the-chummy-e-mails/

Perhaps with JPM's Daley beside him, Mr Obama will pursue the "bipartisan" privatization of Social Security for which JPM and the cabal of banksters who launched our current financial crisis have been lobbying for so long?

Regarding the aforementioned theft of WaMu by Wm Daley's employer, JPM, today brought a long-awaited opinion from J. Mary Walrath in the DE bankruptcy courtroom regarding the Plan of Reorganization that would gift JPM with a few billion dollars more than it paid for WaMu:
http://ghostofwamu.com/documents/08-12229/08-12229-6528.pdf

Now, perhaps, other litigation that has been in abeyance will move forward and much more will be learned about how WaMu was taken down by the collusion of JPM and the FDIC. "Perhaps" because what can be learned depends upon an independent, honest judiciary.

Steve: . . Man, I thought leaving Portland was enough, maybe I should leave the country.

Wonder how many here have had the same thoughts?

Wonder if living here in the city that has worked us over has in some ways prepared us to see "whatever might be coming down the pike" a little quicker to lead to that conclusion?

Wonder if I have been listening to too much good music tonight?

Take care Steve.
Let us know when you depart.

Dearly departed......

"And lo, the Daley women found the infant Barack floating in a reed basket along the banks of the Chicago River."

Hah! Birther questions solved!