If someone like Corker won’t play along with the plan to cut social security, then it’s unlikely to get the mix of Republicans and deficit hawk Democrats they’ll need to pass the Commission recommendations.

Sadly, it appears the Obama Administration now falls firmly in the same camp of having “deficit reduction” just mean stealing from the poor to give to the rich. While the president talks about how we need to reduce the deficit, he has his staff and surrogates fighting diligently to increase the deficit by making sure hedge-fund managers and wealthy Wall Street investors pay a lower tax rate than teachers and police officers.

Yesterday I went to GRITtv and spoke with host Laura Flanders and Louisiana author Jordan Flahrety about BP’s exploitation of working people in the Gulf Coast. We discussed just a few of the many problems facing fishermen, recovery workers, and residents of the Gulf that are all at the mercy of BP.

That’s right, 3 out of every 4 habeas cases of Guantanamo prisoners have found no reason to hold them in custody. These, we were told, are the “worst of the worst” prisoners, the ones that simply cannot be released into civil society. But 3/4 of them are innocent of any crime, according to federal judges which historically give a lot of deference to the wishes of the government.

More than one percent of all Americans — 3.3 million people — will have lost their unemployment benefits by month’s end if Congress doesn’t pass an extension of long-term benefits. They represent a huge chunk of our neighbors, our customers, our family members. And our country seems to have decided they and those who depend on them are expendable.

CTEH is the company contracted by BP to monitor air levels as they related to recovery worker safety in the Gulf of Mexico. The firm, which has a sordid history of covering up corporate environmental disasters, just released new data with BP yesterday that shows disturbing levels of toxic dispersants in 20% of offshore recovery workers and 15% of near-shore workers. But these just aren’t any toxic dispersants. It’s the same chemical blamed for chronic health problems in Exxon Valdez recovery workers that is now poisoning at least one-fifth of BP’s offshore recovery workers.

Here are just a few of the people who wrote big checks to Reshma. Someone is going to have to explain to me how it’s morally superior to take money directly from people than it is PACS, or how it makes a candidate any less free from the influence of their donors.

One thing is clear – if strategic defaults are so attractive, it’s a sign that the market is broken, not the people making self-interested decisions. Loan modifications have done absolutely zilch to help struggling borrowers. The options on the table that could have provided relief, like cramdown or own-to-rent, didn’t get adopted. And so you have a situation where the rich buy and drop homes with relative impunity, but the most vulnerable borrowers, the ones pushed into loans they couldn’t afford, suffer the consequences.

The logical next step after treating counseling on conflict negotiating as material support for terrorism is to treat reporting on conflict negotiations as material support for terrorism.

If the Obama Administration’s Justice Department declined to appeal the ruling, the point would be moot and the ruling would stand. Lawyers for the plaintiffs expect an appeal, however, which would go to the 1st Circuit Court, and then potentially the Supreme Court.