A big sign that the federal implementation of the Affordable Care Act is not going smoothly is the Obama administration delaying two big components of the law for at least a year.

Last week Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) announced that the Obama administration will delay the Federal Basic Health Plan Option (FBHPO) until 2015. Cantwell is responsible for putting the provision into the law. It will allow states to create a program to cover people from 138% to 200% FPL instead of putting them on the new private insurance exchanges.

This is another powerful indicator have how radically the politics surrounding marijuana reform have changed in the past decade. As little as ten years ago publicly supporting marijuana legalization was seen as a real political liability. Now there politicians in contested elections, like Baumgartner and King Country Sheriff Steve Strachan, endorsing legalization right before the election, presumably in attempt to make themselves more popular with voters.

Overlooked in the mockery of the GOP House taking some innocuous-seeming bills about small business capital formation and wrapping them up into a package to call them the JOBS Act is that the underlying bills themselves are really not good at all. It’s an effort to exempt a bunch of companies from reporting requirements and weaken investor protections. It’s a financial industry deregulation bill.

We know that Wall Street speculation shoulders part of the blame for rising gas prices, and that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has done little to stop it. But I didn’t know that even the weak CFTC rules established last year were being challenged in federal court. And the outcome of that court case could lead to speculation running rampant without a check from federal regulators.

Democrats have an incredible 23 Senate seats they need to defend this cycle, but it appears they won’t need to worry much about losing the race in Washington state this year. Incumbent Senator Maria Cantwell has a good favorability rating and she is polling very strong in potential general election matchups.

In a way, I’m not sure why the President made a jobs speech to Congress yesterday at all. Clearly all of our job worries have been solved with the passage of a patent reform bill.

It took the Obama Administration years to build a case against a few financial firms for their role in the 2008 oil spike, but at least they’ve gotten around to it. The people most equipped to know the existence of the problem were screaming to the government at the time that speculation, not supply and demand, was driving prices.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged one trading house and two individuals for illegally manipulating oil prices during the price spike of 2008, when oil reached $147 a barrel, by creating the appearance of a shortage to drive up the benchmark for crude. While the action covers oil trading in 2008, the connection to today, where speculation is seen as a primary cause for higher gas prices, is unmistakable.

The bank lobbyists are pushing hard for this exemption, which should tell you a lot about it. And Geithner appears to be right there with them.

Last night, Maria Cantwell announced her support of the Dodd Frank financial reform bill, citing a letter from Commodity Futures Trading Commission chief Gary Gensler ensuring her that the derivatives title will be rigorously enforced. Which begs the question: why in the hell did the conference committee give Scott Brown basically everything he wanted? Because Brown’s vote is now irrelevant.