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(November 3, 1979 - by the end of the day it looked like this)

Saturday November 3, 1979 was supposed to be, by all intents and purposes a slow news day. South Korea had just buried its assassinated President Park Chung Hee, the 1980 Presidential race was getting started, the body of Mamie Eisenhower, former First Lady arrived in Kansas for burial and the coming week would mull Congress giving Chrysler a much needed bailout to stave off bankruptcy.

By the afternoon it got different. Five people were shot dead and at least eight were wounded during an Anti-KKK rally in Greensboro North Carolina, as carloads of whites opened fire on an otherwise peaceful demonstration. Twelve acknowledged Klan members would later be arrested. Protesters overran the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, signaling what would become a 444 day odyssey of hostages and attempted negotiations.

It goes to prove how quickly things can change, from seemingly nowhere.

But on the morning of the 3rd, when this CBS World News Roundup was broadcast, it was just another quiet weekend.

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Today Blue America is hosting an old friend here at Crooks and Liars, Representative Paul Hodes. Paul first came onto our radar in 2006 was he was campaigning-- successfully, as it turned out-- against entrenched incumbent Charlie Bass in New Hampshire. Blue America endorsed him and has been gratified to see him consistently standing up for working families in the House of Representatives. He was one of the Democrats who put his foot down and refused to vote for the Wall Street bailout, TARP. He believes, firmly, that the government has to watch out for Main Street and for American consumers by reigning in the excesses of Wall Street. "I voted against the Wall Street bailout because I didn’t believe we should bail out the big banks while middle class families are hurting across America. I'm working-- fighting-- for tougher regulations on credit card companies, mortgage lenders, and big Wall Street banks so Wall Street’s greed will never be able to hurt middle class families again." When AIG's irresponsibility, unregulated avarice and gambler's instincts got them in trouble and they came looking for money from the government, it was Rep. Hodes who pointed out that to American taxpayers AIG "stands for arrogance, incompetence and greed."

Today, he's asked us to let our readers know that he'd like anyone who was considering donating to his campaign during this live blogging session, instead donate to the No on 1 campaign in Maine. Paul isn't a frightened, mealy-mouthed congressman tiptoeing around equality with a "separate but equal" non-solution for marriage rights. You don't hear him talking about domestic partnerships. He favors equal rights under the law for all couples regardless of gender. "The legislation passed in New Hampshire," he reminds us, "will ensure that all Granite Staters have equal rights under the law. And the law is consistent with the spirit of New Hampshire expressed in our state motto ‘Live Free or Die.’ Marriage equality gives equal justice to New Hampshire residents. I will continue to work for those same principles as a US Senator and I am a proud co-sponsor of the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act."

Please join us in the comments section below and let's talk with Paul about why he's demanding a timeline in Afghanistan and a public option in the health care reform bill-- and anything else you'd like to ask someone who's been serving in the House and wants to move over to the Senate.

Amazing. They don't know why people are angry - and their feelings are hurt. All over the country, people are losing their homes, their life savings and their jobs - and they're upset that the Obama administration is criticizing them over the latest round of million-dollar bonuses.

I think the word I'm groping for here is "narcissists":

WASHINGTON — The Wall Street giants that received a financial lifeline from Washington may have no compunction about paying big bonuses to their dealmakers and traders. But their willingness to deliver “thank you” gifts to President Obama and the Democrats is another question altogether.

Mr. Obama will fly to New York on Tuesday for a lavish Democratic Party fund-raising dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel for about 200 big donors. Each donor is paying the legal maximum of $30,400 and is allowed to take a date. Four of the seven “co-chairs” listed on the invitation work in finance, and Democratic Party organizers say they expect that about a third of the attendees will come from the industry.

But from the financial giants like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup that received federal bailout money — and whose bankers raised millions of dollars for Mr. Obama’s election — only a half-dozen or fewer are expected to attend (estimated total contribution: $91,200).

Part of the reason, several Democratic fund-raisers and executives said, is a fear of getting caught in the public rage over the perception that Wall Street titans profiting from their government bailout may use their winnings to give back to Washington in return. And the timing of the event, as the industry lobbies against proposals for tighter regulations to address the underlying causes of last year’s meltdown on Wall Street, has only added to the worry over public appearances.

“There are sensitivities there,” said Scott Talbot, a lobbyist for the industry’s Financial Services Roundtable. Political contributions “can make a donor a target,” Mr. Talbot said. Many involved, though, say the low attendance from those Wall Street giants also reflected a broader disenchantment with Mr. Obama over the angry language emanating from the White House over the million-dollar bonuses and anti-regulatory lobbying.

“There is some failure in the finance industry to appreciate the level of public antagonism toward whatever Wall Street symbolizes,” said Orin Kramer, a partner in an investment firm who is a Democratic fund-raiser and one of the event’s chairmen. “But in order to save the capitalist system, the administration has to be responsive to the public mood, and that is a nuance which can get lost on Wall Street.”

Krugman points out (again) that the administration should have nationalized troubled banks. They didn't, and the under-regulated, undisciplined banking industry is hurting everyone else as a result:

Ask the people at Goldman, and they’ll tell you that it’s nobody’s business but their own how much they earn. But as one critic recently put it: “There is no financial institution that exists today that is not the direct or indirect beneficiary of trillions of dollars of taxpayer support for the financial system.” Indeed: Goldman has made a lot of money in its trading operations, but it was only able to stay in that game thanks to policies that put vast amounts of public money at risk, from the bailout of A.I.G. to the guarantees extended to many of Goldman’s bonds.

So who was this thundering bank critic? None other than Lawrence Summers, the Obama administration’s chief economist — and one of the architects of the administration’s bank policy, which up until now has been to go easy on financial institutions and hope that they mend themselves.

Why the change in tone? Administration officials are furious at the way the financial industry, just months after receiving a gigantic taxpayer bailout, is lobbying fiercely against serious reform. But you have to wonder what they expected to happen. They followed a softly, softly policy, providing aid with few strings, back when all of Wall Street was on the ropes; this left them with very little leverage over firms like Goldman that are now, once again, making a lot of money.

But there’s an even bigger problem: while the wheeler-dealer side of the financial industry, a k a trading operations, is highly profitable again, the part of banking that really matters — lending, which fuels investment and job creation — is not. Key banks remain financially weak, and their weakness is hurting the economy as a whole.

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