Los Angeles county sheriff is suffering through the worst performance record in the country outside of noted racist Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Arizona. First, Sheriff Lee Baca had to endure credible allegations of mistreatment of prisoners in county lockups. Now, he has a new scandal on his hands.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has received a lot of the headlines for his no-holds-barred investigations against the banks, but he’s had a partner in Delaware’s Beau Biden. Because New York and Delaware were where most of the securitization trusts were originated, having a united front on this issue of fraud is vital, and despite the family ties with the White House, Biden has been uncompromising. His latest salvo is a lawsuit against MERS, the electronic registry owned and funded by the banks, which they used to evade the public land transfer system and save money on county recorder fees.

When ordinary citizens take their savings out of big banks, it has a small effect, but it would take lots and lots of take-up for that to really hurt those behemoth financial institutions which have such market share. By contrast, when a municipality, particularly a large municipality, moves their money out of a big bank, that can have an impact on behavior. This is particularly true if the municipal governments cite specific reasons, like a failure to modify mortgages for their constituents or a failure to maintain dilapidated, foreclosed properties, for moving the funds.

A few people asked me why the Obama Administration is so dead-set on deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants, when they have no hope of attracting the anti-immigrant crowd from a political standpoint. Rep. Luis Gutierrez explained that to me at Netroots Nation, and I think if more people understood this rationale you’d see even more outcry than you do now:

So why have there been so many deportations, more than under the Bush Administration? Gutierrez suggested that the White House feels they have a mandate from Congress to deport 400,000 people a year. Which means they’re literally breaking up families to fulfill a budgetary authority. Congress has expanded deportation systems and given DHS more money to deport. So the contractors have been paid, and now they have to be used. That’s how Secure Communities, a real cash cow for the contractors, was created. And that’s why they don’t want states dropping out. “The fastest-growing airline in the country is the one that flies around undocumented immigrants,” said Gutierrez. In the end, it comes down to money, for detention, information sharing and the mechanics of deportation.

he Assembly Democrats have presented an alternative budget proposal and are meeting with the head of the Department of Administration, Mike Huebsch. We’re trying to get a copy of the alternative proposal, but I’m not sure they’ll have any more success with that as they’ve had with their litany of amendments on the floor of the Assembly. All of them have been defeated. The most recent one were amendments that would have removed the collective bargaining limitations from the bill.

However, Huebsch is a member of Scott Walker’s cabinet. The fact of the meeting itself is pretty notable.

As you probably know, I recently moved from an idyllic left wing small city to an idyllic right wing small city. Both are great places to raise a family, both have charming downtowns, and both support diverse local businesses. One big difference, I’ve come to learn, is that the left wing city provides high quality public services–including single stream curbside recycling, best-in-state public schools, and well-developed social services, whereas the right wing city has privatized those same functions, with “choice” in trash collection, a significant reliance on religious schools (this is one of the hotbeds of voucher activism), and church groups providing many of the social services.

The larger story here is really about the banks gouging the municipalities in often shocking ways. Michael Bennet is in a position to know a lot about that based on his DPS experience. He could speak out; but the web of contacts between Bennet and the FIRE sector could plausibly present problems for him in doing so. That’s what makes Sunlight’s Poligraft so powerful.

Obviously it hasn’t run through the legislative wringer yet, but the Local Jobs For America Act proposed by House Education and Labor Secretary George Miller looks like an exceedingly good piece of policy. It would provides through the community development block grant program $100 billion dollars to create local jobs through state and municipal budgets. Miller claims he could create or save a million jobs with that money.

An energy retrofit program would be a boon to the economy, would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and could reduce barriers to entry for millions of Americans who would otherwise not see upgrades in their homes or places of business. But it has to be done in concert with a process that ensures such retrofits are accessible and allowable without blockage at the local level.