Yesterday in downtown Los Angeles, 22 activists, including the head of SEIU Local 721 and members of ACCE (the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment), were arrested outside a Chase bank for protesting the foreclosure crisis. The banks have basically disregarding all the legal constraints on their activities, and people have begun to fight back.

Two developments have started to fragment the Internet of late. One looks quite a bit more benign, but both threaten the openness that has been a hallmark of the connected world.

Alan Blinder has a great story in the Wall Street Journal Friday about the US economy and how impossibly tilted it is toward the rich. You have working people producing for their employers and not coming close to sharing in the benefit. You have stagnant incomes for the last 35 years, which is absolutely incredible.

And this leads necessarily to income inequality.

Right now, the biggest date on the Senate calendar is January 5. Pressure will have to be put on the Democrats in Congress to change the rules and make the chamber more functional. As for what members need the most pressure, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) chuckled. “I’m sure in general that will become known.”

As both a liberal and a sports fanatic, I jumped at the chance to host today’s salon with Dave Zirin to talk about his new book “Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love.” Dave’s book is a very smart, witty and hard-hitting look at how jerkbag sports owners have transformed their stadiums from blue-collar and middle-class entertainment venues into massive profit-making behemoths tailored more toward corporate America than Joe Six Pack. Average families have found themselves priced out of going to games, since owners have cordoned off entire sections of ballparks for luxury boxes and club seats. And to make matters worse, these same owners have grown ever-more-fond of shaking down taxpayers for cash to build their multiplexes despite the fact that many of these taxpayers will never be able to afford to attend a game. This heinous practice is particularly glaring in Washington, DC where the city forked over hundreds of millions of dollars to build a new ballpark for the perpetually terrible Washington Nationals, despite the fact that the city at the time was planning to shut down a whopping 24 public schools.

If you are an individual without employer-provided health insurance that plans to get insurance on the exchange, the existence of the individual mandate (or lack there of) will likely have little or no impact on what you will pay in premiums.

During the Presidential campaign, President Obama said that “change happens from the bottom up.” We just saw an example of that today.

So would there be another opportunity for the bill? Senate leadership aides tell FDL News that they will try to include the bill in their version of a continuing resolution. The Senate’s continuing resolution would only fund the government through February 18, in all likelihood, giving the more conservative incoming Congress an early opportunity to slash federal spending. But the Senate leadership does want to move that along with the food safety bill.

Yes, today’s Senate vote, likely to repeal this odious policy, is another step on the road to the end of DADT. But it does not implement open service immediately.

Tim Geithner has changed his tune somewhat, backing a bill that would clarify the Treasury’s right to allow Hardest Hit Fund grant money to be used for foreclosure legal aid, but it’s unclear whether there’s enough time in the end of the legislative session to get this done.