The House released their version of a year-end bill to extend unemployment benefits, a payroll tax cut and a “doc fix” to avoid a 27% cut in Medicare reimbursement. A look at the various elements of the bill make clear that Republicans have little interest in passing anything through Congress.

Many conservative bloggers went to sleep last night all butthurty and sad because Mitt Romney’s minions (Mittiots by proxy) would not take their phone calls during the Official “Newt Gingrich’s mama is soooo fat…” conference call.

Daytime fireworks, a novel idea, I mean the video. (H/T HuffPo) Scarecrow says: Good grief. That must be the worst concentration of stupid, mean, and dishonest ever assembled for national television. Our only hope is a Chinese cyber attack on the entire grid. Everyone go out and buy candles and batteries. To which Eli replies: [...]

Bedtime For Sniffles. This Warner Bros/Merrie Melodies cartoon was released on November 23, 1940.

So there I was, doing my daily surfing of various news and web sites when I noticed this from CNN about folks in Russia protesting the recent election that returned Vladimir Putin to the Russian leadership…

People would rather not focus on the litany of undeclared wars this country currently fights, but when one of the adversaries considers putting defensive weaponry at the border to guard against future attacks, it’s worth taking notice.

Another debate between GOP candidates for President, sponsored by ABC News, the Iowa GOP, Yahoo News, WOI-TV and The Des Moines Register,

If you needed to appeal to one authority on banking regulation, you could do worse than to consult Sheila Bair, the former chairwoman of the FDIC. And now she’s advocating scrapping the Volcker rule and starting over. She comes at this by looking at the spectacle of MF Global – a brokerage house that would not be covered under the Volcker rule – and asking whether they would be permitted to trade depositor funds on their own account if they were a bank. The answer is far less clear-cut than it should be – and that’s the problem with how the Volcker rule emerged from the sausage grinder of the regulatory apparatus.

A few days back, Boston Mayor Menino told the media/public (and indirectly the court considering an injunction) that he had no immediate plans to evict the Occupy Boston folks from Dewey Park. He just wanted the ability to do so if necessary for health/safety reasons. He was lying, of course, or we’ve just witnessed the fastest landscape planning and permitting exercise in the history of Boston.

In the summer of 2011, 14 million Americans were unemployed and 16% of the country was officially poor. Student loan debt eclipsed credit card with over $1 trillion outstanding. One in five mortgages was underwater. Our leaders said the economy was recovering from the recession caused by the financial crisis, but their soothing pronouncements seemed to mock the evidence of our senses. On September 17, a group of activists converged on a small concrete plaza in lower Manhattan, determined to Occupy Wall Street.