emptywheel

BoA has agreed to this settlement just weeks after Abigail Field did the work the Attorneys General and other regulators should have been doing. And she found that for a sample of NY foreclosures, Countrywide had endorsed none of the notes of Countrywide-generated mortgages.

Eric Holder just released an announcement revealing that John Durham has recommended criminal investigation of two detainees tortured to death. But cases of the remaining 99 detainees whose treatment Durham investigated will be dismissed.

Remember that swipe fee measure that passed the Senate twice? It lowered the amount credit card companies can charge merchants to $.12 a transaction. It was a stunning victory that retailers (which admittedly includes WalMart but also includes your locally owned business struggling to stay in business) won that battle twice.

Well, lucky for the banksters, they had one more ace in their pocket: The Federal Reserve, which just cut the baby in half and set transaction fees at $.21 plus some anti-fraud amounts.

Usually, when Max Baucus tries to craft a grand bargain, oversized legislation starts by getting progressively worse, at which point the legislation finally dies.

But he has finally succeeded in getting a grand bargain, with a deal to extend Trade Adjustment Assistance in exchange for votes on the Korea, Colombia, and Panama trade deals.

If we actively work to assassinate the leader of a country we recognize, we are implicitly endorsing such actions against us.

As bad as it is too see the Obama Administration caving on worker protections, it is good to see Representatives like Sander Levin standing up and saying no.

The US has had the potential capability to track Russian mobsters since SWIFT let us access the databases after 9/11, particularly now that we’re making all our specific requests orally. So far as I know, no one has ended up dead in a duffel bag over that access.

The government says it hasn’t subpoenaed the phone records of any reporter. Presumably they mean no reporter has been the target of a subpoena. But with a community of interest subpoena, of course, the government would get Risen’s call data without subpoenaing him directly.

The article proclaims that RomneyCare “achieved its main goals.” But nowhere in the 4,600+ word article does it treat “ensuring MA residents get access to health care” as one of RomneyCare’s goals. Instead, it reports on RomneyCare’s great success at ensuring MA residents get health insurance. And given the article’s admission that the cost of the program is unsustainable, the distinction is critical.

Remember the Polish prosecutor who got fired as he was preparing to charge top members of the Democratic Left Alliance party for their complicity in America’s torture site? The same newspaper that broke that story–Gazeta Wyborcza–just reported former President Aleksander Kwasniewski’s purported explanation of his role in the torture site: complete ignorance.