1.) Michael Steele’s dark night of the soul will never end — Apparently not, reports The Daily Caller’s Jon Ward. “There is still no consensus candidate to run against RNC Chairman Michael Steele,” Ward writes. “But that no longer worries Steele’s adversaries, who told TheDC that they believe the embattled chairman does not have the support he needs to win 85 votes when the RNC’s 168 members vote on Jan. 11.” For almost a solid week, Republican insiders looked at House returns and possibly thought to themselves, Maybe that whole lesbian bondage thing was good for us. And then they remembered all the outside money, Haley Barbour’s baritone, Karl Rove and Sarah Palin’s acrylic-clawed cat fight, and Steele posing for those silly pictures with his interns, and the truth hit them like a ton of bricks: Lowered. Expectations. “A month ago most thought he could not be beaten,” said one Republican who is involved in the effort to find an alternative. “Today most think he cannot win.” PRO-FOUND!
2.) The American Postal Workers Union bends America over a barrel — We just made that up, actually. The USPS cannot sue email or the Internet for being so much better than the USPS, anymore than it can sue America for not sending things via snail mail anymore. All the USPS can do is beg for its life, which it is doing with all the fervor expected of the nation’s second largest employer/any company that is paid for by taxpayers and loses $8 billion in a year. “There needs to be a lot of changes made by Congress to put us on solid financial footing,” a USPS spokesman told The Daily Caller’s Alexis Levinson, who writes that the USPS is working to reduce costs by asking Congress to stop Saturday mail delivery and close poorly performing post offices. What is stopping these things from happening? Unions! The APWU and others are not only sucking up all the money and walking slowly around your neighborhood and sometimes delivering nothing but brightly colored fliers for pizza delivery and foreclosure auctions, they are also fighting reform. The USPS brass would love it if they no longer had to deal with these folks. Other things the USPS wants that it is more likely to get: For young people to stop sending pictures in the tubes; ponies for everyone.
3.) Charlie Rangel has a case of the Mondays — “After two years of investigations and political recriminations, Mr. Rangel is scheduled to appear before a hearing of the House ethics committee on Monday to formally rebut charges that his fund-raising and personal finances violated Congressional rules,” reports the New York Times. Not since the trial of Rep. Jim Traficant in 2002 has Congress actually followed through on allegations of wrongdoing, so there is an understandable amount of anticipation and mystery here. According to the Times, “one of the biggest unknowns is whether Mr. Rangel, who has parted ways with his legal team, will have a lawyer make his case or will represent himself.” Oh gosh. Please let him represent himself!
4.) Whiskas Commission gives boomers a free pass — The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform knows which side its bread is buttered on: The bulk of its most controversial suggestions will inconvenience everyone in America except the people who ran our country into the ground, writes Business Week’s Chris Farrell. “One major recommendation from Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson is to scrap the tax deduction for mortgage interest. That’s fine for older Boomers, since many have paid off that debt or have little interest left to deduct. No child credit? Hey, they’re (hopefully) out of the house. Boosting the retirement age for Social Security to age 69 by 2075? The Boomers will be dead then. Gradually hiking the federal gas tax by 15¢ per gallon from its current 18.4¢ starting in 2013? Aging Boomers won’t be driving much in their dotage. End the employee-sponsored health-benefit exclusion from income taxes? Boomers will be on Medicare.” On medicare, or dead! That is where the boomers will be when Generations X-through-eternity are dealing with all this crap!
5.) Update from the front lines of foreclosure crisis — While Washington types obsess over who will chair what, and whether the Obamas are still Americans after spending 10 days in the Orient, the rest of America is still sucking down stone soup and praying for manna. In Florida, for instance, a program that temporarily brought judges out of retirement to help with foreclosure backlogs may have created more problems than it solved. “Did the combination of senior judges charged with moving foreclosure cases rapidly along and the questionable paperwork concerns unfairly or improperly put people out of their homes?” asks the Orlando Sentinel. “With questions being raised about whether some lenders have legitimate claims to certain properties, more homeowners may start contesting the proceedings.” May? Ha. Try “will.” And when they do, said a Florida Supreme Court spokesperson, “They are entitled to full due process, and that means more time in court.” Due process coupled with voluntary foreclosure moratoria means nobody will ever be thrown out of a house again, even if they should be! The good news in all of this is that Florida has volunteered to be the canary in the coal mine. The bad news is that we are all in a coal mine.
6.) It’s like financial regulatory reform never happened — For all the howling over financial regulatory reform–whether it addressed the “Too Big To Fail” question, or knee capped the derivatives industry–Wall Street still seems to be boning main street. “Despite taking up 2,319 pages, the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act left key details to regulatory agencies,” reports the LA Times. Since the bill’s passage, “regulators have had at least 510 meetings with lobbyists representing 325 organizations, according to a Times analysis of meeting logs. That’s when the Fed, the SEC, the FDIC and the CFTC first began keeping the logs on their websites, in the spirit of transparency that was a driving factor for the financial reform law.” Good news: The meetings are public. Bad news: The meetings are happening.
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