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Today, we are calling on the acting head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Edward DeMarco, to either move or be removed: Stop standing in the way of the mortgage relief millions of homeowners need.

As a Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney should wear a warning label: "CAUTION: following changes in this candidate's positions could cause whiplash and other injuries." Seriously, you could hurt yourself trying keep up with the speed with which this gu

And to think the Republicans called John Kerry a flip-flopper for saying he voted for war funding before he voted against it and are now very likely to put a ping-pong ball on their presidential ticket.

Originally published at Capital Gains and Games.

Corporate tax reform as it's most often discussed these days sounds great in theory: Lower the overall tax rate and offset the budget impact by eliminating various special provisions.

Who isn't in favor of that?

As Greg Ip in the latest issue of The Economist notes, the answer is lots of people.

Not surprisingly but largely overlooked in the reports on the plan announced by the White House several weeks ago, the biggest opponents (other than House and Senate Republicans, that is) to any substantial corporate tax overhaul come from the corporate world itself: They are the companies, industries, and sectors that currently benefit from the current system at the expense of the corporations, businesses, industries, and sectors that don't get the same special treatment.

And that's just the beginning.

We're headed into an election that will feature the clearest ideological divide since Goldwater-Johnson.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently said that he felt safer in Lebanon than he did when Occupy marched past his house. If nothing else, it proves that Wall Street bankers haven't gotten any better at risk management - the art of knowing where danger lies and avoiding it - than they were when their bad bets crashed the economy and caused the Great Recession.

But then we knew that already, didn't we? After all, Chase is one of five too-big-to-fail banks that could lose $80 billion or more from their poorly-thought-out risk-taking in Europe's most troubled countries. The risky behavior shouldn't surprise anyone, though. These banks know -- or at least believe -- that their too-big-to-fail status means we'll rescue them again when they make the next devastating set of blunders.

What's really striking about comments like these is the fact that executives at America's big banks never seem to worry when police cars approach their houses. Their biggest fear is that that they might glimpse a sign or hear the sound of a mic check reverberating faintly through well-aged brick walls.

Consider JPMorgan Chase, the institution run by Mr. Dimon. To call his bank "scandal-plagued" would be putting it mildly. Chase has settled six fraud cases with the SEC over the last thirteen years and is implicated in several ongoing investigations, including the two most notorious fraud cases of our time. At any other moment in history the headlines would be screaming with various combinations of the words "JPMorgan Chase," "fraud," "probe," "drop," mistakes," "disaster," "incompetence," and "scandal."

Originally posted on Capital Gains and Games.