Steele the figurehead and Obama the pragmatist

loltastic story of the day is erstwhile comedian Michael Steele losing his control over the RNC's budget after a series of calamitous public appearances followed by what appears to be a six-week banishment. Steele - you remember him as the guy who actually had the balls (stupidity?) to call question the divinity of Rush Limbaugh - now is nothing but a figurehead:

The "good governance" agreement revives checks and balances Mr. Steele resisted implementing for RNC contracts, fees for legal work and other expenditures that were not renewed after the 2008 presidential nominating contest.

I'm not sure this is a good or a bad things for the Dems. Good because the idea of secret meetings taking place to sort out public policy is exactly the type of thing that shows the GOP haven't learned shit; bad because it's hard to imagine the new leaders will be as inept as Steele.

...

Best column I've read in some time, courtesy of Robert Reich at TalkingPointsMemo. Reich points out that, while it's great that Obama is a pragmatist, it's not nearly enough.

I’m relieved the President is a pragmatist, but that doesn’t let him or anyone around him off the hook for describing what he wants to achieve and why. Being a pragmatist is a statement about means, not ends. It describes someone who chooses the most practical way of achieving a certain goal but it does not explain why he chooses one goal over another.

The President seems to me especially thoughtful and passionate about one of the great moral questions of domestic policy today: widening inequality of income and wealth, and therefore of opportunity and political power. As I’ve noted before, as recently as 1980, the richest 1 percent of Americans took home about 9 percent of total national income. But since then, income has concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. By 2007, the richest 1 percent took home 22 percent of total national income.