What journalist Matt Bai and Virginia’s junior Senator Mark Warner choose not to understand is that centrism is an ideology even more stubborn than the left or right they love to attack, but an ideology that got us into the mess we’re in now, both fiscally and electorally.

Maria Cantwell noticed a huge loophole in Lincoln’s “tough” reform bill, and vowed to oppose cloture until it was fixed. Lincoln did not. Everyone and their brother knows that the provision spinning off the swaps trading desks from the big banks is going to get cut. Heck, Mark Warner told Andrea Mitchell today that the derivatives language “will be out” of the final bill. But to Blanche, “it’s gonna pass.”

I don’t want to say this was completely a technical glitch – even with that the market went down 350 points, mostly on European debt fears. But in a sense, what we saw yesterday does argue for stronger regulation of the financial sector. Too much trading is on auto-pilot, too much is invested in the sophistication of a computer program rather than the smooth flow of capital and judging the fundamentals of a company’s product. It’s like a casino populated by robots and automatic black jack machines. And as we saw, that has the potential to be dangerous.

Sen. Chris Dodd appears obsessed with getting a bipartisan financial reform package through the Senate Banking Committee, no matter if it makes a mockery of reform, no matter if it includes virtually nothing to protect consumers or deal with the problem of “too big to fail” financial firms. He’s already seeking to drop the Volcker rule put forward by the White House that would limit proprietary trading from banks.

The Washington Times has a story about Mark Warner addressing one of the biggest unspoken problems in the health care reform debate. “I wish the president would have started the debate by explaining to the American people that our current health care system is not financially sustainable, for even another decade,” Mr. Warner said. “Driving [...]