The dream world of Villager punditry is truly something to behold. Take William Cohan who has a suggestion in the Washington Post for Elizabeth Warren, who has just declared her candidacy to run for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts currently held by Republican Scott Brown.

Seven weeks removed from the political reality that cost her a job as one of the nation’s best-known — and controversial — advocates for consumers and the middle class, Elizabeth Warren now officially wants to return to Washington as the junior senator from Massachusetts. But if she is really serious about wanting to help working Americans and reform Wall Street, Warren should consider a different line of work: She should get a job as a partner at Goldman Sachs.

The idea isn’t as crazy as it sounds.

No, it is as crazy as it sounds, if not crazier. The idea that Elizabeth Warren, after railing for years at how banks like Goldman Sachs have been profiting while impoverishing the middle classes by taking advantage of deregulation and lax oversight by the government, could simply pick up the phone and ask Goldman Sachs to hire her to reform it, and that Goldman Sachs would offer her a partnership in order to reform itself is doubly bizarre.

The only way that this could happen is if there is cynical collusion between Warren and Goldman Sachs in which Warren is just another cynical academic on the make and agrees to uses her reputation for integrity to get a high-paying job providing cover for Goldman Sachs for the pretense that it is serious about reforming itself. But if that is the case, then this demolishes Cohan’s argument that this move would help in reforming Goldman Sachs and Wall Street.

What amazes me is that these Villager pundits actually get paid to churn out this drivel.

The occasion of the unveiling of the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial causes Cornel West to decry the oligarchic control of the US.

The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.

As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.

Michele Bachmann is continuing to take a well-deserved pounding on her irresponsible publicizing of a claim by some person she said she met who said that her daughter had become mentally retarded as a result of taking the HPV vaccine.

What started out as an effective attack on Rick Perry, suggesting during Monday’s debate that he had issued an executive order mandating that the vaccinations be given to all young girls in Texas in return from contributions from the vaccine manufacturer Merck, has now become an albatross around her own neck. In doing so, she has deflected attention not only from Rick Perry but from the important question of how drug companies are unduly influencing decisions about health policy.

NPR interviewed Steven Miles, the bioethicist at the University of Minnesota who offered a $1,000 reward if Bachmann could provide “a properly signed medical release form so that these documents can be reviewed by highly qualified neurologists to see if this claim is true.” Bachmann has not responded to NPR’s queries about this challenge to produce the document. Miles further said that, “If we had a vaccine that would prevent a nonsexually caused cancer that affected 10,000 women a year, this would be a no-brainer. This controversy over the HPV vaccine is about the sexual politics in the United States. It is not about the medicine.”

Miles is absolutely right. The thought that somewhere some people might be having sex outside of marriage totally freaks out the religious right.

In a further sign of the steady deterioration of the US infrastructure, the US postal service may become the next victim of the oligarchy’s drive to eliminate anything that does not benefit themselves. The US postal service is an institution that is committed to serving people all over the nation and it delivers mail to even the remotest parts of the country at the same cost to anyone anywhere. So those of us in the cities where the volume of mail is large essentially subsidize the mail services of the more remote areas. It is a socialized system (i.e., one that spreads the cost over the entire population and thus makes it affordable to everyone) and thus targeted by those who oppose any measure that promotes the general welfare. Chuck Zlatkin describes the campaign to destroy the postal service. If it succeeds, the US will be the rare (only?) country that does not have a national mail system.

Phil Rubio explains to Stephen Colbert how the postal service has been shackled and the efforts being made to save it.

She made the announcement yesterday that she will be running for the US senate in Massachusetts. Her website is ElizabethWarren.com.

The oligarchy will pull out all the stops and pour money into this race to try to prevent her winning. People are going to troll through her past and drag her through the mud. This election will be a good indication of whether an earnest, centrist, political amateur can defeat the oligarchic machine and its professional cadres. I sincerely hope so.

My daughter moved to Massachusetts last month to go to graduate school and will likely work on this campaign. Although I live in Ohio, I gave the Warren campaign a contribution yesterday because improbable candidacies need money early.

Two bioethicists are offering up to $11,000 for the identification and release of the medical records of the person whom Michele Bachmann claimed became mentally retarded after getting the HPV vaccine. These kinds of irresponsible statements can cause great harm if not quickly challenged, as we saw with the claim that the MMR vaccination causes autism, and the media’s idiotic ‘balanced’ approach that treats even empirical questions as matters of opinon (“Some say this but others say that”) does nothing to dispel them.

I am glad that in this vacuum, private citizens are stepping up to clear the record.

“These types of messages in this climate have the capacity to do enormous public health harm,” [Steven Miles, a U of M bioethics professor] said of why he made the offer. “The woman, assuming she exists, put this claim into the public domain and it’s an extremely serious claim and it deserves to be analyzed.

Bachmann is sensing trouble and trying to wriggle out.

Bachmann somewhat walked back her comments Tuesday on Sean Hannity’s radio show, where she said she had “no idea” if the HPV vaccine was linked to mental illness. “I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scientist, I’m not a physician,” Bachmann said. “All I was doing is reporting what this woman told me last night at the debate.”

No, you are none of those things. But you are a high profile elected official running for the presidency, which means that your words get hugely amplified and so should know not to pass along stories that have the potential to cause panic and harm until you have had time to substantiate them. Why is that so hard to understand?