Archive

"Investigate the Banks!" Today a coalition of progressive groups handed in a petition with more than 360,000 signatures that demanded exactly that. It calls on the Obama administration to stop pushing a cushy fraud settlement for bankers, to pursue a fair deal for shafted homeowners, and to let criminal investigations against Wall Street crooks proceed.

Republicans were blocking National Labor Relations Board and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau nominees to keep these agencies from doing their jobs under the law, in exchange for a cut of the take. Obama made recess appointments to get them up and operating. Now Republicans are trying to defund the agencies.

NLRB and CFPB Protect Public And Legitimate Businesses

So Perry is out of the race. What a coward. It's not as if it's just a matter of not throwing good money after bad. The election is in a couple of days. He obviously just couldn't face the humiliation of losing.

On paper he was the perfect anti-Romney and everyone expected him to make it a real race. But he was a flop from the very beginning, his poor showing in the debates and obvious lack of basic knowledge made him too much even for the neanderthals. Actually, I think that was his real problem --- on a subliminal level he just reminded everyone too much of George W. Bush and that particular personality type was just too uncomfortable even for the folks.

After Newt Gingrich was rewarded with a surge in the polls, for playing the race card during the South Carolina GOP debate, Mitt Romney has launched

Progressive Breakfast - 1/19/2012

by Bill Scher | Jan 19, 2012

Mitt Romney's ultra-low tax rate on his ultra-high income is reviving questions about the breaks and perks that the wealthiest of the 1% receive from the rest of us. One of these is a special low tax rate for investments -- as if anyone needed special tax incentives to induce them to make a bundle.

High Incomes At The Top

After a painfully wobbly response to a debate question regarding whether he would release his tax returns, Mitt Romney has relented and said he would release his 2011 tax return once it was

James Fallows has some reader follow-ups to an earlier discussion of Newtie's "food stamp president" quip. And they've made me rethink whether or not this is a real dogwhistle.

One of his readers says that it wasn't racist in the least, that it was simply a dry, philosophical point about the virtues of hard work. This, of course, is nonsense. I quoted this yesterday, but it bears repeating since this is all taking place in South Carolina, the home of Lee Atwater, who famously said this: