Here are a couple little snowflakes from the legacy of the Affordable Care Act. You might remember that the one staffer Max Baucus personally thanked on the floor of the Senate for her work on the bill was Liz Fowler, the former WellPoint VP. From there, she went to work at the Department of Haelth [...]

The Congressional resignations have begun early this cycle. The new Congress has not even been sworn in, and already we have two resignations. Jesse Jackson Jr. resigned in the wake of medical admissions for depression and an imminent arrest on political fundraising violations. Now, Republican Jo Ann Emerson will resign from the House in February, [...]

This Campaign to Fix the Debt organization bankrolled by a bunch of corporate interests has become the newest entry into the Washington favor factory, and it certainly knows how to spread the money around. This anecdoteabout the organization and Mike Allen’s rumor-laundering morning dish “Playbook” is very illustrative. Politico chief White House correspondent Mike Allen [...]

In case you were wondering what all those retiring and defeated lawmakers do with themselves once banished from Capitol Hill, I have a simple answer for you: they get paid. Take Tony Blair, the former British prime minister. In September, Mr. Blair was called to Claridge’s hotel in London to mediate a renegotiation of the [...]

The new report that campaign spending in the 2012 cycle will reach $6 billion has come as depressing news to many despairing over the purchasing of our democracy. Some have held out hope that the sheer numbers will provide a wake-up call to all Americans that something must be done to take this democracy back. [...]

Almost four months after the deadline passed on finalizing the Volcker rule, the firewall on most types of proprietary trading set up between investment and commercial banks, the regulators tasked with writing the rule are no closer to a resolution. The Treasury Department last promised that the rule would get written by the end of [...]

Before last night’s debate, Jeff Connaughton, former chief of staff to Senator Ted Kaufman and longtime aide to Joe Biden and President Clinton, offered some advice to Mitt Romney. He thought Romney should go after Barack Obama’s biggest weakness: the failure to prosecute Wall Street crimes. In actuality, Romney only submitted a glancing blow with [...]

The Daily ShowGet More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook The not-as-funny way to make the point Jon Stewart made about the Republican conception of the entitlement society and where it fails to intersect with reality comes from Simon Johnson. The true “moochers” in American life are, not surprisingly, [...]

Tim Pawlenty, whose previous experience with Wall Street consisted mainly of telling them to “get their snouts out of the trough,” has taken a job as the head of the Financial Services Roundtable, one of the main trade groups for Wall Street. The Roundtable is one of a handful of Washington groups, including the American [...]

I wish I had known about this before the Chicago Teachers Union suspended their strike and returned to work, but it may shed some light on the timing of the suspension. At the least, it provides a little more context for what teachers unions have to deal with on the ground. Apparently the above anti-union [...]

Four years later, we have not seen a systematic dismantling of the conditions that created the crisis. We’ve seen trillions in emergency support thrown at the banks that survived the crash, all of whom have grown bigger and more indispensible, even more “Too Big to Fail” than before. We’ve seen cosmetic regulatory changes, many unrelated to the crash at all, which have not yet been tested and in many not yet implemented. And the core problems of a massive financial sector have not been resolved.