Jim DeMint decided against forcing a reading of the new START treaty on the floor of the Senate. He’s hilariously trying to spin this as a victory because Harry Reid delayed the opening of the debate one day.

In a year when kids keep begging Santa for bare necessities for Christmas, the Walton family has been made even richer by Obama and Congress. And the thanks Congress and the American people get is higher prices for toys.

Several banks, in particular Bank of America, have added negative reports to the credit files of borrowers who ask for their notes. It’s part of a broader trend, where the servicers and big banks, having been exposed by the foreclosure fraud crisis, are now lashing out at their critics. They knock the credit scores of anyone who even asks for their note, which is basically a copy of the contract a homeowner thought he signed. The goal is silence and intimidation.

>Tonight is the kickoff of the “Steel on Wheels” tour, featuring MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan and Nucor Steel CEO Dan DiMicco, who are leading a “Get America Working” townhall in Seneca Falls, NY – the home of the Suffrage Movement and the inspiration for “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The townhall is designed to start a “Jobs Movement” that tackles what Ratigan labels as the four biggest obstacles to job creation. You can watch the townhall live here starting at 7pm EST.

AT&T and Verizon are now blocking Wikileaks sites internally, too. Maybe we can just find out who is spying for the government based on which companies implement these kinds of blocks on Wikileaks?

The paper seriously starts with the declarative sentence “Bubbles happen.” That’s the level of intelligence the GOP will bring to bear on this debate.

If Democrats actually feel they have something akin to a hostage crisis, they shouldn’t be paying ransom–this only encourages more hostage-taking in the future, with demands for even bigger ransoms. The proper response to a hostage crisis is to disarm the hostage takers. This is, in effect, what Sen. Tom Harkin’s (D-IA) push to end the current filibuster would do at the beginning of next year.

Next year, at the beginning of the next Congress, the Senate has the opportunity to change its rules by a majority vote. Tom Udall has been pushing this all year; he calls it “the Constitutional option.” Udall would ask for a ruling from the chair, probably Joe Biden, to make a ruling on the ability of the Senate to change the rules. If Republicans object, Democrats will move to table their objection, and they only need 51 votes to uphold it. After that, the Senate can rewrite the rules.

Some old-line Democrats have been wary of this approach, but you get the sense that they are completely fed up with how the Senate operates. So they have set a date – January 5 – to attempt to change the rules.

I would eagerly read anything written by Linda Greenhouse or Reva Siegel on the subject of abortion (or just about any topic). This dynamic duo brings to Before Roe v. Wade decades of careful study and scholarship.

Greenhouse is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who set the industry standard for Supreme Court coverage in thirty years with the New York Times (as well as author of Becoming Justice Blackmun, about Roe’s author). Siegel, a Yale Law professor, is a – to my mind, the – leading legal academic writing on abortion, from her 1992 Stanford article, Reasoning from the Body, to recent work including the shift from fetal-protective to woman-protective arguments against legal abortion.

The Senate as expected passed the tax cut deal by a 81-19 vote. The bill moves to the House, and all expectations are it will pass there as well.