Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) on Caroline Kennedy: “Rembrandt was a great artist. His brother Murray, on the other hand, Murray Rembrandt wouldn’t paint a house.”

Yes, it’s an intentionally provocative headline. But hear me out.

We usually conflate Dick Cheney’s constitutional self-aggrandizement and law-breaking with the fact that he’s an extremely influential force in the Bush administration. But they’re two distinct realities. And for the moment I’d like to set the first aside to focus on the second, to consider whether we may be looking at a trend.

Vice President Cheney’s clout within the Bush administration is heavily tied to the fact that the he early — and quite credibly because of his medical history — disavowed any plans to seek the presidency in his own right. We’re in the midst of a four decade trend toward more and more powerful and influential vice-presidents (in the sense of clout not constitutional prerogative). But the big brake on the veep’s role in decision-making has always been the fact that everyone else who wants to be president someday has a strong interest in keeping his power in check. Since Jimmy Carter picked Walter Mondale in 1976 you can see these two dimensions of the veep’s modern role in constant tension — whether with Mondale or Bush or Gore. And the Cheney model, to a significant degree, resolved that tension.

Joe Biden is 66. And he’ll turn 74 a few days after the 2016 November election. Nothing’s for certain these days. But I think that puts him at the outer edge of the envelope of age range in which you can credibly run for president. So I suspect it will become clear, sooner rather than later that Biden does not plan to run for president again.

There are other factors of course. Whether you think it’s intelligence or experience or just lack of work ethic, there’s been a vacuum of presidential heft in which Cheney’s clout and influence have been able to expand. I doubt Biden’s and Obama’s relationship will be the same. But I do think there are more similarities between Biden and Cheney — in the sense of the Senior Counselor model of the vice presidency — than a lot of us realize.

I first noticed this on Atrios’s blog. Jennifer Palmieri, who’s acting CEO of the Center for American Progress while John Podesta is working on the transition, did a forcible ‘guest post’ on Matt Yglesias’s blog, which is now hosted at CAP, disavowing one of Matt’s posts that was critical of ‘Third Way‘, an avowedly centrist and incrementalist Democratic pressure group.

I’m curious whether Podesta would have done something so clumsy.

In any case, I think it would be reasonable for CAP, if they had some institutional disagreement with what Matt wrote to say so on their front page or perhaps say so on some CAP company blog, if there is such a thing. I can’t think of an example where I’ve done that. But if someone who writes at TPM wrote something I strongly disagreed with, I don’t think I would refrain from doing a post on TPM saying I disagreed with them. But forcing a post onto the person’s own blog, their own editorial turf, completely undermines the whole organization’s credibility and all the writing that gets done at the site and frankly for the whole organization — which is too bad, since a lot of it is extremely good.

It’s true that there’s some inherent tension in housing journalistic writing under the roof of what is after all fundamentally an advocacy organization. But some basic rules of the road combined with maturity and discretion on the part of the overlords could make it workable.

Adding to the problem is the fact that the ‘guest post’ seems pretty clearly to stem from inter-group Dem politics rather than any disagreement that some actual person has with what Matt said.

Can someone who knows Palmieri mention to her that she goofed here? That she undermined Matt and made herself and the institution she’s helming lose a significant amount of credibility and respect? I would think that Palmieri could say that this was a slip up caused by the novelty of the blogging medium or some such mumbojumbo. It might even be true.

(ed.note: Full disclosure. Matt’s a friend and prior to hosting his blog at CAP and The Atlantic, he ran his blog at TPM.)

Everybody, it seems, wants a bailout. And observers are left demanding bailouts for some industries (cars) and bewailing them for others (commercial construction, hedge funds). But as I watch this unfold I feel increasingly concerned that the people controlling the money are using the complexity of the situation and the public’s difficulty in understanding it to use public money to shield very wealthy institutions and individuals from the inherent risks of their chosen line of work.

There’s a basic distinction that should be guiding all the public expenditure we’re doing in the finance sector. There’s no reason to use public money to compensate people who’ve lost a lot of money on bad investments, no interest in bailing out big commercial or investment banks that made lousy investments. (I’m particularly suspicious of the commercial building folks who say they want the Treasury IV as well.) What I think we all recognize though, at least in principle, is that there’s a strong public interest in preventing major disruptions in the financial sector that could hobble the rest of the economy.

But I keep hearing more and more examples that sound a lot more like trying to socialize the losses of the major investment houses and hedge funds and their owners than trying to achieve any reasonable public purpose. Because it’s very difficult for most people to distinguish in practice between structural intervention (as I’ve defined it above) and unjustified bailouts for people who made bad investments.

It’s a slow news week. And this is going to require a lot of digging. But this is something that we’re going to be digging into in a big way. So for all of our readers who have insight into this question, please let us know where we should be looking.

Can you believe it’s been 20 years since Pan Am 103 was brought down on Lockerbie, Scotland?

Biden defends Obama’s Rick Warren decision.

TPM Reader JM pipes up on the Yglesias story …

As an in utero blogger, I’m watching L’Affaire Yglesias with acute interest. Institutionally supported blogging is an increasingly common model, yet there seem to be no rules on how far bloggers can go in crossing their home institution (if at all).

I’m trying to imagine what would happen if a New York Times blogger accused the Pulitzer committee of promoting “hyper-timid bullshit.” What if a magazine-affiliated blogger like Drum or Sullivan said that about a sister publication?

Of course my inclination is to push for as much blogger freedom as possible. But as institutional affiliations become more common, blogging may lose some of the free-wheeling style that made it popular to begin with. It’s a tricky balance to strike, and I’m not sure I know the answer. But I’m thinking very hard about it…

I actually don’t think some trans-institutional system is possible or even desirable. Different kinds of publications, different kinds of institutions will chart their own choice, with their institutional credibility falling or rising accordingly.

Darrel Dochow, a inspector from the Office of Thrift Supervision, who didn’t shut Charles Keating down in time, was still around to lend a fishy helping hand to IndyMac, before it swirled down the drain earlier this year.

Dochow has now been “removed” pending an internal investigation.

I don’t know how many of you have seen HBO’s House of Saddam. I really didn’t know what to expect from a mini-series about Saddam Hussein. There are so many obvious pitfalls, it’s hard to know where to start. But it’s actually really, really good. And the portrayal of Saddam is actually surprisingly sympathetic, at least sympathetic in the broader context of mass-murdering dictators. (And no, that’s not just ironic snark — I’ll try to elaborate in a subsequent post about what I liked about it.)

But if you watch the credits one funny or ironic or just (for me) hard to forget things about drama is that Saddam is played by an Israeli (Igal Naor), something that must sit fabulously well with Arab nationalists.

Dan Ephron explains the larger phenomenon of Israelis so often playing Arabs on the big screen.

I’ve been extremely skeptical of the idea of government aide to the commercial real estate industry. So I’m passing on this note from TPM Reader KS, who makes the contrary case. The key point to me about KS’s argument is how much turns on the fact that the bailed out banks aren’t using the TARP funds for lending, which remains perhaps the greatest scandal of the whole bailout saga …

As a commercial real estate attorney, I’m deeply involved with the current complete freeze-up of the commercial lending markets. I have many clients who have sound business practices in the development of commercial real estate.

Suddenly, and coinciding with the Lehman/Goldman fiasco, the commercial lending markets completely disappeared. Not just a slow down, but a complete and total shut down. Loans for which there were commitments were suddenly pulled. Term loans (most in the development world are for 1-2 years at a time) were suddenly not available for renewal putting borrowers in immediate default, or the lender required severe principal reductions in order to for the borrower to renew – severe to the point of not possible.

I’m not talking about over-speculative developers here asking for a bail-out. I’m talking about fiscally responsible developers, on-time payors with pared down staffs, who wrongly believed that the TARP funds going to the major banks would be put into circulation in the credit markets for new loans and renewals, which are the life-blood of the real estate industry. One bank had the temerity to tell me on a conference call that they were using the TARP funds for acquiring other banks, not for new loans or renewals.

And here lies the problem with the Paulson/Bernacke/Frank plan…they once again trusted the banks “to do the right thing”, (a la Greenspan), without requiring that the TARP funds go right back into the lending stream through the conduit of the banks. I’m not socialist, but I sure would agree for a Bank of US to come out of this mess. This is happening today, and the warnings are clear, and the results will be catastrophic.