Thursday Open Thread

Welcome to your Thursday open thread. Tonight is Drinking Liberally at the Beach! The festivities begin at 7 PM at the Purple Parrot in Rehoboth. Come out and meet your fellow Delaware Liberals (and friends).

Former Reagan Justice Department official Charles Fried makes the case for a recess appointment of Elizabeth Warren to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

That’s where Elizabeth Warren comes in. Those who are lobbying hard against her nomination to head the Consumer Financial Protection Agency are the same people who lobbied against financial reform legislation and lost. They paint her as the enemy of capitalism and free markets. Nothing could be further from the truth: She is the enemy of dishonesty, abuse, and just plain theft.

Many of those who originated the toxic loans now poisoning the financial world were outright fraudsters, and many of those who bundled and purveyed those toxic assets in what amounted to a giant Ponzi scheme were no better than fences of stolen goods. Credit card companies for years have buried surprising fees, penalties, and interest rate increases in print so fine and terms so obscure that the borrowers most likely to be caught by them could not possibly understand them. That’s not capitalism; that’s fraud. To be the scourge of theft and fraud is to be the best friend of well-functioning markets.

The new legislation promises steps toward restoring faith in the honesty of the system of markets and credit. Warren’s critics call her an ideologue and a zealot, as if she were being considered for a position on a federal court. But this is an agency with a mission, and the legislation will be successful only if those writing the rules and enforcing them believe in its mission and are zealous in its pursuit.

…

Warren is smart, determined, and committed to the cause of honest financial services. The president should give her a recess appointment, as Representative Barney Frank has suggested. That will give her a year or so to hire the staff and write the regulations and in that way set the new agency’s course for many years to come. The opposition to her knows this perfectly well; its arguments are in utter bad faith and should fail. The president has the tool to defeat them.

Chris Dodd has already said “no” to a recess appointment but that’s not his decision to make. We should put pressure on the administration to appoint Warren. She’s a true champion for people, and not for the financial industry. That’s exactly what we need right now.

As health care reform starts to take effect, its support is rising:

We’re not yet near the point at which the Affordable Care Act could be characterized as “popular,” but Dems are likely pleased with the recent trend.

Opposition to the landmark health care overhaul declined over the past month, to 35 percent from 41 percent, according to the latest results of a tracking poll, reported Thursday.

Fifty percent of the public held a favorable view of the law, up slightly from 48 percent a month ago, while 14 percent expressed no opinion about the measure, according to the poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Since April, the tracking poll has found support for the health care reform law go up four points, while opposition has gone down five points. Less encouraging were results that showed more than a third of seniors still believe made-up “death panels” are real — zombie lies are surprisingly hard to kill — but overall, proponents of the ACA who predicted that blind hatred for reform would fade over time appear to be correct.

In fairness, not every recent poll offers such encouragement. A recent Pew Forum/National Journal survey (pdf) still showed opponents outnumbering supporters by a fairly wide margin.

On the other hand, last month, a national Associated Press-GfK poll found that support for the Affordable Care Act was not only on the rise, but had reached new heights — health care reform’s supporters outnumbered opponents, 45% to 42%. A week later, a Gallup poll found 49% of respondents agreeing that passage of the law is a “good thing,” while 46% think it’s a “bad thing.”

I’m sure it depends on how the question is asked but a whole bunch of people who couldn’t get health care before can now get coverage. Now, if we can get that public option…