Former Navy Secretary Richard J. Danzig reportedly stressed the imminent threat of an Anthrax attack "while serving as a director of a biotech startup that won $334 million in federal contracts to supply" a drug to defend against it. As the Los Angeles Times reported:

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At this stage of the game we probably don't need any more reminders that the last thing online services want to see happen is for their users to gain any meaningful control about how their personal information is exploited. Or, for that matter, about how lobbying money routinely skews public policy against the public interest. The new money of Silicon Valley is just the same as the old money of Wall Street or the fossil fuel industry.

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And there's more. As TechDirt highlighted Monday, a huge amount of special interest funding ($84 million, to be precise) may have helped over double the number of Democrat representatives willing to vote for CISPA this time round, having rejected this bill's first iteration last year. Via TechDirt:

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First and foremost, if my old boss and friend, the wildly popular former Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D), mounts a Democratic candidacy it means the seat would likely remain in the party's hands. Additionally, and more important for the long-term topography of American politics, Baucus is not just a single Democrat holding a Senate seat in a Republican-leaning state. He is one of the politicians most responsible for the Democratic Party's destructive long-term shift to the right on economic issues. That means his retirement isn't just a 2014 story or a Montana story; it is significant to the whole country.

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The case falls within a sadly predictable continuum for the Roberts Court, which virtually always sides with the corporate litigant over the government or individual. This time, the arguments in FTC v. Actavis revolve around an insidious tactic common to the nation’s largest drug companies, and known as “pay for delay.” As a result of the likely ruling in this case, drug companies will be able to charge consumers as much as five times the potential cost of their products. And both government regulators and consumers will watch helplessly as pharmaceutical companies bribe generic drug makers to retain their exclusive holds on the lifesaving medicines we all inevitably require.

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This story was co-produced with NPR.

Imagine filing your income taxes in five minutes — and for free. You'd open up a pre-filled return, see what the government thinks you owe, make any needed changes and be done. The miserable annual IRS shuffle, gone.

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The New York Times quoted Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen lauding the "new Google":

"This is the industry giant," he said. "It is committing to change its corporate culture to encourage sensitivity to issues of personal data privacy."

But less than 24 hours later, Google kicked Adblock Plus, a popular app that blocks ads and prevents third-party tracking, right out of its Google Play app store. There are obviously some clear limits to Google's privacy sensitivity, particularly when it comes to protecting advertising revenue on mobile devices.

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"Brown will focus his practice on business and governmental affairs as they relate to the financial services industry as well as on commercial real estate matters," the firm, Nixon Peabody LLC, said in a press release. Brown will not be a lobbyist, the firm said, but whether he meets the specific legal requirements to be a registered lobbyist or not, it's clear that he will draw on his contacts and status to help advance clients' agenda in government. "He can offer many types of legal services to his broad network of contacts," the firm said.

The head of the Nixon Peabody's Government Relations practice is ex-New York congressman Tom Reynolds, who now lobbies for Goldman Sachs on "[f]inancial services regulatory and tax issues." According to the firm, Brown will also work with fellow Massachusettsian Jim Vallee, who abruptly left his job as majority leader of the state House of Representatives last year after getting hired by the firm.

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The HuffPo's Ryan Grim and Sabrina Siddiqui obtained a PowerPoint presentation given to incoming Democratic freshmen legislators by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the DCCC's recommended schedule for House members includes four hours spent on the phone begging rich people for money and one hour spent begging rich person for money in person. This is the daily schedule.

As Kevin Drum notes, this leaves no time for studying or homework. Members rarely know much about anything, policy-wise. An unnamed member confirmed to HuffPo that these guys basically are exactly as ill-informed as you feared:

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But then came the disastrous third-place finish at the Iowa straw poll, and Pawlenty promptly quit the race. It's hard to blame him -- nothing says "loser" quite as much as getting thumped by Michele Bachmann. Not to worry, though, as he emerged not long afterward as a co-chairman of Mitt Romney's campaign, with a potential chance of becoming the vice-presidential nominee or at least getting a juicy Cabinet position.

One thing we know about Tim Pawlenty: He is not afraid to quit! Today, the Financial Services Roundtable, Wall Street's deepest pocketed and most influential lobbying organization, announced that Pawlenty is leaving Romney's campaign to  become its new leader, replacing longtime head Steve Bartlett. See ya later, Romney!

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Reuters:

It will lobby on issues such as allocation of visas for engineers and matters of privacy and piracy, said the group's president Michael Beckerman, a former advisor to Fred Upton, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee.

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Powell’s intention was to spark a full-scale political rebellion by America’s corporate leaders — what one writer called “the Revolt of the Bosses” — to change the political and policy mainstream in Washington and to put the nation on a new track, a track more favorable to business. And he succeeded, probably far beyond his expectations.

In his memo, Powell never mentioned Nixon or his administration by name. But writing in 1971 on the heels of Nixon’s new regulatory initiatives and his new tax law that was hard on business and the wealthy, Powell warned the corporate community that anti-business sentiment in Washington had reached a dangerous new high, and it was threatening to “fatally weaken or destroy” America’s free enterprise system. Business was being victimized, he said, by government regulations, consumer activism, and politically powerful trade unions. The political influence of the business community had become so weak, Powell contended, that the business executive had become “truly the ‘forgotten man.’”

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But that doesn't mean I'm not outraged when the potato lobby, with a big assist from House Republicans, walks all over the nutritional guidelines in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children. If you're looking for yet another piece of evidence proving why our government is broken, look no further than the dread potato.

The basic story, as reported by Zoe Neuberger at the Off the Charts Blog, is distressingly straightforward. In the 38 years since the formation of the WIC program -- which provides nutritional assistance to some 9 million women, infants and children -- Congress had not previously dictated what foods should be included. Such decisions, until now,  have been left up to the consensus opinion of nutrition scientists consulted by the USDA.

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ALEC is now shutting down its "Public Safety and Elections" task force. ALEC's Public Safety and Elections task force's goals were twofold: to improve "public safety" by making it easier for citizens to carry guns everywhere they go and to shoot certain people without fear of arrest or prosecution, and to improve elections by making it harder for politically undesirable types to exercise their right to vote. (Why were gun rights and voter disenfranchisement the purview of one task force? Those two issues really have very little in common besides being of supreme importance to paranoid white people.)

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Whether it's a lobbyist-written trade deal lurking beneath a bill extending unemployment benefits or a corporate subsidy undergirding a must-pass defense spending bill, this is the way some of the most corrupt policy has become law in recent years. It's also the way oil and gas business allies are now advancing that industry's interests in the face of proof that drilling may be endangering Americans' health.

The situation is harrowing. In just the last year, the Environmental Protection Agency and Duke University have both uncovered evidence linking groundwater contamination to the controversial drilling practice known as hydrofracking. The incriminating findings are so clear that according to Pittsburgh's CBS affiliate, fossil fuel firms in Pennsylvania acknowledge that the "natural gas exploration industry is partly responsible for rising levels of contaminants found in area drinking water."

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It's no surprise that Romney is using the lobbyist card: Polls consistently show that the American public view lobbying as one of the worst professions when it comes to honesty and ethics. More surprising is that the Gingrich campaign has not turned the tables on Romney by looking at the recent lobbying work of several of Romney's top aides.

I recently reported that informal Romney advisor Charlie Black, for example, lobbied for the DREAM Act, putting him directly at odds with Romney's position on the immigration legislation.

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“Over the last 15 years since he left the House, he talks about great bold movements and ideas,” Romney told a Florida crowd this week. “Well, what’s he been doing for 15 years? He’s been working as a lobbyist, yeah, he’s been working as a lobbyist and selling influence around Washington."

In fact, Gingrich has never been a registered lobbyist -- a distinction that Gingrich invoked in the Monday night debate -- but his "strategic advice" work for Freddie Mac looked a lot like what can be colloquially described as lobbying, or at least something close to it.

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We’ve already made our choice for the best headline of the year, so far:

"Citigroup Replaces JPMorgan as White House Chief of Staff."

When we saw it on the website Gawker.com we had to smile -- but the smile didn’t last long.  There’s simply too much truth in that headline; it says a lot about how Wall Street and Washington have colluded to create the winner-take-all economy that rewards the very few at the expense of everyone else.

The story behind it is that Jack Lew is President Obama’s new chief of staff -- arguably the most powerful office in the White House that isn’t shaped like an oval. He used to work for the giant banking conglomerate Citigroup. His predecessor as chief of staff is Bill Daley, who used to work at the giant banking conglomerate JPMorgan Chase, where he was maestro of the bank’s global lobbying and chief liaison to the White House.

Daley replaced Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who once worked  as a rainmaker for the investment bank now known as Wasserstein & Company, where in less than three years he was paid a reported eighteen and a half million dollars.

The new guy, Jack Lew – said by those who know to be a skilled and principled public servant – ran hedge funds and private equity at Citigroup, which means he’s a member of the Wall Street gang, too.  His last job was as head of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget, where he replaced Peter Orzag, who now works as vice chairman for global banking at – hold onto your deposit slip -- Citigroup.

Still with us? It’s startling the number of high-ranking Obama officials who have spun through the revolving door between the White House and the sacred halls of investment banking. Sure, you can argue that it makes sense that the chief executive of the nation would look to other executives for the expertise you need to build back from the disastrous collapse of the banks in the final year of the Bush Administration.

Remember -- it was Bush and Cheney with their cronies in big business who helped walk us right into the blast furnace of financial meltdown, then rushed to save the banks with taxpayer money. That little fact seems to have been overlooked in the current primaries.

All this brings back memories of Hank Paulson, doesn’t it? Hank Paulson, the $700-million man who became secretary of the treasury for President Bush. Paulson had been head of Goldman Sachs, the rich investment bank.  As his successor at Goldman Sachs, Paulson chose Lloyd Blankfein. Several times, according to Bloomberg News, Rolling Stone,and Paulson’s own memoir, the treasury secretary made sure Blankfein and Goldman got privileged inside information.

But Bush and Cheney aren’t the only ones to have a soft spot for financiers. President Obama may call bankers “fat cats” and stir the rabble against them with populist rhetoric when it serves his interest, but after the fiscal fiasco, he allowed the culprits to escape virtually scot-free. When he’s in New York he dines with them frequently and eagerly accepts their big contributions.  Like his predecessors, his administration also has provided them with billions of taxpayer dollars – low-cost money that they used for high-yielding investments to make big profits. The largest banks are bigger than they were when he took office and earned more in the first two-and-a-half years of his term than they did during the entire eight years of the Bush administration. That’s confirmed by industry data.

And get this. It turns out, according to The New York Times, that as President Obama’s inner circle has been shrinking, his “rare new best friend” is Robert Wolf. They play basketball, golf and talk economics when Wolf is not raising money for the president’s campaign.

Robert Wolf runs the U.S. branch of the giant Swiss bank UBS, which participated in schemes to help rich Americans evade their taxes. During hearings in 2009, Michigan’s Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the permanent subcommittee on investigations, described some of the tricks used by UBS: “Swiss bankers aided and abetted violations of U.S. tax law by traveling to this country with client code names, encrypted computers, counter- surveillance training, and all the rest of it, to enable U.S. residents to hide assets and money in Swiss accounts.

“The bankers then returned to Switzerland and treated their conduct as blameless since Swiss law says tax evasion is no crime. The Swiss bank before us deliberately entered United States, actively sought U.S. clients and secretly helped those U.S. clients defraud the United States of America.”

And so it goes, the revolving door between government service and big money in the private sector spinning so fast it becomes an irresistible force hurling politics and high finance together so completely it’s impossible to tell one from the other.

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Johnson’s past work as a lobbyist was noted in the press when he was appointed a top Obama surrogate in late October, but not the details of his extensive and lucrative work for the financial services industry. Johnson’s hiring despite his recent work for Wall Street strikes a dissonant note in view of the Obama camp’s reported strategy of "channeling anti-Wall Street anger" as a way to take on the Republicans.

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