So! H.R.3 supposedly won’t redefine rape anymore, but the fight’s just getting started. We learned last week that the new Congress followed H.R. 3 with H.R. 358, the Protect Life Act, which would redefine “conscience” clauses to allow pregnant women to die if saving them would require harming the fetus.

I attended a Huffington Post Mortgage Madness Meetup in Los Angeles last night, which suffered from some late planning, the buggy nature of the Meetup tool and the general difficulty of self-organizing. Only a half-dozen people showed, and most of them were either media (a guy from NPR’s Marketplace) or interested observers in the foreclosure mess. In fact, the one homeowner with a story to tell arrived late and almost didn’t make it because he went to the wrong location initially. But oh, what a story he had to tell. And while I’ve heard a lot of these HAMP horror stories in the past year, I’ve never heard anything like this.

Most of the Republican base appears willing to accept some ideological concession if need be to select a presidential candidate that can actually win.

Wikileaks has posted the presentation three security companies–Palantir, HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies–made to Bank of America, proposing to help it respond to Wikileaks.

in addition to proposing to conduct cyber attacks on Wikileaks’ European-based infrastructure (complete with a picture of WL’s bomb shelter-housed servers), the proposal appears to recommend that these companies be paid to troll social media, like Twitter, to not only “identify risky behavior of employees” but also, presumably, “push the radical and reckless nature of wikileaks activities.” You know–the kind of trolling we often see targeted at Glenn (and in recent days targeted against David House, who was also listed in this presentation).

Rep. Chris Lee (R-NY 26) has abruptly resigned from the House of Representatives, hours after it was revealed that the married Congressman sent flirtatious emails to a women he contacted through Craigslist.

Less remarked-upon is the kinds of systemic issues with public policy that led to the shooting in the first place: the breakdown of the US mental health system, and the ease with which people with intent to kill large numbers of people can get the weapons they need for that purpose. This has become the dog that didn’t bark in this tragedy. One of the victims of the shooting in Tucson was Gabe Zimmerman, a staffer for Giffords. His fiancee is one of the few to actually identify a problem related to the attack, and propose a solution.

In last night’s episode of CBS’s legal drama The Good Wife, Just Say Now was briefly featured in the episode’s plot. Peter Florrick, the character played by Chris Noth, is the main character’s husband making a run for his old seat as the State’s Attorney after being imprisoned for corruption. Peter seeks to make a political comeback by turning out the youth vote on the wave of a medical marijuana initiative in the state.

The show briefly featured a big board featuring the Just Say Now logo, and in a mock-web video, shows Peter speaking with students at a meeting of the fictional “Cook State College” Just Say Now chapter. Below are two screen captures of Just Say Now on The Good Wife.

It’s completely different to support raising the retirement age, which is mainly a benefit cut and an attack on workers in menial labor jobs who cannot hold out the way someone sitting at a desk can, than it is to “consider all options, including raising the age,” according to Hoyer. I’m not sure it’s so different, really.

In 2000, Congress approved a program called the New Market Tax Credits with the intent to provide subsidies for development in low income areas–but by gaming the system and using very out-of-date demographic data, huge corporations are getting millions in government money to build high-end hotels and condos.

After the world turned away and thought the protests in Egypt over and a smooth transition to democracy under torturer-in-chief Omar Suleiman assured, everyone forgot one thing: the view of the protesters. They have actually stepped up their protests, blocking the entrance to Parliament and forcing the new Mubarak cabinet to convene elsewhere. In the face of this, the other US allies in the Middle East are pressing Obama to back off of Mubarak and allow the “stable” process to take hold. They aren’t really talking about Egypt, but their own countries; they don’t want to see the same kind of unrest at their doorstep, and so they view Mubarak holding on as crucial to their continued survival. They say it would “destabilize the region.” But stability in this case is synonymous with autocracy.