The Washington Post has a story, Bailout Lacks Oversight Despite Billions Pledged, which I suppose has many interpretations depending on your world view.

For the true conservatives among us, I suppose the lesson could be about the pitfalls of letting the government do economic things.

For the anti-Bush among us, I suppose the lesson could be that competence in the executive branch still matters.  I had mixed feelings about writing that last sentence, but here is how I came to justify it in my own mind. Congress imposed some very difficult deadlines to set up the oversight operation.  It might be ok to let these deadlines slip a little if one could trust in the competence of the executive branch.  So while Congess has not yet lived up to its obligation to keep a watch on the executive, it wouldn’t be such an issue if it were an executive branch run by someone who has shown he is trustworthy and competent.

Reading the Huffington Post web site comments on this story makes me wish I had known about the C-SPAN coverage of the hearings.

In my previous post Obama’s Challenge: A Transformative Opportunity, I extolled the interview with Robert Kuttner. I said:

Robert Kuttner provides the facts and figures that dispel the notion that we don’t have the resources to solve these problems.

Well, I stumbled across a post on another blog called The Only Winning Move written by Joshua Herring. I was stunned at how someone could hear the same interview that I did, and yet come up with such a different reaction. I post the link to the blog just so you too can see how one’s prior convictions can blind you to information (I am sure that is true of me too). I hope that Joshua does a better job of looking for the truth in his PhD studies than he does in the political/economic realm.

Joshua is so sure of his own set of facts, that he couldn’t believe anything that Kuttner said.  If Joshua had to mis-hear what Kuttner said to reconcile with his own inner demons, then that is apparently what Joshua did.

When Joshua says such things about Kuttner as

He happens to know off the top of his head that the debt is $5.6trillion

then you know he is clutching at straws.  Kuttner is being interviewed about a book that he has just written.  Joshua is sure that numbers that Kuttner is using just came into his mind and were not the product of research for the book.

From News at Princeton comes this article Evolution’s new wrinkle: Proteins with cruise control provide new perspective.

A team of Princeton University scientists has discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution.

Why is this political?  Anything having to do with evolution and intelligent design is political.

The scientists do not know how the cellular machinery guiding this process may have originated, but they emphatically said it does not buttress the case for intelligent design, a controversial notion that posits the existence of a creator responsible for complexity in nature.

I report, you decide.

RichardH has suggested the article Battle Plans by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker, Nov 17, 2008.

I am only up to page 3 of this 8 page article, but I am enjoying reading it very much. If this article had only been published before the election, I would have tried to vote for Obama twice.

The article just reinforces the idea that he actually is what I voted for.

I have finished the article. I was tempted to quote the last paragraph here as an inducement to get you to read the article. I stopped myself, though. That would be like telling you the butler did it in order to get you to read a mystery novel.

Follow this link to the UPI story.

Follow this link to The Huffington Post to see more comments on this news item