I think we’ve all become inured to an era of “looking forward, not backward” and retroactive immunity for both official and corporate crimes, that it’s hard to even process what happened here. The Bush Administration and their private military and intelligence contractors committed acts of torture and murder, and nobody but low-level officials gets prosecuted. Indefinite detention is found to violate the Constitution, and Congress passes a law immunizing the government for that crime and effectively suspending habeas corpus for non-citizens. The government partners with the telecom industry to capture a massive web of the private communications of US citizens without a warrant, and Congress passes a law letting the industry off the hook for the crimes. Financial misdeeds lead to a near-collapse of the US economy, and Congress rewards the firms responsible with a bailout. The culture of no accountability has been the signifying feature of the last decade.

And it looked as if this movie would play once again with respect to foreclosure fraud.

Here you see the dog that didn’t bark on cable news. It’s a compilation of some of the 400 jobs protests from around the country in August. Thousands of people participated in the actions. If 2009 was any indication, it should have been an enormous story. As it is, you had to search for any traditional media coverage of the story.

CREDO has become the first national progressive group, to my knowledge, to back New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as he attempts to hold a full investigation into fraud in the securitization processes by the mortgage industry.

The town hall revolution is occurring on a very narrow playing field. Even where Republicans are holding town halls, they are not being held in the most populated areas of the district, in some cases. And we know about the “pay-per-view” town hall, where constituents have to pay $15 to get in.

That includes Democrats, by the way, who are ignoring town halls at a faster rate than Republicans.

Wisconsin Democrats came up just short last night, flipping two seats in recall elections but not the three needed to take back the state Senate. Currently the Senate will have a 17-16 majority for Republicans; there are two recall elections against incumbent Democrats Robert Wirch and Jim Holperin next Tuesday, August 16. It’s possible that the disappointment of not reaching the goal number in the Republican recalls will depress Democratic turnout, but the expectation is that Wirch and Holperin will hold the seats.

Tomorrow, six recall elections against Republican state Senators will finally happen in Wisconsin, the biggest result so far of a six-month uprising in the state against conservative policies and an assault on worker’s rights. If Standard and Poor’s wasn’t trying to force cuts to entitlements it would be the biggest story in America, and in a way, it still should be. This recall process, and the protests and activism that came before it, carry the seeds of a new progressive/youth/labor alliance that could be a catalyst to not only next year’s elections, but a re-imagining of the Democratic Party.

In Chris Cillizza’s smug dismissal of liberal frustration, with the curt statement “liberals and progressives have nowhere else to go,” he overlooks the fact that liberals have plenty of places to go. More than ever, in fact. From a movement-building perspective, there are more opportunities than normal in an off year to really make a difference on progressive policy.

I’m not a big Charlie Cook fan, and I think he’s deeply confused about economics in this post. But I feel like he definitely gets it right about the era we’re heading into.

Steve Benen had a look at Barack Obama’s last lecture, and let’s just say he had a different reaction.

Governor Jerry Brown, who returned to Sacramento saying he would be “an apostle for common sense” able to get lawmakers to work together to meet the challenge, finally admitted that he actually couldn’t this week. Brown wanted to solve the $26.6 billion budget gap with a mix of cuts and an extension of revenues set to expire in June. The cuts have already been enacted; but it still takes a 2/3 vote of the legislature to pass revenues, and even to get them on the ballot for a proposed June statewide special election. Republicans, who have no other leverage over the government in the state after being wiped out completely over the past decade, dithered and moved goalposts and eventually came with a 53-point plan (53!) with new demands for changes to the state regulatory structure and public pensions, the institution of a hard spending cap, and more. It took Brown a long while, but finally he had enough. In his letter to Senate Minority Leader Bob Dutton, Brown lamented the new list of demands and the unwillingness to compromise. So he called off the talks, which were going nowhere.