The House Republican position on President Obama’s recess appointments is hard to even express without laughing. GOP Congressmembers are actually saying that they oppose the appointments because Congress is not in recess – and as soon as they finish their vacation and get back to Washington, they’ll have something to say about that.

The President is making a distinction between nominees who the various agencies can do without for a spell and nominees whose seating is crucial to the functioning of the agency.

DC residents should ask the city and police what kind of crime and safety problems have actually arisen since the group began camping. DC residents should ask if there should be as many police on patrol as there typically are. And, DC residents should ask if the city can cut back on the number of officers so officers can get back to patrolling neighborhoods where their presence is actually needed.

Hot Coffee, the fast-paced, info-packed exploration of tort reform exposes the real story behind Stella Liebeck, who sued McDonalds after being badly burned by spilled coffee, an incident which wrongly entered the collective consciousness as a prime example of a “frivolous” lawsuit. First time director Susan Saladoff, a civil litigator with 25 years of experience, uses the McDonalds coffee case as the starting point and from there builds a strong case that tort reform, binding arbitration and non-economic damage caps subvert justice and benefit big business.

If Elizabeth Warren were no threat to the established order, they wouldn’t get around to any effort to stop her ascension in the Massachusetts Senate race until much later in the cycle, if at all. But her surge over Scott Brown, and the possibility that she would have an even bigger perch from which to articulate her agenda for the middle class, clearly has Wall Street spooked. So much so that they’re already marshaling forces against her, with a year until the general election.

It is an article of faith among Republicans (and far too many Democrats) that all those pesky “regulations” are to blame for the lack of jobs today and the ongoing economic slowdown. Just the first of this month, McClatchy had an article where they had surveyed small business owners across the country and the consensus was that in fact regulations are not the problem for small business but lack of demand is.

The Markets and the Financial Media were stunned by the August Jobs report, which said there were no net jobs created in August. Whatever gains there have been in certain sectors of private industry, every parent in the country with school-age kids can tell you how a sizable chunk of those gains were erased.

Cuts to school budgets.

Serious business leaders know that poor schools today means less qualified workers tomorrow. Local chambers of commerce get it, but if you expect the US Chamber of Commerce to come out in favor of more actual spending for school districts . . . well, I’ve got an abandoned school building to sell you.

The White House is getting an early jump on the House Republicans’ next potential hostage-taking event, and perhaps learning something in the process. In an event today, flanked by AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka, Chamber of Commerce COO David Chavern and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, President Obama will call for a clean extension of the Highway Trust Fund, which is set to expire at the end of September. Rather than cutting the surface transportation budget, rather than pre-compromising on a level of cuts, the President will demand a clean bill at present levels.

If this is the best they’ve got, this childish “If you like high taxes rates so much, why don’t you marry them?” argument, they don’t have much at all. Hilariously, some flak at Heritage tries the idea that Buffett “downplays the role taxation plays in investment decisions.” Because what would Warren Buffett know about investment decisions?

Corporate America and the GOP have been playing a very dangerous game, throwing enormous amounts of money behind PR campaigns demagoguing the very deficit that their radical manipulation of the political system created in the first place. They thought they could hide their true intentions under the cloak of fiscal responsibility and good governance. The fact that the very tool they virtually invented to captivate the democratic process finally turned around and bit them in the ass is almost Shakespearean in its irony.