The Republican party should be abolished for the good of the country, and it’s astonishing that Jim Cramer is just discovering this. Will Maria now admit it too?

But plucky Bill Hemrick is not one to be denied a voice in determining the future course of The American Experiment, so he and some buddies all pitched in to start up Tea Party HD which was supposed to be a teevee network devoted to teabaggers that would, I don’t know, maybe have a camera mounted on everyone’s flatscreen and people could sit on their couches and watch themselves scream . . .

The judge stated flatly that the penalty against the back, $95 million, is 1/7 of the level of the investor losses on the deal. “So the net effect of this is that you’re only returning a small fraction of what the investors lost, yes,” he said.

Just in: from the Washington Blade.

The Obama administration will likely soon announce that the State Department will consider an alternative route for the Keystone XL Pipeline. If that happens, it will likely delay any decision on the pipeline until after the 2012 election.

The Democrats on the Super Committee, in their efforts to reach an deal with Republicans, have offered a new deficit reduction package and just like their last offer this one also contains cuts to Medicare benefits.

Oligarchs hate that financial transactions tax, and they have senior administration officials in high places to protect their wealth from any tax, no matter how small.

At last night’s GOP presidential debate, after the candidates all took turns blaming the Bush Administration big gubmint for the financial crisis, John Harwood asked Newt what he did to earn $300,000 from Freddie & Fannie in 2006.

I’m beginning my tour of the east coast, and for the time being this is the live blog for today. Here is a video from Berkeley, with police using their batons to forcefully push back students who set up an encampment last night. It appears that a few students camped out on steps on campus.

This ubiquitous world-wide surveillance of anyone and everyone should serve as a wake up call for what the future may hold. Rapid deployment of the new technologies uncovered in the FOIA records brings us closer to an extensive and inescapable surveillance state, where we blindly place our hands on electronic devices that capture our digital prints, stare into iris scanning devices that record the details of our eyes, and have pictures taken of different angles of our faces so that the FBI and other federal agencies can store and use such information.