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Former TARP Inspector General Neil Barofsky sat down with The Daily Show's Jon Stewart to talk about his book Bailout: How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street and the reasons for the program's failure.

You can read more about that in Matt Taibbi's latest at Rolling Stone: 'Bailout': Neil Barofsky's Adventures in Groupthink City:

Bailout has its first paperback release this week, and Barofsky accordingly is making the media rounds (check out Comedy Central tomorrow), where he'll mainly be asked about the political revelations in the book. You know, the inside-baseball stories of how the officials who administered the TARP bailout fought transparency at every turn, failed to do due diligence on the health and viability of bailout recipients, seemed totally uninterested in creating safeguards against fraud, and generally speaking spent more time bitching about the media and plotting against the likes of Elizabeth Warren and, eventually, Barofsky himself than making sure the largest federal rescue in history wasn't a complete waste of money.

As the former Special Inspector General of the TARP, a key official who was present at the highest levels throughout most of the bailout period and saw from the inside how both the Bush and Obama administrations attacked the economic collapse, Barofsky does have that story to tell, and the book unsurprisingly is full of historically weighty scenes and factoids that will be culled by reporters like me for years to come.

But there's a secondary and I think more interesting subplot to this book, a personal story that will give it more staying power. Just like Will was really a journey-of-self-discovery story that just happened to have the Watergate burglary as a backdrop (the book's real climax comes in the post-Watergate prison years, where Liddy really "finds himself"), Bailout is a kind of Alice in Wonderland tale of an ordinary, sane person disappearing down into a realm of hallucinatory dysfunction, with Tim Geithner playing the role of the Mad Hatter and Barofsky the increasingly frustrated Alice who realizes he's stuck at the stupidest tea party he ever was at. [...]

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How could we ever get through another week of Sunday bobble head shows without Peggy Noonan around to let all of you people know what Very Serious People the Republicans are. On this week's edition of Meet the Press, it was Paul Ryan's turn for Nooners to fawn all over him, but at least she got some push back this time from Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed.

So-called "tea partier" and Senate candidate Ted Cruz did his best to help Noonan out and Reed did a nice job shooting down his talking points as well. The best Cruz could come back with is their nonsense about the Senate not passing President Obama's budget when what they voted on was a Republican parody of his budget and a cheap political stunt.

You can read the entire exchange here but I've left out some of E.J. Dionne and Chuck Todd's remarks for the sake of brevity:

MR. KASIM REED (D-Mayor of Atlanta, GA): Well, you know, the bottom line is I think that the Republicans made a decision to run for the second time a right-right election. And my dad said, you know, Republicans do well when they do dog leg left. If you go out to the Senate and you come-- you go out to the right and back to the center. Democrats go out to the left, come back to the center. This is the second time they’ve gone right-right, which means they’re going to go in the woods. I mean, the fact of the matter is McCain picked Palin, right-right. And now Mitt Romney who is a moderate is picking a person who is right-right. He’s just a better salesman at it.

GREGORY: Well, E.J. and Peggy, here’s the Weekly Standard cover story this week. It’s got Paul Ryan on the cover, the assault on Paul Ryan. E.J., have they landed any real blows?

[...]

GREGORY: Peggy, initial thoughts here on-- on the assault on Paul Ryan?

MS. PEGGY NOONAN (Columnist, Wall Street Journal): Uh, look, I think the choice of Ryan was admirable, you know. And I think Ryan himself is an admirable and accomplished person, and a serious man. He talks about serious issues. He does focus things on the budget, and on entitlement spending. But I also think this is a little bit delicate for Republicans. This is a stressed nation. This is a tough context in which to talk about things that people will hear as cuts. I respect the road the Republicans are going down. I think so far in the past week the real news has been they’ve been talking Medicare, and they’ve been winning on it. But long-term I think the Republican issues are growth, jobs, the economy, those are the things people trust the Republican Party on. So this is all very delicate. It’s strong, but it’s delicate.

[...]

GREGORY: Peggy, I come back to this tone though, because it does-- this polarization does matter. It does seem even more polarized and it’s got to have some impact on A, you know, are there moderates who actually show up and vote, and who do they vote for, and then how you govern after this kind of condition?

MS. NOONAN: Yeah, that’s a problem. Oddly enough, the-- while it’s so good in so many ways to focus on Medicare, by making people over the next 60 days take very definite points of view, you may make it harder to make a Medicare deal down the road. But overall, it seems to me, I’m not sure the American people themselves are so polarized. I, sort of, have a sense that they know-- they tell pollsters, I think I’m going this way for the president, I think I’m going this way for Mr. Romney, there’re so few undecided. But lately I have a feeling, the un-- there’s a sort of feeling of dissatisfaction among a lot of voters with the choices that they have. They are open to persuasion, they are open to listening for the next 70-80 days to a point of view that is serious and not low. They want hope. It’s a big group of Americans who are feeling cynical and disaffected. If somebody could reach in to them and say I can help, that would be very powerful.

[...]

MR. REED: I want to push back on this notion of Paul Ryan as a serious man. He b-- he voted for every budget b-- busting measure under President Bush. He voted for TARP. He asked for money under the American Recovery and Investment Act. He voted for both wars. He put Medicare on a credit card, and then all of a sudden in last 24 months, he’s developing the stature as a serious guy, so I want to push back on that…

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Apparently the moderators at the Fox South Carolina Republican presidential debate didn't think it was worth calling Mitt Romney out, or didn't do their homework, heaven forbid when they let him repeat his hypocrisy on whether the TARP bailouts were a "slush fund." Color me not shocked that the crack team of "reporters" over at Fox didn't catch this one.

From Think Progress from last June -- After Calling TARP A ‘Slush Fund,’ Romney Campaigns At Bank That Took TARP Funds:

At different times, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) has both supported and derided the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), better known as the bank bailouts of 2008. Most recently, Romney called it a “slush fund” that “should be shut down.”

Today, however, Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign stopped at Lincoln Financial Group in Concord, New Hampshire, where hundreds of the company’s employees turned out to hear Romney talk about jobs and the economy. Lincoln Financial Group and its parent company, Lincoln National Corporation, took $950 million in TARP funds in 2008.

That’s not the worst of it, though. Originally, Lincoln Financial was eligible for much less in TARP funding because it did not qualify for money marked for thrift savings companies. To become eligible, it bought a small thrift savings company that, on its own, would have received only $350,000 in TARP funding. Because of how TARP funding was calculated, however, Lincoln Financial was eligible for the $950 million it received solely because it added the small thrift savings company. In 2010, the Special Inspector of TARP issued an oversight report about the program in which he detailed the way Lincoln Financial gamed the system to receive more funding: [...]

In 2009, Romney told the crowd at the Values Voters Summit that, when the government starts “bailing out banks…we have we have every good reason to be alarmed and to speak our mind.” That apparently wasn’t the case today. According to reports from the event, Romney never mentioned the bailouts even while standing inside of a company that benefited directly from them.

Apparently Romney still has no shame or remorse for the same level of hypocrisy, since he continued to tout those same lines during this week's debate.

Transcript below the fold.

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Chris Wallace asks Mitch McConnell if he's worried about his party being labeled the "Party of No" after blocking lending assistance for small business, voting against extending unemployment benefits and voting against financial regulatory reform.

It's pretty bad when even Chris Wallace is questioning whether this is the best strategy for Republicans if they're hoping to make gains in the mid-term elections. Here's how McConnell responds when Wallace presses him on why the Republicans decided to block the small business lending bill.

McConnell: That is another TARP. You know, we tried that once under the previous administration and under this one. Basically the lending facility portion of that bill is TARP III or the son of TARP.

Wallace: But you're... because there have been some questions on whether this is a procedural issue... you're now saying that Republicans are against boosting lending assistance to small businesses?

McConnell: This particular provision is another TARP. It puts the government in the position of taking equity positions in businesses. Look... look at what they've done. They're running banks, insurance companies, car companies and nationalizing the student loan business, taking over health care.

We don't need the government taking equity positions, ownership positions in any more private sector businesses. That's not the way out of this. The way out of this is to kill this job killing tax increases coming that they advocate that is going to affect 50% of small business income and 25% of our work force.

That's going to be their plan in September to raise taxes in the middle of a recession.

As Ryan Witt pointed out:

There are a number of notable differences between the two bills including:

- TARP was passed as an emergency measure with little oversight by the legislative branch. The small business lending bill has been passed through committee and scored by the Congressional Budget Office.

- TARP involved over $1.61 trillion of government funds. It is therefore 53 times as large as the small business lending bill.

- TARP funds were almost exclusively given to large banks and corporations like AIG. The funds effectively "bailed out" those companies. The small business lending funds, by limitations put within the bill, go exclusively to the kind of "mom and pop" stores found on Main Street as opposed to Wall Street.

Despite these facts, Republicans always seem to find a reason to oppose proposals from Democrats. In November voters will have a chance to decide whether they agree with the GOP justifications for their most recent obstructionism.

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Chris Wallace asks Mike Huckabee if it's enough for Republicans just to remind voters that they're not in charge of the White House and the Senate and whether they've learned their lessons from 2006 and 2008 if they're hoping to make any electoral gains come this November mid-term election.

Huckabee: Well I think Republicans need to walk the Sawdust Trail. They need to repent for the spending that they were responsible for. They need to apologize and repent for the TARP bill which I still believe was a big huge mistake and only set up the further bailouts that happened when Barack Obama and the Democrats did take full power. The Republicans can’t rely on we’re not the other guys as a reason to get elected.

They do have to say that they will focus on getting rid of these runaway deficits, that they will begin to trim down the debt and not put so much of a burden on future generations and grandchildren. We can’t be the generation that does the polar opposite of our parents’ generation that we call the greatest generation. And we call them that because they sacrificed themselves so their kids would have a better life. We’re the generation that looks like now, are sacrificing our kids so that we can have the best life and not have to pay for our own sins. That’s just recklessly irresponsible and it’s certainly un-American from the standpoint of our history as a nation.

On his HuckPAC site, Huckabee blames Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for not adding transparency to the process, rather than the lack of regulation of the banks that made bailing them out necessary in the first place. So I guess the lesson learned from that debacle is how to blame it on the Democrats in Huck's book. And of course you know when he's talking about these evil runaway deficits, he's not talking about getting rid of tax cuts for the rich or ending our military engagements. I'm sure Huckabee like the rest of the Republicans will be wanting to "save" the next generation by slashing every social safety net we've got left.

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Sherrod Brown would like to see Elizabeth Warren appointed as the head of the new consumer financial protection agency, and so would I. I think she would make an excellent choice. Here's one reason why. She's been holding Tim Geithner's feet to the fire with her current TARP oversight duties.

Geithner and Warren Duel Over Banks’ Health:

When it comes to the health of the banking system, Timothy F. Geithner and Elizabeth Warren don’t see eye to eye.

Mr. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, told the Congressional Oversight Panel on Tuesday that the Troubled Asset Relief Program had been “remarkably effective” in stabilizing the banking system, noting that the program was on track to end in October with only minimal losses to the taxpayers.

But Ms. Warren, the panel’s chairwoman, questioned whether the banks were really stable enough to stand on their own without the program’s government safety net, and she called for another round of stress tests to make sure the banks are sound.

Ms. Warren was particularly concerned about the billions of dollars worth of bad securities and questionable commercial real estate loans still on the banks’ balance sheets. These relics from the boom years could haunt the banks in the future, possibly forcing them back into the arms of the government. Read on...

Elizabeth Warren appeared on the PBS Newshour and expressed similar concerns about the health of the banks and relief on foreclosures with Judy Woodruff.

TARP Watchdog: Foreclosure Program 'Too Small, Too Slow:

JUDY WOODRUFF: We heard Secretary Geithner say today he thinks the TARP program has worked remarkably well. Taxpayers are getting most of their money back. Should that be the main measurement of its success?

ELIZABETH WARREN: Well, it should be one of the measurements.

And, look, it's always part of the measurement that the initial action very well may have pulled us back from the brink of a depression. The big question is, what are we going to do with the money now? TARP is winding down. There's three more months to figure out whether or not we actually have adequate stability in the financial institutions and what to do about home mortgage foreclosure.

We only have this limited period of time to adjust the programs, to change the programs to try to deal with those problems.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, let me ask you about the home mortgage foreclosures. You had a very animated exchange with the secretary over that question.

ELIZABETH WARREN: We did.

JUDY WOODRUFF: He says the success, as we heard him say, can be measured family by family, that it was never intended to help everybody.

ELIZABETH WARREN: Well, you know, no one disputes that. Of course it was never intended to help everybody. But it was intended to help somebody.

The problem we have got -- let me put it this way. This is a program that is saving a tiny number of people, ultimately, by getting them into affordable mortgages that the estimates are they will be able to sustain over time.

And for every one of those families that goes in, there are many, many more families who never make it. And the kinds of numbers we're looking at, we're looking at mortgage foreclosures that stay well over a million families this year, next year, the year after that, the year after that.

That has implications, not only for those families, but for the financial institutions that are holding those mortgages, for the construction industry, for our overall economy. We have a serious problem and a limited amount of time to get ahead of it. HAMP is not getting ahead of it.

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Keith Olbermann talked to The Washington Post's Dave Weigel about the significance of Bob Bennett's defeat in Utah.

How the Club for Growth beat Bob Bennett:

The free-market PAC's spokesman, Mike Connolly, explains all to David Catanese. The rundown:

-- The Club for Growth spent only $177,750 against Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah), "largely on phone calls to delegates, online strategy, mailings and robo-calls."

-- The pivotal moment for Bennett, as many strategists told me, was the election of a new crop of conservative activists in the March 23 caucuses. Those activists, many coming out of the tea party movement, held Bennett's fate in their hands. And he never had a chance at the convention.

It emphasizes that as exciting as this story was, it's simply not repeatable in other states -- Utah's empowerment of the most dedicated activists, which lets them shrink the primary field to their two preferred candidates, is unprecedented.

Keith asked Dave Weigel if electing these tea party candidates is going to be beneficial to the Democrats.

Weigel: Well, they do celebrate whenever this happens. They’ll have a better shot at a couple of Senate seats, a couple of House seats if tea partiers nominate somebody who can’t win. In this case Utah’s a very tough nut to crack. They’ve got a candidate but they’re not optimistic. But in Arizona if J.D. Hayworth beats John McCain they’ve got a Phoenix city councilman who they think could win there.

Charlie Crist if he ends up winning that three way race or if Kendrick Meek wins in Florida that’s better than they could have had in a two way race. They actually had a bad situation this weekend in Hawaii where there’s an intra-Democratic Party feud that cost them a seat. But generally they’re quietly cheering and they’re waiting to unleash a lot of opposition research once these nominees are well chosen. Utah not so much, other states like South Dakota, Ohio, not Ohio yet, other states they’re hoping that tea party candidates make these challenges.

Keith also asked him if some of them getting elected are going to hurt the Republican Party since it's going to show them to be extremists. Weigel expressed something along the lines of my feelings about Republicans. If the crazies like Michele Bachmann haven't already hurt the party, a few more of these wingnuts isn't going to matter much with the electorate as pissed off as they are now at politicians in general.

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DDay summed this up nicely over at FDL -- McCain’s Lie On TARP So Pathetic, Even J.D. Hayworth Can Recognize It:

John McCain just put out a silver platter gift to his primary opponent in Arizona, one that could very easily lead to the end of his political career. [...]

NOVOTNY: Let me ask you about something that Sen. McCain has said. He says that he was misled on TARP by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke. McCain says that the two initially assured him that TARP would be used to counter the mortgage crisis not to bail out the big banks. Do you believe that McCain was misled?

HAYWORTH: No I don’t Monica, and I find it most disturbing. Because the night before, on NBC Nightly News, you may remember John Yang had a report that featured John McCain saying that because of his experience, he was best equipped to represent Arizona. Now in Western vernacular, this ain’t John’s first rodeo. With over a quarter-century of experience, when he suspended his campaign to go back to Washington to sit face to face with those decision makers, now a couple years later, he’s telling us he was misled? I’m sorry, but I have to tell you, this instant revisionist history, saying you oppose something now that you actually voted for, that sounds a whole lot more like John Kerry in 2004 than the John McCain I used to work with.

[...] It’s highly amusing to see John McCain go down in a cascade of lies. If Hayworth can get this message out on the bailout, he’s done in a Republican primary. Mark my words. Read on...

As DDay noted Dennis G. at Balloon Juice has a great post up on Abramoff buddy Hayworth's problems in the general election if he knocks out John McCain. How's that cover up working out for you now McCain? The Grifter and the Coward…:

Both men are also linked to the Abramoff scandal. It will be fascinating to see if McCain will decide to release details about the Abramoff scandal that he has kept covered up for years in a desperate effort to hold onto his Senate seat. Yesterday he gave an indication that he was ready to take that step.

Hayworth is a classic backbencher low level Congressional grifter who wants to take his skills of selling out his constituents to lobbyists, corporations and special interests from the House to the Senate. At one time, he was under investigation by the DOJ for his involvement in the Abramoff Scandal but the Feds decided to stop chasing him after he lost his House seat in 2006. This was not a surprise as the Bush DOJ did everything they could to slow-walk the Abramoff investigation and it was a ploy that kept most co-conspirators like Hayworth safe from any legal jeopardy (Republican do tend to take care of each other—especially when a scandal is involved). Read on...

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Elizabeth Warren visited the set of Real Time again and and talked to Bill Maher about why we still don't have our financial system reformed yet and the power of the bank lobbyists in Congress.

Warren: The problems could not be more obvious and quite frankly the solutions are just as about that obvious, but we can’t seem to get the two together.

[…]

The reason that we aren’t changing things right now is the banks have lobbyists in numbers I’ve never seen. They’re coming, not just you know once a month, once a week or even once a day. These guys are coming in two and three and four times a day. They’re making phone calls. They’ve got the position papers and they just keep slamming in the same direction over and over and over and over, and people who just want to advocate for American families—people who want some changes who want to level the playing field—they just don’t have that kind of lobbying power.

And so what we’re really watching here is a David and Goliath story of just monumental proportions.

As Maher and Warren pointed out, very little has been fixed even there is a set of new rules for credit cards taking affect this week.

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From Sen. Franken's You Tube page:

Sen. Franken spoke on the Senate floor about his new jobs bill, the Strengthening Our Economy Through Employment and Development (SEED) Act. The SEED Act, informally known as Cash for Jobs, would take $10 billion in existing funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and re-allocate it to creating jobs in the private and public sectors.