Today's episode of shit Obama is talking about 3 years too late

Of course even this isn't quite enough. And of course it's an empty campaign stunt. But at least he gets the conversation in the right direction.

President Barack Obama will announce a plan to shift some federal dollars away from colleges and universities that don't control tuition costs and new competitions in higher education to encourage efficiency as part of an effort to contain soaring college costs.

Meanwhile, some quick notes regarding some of the seemingly "populist" theme of Obama's State of the Union address. I recommend Taibbi's inconclusive but helpful speculation here. Even Obama's mortgage fraud investigation unit led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman could be just more clever cover for letting the banks get away with whatever they want.

The question is, how real of an investigation will we get? The fact that Schneiderman’s co-chairs are Lanny Breuer and Robert Khuzami make me extremely skeptical. I’m actually not sure that both men, in an ideal world, wouldn’t be targets of their own committee’s investigation.

Before joining the SEC, Khuzami was senior counsel of the fixed-income desk at Deutsche Bank, which was creating exactly the sort of dicey CDOs that this investigation ought to be targeting.

Breuer, meanwhile, worked for the hotshot defense firm Covington and Burling, which among other things provided legal help that led to the creation of the electronic mortgage registry system MERS.

The MERS issues are probably more the province of the foreclosure settlement, but the banks’ joint efforts to evade the paper registry system are certainly an element of the larger effort to defraud MBS investors that will be covered by this committee. In fact, I’m not sure that mortgage securitization and the proliferation of CDOs and CDS could have taken place on anywhere near the scale that it did without MERS.

So having those two guys attached to Schneiderman’s hip makes me wonder what is going on here. Khuzami’s presence is especially odd. The theoretical reason we need a committee like this in the first place is because the federal agency that is supposed to be doing this work – the SEC – has stubbornly refused to do so.

And that, more than anything, is the tell. If after three years of refusing to bring the already in place enforcement apparatus against the banks, why on Earth would anyone expect the President to sanction suddenly radical action by some newly created committee? As David Dayen suggests here, this is all just more horrific Obama political phoniness.

Only this isn’t a victory at all, at least not yet. Schneiderman may be trying to work from within, but he’s saddled with a panel full of co-chairs tied to banks with a history of obstructing accountability. The united front of Justice Democrats has been nicked. Kamala Harris, facing enormous pressure to go along with the settlement (she remains opposed at this point), now must contend with being the main big-state holdout AND having a family member co-chairing the investigation panel!

This is a classic Obama move, putting a threat or a rival inside the tent. It happened with Elizabeth Warren and David Petraeus and Jon Huntsman, and it’s happening again. It divides the coalition against a weak settlement, which will at the least shut down state and federal prosecutions on foreclosure fraud and servicing issues. It puts hopes in yet another investigation, one with little chance for success.

Obama, much like Bush before him, was always primarily interested in protecting the banksters. Why should anyone expect that to suddenly change just because there's an election coming?