Wall Street makes a lot of money. Or, more correctly, they TAKE a lot of money, as the leeches and banksters on Wall Street are very much Takers, rather than Makers. They don't make anything - they just move money around and skim - take - their vig off the top. But in the process, they end up with hundreds of billions of dollars in cash - truly big bucks. About a dozen Wall Street banksters made over $2 billion dollars last year - EACH! And the banks themselves have had one of their most profitable years ever, borrowing billions from the Fed at zero percent interest rate, loaning that money to the US Treasury at 2 percent or so, spinning off trillions in derivatives, and stuffing all the profits in their pockets.

Thom Hartmann's crazy alert!

David Selig, Federal Tax Practitioner vs. Thom Hartmann. According to a new report - Republican's attempt to obstruct the debt limit debate in 2011 cost American taxpayers 1.3 billion dollars. How come Republicans in Washington are so good at wasting money - and so bad at putting Americans back to work? Given their track record - I'd be amazed that anyone would vote to let Republicans spend another two years running the People's House into the ground. Then again - a billion dollars in contributions from corporations, millionaires, and billionaires can make make even a stuffed pig look like a strong politician

Corey Saylor, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) joins Thom Hartmann. What do you do if you're Mitt Romney and you can't attack President Obama over issues that acutally matter? You blow the dog-whistle of course! How much damage is the Republican love affair with dog-whistle politics doing to the American society? They can't just suck up to racists by throwing out the lie that black people are lazy - or suck up to religious bigots by saying that all Muslims are terrorists - or suck up to the paranoid homophobes by saying that gays are pedophiles. So instead they talk in code - the Republican dog whistle. Sure - saying that President Obama's policies are "foreign" might sound benign to the general electorate. But to a much smaller, targeted group of individuals - like the Tea Party, the far Right, and Fox so-called News viewers - basically the crazies who actually think the President was born in Kenya or who are uncomfortable with a black man in the White House - characterizing the President as "foreign" has a very clear meaning. It's the Republican dog whistle. And Mitt Romney isn't at all afraid to get in the mud with these whack-jobs and tell them what they want to hear - albeit in code - because the paranoid, the racists, and the bigots actually show up to vote