Tim Geithner won’t show up to House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa’s first hearing, on TARP and the foreclosure crisis, sending a top deputy instead. The deputy, Tim Massad, has no real experience with the Administration’s foreclosure mitigation programs. Maybe Geithner didn’t want to testify on foreclosures because he didn’t have anything to say beyond “Everything’s great!”

We know about Darrell Issa’s steady stream of investigations. What we didn’t know is how central federal regulations were to that list. In fact, in determining how to proceed on the regulatory aspect of his oversight hearings, he has enlisted the industries themselves to tell him which regulations to jettison. Because there’s nothing corporations do better than act in the public interest.

Cummings has the potential to be a worthy adversary to Darrell Issa. But the way in which the leadership went about this was pretty ham-fisted.

Last night, it appeared that Elijah Cummings would attempt to leapfrog seniority and obtain the ranking membership of the House Oversight Committee with the backing of outgoing ranking member Ed Towns. However, Towns reversed course last night, saying in a statement, “I support Carolyn Maloney to become Ranking Member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. She is next in line on the Committee, she has the seniority and competence to serve the Caucus well.”

Ed Towns will give up his post as the Democratic ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, setting up a potential battle for that spot, opposite Darrell Issa, who has promised vigorous and probably endless oversight of the Obama Administration.

Not sure why the White House would want to bring in someone, right before Darrell Issa gets the gavel of the House Oversight Committee, involved in a long-ago scandal.

But hey, he might “bring back” the business community! Goody.

Rep. Towns, are we really supposed to believe that with the change of a single leadership role in Afghanistan, that these enormous problems with accountability and transparency in DOD contracting and the mission in Afghanistan have changed virtually overnight, that a culture in which lawlessness and corruption has been ingrained for decades has suddenly turned itself around?

In the BP disaster we have seen a pattern from MMS of outright ignoring their responsibilities. So it’s worth probing again the failures at the agency. And the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform plans to do just that.