Unions filed a new lawsuit to stop the anti-union law, but given the cravenness of David Prosser Who Will Choke You and the state Supreme Court, I don’t see much chance for overturning it. The ballot box is the alternative, for now, and it will take years to actually win back the necessary votes to repeal. It starts with the recalls.

With more rumblings of a foreclosure fraud settlement in the air (you’ll notice that the New York Post’s not-believable figure of a $60 billion settlement has been revised down to $25 billion, and that none of the AGs who have repudiated the deal are quoted here), the more significant actions are happening, paradoxically, at the federal regulatory level.

Details on the phone hacking scandal have been largely absent from US news. For months, an unfolding story centered on tabloids hacking into phones has been taking shape in the UK. But, just recently, The Guardian reported News of the World targeted “missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler and her family in March 2002, interfering with police inquiries into her disappearance.” This revelation indicates not only were typical targets of any tabloid newspaper hacked but so too were members of the public.

The Obama administration is using U.S. vessels to hold ghost prisoners. We don’t even know how many. The old bad days of the Bush administration are back, and the details aren’t pretty, and the outstanding questions about what is really going on are many.

I’ve always thought the pent up anger at George Bush and the frustration from the Bush years would have allowed Daisy Duck or the Chipmunks to win the Presidency in 2008. So the trick was to elect someone who understood that anger and was prepared to reverse all the reasons it existed. Sure, the Obama message people understood this, but so did my cat. Now the people who helped Obama defraud voters by channeling everyone’s hope for change have convinced themselves he won the election because they’re political geniuses.

It’s being reported (finally) that the President wants to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits as part of a deal on the debt ceiling. We’ll fight this, because it’s the right thing to do. We will probably lose. But we will make it as painful as possible for any politician from any party to participate in this wholesale looting of the public sphere, this “shock doctrine” for America. And maybe along the way we’ll get a vision of what comes next. Because what we believe in as Americans, and what we stand for, is not something the Democratic party represents any more.

Wall Street’s hostage-takers and its arsonists are laughing at the middle class, all the way to the bank.

Keeping your own party in the dark while you conspire with the GOP to gut the New Deal is very hopey and changey!

Apparently the White House is back handing out extremely bad political advice to Congressional Democrats to get their support for a big partisan austerity package that includes Medicare and Social Security benefits cuts.

Although specifics have yet to officially emerge, there is little doubt that among the Social Security benefit cuts the President is proposing will be a reduction in Social Security’s annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) through an obscure change in the COLA formula known as the chained CPI