Elizabeth Warren has been busy setting up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Though there are indications that she was the prime mover in stopping a bill that would have legalized out-of-state and electronic notarizations and made it harder for foreclosure defense attorneys to challenge paperwork, and though Warren has made it clear that she favors the 50 state Attorneys General investigation as the best way to get to the bottom of the crisis, she has been somewhat reticent about foreclosure fraud. No longer.

Is there anyone more emotionally needy than a bunch of anonymous bankers?

• Happy holidays.
• Another nut for the 2012 GOP bowl?
• Ruled by the ridiculous.
• It’s no longer possible to parody these idiots.
• But…but…the showers!

I guess there’s not as much graft to go with the continued failure.

Dean Martin and Victor Borge — Musical Phonetic Punctuation, from The Dean Martin Show.

Everyone loves leftovers, unless it’s some political yuckiness still sticking around. And everyone one probably has a moldy smelly chunk of of something they’d like to toss. . . .

We saw how during the first wave of the financial crisis, bad news had a tendency to metastasize, compounding the woes of a Bear Stearns or a Lehman Brothers. This is going to get bad for at least one bank, and the most likely candidate is BofA.

An editorial in Tuesday’s New York Times praises as “A Step Toward Fairness” a ridiculous new proposal from the Obama administration that will keep a number of Guantanamo prisoners in legal limbo with no hope of a real judicial hearing on their status. At the same time, it appears that there will be no effort to close Guantanamo, now approaching more than a year past Obama’s target for closing it. Little wonder, then, that Tuesday’s Times also reports that erstwhile rival insurgent groups in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area now seem to be setting rivalries aside to attack US interests. Keeping Guantanamo open only feeds such hatred against the US that rivals will team up.

The usual suspects always make the structural argument because they just don’t believe in fiscal policy and the normal means of stimulating investment and consumption. And I think it’s important to understand the fate to which that consigns 15 million unemployed Americans.

The fall and decline of an empire can take many years, but certain “benchmarks” (as imperial courts have been known to call them) can measure the progress in one year alone. Take, for example, the year 2010.