After watching the news last night, I couldn’t help but think of Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Anderson. When it comes to hardball negotiations with entrenched interests, they sure could give the Obama Team a few lessons.

I would eagerly read anything written by Linda Greenhouse or Reva Siegel on the subject of abortion (or just about any topic). This dynamic duo brings to Before Roe v. Wade decades of careful study and scholarship.

Greenhouse is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who set the industry standard for Supreme Court coverage in thirty years with the New York Times (as well as author of Becoming Justice Blackmun, about Roe’s author). Siegel, a Yale Law professor, is a – to my mind, the – leading legal academic writing on abortion, from her 1992 Stanford article, Reasoning from the Body, to recent work including the shift from fetal-protective to woman-protective arguments against legal abortion.

Now that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been created, everyone is waiting for Obama to nominate someone to head it. The longer this drags on, it becomes a less a question of “Who?” and more a question of “Why not Elizabeth Warren?”

That’s a question that the Obama White House does NOT want to answer.

Like they did to Dawn Johnsen, the Obama White House has hung absolutely outstanding progressive nominees Goodwin Liu and Edward Chen out to dry, and are well on their way to doing the same with Elizabeth Warren. It is a pathetic track record on progressive nominees.

Firedoglake.com founder Jane Hamsher appeared on MSNBC this afternoon with host Cenk Uygur. The topic for discussion was the evolving story that Christina Romer’s resignation as head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers is symptomatic of a larger problem of women not being treated equally within the Obama administration. Hamsher describes how, especially within the White House economic team, women who were right about the economic meltdown are ignored in favor of the men on the team who were “aggressively wrong” in making both the decisions that led to the disaster as well as current decisions that are not improving the situation sufficiently.

As you probably know, the Office of Legal Counsel is basically the Supreme Court inside the executive branch, providing legal opinions for the Administration on what they can and cannot do. It was legitimately good news at the time when that office was being staffed with people vocally opposed to torture. It’s legitimately depressing news that they have all been either blocked from their jobs or left them on their own accord. It signals a dark time in American history for the rule of law.

Laurie Anderson’s terrific performance of “Only an expert (can deal with the problem)” on The Late Show Wednesday night provokes thought on our current reliance on precisely the wrong experts to deal with the problems we face.

Yet another recess appointment proves the sham and fraud that was the Obama White House handling of Dawn Johnsen’s nomination to head the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel.

President Obama is not only appointing someone who wants to dismantle DNI even while Congress thinks it should be strengthened; he’s doing so in such a way that deliberately avoids reestablishing the balance of power between the branches of government.

Former OLC nominee Dawn Johnsen has a must-read op-ed today describing how the Bybee memo damaged the Office of Legal Counsel. Is there something specific Johnsen is responding to?