It’s holiday schedule time. Let me reiterate that I’ll be on Countdown (MSNBC, 8pm ET) tonight with Sam Seder talking about the Republican war on public employees and their pensions. Personally, I was hoping to get a cameo on Lockup. But I’ll take what I can get. To the (relatively meager) links:

• Are we headed toward Korean War II? I do think some diplomats need to start paying attention to the overheated rhetoric over there before it gets out of control.

• How do you square this analysis from the Joint Economic Committee that job creation is occurring “faster than previous recessions” with your lying eyes?

• Another BofA class action suit for failing to comply with loan modification guidelines under HAMP. This one comes out of St. Louis. I wonder if these suits will all get consolidated.

• Randall Wray says it’s time to stop all foreclosures, audit the REMIC trusts, put the loans back on the banks, modify everything into new fixed-rate mortgages and basically hit the reset button. It’s amazing how many people go out of their way avoiding this solution.

• I’m willing to believe state stimulus czars who say that money from their share of stimulus funds wasn’t channeled into innovative programs, but it depends on whether you think that speed or investment should have been the goal at a time of runaway unemployment. Saving government jobs, which he lists as an example, is an important priority when the alternative is another unemployed individual.

• Nine charged with terrorism in Britain, as Europe’s awareness of the potential for attacks increases.

• Krugman looks at commodity prices in an era of scarcity, asserts that global growth and finite resources is the culprit, not hyper-inflation.

• Is dispersant still being sprayed in the Gulf? BP claims to have stopped all the way back in July.

• My fear is that large corporations used the downturn to streamline and automate, which means they won’t need the increased labor costs even if their businesses expand.

• If you’re overseeing health care policy in the new Republican House, you hire a health care lobbyist to run the oversight. If you’re overseeing derivatives markets, you hire a lobbyist who worked on derivatives. Keep up, people.

• Greenwald hammers Wired for their work in the Bradley Manning case. Basically, they’ve withheld the key evidence in the case, the Adrian Lamo chat logs, while allowing Lamo to run around and make statements not backed up by the logs which have been released.

• The White House is incensed by the conviction in Russia, for a second time, of former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The White House sees it as an abuse of the legal system.

• Obama called Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, thanked him for giving Michael Vick a second chance. I’m the biggest dog lover in America, but I do believe in time served, and wish more employers would give ex-cons a chance. Obama could practice what he preached as well by actually commuting some unjust sentences.