Via Atrios, three Democratic members of Congress have sent a letter to Michael Williams, the CEO of Fannie Mae, challenging him on his GSE using “foreclosure mill” law firms in foreclosure cases. I’ve added the letter on the flip. At issue are the law firms who are under investigation by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum [...]

GMAC, the struggling financing arm of General Motors, whose mortgage arm holds $26 billion of mortgages, just suspended foreclosures in 23 states in a harried, chaotic policy shift. Ally Financial Inc.’s GMAC Mortgage unit told brokers and agents to halt foreclosures on homeowners in 23 states including Florida, Connecticut and New York. GMAC Mortgage may [...]

The activity on the left to fire Alan Simpson from the Cat Food Commission is growing. Today, Rep. Alan Grayson joins the effort. From an email to supporters: Deficit Commission Republican Co-Chair Alan Simpson just called Social Security a “milk cow with 310 million tits.” Simpson seems to know a lot about farm animals. Which [...]

Two FCC Commissioners and one US Senator slammed the Google-Verizon joint policy agreement and strongly endorsed the principle of net neutrality last night at a hearing before hundreds of citizens in Minneapolis, giving the Chairman of the federal agency Julius Genachowski all of the support he would need to regulate broadband Internet, if he so [...]

This is interesting: Alan Grayson has delivered a harsh attack against Politico, the political gossip site. In a new email to supporters, Grayson lays out the nexus of corporate support of Politico and its systematic attempts to attack his candidacy for re-election: What do Boeing, AT&T, America’s Natural Gas Alliance, CTIA, McDonald’s, and Goldman Sachs [...]

While Alan Grayson hides behind a belief that statutory law governing net neutrality would be safer from rollback than a change in classification at the FCC, John Kerry takes the realistic view: A congressional stalemate has made passage of a net-neutrality bill unlikely for the time being, according to a statement from Sen. John Kerry [...]

The FCC had been meeting with lobbyists for the telecoms, broadcasters and Internet giants like Google for the past week, trying to accommodate them in selling out the Internet. This only worked in getting net neutrality activists to recognize what a disaster was looming in just a few short weeks. Free Press and others engaged [...]

One thing I missed while at Netroots Nation is the fact that the DISCLOSE Act will get a vote on a motion to proceed tomorrow in the Senate, in all likelihood, with a newer version from Chuck Schumer that includes some changes from the House version, some good, some bad: Schumer has left intact a [...]

Progressive Democrats issued a challenge this morning to their colleagues in the House on the eve of a scheduled vote on the war supplemental: the only fiscally responsible stance is to end the emergency funding. It is disingenuous to say this is an “emergency” supplemental. The only “emergency” is this: In funding the longest war [...]

The amendment to audit the Federal Reserve had well over 300 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives, and it passed easily in the House Financial Services Committee. It lives in their version of Wall Street reform. The Senate, as part of a bankruptcy reform bill last year, passed a version of auditing the Fed, through [...]

At a Hollywood bar last night, Rep. Alan Grayson and President George W. Bush* squared off in an entertaining and sometimes exhausting debate about the economy, war and the state of the nation. I moderated the debate, as you can see in the slightly fuzzy photo to the right. President Bush took to the stage [...]