A couple days ago, Dick Durbin was confronted by constituents in Illinois and forced to take a position assuring protection of Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. Two days later, he offered to put “entitlements” on the table in exchange for phony GOP tax proposals that benefit the rich.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) told a crowd in Northbrook that he would like to see the Senate rules changed so that if a minority wanted to filibuster to prevent a vote on the bill, they would need to actually continuously talk on the Senate floor. Why not just majority rules?

PCCC’s email seeks additional co-sponsors for the legislation. But the legislation is mainly a signpost for the idea that Americans still have a choice with their banking. That choice is dwindling as banks consoldiate to an amazing degree. But there still are community banks and credit unions in almost every city, eager for the opportunity to work with customers without trying to gouge them at every turn. And while legislation to make the process of changing banks hassle-free would be very nice, just highlighting the whole idea has value. It adds the notion of competition into a market where banks want none.

Keynes’s ideas aren’t dead. Congress is full of ignorant people who can’t understand those ideas or their implications for our situation today, but the ideas aren’t dead.

These so-called deficit hawks just couldn’t imagine an agreement without their wise counsel, so they bigfooted into the debate. In the process, they blew up the only two solutions on the table at the time, and added this alternative that produced a panoply of opinions about how to move forward. It gave everyone something to hide behind, so they could say “I support a deficit plan, but they won’t bring the one I like up for a vote.” It’s the first rule of negotiation: you don’t throw in a whole new plan at the end of the process.

One of the more revealing elements of the Greek bailout discussions is not that the IMF and European finance ministers want another round of austerity from Greece before providing funding, and not even that banks are being urged to take haircuts or engage in restructuring to accommodate the Greeks. It’s that other element – privatization of state assets – that is the tell here. This is the real extraction from the Greeks, the real shock doctrine scheme at work here. Greece essentially must sell the family silver – their ports, their state-run water supply systems, their utility company, their telephone company – to get out of the mess created largely by the financial crisis and the Great Recession.

The Senate Democratic leadership – all of them, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Patty Murray, Debbie Stabenow and Mark Begich – planned a morning press conference today where they will call for job creation measures, or stimulus, to be included in any debt limit deal.

We have all kinds of problems (unemployment, foreclosure, not to mention two wars) that we seem unable to do anything about. What we can do in the United States Congress is engage in a months-long lobby bonanza between the largest retailers in the country and the largest banks in the country over how they will split up the fee for when you purchase products via debit card. And finally, that battle over swipe fees gets a vote today.

Democrats were willing to cut $400 billion from Medicare, Coburn wanted another $130 billion lopped off. Not a pretty picture.

It would be a big mistake to let the month go by without getting Republicans in the Senate on the record. Dean Heller, the new Senator from Nevada who already voted to end Medicare in the House, has every intention of doing it again. Scott Brown announced he would vote for the Ryan budget as well, and in all likelihood you can get Olympia Snowe and Richard Lugar to vote for it. So, virtually every marginally contestable seat on the Republican side will have GOP candidates who voted to end Medicare. And with so many more Democratic seats up for grabs, they’ll need to play offense somewhere to take off the pressure.