This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects – including a homeland security transition project – and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

Via Neil Sinhababu, I see that Henry Waxman is being classy, smart, and savvy all at once making nice with John Dingell:

Under terms announced Thursday, Michigan Rep. John D. Dingell will take the lead on all major health care initiatives before the committee in the next Congress and have a say in personnel matters as part of an agreement worked out with his successor. [...] By granting Dingell a role as “the lead sponsor” of whatever national health care legislation the committee considers, Waxman is giving the Dean of the House the chance to cap his historic career by realizing his father’s goal of universal health care coverage – Dingell’s father, a former House member, first introduced legislation creating national health insurance in 1943.

“I intend to be an active and enthusiastic leader on the Committee and I appreciate the efforts of Chairman Waxman to partner with me as we move into the 111th Congress,” Dingell said in the release. “Henry and I have been able to work together in the past and agreed on most issues, and even in areas where we have disagreed, together we have passed important legislation.”

The crux of the Dingell-Waxman fight for control of the House Energy and Commerce committee was climate change, where Dingell’s views are decidedly unprogressive. But the committee has extremely broad jurisdiction, including a substantial role in health care, and Dingell is a strong progressive voice on that issue. This will let Dingell end his career with dignity and, hopefully, end it by playing a major role in the sort of successful reform effort that the Dingells have been calling for for decades.

I hope to never address this issue again, but I can’t help but notice that for an administration that allegedly contains no Southerners, Barack Obama’s administration contains an awful lot of people with significant ties to the south.

The Secretary of State lived in Arkansas for 26 years, including over ten years as First Lady of that state. The Secretary of Defense lived in Texas for seven years, including time spent as president of Texas A&M University. The Press Secretary is from North Carolina. The “climate czar” is from Florida and spent many years working in Florida politics. And the US Trade Representative is from Texas and served as mayor of a major southern city.

But apparently things like “being from the south” or “living in the south” or “working in the south” or “heading major southern institutions” doesn’t count as being a southerner. It’s Trent Lott or bust!

Transition announcement today that Barack Obama intends to form a White House Task Force on Working Families, to be chaired by Joe Biden and to include “the Secretaries of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Commerce, as well as the Directors of the National Economic Council, the Office of Management and Budget, the Domestic Policy Council, and the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors.”

It’s a bit hard to say what that’s going to accomplish, but in the announcement Biden says “Our charge is to look at existing and future policies across the board and use a yard stick to measure how they are impacting the working and middle-class families: Is the number of these families growing? Are they prospering? President-elect Obama and I know the economic health of working families has eroded, and we intend to turn that around.” It’s good to see these questions getting asked. Over the past eight years to a remarkable degree the focus has been on trying to put as good a spin as possible on things rather than on trying to actually improving wages and living standards for the bottom 80 percent of Americans.

There’s a whole lot worth chewing over in the big NYT article on the Bush administration and the financial crisis but this bit reflects some much broader problems than trouble with the president:

The housing market was a bright spot: ever-rising home values kept the economy humming, as owners drew down on their equity to buy consumer goods and pack their children off to college.

The thing of it is that in a rational housing policy universe, or a rather media conversation about housing, “ever-rising home values” would be a bad thing. Homes are things people need to live in. Making homes expensive doesn’t make people richer, it makes it harder for people to afford to house themselves. What a country needs is decent quality, reasonably convenient housing to be affordable — not for rising home prices to act as a substitute for rising incomes.

Matt Corley observes Dick Cheney outlining his view of presidential power:

On Fox News Sunday today, host Chris Wallace asked Vice President Cheney, “if the President, during war, decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?” “I think as a general proposition, I’d say yes,” replied Cheney.

Obviously, everyone would like the president to take action to protect the country during war. Indeed, protecting the country is good even during time of peace. But Cheney’s view of this matter is inimical to the idea of liberal democracy. Suppose President Obama feels that John Boehner’s neo-Hooverite opposition to economic stimulus is endangering the economy and playing into al-Qaeda’s hands, so he decides to lock him up in Gitmo? That would be extreme, of course. But every President feels, completely sincerely, that his policies are necessary for the security of the nation. And thus, every President feels that his opponents are endangering the country. And in the past executive branch officials have repeatedly been tempted to abuse their authority in order to persecute political enemies. Woodrow Wilson did it, Richard Nixon did it, and to some extent so did all the presidents between them.

And it’s important to recall that Cheney doesn’t think that there needs to be a declared war or anything to bring these wartime powers online. The mere risk of terrorist attack — something that it’s hard to image ever entirely going away — is sufficient.

Underlying all of this is an odd conservative lack of faith in democracy. Cheney’s implicit theory is that the democracies prevailed in the Cold War — surely a time of greater external threat — despite our liberal political systems. In fact, the openness of liberal democracy was a major strength. Robust political competition, a free press, transparency in government, etc. helped ensure that policy errors would actually be corrected and that corrupt practices would be curbed. Cheney-style autocracy works fine as long as nobody is ever incompetent or corrupt, but that’s never. And it certainly doesn’t describe the Bush-Cheney administration.