Tonight on Bloomberg

“Now the firms and their chiefs, confronting a wave of public anger against their bonuses awarded in the wake of the financial industry bailout, are trying to devise a strategy to fight both the proposed new limits on banks’ size and activities as well as the bank tax. While they are still plotting tactics, one thing has become clear: The banks don’t want to go to war with the commander-in-chief.

“We don’t want to fight the administration,” said Rob Nichols, whose trade group, the Financial Services Forum, represents the chief executive officers of the largest financial companies. “We just want to sit at the table and have a productive conversation about the kinds of reforms needed to address the real causes of the recent crisis.”

That the president’s top advisers failed to give the financial executives a heads-up, even while reporters were being briefed on the plan, underscores how strained the banks’ relationship with the administration has become.

Political Attack

Some Wall Street executives are seething over what they see as a political attack by the president after the Democratic Party lost the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, according to interviews with a half-dozen people who work for or consult with the largest financial firms and who declined to be named in order to speak freely.

They are equally concerned that they will remain targets for the rest of the year, the people said, and are willing to take steps to try to prevent that from happening. Some of the executives dining with Geithner and Jarrett indicated that Obama’s bank tax would be a small price to pay if it made the taint of the Troubled Asset Relief Program go away, according to one attendee.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=ahZWYpjH1as0&pos=10

Where’s Brit Hume? It’s just not the same without his scowl.

Juan Williams is concerned that the pres “intimidated” the Supreme Court. What’s wrong with that? To steal a phrase from an old grad school prof of mine, they’re a hotbed of inertia.

This is a complete distortion of the feeling on the ground in Haiti. People there are disgusted with the belated and  ”pathetic” US response (to quote  Italy’s disaster chief) and outraged by all the gun-pointing US Marines whose deployment has muscled aside cargo planes from France and other countries carrying doctors, medicine and inflatable hospitals, effectively increasing quake casualties. The Pentagon, on Obama’s watch, is cynically using a natural calamity to take over a nation of a people who have courageously  fended for themselves (with the help of about  500 Cuban doctors in the capital) through most of the post-quake horror but who need “more gauze, not guns” in the words of one US doctor helping there.

“Combat troops” out of Iraq. How many does that leave?

Karzai himself is promoting political negotiations among Afghanistan’s warring factions to bring resolution to Afghanistan’s armed conflicts.

Not supporting such negotiations — as it is current US policy to do — merely delays resolution, giving our government an excuse to delay our departure.

As my wife, LIza Featherstone, just pointed out, it’s hilarious that Congress is applauding the anti-lobbyist rhetoric. Without lobbyists, who’d pay for their campaigns or buy them lunch?

Nice, though, to see him hammer the Supreme Court. What a collection of ghouls.

Zinn’s obituary quotes him calling on people to push Obama beyond being a mediocre president, noting that a mediocre president is a dangerous one.

But then he pivots, as the pundits like to say, toward deficit reduction. Ronnie’s spectre is quick to re-assert itself.

I’ve done the math. Cut the military by a third—which would take it back to 2000 levels, relative to GDP—and sprinkle, not soak, the rich, and the deficit will go away. But we can’t say that, much less do it.

You could eliminate all student debt in the U.S. by expropriating the wealth of the 5 richest people in New York City (starting with our mayor). Just saying.

Tax credits to encourage saving? People can’t save because they don’t have the money.

Promoting higher house prices? Didn’t we just get hurt by a housing bubble? Why is a good thing when one of life’s essentials, shelter, rises in price? We should be promoting housing affordability, not another bubble.

Oh and now he’s going on about health care. By defending a proposal about which an industry lobbyist said, “We win!” Please.

“I’m not interested in punishing banks.” Why not? How can you prevent a rerun without punishing these maniacs?

“Encourage American innovation.” Actually the worthless cash-for-clunkers program was financed by raiding the funds for alternative energy research—a budget that was too small in the first place. Omigod, a new generation of nuclear power plants. Yeah, that’s just what we need. More oil & gas, biofuels, and clean coal. We’ll choke on more oil and gas. Biofuels are an enormous boondoggle. There is no such thing as clean coal—producing coal is filthy and burning it emit CO2. We could generate energy by boiling water with sunlight. But you can’t make much money off that, can you?

And the yahoos are booing climate change. I suspect there are frathouses with higher collective IQs than Congress.

How about last place as the country which gets the lowest education scores in proportion to its per capita income ?