Hundreds of community, labor and faith leaders rallied at the Wells Fargo shareholders meeting today in San Francisco. Eight protesters were arrested. A smaller group spoke directly to Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf: A delegation of 12 people – including homeowners facing foreclosure from ACCE (Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment), CCISCO (Contra Costa Interfaith [...]

This is not some back-bencher, but the leading counter-terrorism adviser: President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser called it “inconceivable” that Pakistan was not providing a “support system” for Osama bin Laden, who was killed Sunday in a raid in a mansion north of the capital city of Islamabad. “We are pursuing all leads on this issue,” [...]

There has been more momentum toward the bin Laden death leading to an exit from our occupation of Afghanistan than I expected. I expected more hesitancy from typically cautious Democrats around this point. But here’s Barney Frank making an argument: Explaining his decision to vote for the Afghanistan war in 2001, Frank said, “We went [...]

Standard & Poor’s, one of the three leading credit rating agencies, has has warned the US on the rating of its government debt. S&P is concerned that Democrats and Republicans will not be able to agree a plan to reduce the growing US deficit. The agency has downgraded its outlook from stable to negative, increasing [...]

Yesterday, Carl Levin introduced his long and relatively effective report on the financial crisis. It focused on four major aspects: mortgage fraud, weak and deferential regulation, the credit rating agencies and investment bank malpractice with mortgage bonds. Levin said that he referred some issues to the Justice Department for potential prosecution. But we can actually [...]

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has released a report on Wall Street and the financial crisis, supported by both the majority Democrats and the minority Republicans. The 639-page report grew out of a series of hearings on the financial industry which the committee, headed by Carl Levin and featuring Tom Coburn as the ranking [...]

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), a member of the Senate leadership, said today that he supported the call for a vote authorizing military action in Libya, consistent with the War Powers Act. “Under the War Powers Act, any Senator can call this question,” said Durbin on a conference call. “I supported that (during Gulf War I), [...]

The Senate permanent subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Carl Levin, is about to release another report on Goldman Sachs, specifically targeting what he colloquially called their “shitty deals,” where they took the opposite side of their own clients on complex bets. The subtext of this is that regulators are gradually writing the rules of the [...]

This is a major breaking story. The main reason that the lame duck session was so productive was that the rest of the legislative session was so UNPRODUCTIVE, because the Republicans were able to ran out the clock. Senate Democrats are taking a stand and saying, we cannot work this way anymore. All Democratic senators [...]

Just getting to an agreement and a vote in the Senate on the defense authorization bill, which has the legislative repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in it, is not enough to send it along to the President. The House passed its own version of the bill way back in the summer, and it’s markedly [...]

The tension in the endgame over the Bush tax cuts is that a resolution would open up the Senate calendar to a couple other victories before the end of the 111th Congress. It’s what Adam Serwer is basically banking on – clearing the ugly compromise on the tax cuts could pave the way to passing [...]