Ultra-conservatives really love the closet. And no, I'm not just talking in a Larry-Craig-kinda way. Sure, some of them who use it to protect themselves, but many more use it to protect their agenda.

You see, the closet can hide all sorts of truths among its shadows. Americans and any facts about America that don't fit the right-wing narrative can be disappeared in this enclosed recess--either bullied into silence or simply ignored--and conservatism can continue to prosper. Because, quite frankly, conservatives need a big enough closet to house a combo Imelda Marcos/Carrie Bradshaw shoe collection if they're to continue prospering after the economic, foreign policy, and social destruction they've wreaked upon this nation.

Right wingers can then tell you that gays and lesbians are some strange breed of misanthrope intent on intergalactic sexual dominion, because if you've never met anyone who is gay before, you just might believe it. Enough of us to sway an election might, all polling to the contrary, be convinced by television advertisements that most Americans want to cut Social Security, think closing the gun-show loophole is unimportant or believe the Citizens United decision makes any sense whatsoever. On all of these, by the way, the "progressive" or non-Ted-Nugent position polls at or north of approximately 70 percent in "swing states" and nationally, making people possessing these ideas the silent majority Richard Nixon once considered worthy of song.

So the protectors of the status quo will fight like hell to keep you and your ideas safely behind the folded khakis or under the Etch A Sketch, you can bet on it. It is what makes Sandra Fluke, Ellen DeGeneres and interviews with those who've lost their jobs due to Mitt Romney's machinations, in a word, dangerous. Human faces, especially, serve to blow up their myths. Because if we see people with which we can identify going through a crisis, or having made what for them was a sensible decision, then it might not seem unreasonable to us. (The principle holds true with humans but not cyborgs. Hence, the reason most of us react to Mitt Romney in much the same way we do to a malfunctioning fax machine)

All of which brings us to last week, at a progressive blogger conference in Providence, Rhode Island, called Netroots Nation. At this conference, former Microsoft software developer and current Congressional candidate from Washington State's 1st District, Darcy Burner, stood up and courageously spoke about the issue of abortion during a keynote address.

Most people don't know that 1 in 3 women have had an abortion (in fact I had no idea until last week), because the Right has successfully shamed women who made a legal, medically-based decision into hiding in those shadows in the closet. Burner, not one for running meek campaigns (a breath of fresh air among Democrats), asked women in the crowd to stand if they had had an abortion, and felt comfortable doing so. She proceeded to ask if everyone else would join them and stand up, showing support for the courageous women around them. Then, Burner rightly said, "this is how we change the stories in people's heads."

Right wingers, as well as other various confused souls, felt that closet door opening ever so slightly. And they knew they needed to kick it closed, lest others cross the threshold and not feel ashamed. Enter comical right-wing blogger Melissa Clouthier (who likes to keep "doctor" in her official title, so we might think she possesses some sort of guidance for us on these and other matters--and as a chiropractor, I'm just sure she's an expert on the uterus), who misquoted Burner and claimed the women in the hall were "celebrating" abortion.

Common sense was also lost on Joe Connelly of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, as he took to Clouthier's misquote and spin. And of course Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson's publication, The Daily Caller, got in on the mythmaking too. But after being fired from most known television networks founded since about 1973, I guess Carlson has to do something to keep his 4 names in the press.

Lucky us, being able, in real time, to watch 1000 Mesozoic-Era intellects bloom.

Burner, on the other hand, was doing what must be done in an age dominated by right-wing moneymen, pouring millions of dollars into everything from telling us Jesus was a car-elevator-owning hedge fund manager to global warming isn't happening.

This is why it is so important that Burner brought some sunlight to the truth. And we'd be all be the better for it if there were many more like her in our politics.

Follow me on Twitter: @cliffschecter

This column first appeared at Al Jazeera English

The market, of course, is very, very happy. I wonder what the IMF terms were?

BRUSSELS — Global markets rallied Monday, reversing the steep declines of recent days, after European leaders agreed to provide a huge rescue package of nearly $1 trillion to combat the debt crisis that has engulfed Europe, and central banks began injecting cash into the financial system.

In an extraordinary meeting that lasted into the early hours of Monday morning, finance ministers from the European Union agreed on a deal that would provide $560 billion in new loans and $76 billion under an existing lending program to countries facing instability. Elena Salgado, the Spanish finance minister, who announced the deal, also said the International Monetary Fund was prepared to give up to $321 billion separately.

Officials were hoping the size of the program — a total of $957 billion — would signal a “shock and awe” commitment to such troubled countries as Greece, Portugal and Spain, in the same vein as the $700 billion package the United States government provided to help its own ailing financial institutions in 2008.

On top of the unprecedented sum, the European Central Bank reversed its position of just a few days ago and said it would buy government and corporate debt. And the world’s leading central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, announced a joint intervention to make more dollars available for interbank lending.

Central bank purchases of euro-zone government bonds began Monday, although the E.C.B. did not immediately release details.

I don't think regulation alone is going to be enough to really make the American people happy. I know I won't be satisfied until we see bankers in pain - serious pain. (Or jail.) Because after all, how else will they learn?

Now let's see if the Republicans walk away from this popular support, just like they did with health care:

About two-thirds of Americans support stricter regulations on the way banks and other financial institutions conduct their business, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Majorities also back two main components of legislation congressional Democrats plan to bring to a vote in the Senate this week: greater federal oversight of consumer loans and a company-paid fund that would cover the costs of dismantling failed firms that put the broader economy at risk.

A third pillar of the reform effort draws a more even split: 43 percent support federal regulation of the derivatives market; 41 percent are opposed. Nearly one in five - 17 percent - express no opinion on this complicated topic.

President Obama, who traveled to New York last week to deliver his case for sweeping changes to the financial system gets an even-up review of his performance on the issue, with 48 percent of those polled approving of his handling of financial regulation and 48 percent disapproving.

But compared with congressional Republicans, Obama has a clear advantage. A slim majority - 52 percent - of all Americans says they trust Obama over the GOP on the issue, while 35 percent favor the Republicans in Congress. Independents prefer Obama 47 to 35 percent, with 16 percent trusting neither side on the issue.In the poll, most Democrats back each of the three major elements of the reform legislation and most Republicans oppose them, echoing the congressional showdown expected this week.

The President is heading to NYC on Thursday to tout the new financial reform bill which is still being worked on while the Maine Twins are at it again.

Susan Collins flatly rejected it after meeting with Geithner and said she will filibuster it.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) announced after meeting with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Monday that she will vote to filibuster a Democratic Wall Street reform bill.

Her announcement hurts Democratic chances of moving financial reform legislation through the Senate this week.

--

Collins said she and Geithner found common ground on many areas of financial regulatory reform and urged Democrats to spend several more weeks negotiating the measure. Collins said it was unlikely that her concerns could be addressed within the next few days so that Reid could stick to his schedule...read on.

Meanwhile, Queen Olympia Snowe says that she doesn't mind being the only Republican vote if they work out their differences.

It would be going too far to say Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) is a shoe-in to vote for the Democrats' financial regulatory reform bill. But after a meeting with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner this afternoon, she sounded much more optimistic about the prospects for a swift bipartisan vote on a slightly modified package than she did last week--and that's even if she's the only Republican who ends up voting with the Democrats.

"I'm optimistic that maybe the Democrats won't go forward with the bill as it is," Snowe told reporters outside her office. "Over the next few days, hopefully, something will change to make that possible. I don't see why it would be impossible because frankly I think that there isn't that much of a gap."

Will the Obama Administration trust Snowe again after what she did on HCR? The administration already caved to Mitch McConnell on the 50 billion dollar liquidation fund that would be paid for by Wall Street and he balked anyway. As is the Luntz way, he wants to start all over again. Will Snowe break the filibuster? Good luck with that.

This is very, very interesting news. Is the White House serious, or is this a pro-consumer doggie biscuit to keep the left wing off their back? Here's hoping it's the real thing:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration waded into negotiations over Wall Street regulations Wednesday, calling for limits on the size of financial institutions and insisting that consumer protections remain a central objective of legislative attempts to rein in the industry.

In the Senate, talks continued on how to create a consumer protection entity. Republicans pressing for a watered-down consumer agency even as they voiced optimism that they could reach a deal with Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, within a week.

The Treasury Department circulated proposed legislation that would prevent commercial banks from carrying out high-risk trades and that would restrict the size of financial firms to holdings no greater than 10 percent of the entire financial industry's liabilities. That restriction would apply only to firms that grow through a merger or an acquisition.

Consumer protections and doing away with financial firms deemed too big to fail are two of the key elements of the legislative efforts to overhaul the rules that govern Wall Street and prevent a recurrence of the 2008 financial crisis. In reiterating its points, the administration was making certain its views were being heard in the Senate at a sensitive time in negotiations between Dodd and Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.

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When even Warren Buffett, who is no Boy Scout himself, is calling them out, you know it's bad:

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Warren Buffett, the world's most famous investor, launched an attack Saturday on big-bank executives, calling for penalties for those who led their companies to near-ruin.

In his latest letter to shareholders, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. decried the fact that while shareholders suffered during the recent crash, the top people at the banks got off relatively lightly.

"It has not been shareholders who have botched the operations of some of our country's largest financial institutions," wrote Buffett. "Yet they have borne the burden, with 90% or more of the value of their holdings wiped out in most cases of failure. Collectively, they have lost more than $500 billion in just the four largest financial fiascos of the last two years. To say these owners have been 'bailed-out' is to make a mockery of the term.

"The CEOs and directors of the failed companies, however, have largely gone unscathed. Their fortunes may have been diminished by the disasters they oversaw, but they still live in grand style," added Buffett.

Good PR move, I guess. Obama allowed public anger to build and now it looks like he only slammed the bankers because he had to. Which is, you know, probably true.

I prefer Yves' idea: That this should be positioned as a windfall profits tax. They didn't earn these outrageous profits; those profits wouldn't exist with the federal government infusing cash into their dying companies.

President Obama plans Thursday to propose a sharp increase in the taxes paid by the nation's largest financial institutions designed to raise $90 billion over the next decade while constraining the industry's ability to take large risks and reap outsize rewards, a senior administration official said.

The tax proposal, which would require congressional approval, is meant to make a splash, demonstrating to the public that the administration is now focused on reforming the financial industry after more than a year of bailout efforts. The official, who spoke with reporters before the president's announcement on condition of anonymity, said that large firms were reaping renewed profit from a rescue intended to help the broader economy and that the public deserved a larger share of the money.

The nation's largest banks are expected to report large annual profits over the next week, along with plans to set aside billions of dollars for employee bonuses.

[...] Industry executives are warning that hitting banks will hurt the broader economy because firms would seek to impose the cost of any tax on customers.

"Using tax policy to punish people is a bad idea," Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of J.P. Morgan Chase, told reporters Wednesday after his testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. "All businesses tend to pass their costs on to customers."

[...] Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said he supports the administration's plan, but he also is holding hearings next week to consider additional ways of curbing compensation, including reversing a cut in the tax rate that applies to the largest bonuses.

Frank said he was unmoved by the argument that the higher taxes might reduce the flow of money to the broader economy. He said some banking activities appeared to have only one purpose: "to simply make money for the people who participate."

He also played down concerns that talent would leave the industry.

"I don't know where people would go for comparable salaries," Frank said. "I guess perhaps they could star in major motion pictures."

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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It was a real Wingnut-O-Rama on Fox yesterday when Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota went on Glenn Beck's show and expounded at length about ACORN's supposed involvement in the Community Reinvestment Act.

What they're trying to do, of course, is taint any kind of minority-advancement program by tying ACORN around its neck. Mind you, the CRA has been around since 1977, since well before ACORN's rise. But nevermind -- they just want to scare white people with false "facts" about minority advancement efforts.

For instance, Beck reiterates what is now right-wing legend:

Beck: You may remember -- or not -- the CRA, the Community Reinvestment Act, is the thing that makes banks makes banks lend money to people they don't want to loan money to because they have very low income and they're very likely to go under. It's often cited as one of the chief causes of the subprime mortgage meltdown.

This is, of course, a flat-out lie. In fact, as the Wikipedia entry explains, the CRA only forces banks to lend to people they don't want to because they're the wrong race:

Congress passed the Act in 1977 to reduce discriminatory credit practices against low-income neighborhoods, a practice known as redlining. The Act requires the appropriate federal financial supervisory agencies to encourage regulated financial institutions to meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered, consistent with safe and sound operation.

... The law, however, emphasizes that an institution's CRA activities should be undertaken in a safe and sound manner, and does not require institutions to make high-risk loans that may bring losses to the institution. An institution's CRA compliance record is taken into account by the banking regulatory agencies when the institution seeks to expand through merger, acquisition or branching. The law does not mandate any other penalties for non-compliance with the CRA.

Bachmann repeats Beck's lie and expands on it:

Bachmann: Well, it's stunning, Glenn. Just as you said, the Community Reinvestment Act is a creation of the federal government forcing private banks to make home mortgages to people who are very poor credit risks. No banks wants to do that. So the federal government in effect threatens banks and says, we're going to close down your interstate bank or we won't let you expand unless you make these bad loans to people or make loans that are unlikely to be repaid. Well, why would a bank want to do that?

Bachmann is outraged, outraged we tell you, that banks have been able to partner with ACORN in making loans to minority families (ACORN plays the role of guarantor, which actually means the loans aren't high-risk). But as Mary Kane at the Windy notes, the entire objection rests entirely on the grounds that ACORN is supposedly a proven evil and corrupt organization -- which has hardly, in fact, been proven. Unless by "evil" you mean "highly effective at getting minority voters to the polls." Which is clearly the case for Bachmann and the Turnip.

Moreover, the claim that the CRA caused the subprime meltdown is pure right-wing garbage. As FDIC chairman Sheila Bair explained:

Point of fact: Only about one-in-four higher-priced first mortgage loans were made by CRA-covered banks during the hey-day years of subprime mortgage lending (2004-2006). The rest were made by private independent mortgage companies and large bank affiliates not covered by CRA rules.

You've heard the line of attack: The government told banks they had to make loans to people who were bad credit risks, and who could not afford to repay, just to prove that they were making loans to low- and moderate-income people.

Let me ask you: where in the CRA does it say: make loans to people who can't afford to repay? No-where! And the fact is, the lending practices that are causing problems today were driven by a desire for market share and revenue growth ... pure and simple.

And as Aaron Pressman at BusinessWeek pointed out, the independent mortgage companies who were the chief offenders in the subprime meltdown were in fact never subject to the CRA.

University of Michigan law professor Michael Barr testified back in February before the House Committee on Financial Services that 50% of subprime loans were made by mortgage service companies not subject comprehensive federal supervision and another 30% were made by affiliates of banks or thrifts which are not subject to routine supervision or examinations.

Well, facts and reality have never made much of an impression on the Planet Wingnuttia domiciles of Bachmann and Beck. But isn't it funny how they focus so much energy on attacking programs that benefit minorities? Hmmmmmm.

Oops, just kidding! Just think, if they'd actually admitted the banks were in deep trouble, and that their assets weren't worth a dime, the crisis might have bottomed out a lot sooner - and the banks wouldn't have been able to use TARP funds to buy up their competitors!

Senior U.S. officials deliberately misled the American people about the health of banks receiving huge government cash infusions last year, according to a report released today from the Treasury Department TARP watchdog.

The officials believed they were telling noble lies. The idea was that confidence needed to be restored and panic stemmed, even if this meant misleading the public about the actual health of our financial institutions.

Of course, this backfired. The government and the bailout lost public credibility when the financial crisis deepened, according to TARP watchdog Neil Barofsky's report.

Worse, the lies may have made the crisis worse by creating false expectations that the bailed out banks would be able to increase lending. Businesses and individuals planning to borrow would have discovered that their projects were impossible and their savings inadequate as banking lending continued to fall.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that the $125 billion injection into nine banks in October 2008 was a program for "healthy" institutions. But privately senior officials believed several of those firms were less than healthy. Hank Paulson himself believed one of those institutions might fail.

"By stating that healthy' institutions would be able to increase overall lending, Treasury may have created unrealistic expectations about the institutions' condition and their ability to increase lending," the report said.