Here’s a delicious chunk of schadenfreude for all of our uniformed men and women in the Gay Militia fighting the fundies out West: “[Colorado Springs-based ministry] Focus on the Family announced this afternoon that 202 jobs will be cut companywide, bringing the total number of employees to around 950. …The cutbacks come just weeks after the group pumped more than half a million dollars into the successful effort to pass a gay-marriage ban in California.” To the suddenly unemployed Culture Warriors in Colorado: don’t be upset! And please don’t complain? No complaining!! If you complain, Jesus will kill you.

Some 691,000 children went hungry in America sometime in 2007, while close to one in eight Americans struggled to feed themselves adequately even before this year’s sharp economic downturn, the Agriculture Department reported Monday.

The department’s annual report on food security showed that during 2007 the number of children who suffered a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat was more than double the 430,000 in 2006 and the largest figure since 716,000 in 1998.

The pressure is ratcheting up on President-elect Barack Obama to do something as soon as he takes office about the Bush administration’s years of law-breaking.

The lawyer and writer Scott Horton, in an excellent feature in the December issue of Harper’s, lays out the Obama administration’s options. Horton points out that there is a long litany of potential crimes the new administration could go after -– from using the Justice Dept. for political purposes to issuing no-bid military contracts to corrupt companies.

But the most obvious crime that’s prime for prosecution is officially sanctioned torture.

We must tell the world that NO ONE is above the law. Not even the President of the United States of America.

World leaders holding an emergency meeting to combat the economic crisis agreed Saturday to a far-reaching action plan that, over the next 4 1/2 months, would begin to reshape international financial institutions and reform worldwide regulatory and accounting rules.

Under the plans outlined by the leaders, countries such as China, Brazil and India would gain greater roles and responsibilities as part of a restructuring of the international financial system, while European leaders won a commitment to new regulations and controls on banks, rating agencies and exotic financial securities. The leaders also agreed that a dramatic failure of market oversight in “some advanced countries” was among the root causes of the financial crisis, an implicit rebuke of the United States.

I am curious how the new Obama administration will address this in April. With the inclusion of China, India, and Brazil in leadership roles within the World Bank and IMF, we are in for some more serious change. Not necessarily bad change, but certainly painful change.

The leaders agreed to set up a new regulatory body, “a college of supervisors,” to examine the books of major financial institutions that operate across national borders, so regulators could begin to have a more complete picture of banks’ operations. They demanded greater scrutiny of hedge funds and the completion of a clearinghouse system to help standardize and limit risk on some of the opaque and exotic financial derivatives that helped bring down Wall Street’s investment banks.

Leaders also agreed to submit their countries’ financial systems to regular, vigorous reviews by the International Monetary Fund — assessments that some countries, including the United States, had long resisted. And they urged new constraints on the pay schemes at financial firms that “reward excessive short-term returns or risk-taking.”

The career of Ann E. Dunwoody ascended Friday from humble beginnings 33 years ago at Fort Sill, Okla., to a peak never before reached by a woman in the U.S. military: four-star general.

Yeah, it is....damn sir. You da man!

A years-long legal dispute between the White House and Congress over testimony by President Bush’s aides likely will be resolved under the incoming Obama administration, former government lawyers from both political parties agreed Wednesday.

Additionally, the lawyers said Democratic President-elect Obama probably will seek to declassify more Justice Department legal memos — as well as documents across the federal government — than did the outgoing GOP administration.

When a big company that gets into trouble is more valuable living than dead, there used to be a well-established legal process for reorganizing it - called chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code. Under it, creditors took some losses, shareholders even bigger ones, some managers’ heads rolled. Companies cleaned up their books and got a fresh start. And taxpayers didn’t pay a penny.

So why, exactly, is the Treasury substituting government bailouts for chapter 11? Even if you assume Wall Street’s major banks and insurance giant AIG are so important to the national and global economy that they can’t be allowed to fail, that doesn’t mean they have to be bailed out. They could be reorganized under bankruptcy protection. True, their creditors, shareholders, and executives would take bigger hits than they’re taking now that taxpayers are bailing them out. But they’re the ones who took the risk. We didn’t.

The Treasury seems to have lost sight of its real client. It’s client is not the creditors, shareholders, or executives of any of these firms. Its sole client is the American people.

You know, I had really even thought about bankruptcy as an option. Odd, huh? 

• Federal Lobbyists cannot contribute financially to the transition.
• Federal lobbyists are prohibited from any lobbying during their work with the transition.
• If someone has lobbied in the last 12 months, they are prohibited from working in the fields of policy on which they lobbied.
• If someone becomes a lobbyist after working on the Transition, they are prohibited from lobbying the Administration for 12 months on matters on which they worked.
• A gift ban that is aggressive in reducing the influence of special interests.