As predicted, Republican Senators, plus DINO Ben Nelson, voted as a block yesterday to stop financial reform legislation from going forward. Alexander Bolton reports for The Hill that Harry Reid is scheduling more votes on financial reform and daring Republicans to keep filibustering.

Bolton writes that “Reid also voted against the motion because of a procedural technicality” that will allow him to bring the measure up again for consideration. So if any wingnuts are saying “Reid voted against it, too,” that’s why.

Brody Mullins writes for the Washington Journal,

For the first time since 2004, the biggest Wall Street firms are now giving most of their campaign donations to Republicans.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of 12 large financial services companies, including J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. shows that they have collectively made $1.4 million in political donations, with 52% going to Republicans so far this year. That’s a reversal from last year, according to the most recent round of fund-raising reports covering January, February and March.

Apparently David Brooks wrote a column about the latest revelations from the financial crisis. I haven’t read it, but Kevin Drum writes,

Brooks has the causation backward here, I think. The establishment didn’t miss the housing bubble because of generic groupthink. It missed the housing bubble because of a specific case of groupthink: the nearly unanimous belief that markets can’t be wrong. Thus, if the market price of housing is going up, it had to be the case that housing prices should be going up. All that was left was to invent reasons to explain skyrocketing property prices, and the establishment did that in spades. But it was market delusion that drove establishment delusion, not the other way around.

Righties speak of “the free market” as if it were a natural ecosystem that will always right itself if mankind (the government) doesn’t interfere. And this is the foundational financial delusion. “Markets” have no existence except in the plans and machinations of human beings, which means they don’t inherently do anything. Put another way, “markets” are simply an effect created by humans, and everything that happens in markets happens because a person or people caused it to happen. So markets are as sane, or as crazy, or as wise, or as deluded, or as thrifty, or as greedy, as the people actively taking part in them. One can find certain behavioral consistencies reflected in markets, but this is because there are certain behavioral consistencies in humans.

I was reading “Lessons from the Health-Care Wars” by Peter Dreier at The American Prospect, and this sentence just about jumped off the page at me: “The job of a social movement is to change the public debate so that progressive reforms become politically viable.”

Let me provide a little bit of a larger context:

Reform activists sometimes disagreed on tactics. Some hoped to gain leverage by explicitly criticizing Obama. Others, particularly the major unions, MoveOn, and consumer groups, believed that attacking the newly elected president, already under siege from the right, was counterproductive and wanted to focus public ire on the insurance industry and its allies in Congress.

But this argument misses the point. The job of a social movement is to change the public debate so that progressive reforms become politically viable. Activism on the ground creates pressure for bolder reform and gives liberal elected officials more room to maneuver.

See, this is exactly what all of us smartypants liberal bloggers and activists are not doing — trying to change the public debate.

For example, during the protracted health care fight there were endless arguments about whether we liberals should support the bill with a watered-down public option, or no public option, or with or without mandates, and whether President Obama was fighting hard enough for a public option, or whether he never intended there to be a public option and that the plan all along was to kill the public option and mandate that people purchase private insurance, etc. etc.

And then there were frequent updates on which congresspersons were going to vote for what, and which ones might be persuadable, and which ones needed to be “primaried.”

But we did not do a good job changing the national debate to make the public option important to a broader swatch of the public. And because we didn’t do that, the public option was politically expendable.

It didn’t help that some activists claimed support for the public option in Congress that probably was never there. Those claims quickly hardened into Accepted Fact by many on the Left, who then felt “sold out” and blamed the White House when the public option disappeared.

Like it or not, the Tea Baggers were more effective at setting the terms of the nation’s health care discussion, if only as plants in the right-wing echo chamber. Yeah, they went off script a lot, but they helped reinforce what the medical-industrial complex wanted people to think — that the Democrats’ bill would be too expensive, would raise their taxes, would disrupt the patient-doctor relationship, is mostly an entitlement for poor people, and is somehow taking us down the road to socialism.

Of course, it’s also true that in our current twisted media-political climate, the truth carries a greater burden than propaganda, and teaching the public about how a complex policy might actually work is darn near impossible. Yet that is what we must do if progressives are ever going to stop playing defense.

I’m not entirely sure how to go about changing the public debate, but here are some tactics that won’t work:

Building alliances with Tea Baggers. You’ve heard the story about the scorpion and the frog? ‘Nuff said.

Tea Party-Progressive Dialogue. Annabel Park’s “coffee party” idea was well intentioned, but it was doomed from the beginning. And that’s not just because one cannot have a rational conversation with someone who sincerely thinks the new health care reform law is “socialism” and that the President is a secret Muslim from Kenya. It’s because there is also an element on the Left more interested in acting out and “self-expression” than in doing anything useful. Think Code Pink.

Public Demonstrations Featuring Giant Puppets, Vulgar Signs, Young Men With Megaphones Who Don’t Know When to Shut Up, and Stupid Costumes. I’ve complained about this before. But, folks, people who marched with Gandhi and Martin Luther King managed to be effective without the giant puppets, etc.

I continue to hope that only about 20 percent of the American public is completely unreachable. I’d like to think that there’s a large portion of the American electorate that maybe aren’t as well informed as we’d like, but who are capable of learning if we could find a way to reach them.

Sen. Harry Reid’s Republican opponent —

Update: I’ve been trying to calculate how many chickens you’d need to pay for, say, an appendectomy. I found a website that says an appendectomy goes for $15,850, these days, on average. That seems low to me, but let’s go with it. I couldn’t find a price for live adult chickens, but you can buy baby chicks in bulk for about $1.60 each, according to one supplier I found. That’s 9,906 baby chicks for one appendectomy. Pretty soon, ol’ Doc can quit medicine and become a supplier for Tyson Inc.!

Or, you can go to the other extreme and pay with a chicken ready for cooking. Right now my local grocery has whole roaster chickens on sale for .99 a pound, and the circular says the birds run from five to seven pounds. Let’s round that up to a dollar a pound to make my life easier. You can give the doc 15,850 pounds of chicken, or 2,641 and 2/3 chickens, figuring six pounds to a chicken. Hope Doc has a big freezer.

Update: See “Chickens for Checkups.”

When news of the Goldman Sachs scandal broke last week, some rightie bloggers had a question for which I did not have a ready answer. If what Goldman Sachs did was so bad, they asked, why did the SEC file a civil suit instead of criminal charges?

The answer seems to be that what Goldman Sachs did probably isn’t criminal — not because it wasn’t really, really bad, mind you, but because no U.S. law exists to cover exactly what Goldman Sachs appears to have done. Richard Adams writes at The Guardian, “the real scandal here isn’t what’s illegal but what’s legal.”

Zachary A. Goldfarb and Tomoeh Murakami Tse write for the Washington Post that Goldman Sachs and the SEC for months “had been involved in secret talks over allegations that the Wall Street bank defrauded customers in selling them investments designed to fail.” Last month the two sides reached some kind of impasse, and the SEC filed the suit to break the impasse.

Further, the SEC had notified Goldman Sachs last summer that it might file the suit. So this has been going on for a while. It’s not clear to me precisely what was being negotiated, however.