This is class war, pure and simple. The rich against the poor. Hedge fund billionaires and defense contractors against senior citizens struggling to get by. Just in time to jam it through a lame duck Congress before the Christmas break, something both John Conyers and John Boehner have warned about — a repeat of what Erskine Bowles planned to do in the 90s.

With both houses of Congress now having passed a Wall Street reform bill, the action now moves to the conference committee. There, House and Senate negotiators will work to finalize a bill with new regulations for the financial services industry, and report back for a final Congressional vote. Here’s a run-down of items in contention.

Almost 48 hours after Rep. Ed Markey pressured BP to put on the Internet a live video feed of the gushing oil pipe, you can finally see the choppy images from the ocean floor. Of course, that’s only if you’re using Internet Explorer, or some instances of Firefox.

The problems surrounding what should be a simple task of putting live video on the Internet are really a microcosm for all the incredible fuck ups in capping the pipe gushing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Senator Al Franken and 22 cosponsors introduced the Student Non-Discrimination Act, a companion to companion bill to H.R. 4530, introduced by Rep. Jared Polis in the House early this year, which would prohibit discrimination in schools on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression.

Kudos to Rachel Maddow for showing us the language of Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which establishes as the law of this land that America will be built on the principle of non-discrimination, and then focusing on how far from that basic America value Rand Paul is.

I’m thoroughly unsurprised by the news of Dennis Blair’s ouster. After all, it’s an impossible job that appears to serve one purpose: to provide a deck chair you can rearrange every two years as a scapegoat for our continuing inability to detect terrorists even with all the surveillance toys we’ve got.

Wah! That girl’s beating me up!

Financial Reform passes, it’s all relatively derivative of something.

Crosby, Stills, and Nash – Southern Cross.

How NOT to select candidates for your political party.