A few highlights:

New York magazine calls it a "Mass Movement for Millionaires." The New York Times' Paul Krugman sums up the idea: "Hey, sacrifice is for the little people."

The Campaign to Fix the Debt is a huge, and growing, coalition of powerful CEOs, politicians and policy makers on a mission to lower taxes for the rich and to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid under the cover of concern about the national debt. The group was spawned in July 2012 by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, architects of a misguided deficit reduction scheme in Washington back in 2010. By now, the "fixers" have collected a war chest of $43 million. Private equity billionaire Peter G. Peterson, longtime enemy of the social safety net, is a major supporter.

[snip]

The fixers are often vague about their mission, and they tend to speak in coded language that conceals their actual goals. Let's have some blunt talk about what the fixers want to do and why they want to do it - talk you're unlikely to hear in mainstream media supported by corporate advertising.

1. "Fix" means cut: When they say "fix" Social Security, they mean cut Social Security.

[snip]

2. "Reform" means rob. When the say "reform" the tax code, they mean "make taxes even lower for the rich."

[snip]

3."Bipartisan" means all of the rich. Fix the Debt is a pro-business ideological movement pretending to be a bipartisan group of concerned citizens.

[snip]

4. "Concern" means covet. [this is a really good section]

[snip]

5. "Fiscal conservative" means economically confused.

[snip]

6. "Strip-mining is not leadership." Fixers present themselves as magnanimous, responsible leaders doing what they believe is best for the country. But that's a tough sell when you're advocating policies that mainly benefit...yourself.

KRAUTHAMMER: Kristol's turning into a Socialist... He's the Secretary of the Treasury sitting right over there. Worker's champion. link

President Obama made public comments to this effect in front of the Business Roundtable. And various other commentators have reported it. But it's turning out to be far more important than the jousting over tax rates that President Obama is saying flatly that he will not negotiate under any circumstances over raising the national debt limit.
link

White House Spox: No Constitutional Workaround To Ignore Debt Ceiling

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Thursday the Obama administration does not believe the 14th Amendment gives the President the ability to ignore the debt ceiling, Reuters reported. link

   According to proposals that the states have submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services, insurance plans will have to cover weight-loss surgery in New York and California, for example, but not in Minnesota or Connecticut. Infertility treatment will be a required benefit in New Hampshire, but not in Arizona.

    Over all, the law requires that essential health benefits cover 10 broad categories, including emergency services, maternity and newborn care, hospitalization, preventive care and prescription drugs. But there is room for variation in those categories. Whether insurance will pay for hearing aids, foot care, speech therapy and various medications will vary significantly by state.

New required services will drive up the cost of insurance.

Different rules for different states will increase the cost of compliance, as well as regulatory cost.  The cost curve is being bent.  Unfortunately it is being bent in the wrong direction.

I want to share some news. I am going to be ending my association with FDL News Desk. My last day will be December 21, two weeks from tomorrow.

This was an agonizing and difficult decision that I made over the course of many months. Those of you who have been kind enough to read my scribblings for the past three years (or, for the real old-timers who go back to Hullabaloo or Calitics or my original blog D-Day, eight) deserve at least an explanation for this, and so I'm going to try and provide one.

Let me start by telling you that this has nothing to do with the fine people at Firedoglake, from Jane on down to the editors and moderators and backstage folks. I have nothing but respect for what this site has been able to build and sustain through a challenging time in media, particularly for ad-supported liberal blogs. FDL has long carved out a niche as a destination for in-depth information relegated to the back pages, if at all, of most news outlets, combined with an activism arm that takes that information and actually transforms it into action. Jane has been extremely generous and patient with me as I attempted to contribute to this in my meager way, and I couldn't be happier with how things turned out. Together we accomplished a good deal. And I'm sure the site will continue to accomplish much more.

The word "lunatic" will be stricken from federal law under legislation passed by the House on Wednesday (it passed the Senate last May) and now is on its way to the president.  The action is to remove language that has become outdated or demeaning--there is no record of which argument was most persuasive.

The legislation cites one instance in banking regulation that refers to the authority of a bank to act as a "committee of estates of lunatics" on guardianship. It is a toss-up as to which is more surprising, this recognition of 21st century understanding of mental disease and illness, or that there is a banking regulation.

Last April, Belize police arrested McAfee and charged him with unlicensed drug manufacturing and possession of an unlicensed weapon, an arrest which which McAfee later claimed was prompted by his refusal to donate money to a local official. He has since made claims online to having been "persecuted" by Belize authorities.

McAfee initially made over $100 million when his software company initially went public in 1992. However, his personal fortune had apparently dwindled to about $4 million over the ensuing two decades, due in large part to bad real estate deals, failed business ventures and bond investments with Lehman Bros. He moved to Belize five years ago to shelter his remaining millions from U.S. taxes, and was living in a beachfront estate on Ambergris Caye.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) wanted to prove on Thursday that Democrats don't have the votes to weaken Congress' authority on the debt limit. Instead they called his bluff, and he ended up filibustering his own bill.
...
"The Republican leader objects to his own idea," Reid declared on the floor. "So I guess we have a filibuster of his own bill."
...
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) scoffed at that notion that a senator would ask for a vote on a bill in good faith while requiring that it be "filibuster-proof."

"This may be a moment in Senate history, when a senator made a proposal that, when given an opportunity for a vote on that proposal, filibustered his own proposal," he said. "I don't think this has ever happened before." link