Mayor Cory Booker said on Meet the Press yesterday he was “nauseated” by the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s record with private equity firm Bain Capital. In a follow-up YouTube that looked like the kind of video hostage-takers make their victims record, Booker walked back the comments, saying that Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital is fair game for scrutiny. But cities have reasons to defend equity firms that help fund their projects.

A bid to guarantee that no US citizen would be subject to indefinite detention by the government has failed in the House of Representatives. The bipartisan amendment, from Reps. Adam Smith (D-WA) and Justin Amash (R-MI), failed on a 182-237 vote. While President Obama has announced his intention not to use the rules granted in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Section 1021, codifying them into law raises the possibility of this or another President using them at their discretion in the future.

You can feel the heat being turned up on Europe. Greece is in the middle of what the Guardian has called a bank jog. In the 10 days since the elections which led to a political stalemate, a caretaker government, and new elections, Greek depositors have removed €3 billion from their banking system. It’s not like the banking system was super-secure before the May 6 elections, either.

The $2 billion “Fail Whale” trade has morphed into a $3 billion loss – and counting. The trade is still being unwound, so we aren’t yet sure about the final losses. What we do know more today is about the massive size of the trade.

This chart, put together by Michael Linden at the Center for American Progress, shows the Obama Administration’s performance on fiscal policy over his term in office. It shows that spending, taxes and the deficit are all lower, relative to the CBO projections from when the President took office in January 2009.

If you’re an economist, you look at this chart, and given the fact that the United States still suffers from elevated unemployment and needs more fiscal stimulus to increase aggregate demand, you shake your head in frustration. If you’re the President of the United States, you tweet out this chart to your millions of followers on Twitter, proud of the fact that you’ve been a President who has cut taxes, cut spending and cut the deficit.

I talked to Michael Linden today about this chart, and why any progressive Democrat should look at it and think that it’s a good thing.

Barack Obama had hoagies with the Congressional leadership yesterday. And he broached the subject of the debt limit, which House Speaker John Boehner vowed to take hostage this week. Consider this a first stab at negotiation. It didn’t work out all that well.

Today the House votes on reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. A version already passed the Senate with 68 votes, but the House version cancelled several protections Senate Democrats added, to apply domestic violence protections to Native Americans, undocumented immigrants and LGBT families. This has drawn a veto threat from the White House. Here’s their statement.

The polling showing that voters hold negative opinions of the President’s performance in housing policy and Wall Street accountability suggests that Americans have a hungering for a much tougher policy on these issues and will reward candidates who reflect that, according to the pollster who did the survey.

Despite polls showing the Presidential race remarkably close, the American people strongly suspect that President Obama is going to win re-election. 56 percent think Obama will win this November, while just 36 percent think Mitt Romney will win, according to Gallup.

The issues of housing policy and Wall Street criminality have not appeared at the top of the agenda in the Presidential campaign, certainly not among horse race journalists. But new polling shows that this is a major challenge for the President, who is viewed as having failed on housing and foreclosure policy, and as too lenient on Wall Street.