When a Democratic President continues to shove Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid back onto the negotiating table after being offered a clean debt ceiling deal by the Senate GOP, CNN polling shows liberals are taken aback.

We don’t really have real debates on much of anything in America anymore, so it’s worth questioning whether this will be the effect. But for what it’s worth, Bernie Sanders’ office has released the major investigation coming out of that amendment – a GAO audit of the emergency lending programs carried out by the Fed in the wake of the financial crisis. These programs – not TARP, which mostly put the Congress on the hook for the bailout politically – represented the bulk of the federal government’s support for the banking sector. And they were carried out largely in secret. This GAO audit provides a window into just what the Fed did.

We’re all Firebaggers now, huh?

This is an extremely important moment not only in the fight to preserve the social safety net, but for the future of the country. Nancy and Eric are both critical figures in this fight, and have bravely led it in the face of incredible opposition, at tremendous personal sacrifice. I cannot say enough good things about them, their courage and their moral integrity.

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We’re very close to a grand bargain endgame, it appears, where the White House will claim they got revenues and the Republicans will claim that the revenues are only theoretical. A lot rides on a “trigger” for additional revenues and entitlement cuts if goals are not reached. This allows lawmakers to defer tough questions on those topics with a fail-safe attached. In one rendering, the high-end Bush tax cuts would expire if the tax reform didn’t come off. But another piece has come into the discussion …

The headline is somewhat misleading because nobody really knows the state of the debt ceiling debate as far as I can tell. It’s unwinding in the midst of more chaos than anything I can recall on Capitol Hill. The complete leadership vacuum is stunning.

The aide who leaked that President Obama and John Boehner were close to finishing a deal with $3 trillion in defined cuts and $1 trillion in aspirational revenue worked for the Senate Democrats. Practically every media outlet in the nation is reporting on their anger. Harry Reid, who learned about the all-cuts deal in the press, reportedly told Budget Director Jack Lew in a closed-door caucus meeting “I’m the Senate majority leader — why don’t I know about this deal?” A senior Senate Democrat told The Hill, “There’s a basic lack of trust with the President.”

Congressmen Bill Posey (R-FL), Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), and Gregory Meeks (D-NY) have introduced a bill to bar the Treasury Department from adopting rules requiring US Banks to report interest paid on deposits by non-resident aliens to their native countries. This shocking bill reinforces the message of Nicholas Shaxson’s book, Treasure Islands, that the US is one of the biggest tax havens in the world.

• Obama’s pitch to Dems: let’s cut popular programs!
• There’s not enough popcorn on the planet for this.
• Paul Krugman is shrill.
• Here comes the Secessionist.
• Even without Beck, Faux’s still batshit.

It is becoming clear that pretty much every method of privacy invasion Murdoch’s empire could do, they did do.