Welcome to Round 1 of our semifinal voting for FDL’s “Name Our Pot Campaign” contest. We had hundreds of entries, way too many to consider fairly in one night, so we’re breaking it up over several days.  Round 2 will continue at Late Nite next week, followed by however many semifinal rounds it takes to [...]

Using some of the strongest language I’ve ever seen from this group, Health Care for America Now basically charged WellPoint with murder today, responding to the Murray Waas article showing that the insurance giant systematically dropped breast cancer patients from the rolls.

A judge in Florida discovered that in two cases, two different banks were trying to foreclose first mortgages on the same piece of property. Judges in every state need to be alerted to this systemic problem; they need to see a complete paper trail and not risk allowing an entity that does not own the note or mortgage to take someone’s house.

The same judge who denied the habeas petition for Yasin Ismail last week, Judge Henry H. Kennedy, Jr. of the U.S. District Court, Washington, DC, approved the petition for a different prisoner, Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, primarily because the evidence against him had been produced by torture. The two tortured “witnesses” against Uthman were presumed al-Qaida members, also held at Guantanamo, Sharqwi Abdu Ali Al-Hajj and Sanad Yislam Ali Al Kazimi. This brings the scorecard to 35 of 48 habeas cases from Guantanamo decided against the government. I don’t know how many of them were due to tortured evidence.

Despite a steady stream of warm, fuzzy stories about General Stanley McChrystal insisting that his COIN strategy is all about protecting civilians and that he spends a good portion of his time imparting this wisdom on the topic to troops, pointless killings of civilians continue.

Ever since the terms “too big to fail” entered the political discourse, the most obvious question has been, if a financial institution is too big, to dangerous to the economy to allow it to fail willy nilly, isn’t it too big to exist? Why aren’t we breaking up these threatening monsters?

At the end of this month, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform will hold its first meeting and begin to consider ways to dig our nation out from the irresponsible deficits created by the Bush Administration. This presidentially-created 18-member commission is tasked with addressing “the growth of entitlement spending and the gap between the projected revenues and expenditures of the Federal Government.”

While I and many of my fellow Members of Congress support efforts to balance the budget, it is critically important that this commission examine every part of the federal budget during this process. For example, the Commission should most certainly consider the $985 billion dollars spent on foreign wars since 2001.

It’s important for people, Democratic Congressional members, consultants, and political pundits to realize just how completely and totally Democrats failed with their health care messaging, especially when it comes to the issue of the deficit. Democrats easily wasted more than two months waiting around and making minor changes to the bills so they could get good CBO scores showing the bill would be projected to reduce the deficit. They risked huge internal fights over the excise tax used to make the bill a deficit reducer. Looking at the polls, this effort was a massive waste from a political perspective.

Dodd seems to think that the discretionary threat of dissolution will act as a deterrent to bankers to staying within the lines of size and particularly risk. Tim Geithner basically said the same thing on Good Morning America today. While he acknowledged the danger in having the six largest banks control 63% of all assets, he focused far more on what would happen “in the future” if they treated those assets like a stake at a casino again.

The SEC complaint against GS is straight-forward, but it doesn’t tell us everything the SEC knows. Here are some questions and some details on this fascinating case.