Status Quo — Pictures of Matchstick Men, from a 1968 UK television appearance.

Sounds like times are tough for the banksters after all, right? Well maybe not so much. Fortune had this post which called the Bank of America $8.5B settlement a “win,” apparently because it allows BoA to “look forward” and all that. According to this from Reuters, BoA will take write-offs of a bit over $20B in total in the 2nd quarter of the year, giving them a loss for the quarter. It is figures like that that show just how skewed things are. One bank takes a write-off/loss of over $20B in a fiscal quarter and will still most likely be profitable for the year!

John O’Brien is engaged in some real activism. He told every homeowner in his district to check the records at his website and see if their home mortgage documentation has been robo-signed. He’s facilitating consumer protection complaints through the Massachusetts AG. He has provided letters that homeowners can print out and send to their servicers, demanding their full chain of title pursuant to federal law.

When you read the Declaration of Independence, it turns out to be an indictment of King George III for various abuses of power. And those abuses of power look fairly similar to abuses of power we happily permit U.S. presidents to engage in today, either as regards the people of this nation or the people of territories and nations that our military occupies today in a manner uncomfortably resembling Britain’s rule over the 13 colonies.

Public workers, up to seven hundred and fifty thousand teachers and civil servants, participated in a June 30 general strike called for in the United Kingdom after UK Parliament passed changes to pensions and retirement, specifically, increasing the amount an employee has to contribute.

BoA has agreed to this settlement just weeks after Abigail Field did the work the Attorneys General and other regulators should have been doing. And she found that for a sample of NY foreclosures, Countrywide had endorsed none of the notes of Countrywide-generated mortgages.

One at a time, that’s how.

I know that’s a flippant way to put it, but all the big picture stuff risks losing sight of the most important thing of all: This happened because passionately committed individuals took it upon themselves to get the training and put themselves in a position to ask their friends and neighbors to support the referendum.

Geithner’s departure would represent a full turnover of the Obama economic team that came into office in January 2009. It’s too soon to speculate on a replacement, but consider this. A lot of people focus their ire on Geithner and Summers, as if they just magically popped up in the most critical positions on the economy to give an otherwise Keynesian liberal socialist President bad advice. When both of them are gone, I hope we get around to reassessing that.

It might seem like this idea of using to the 14th Amendment to short circuit the debt ceiling limit vote came from out of the Left, but the reality is that the first person to bring it up was Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner. And he brought it up more than a month ago.

Eric Holder just released an announcement revealing that John Durham has recommended criminal investigation of two detainees tortured to death. But cases of the remaining 99 detainees whose treatment Durham investigated will be dismissed.