Maybe it’s because I’ve done so much reporting on the foreclosure fraud issue, but I have to admit to some surprise that the firing of two Assistant Attorney Generals down in Florida, the hotbed of the housing crisis, hasn’t gotten much attention nationally. In my mind, this is the state-based equivalent of the US Attorney scandal. You have a conservative Attorney General who has fired two investigators who were tasked by a previous Republican regime with finding violations of the law. When they proved too effective for the next regime to stomach, they were canned. And now, the new AG, Pam Bondi, is smearing their reputations.

On several occasions after the Great Depression began, President Hoover admonished the public and those demanding the government provide economic relief that the nation had run out of money and that it would be irresponsible to borrow and engage in profligate spending. Over 80 years later, we are hearing virtually the same economic gibberish from President Obama.

In this new book, Kathleen Barry turns her attention as a sociologist to the plight of men trapped in a system which creates and maintains what she calls “core masculinity.” This concept of core masculinity can be summarized this way (and of course I expect that Kathleen will answer questions about it in our chat) that men are trained to take on the role of protector of women and to dominate them from this position.

The Library of Congress (LOC) and the National Library of Australia (NLA) have, in the past week, reviewed their categorization for WikiLeaks books that were on file. A bottom-up movement of WikiLeaks supporters and writers on Twitter going back and forth on how WikiLeaks books were being categorized led the LOC and NLA to mount this review. And, reviews by the LOC and NLA led to a change in categorization, meaning no longer will WikiLeaks books be categorized under the subject header “Extremist Websites.”

The only response to the two attacks in Norway yesterday is total horror. In the latest update, at least 91 people are dead from a bomb at a suite of government buildings and a gun attack at a Labour Party youth camp on Utoya Island. The suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, was a right-wing nationalist and Christian fundamentalist with a predilection for Pamela Geller and other anti-Muslim, white supremacist websites and writers.

This gamesmanship at the end of the process blew up what would have been a substantial deal, with well over $3 trillion in spending solutions, more like $4 trillion if you include the foregone debt payments that would result. And yes, the accounting gimmick on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq accounts for a full trillion dollars.

This past week, Pope Benedict XVI named Denver Archbishop Charles J. Chaput to succeed Cardinal Justin Rigali as head of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. While this is an in-house decision of the Roman Catholic church, it will have major implications far beyond Philly, and reaches deeply into the broader political discussions in the US and beyond. Chaput is a leading conservative voice on church and state, and a strong defender of the church in general, and he’s stepping into the biggest church vs. state battle going on right now outside of Ireland.

Naming Chaput to head up the Philadelphia Archdiocese put one of Benedict’s most articulate and powerful voices front and center in those battles, and also changes the secular political calculus for 2012 in Pennsylvania and beyond.

It’s been two and a half years since we first said Obama was trying to cut Social Security. Denial is no longer possible.

President Obama’s USA Today op-ed says that raising the debt limit, previously a one-page bill passed in routine fashion with some grumbling, affords the nation “the opportunity to do something big and meaningful.” This is definitely true: the opportunity will result in either an immediate depression or a lesser depression.

When the news first came of the shocking terror attacks in Norway yesterday, movement conservatives figured that Muslims were the perpetrators. Turns out the guy was a Con himself.