U.S. Chamber of Commerce | Photo via SEIU/William Melton on Flickr
This shouldn’t surprise anyone, but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been voted the 2009 Scrooge of the Year.

They White House knows they can’t get approval for more TARP money through Congress, so they’re going to double the commitment to Fannie and Freddie from $400 billion to $800 billion and then they can use the money to buy up more toxic assets from the banks. With no Inspector General. No independent oversight. But they have to do it by December 31, because after that it requires congressional approval, which will never happen. So if you’re going to stop it, you have to do it in the next six days. Not a lot of time, especially given the media black hole between Christmas and New Years.

Of course, if it’s just corrupt when Republicans do it but fine if it’s your BFF, no worries.

We may be targeting al Qaeda, but the convenience of killing cleric al-Awlaki now makes me a wee bit suspicious.

Today’s vote in the Senate to pass their health care reform bill was a big win for many people. It was a big win for the drug companies, the biologics industry, the hospital companies, and the for-profit health insurance corporations. They will all get billions of government dollars piled on to their ledgers, and and millions of Americans now forced to buy their products. The vote was also a huge win for the lobbyists who just saw their profits jump thanks to this great opportunity to show their clients just how powerful their hold on Washington really is.

That’s it. Specter is #50; Stabenow is #51; Sanders is #60

Covering the Senate’s vote on the Health Care Reform Bill.

With alarms set extra early to catch the Senate’s 7 AM EST vote on health care redeform, you know you ought to be sleeping right now. If the thought of sending billions of taxpayer dollars right into the coffers of the insurance industry is keeping you up, the friendly folks at FDL have preserved in digital amber this fine moment from the Senate leadership’s post-cloture vote presser.

David Broder a Christmas minuscule.

Featuring a It Must Be Santa video from Bob Dylan and a holiday poem from Brendan Benson, Cory Chisel, and their touring families.

Hey, anything much happen at the ‘ol FDL blog today while I was busy? Harydyharhar I’m kidding. But while clearly healthcare is the Top Story of the day, the month, the year, it’s not in fact the only Big Story out there. Indeed, it could be argued that in the long run climate change, which [...]