Odds and ends for 10/27

• I’ve said many times that there’s blame enough to go around for the current economic mess. Jeremy Grantham spreads some blame around and, as if that’s not enough fun, explains why things will get worse before they get better.
• Why do Senate Republicans want the long-term unemployed to suffer?
• Michael Lind says the problem with tax breaks is that they make a true accounting of government finance impossible — and that’s a big problem indeed.
• I’ve been warning about the coming commercial real estate meltdown. Fecund Stench provides data points.
• Sen. John McCain likes to say he’s friendly to business and innovation. But his Internet Freedom Act (a title that falls somewhere between ironic and Orwellian) would privilege a few large existing Internet service providers — and their content divisions — at the expense of true competition on a level playing field. But don’t take my word for it. Take Jon Stewart’s.
• More from Bloomberg on how taxpayers got screwed by the AIG bailout, along with a bit of an update on Bloomberg’s Freedom of Information Act suit against the government regarding records pertaining to the bailout.
• The derivatives market needs fixing. A reasonably clear explanation of a complex subject.
• Michael Mukasey thinks the world’s greatest court system is inadequate to try terrorists. Cynthia Kouril and Adam Serwer smack him down. And Emptywheel ties it all together to suggest reasons why hacks like Mukasey may really be so terrified of civilian trials of terrorists.
• Chicago prosecutors, instead of making damn sure they’re convicting the right people, are harassing students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism who have found evidence that they are not. I believe the technical term for this is “abuse of process,” if not “obstruction of justice.”