This will be a jam-packed week for the Wall Street reform conference committee, with a final draft expected to go to both chambers of Congress by Friday. And many of the more important details remain up in the air. In particular, the consequential, hard-wired reforms designed to reduce risk and even the size of risky markets still have to clear the final hurdles.

Opposition to the blockade of Gaza moved yesterday to the docks of Oakland while Tony Blair led a PR campaign to sell a new “easing” of Israel’s efforts to keep essential goods from the Gazans.

• I blame the environmentalists, Al Gore and Obama.
• How do we prevent another Deepwater? Less regulation.
• Green shoots in the job market
• The Shrill One: now and later.
• Wingnuts heart BP.

Let me post the first of what I’m sure will be many more lies this week from BP.

The Rolling Stones-Saint of Me.

How, then, Ted Olson asked, can the expression of that protected private right result in the state’s withholding of the fundamental marital bond? It can’t. It especially can not when no harm has been shown, by the evidence.

Former Senator Alan Simpson, the co-chair of President Obama’s deficit commission, complained that the government had spent the money it borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, just as it does with the money it borrows from anyone else.

In the midst of tracking news of Gaza this week, I heard the report that the Saville Commission on Bloody Sunday had – after 38 years – found that the actions of the British government on January 30, 1972 were “unjustified” and “indefensible.”

The current meme in the BP-protecting Tory community, both here and across the ocean, is that President Obama, one of the most corporate-friendly US politicians around today, is an evil Brit-hating Socialist. The wagons are being circled and the propaganda flows like a broken oil well.

Before the supporters of the president’s brutal, costly counterinsurgency strategy (referred to without affection as “COINdinistas”) get started this week, I want to reiterate a point I made a couple of months ago when the last round of silly, disingenuous pro-counterinsurgency celebrations took place.