Penn State’s football coach Joe Paterno submitted a pre-emptive retirement, effective at the end of the season, before the Board of Trustees of the university meets to investigate the case. The day before, Paterno appeared at an impromptu pep rally on his front lawn, cheering on student supporters. It’s a horrifying cap to an era of elite failure.

If nothing else, the #occupywallstreet protests, happening in the heart of the world’s financial center, have forced elites to reckon with their own precarious position. The New York Times does the honors today, connecting the protests to other uprisings around the globe, and making a subtle (and also wrong) point that there’s something anti-democratic about popular protest.

Alex Lawson of Social Security Works was stopped by the DC police and prevented from questioning the powerful elite Super Committee members for an FDL livestream after their meeting on Capital Hill today.

It’s easy to see what’s going on here. Elites, having broken the world, are trying to pin the blame on voters. It’s not voters’ fault that their votes matter far less than the elite consensus, which has been adopted by virtually every politician, regardless of stated ideology, and which has been proven to be tragically wrong.

In short, there is no deficit that cannot be plugged except for our political deficit. It sustains the defeatism of years of no growth, stagnant wages, high unemployment. The political tendency toward right-wing and corporatist policy ideas over the past 30 years, tied up with the cost of running campaigns, the failure of traditional media, the conservative movement’s public relations machinery, has widened that political deficit between what government can provide and what it will provide.

I’m not a big Charlie Cook fan, and I think he’s deeply confused about economics in this post. But I feel like he definitely gets it right about the era we’re heading into.

People want to disparage this whole thing as not a “real” issue – present company included. But what it says about America circa 2011 is very real.

The focus on events at Fukushima Daiichi belie the apparently woeful response to the crisis created by the companion natural disasters that have killed at least 10,000 and left up to a half a million homeless.

The White House is generally pretty pleased with what they’ve done, they don’t think they’re likely to get anything additional from Congress – which they’re right about, but that assumes that the executive branch has no authority of its own – and they’re going to just engage in happy, sunny, Reagan-esque optimistic talk and hope the economy comes back on its own. There are some things – like a new budget – that must be done, and there we shall see where talk meets action. But basically, the White House is done, and they’re quite happy with their efforts. If you want to be real charitable, they think it’s the best they can do.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report is sure to provide a powerful reinforcement to the growing lack of faith in elites and especially the financial industry. Because they will outline, in painstaking detail, how the financial meltdown of 2008 was completely avoidable – the result of policy failure at the highest levels of government and Wall Street, failures that bordered on criminal and that have never been fully adjudicated.