Greetings, firebaggers, here’s what I’ve got for you! Oops, sorry for the slip, I just took a job with the New Mexico Organizing for America team.

• Will the US Supreme Court take a case on MERS’ standing to foreclose? I really don’t want them involved, in my perspective, and cannot really see how they would get involved in what is a state issue. Incidentally, this case came to SCOTUS from a homeowner’s attorney who lost his case with the state Appellate District Court in California. The state Supreme Court declined to take the case.

• Matt Taibbi has a bombshell story about the SEC engaging in a willful coverup of Wall Street crimes by destroying the preliminary evidence. I actually saw Harry Markopolos, the Bernie Madoff whistleblower, tell Bill Maher that it’s a new day at the SEC and that they’re starting to take these crimes seriously. FWIW.

• The dog that didn’t bark: Medicare spending slows after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, according to one report. Does this show that government-run health care saves money? Actually, Zeke Emanuel (not an unbiased source) says this is part of the ACA kicking in.

• Alan Blinder doesn’t think much of the Federal Reserve’s recent actions.

• The New York Times does their bit on Latino protests of Secure Communities. They get some quotes from Administration officials defending the program, none of which wrestle with the problem of non-criminals reporting crimes and getting caught up in the deportation net. There’s another task force hearing today in Chicago: I’d expect the same reaction from the Latino community.

• Forget Texas, I want to know about the farm state miracle, with significantly lower unemployment rates than the rest of the nation. A lot of it is due to public investment through biofuels and our successful agriculture industry.

Republicans really are Obama’s secret weapon for re-election. Your current flavor of the month (vanilla edition) is Rick Perry. He likes threatening secession while sucking down federal money and pretending he found out Ben Bananke supplied salsa made in New York City. In the alternative he’s a noted skeptic of science, thinking they play politics.

In a way this makes sense from Perry’s point of view. As he got pretty much D’s and C’s in science, meaning the scientists were better at science than he was, which is not surprising. But he also got the same grades in political science, economics and history. So the scientists were better at that too. But hey, he’s a moronic Republican Governor from Texas, so if he somehow malaprops his way into the White House he can use Bush’s old lines about who the President is when he gets surrounded by “egg heads” and their 3.0 and better GPAs.

But he’s definitely always been a Republican who seemed destined for the top:

John Sharp, an A&M classmate and now a former state comptroller and Texas legislator, had something else to say about college-aged Perry.

“When I first saw him, I thought he looked stupid,” Sharp said in a 1989 interview with the Abilene Reporter-News

And that guy is a personal friend.

Oh well, there’s still the “Greater White Hope” that is Chris Christie, who just got his state’s credit rating knocked down another notch because of his tax cuts to AA-.

Which is far too many A-grades to get himself the nomination.

Roy Rogers — Look Over Yonders Wall.

What’s on your mind?