The AP noticed something troubling in Michael Vickers’ response to the Senate Armed Services Committee questions on his nomination to be Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence: the government did not include descriptions of its cyberwar activities in the quarterly report on clandestine activities.

Shahien Nasiripour’s article about Citibank’s near-bankruptcy in November 2008 shows how silly it is to expect safety by creating a “systemic risk council,” one headed, I might add, by Tim Geithner. He basically applies the Potter Stewart principle to systemic risk, saying that he’ll know it when he sees it. And somehow, I’d guess that he’ll see systemic risk in any big bank that goes down.

As a number of people are reporting, Julian Assange told John Pilger Wednesday that WikiLeaks has files on some media companies. I wanted to look at the exact quote, because coverage of this claim has been conflated into “insurance files = 504 cables = Murdoch, News Corp, and Fox,” which may not necessarily be the case at all.

• Still the fattest sacred cow in American politics.
• Don’t go, MC Steele!
• Krugman: a tale of two moralities.
• Transparent and open government, GOP style.
• Tightly cocooned in their own reality.

FoxNews on Monday shows us the way to remember people in a tasteful manner — best if accompanied by a lot of graphics.

Neil Young and Pearl Jam — Keep On Rockin’ In The Free World, live at the MTV Awards, 1993.

Uh-oh. CNN didn’t tell us that these soldiers help to get soldiers they like elected. I’ve heard that Little Davey P might want to be President some day. Is that why these soldiers want him to get a star?

The banks are right to be worried, as evidenced by this flurry of activity. Homeowners and investors alike are getting smarter about the scams that the banks have tried to use in recent years. They are engaged in a more public strategy to identify criminal fraud and dictate the terms of an acceptable settlement. They have studied the games the banks play and know how to point them out to a judge. This is a good example of that.

Ibanez set off the alarm bells among the corporatist sources. But the unlikely allies – foreclosure victims, public interest lawyers, academics, investors – have been ready for this for a while.

In case you were worried that the new health care law, the so-called “government takeover of health care,” was going to hurt the profits of the completely unnecessary private health insurance middlemen, don’t be.

The criticism Boehner is receiving is entirely self-inflicted. He had an opportunity to make a statement on behalf of his party about national unity in the face of unspeakable violence, and he punted. Clearly he should have known how that would look: petty and disrespectful. And that’s regardless of the extenuating circumstances.

Could it be that he was actually afraid of committing the House GOP to standing with the President, lest he get blowback from his political base?