I don’t disagree with Adam Levitin at all about the foreclosure crisis and the deliberate backing away from any accountability for the banks. Clearly this accountability crisis is at the forefront of not only our financial meltdown and our economic malaise, but a host of other matters including civil liberties in particular.

However, without concluding that a corner has been turned or that a new era has come to Washington, let me relate a few disparate items here for you.

Obama said it wouldn’t be easy, and it wasn’t – a lot of American and Afghan blood was spilled in order to “break the momentum” and get a seat at the table. And it certainly wasn’t quick, these talks have been in the works for well over a year now. So, how did it go?

Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, isn’t having any of it…Damn, what’s the problem?

The public ought to know who supports what position in this debate. And who knows, maybe Democrats could get enough crossover votes to pass the middle class tax cuts only, although the prospects of that holding in the Senate are quite dim.

House Republicans are demanding that Gen. Petraeus appear in person to testify on the Administration’s December review of policy in the war in Afghanistan, the Politico reports. According to Politico, the key reason that the Pentagon doesn’t want Petraeus to testify is that they are trying to bury the review because they have nothing good to report.

When all the House races are finally called, Democrats will have likely lost, on net, roughly 62 to 65 seats. It was a true Republican wave, and the results were worse than you would have expected, even considering the poor economic conditions and the fact that the President’s party tends to lose seats in the first midterm. In light of these huge losses, two big Democratic strategists, James Carville and Stan Greenberg, are pointing out that Obama’s messaging leading up to the election was utterly unhelpful to his party.

Maybe going around Congress and spending $173 million on Joe Lieberman’s cherished porno scanners wasn’t the absolute best idea.

Social Security benefits are, on average, extremely low. They are not a sufficient replacement for prior earnings, and they aren’t really enough for subsistence living absent other sources of income. Cutting that meager benefit is simply the wrong path and will send many seniors into abject poverty.

When Steven Rattner published this piece on the GM IPO in HuffPo, he had not yet been sued by NY’s Attorney General for allegedly being “willing to do whatever it took to get his hands on pension fund money including paying kickbacks, orchestrating a movie deal, and funneling campaign contributions,” nor had he yet settled–with no admission of guilt–the SEC investigation that alleges he, “delivered special favors and conducted sham transactions that corrupted the Retirement Fund’s investment process.” Thus, it would go too far to call the Steven Rattner that published that piece a fraudster, or even an alleged fraudster.

But a big part of this victory lap is fraudulent.

At the same time that the US and NATO are explicitly setting the end date in Afghanistan later and later into the decade, a new poll from Quinnipiac shows that public support for the war has completely collapsed. A majority of Americans now opposed continued involvement in Afghanistan. The ideological lines on this issue are interesting. . . .

Democrats simply don’t have discipline on motion to recommit votes, and depending on the motion the Republicans could have easily mucked up the bill. Therefore, a bill which got a vote of 258-154 today failed, because under suspension of the rules it needed a 2/3 vote for passage.