Digby: Unleashing The Beast

By Digby on December 14, 2007 - 2:30am.

This week we found out that the CIA had destroyed video evidence of torture and the Bush administration is so compromised that it can no longer state unequivocally that it would be against the Geneva Conventions to waterboard American servicemen.

The government argued that they had to destroy the tapes because they could not take the chance of revealing the identities of undercover agents. (An irony if there ever was one considering the Valerie Plame matter.) And then a fresh faced fellow appeared on TV to tell the world that he had been one of the participants. He seemed so young and earnest and said that while he now believed it was wrong, it had been a good thing because it had saved lives, (also debatable.)

But it remains to be seen if he will be representative of his brot

Heckuva Job, Bernanke!

Is the Fed the new FEMA?

By Daniel Gross
Posted Thursday, Dec. 13, 2007, at 3:38 PM ET

---

The Federal Reserve and the Federal Emergency Management Agency seem to have very little in common. One is a respected professional organization, led by highly credentialed economists, that is charged with promoting price stability and full employment. The Fed enjoyed a justly deserved reputation for responding well to man-made financial disasters in the 1990s. The other is an agency that had a reputation for responding well to natural disasters in the 1990s, but which devolved quickly into a Bush-era parking ground for third-tier political hacks. The former was led by the legendary Alan Greenspan, who bestrode the financial world of the 1990s like a colossus. The latter was led by Michael Brown, who would become legendary for bestriding the crisis-management world the way President George W. Bush rides a Segway.

And yet, in seeing how the two agencies have responded to the biggest challenge they have faced in recent years—the subprime mortgage debacle for the Fed, and Hurricane Katrina for FEMA—there seem to be certain commonalities. The analogies are admittedly imperfect, but the agencies' subprime response to the submerging of New Orleans and the subprime crisis encapsulate the way in which the Bush administration has failed to anticipate and prepare for significant problems and then to respond with alacrity and efficiency.

Benjamin Barber on ‘Supercapitalism’

Posted on Dec 13, 2007

By Benjamin Barber

According to Bill Clinton’s own labor secretary, his administration was “one of the most pro-business administrations in American history.” That labor secretary was Robert Reich, an old friend of the Clintons who was too controversial and radical a critic of business to be very influential in Clinton’s two-term presidency, dominated as it was by the Democratic Leadership Council, Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers and other business luminaries. Clinton’s presidency embraced market capitalism so ardently that “market democracy” became a synonym for the administration’s stance on big business. The book Reich wrote about his experience as labor secretary with the telling title “Locked in the Cabinet” displayed more spleen than political savvy, but it was a revealing and acute exposition of how much less progressive the administration was in its policies and practices than in its rhetoric.

When Barbarians Take Hostages

As a central villain in the famous book "Barbarians at the Gate," Henry Kravis has become one of the world's richest mavens of private equity--the Wall Street sector that buys up companies, breaks them apart and sells their assets. In 2006, Kravis made $450 million, or more per hour ($51,000) than the average American household makes in a year. Incredibly, his wealth puts him right within the average for executives in this largely unregulated industry that oversees about $400 billion in annual business.

Brutes like Kravis haven't amassed such treasure by playing nice. During their takeover rampages, they often crush workers and leave communities for dead. And now, as we've seen over the last month, when the tax man comes calling, these barbarians start taking hostages.

Greenspan: Odds rising for a recession

Greenspan: Odds of a Recessions Are Rising, Economic Growth Is Getting Close to 'Stall Speed'

JEANNINE AVERSA,AP News
Dec 13, 2007 19:00 EST

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says the odds the U.S. will fall into a recession are "clearly rising" and he believes economic growth is "getting close to stall speed."

Greenspan, who ran the central bank for 18 1/2 years, until early 2006, offered his views on the economy in an interview on NPR News' Morning Edition that will air on Friday. Excerpts of the interview were released on Thursday.

Activists see Senate Dems backing down to Bush, ready to give immunity to phone companies

12/14/2007 @ 10:03 am
Filed by Nick Juliano

As lawmakers hurry to clear their legislative plates before rushing home for Christmas dinner, it appears all-but-certain that Congress will not finish work to update a foreign spy law before the new year.

But votes expected this week and next in the Senate have civil libertarians worried about their prospects to block a proposal that would free telecommunications companies from legal oversight of their facilitation of President Bush's post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping scheme.

Paul Krugman: After the Money’s Gone

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve announced plans to lend $40 billion to banks. By my count, it’s the fourth high-profile attempt to rescue the financial system since things started falling apart about five months ago. Maybe this one will do the trick, but I wouldn’t count on it.

In past financial crises — the stock market crash of 1987, the aftermath of Russia’s default in 1998 — the Fed has been able to wave its magic wand and make market turmoil disappear. But this time the magic isn’t working.

Why not? Because the problem with the markets isn’t just a lack of liquidity — there’s also a fundamental problem of solvency.

The Plutocrats v. The Theocrats

As the primaries (finally) approach, it is increasingly apparent that the real GOP battle is between the business wing and the social conservative wing of the party. Is the real showdown going to be over the future of the GOP?

Paul Waldman | December 13, 2007

After months of tedium and mindless chest-thumping, the race for the Republican presidential nomination finally got interesting over the last couple of weeks. And the way it did so highlights the fundamental rift threatening the future of the GOP: the divide between the party's corporate/anti-tax wing, which includes the people who write the checks, and its social conservative wing, which includes the people who get bodies to the polls. It's the plutocrats versus the theocrats, and at the moment it's hard to tell who's going to win.

Try to imagine the combination of pain and dread now covering the Mitt Romney campaign like a wet wool blanket. After all the work, after all the enthusiastic pandering, after outspending his opponents by millions, after the months in which he was the only candidate airing ads in Iowa, his support there turned out to be a mile wide and an inch deep. At the first opportunity, the social conservatives whose feet he had kissed with such commitment wandered away from his gleaming campaign and over to that smooth-talking preacher setting up folding chairs in his bare-bones storefront.

Voter fraud fraud

December 13, 2007

IT MADE for a tantalizing news story: Thousands of people who cast votes in the 2004 presidential election in New Jersey were actually dead. Newspapers wrote articles with grabber headlines like "GOP Sees Dead People" and "Dead Man Voting." Except that a more careful analysis of the allegations found flaws in the match between the voting rolls and death lists, and none of the claims was ever substantiated.

New Jersey's state Republican Party also claimed that 4,397 people had voted twice in 2000, and another 6,572 voted both in New Jersey and in one of five other states. But a systematic review by the Brennan Justice Center at New York University Law School found most of the matches ignored different middle names, dates of birth, or other discrepancies. All told, the center found that eight of the 3.6 million New Jersey voters in 2004 intentionally cast invalid votes - a "fraud rate" of four ten-thousandths of one percent.

Republicans Urge Supreme Court to Allow Preemptive Strikes in Elections

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on December 13, 2007, Printed on December 15, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/70578/

A new legal strategy that allows states to pass repressive election laws in the name of fighting voter fraud -- even if there is scant evidence such fraud exists or threatens election outcomes -- is emerging before the 2008 election, and the Department of Justice's Voting Section appears to be its biggest champion.

In legal briefs filed at the Supreme Court before a January hearing over the constitutionality of Indiana's 2005 voter I.D. law, the Department of Justice and other defenders of the ID law are making several new arguments that, if accepted by the court, would allow states to create barriers to voting without showing these laws address real problems.

F Rating For Hannity/Ollie Scam Concerts

by davefromqueens
Fri Dec 14, 2007 at 04:31:07 AM PST

Sean Insanitized Hannity's "Freedom Concerts" purport to help the troops. In reality, these concerts are a scam siphoning off money to his buddies and himself, including convicted felon Oliver North and his dubious charity, the "Freedom Alliance."

The Orwellian named Freedom Alliance, along with other charities, has been given an F rating by a non partisan watchdog group. Our friends at Newshounds have an excellent writeup on this story and even the Washington Post reported some of the facts. (A rarity for this rag of a newspaper.) However, and I am self promoting, the mainstream media is only several months behind DFQ in breaking this story. Makes you wonder who the real journalist is. Notwithstanding such, this story should be front page news.

Big Coal's Dirty Plans for Our Energy Future

By Antrim Caskey, AlterNet
Posted on December 14, 2007, Printed on December 15, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/70475/

Just as the American people and the world are beginning to recognize the necessity of shifting to renewable energies, Big Coal, in collusion with an out-of-step administration, is pushing their dirty fossil fuel as the solution to our nation's energy crisis.

Big Coal and its cohorts envision a "clean coal technology" future fueled by liquifying and gasifying coal, capturing the carbon emissions and injecting them underground. By 2030 the West Virginia Division of Energy -- a nascent state agency formed in July, 2007 -- wants to oust oil and exalt coal by displacing the 1.3 billion gallons of foreign oil the state currently imports every year.

Digby: Moral Clarity

Remember that? it seems like only yesterday we were being told that our foreign policy had been distilled to a distinct, black and white battle between good 'n evul.

Here's what it is in practice:

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “The Legal Rights of Guantanamo Detainees” this morning, Brigadier General Thomas W. Hartmann, the legal adviser at Guantanamo Bay, repeatedly refused to call the hypothetical waterboarding of an American pilot by the Iranian military torture. “I’m not equipped to answer that question,” said Hartmann.

EPA Pushed to Lower Reporting Standards

WASHINGTON (AP) - The White House pressured the Environmental Protection Agency to weaken requirements that companies annually disclose releases of toxic chemicals, congressional auditors say.

In a study scheduled to be released next week, the Government Accountability Office says the changes mean that industry will have to file 22,000 fewer reports each year, reducing an important public monitoring tool on industrial emissions.

The 401(k) Myth

Posted on Dec 12, 2007

By Marie Cocco

WASHINGTON—The great 401(k) bonanza may well turn out to be a bust for most workers. This is not news to millions who know their account balances, or to low-income workers whose employers rarely offer them the chance to open an account.

In the 1980s and, especially, the go-go 1990s, the 401(k) was the wondrous new invention that was supposed to make assembly-line workers capable of becoming rich, in retirement, through their own industriousness and, lest we forget, the magic of the stock market. The myth began to fade amid Wall Street’s uncertainty during the past decade. It should be buried—deeply—with the latest Government Accountability Office report on the savings plans that have become the primary form of pensions available to that half of the private work force that has any pension at all.

There’s more to character than being charming

Pundits and TV anchorcreatures love pronouncing about politicians ’ “character,” when all they’re really talking about is personality. Hence glib, superficially charming candidates invariably win plaudits in the reality-TV epics we call presidential elections. This year’s GOP Prince Charming is former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. When it comes to ingratiating himself, few surpass the one-time Baptist preacher. He’s witty, he’s warm, and doggone it, people like him. Character consists of something deeper. That’s why it’s important to know the truth about Wayne DuMond, the serial rapist and murderer Huckabee freed from the Arkansas penitentiary to kill again. Unfortunately, that’s the last thing you’ll hear from the candidate himself.

Another Blackwater Overseer at State Dep't Resigns

Make that two State Department officials overseeing Blackwater to resign. On November 30, Kevin Barry, a top official at the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security -- Blackwater's liaison office -- opted to spend more time with the family. Barry joins the Bureau's chief, who quit in October.

The Stonewall Continues

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, December 12, 2007; 1:30 PM

The White House continues to dodge important questions about its involvement in the destruction of videotapes documenting the CIA's torture of terror suspects.

The evidence is mounting that the White House role in the decision to destroy the tapes may have been significant. But no details are forthcoming from White House aides. Rather than come clean with the public, they are once again hiding behind a familiar but transparent dodge, saying that ongoing investigations preclude them from speaking.

U.S. Commits, Lies About Domestic Human Rights Violations

By Alex Jung, AlterNet
Posted on December 12, 2007, Printed on December 13, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/70353/

The Geneva conventions aren't the only humanitarian standards the United States ignores. Under the Bush administration, the United States routinely commits human rights violations within its borders, according to a new report by the U.S. Human Rights Network.

The USHRN, a coalition of over 250 social justice and human rights organizations, published its report to challenge the findings of a self-assessment the U.S. government filed with the U.N. Committee on Ending Discrimination (CERD) last April.

Gary Webb's Enduring Legacy

By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
December 11, 2007

Three years ago, I walked into my home in Arlington, Virginia, and checked my phone messages. One was from a Los Angeles Times reporter who was looking for a comment from me about Gary Webb’s suicide on the night of Dec. 9, 2004. It was the first I had heard of the news.

After I recovered from the shock, I called the reporter back to get more details. I also told him he would have a hard time writing a decent obituary on Webb because the L.A. Times had never acknowledged that Webb was substantially correct in his reporting about the Nicaraguan contras' role in smuggling cocaine into the United States in the 1980s.

Though Los Angeles had been hit hard by the “crack epidemic” and the L.A. Times had devoted front-page space to trash Webb’s contra-cocaine reporting in 1996, the newspaper never ran a story detailing the CIA inspector general’s 1998 findings, which confirmed much of what Webb had alleged – and more.

David Neiwert

Character will out

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

-- by Dave

We've known for a long time that the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) -- a favorite "think tank" for right-wing nativists, who find their endless churn of often dubious statistics grist for their own anti-immigrant mills (Lou Dobbs in particular has a penchant for citing them) -- has a background that is, to put it kindly, a bit sketchy.


Feeling the thuggery

Tuesday, December 11, 2007
-- by Dave

David Love at In These Times has a followup to the recent SPLC report on "noose incidents" as an indicator of a growing white backlash against minorities, and concludes:

But why are these racially motivated crimes on the rise at this point in time? Potok suggests that the recent noose incidents reflect not a fringe phenomenon, but a major social problem. "We're looking at an upsurge in racial nationalism," says Potok. "What's going on is a serious backlash against globalization. You have a certain level of economic rage that provides fertile ground for these groups." He says that with more people of color immigrating to the country, "whites are angry and uneasy."

All the News That's Fit to Depress

Staying informed has become -- for so many of us -- a moral obligation that feels like hell.

Courtney E. Martin | December 3, 2007 | web only

"I turn on Tape Nine, Omission/Partial Omission. When sadness-inducing events occur, the guys says, invoke your Designated Substitute Thoughtstream. Your DTS might be a man falling off a cliff but being caught by a group of good friends. It might be a bowl of steaming soup, if one likes soup…My DTS is tapping a thin rock wall with a hammer. When that wall cracks, there's another wall underneath."

--George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation

* * *

It is Saturday. I am at a coffee shop in Brooklyn with my boyfriend and one of our best friends -- nice guys, guys who care deeply about what is going on in the world beyond fantasy football, music, and their motley crew of friends. We're drinking coffee, eating bagels, and reading my New York Times.

I tend to stick to a quick perusal of the Times online, in addition to a half dozen blogs and online news sites (like this one) during the week, but on the weekends I like to hold the paper in my hands, let my fingertips get blackened, really immerse myself in what's been happening. When I was just out of college and had very little money, I used to wait until late Sunday evening and then scour my neighborhood for discarded papers. When I finally started making money from my writing, one of my first "indulgences" was a weekend subscription to The New York Times. (So fancy, I know.)

Veto of Energy Measure Is Raised as a Possibility

By JOHN M. BRODER

Published: December 12, 2007

WASHINGTON — The White House has raised last-minute concerns over regulation of automobile emissions and fuel economy that aides said Tuesday could lead to a presidential veto of the energy bill now before Congress.

The bill, which passed the House and is pending in the Senate, requires automakers to meet a fleet average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020, but does not specify which government agency should enforce the new rule.

Worst. Forecasters. Ever?

The cockeyed optimists of the National Association of Realtors.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Monday, Dec. 10, 2007, at 5:34 PM ET

---

This morning at 10 a.m., CNBC real-estate correspondent Diana Olick hit the gray streets of Washington, D.C., to report the latest housing data from the National Association of Realtors. (Strange, I was able to get the data while remaining inside.) The news? The Pending Home Sales Index, an indicator of future activity, edged up in October, although it was still off 18.4 percent from October 2006. Olick also dutifully reported NAR's annual year-end forecast, which was picked up by the wire services. While the housing market may be in the dumps, said NAR economist Laurence Yun, "Now that mortgage conditions have improved, some postponed activity should turn up in existing-home sales over the next couple of months, and I expect sales at fairly stable to slightly higher levels."

Destruction of C.I.A. Tapes Cleared by Lawyers

By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

Correction Appended

WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 — Lawyers within the clandestine branch of the Central Intelligence Agency gave written approval in advance to the destruction in 2005 of hundreds of hours of videotapes documenting interrogations of two lieutenants from Al Qaeda, according to a former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the episode.

The involvement of agency lawyers in the decision making would widen the scope of the inquiries into the matter that have now begun in Congress and within the Justice Department. Any written documents are certain to be a focus of government investigators as they try to reconstruct the events leading up to the tapes’ destruction.

Tomgram: Greg Grandin, On the Torturable and the Untorturable

In Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, reporter Siobhan Gorman offered a striking little portrait of Jose A. Rodriguez, who, in 2005, as chief of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, ordered the destruction of those "hundreds of hours" of CIA videotapes of the…

Now, what do we want to call it? Gorman refers to "extreme techniques" of interrogation (putting the two words in quotes), then repeats the phrase a second time later in the piece without the quotes: "… [Rodriguez] took a careful approach to controversial practices such as renditions -- sending detainees to countries that use more extreme interrogation methods…"). In this mini-portrait of Rodriguez, as painted by his colleagues, and of the disappeared videos, the word "torture" is never used, but don't blame Gorman. As Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher pointed out recently, she's hardly alone.

‘Not us. We’re not going.’

Soldiers in 2nd Platoon, Charlie 1-26 stage a ‘mutiny’ that pulls the unit apart

Stories by KELLY KENNEDY - Staff writer
Posted : Saturday Dec 8, 2007 14:32:57 EST

Spc. Gerry DeNardi stood at the on-base Burger King, just a few miles from downtown Baghdad, hoping for a quick taste of home.

Camp Taji encompasses miles of scrapped Iraqi tanks, a busy U.S. airstrip and thousands of soldiers living in row upon row of identical trailers. Several fast-food stands, a PX and a dining facility the size of a football field compose Taji’s social hub. The base had been struck by an occasional mortar round, and a rocket had hit the airfield two weeks before and killed an American helicopter pilot. But the quiet base brought on a sense of being far from roadside bombs, far from rocket-propelled grenades and far from the daily gunfire that rained down on the soldiers of Charlie 1-26 as they patrolled Adhamiya, a violent Sunni neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad.

Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013'

Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice.

Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.

Central banks act on credit fears

The Federal Reserve, European Central Bank and central banks from the UK, Canada and Switzerland are to jointly help banks deal with the credit crunch.

They have each announced that they will provide billions in loans to banks in order to lower interest rates and ease the availability of credit.

Read Al Gore’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

By Al Gore, AlterNet
Posted on December 12, 2007, Printed on December 12, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/70330/

SPEECH BY AL GORE ON THE ACCEPTANCE
OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
DECEMBER 10, 2007
OSLO, NORWAY

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honorable members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen.

I have a purpose here today. It is a purpose I have tried to serve for many years. I have prayed that God would show me a way to accomplish it.

Echidne Of The Snakes: On Pink Elephants and Income Inequality

The way conservatives think about the growing income inequality in the United States is what might happen when a family picture you took in your living-room appears to have a pink elephant sitting right between Uncle Albert and Cousin Selma, on that new green couch. Your first reaction might be to deny that the elephant is there at all, and that's pretty much how conservative pundits reacted to the first news of widening income equality. But that didn't work, because with all the amendments and adjustments, the data still obstinately showed that inequality is rising.

So the pink elephant sits there, in the middle of your family picture. What to do next?

Digby

Bruised Genitalia

Gosh, I sure hope nobody tore up these photos over the week-end before the Attorney General finally got around to ordering everyone to cease destroying evidence:

Lawyers for a British resident who the US government refuses to release from Guantanamo Bay have identified the existence of photographs taken by CIA agents that they say show their client suffered horrific injuries under torture.

Now it Makes Sense

The banks get by with a little help from their friends:

But unfortunately, the "freeze" is just another fraud - and like the other bailout proposals, it has nothing to do with U.S. house prices, with "working families," keeping people in their homes or any of that nonsense.

The sole goal of the freeze is to prevent owners of mortgage-backed securities, many of them foreigners, from suing U.S. banks and forcing them to buy back worthless mortgage securities at face value - right now almost 10 times their market worth.

Inside Edition

If anyone questions the view that the Village isn't like the rest of us, check this out from the Politico:

For Sunday talk shows, thriving in the D.C. ratings — although clearly trumped in size by New York — provides bragging rights over which show reaches more political insiders.

But more importantly, since the Sunday shows’ objective is not only to reflect on the past week’s events but to get political leaders to break news and move the conversation forward in the newspapers and the blogosphere on Monday morning, it’s essential for both leading Republicans and leading Democrats to reach members of D.C.’s chattering class.

The Pirates of Mesopotamia

So, apparently Halliburton isn't just pillaging the treasuries of Iraq and the US. Their mercenaries are allegedly raping their own female employees, with no repercussions. From Jane Hamsher:

No doubt it was just a few "bad apples":

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

"Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told.

Parallel Universes

Everybody should read this post by Kevin Drum, showing the two diametrically opposed versions of who torture victim Abu Zubayda actually was. The fellow who's been all over TV today is saying that Zubaydah was some sort of intellectual mastermind, and that torture broke him saving many lives. Ron Suskind reported that Zubaydah was little more than a gopher who made up fabulous tales to stop the torture --- which led the US authorities on many merry chases tracking down bogus terrorist plots.


Let's Talk About The Bill Of Rights

There has been a lively discussion recently about this post by Zack Exley who is working with left leaning evangelicals to find some common ground on which to build a coalition around values such as "people over profit, the environment over mindless growth, meaning over consumerism, means of making a living and health care for all, care for the needy, peace and more."

Partisan Soljahs

Whenever I'm asked who my favorite columnist is, I always say Paul Krugman, and it's not just because of his positions on the issues, which I largely (but not always) agree with. It's because he has, in my view, a clear-eyed, no bullshit view of current American politics and understands how to wage the battle. So I've been thinking about this Krugman-Obama flap trying to sort out my emotional reaction to seeing a Democratic presidential candidate put out a misleading oppo research document on someone whom I see as so fundamentally valuable to the progressive movement.

Cards On The Table

Despite some very passionate arguments that Pelosi, Harman and Rockefeller should not be held liable for doing nothing about the torture regime they were briefed on, because it will short circuit the investigations about the destruction of the torture tapes, I remain unconvinced.As Glenn Greenwald says:

I continue to be amazed and disturbed by the number of people willing to defend the actions of Rockefeller and his comrades by claiming that these poor, victimized Congressional members just have no ability to do anything when they learn about outright lawbreaking by the administration. As I asked yesterday, why would they even bother to attend briefings if they believed that they were "powerless" to act even upon learning of serious illegalities? Here is the central purpose of the Select Committee on Intelligence -- the primary reason it exists, as stated by the resolution which created the Committee:

It is further the purpose of this resolution to provide vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and laws of the United States.

Daily Kos: ActBlue, public financing, and the FEC

by kos

Mon Dec 10, 2007 at 11:21:30 AM PST

The Edwards campaign asked the FEC whether contributions donated via ActBlue could be counted for matching grant purposes. Adam Bonin, who represents this site on regulatory matters, explained the situation a few weeks ago:

So here's the problem -- as you know by now, not everything is matchable. The main category is "contributions over $250", but also listed in the regulations regarding the list of sources for funds that can be matched is the explicit statement that for a check to be matchable, it must be "written on a personal, escrow or trust account representing or containing the contributor's personal funds." And, what's worse, listed among those sources of funds which are explicitly not-matchable are

Contributions in the form of a check drawn on the account of a committee, corporation, union or government contractor even though the funds represent personal funds earmarked by a contributing individual to a Presidential candidate;

And ActBlue is, indeed, a committee that's writing checks which represent personal funds earmarked by a contributing individual to a Presidential candidate.

Now, common sense would dictate that this law was enacted decades ago to prevent the matching of illegal funds.

Small Business Optimism Falls to 1993 Low

Small business confidence in the U.S. economy tumbled for the second straight month in November because of worries that economic growth will slow, a survey released on Tuesday showed.

The National Federation of Independent Business said its index of small business optimism fell 1.8 points to 94.4 in November from October to its lowest since 1993.

Waterborne carbon increases threat of environmental mercury

MADISON - Mercury is a potent neurotoxin and a worrisome environmental contaminant, but the severity of its threat appears to depend on what else is in the water.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that the presence of dissolved organic material increases the biological risk of aqueous mercury and may even serve as an environmental mercury source.

Mercury is present throughout the environment in small quantities in rocks and in watery environments, including lakes, wetlands and oceans. It accumulates in fish living in mercury-contaminated waters, posing a health risk to animals and humans who eat the tainted fish.

Religious right meltdown? More fiction than fact

Despite rumblings in the traditional press about a religious right 'crackup,' key conservative Christian organizations are bringing in 'more money than ever' says Americans United for Separation of Church and State

Over the past two-plus decades it has become fashionable for the traditional press to periodically pen the Religious Right's obituary. Or, if not an outright death notice, articles will appear that detail real, or perceived, rifts within the Religious Right -- Pat Robertson's endorsement of Rudy Giuliani for example -- plus periodic contentiousness between the Religious Right and other elements of the Republican Party. The traditional media often conclude that the Religious Right's days are numbered.

Democratic complicity in Bush's torture regimen

The Washington Post reports today that the Bush administration, beginning in 2002, repeatedly briefed leading Congressional Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees -- including, at various times, Jay Rockefeller, Nancy Pelosi, and Jane Harman -- regarding the CIA's "enhanced interrogation methods," including details about waterboarding and other torture measures. With one exception (Harman, who vaguely claims to have sent a letter to the CIA), these lawmakers not only failed to object to these policies, but affirmatively supported them.

This information was almost certainly leaked to the Post by intelligence officials who are highly irritated -- understandably so -- from watching the manipulative spectacle whereby these Democrats now prance around as outraged victims of policies to which they deliberately acquiesced, when they weren't fully supporting them. Numerous liberal bloggers are already drawing the only conclusions that can be drawn, and expressing their outrage and horror at the Democratic Party leadership. Those sentiments are indisputably appropriate, and I just want to add a few more points to them.

The President-Tyrant

The irreplaceable Fritz Stern reminds us that as a democracy with two-hundred thirty years of experience, America is better situated than most to weather the storms of a wannabe tyrant. “But that,” he adds, “would presuppose that such a nation really understood its heritage and had a genuine historic sense.” We live now with a Government that shamelessly fabricates and alters history—both from the last two hundred years and from the last six years. It does so with a purpose—making its outrageous deeds seem perfectly reasonable and in tune with the past.

The American Dream is Alive and Well ... in Finland!

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on December 11, 2007, Printed on December 11, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/70103/

Fewer than one percent of Americans are millionaires, but almost one in three believe they'll end up among that group at some point.

The belief that our chance of moving up the economic ladder is limited only by our innate abilities and our appetite for hard work is almost universal in the United States. When you define the "American Dream" as the ability of working-class families to afford a decent life -- to put their kids through school, have access to quality healthcare and a secure retirement -- most will tell you it simply doesn't exist anymore. In stark contrast, when you define it according to mobility, the picture is radically different; according to a study of public opinion in 25 rich countries, Americans are almost twice as likely to believe that "people get rewarded for intelligence and skill" than working people in other advanced economies (PDF). At the same time, fewer than one in five say that coming from a wealthy family is "essential" or "very important" to getting ahead -- significantly lower than the 25-country average.

Slowing Job Growth Seen as Ominous Sign for Economy

By PETER S. GOODMAN and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

The nation gained a modest 94,000 jobs in November, the Labor Department reported yesterday, pulling back considerably from the previous month in the clearest sign yet that the American economy was headed for a substantial slowdown.

But the jobs report, a much-anticipated indicator of the health of the economy, also provided some comfort that the United States had not slipped into a recession and might not be weakening as rapidly as some experts feared. With business leaders expressing uncertainty about the prospects for further growth, analysts said, a better view of the direction of the economy was not likely to emerge until next year.

Methane from microbes: a fuel for the future

Microbes could provide a clean, renewable energy source and use up carbon dioxide in the process, suggested Dr James Chong at a Science Media Centre press briefing today.

“Methanogens are microbes called archaea that are similar to bacteria. They are responsible for the vast majority of methane produced on earth by living things” says Dr Chong from York University. “They use carbon dioxide to make methane, the major flammable component of natural gas. So methanogens could be used to make a renewable, carbon neutral gas substitute.”

Scientists: Seaweed Could Stem Warming

By JOSEPH COLEMAN

The Associated Press
Sunday, December 9, 2007; 4:17 PM

BALI, Indonesia -- Slimy, green and unsightly, seaweed and algae are among the humblest of plants.

A group of scientists at a climate conference in Bali say they could also be a potent weapon against global warming, capable of sucking damaging carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at rates comparable to the mightiest rain forests.

Under Bush's watch, decay of public firefighting has spawned billion dollar private industry

12/10/2007 @ 8:21 am
Filed by Miriam Raftery

Trade group founded in 2000 now represents 10,000 private firefighters

SAN DIEGO - After the Great Fire of London in 1666, insurance companies started issuing plaques to show private fire brigades which homes to save--and which to let burn. Insurers organized their own firefighting companies. Not having a plaque didn’t mean your home went totally ignored, but it certainly didn’t help.

Today, a decline in public funding for firefighting services has sparked explosive growth in the private sector. The world’s largest insurance company – American Insurance Group – now has “Wildfire Protection Units” in 150 US zip codes. During the 2007 California wildfires, AIG’s firefighters saved homes in wealthy areas, while less fortunate neighbors were left with rubble. A trade group for private firefighters founded in 2000 now represents 10,000 private firemen.

Paul Krugman: Henry Paulson’s Priorities

By Bush administration standards, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, is a good guy. He isn’t conspicuously incompetent; and he isn’t trying to mislead us into war, justify torture or protect corrupt contractors.

But Mr. Paulson’s actions reflect the priorities of the administration he serves. And that, ultimately, is what’s wrong with the mortgage relief plan he unveiled last week.

The plan is, as a Times editorial put it yesterday, “too little, too late and too voluntary.” But from the administration’s point of view these failings aren’t bugs, they’re features.

This Generation's 'Winter Soldiers' to Expose Horrific Reality of U.S. Occupation

By Liam Madden, AlterNet
Posted on December 7, 2007, Printed on December 10, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/69915/

Thanks to our nation's leadership, history will come to know this as an era of unabashed torture and war, led by the United States and its amorphous "War on Terror."

Meanwhile, the mass media bombard us with the vacuous creed of post-9/11 America: "we're more concerned with which color ipod to buy than the dismantling of our constitution, our country is always the 'good guy,' and the layout of our lives isn't supposed to deviate greatly from the characters of our favorite television show." From a historical perspective, my generation is ominously quiet at a time when silence is particularly dangerous.

The Roots of the Lending Crisis Run Through Wall Street

By Nomi Prins, The Nation
Posted on December 9, 2007, Printed on December 10, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/70096/

Behind every great bubble and its subsequent bust lies the power of Wall Street's trading operations. In the case of our national housing market saga and toxic subprime fallout, it's true that banks and specialist lending institutions rapaciously extended credit to ill-equipped borrowers.

But that's not the whole story. Housing value fluctuations weren't just caused by lending run amok, but by the trading that enabled the lending and made a precarious situation even worse.

Libby Drops Appeal in CIA Leak Case

WASHINGTON — Former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is no longer appealing his conviction in the CIA leak case, a tacit recognition that continuing his legal fight might only make things worse.

Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted of perjury and obstruction but President Bush commuted his 30-month prison sentence in July. As a convicted felon, Libby will lose his law license and, in some states, cannot vote.

Iowa: Hillary Looks Shaky in a Pivotal Contest

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com
Posted on December 10, 2007, Printed on December 10, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/70104/

Iowa is not like other states. There's fuck-all to do here, and unless you just love dirt or barnyard sex, you could easily die of boredom -- except in an election year, when suddenly you become the center of the universe. Iowa political events sometimes seem like meetings of Athenian elders; every last audience member seems to have read the text of the Military Commissions Act, and even the best-prepared candidates come out of town-hall meetings looking harried and tested. And these days, the candidate who looks the worst for wear in Iowa is Hillary Clinton.

Here's how bad it's gotten for Hillary of late: Rival candidates are literally tripping over each other in an effort to knock her wobbling campaign off its pedestal. For the first time since this race began, three major candidates are in a three-way tie at the top of the Iowa polls. A primary season that looked like a prolonged slam-dunk coronation a month ago has morphed into a scene from the Spike TV classic Predator, with her seven pursuers fingering the green blood on the ground and whispering with a weary smile about the once-invincible monster:

Digby: Accomplices

Yesterday on CNN I heard author Ronald Kessler say:

Inside the CIA are dismayed these tapes were destroyed. But at the same time, these techniques are something that worked and that were approved by congress and that were needed to protect us.

I was aghast because we know torture didn't work, it wasn't (explicitly anyway) approved by congress and it wasn't needed to protect us --- and CNN offered no rebuttal to those claims.

Digby: Panting For Attention

You would think that after Britney Spears' well publicized problems getting in out of cars in a dress, nobody would question any public woman's choice to wear pants. No such luck:

Women have come a long way from the time when wearing a pair of pants was considered "borrowing from the boys." So it would be highly regressive to suggest that the candidate is using trousers to heighten the perception that she can be as tough as a man. And yet . . .

Frank Rich: The Republicans Find Their Obama

COULD 2008 actually end up being a showdown between the author of “The Audacity of Hope” and the new Man from Hope, Ark.?

It sounds preposterous, but Washington’s shock over Mike Huckabee’s sudden rise in the polls — he “came from nowhere,” Robert Novak huffed last week — makes you wonder. Having failed to anticipate so much else, including the Barack Obama polling surge of days earlier, the press pack has proved an unreliable guide to election 2008. What the Beltway calls unthinkable today keeps turning out to be front-page news tomorrow.

Glenn Greenwald: "Missing" evidence is familiar Bush pattern

The New York Times' revelation that "the Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency's custody" conclusively demonstrates obstruction of justice which, if Michael Mukasey has an ounce of integrity or independence, will be the subject of a serious and immediate criminal investigation. While the revelation is obviously significant, it is also is part of a long-standing pattern of such obstruction.

In April, I compiled a long list of the numerous court proceedings and other investigations which were impeded by extremely dubious claims from the Bush administration that key evidence was mysteriously "missing." Much of the "missing" evidence involved precisely the type of evidence that the CIA has now been forced here to admit it deliberately destroyed: namely, evidence showing the conduct of its agents during interrogation of detainees.

Tomgram: Steve Fraser, Concocting the Perfect Electoral Storm

Back in February of this year, writing about the history of turning-point elections, Steve Fraser asked a question, but didn't answer it: Would campaign 2008, he wondered, turn out to be a rare presidential election of historic proportions? After all, the Democrats had recaptured the House and Senate only months before -- and mightn't that have been "a signal" on the horizon of such an upcoming electoral turning point? Just ten months later, in a new economic moment, he's ready to answer his question, definitively.