Bank of America wound up with what many observers found to be a favorable settlement with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over repurchase claims on mortgage backed securities where the bank violated clear representations of the product. But Wells Fargo continues to maintain that they’re the “good” bank in all of this. The facts show otherwise.

A long-term report on the murder of Danny Pearl has just been released. The WaPo describes the report this way.

A recently completed investigation of the killing of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan nine years ago makes public new evidence that a senior al-Qaeda operative executed the Wall Street Journal reporter.

Khalid Sheik Mohammed — the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, who is being held at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — said at a military hearing in 2007 that he killed Pearl. But there have been lingering doubts about his involvement, and the United States has not charged him with the crime.

Laurence Platt, a partner at the firm K&L Gates, which defended Wells Fargo and US Bank in the Ibanez case, basically threatened the American homeowner with sky-high interest rates if the banks aren’t allowed to run their own private land recording system.

Now match that list of actual problems against anything we’ve heard from the Obama Administration or the new Tea-GOPer Congress about their priorities. There’s almost zero overlap. There’s no jobs program, no mortgage solution, no state budget rescue, no reining in the financial sector before the MOTU tank the economy again, no end to wars, no restoration of the rule of law. In short, we see nothing even remotely helpful coming from Washington.

The conservative Republican Study Committee has released a document identifying $2.5 trillion in cuts over 10 years, a tangible list of programs conservatives would like to eliminate. This represents the right flank in the upcoming debate over spending that will consume much of the first year of this Congress.

On June 29, 2010, the United States Supreme Court vacated the judgment in which former Alabama Governor Donald Siegelmand and former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy were convicted on multiple counts and remanded the case to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals “for further consideration in light of Skilling v. United States“. Oral arguments relating to this further consideration were held Wednesday in Jacksonville, Florida, in a thirteenth floor courtroom of the Bryan Simpson United States Courthouse there.

Tim Geithner won’t show up to House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa’s first hearing, on TARP and the foreclosure crisis, sending a top deputy instead. The deputy, Tim Massad, has no real experience with the Administration’s foreclosure mitigation programs. Maybe Geithner didn’t want to testify on foreclosures because he didn’t have anything to say beyond “Everything’s great!”

Over the past 12 days the Gallup daily tracking poll found Obama’s job approval numbers have been net positive every day.

The NBC poll is that the deficit is not nearly as important as job creation. And a separate poll from Celinda Lake shows that Social Security cuts would have a severely bad effect on the President’s electoral chances

For the past 2 years, wingnut pundits have been telling us how awesome Texas’ economy is under our Republican rulers. Never mind that Rick Perry was papering over our fiscal problems with socialism federal stimulus money — the narrative was that low taxes and low regulations are the answer to everything.