This week marks the end of the public comment period on the Volcker rule. The usual suspects have all delivered their comments. The huge finance lobby delivered their mass of comments, in particular calls for multiple exemptions and waivers. But a new group, Occupy the SEC, a collection of experts in finance which sprung out of the Occupy Wall Street movement, delivered a 325 page letter to the SEC about the rule reminding the SEC about their obligations to the public.

The House passed a watered-down version of the STOCK Act, the bill that would ban insider trading among members of Congress as the Office of Congressional Ethics investigates Rep. Spence Bachus for insider trading.

When the Senate passed the STOCK Act, the bill that bans insider trading on non-public information picked up in Congress (yes, that’s not against the law right now) along with some other ethics reforms, I thought that could be a vehicle that would move expeditiously through the House. However, even though Majority Leader Eric Cantor made promises that the STOCK Act would get a vote this week, instead what has happened is a free-for-all, with lobbyists gutting the bill at Cantor’s behest.

After the death of PIPA this morning comes the news that Lamar Smith, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee who planned on resuming the markup of SOPA, the House version of anti-piracy legislation, in February, has put the bill into cold storage. The work of the grassroots coalition did the trick: SOPA and PIPA are dead for now.

Yesterday’s SOPA strike was enormously successful, not only raising attention to the issue but moving a tremendous amount of politicians for a one-day event. Over 4.5 million people signed Google’s petition against SOPA. The Wikipedia action gave high-profile attention to the issue as well, and even if Facebook and Twitter’s responses were muted, overall the online community made themselves heard.

But those of us charting the protest yesterday were struck by how most of the lawmakers turning against the bill were Republicans. If you look at the latest whip count on PIPA, for example, you see that more Republicans oppose it at this point than Democrats.

Yes, of course Newt Gingrich was a lobbyist, because that’s the only reason political figures get paid millions of dollars by corporations. It’s not to give advice. They have large payrolls with all the strategists they’ll ever need. The only thing they don’t have are front men to make sure their strategies get put into action on Capitol Hill.

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.

“Our elected-official targets are so amenable to our corrupting influence, we can accomplish what our clients want so quickly, that the hourly rate system is outmoded. Congresspersons are so eager to meet our demands, and in such record time, that the actual moments involved no longer accurately represent the value to our client. Going forward, we’ll take a percentage of the cash value to our clients instead. If we save a client one hundred million dollars in taxes over ten years, we’ll take ten percent. If we game the system so that our client earns that sum in one year, we’ll take our cut all at once.”

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.

Whether Herman Cain is actually reassessing his campaign or not, he’s done on the Presidential stage. And the data show that the biggest beneficiary of this is Newt liberal-hater Gingrich.