If you sell yourself as a maverick and a champion of campaign finance reform, even latent ties to Jack Abramoff are bad news. So $100,000 in contributions from employees of Abramoff's old law firm are, as professionals say, incredibly inconvenient. Not illegal, but certainly not on message. Huffington Post's Sam Stein has the details.

Karl Rove has sounded a conciliatory tone on the conservative / McCain rift lately. As a counterpoint, ex-Wonkette and current Time editor Ana Marie Cox produces some vintage film of Karl Rove in 2000 saying, about John McCain, that "...if you're not with him, he belittles you, he makes fun of you, he disparages you." Apparently Karl thought McCain just wasn't a uniter, like Karl's old boss. Video after the jump.

After posting a record $38.7 billion loss in 2007, General Motors has decided to offer some 74,000 hourly union employees either a buyout or early retirement. If you post a loss like that in a year that you also make $9 billion in cost cuts, some aspects of your model probably need to be addressed. According to the Post, UAW saw this coming and projects the total buyouts to be around 20,000 employees.

At first it seemed like America's most major financial pitfall of immediate concern was subprime mortgages, and how the structure of such debt (and the staggering multitudes of people saddled with it) would ultimately affect the economy.

Today the New York Times has coverage of how credit problems are spreading into prime mortgage territory as well as other industries. I am sure it is no coincidence that such coverage comes on the same day that the Treasury and HUD announce a new federal plan to aid homeowners in delaying foreclosures.