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Wall Street + The Financial Crisis | What has Washington done to remedy the issues identified here?

Senator John McCain warned his Senate colleagues on Wednesday, "To hold out and say we won't agree to raising the debt limit to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution, it's unfair, it's bizarro."

offshore drilling

Obama made a safe pick: He wanted Kagan to have an easy path to the court. And it looks like that's exactly what she'll have. No Senator will buck the tide in an election year.

"Vice President Joe Biden is predicting that Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan will win Senate confirmation with "strong bipartisan support.""

"Judging Elena Kagan Because she's never been a judge, senators must seek to elicit her views on the Constitution and the role of a judge."

Senate version of the Public Online Information Act of 2010

"...compromise with the administration and the Fed would give Mr. Sanders and other critics of the central bank an opportunity to claim victory, while not breaking with the Fed's insistence that its monetary decisions be sacrosanct and insulated from political influence."

"Senator Bernard Sanders, independent of Vermont, has agreed to modify a proposal that would require public audits of the Federal Reserve in a potential compromise"

I was tooling around the internet for awhile yesterday, looking for a transcript of the Congressional hearings that featured Goldman Sachs executives and traders as the star witnesses, before I realized that nowhere in print was there any real sense of what had gone on. Congressional hearings may have been effective at some point in the past, but these days, the witnesses are usually far too polished and used to dissembling for hours at a time to be of any real value, and the senators and congressmen who are asking the questions are usually too polite to do more than ask questions of little or no value. Senator Carl Levin tried to deviate from that formula on Tuesday. He was harsh, unyielding and relentless. "Your clients lost. Goldman profits" rang out several times during his opening address. But Senator Levin didn't have enough of an understanding of the business to really pin back the ears of any of the witnesses, including Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs chairman. I couldn't figure out for the life of me why his staffers didn't line up a few disgruntled traders and insiders to give the senator a three or four day crash course on the business. His gambling analogies were something that might appeal to my grandmother, who puts gambling of any kind up there with the cardinal sins, but missed the mark when it came to characterizing Wall Street's shenanigans.