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Hey, what do you know. Mark Shields, the normally hapless faux liberal that The PBS Newshour puts across from Bobo week after week, actually called David Brooks out for his hackery. Republicans just mindlessly repeat these ridiculous claims that big evil government just needs to "get out of the way" and let the private sector get to creating those jobs -- and they're almost never called on it. This was one of those rare times that Brooks had someone actually take him to task for it.

MARK SHIELDS: Getting government out of the way, I love that. That's a great one, after what we have been through in this country with absolutely no control. And we just learned again this week that banks too big to fail are even too big to be reprimanded, controlled by the federal government.

Later in the segment, Brooks attempted to defend his remarks and Shields hit back at him again, this time for his hypocrisy on what is or is not good government spending. Brooks responded by backpedaling so fast, you could see tread marks:

DAVID BROOKS: Well, it sort of doesn't feel like the first year of an administration, like the first few months. It feels kind of exhaustion.

Those of us who -- we have interviews in the White House, interviews in Congress. They have differences, not as big as they think. They have a lot of mythology about the other sides. And so just having these meetings would be a good thing, personal relationships.

And so I think we have begun to see a little change in mode, as I say. Secondly, they have created space for some deals, so the people right now, there are eight senators sitting in Capitol Hill doing immigration. They're making incredible progress, really good progress. And I think that's part of the tune.

And if I could just defend this idea of getting government out of the way, listen, we have got 24 percent of the economy as the government. We're not shrinking into Hong Kong wonderland here. But it's -- without question, just in a cyclical sense, uncertainty about Washington, these fiscal catastrophes, these debt ceiling, middle-of-the-night things, that's had an unnerving effect on investment. And if we could just stop that, that would help the economy.

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We've covered both of these stories here, whether it's the "too big to jail" corrupt HSBC, or the out of touch greedy AIG, which was considering suing the taxpayers after they'd bailed them out. This Wednesday evening, The Daily Show's Jon Stewart took his turn going after them.

AIG decided not to join their former CEO "Hank" Greenberg's lawsuit against the government after all. I guess they took a look at those booming sales of pitchforks and torches and decided it might not bode well for them to do so.

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Too big to jail ought to mean too big to exist. Don't dare rob a bank or run drugs across the border, or you're sure as hell going to prison. But if you're a megabank which might take down our economy, by all means feel free to break the law with a slap on the wrist.

Too Big to Jail: Big Banks Can Finance Terrorists and Walk Away Scot-Free:

HSBC receives get-out-of-jail-free card in a real-life game of Monopoly.

The New York Times reports this week that megabank HSBC has escaped criminal prosecution for money laundering that probably funded terrorists and narcotics traffickers. Why? Because regulators and prosecutors were petrified that an indictment would undermine the entire financial system. The Times quotes anonymous government sources who confessed fears about bringing formal charges because doing so would be a "death sentence" for the bank. So they let it off the hook.

That’s right, HSBC is officially above the law. Too-big-to-fail has become too-big-to-prosecute.

A year-long investigation found that the British banking giant had blown right past federal laws by laundering billions of dollars from Mexican drug trafficking and processing banned transactions on behalf of Iran, Libya, Sudan and Burma. A Wednesday Times article serves up vivid passages about the shady goings-on, including HSBC officials working closely with Saudi Arabian banks linked to terrorist organizations. According to the report, "the four-count criminal information filed in the court charged HSBC with failure to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program, to conduct due diligence on its foreign correspondent affiliates and for violating sanctions and the Trading With the Enemy Act."

In a statement, the bank said it “will acknowledge that, in the past, we have sometimes failed to meet the standards that regulators and customers expect.” HSBC apologized and promised never, ever to do it again, scout’s honor.

I’m pretty sure I know what would happen to me if I stole a loaf of bread from the corner store. But a big bank can act as financier to freaking terrorists and never worry about things like jail. Funny how a corporation is a person until it breaks the law. Read on...

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Shortly after Jamie Dimon's appearance on Fox last month, PBS's Bill Moyers had former Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and head of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, Paul Volcker, whose namesake is the Volcker rule that Wall Street has been lobbying so hard to water down or get rid of, as his guest.

In light of the recent debacle at JPMorgan Chase where Dimon's company lost at least $2 billion on high risk derivatives trading, his advice for Dimon during this interview is downright prescient; If you want to participate in proprietary trading, give up your banking license.

Paul Volcker on the Volcker Rule:

You’d think after such a calamitous economic fall, there’d be a strong consensus on reinforcing the protections that keep us out of harm’s way. But in some powerful corners, the opposite is happening. Business and political forces, including hordes of lobbyists, are working hard to diminish or destroy these protections. One of the biggest bull’s-eyes is on the Volcker Rule, a section of the Dodd-Frank Act that aims to keep the banks in which you deposit your money from gambling it on their own — sometimes risky — investments. [...]

Volcker contends the rule aims to curb conflicts of interest between bankers and their customers. He suggests that former investment companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which sought banking licenses during the economic crisis in order to access federal protection against failing, should now turn in those licenses if they want to do speculative trading.

“You shouldn’t run a financial system on the expectation of government support. We’re supposed to be a free enterprise system,” Volcker tells Moyers. “The problem of course is once they get rescued, does that lead to the conclusion they’ll get rescued in the future?”

Transcript of the clip below the fold and you can watch the entire interview at the link above.

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Looks like Red State's Erick Erickson has a book to peddle, since he showed up on MSNBC's Morning Joe instead of his usual gig with the poorly named "best political team on television." When talking about the fact that conservatives didn't stick to many of their so-called "principles" during the years that George W. Bush was in office, Erickson agrees and thinks that they should be allowing the "free market" to do its job. When asked by Dylan Ratigan if he thinks that after allowing the finance companies to get "too big to fail" the government should have allowed them to go down -- even if it meant God knows how many retirees losing their pensions -- Erickson replies, in no uncertain terms: "Yes."

I wasn't wild about the bailouts but I understood why they did them. They were worried about setting off a death spiral where the entire world's economy collapsed and we had a worldwide great depression. Apparently that's something Erickson thinks we should have risked happening. Of course, his ilk doesn't want any regulations either that might have prevented that sort of collapse in the first place.

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Rick Sanchez seems shocked to learn that Wall Street's lobbyists out numbered the poor unpaid lobbyists working on the side of financial reform 1800 to 60. No big shock here. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi talked to Sanchez about that and the problems with the financial regulation reform bill that would be expected after that amount of intense lobbying on the Congress, such as not addressing to too big to fail and the derivatives market.

SANCHEZ: Now to this. You know how I feel as we have these conversations every day, and we talk about a lot of different things, you and I. But you know how I feel about conventional wisdom. As far as I'm concerned more often than not, you know, a quarter will buy you a blow pop. Conventional wisdom often will get you very little. More often than not it's more like conventional idiocy, as a matter of fact.

I want to bring in somebody who often tackles conventional wisdom as well. As you know, he works for the "Rolling Stone," Matt Taibbi. And he's writing now about this new financial reform that all of us have been reading and writing about that most have believed is the right thing to do that will salvage the situation on Wall Street and never let us have to go through what we've been through before, meaning what happened two and a half years ago.

He joins us now, and let me start -- let me start with this -- general question to you, Matt. If what they're doing is undoing the problem that led us to the meltdown itself, you know, putting back in the regulations that we needed, putting back in some of the laws we've gotten rid of, isn't that a good thing?

TAIBBI: It is, but they just didn't do enough of that. They really address add few things. There are some good things in this bill, but the really, really key thing, the big problems they left unaddressed or they did a half-measures or quarter measures, and they didn't really tackle the problems head-on.

The key things are too big to fail, they didn't really fix that problem, and they didn't really solve the derivatives issue very well.

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From Sen. Al Franken:

Sen. Franken proposed an amendment to create a Credit Rating Agency Board, supervised by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which would assign credit rating agencies to provide initial ratings in order to reduce conflicts of interest. This would increase competition by enabling smaller credit rating agencies to finally have an opportunity to compete against the largest three agencies.

DDay at FDL has more -- Al Franken Takes On “Too Big To Fail” Rating Agencies:

Last week, I wondered if anyone in Congress would get their act together and try to deal with the problem of the credit rating agencies as part of the Wall Street reform bill. These raters essentially sold their power to high-rate crap securities to the highest bidder among the banks, because they are hired and paid by the companies whose securities they rate. Jeff Merkley told me that “there hasn’t been enough work done on it yet to come up with a solution.”

Sen. Al Franken has quietly done the work, and come up with an amendment that would change the way the rating agencies and their issuers do business. His amendment, co-sponsored by Bill Nelson and Chuck Schumer, would set up an office inside the SEC that would assign initial rating requests to the accredited rating agencies, rather than have the issuer hire the raters. “Our amendment brings the most fundamental change to the rating agency system,” said a staff member for Senator Franken who walked me through the amendment today.

The reform, modeled after a proposal by NYU law professors Matthew Richardson and Lawrence White, plugs a hole in the Wall Street reform bill by removing the conflict of interest among the rating agencies, according to Franken. He told ABC News yesterday that “If a failing student paid their teacher to turn their F into an A, everyone would agree that what the teacher had done was unethical … But right now, investors are being sold a phony bill of goods. We need to protect consumers from the pay-to-play system that rewards Wall Street players at the expense of Main Street.” Read on...

From Sen. Bernie Sanders -- Sanders vs. Gregg:

Sharply contrasting views of the role of Wall Street in American society were staked out in a Senate floor debate over a major overhaul of financial regulations. In an exchange that extended over two days, Senators Bernie Sanders and Judd Gregg clashed over their competing visions of big banks and federal regulation of the financial industry. The progressive independent and a conservative Republican from neighboring states that share a border shaped by the Connecticut River debated how best to avoid the kind of financial fallout that plunged the economy into a severe recession in the fall of 2008.

Sanders Op-Ed: Real Wall Street Reform:

In my view, the real and transformational financial reform we need must include the following elements:

Break Up Huge Banks The four major U.S. banks – Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Well-Fargo – issue two-thirds of the credit cards in this country, write half the mortgages and collectively hold $7.4 trillion in assets, about 52 percent of the nation’s estimated total output last year. Incredibly, despite all of them being bailed out during the Wall Street meltdown because they were “too big to fail,” three of them (Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo) are now bigger than before the bailout. But this is an issue which goes beyond the danger of “too big to fail” and future taxpayer liability. We must break up these behemoths because of the incredible economic power they exert on the economy through their concentration of ownership and enormous competitive advantages.

Financial Institutions Must be Integrated Into the Real Economy At a time when we are in the midst of a major recession, it is insane that our largest financial institutions continue to trade trillions in esoteric financial instruments which makes Wall Street the largest gambling casino in the world. We need to create a financial system which invests in the real economy, and helps create millions of new jobs by providing small and medium businesses with the credit they desperately need. We also need investments to rebuild our manufacturing sector, transform our energy system and create modern transportation and infrastructure systems. We don’t need banks pushing home mortgages on people who can’t afford them. We don’t need huge amounts being “bet” on whether housing securities go up or down or what the price of oil will be six months from now.

National Usury Legislation Major financial institutions have, in many ways, become nothing less than loan-sharking operations. Today, millions of Americans who pay their bills on time are now forced to pay 25 or 30 percent interest rates. That is not only obscene but, according to every major religion, immoral. Banks cannot be allowed to engage in usury and charge outrageous interest rates. We must cap interest rates for private banks at the same level as we do for credit unions – 15 percent except under exceptional circumstances.

Transparency at the Federal Reserve The Federal Reserve cannot continue to operate in almost total secrecy. During the bailout, large financial institutions received trillions of dollars in zero or near-zero interest loans. Who received those loans and under what terms? The Fed isn’t telling. Did some of them turn around and, in a mammoth welfare scam, invest that Fed money in government treasury bonds at 3 percent or 4 percent interest rates? The Fed refuses to say. It’s time we had transparency at the Fed so that the American people know what our central bank is doing.

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More "too big to fail" double-speak from Sen. Keating Five McCain. This man has absolutely credibility whatsoever talking about financial reform given his history on the topic as I pointed out after Fox had him on again for the Sunday bobble head show.

McCain doesn't want these industries to be "too big to fail", and now he's claiming we should have a wall between "traditional banking and investment". He also thinks there should be some "oversight" but never says who should be doing it and he says if "taxpayers dollars are not at risk we should let them do what they want". So in other words, he still doesn't want any regulation and if these financial institutions come crashing down again, just let the entire economy explode. When he tells us how he plans to get them unscrambled from the funds in those traditional banks without regulating them, I hope he lets us know. I'm not holding my breath since he helped tear down the walls in the first place he now says should be put back up.

Greta asks him if he thinks we're "using our criminal code enough". McCain agrees and says "there should be more criminal enforcement of some of these things that we have seen take place". Of course McCain doesn't say which things that have taken place should be prosecuted. I'm sure McCain knows all too well that far too many of the activities that took down our financial markets unfortunately are not illegal because they were deregulated and they let the financial markets turn into the Wild West with his help. I do hope they prosecute or sue over the activities that were illegal, but so far we've seen little of that.

He then gets asked to comment on whether he agrees with Blanche Lincoln's proposal for more transparency of the derivatives market and he doesn't answer and says we need more transparency from the Fed. Well, that's true, but I doubt he'll supporting Lincoln's amendment.

It really gets old seeing this man be allowed to come on the television and talk out of both sides of his mouth so badly and never get called on it.

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Chris Wallace asks Bill Kristol if it’s bad news for the GOP if the Democrats are pushing to crack down on Wall Street and the Republicans are blocking it. To the surprise of everyone on the panel, after attacking President Obama for treating the American public like they’re stupid, Kristol actually suggests that the Republicans should “think about breaking up the banks”. I await Kristol trying to pretend he didn’t actually say this in about a week.

Kristol: If one has a view of the voters that they’re really simple minded and they… the Democrats get to say over and over again as President Obama says over and over again, Wall Street bad, this bill anti-Wall Street, you should be for this bill. That’s sort of the level of the rhetoric the President’s engaging in and it’s the same view of the voters that we talked about in the last session with the tea partiers. Hey, you guys got a little tax benefit there. You should be grateful to me. Hey, Wall Street bad, you should support me.

Let’s have a serious debate on the bill. It’s quite complicated. The fact is a serious critique of the bill is, Fannie, Freddie, AIG, the five big banks, all too big to fail. This bill does nothing about that. It makes none of them too big to fail. There are some good things in the bill. There’s some bad things in the bill.

It doesn’t address the problem that led to the financial meltdown and that problem can be addressed I think in conservative ways, through bankruptcy law and possibly through breaking up the banks. I think Republicans do need to be a little radical on their side in thinking through what the right solution is, but I’m not so convinced as everyone else that President Obama just gets to say Goldman Sachs bad, this bill anti-Wall Street. Everyone support this bill.

Liasson: Republicans are for breaking up the big banks?

Kristol: They should think about breaking up the banks.

Liasson: That would be a truly… then they would join with Bernie Sanders and the left wing of the Democratic Party.

Kristol: Yeah. You’ve got to be imaginative sometimes, huh?

Williams: Well, let me just say that I don’t think Americans are simple minded when 80 plus percent of Americans think that Wall Street is greedy and that they contributed to the financial collapse that we are experiencing as a country and they want some reform. And in fact what’s serious to me is in addition to the fact that they think that we may have another collapse because of Wall Street’s excesses within the next three years is that they really want reform without even looking at the content. Americans are so concerned about what’s going on on Wall Street, they want some reform. They don’t care what the content is.

Kristol: That’s the beauty of the American public. They don’t care about the content. Throw anything in…

Williams: That’s not simple minded.

Kristol: $50 billion bailout fund, don’t address too big to fail, but hey American public will just go along like sheep because the President says it’s reform.

No Bill, that's what Republicans do. Repeat the same talking points over and over with no regard to whether there's an ounce of truth to them, just like you did here.