In case you didn’t see it, The New Yorker’s piece on the Kochs is superb. Their old man was apparently a real charmer.

Bang for your buck, the morally bankrupt way.

Mike And The Mechanics – The Living Years This song has always resonated with me, since I lost my father at a young age…! What’s on your mind tonite…?

Americans didn’t exactly live up to the Founding Fathers’ ideals this past weekend.

Proposition 19, the California initiative to legalize, tax and regulate cannabis, is far more popular than any politician or ballot measure this up for a vote this November—at least on the social networking behemoth Facebook.

Treasury gets to set up the CFPB before it transitions into the Federal Reserve, and the interim director of the agency they name can get started right away without Senate confirmation. And he or she can hold the office indefinitely, or until the President gets a nominee confirmed for the post.

I don’t expect Warren to just become a permanent interim director. But with her in place and making the rules for the various industries to follow, she would have less of a problem with confirmation if nominated.

Speaking in Tongues teaches the advantage of students taking part in an optional immersion programs for Mandarin, Cantonese and Spanish, following four students ranging in age from kindergarten to 8th grade during a year of their studies.

According to rumors in recent news reports, the deficit commission plans to cut Social Security benefits for middle-income beneficiaries.

In fact, the banks essentially created HAMP. It was their counter-offer to cramdown, their attempt to put a foreclosure-mitigation scheme friendlier to their interests in place. Under the proposal, the banks would be allowed to work out their terms with borrowers first, before resorting to a bankruptcy judge. This is how it worked in the House version of cramdown, which passed in March 2009; the homeowner had to negotiate a voluntary loan mod with the lender before going to the bankruptcy judge. And this may have worked, but only because, for the servicers, cramdown would have loomed in the background as a big stick, forcing a negotiation with a level playing field for the borrower.

Instead, you ended up with a voluntary program that provided meager incentive payments to the servicers, but didn’t force them in any way to work out terms. You got all carrot but no stick.

The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus reports on the non-coercive interrogation of an Al Qaeda suspect without noting that the interrogator involved, Stephen Gaudin, was a participant in the torture interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.