Harold Meyerson

The Goldman Sachs scandal has done the unthinkable: It's made it possible that legislation reining in Wall Street's casino may actually be enacted.

The odds against real reform are still steep. Wall Street remains the most deep-pocketed lobby in the land. And the problem isn't just Republican opposition. "A lot of our members up here just want a bill passed," says one Democratic legislator. "They don't think that people are watching that closely. But this matters immensely to people. This is a which-side-are-you-on moment."

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Jordan Yospe has a job you couldn't make up. He is, according to a report in Monday's New York Times, a Los Angeles attorney who works with screenwriters and producers to place name-brand products in movies.

As the cost of filmmaking continues to rise, "product placement" has become a serious source of production funding. The more a product is shown or used in a movie, the Times reports, "the more a brand pays for the appearance, offering fees ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to several million a film."

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We'll begin with some good news. In mid-February, 7,600 baggage handlers and ramp workers for Continental Airlines -- painfully aware that they were the lowest-paid handlers in the industry and that their four previous attempts to unionize had all fallen short -- finally voted to join a union. This was a more arduous achievement than it may sound. Under the byzantine provisions of the Railway Labor Act, which governs labor relations in the airline industry as well, workers seeking a union need to win a majority not just of those employees who vote but of all the employees in their unit. Worse yet, their unit is defined as everyone in their job category within the United States: The more than 2,000 Continental ramp workers employed at the airline's Houston hub, for instance, could not vote to join the union on their own.

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I don't mean to sound nostalgic for the Cold War, but we've got to stop conducting ourselves as if nobody is looking.

When she spoke from the floor of the House on Sunday in support of the healthcare reform bill, the word she wielded was "opportunity." Her point -- that the bill would enable Americans to leave their jobs to start up new ventures without fear of not being able to get health insurance in their new gig -- was altogether valid and perfectly good, but she insisted on repeating the word "opportunity" so many times that she left listeners (this listener, anyway) a little woozy.

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Pelosi's role in passing healthcare reform puts her in the top rank of House speakers.

Anyone who has heard Nancy Pelosi speak knows she is not a great speaker. Her favorite rhetorical device is to seize on a word and club her listeners over the head with it.

When she spoke from the floor of the House on Sunday in support of the healthcare reform bill, the word she wielded was "opportunity." Her point -- that the bill would enable Americans to leave their jobs to start up new ventures without fear of not being able to get health insurance in their new gig -- was altogether valid and perfectly good, but she insisted on repeating the word "opportunity" so many times that she left listeners (this listener, anyway) a little woozy.

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With the enactment of health-care reform, the often hapless, sometimes hopeless Democrats have transformed themselves into something America has not seen in decades: a governing party. By passing the most significant social legislation since the '60s, they have ended the policy gridlock dating to the middle of Ronald Reagan's presidency. They have revalidated the almost quaint notion that -- despite the ever greater role of money in politics -- elections have consequences, too.

This revival was partly the result of the Democrats' decision to activate their base. Obama for America -- the 13 million-member organization of the president's supporters -- was put to sleep after Barack Obama's election. But in recent weeks it was awakened and enlisted in a massive effort to lobby wavering lawmakers. Its members sent a million text messages and made half a million phone calls to fence-sitting Democrats during the 10 days preceding the House votes on Sunday. Unions and other organizations that were already pressuring Democratic lawmakers to support the legislation intensified their efforts.

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