For as long as many of us can remember, progressives have been heaving against the locomotive of the radical right. Now, thanks to an inspiring election and a collapsing economy, we can begin to think about what we’re for instead of what we’re against.

The policy ideas in Thinking Big: Progressive Ideas for a New Era are practical (in the sense of being imaginable within the foreseeable future), but, at the same time, bold and transformative (in the sense of pointing our country down a clearly different road). These are proposals linked, as Nathaniel Loewentheil and Deepak Bhargava write in their introduction, “to a picture of the nation and the world we hope to achieve, a vision that energizes our ideas and builds the political will for meaningful change.”

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has asked Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner to prohibit banks receiving taxpayer bailout money from lobbying the federal government, especially against the Employee Free Choice Act.

Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) was on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, saying that bank nationalization is a bad idea and that once people learn what the Geithner plan is, they’re going to love it.

This despite the fact that people like Jamie Galbraith, Dean Baker, Nouriel Roubini, Paul Krugman and others are arguing that nationalization is the only answer, and it’s just a matter of how much money we’re going to light on fire before we do it.

I’d say Simon Johnson has it about right when he says the G7 are asleep at the wheel. A combination of mild squabbling and feel good statements about how wonderful Geithner is can’t conceal the fact that they don’t actually have anything like a unified plan of action. Part of the issue seems to be that no one is taking control and leadership.

In the film, “The Reader,” Hannah Schmidt shocks the courtroom when she says that her Nazi-era failure to release 300 prisoners from a burning church made sense because chaos might have resulted from their release. But doesn’t the American health care system lock millions into a burning church that guarantees ill health and death?

Ben Smith has an interesting article on how pollsters are finding that there is a pretty big gap between what DC journalists think Americans think, and what Americans actually think.

No better example of this can be found than the “winners” and “losers” that DC media are proclaiming in the wake of the passage of the stimulus bill, and what DailyKos polling on the subject indicates.

DC opinion:

Larry Summers is opposed to bank nationalization because he thinks it’s “Putinesque” and the economics team is largely staffed by people from the banking world who have no interest in standing up to the banking community. Stress testing is deliberately opaque and designed to inspire market confidence, not make a case to Congress for something Geithner is doing everything in his power to keep from doing.

Geithner promises “stress testing” of big banks. What did he mean?

ABC: Sen. Chuck Schumer, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Rep. Maxine Waters, Rep. Peter King. CBS: Robert Gibbs,Rep. Barney Frank, Sen. Richard Shelby. CNN: Sen. John McCain, Robert Gibbs, Gwen Ifill, Rep. Aaron Schock. GPS: Hamid Karzai. FOX: David Axelrod. Eric Schmidt, Mark Zandi. NBC: David Axelrod.

Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. presents Pepe Le Pew in Louvre Come Back To Me.  This 1962 Looney Toons cartoon was Pepe’s final appearance on the silver screen.  Story by John Dunn.  Animation by Richard Thompson, Bob Bransford, Tom Ray, and Ken Harris.  Backgrounds by Tom O’Loughlin and Philip DeGuard.  Film editing by Treg Brown.  Voice characterzations by Mel Blanc and others.  Music by Milt Franklyn.  Co-directed by Maurice Noble.  Directed by Chuck. Jones.

What’s on your mind tonight?