Did Charles Koch really say that if you make more than $34,000, you are "part of the 1%" "in the world"? Yes, he did. Mr. Koch must think we're all able to buy our groceries in India and buy a house in Nepal but still have a job in America.

Jesse Eisinger at ProPublica finds that banks are actually starting to lose fights with government regulators. He cites two proposals tightening derivatives markets and requiring banks to raise more capital, and though they're only proposals at this point, banksters had been stopping regulators from even issuing proposals. Choice bit: when Jamie Dimon's 2013 whining about having to raise more capital gets pimp-slapped by Jamie Dimon's 2008 bragging about how raising more capital makes his bank stronger.

Pennsylvania Republicans may be looking to push out Gov. Corbett in advance of the 2014 election -- but I doubt it's because he's not right-wing enough, given that Mr. Corbett has rammed through three horrible austerity budgets in a row and handed out lots of corporate welfare to frackers. I suspect he's down in polls right now not just because everyone knows his policies haven't worked, but because he's a miserable, thin-skinned bastard -- I mean, Scott Walker's policies haven't worked in Wisconsin, either, but at least he's a calm, thick-skinned bastard. (At the risk of piling on, Allyson Schwartz and Rob McCord, being a U.S. House Rep and a statewide elected official respectively, aren't "little-known.")

Excellent news out of Georgia: Tea Party Patriots help push through a plan to make Georgia Power, the state's largest utility, double its use of solar power by the end of 2016. In this they faced opposition from another Tea Party group, the local chapter of Americans for Prosperity. I'm happy the Tea Party Patriots did the right thing, but I don't think one example obliterates a trend, either -- most Tea Partiers are still just corporate hacks in tri-cornered hats, because that's as the Koch brothers intended.

Finally, NSA gets sued over its domestic surveillance programs by what the Huffington Post calls "an unusual coalition" including pro-gun groups and environmental groups. Think about it, though, and you realize such coalitions shouldn't be "unusual" at all -- the NRA joined the fight against media consolidation in the mid-2000s, you may recall, and there's nothing about being pro-gun that demands you be anti-anything-else-good-and-decent, except that co-opting by Republicans has made it so.