Every year the Defense Authorization includes some big controversy. This time it’s provision measure that would mandate indefinite detentions of terrorist suspects in military custody and open the door for those indefinite detentions to extend to US citizens. Mark Udall is trying to strip out that provision.

If we work together as a community, maybe we can get some criminal prosecutions for the crimes that caused the Great Crash. It doesn’t happen by accident.

It’s possible that this is just an illusion of investigation from the Department of Justice. But with Levin continuing to tell the press that there will be an indictment, it raises the stakes for DOJ. It makes it harder for them to let it go, although that’s certainly still possible.

What does that say about DOJ, then, that the Senate is doing such a better job at investigating crimes? In just one month’s time the Senate has produced two investigations that have left DOJ–and the SEC and FEC–looking toothless by comparison.

Hundreds of community, labor and faith leaders rallied at the Wells Fargo shareholders meeting today in San Francisco.

There has been more momentum toward the bin Laden death leading to an exit from our occupation of Afghanistan than I expected.

The New York Times has what I assume to be a bizarre form of beat sweetener on Goldman Sachs today. It spends most of 1,300 words speculating on who might replace CEO Lloyd Blankfein if he were to step down, exploring three possible candidates in depth. But the Times ignores one of the big reasons Blankfein might be eyeing the door.

I get the feeling that we’re sitting on a ticking time bomb, and we’ll replay this all over again soon.

The Great Muddle Through Plan of the Obama Administration lets banksters off the hook for everything and sticks the costs of the Great Crash on the innocent. The US Attorneys’ role in the Great Plan is to refuse even to investigate the possibility that there were crimes.

Building on the success of his “The Runaway General” article that led to President Obama firing Stanley McChrystal, Michael Hastings returns to the pages of Rolling Stone with “Another Runaway General“, where he exposes information operations, or Psy-Ops, on dignitaries including US Senators as they visited Afghanistan on “fact-finding” trips. What should not be missed when contemplating the illegal and immoral aspects of this information operation directed against the citizens of the country and high level government officials is that it is just one more instance in an ongoing pattern of information manipulation and outright deception on the part of the military in recent years. A few recent examples include the use of retired generals posing as independent military analysts to spout information coordinated by the Pentagon, intentional deception to cover up Special Operations troops digging bullets out of the bodies of pregnant women they killed in a night raid and the more recent claim by General Petraeus that parents intentionally burned their children in order to exaggerate injuries received in a US attack, to name just a few.