While Barack Obama is making all the news headlines today for (finally!) doing some cheerleading for his recovery package (as it wends its way through Congress), I'd instead like to shine a light on something that appears to be getting lost in the media fray. Because, while it's admittedly more fun to cover politicians squabbling over stimulus details, we were just informed last week that the Treasury has apparently lost $78 billion of our tax dollars.

This is an outrage. To put this in perspective, this is more money than the annual budget for the Department of Transportation. It is more than we pay for the Department of Education. It is the size of the Departments of Justice, Energy, State, and the Interior -- combined. It is an amount bigger than the GDP of all but about 60 countries in the world. Even in Washington, this ain't pocket change, in other words. It's a lot of money. And it seems to have vanished.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you are not alone. This story broke briefly last week, and then was swallowed up in all the other political coverage. The story sank with barely a ripple in the media.

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Truth be told, it's actually been kind of a "talking points week" for me this week. On Monday, I wrote about how the Democrats need to frame the stimulus debate better if they wanted to convince the public of the righteousness of their cause. Tuesday, I took a break to express my support for the idea of nominating Howard Dean as Health and Human Services Secretary, after Tom Daschle crashed and burned. Wednesday, though, I was back at it again advising Democrats to start demanding an up-or-down vote in the Senate, and yesterday I asked the eternal question: "Why must Democrats always act like such... well... Democrats?"

In other words, it's been a week of focusing on the stimulus package and how Democrats should be framing the issues. Now, President Obama seems to be finally hitting his stride on the issue, as he showed some genuine frustration yesterday. This is good, because he's going on prime time television Monday and he needs to be in peak form when he does.

But alongside the stimulus debate, there is another issue which needs addressing -- one which I have been avoiding talking about until now. I speak of executive compensation. The reason I have been avoiding it is that (1) the stimulus is a more pressing and immediate concern because it will be passed first, and (2) because every time I sit down to write about it I get so enraged I can barely type. So I've held off. Until now.

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Why must Democrats always act like such... well... Democrats?

[Sigh.]

Half a century ago, Will Rogers (who famously "never met a man he didn't like") summed it up best: "I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat."

[Double-sigh.]

Maybe they all really believed their own press releases. Maybe they thought that Republicans truly were going to offer up flowers and rainbows and play nice. Maybe everyone was so new on the job that the backlash caught them unawares. Maybe they thought "we've got the votes, we don't need to sell it." Maybe they thought "it's so popular and so obviously necessary we don't need to sell it to the people." Maybe they just didn't think.

Granted, while slow off the mark, President Obama has finally realized he needs to explain his agenda to the American people in order to galvanize support for it. Starting this week, he has tried to go on the offense. Unfortunately, then this year's version of "nanny-gate" began, and Obama nominees began sheepishly admitting that they "inadvertently" didn't pay a bunch of taxes. Thanks, guys! That's just what we needed this week -- more ammo for Republicans and late-night comics.

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Democrats are obviously having problems framing the issues in the ongoing debate about the stimulus package. The bill is now in the Senate, and Republicans are using the leverage of a filibuster (or, technically, a cloture vote) to tear the bill apart and rebuild it to their liking. So it's time to steal a page from their playbook: demand an "up or down" vote.

The thing about this phrase is that it sounds eminently fair to most Americans. The intricacies of the parliamentary procedures in the Senate aren't easy to understand, but the core (small "d") democratic principle of a vote in which the majority wins is. That's why Republicans used it so effectively over the past few years. Here are but a handful of examples:

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Howard Dean is a man of many titles. You can call him Governor Dean, or Chairman Dean, or even ex-presidential candidate Dean. But the one title which qualifies him to be named as Secretary of Health and Human Services is Doctor Dean. Now that Tom Daschle has withdrawn from consideration (due to a few tax problems), Howard Dean should be first on the list of possible appointees.

This isn't my original idea, I should mention. Ryan J. Davis wrote about it yesterday in The Hill, and there is already a Facebook group in support of the idea.

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President Obama has been failing a crucial test in the past few weeks. In the first (and possibly most important, at least for a while) legislative struggle in Congress, President Obama's stimulus package has had its ups and downs. But what is truly missing is one entire side of this debate. Where are the cheerleaders for the stimulus package?

Where are the point people out there strongly making the case for the bill? I hear a lot of noise from the Republicans who are fighting the stimulus package, but what response there is from the Democratic side has been mostly weak, disorganized, and off-message. John Kerry did a pretty good job this past Sunday, but other than that, the Republicans are the ones all over the airwaves. Which means the Democrats (and Obama) are in danger of letting their opponents frame the issue in the public's mind.

This is not a good way to lead. Democrats have to get out in front of the media narrative, and make their case in such a clear and compelling fashion that ordinary Americans can understand what the fight is all about.

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What is it with shoes this week?

First we had the sale of Sarah Palin's "Double Dare" Naughty Monkey shoes on eBay. And now someone has erected a statue of a shoe, according to the BBC. A very specific shoe. Muntadar al-Zaidi's shoe. You remember him -- he's the Iraqi journalist who hucked both his shoes at President Bush's head a while back. Well, an Iraqi artist has honored him with a huge statue of his shoe. The funniest quote from the article? After describing the statue's dimensions and appearance, the Beeb adds: "There is also a bush sticking out of the shoe."

Heh.

But enough frivolity. Because, according to Paul Krugman (who just won the Nobel Prize for Economics): "There's a populist rage building in this country, as Americans see bankers getting huge bailouts while ordinary citizens suffer."

A populist rage? Really?

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News from Iraq has seemingly slowed to a trickle, due to most of America wanting to turn the page and move on. But an item which appeared today in the Washington Post shows that the Iraqi government is not wasting any time in asserting the prerogatives of true sovereignty which they gained on the first of this year. Even in the midst of an Iraqi election (or perhaps because of the impending vote), Iraq announced that the security company Blackwater Worldwide will not be getting a renewal of their license to operate in Iraq this year.

Meaning they're going to have to get out of Dodge. Not right away, and with a loophole or two, but the end is in sight for the company's ability to provide security in the country of Iraq. That "get out of Dodge" was not random, either, since up until this point Blackwater has operated largely in a Wild West atmosphere where they were not legally under any law -- U.S., military, or Iraqi. The abuses that sprang from this situation finally became so egregious in an incident where Blackwater personnel killed 17 unarmed civilians that the persons responsible are now being charged in U.S. federal court. But I expect their defense is going to heavily rely on "this court has no jurisdiction," which may indeed be the truth, and may win their freedom. Because from the inception of American forces in Iraq up until December 31, 2008 there simply was no law to restrain them.

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Sarah Palin is the gift that keeps on giving. At least for snarky left-wing pundits.

[Ahem. Let's try that again, shall we?]

Sarah Palin is the goose that just keeps laying golden eggs, so to speak, and the Republican National Committee seems astonishingly clueless when it comes to capitalizing on Palin's star power. I mean, this is supposed to be the party of free enterprise, making lots of money, and fatcats in general. And yet, a little girl has to show them how to make money? In an Obama-esque spirit of reaching across the aisle, I would like to rub their noses in it.

Um, wait a minute, that's not quite Obama-esque enough... how about: "I would like to draw their attention to an entrepreneurial spirit in their midst." Yes, that's better.

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Our new president has had a pretty good first week in office. In his "first 168 hours" (for those of you who love arbitrary timelines for the "honeymoon" period), he has made good on quite a few campaign promises, sent an envoy to the Middle East on a "listening tour," and pushed his stimulus package in Congress. All around, an impressive first week by any standard.

The San Francisco Chronicle has a nice list of the executive orders President Obama has been issuing all week. These are the "low hanging fruit" types of issues that Obama can change with nothing but his signature, and almost all of them fulfill promises he made on the campaign trail:

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