"It would be hard to find two administrations more different than Bush and Obama. Yet, when it comes to bailing out financial firms, Geithner's approach is a seamless continuation of his predecessor, Hank Paulson's. It makes you wonder who is the permanent government. Perhaps Wall Street?

"Even the players are the same Goldman-Citigroup crowd. The well named Neel Kashkari, the Citigroup executive brought in by Paulson to run the TARP program, is still in place. Geithner's top assistant, Mark Patterson, is from Goldman. And most of the concepts are coming from the same Wall Street crew. 

"Like everything else about the Paulson-Geithner approach, this latest twist is totally clubby and non-transparent. There is no objective process, and no public criteria. Congress is being kept in the dark. The Congressional Oversight Panel is being denied the documents it needs. (If you want to delve deeper, the Panel's reports are must-reading.)

"The Treasury does not have the staff resources to do the job properly, so it hires private investment bankers. This recalls the era when J.P. Morgan and his financier pals mounted a private rescue to halt the bank panic of 1907. But Morgan was a purely private banker, and he was using his own bank's money. It this case, the Treasury is supposedly a public institution using taxpayer funds, yet behaving with all the transparency of Morgan. 

"The council's findings come two decades after the March 24, 1989 disaster, when the single-hulled Exxon tanker hit a reef, emptying its contents into Alaskan waters. The spill contaminated more than 1,200 miles of shoreline and killed hundreds of thousands of seabirds and marine animals.

"The council, made up of three state and three federal appointees, was created to administer the $900 million that Exxon paid to settle lawsuits filed after the accident...

"In the weeks and months following the spill, thousands of people tried to clean up the contamination. But two decades later, oil persists and is estimated to total around 20,000 gallons, according to the council. One of the lessons learned is that a spill's impacts can last a long time in a habitat with calm, cold waters like Prince William Sound, the council said.

" 'Following the oil and its impacts over the past 20 years has changed our understanding of the long-term damage from an oil spill,' the council stated. 'We know that risk assessment for future spills must consider what the total damages will be over a longer period of time, rather than only the acute damages in the days and weeks following a spill.'

"And there will be no withdrawal from the political frontlines by the man who spun out of the Nixon White House to become Gerald Ford's chief of staff, parlayed that role into a seat in Congress where he served as Ronald Reagan's House floor leader, exploited personal and political ties to position himself as George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense and then effectively nominated himself to be George W. Bush's vice president.

"Cheney, whose ambition has always exceeded his knowledge and skill, is determined to defend the political misdeeds, policy machinations and power grabs that -- thanks to George W. Bush's ignorance about the most basic workings of the White House -- briefly made him the most powerful man in the world. 

"Should we mind that Cheney intends to stay in the fray?

"Not at all.

"Cheney should be welcomed to the microphones.

"Indeed, his determination to remain in the limelight should make it easier to invite him to explain a few things – under oath.

"Where to begin?

"How about with investigative reporter Seymour Hersh's allegation that the Bush-Cheney White House operated an "executive assassination ring" that reported directly to Cheney's office? 

"An elite assassination squad run out of the vice president's office?

"That certainly sounds like an interesting point at which to begin an official inquiry.

"And since the vice president is so willing to talk about his time in office--as evidenced by his recent media appearances--why not invite him up to Capitol Hill to engage in it?

"Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich has a suggestion that might get the ball rolling.

Kucinich has asked New York Congressman Edolphus Towns, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, to begin an immediate investigation into Hersh's allegations."

"Even as Bush implemented one massive expansion of government power after the next -- the very "un-conservative" policies they long claimed to oppose -- there was nothing but (at best) the most token and muted objections from them...  Uncritical support for the Leader was the overarching, defining attribute of conservatism...

"Whenever I would speak at events over the last couple of years and criticize the Bush administration's expansions of government power, extreme secrecy and other forms of corruption, one of the most frequent questions I would be asked was whether "the Left" -- meaning liberals and progressives -- would continue to embrace these principles with a Democrat in the White House, or whether they would instead replicate the behavior of the Right and uncritically support whatever the Democratic President decided.  Though I could only speculate, I always answered -- because I believed -- that the events of the last eight years had so powerfully demonstrated and ingrained the dangers of uncritical support for political leaders that most liberals would be critical of and oppositional to a Democratic President when that President undertook actions in tension with progressive views. 

"Two months into Obama's presidency, one can clearly conclude that this is true.  Even though Obama unsurprisingly and understandably remains generally popular with Democrats and liberals alike, there is ample progressive criticism of Obama in a way that is quite healthy and that reflects a meaningful difference between the "conservative movement" and many progressives.