This isn’t really my issue, but I found the indignant pieces on the Pope’s response to the latest developments in sex abuse issues by Sinead O’Connor and Matt Taibbi to both be very interesting.

One name missing from the list of recess appointments that I’ve heard a lot about is Dawn Johnsen. One who’s been less mention is Lael Brainard whose nomination to serve as Undersecretary of Treasury for International Affairs has been pending since the dawn of time. This isn’t necessarily obvious from the title, but the Undersecretary for International is one of the most important subcabinet jobs in the government. For illustrative purposes, note that both Larry Summers and Tim Geithner used to have the gig.

The obstructionism about Brainard is particularly odd since it has no real motive. The pretext is something about past tax filings, but there’s no real allegation that Brainard is corrupt and Brainard isn’t, as far as anyone I’ve talked to knows, particularly liberal for a Democrat. Certainly I’ve never heard a conservative offer any dark intimations that lurking behind apparent-moderate Barack Obama is closet socialist Lael Brainard.

And to make it triply odd, not only is she being held up on pretext of some minor tax business, but her husband was confirmed many months ago as an assistant secretary of state so there very clearly isn’t any kind of principled opposition to members of the Brainard/Campbell household serving at high levels of the US government. This is just Chuck Grassley screwing around because (a) he thinks he can get away with it, (b) Republicans think that if the country suffers the GOP will benefit, and (c) the evidence suggests that he can in fact get away with it.

Glenn Reynolds says: “Possibly Obama just hates Israel and hates Jews. That’s plausible — certainly nothing in his actions suggests otherwise, really.”

Now to be clear, if you read the rest of Reynolds’ post it’s clear that he’s so far through the looking glass that he regards the fact that he doesn’t think this is the only plausible explanation for Obama’s policies as constituting a pro-Obama post. Which is to say that Reynolds is extremely out of touch with reality.

I’ll say for my part that I think a great many of Obama’s actions throughout the years—most notably his many social and professional relationships with Jewish people—suggest that he is not motivated by hatred of Jews. What’s more, his ability to persuade the overwhelming majority of American Jews to vote him is likewise an indication that the people most likely to be concerned with detecting Jew-hatred do not find this charge to be plausible. I suppose it’s true that the old “some of my best Chiefs of Staff are Jewish” thing can fall flat at certain points. But then there’s Larry Summers, David Axelrod, Peter Orszag, etc. The Obama White House looks more like an anti-semite’s conspiracy theory about Jews running the government than like an actual anti-semitic conspiracy.

Here’s a nice catch from Dara Lind about Senator Lindsay Graham offering different messages on immigration reform to the English and Spanish press. In English, Graham is threatening to blow up any hope of an immigration deal over the health care bill. In Spanish, not so much:

That’s been his line to the English-language press through this week. In his own statements, he’s been walking a fine line between threatening to walk away himself and making vague pronouncements about the lack of political will generally — presumably among other Republicans. (The notion that Senate Republicans were somehow willing to cooperate before reconciliation is, of course, so laughable that it points out how disingenuous the whole thing is. One also wonders what the heck Graham thought was going to happen with reconciliation on Thursday, when theoretically he could have yanked the WaPo op-ed.) The media has been eliding this carefully crafted distinction. It’s always sad when the press fails to capture the subtlety of weaselly doubletalk.

Even sadder is when they don’t notice just how weaselly it is because they’re watching the wrong Sunday morning talk shows. Because two days after Graham debuted his Cassandra mask for the English-language press, he went on Al Punto, Univision’s Sunday politics show, to express his support for reform. He didn’t ignore the reconciliation point — he mentioned that it would make things “difficult” — but that was hardly the topline message. Furthermore, the content of his appearance was much less important than the appearance itself. Graham doesn’t appear to have any problem being portrayed as the Man Who Would Kill Immigration Reform for the English-speaking DC media, whose incentives to favor partisan squabbles are stronger than their desire to see any particular piece of legislation pass. I’m hardly saying that desire to see legislation pass should be guiding journalistic coverage, but it’s an entirely different audience than the millions of people who watch Al Punto every week — whose desire to see immigration reform pass is much stronger than their appetite for finger-pointing.

One interesting aspect about the rise of digital media is that politicians’ efforts to segment their message has generally declined a great deal. It’s much harder nowadays to say one thing to the hometown paper and another thing entirely to Roll Call and hope that it’ll basically go unnoticed. But the rise of a robust Spanish-language media inside the United States has created a new set of opportunities.

On the subject of recess appointments, James Fallows has this on Alan Bersin who’ll now be heading Customs of Border Patrol:

Bersin was an all-Ivy star football player at Harvard. Then he went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. Then he went to Yale Law School. Then he was a U.S. Attorney in California. Then he was head of a Justice Department unit overseeing US-Mexico border affairs. Then the head of the San Diego school system. Then the Secretary of Education for California, under Arnold Schwarzenegger. Recently he has been an Assistant Secretary at DHS. Last month the past three commissioners of CBP, including two from the GW Bush administration, wrote to Republican Senators asking them, please, to get Bersin into the job rather than leaving this very important agency leaderless.

Instead the Republicans placed various holds on Bersin and the others and would not bring him to a vote. Thus, good for Obama in saying, Enough.

(A) This is a sign of an opposition political party gone mad. But (B) this is a poor way to organize a government. The number of political appointees in the executive branch should be reduced, the proportion of political appointees requiring congressional confirmation should be lowered, and some kind of express track to an up-or-down vote for nominees should be established. Confirming judges—lifetime members of a coequal branch of government—is one thing, but a president needs to be able to staff his administration.

Craig Becker is getting all the attention out of yesterday’s batch of recess appointments, but a fuller look at the list is really required to understand how absurd the level of GOP obstructionism has become. For example:

— Jeffrey Goldstein will be Undersecretary of Treasury for Domestic Finance.

— Michael Mundaca will be Assistant Secretary of Treasury for Tax Policy.

— Eric Hirschorn will be Undersecretary of Commerce for Export Administration.

— Michael Punke will be Deputy US Trade Representative and head up the office in Geneva.

— Islam A. Siddiqui will be Chief Agricultural Negotiator, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

There are also others. But I’ve picked these out. I know for a fact that the failure of the Senate to confirm Siddiqui and especially Punke has been a very real impediment to the World Trade Organization’s ability to function and move forward, and thus a small-but-real drag on America’s economy. And does anyone think this is a good time to leave the Domestic Finance job unfilled?