Was the Public Option really as dead as the mainstream media (and even most recently by Josh) have been making out?

Or was this yet another example of 'He-said-She-said' journamalism where the reality on the ground -- Dems got the votes, Dems got the votes -- was conveniently ignored so that we could hear yet more of Chuck Grassley and Olympia Snowe?

I love the need of David Brooks and others to portray the teabaggers as "populist" and anti-big-government when there was absolutely no invasion of our civil rights during the Bush Administration -- from imprisonment without trial to warrantless wiretaps -- that these people had problems with.

But if someone like Brooks is going to go and call these people populists, at the very least, you'd think he'd be under an obligation to show how their beliefs help working people and if he can't show that, then who exactly their beliefs do help.

I mean, we can get a group together for liberal causes that matches up pretty well, economically speaking -- so how are they not populist?

And if we go beyond income levels, what then distinguishes someone -- anyone -- as 'populist'?

It might help to look at what the original Populists actually advocated. If you do, you'll see that much of their platform (e.g. the "Omaha Platform", 1892) required a huge expansion of government power, greater worker and labor rights, and a mighty shot across the bow of Corporate America.

There's nothing, absolutely nothing, in the current teabagger's agenda with its crazy mix of anti-statism (Dems in power), subservience (GOP in power) and knee-jerk devotion to laissez-faire that a real populist from back-in-the-day would recognize as his own.

In fact, the only similarity is something Brooks (who titled his piece, "No, It's Not About Race") specifically won't admit to, namely, a predilection towards anti-immigrant bias bordering in some cases on racism.

But if we focus on the more positive aspects of the populist movement, it's hard not to conclude that this attempt to appropriate its name for purposes completely antithetical to everything it actually stood for is both a-historical and extremely cynical.

It's nothing but an effort to give rightwing groups a legitimacy -- or in other words, 'working class creds' -- that nothing in the agenda or activities of these groups would suggest.

You can understand why someone would want to do this -- who wants to appear, at least openly, as an apologist for wealth and power? -- but it's not something rational people ought to treat with any degree of respect.

So the head of the RNC is going around bad-mouthing government.  You got supporters running around with 'tree of liberty' tee-shirts and others talking about the perils of government access to online medical records.

It's hard then to explain their earlier confidence when government was detaining people without trial and bugging their phones without warrants. No problem there.

So my question is, what happened?

So if the Medicare plan pays for hysterectomies, does that mean everyone has to get one -- that some 'government bureaucrat' is going to be empowered to tell you and your wife, your sons and your daughters, 'go out and get a hysterectomy or else'?

All day long, WBBM Radio (the CBS affiliate in Chicago) played Sen. Orin Hatch's comment that 'empathy', which is one of Obama's criteria for selecting a Supreme Court justice, was just "a code word for an activist judge." All day long, they played this.

Hatch has said it on 'This Week with George Stephanopoulos'. What they failed to broadcast -- even once and hence I had no idea it existed till NPR reported on it this morning -- was Sen. Leahy's response. It went like this:

We've had a very activist court. We had an activist court that made a decision that allowed employers to covertly discriminate against women so that women wouldn't get paid equally. We in the Congress reversed that with a law, in fact, the first law that President Obama signed into law. I think he wants to have somebody to treat people all the same, whether they're Republicans, or Democrat, men, women, or whatever they may be.

So it's okay -- at least on WBBM Radio -- to spend the whole day with nothing but a Republican talking about 'activist judges' being appointed to the judiciary by Democrats, without a single contrary voice.

Is it any wonder that someone might come away from such coverage thinking Democrats only wanted 'activists' for the bench whereas Republicans only wanted 'strict constructionists'?

The worst possible outcome of our current financial mess is that we end up with the same financial institutions that we started out with.

Obama's response to a question about Glass-Steagall in an interview he gave to the NYT last week didn't make me feel too confident:

"You know, I've looked at the evidence so far that indicates that other countries that have not seen some of the problems in their financial markets that we have nevertheless don't separate between investment banks and commercial banks, for example. They have a "supermarket" model that they've got strong regulation of."

So in other words, we'll have the same monster financial institutions around our necks at the end of this crisis that we had at the beginning -- minus the trillions coming out of our pockets either as unwilling taxpayers or consumers.

Robert Kuttner urges us to bring back the Pecora Commission:

Pecora's work led to several resignations of bank executives, but more importantly in created a climate for reform legislation. Pecora's findings helped inform the Glass Steagall Act of 1933 separating investment banking from government-insured commercial banking, the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Most importantly, it functioned as a public shaming of Wall Street. It thus helped change the political climate so that radical reforms could proceed....

Defenders of the current regime treat with contempt any attempt to bring honesty back to the system. 'Glass-Steagall was already outdated in the Eighties', you'll hear them say. 'Such restrictions have no place in modern banking.'

Of course, these were the same arguments that were used in the attempt to stymie the original regulations in the 1930s. It's not like the bankers of that earlier period accepted these restrictions with open arms. In fact they opposed them tooth and nail though the regulations, once established, served us well over the decades until removed in the reckless Eighties and Nineties.

At that point Jamie Galbraith reminds us, "it took less than a decade to reproduce all the pathologies that Glass-Steagall had been enacted to deal with in 1933."