The Department of Justice has announced a $335 million settlement with Countrywide, the former subprime mortgage giant now subsumed into Bank of America, on claims of housing discrimination. And once again we see that Countrywide doesn’t have to admit wrongdoing for their crimes.

Jones argument about wasting money in pointless wars has broad applicability. It applies to Iraq, where extending our military presence would just cause a mass uprising, collapse the government and put US troops at grave risk (imagine the sad spectacle of five US deaths today in a rocket attack on an operating base being multiplied many times over). It applies to Libya, where Sen. Richard Lugar, who’s moving to the right on most other matters to stave off a Tea Party primary challenge, felt comfortable to write an op-ed castigating the President for denying Constitutional principles in seeking a rubber stamp to continuing military operations. That’s very much in the vein of the isolationist, Jones-ian impulse, rather than the neocons who put together the Senate resolution of approval for the conflict in Libya, which Lugar wants canceled.

This was the first vote on the Afghan war since the killing of Osama bin Laden. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi gave it a huge boost by announcing she would vote for it this morning, in defiance of the Obama Administration’s strategy.

The House passed Republican Paul Ryan’s budget that would end Medicare as we know it and replace it with a privatized system of vouchers. While it is good to know not a single Democrat was actually stupid enough to vote for it, on a purely political level, I’m actually stunned that four Republicans, Walter Jones, Ron Paul, Denny Rehberg and David McKinley, voted against it.

Ron Paul (R-TX) and Walter Jones (R-NC) wrote a letter to their colleagues urging opposition to KORUS, President Obama’s NAFTA-Style Korea Free Trade deal.

California’s budget crisis is actually much less than they’re spending on the war in Afghanistan. $26 billion for the budget vs $38 billion for war. And what do they get for it? It’s not better to live in California thanks to the war. It’s actually getting much, much worse.