I don’t think that increasing fees and ripping off customers are the only sources of big bank revenue – they have the carry trade, making billions off the difference in interest between what they can get from the discount window and what they can loan out. And they are still engaging in plenty of risky activities like high-frequency and derivative trading. But certainly, fees and bad loan contracts still exist. And it would be the CFPB’s mandate to stamp them out.

Oh well. At least this time she didn’t compare herself to God.

IANAE (I am not an engineer), but I’m getting a little uneasy since the goals of BP and the government diverge.

Oregon voters will decide in November if the state should have medical marijuana dispensaries in the spirit of California and Colorado. A ballot initiative, known as I-28, would legalize nonprofit medical marijuana dispensaries to sell marijuana to card-carrying patients. According to Oregon Business, the initiative barely qualified for November’s ballot.

Every single one of the issues that has led to tomorrow’s confirmation hearing is an issue that goes to the heart of the problems identified in the WaPo piece: the ongoing lack of real value-added analysis to make sense of all the intelligence collected, the opacity and potential waste and fraud of the entire IIC, and the turf battles that contribute to that waste.

So while I’m grateful that this story (and more importantly, the issues behind the story, since the content of today’s installment has largely already been reported by Tim Shorrock) is getting as much attention as it is, I’m aghast that the WaPo didn’t try to contextualize it by framing the issues in it in terms of Clapper’s nomination to be DNI.

Joe Biden played down expectations for the celebrated July 2011 “inflection point” in Afghanistan by lowering the bar on the number of troops that may leave the country in the first phase to an almost comical number. You get the sense that these guys are petrified to be left with no wars to fight and no toughness to display.

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones writes, “This is stunningly bad journalism… The Bloomberg results make for an exciting headline, but that’s about it. Correlation with reality is pretty close to zero.”

• Still flailing in the Gulf.
• The War on Terra: a special investigation.
• Disparaging the unemployed — always brilliant politics.
• The Pundit Delusion.
• Totally non-racist organization boots racist leader.
• Deficit peacocks on parade.

“Freedom” GOP style

John Lennon-Imagine