Sounds great, so why not before?

President-elect Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan won't include money for politicians' pet projects and will include provisions aimed at ensuring his administration is open and accountable to taxpayers and Congress, a transition official said Tuesday.

As part of the package likely to cost as much as $775 billion, Obama plans to establish an oversight body to meet publicly and issue reports to Congress on how the money is being spent. The president-elect also plans to create a user-friendly Internet site to allow people to track the flow of dollars.

The official who disclosed the details spoke on the condition of anonymity because Obama planned to make the official announcement during a meeting later with his economic advisers.

So, when Obama was working the phones for the Bush + Reid + Pelosi + Obama + Paulson bailout, why wasn't he pushing for accountability then? It's not lilke he, and the Democrats, didn't have leverage, since the bill had to be passed NOW NOW NOW NOW, right? Read more…

Lovely.

NOTE Via The Confluence.

Stoller. Read more…

CopyBlog:

Mass media is a historical aberration. For a short 70-odd years of human history, a relatively small group of people told us what to think and what to buy, and we were expected to passively accept it.

That’s not how things worked for thousands of years before, and that’s not how it’s going to work in the future. Clinging to the precepts of a brief period of weirdness may not be the best model to guide us, you think?

Before mass media, people marketed their wares directly to one another in a social context. Some people were considered honest and trustworthy, and some people were considered shills and charlatans. Others were revealed to be criminals and con men.  Read more…

Can you believe this? From the Times:

Quality of Cancer Care
Should doctors be obliged to inform their patients if better care is available elsewhere?

Why are we even asking the question?!?!?!?! Read more…

If the embed isn't working for you, try this link.

And then, as always, there's the meta: Read more…

Here. Of course, "we do not torture," and the Village doesn't want any Villager held accountable for anything, ever, but still, encouraging signs. I mean, imagine if Hayden were kept on as a holdover in the spirit of bi-partisanship. Read more…

Via Glenn Greenwald, who remarks, of Obama's new appointment to OLC: Read more…

Hnak Paulson's golfing buddies are hoarding:

"There's now an estimated $8.9 trillion sitting on the sidelines in cash and money markets," said Stephen Leeb, president of New York-based Leeb Capital Management. "High cash levels and low stock prices historically go hand in hand. The current level as a percentage of the stock market's capitalization matches that at the market bottom in 1990."

What I want to know: How much of that money is ours, from the bailout? I'm betting a lot of it, since Hank Paulson won't say where the bailout money went, and the innocent have nothing to hide. Read more…

Here's a hilarious caption from an article in the Style section of the Times about how Village hostesses can snag the Obamas:

COVETED GUEST Will the new president and first lady be more like the stay-at-home Bushes or the gregarious Reagans?

"Or," eh? Gee, wasn't there another administration in there, somewhere? Let me think.... Read more…

A new book by Adam Cohen reviewed by Publisher's Weekly contains this sentence, quoted by the alert Taegan Goddard:

The vital foundation for FDR's New Deal was crafted through a process of rigorous argument within the president's innermost circle rather than ideological consensus.

Why does Adam Cohen hate FDR? What's wrong with him? Read more…

I feel inspired this morning:

Bush was here
But now he's gone
Yet still the Village
Carries on.  Read more…

What Avedon said, in response to another trivial emission from Frank Rich: Read more…

Judges 12:4-6:

Then Jephthah gathered all the men of Gilead and fought with Ephraim; and the men of Gilead smote Ephraim because they had said, You Gileadites are fugitives of Ephraim in the midst of Ephraim and Manasseh.

And the Gileadites took the fords of the Jordan before the Ephraimites; and when any of those Ephraimites who had escaped said, Let me go over, the men of Gilead said to him, Are you an Ephraimite? If he said, No,

They said to him, Then say Shibboleth; and he said, Sibboleth, for he could not pronounce it right. Then they seized him and slew him at the fords of the Jordan. And there fell at that time 42,000 of the Ephraimites.

The common factor with Village favorite Caroline Kennedy:

In a surprise choice, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter (D) appointed Denver schools Superintendent Michael Bennet to fill the Senate seat vacated by Ken Salazar, who is slated to become interior secretary in Barack Obama's administration.

Bennet, 44, who has never run for elected office...

Just saying. Read more…

McClatchy:

Israel's moves are meant to oblige some tight political and diplomatic deadlines, said Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution and a professor at the University of Maryland.

One is a renewed UN effort to address Gaza, which will intensify next week. Another is upcoming elections n Israel. A third is the close of Mahmoud Abbas's recognized term as president of the Palestinian Authority. Obama's pending inauguration in Washington is a fourth.

Reminds me of the AUMF, eh? (Not Tom Daschle's role in enabling it, though I'm sure there are Israeli equivalents; Bush's role in making war an issue before the mid-terms.)

Meanwhile, the Times asks a question:

Is the real aim of the operation to remove Hamas entirely, no matter the cost?

Simple answers, in this case provided by the Israeli government itself: Read more…

The bubble was your work. Now it's burst and as usual, others are paying:

The U.S. economy probably lost more jobs in 2008 than in any year since the end of World War II as firings rippled from homebuilders and automakers to banks and retailers, a government report may show this week.

Payrolls fell 500,000 in December, bringing last year’s decline to 2.4 million, the most since 1945, according to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News ahead of Labor Department figures due Jan. 9. The unemployment rate likely jumped to the highest level since 1993.

Well done, all. Read more…

... and doggone it, the Strib just called it:

Franken up 225 with recount complete; focus turns to court
Norm Coleman's term as a U.S. senator ended at noon Washington time on Saturday, and by evening his hopes of winning a second term had been dealt an expected but serious setback as state officials counted previously rejected absentee ballots in St. Paul.

At least Franken isn't going to fall for this post-partisan bullshit. Read more…

Bonus track: Read more…

Israel's ground invasion of Gaza begins. NPR remarks that AK47s have hitherto had little effect against tanks. Who knew? Read more…

... in the immortal words of Diamond Jim Fisk. Go read Krugman. Ouch! Lord Eschaton links to, but does not quote, Krugman's comment on honor among economists. He should have gone in for the kill:

Two things are really striking here. First is the obsequiousness toward Alan Greenspan. To be fair, the 2005 Jackson Hole event was a sort of Greenspan celebration; still, it does come across as excessive — dangerously close to saying that if the Great Greenspan says something, it must be so. Second is the extreme condescension toward Rajan — a pretty serious guy — for having the temerity to suggest that maybe markets don’t always work to our advantage. Larry Summers, I’m sorry to say, comes off particularly badly. Only my colleague Alan Blinder, defending Rajan “against the unremitting attack he is getting here for not being a sufficiently good Chicago economist”, emerges with honor.

"Obseqiousness" and "condescension" -- Those really are the values of courtiers, aren't they? Read more…

 Read more…

WKJM, 2009-01-02:

As Josh mentioned earlier in the week, the Fed has brought in -- with next to no transparency -- four firms to dispose of the $500 billion of toxic mortgage-backed securities the Fed has purchased as part of one of its bailout programs (separate and apart from the Treasury Department's TARP program).

So how much are these guys making under their contracts with the Fed? We called around and all of them declined to say.

Corrente, 2008-10-21: Read more…

Yeah, well...