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.

This is a major breaking story. The main reason that the lame duck session was so productive was that the rest of the legislative session was so UNPRODUCTIVE, because the Republicans were able to ran out the clock. Senate Democrats are taking a stand and saying, we cannot work this way anymore.

The idea that the schedule would doom DADT is basically an excuse, and the result of policies taken months and years ago, particularly to have a Pentagon study get released December 1, necessarily squeezing the time frame.

I’m going to have a few follow-up posts about Steven Rattner’s Overhaul generally and Saturday’s book salon on it. But for the moment, I wanted to add something to two excellent reviews of it by Malcom Gladwell and Felix Salmon. Together, they both distinguish between the product GM makes and the debt it had.

A new investigation from the Senate Armed Services Committee shows that private security contractors in Afghanistan “rely on warlords and strongmen” to provide security guards that watch US bases. These guards often have ties to the Taliban.