A Progressive, going back to William Jennings Bryan, would want easy money and low interest rates.  Bernanke delivered.  What is needed is another Bernanke.

Regulation of Wall Street and taxes and spending and the rest, not the Fed role.

I wonder where this fits in:

   Mr. Summers, who was director of Mr. Obama's National Economic Council early in his presidency, was widely believed to be the president's first choice. But opposition from liberals and women's groups--and, importantly, from some Senate Banking Committee Democrats--had been mounting...

    Mr. Obama angrily defended Mr. Summers at a closed-door meeting with lawmakers, but he did little to thaw views among many liberal and centrist lawmakers that Mr. Summers was too combative and too close to Wall Street.

Since article is behind a pay wall, here's the link to where I read it: FDL NEws Desk.

So...was this the head-fake portion of Obama's trademarked 11-dimensional game plan, meant to distract from his "real" first choice, setting up the Senate to be amenable to whoever is eventually nominated because it would just be unacceptable to reject a second name?

Will we regret opposing Summers when we learn who the nominee will be?

Or does none of this matter, since the Fed Chair doesn't really "do" anything much?

Summers' people and Yellen's people (aka unnamed sources and leaks) have been playing politics with the position from day 1. Don't be surprised if the most likely choice has always been behind door number 3. There are at least a handful of very qualified people to choose from.

Obama has also been very good at choosing women. Would this tendency bias lead to a stronger possibility of his choice being the first female Fed chair?

Yoiks ... you throw the "justify your life type question" in addition.  Whether that was deflection or not, I will give a brief answer both because I'm too lazy this a.m. to write an essay and to avoid any incoming remark about the size of a reply.  So ... briefly: (1) As I have discussed a lot in the past, I am a fan of health care reform, and the includes the ACA because of the changed burden of proof on insurers together with the benefits that millions will enjoy. Contemporaneous with that position, I would expect & hope that as the years go by the ACA will be improved (as were the Social Security and Medicare programs over the years.)  For 70 years or more, Presidents endeavored in varying degrees to achieve health care reform ... it required tremendous coordination, compromise, and community skills ... only President Obama was successful.  (2) Two women appointees to the Supreme Court and a number of appellate nominees. That speaks for itself.  The ability to recognize the team that the selection of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State created.  Fashioning the Consumer Protection Bureau through the skilled, adept Elizabeth Warren.  On matters of special significance for women: The early executive action on stem cell research and the early deliverable legislatively to rectify equal pay issues (Lily Ledbetter.)  (3) On Immigration reform, the bold executive action known as the Dreamers' EO ... and the continued direction and push for comprehensive immigration reform.  IMO, when this initiative succeeds -- and I believe that this moral mandate for change surely will -- it will also represent the mastery of achieving reform that has eluded others for decades. (4) Despite your legitimate concerns in general about the growth of wars in our society in recent decades, President Obama acted quickly but methodically to draw down Bush's War in Iraq and he is on schedule to draw down the Afghanistan troops in 2014.  I also strongly believe that the Syria situation has furthered the carrot & stick approach so useful in the hands of skilled politicians and diplomats. (We will continue to disagree about the "coincidentally" rapid march toward resolution via UN agreement after the stick known as believable threat of force.) (5) However the President evolved on the civil rights matter of same sex marriage, he did; and, his DOJ followed suit.  The transition from the hurtful DADT application to open service in the military was the right thing to do, and because it was done with the cooperation of the military (as skillfully built by this President), it was an impressive display of needed transition in the bureaucracy as well.  (6) Given my own EPA background, suffice to say that his Administration's approach to climate change is one that takes advantage of any opening for more restrictive regulations of greenhouse gas emissions.  To date, he is weighing carefully a pathway that provides environmental protection for the Ogalala aquifer with the harsh realities of Repub demagogy as to economic effects in the region.  (7) The big issue always must be the economy.  To begin with, any President that had to confront the collapsing economic situation in 2009 should not have survived the next election.  Most politicians expected a one-termer.  President Obama engineered the stimulus (not the size some of us wanted, but a substantial one at the that which had been predicted to fail in Congress.)  Whether it was his continual efforts to provide jobs via infrastructure repair, rebuilding & construction, green growth, etc. his efforts saw a stabilization ... minor growth, but stabilization.  The citizenry clearly recognized that he used every opportunity to grow the economy in face of those clamoring for austerity provisions by harping on the debt limit (the reprise of this should be heard again in the next weeks.) The recognized that those efforts and rewarded him with another term by a surprisingly large margin.

OK.  That was my off-the-cuff response about the laudable aspects of Obama's almost 5-year Administration.  Somehow he and his family have managed the no small feat of not being ensnared in any tangle of personal scandal ... that seems to be an achievement in itself given the political combat atmosphere in DC these past twenty years.

One major area where we need to do a bit of redirection, imo, involves the correction of our long spate of fear following 9-11.  I am supportive of legislative change of the type proposed by Senator Mark Udall (CO) as to the seemingly unrestrained gathering of information on US citizens.  Understanding that the balance shifts from time to time, nonetheless, a NSA "fix" is in order.

It's supposed to be "just a game" - and it's a rather silly one, at that - but we've imbued it with so much meaning and poured so much money into it, treated it like an unpaid tryout for the pros, so we can't then fall back on the it's-just-a-game thing and call it a day.  

No, they'd be having fun playing on the full-of-divots, dusty, imagine-this-is-where-the-yard-markers-are fields when they could cadge some time from the girls' softball team, and be lucky to get a frat-house, dorm-full of spectators to sit on the splinter-y bleachers.

College football is a business, not a game, kdog, but I guess by the rules of business these days, who cares if something goes wrong as long as it doesn't affect the cash flow, right?  You think Nicholls State went up against Oregon in week 1 for the love of the game?  You think they loved the game so much they were willing to get 66 points laid on them while managing only a measly field goal?

No, Nicholls went to Oregon because of the big, fat check the school got for it.

And I gather that it is not Pac-10 that you're dismissing as "the beer league" but the Big Ten?