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Why haven't the President and Senate Democrats pulled the reconciliation trigger before now? I haven't spoken directly with the President or with Harry Reid but I've spent the last several weeks sounding out contacts on the Hill and in the White House to find an answer. Here are the theories. None of them justifies waiting any longer. Reconciliation is too extreme a measure to use on a piece of legislation so important. I hear this a lot but it's bunk. George W. Bush used reconciliation to enact his giant tax cut bill in 2003 (he garnered only 50 votes for it in the Senate, forcing Vice President Cheney to cast the deciding vote). Six years before that, Bill Clinton rounded up 51 votes to enact the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the largest expansion of taxpayer-funded health insurance coverage for children in the U.S. since Medicaid began in the 1960s. Through reconciliation, we also got Medicare Advantage. Also through reconciliation came the COBRA act, which gives Americans a bit of healthcare protection after they lose a job ("reconciliaton is the "R" in the COBRA acronym.) These were all big, important pieces of legislation, and all were enacted by 51 votes in the Senate. Use of reconciliation would infuriate Senate Republicans. It may. So what? They haven't given Obama a single vote on any major issue since he first began wining and dining them at the White House. In fact, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and company have been doing everything in their power to undermine the President. They're using the same playbook Republicans used in the first two years of the Clinton administration, hoping to discredit the President and score large victories in the midterm elections by burying his biggest legislative initiative. Indeed, Obama could credibly argue that Senate Republicans have altered the rules of the Senate by demanding 60 votes on almost every initiative - a far more extensive use of the filibuster than at any time in modern history - so it's only right that he, the President, now resort to reconciliation. Obama needs Republican votes on military policy so he doesn't dare antagonize them on health care. I hear this from some quarters but I don't buy it. While it's true that Dems are skeptical of Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan and that Republicans are his major backers, it seems doubtful R's would withdraw their support if the President forced their hand on health care. Foreign policy is the one area where Republicans have offered a halfway consistent (and always bellicose) voice, and Dick Cheney et al would excoriate them if they failed to back a strong military presence in the Middle East. This is truer now than ever. Reid fears he can't even get 51 votes in the Senate now, after Scott Brown's win. Reid counts noses better than I do, but if Senate Democrats can't come up with even 51 votes for the health care reforms they enacted weeks ago they give new definition to the term "spineless." Besides, if this is the case, Obama ought to be banging Senate heads together. A president has huge bargaining leverage because he presides over an almost infinite list of future deals. Lyndon Johnson wasn't afraid to use his power to the fullest to get Medicare enacted. If Obama can't get 51 Senate votes out of 58 or 59 Dems and Independents, he definitely won't be able to get 51 Senate votes after November. Inevitably, the Senate will lose some Democrats. Now's his last opportunity. House and Senate Democrats are telling Obama they don't want to take another vote on health care or even enact it before November's midterms because they're afraid it will jeopardize their chances of being reelected and may threaten their control over the House and Senate. I hear this repeatedly but if it's true Republicans have done a far better job scaring Americans about health care reform than any pollster has been able to uncover. Most polls still show a majority of Americans still in favor of the basic tenets of reform - expanded coverage, regulations barring insurers from refusing coverage because of someone's preexisting conditions and preventing insurers from kicking someone off the rolls because they get sick, requirements that employers provide coverage or pay into a common pool, and so on. And now that many private insurers are hiking up premiums, co-pays, and deductibles, the public is even readier to embrace reform.

Joe Stack's adult daughter, Samantha Bell, spoke to ABC's "Good Morning America" from her home in Norway. Asked during a phone interview broadcast Monday if she considered her father a hero, she said: "Yes. Because now maybe people will listen." Authorities say Stack, 53, targeted the IRS office building in Austin on Thursday, killing employee Vernon Hunter and himself, after posting a ranting manifesto against the agency and the government. He apparently set fire to his home before flying his plane into the office building. Hunter's son, Ken Hunter, said he's alarmed by comments that the pilot was a hero. "How can you call someone a hero who after he burns down his house, he gets into his plane ... and flies it into a building to kill people?" Hunter told ABC." "My dad Vernon did two tours of duty in Vietnam. My dad's a hero." Bell said she offered her deepest condolences to Hunter's family. She said her father's last actions were wrong. "But if nobody comes out and speaks up on behalf of injustice, then nothing will ever be accomplished," she told ABC. "But I do not agree with his last action with what he did. But I do agree about the government,"

The ex-Treasury officials, who served both Republican and Democratic administrations, wrote that the reform measure, which would prohibit commercial banks from owning or investing in hedge funds, private equity funds or "proprietary trading" operations, is a reasonable trade for the benefits banks reap from "public support by means of access to the Federal Reserve and FDIC insurance." And while the rule may not alone prevent the next financial crisis, they said it's a crucial part of a more expansive regulatory reform package: "We fully understand that the restriction of proprietary activity by banks is only one element in comprehensive financial reform. It is, however, a key element in protecting our financial system and will assure that banks will give priority to their essential lending and depository responsibilities."

Based on the discussions at the event, it is evident that body scanners can be easily defeated by concealing explosive materials in body cavities, the letter says. There is also little information on the health risks posed by the use of such scanners, according to the letter. The fact that the systems can be configured at any time to record and store images of travelers also raises privacy questions, the letter says. "The public does not currently understand the inability of these devices to detect the types of explosive materials that could be used or the possible risks to privacy and health," Rotenberg and Nader wrote. "The Department of Homeland Security has made significant mistakes with similar programs in the past," they added, citing as an example the agency's discontinued effort to equip airports with so-called explosive trace portals (ETP), which are designed to detect traces of explosives on travelers' clothing.

So in coming to this meeting of some of the very best in the field -- from Elizabeth Warren to George Soros -- I was keen to hear just what the strategy was to restore us to some sort of financial sanity. How could we avoid it again? Yet through the course of the morning, I was struck by two very different and very depressing points. The first is that things are actually much worse than anyone ever talks about. The pivot points of our financial system -- the infrastructure that lets free markets produce real wealth -- have become profoundly corrupted. Balance sheets are "fictions," as Professor Frank Partnoy put it. Trillions of dollars in liability hide behind these fictions. And as expert after expert demonstrated, practically every one of the design flaws that led to the collapse of the past few years remains essentially unchanged within our financial system still. That bubble burst, but we can already see the soaring profits of the same firms that sucked billions in taxpayer funds. The cycle has started again. But the second point was even worse. Expert after expert spoke as if the problems we faced were simple math errors. As if regulators had just miscalculated, like a pilot who accidentally overshoots the run way, or an engineer who mis-estimates the weight of cargo on a plane. And so, because these were mere errors, people spoke as if these errors could be corrected by a bunch of good ideas. The morning was filled with good ideas. An angry earnestness was the tone of the day.

There were exceptions. The increasingly prominent folk-hero for the middle class, Elizabeth Warren, tied the endless list of problems to the endless power of "the banking lobby." But that framing was rare. Again and again, we were led back to a frame of bad policies that smart souls could correct. At least if "the people" could be educated enough to demand that politicians do something sensible. This is a profound denial. The gambling on Wall Street was not caused by the equivalent of errors in arithmetic. It was caused by a corruption of the system by which we regulate those markets. No true theorist of free markets -- and certainly none of the heroes of even the libertarian right -- believe that infrastructure markets like financial systems can be left free of any regulation, including the regulation of rules against fraud. Yet that ignorant anarchy was the precise rule that governed a large part of our financial system. And not by accident: An enormous amount of political influence was brought to bear on the regulators of these core institutions of a free market to get them to turn a blind eye to Wall Street's "innovations." People who should have known better yielded to this political pressure. Smart people did stupid things because "the politics" of doing right was impossible. Why? Why was their no political return from sensible policy? The answer is so obvious that one feels stupid to even remark it. Politicians are addicts. Their dependency is campaign cash. And in their obsessive search for campaign funds, they let these funders convince them that for the first time in capitalism's history, markets didn't need the basic array of trust-producing regulation. They believed this insanity because it made it easier for them -- in good faith -- to accept the money and steer financial policy over the cliff. Not a single presentation the whole morning focused this part of the problem. There wasn't even speculation about how we could build an alternative to this campaign funding system of pathological dependency, so that policy makers could afford to hear sense rather than obsessively seek campaign dollars. The assembled experts were even willing to brainstorm about how to educate ordinary Americans about the intricacies of financial regulation. But the idea of changing the pathological economy of influence that governs how Washington governs wasn't even a hint. We need to admit our (democracy's) problem. We need to get beyond this stage of denial. We need to recognize that until we release our leaders from a system that forces them to ignore good sense when there is an opportunity for large campaign cash, we won't have policy that makes sense. Wall Street continues unchanged because the Congress that would change it is already shuttling to Wall Street fundraisers. Both parties are already pandering to this power, so they can find the fix to fund the next cycle of campaigns. Throughout the morning, expert after expert celebrated the brilliance in Franklin Roosevelt's response to the Nation's last truly great financial collapse. They yearned for a modern version of his system of regulation. But we won't get to Franklin Roosevelt's brilliance till we accept Teddy Roosevelt's insight -- that privately funded public elections tend inevitably towards this kind of corruption. And until we solve that (eminently solvable) problem, we won't make any progress in making America's finances safe again.

The Vilks controversy arose in 2007, when his entry in an arts project was published by the newspaper. It pictured a dog with the head of a bearded man in a turban. Several Muslim countries protested against the picture. At the time, Swedish officials expressed regret at any hurt caused to Muslims' feelings, but said the government could not prevent the publication of such drawings because of media freedom rules. The case came about a year and a half after a series of depictions of Muhammad in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten paper caused an uproar in early 2006. Those cartoons sparked protests from Muslims around the world. Dozens of people were killed in riots. Muslims regard any image of the Prophet Muhammad as blasphemy. In January, one of the cartoonists whose drawing appeared in Jyllands-Posten, the Dane Kurt Westergaard, was targeted in his own home, allegedly by a Somali radical Muslim with an axe. Mr Westergaard, who escaped unharmed, had depicted the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. Mr Vilks told The Associated Press news agency that the telephone threats in January had come from "a Swedish-speaking Somali. He reminded me about what had happened to Westergaard and threatened with a follow-up and that 'now it's your turn'."

Today, he is emerging as one of the nation’s archreformers, pushing to impose some of the most stringent new financial regulations in history. And as the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the leading contender to oversee the complex derivatives contracts that played a central role in the financial crisis and, in turn, the Great Recession, he is in a position to influence the outcome. It may seem an unlikely conversion, but it is one that has won the approval of Brooksley E. Born, of all people, a former outspoken head of the commission. She sounded alarms more than a decade ago about the dangers hiding in the poorly understood derivatives market and was silenced by the same Washington power brokers that counted Mr. Gensler as a member. Mr. Gensler opposed Ms. Born, according to people who worked at the commission in the 1990s, and in 2000 played a significant role in shepherding through Congress deregulation measures that led to explosive growth of the over-the-counter derivatives market. That was then. These days, Ms. Born is convinced of Mr. Gensler’s reformist zeal, as he takes on Wall Street in what is becoming one of the fiercest battles over regulation in the postcrisis era. “I think he is doing very well,” she said in an interview. “He certainly seems to be committed to robust oversight of derivatives and limiting excessive speculation and leverage.” The proposals championed by Mr. Gensler, if adopted by Congress, would substantially alter what is now a largely unregulated market in over-the-counter derivatives, financial instruments used by companies and investors to protect themselves and bet on moves in variables, like interest rates or currencies, and to speculate. The proposals include forcing the big banks that sell derivatives to conduct their trades in the open on public exchanges and clear them through central clearinghouses, so that any investor can see the prices that dealers charge their customers. Today, those transactions are bilateral and private.

A Harris release on the February 16-21 telephone survey of 1,010 adults did not specify how financial regulation should be applied but said three-quarters of Americans believe Wall Street companies should pay bonuses only while in the black.Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad heredap('&PG=NBCMSB&AP=1089','300','250');Harris said the U.S. public does see value in Wall Street itself: nearly 60 percent say the financial sector is an essential benefit to the United States.But a slightly larger majority disagrees that what is good for Wall Street is good for the country, while about two-thirds harbor strong negative views about the people who work there.By a margin of 66 percent to 29 percent, Americans agree that "most people on Wall Street would be willing to break the law if they believed they could make a lot of money and get away with it," pollsters found.Sixty-five percent say most successful people on Wall Street do not deserve the kind of money they make.