Paulson's Swindle Revealed

By William Greider
October 29, 2008

The swindle of American taxpayers is proceeding more or less in broad daylight, as the unwitting voters are preoccupied with the national election. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson agreed to invest $125 billion in the nine largest banks, including $10 billion for Goldman Sachs, his old firm. But, if you look more closely at Paulson's transaction, the taxpayers were taken for a ride--a very expensive ride. They paid $125 billion for bank stock that a private investor could purchase for $62.5 billion. That means half of the public's money was a straight-out gift to Wall Street, for which taxpayers got nothing in return.

These are dynamite facts that demand immediate action to halt the bailout deal and correct its giveaway terms. Stop payment on the Treasury checks before the bankers can cash them. Open an immediate Congressional investigation into how Paulson and his staff determined such a sweetheart deal for leading players in the financial sector and for their own former employer. Paulson's bailout staff is heavily populated with Goldman Sachs veterans and individuals from other Wall Street firms. Yet we do not know whether these financiers have fully divested their own Wall Street holdings. Were they perhaps enriching themselves as they engineered this generous distribution of public wealth to embattled private banks and their shareholders?

Fear of Deflation Lurks as Global Demand Drops

As dozens of countries slip deeper into financial distress, a new threat may be gathering force within the American economy — the prospect that goods will pile up waiting for buyers and prices will fall, suffocating fresh investment and worsening joblessness for months or even years.

The word for this is deflation, or declining prices, a term that gives economists chills.

Deflation accompanied the Depression of the 1930s. Persistently falling prices also were at the heart of Japan’s so-called lost decade after the catastrophic collapse of its real estate bubble at the end of the 1980s — a period in which some experts now find parallels to the American predicament.

It Is Now Absolutely Crystal Clear That Republican Rule Is Dangerous and Authoritarian

By John Dean, FindLaw.com
Posted on November 1, 2008, Printed on November 1, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/105669/

Republicans rule, rather than govern, when they are in power by imposing their authoritarian conservative philosophy on everyone, as their answer for everything. This works for them because their interest is in power, and in what it can do for those who think as they do. Ruling, of course, must be distinguished from governing, which is a more nuanced process that entails give-and-take and the kind of compromises that are often necessary to find a consensus and solutions that will best serve the interests of all Americans.

Republicans' authoritarian rule can also be characterized by its striking incivility and intolerance toward those who do not view the world as Republicans do. Their insufferable attitude is not dangerous in itself, but it is employed to accomplish what they want, which it to take care of themselves and those who work to keep them in power.

Glenn Greenwald: Defeating McCain: Ending Not Only Neocon Policies, but Also Tactics

Numerous commentators have condemned the McCain campaign's despicable -- and patently false -- attack on Professor Rashid Khalidi as an "anti-Semite," deployed in order, yet again, to insinuate that Barack Obama is an American-hating, Muslim/Arab radical. Even Fred Hiatt's Washington Post Editorial Page this morning called McCain's comments about Rashidi "a vile smear," "simply ludicrous," and "itself condemnable," and favorably cited Rashidi's response when asked by The Post if he wanted to address the controversy: "I will stick to my policy of letting this idiot wind blow over."

It's true, as those commentators point out, that this episode is just the latest in the McCain campaign's increasingly desperate (and laughably inept) attempt to win by sinking lower and lower into McCarthyite muck. But it goes far beyond just the McCain campaign. The neoconservative Right has been doing exactly this for a long time -- playing frivolous games with the "anti-semitism" accusation, casually tossing it at anyone who utters any criticism of Israel or who advocates some even-handed approach to Israel's conflicts with its various enemies.

The War against Citizens and Our Freedom

I have been travelling around the country for five weeks now, flying home on breaks to be with my kids. The message — what do we do to fight and win this war against citizens and against our freedom.

While I have had to focus on assimilating new news and information, checking reports, blogging and taping and speaking, my mind is so full of the people I have met and the stories they have told. Each city has crystallized a scene or moment that will stay with me forever. I wish I could show you each of them. They are the real story.

Documents reveal how Ohio routed 2004 voting data through company that hosted external Bush Administration email accounts

Filed by Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane

Newly obtained computer schematics provide further detail of how electronic voting data was routed during the 2004 election from Ohio’s Secretary of State’s office through a partisan Tennessee web hosting company.

A network security expert with high-level US government clearances, who is also a former McCain delegate, says the documents – server schematics which trace the architecture created for Ohio’s then-Republican Secretary of State and state election chief Kenneth Blackwell – raise troubling questions about the security of electronic voting and the integrity of the 2004 presidential election results.

Paul Krugman: When Consumers Capitulate

The long-feared capitulation of American consumers has arrived. According to Thursday’s G.D.P. report, real consumer spending fell at an annual rate of 3.1 percent in the third quarter; real spending on durable goods (stuff like cars and TVs) fell at an annual rate of 14 percent.

To appreciate the significance of these numbers, you need to know that American consumers almost never cut spending. Consumer demand kept rising right through the 2001 recession; the last time it fell even for a single quarter was in 1991, and there hasn’t been a decline this steep since 1980, when the economy was suffering from a severe recession combined with double-digit inflation.

Naomi Klein: Bailout = Bush's Final Pillage

By Naomi Klein, The Nation
Posted on October 31, 2008, Printed on October 31, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/105452/

In the final days of the election, many Republicans seem to have given up the fight for power. But that doesn't mean they are relaxing. If you want to see real Republican elbow grease, check out the energy going into chucking great chunks of the $700 billion bailout out the door. At a recent Senate Banking Committee hearing, Republican Senator Bob Corker was fixated on this task, and with a clear deadline in mind: inauguration. "How much of it do you think may be actually spent by January 20 or so?" Corker asked Neel Kashkari, the 35-year-old former banker in charge of the bailout.

When European colonialists realized that they had no choice but to hand over power to the indigenous citizens, they would often turn their attention to stripping the local treasury of its gold and grabbing valuable livestock. If they were really nasty, like the Portuguese in Mozambique in the mid-1970s, they poured concrete down the elevator shafts.

Expanding War, Contracting Meaning

The Next President and the Global War on Terror

by Andrew J. Bacevich

A week ago, I had a long conversation with a four-star U.S. military officer who, until his recent retirement, had played a central role in directing the global war on terror. I asked him: what exactly is the strategy that guides the Bush administration's conduct of this war? His dismaying, if not exactly surprising, answer: there is none.

President Bush will bequeath to his successor the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone. To defense contractors, lobbyists, think-tankers, ambitious military officers, the hosts of Sunday morning talk shows, and the Douglas Feith-like creatures who maneuver to become players in the ultimate power game, the Global War on Terror is a boon, an enterprise redolent with opportunity and promising to extend decades into the future.

Pre-election surveys show deep concern about state of health care

With only a few days remaining before Election Day, researchers from Harvard School of Public Health and the Kaiser Family Foundation, writing for the Nov. 6, 2008, New England Journal of Medicine, find that seven in ten registered voters say major changes are needed in the US health care system.

Why I Love Taxes -- And Most Americans Do, Too

By Sally Kohn, Movement Vision Lab
Posted on October 30, 2008, Printed on October 30, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/104546/

Over the last 40 decades, conservatives have launched a concerted attack on taxes with such success that now candidates of both parties reliably compete with each other to prove who is more anti-tax. When John McCain and Sarah Palin attack taxes, that's one thing. But when Barack Obama starts doing it, we have a big problem.

Conventional wisdom has it that Americans hate taxes. But the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Black hole gapes for pensions

By Henry C K Liu

More than three years before the current financial crisis, in a series Greenspan, the Wizard of Bubbleland that began on September 14, 2005, I warned:

Through mortgage-backed securitization, banks now are mere loan intermediaries that assume no long-term risk on the risky loans they make, which are sold as securitized debt of unbundled levels of risk to institutional investors with varying risk appetite commensurate with their varying need for higher returns. But who are institutional investors? They are mostly pension funds that manage the money the US working public depends on for retirement. In other words, the aggregate retirement assets of the working public are exposed to the risk of the same working public defaulting on their house mortgages.

Hendrik Hertzberg: Like, Socialism

Sometimes, when a political campaign has run out of ideas and senses that the prize is slipping through its fingers, it rolls up a sleeve and plunges an arm, shoulder deep, right down to the bottom of the barrel. The problem for John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican Party is that the bottom was scraped clean long before it dropped out. Back when the polls were nip and tuck and the leaves had not yet begun to turn, Barack Obama had already been accused of betraying the troops, wanting to teach kindergartners all about sex, favoring infanticide, and being a friend of terrorists and terrorism. What was left? The anticlimactic answer came as the long Presidential march of 2008 staggered toward its final week: Senator Obama is a socialist.

"This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing," Todd Akin, a Republican congressman from Missouri, told a McCain rally outside St. Louis. "It's a referendum on socialism." "With all due respect," Senator George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said, "the man is a socialist." At an airport rally in Roswell, New Mexico, a well-known landing spot for space aliens, Governor Palin warned against Obama's tax proposals. "Friends," she said, "now is no time to experiment with socialism." And McCain, discussing those proposals, agreed that they sounded "a lot like socialism." There hasn't been so much talk of socialism in an American election since 1920, when Eugene Victor Debs, candidate of the Socialist Party, made his fifth run for President from a cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was serving a ten-year sentence for opposing the First World War. (Debs got a million votes and was freed the following year by the new Republican President, Warren G. Harding, who immediately invited him to the White House for a friendly visit.)

Conservative Fiction: The New Deal Sucked!

By Bill Scher

Created 10/29/2008 - 9:12am

As we are facing the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression as a result of conservative deregulation, it's only logical that we would look to how we successfully dealt with the last major economic crisis -- the progressive principles that shaped President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "New Deal."

The conservative response? Pretend that the New Deal sucked.

Last month Jonah Goldberg wrote on the National Review blog The Corner [1] that the New Deal is to blame for making it a "Great" depression:

...we shouldn't let invocation of the Great Depression — and our fear of it — justify all of this New Deal talk. Say it with me: The New Deal prolonged the Great Depression. In fact, if anything it was the New Deal itself that made the Great Depression "Great." By 1938 one in six Americans were still without jobs. It wasn't until WWII, when FDR started describing himself as "Dr. Win the War" instead of "Dr. New Deal" that America finally started to lift itself out of its state-imposed economic stupor.

Yesterday, the Heritage Foundation's Conn Carroll claimed [2] that the New Deal created a wholly separate Depression:

One of the great untold stories about the Depression is that there were really two of them. By the mid-1930’s the U.S. economy was well along the road to recovery with the number of unemployed dropping from 13 million in 1933 to 7.6 million in 1936. The the Supreme Court, bowing to the court packing pressure of FDR, approved the Wagner Act and the economy tanked again.

The Wagner Act [3] is that awful, awful law that gave workers the right to join unions [4], which in ConservativeWorld, ruined everything.

Brace yourselves - George Bush will soon be free to do just what he wants

The raid on Syria is a dark portent. The current president has three long, unaccountable months to cement his legacy

Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian
Wednesday October 29 2008

We are about to enter the twilight zone, that strange black hole in political time and space that appears no more than once every four years. It is known as the period of transition, and it starts a week from today, the time when the United States has not one president but two. One will be the president-elect, the other George Bush, in power for 12 more weeks in which he can do pretty much whatever he likes. Not only will he never again have to face voters, he won't even have to worry about damaging the prospects of his own party and its standard bearer (as if he has not damaged those enough already). From November 5 to January 20, he will exercise the freest, most unaccountable form of power the democratic world has to offer.

How Bush might use it is a question that gained new force at the weekend, when US forces crossed the Iraqi border into Syria to kill Abu Ghadiya, a man they said had been funnelling "foreign fighters" allied to al-Qaida into Iraq. That American move has touched off a round of intense head-scratching around the world, as foreign ministers and analysts ask each other the time-honoured diplomatic query: what did they mean by that? To which they add the post-Nov 4 question: and what does it tell us about how Bush plans to use his final days in the White House?

Thomas Frank: Blessed Are the Persecuted

How Joe the Plumber fits the GOP narrative.

Historically speaking, conservatism is a movement organized and funded by society's most powerful members; politically speaking, it lusts for tax cuts and government rollbacks that will benefit those same fortunate folks at the top.

But what it really is, in its own mind, is a crusade on behalf of society's most abject members: the true Americans who are victimized, sneered at and persecuted for their faithfulness.

Earth on course for eco 'crunch'

The planet is headed for an ecological "credit crunch", according to a report issued by conservation groups.

The document contends that our demands on natural resources overreach what the Earth can sustain by almost a third.

The Living Planet Report is the work of WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network.

Don't Look Now, There's a Huge Wave of Inflation Coming Toward Us

By Kevin Phillips, Huffington Post
Posted on October 29, 2008, Printed on October 29, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/105107/

The time has come to review how back in 2005-2006 George W. Bush -- now increasingly perceived as another Herbert Hoover -- picked two top appointees who helped steer him towards his fateful 2008 rendezvous with a second Great Crash.

One of them, a top level financier, insured that Washington's eventual rescue policies would concentrate on trying to bail-out Wall Street while ignoring the gnawing cancer of its warped ambitions and financial malpractices. The second, a professor, misapplied dogma about how to guard against severe downturns into a disastrous attempt to refight the onset of the 1930s depression -- his academic specialty. He did not understand the very different context of our own era of cyber-spatial financial recklessness and gathering global inflation.

Can You Guess a Person's Politics by Their Personality? Psychologist Team Says Yes

By Maria Luisa Tucker, AlterNet
Posted on October 29, 2008, Printed on October 29, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/105089/

If your office is a mess, you're known as a chatty Cathy, and you consider yourself hard to scare, then chances are, you will be voting for Obama in six days. But your neighbor, an optimistic clean freak who prides himself on the fact that he has woken up at 5 a.m. every day for the last 10 years, is a likely McCainiac.

It may sound a little like political palm reading, but some social psychologists say personality and biology may form the basis of a person's political leanings. While there's no Republican or Democrat gene, researchers are coming closer to pinpointing fundamental psychological and biological differences between conservatives and liberals.

Part 2 of 2: Killer touch for market capitalism

By Henry C K Liu

Part I: US government throws oil on fire

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson asserts that the full resources of the Treasury Department are being used to ensure the success of its US$700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). The "full resources of the Treasury Department" commands the full faith and credit of the United States anchored by Treasury's taxing authority as approved by Congress. Tax payments in the US are made to the US Treasury via the Internal Revenue Service.

The Congress can approve taxes for and spending by the Administration, but Congress cannot create money like the Federal Reserve can. The Treasury's money can only come from future taxes approved by Congress. Article I - Section 7.1 of the Constitution stipulates that "All Bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives". The Federal Reserve has the authority to create money as part of its monetary policy prerogative but the Treasury does not have any constitutional authority to expand the money supply. The Treasury must depend on tax revenue for funds beyond which the Treasury must sell sovereign debt to raise funds up to the national debt ceiling approved by Congress. Section 8.2 stipulates that only Congress has the power to borrow money on the credit of the United States. Proceeds from sovereign debt are advances on sovereign liability and not revenue, and must be paid back from future tax revenue.

'We're not going to win this war'

By China Hand

As the US public is dimly aware, things are not going very well in Afghanistan.

The most recent United Nation situation map for Afghanistan issued September 3 paints a grim picture: there are large swaths of the country where things are getting worse. This includes the entire area surrounding Kandahar on the Pakistan border in the south, as well as areas on the Pakistan-Tajikistan border in the northeast and other areas on the Turkmenistan border to the northwest.

Medical Debt Sending Many Over Financial Brink

by Amanda Gardner
healthday Reporter
1 hr 12 mins ago

TUESDAY, Oct. 28 (HealthDay News) -- Since 1999, Keith and Deborah Krinsky of Magalia, Calif., have seen their health insurance deductible soar from $1,000 to $10,000.

And their health-care costs have put them in a financial hole.

A combination of Keith's chronic asthma and potential heart problems, Deborah's connective tissue disorder and fallen arches, and their kids' various scrapes and stumbles led them to amass a pile of credit card debt and forced them to refinance the mortgage on their house -- which they now are having trouble paying.

Keith, once a plant manager for a trucking company in Chico, took a $30,000 pay cut to get a job with better health benefits. Deborah, who doesn't work because of her disability, said they are still fighting desperately to stave off foreclosure.

Volcker Signs On: A ‘True’ Conservative in the Obama Camp

The Fed Chairman Who Faced Down Economic Crisis Looks to Obama

By Charles R. Morris 10/28/08 5:04 PM

The announcement that Paul A. Volcker is a key economic adviser to Sen. Barack Obama – cited by the Democratic presidential nominee during the last debate and appearing with him at a campaign event in Florida last week — was met with surprise in some circles.

Volcker, 81, is celebrated as the Federal Reserve chairman who broke the plague of global inflation in the early 1980s. But he did it be engineering a violent crackdown on excess credit — at one point the short-term bank rate jumped to 20 percent — and the 1982 drop in gross domestic product was one of the sharpest in the postwar era.

Banks to use bailout for lending, acquisitions

Analysts see plan to weed out weaker companies as plan morphs yet again

NEW YORK - The Treasury's $700 billion program to rescue the financial services industry, which began with a three-page memo six weeks ago, is evolving yet again.

When the fleshed-out proposal was passed by Congress and signed into law Oct. 3, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's plan was to use the money to buy "toxic" mortgage-related securities weighing down banks and clogging the flow of credit to business and consumers.

A Myth of Voter Fraud

In Pursuit of an Unlikely Crime

By Daphne Eviatar 10/28/08 6:00 AM

Earlier this month, Republicans in Ohio lost their lawsuit challenging a state rule that allows voters to register and vote early on the same day. But the state party had no intention of conceding the point. GOP officials demanded records from all 88 county boards of election identifying every person who took advantage of same-day registration and voting. In one county, the Republican district attorney even opened a grand jury investigation.

“He’s investigating people who the law says are allowed to vote,” said Ohio ACLU lawyer Carrie Davis. After it was revealed that the district attorney was also the local chairman of the McCain campaign, he was forced to appoint a special prosecutor to handle the case.

How Universal Health Care Changes Everything

By Sara Robinson

Created 10/28/2008 - 4:44am

With one fell stroke, giving Americans universal access to health care will undermine some of the deepest and most persistent myths of the conservative worldview.

-------------------
We've worked hard to build a progressive political juggernaut that will, God willing and the creek don't rise, put us in control of both Congress and the Executive Branch starting just a week from now.

But it's one thing to get power, and another thing to keep it.

Someone (OK, it was Rick Perlstein) recently asked a group of friends to name the single most important policy step progressives could take to solidify a long-term grip on the government — the kind of extended run we had from 1932 through to the Age of Reagan.

ACLU tells next pres: Stop torture on day 1

The last eight years have not been kind to civil libertarians, and one prominent group has issued a guide book of sorts for the next president to get the country back onto the proper constitutional path.

The American Civil Liberties Union on Monday unveiled a nearly 100 page plan to dial back what it sees as the myriad abuses of the Bush administration, including torture, extraordinary rendition, warrantless wiretapping and surveillance of peaceful activists.

Neo-Nazis foiled in 'assassination plot' targeting Obama and black pupils

Two skinhead neo-Nazis accused of planning to kill presidential candidate as the culmination of a murder spree targeting black people

Peter Walker, Elana Schor in Washington and agencies
Tuesday October 28 2008 09.53 GMT

US police claim to have foiled an alleged plot by two skinhead neo-Nazis to assassinate Barack Obama as the culmination of a murder spree targeting black people.

According to federal authorities, Daniel Cowart, 20, and Paul Schlesselman, 18, who were arrested in Tennessee on Wednesday, planned to attack an unidentified high school where most pupils were African-American. They intended to shoot 88 people and behead 14 others, before trying to shoot Obama.

Methylmercury warning

Precautionary approach to methylmercury needed

Recent studies hint that exposure to the toxic chemicals, such as methylmercury can cause harm at levels previously considered safe. A new analysis of the epidemiological evidence in the International Journal of Environment and Health, suggests that we should take a precautionary approach to this and similar compounds to protect unborn children from irreversible brain damage.

Philippe Grandjean of the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard School of Public Health, in Boston, and the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, explains that the causes of suboptimal and abnormal mental development are mostly unknown. However, severe exposure to pollutants during the development of the growing fetus can cause problems that become apparent as brain functions develop - and ultimately decline - in later life. Critically, much smaller doses of chemicals, such as the neurotoxic compound methylmercury, can harm the developing brain to a much greater extent than the adult brain.

Downturn Clobbers Public Pension Funds

By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 28, 2008; D01

The market downturn is ravaging public pension funds across the United States, with many state and local governments seeing more than 20 percent of their retirement pools swept away in the turmoil.

Even before the financial crisis, many large pension funds already were considered to be inadequately funded, according to the Government Accountability Office. The losses could force some states and local governments to ask taxpayers to pay more into the funds or to demand more contributions from the police, teachers and other government employees whom the benefits cover.

Paul Krugman: The Widening Gyre

Economic data rarely inspire poetic thoughts. But as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

The widening gyre, in this case, would be the feedback loops (so much for poetry) causing the financial crisis to spin ever further out of control. The hapless falconer would, I guess, be Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary.

And the gyre continues to widen in new and scary ways. Even as Mr. Paulson and his counterparts in other countries moved to rescue the banks, fresh disasters mounted on other fronts.

Paul Krugman: Desperately Seeking Seriousness

Maybe the polls and the conventional wisdom are all wrong, and John McCain will pull off a stunning upset. But right now the election looks like a blue sweep: a solid victory, maybe even a landslide, for Barack Obama; large Democratic gains in the Senate, possibly even enough to produce a filibuster-proof majority; and big Democratic gains in the House, too.

Yet just six weeks ago the presidential race seemed close, with Mr. McCain if anything a bit ahead. The turning point was the middle of September, coinciding precisely with the sudden intensification of the financial crisis after the failure of Lehman Brothers. But why has the growing financial and economic crisis worked so overwhelmingly to the Democrats’ advantage?

The Making (and Remaking) of McCain

By ROBERT DRAPER

Published: October 22, 2008

On the morning of Wednesday, Sept. 24, John McCain convened a meeting in his suite at the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Among the handful of campaign officials in attendance were McCain’s chief campaign strategist, Steve Schmidt, and his other two top advisers: Rick Davis, the campaign manager; and Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime speechwriter. The senator’s ears were already throbbing with bad news from economic advisers and from House Republican leaders who had told him that only a small handful in their ranks were willing to support the $700 billion bailout of the banking industry proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The meeting was to focus on how McCain should respond to the crisis — but also, as one participant later told me, “to try to see this as a big-picture, leadership thing.”

Financial Times endorses Obama

LONDON (AFP) — The Financial Times, the respected business daily, endorsed Barack Obama on Monday to become the next US president, even though it prefers the trade policies of his Republican rival John McCain.

The newspaper, which has a daily readership of about 1.3 million worldwide according to its parent company Pearson, said the Democrat's policies blended the "good, not so good and downright bad" but he was "the right choice".

If the GOP Had Listened to ACORN's Advice, the Mortgage Industry Wouldn't Be in Meltdown

By Peter Dreier and John Atlas, The Nation
Posted on October 27, 2008, Printed on October 27, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/104726/

An increasingly desperate Republican attack machine has recently identified the community organizing group ACORN as Public Enemy Number One. Among ACORN's alleged crimes, perhaps the most serious is that it caused, nearly single-handedly, the world's financial crisis. That's the fantasy. In the reality-based world, it was ACORN that sounded the alarm about the exploitative lending practices that led to the current mortgage meltdown and financial crisis.

Obamageddon

For many on the religious right, the prospect of an Obama presidency represents the end of life as we know it

Sarah Posner
guardian.co.uk
Monday October 27 2008 15.00 GMT

With polls showing Barack Obama pulling ahead of John McCain in the US presidential race, the Republican party's hard-right evangelical allies are starting to panic. As the political elites in the movement freak out, they're sowing the seeds of grassroots anxiety that God will punish America for electing Obama.

Theodicy lies at the heart of the evangelical right's political strategy: Christians must perpetually engage in spiritual warfare with Satan, and take dominion over governmental and legal institutions. God will be pleased then; but if these Christian soldiers fail to vanquish Satan, God won't be happy at all. Chaos ensues: socialism, Bible burning, abortions in public schools, boy scouts forced into homosexuality!

US plans separate nuclear command

The US Air Force (USAF) is planning to set up a new Global Strike Command for its nuclear weapons as part of a re-organisation after recent mishaps.

The move follows the discovery that six nuclear weapons were mistakenly flown across the US, and that nuclear missile fuses were sent unknowingly to Taiwan.

The blunders resulted in the sacking of two of USAF's most senior officials.

Bill Moyers Journal

October 24, 2008

BILL MOYERS: Watching Alan Greenspan testify before Congress this week, I tried, I tried very hard not to keep thinking of Ayn Rand. I failed.

The philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand was Alan Greenspan's ideological guru, his intellectual mentor. She was also one of the most amazing fantasists of the last century, the author of two of the most influential books of my generation THE FOUNTAINHEAD and ATLAS SHRUGGED, both timeless best-sellers.

Rand was a hedonist, an exponent of radical self-interest, who so believed in unfettered, unbridled capitalism that she advocated the abolition of all state regulations except those dealing with crime. In the gospel according to Rand, the business community was constantly beleaguered by evil forces practicing, are you ready for this? Altruism! Yes, the unselfish regard for the welfare of others was a menace to greed, and Rand would have none of it.

The 20-Hour Workweek

The unemployment rate seems low. That's because it's not counting all those underemployed workers.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2008, at 3:59 PM ET

It's hard to overstate the poor numbers coming out of Wall Street in recent months. But could it be that we're overstating the gravity of the situation? As job losses have mounted and consumer confidence has plunged, policymakers, news organizations, econo-pundits, and even some of my Slate colleagues have noted that the unemployment rate, which rose to 6.1 percent in September, seems to be at a nonrecessionary, noncatastrophic, low level. The unemployment rate is still below where it was in 2003; and between September 1982 and May 1983, the last very deep recession, it topped 10 percent. (Go here for a chart and historical data).

Save! (But Not Too Much.)

Americans are getting thrifty just when we should be spending more.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Friday, Oct. 24, 2008, at 3:55 PM ET

Thrift, like the repossession business, is a classic counter-cyclical industry. When the gross domestic product shrinks and the bulls are stricken, Americans are called to rouse themselves from a consumption-induced daze and start saving and investing rather than borrowing and splurging. At about this time in the economic cycle, we hear a lot more from Warren Buffett and a lot less from Donald Trump. Coupon-clippers are exalted, and high-flyers are laid low. Of course, once the good times begin to roll again, the calls for thrift subside.

History Lesson: Presidential Firepower

How FDR saved capitalism in eight days.

By David Greenberg
Posted Friday, Oct. 24, 2008, at 4:34 PM ET

President Bush's vacillating response to the financial crisis has occasioned fond memories of the last president to face a banking catastrophe, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The comparisons are bound to be invidious. FDR's response to the panic of 1933 represented his finest hour—one of them, at any rate—while Bush's moves exhibit all the surefootedness of a dying animal. Yet FDR's early years should be revisited, not as an exercise in nostalgia or an excuse to bash Bush but as a chance to understand how FDR earned the reputation for sterling leadership that he retains today.

Frank Rich: In Defense of White Americans

IT seems like a century ago now, but it was only in 2005 that a National Journal poll of Beltway insiders predicted that George Allen, then a popular Virginia senator, would be the next G.O.P. nominee for president. George who? Allen is now remembered, if at all, as a punch line. But any post-mortem of the Great Republican Collapse of 2008 must circle back to the not-so-funny thing that happened on his way to the White House.

That would be in 2006, when he capsized his own shoo-in re-election race by calling a 20-year-old Indian-American “macaca” before a white audience (and a video camera). “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia,” Allen told the young Democratic campaign worker for good measure, in a precise preview of the playbook that has led John McCain and Sarah Palin to their tawdry nadir two years later.

Katha Pollitt: Still Lots of Right-Wing Mayhem to Go Around

The right seems to have decided that the culture war, like just about everything else, sells better if promoted by attractive youthful spokesmoms. Goodbye Pat Buchanan, hello Sarah Palin -- and an especially big shout-out to that bright-eyed smiling newcomer to the national hate sweeps, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann. Bachmann, as you may know, has become a YouTube star, thanks to her interview on "Hardball," in which, talking to an incredulous Chris Matthews, she called for the news media to ferret out "anti-American" members of Congress.

The stronger Obama gets, the more unhinged the Republicans become -- at least, those Republicans who haven't already detached (Chris Buckley! Colin Powell! Charles Krauthammer! Peggy Noonan! Kenneth Adelman!) -- although to be fair, Bachmann has been sending bulletins from Outer Wingnuttia for quite a while. In August she mocked Nancy Pelosi for "global warming fanaticism ... She has said that she's just trying to save the planet. We all know that someone did that over 2,000 years ago." Bachmann also claimed that Democrats want high gas prices in order to force Americans to move to "the inner city." Watch out, Real America, Democrats want to turn you into blacks.

GOP lawyer refuses to deny private eye visits

Two in ACORN controversy say investigator's visits were intimidating

By Gwyneth Doland 10/23/08 7:45 PM

ALBUQUERQUE – Republican Party attorney Pat Rogers refused to say Thursday if a private detective who visited the addresses of two of the 10 Albuquerque voters cited at a news conference last week about voter fraud was working for the GOP.

Project Vote, a nonprofit that works with the community-organizing group ACORN, charged yesterday that the 10 voters are eligible voters and that the visits constitute voter intimidation. The group called on U.S. Attorney Gregory J. Fouratt to investigate.

When asked by the New Mexico Independent if the private investigator worked for Rogers’ law firm, Rogers said, “I have no interest in responding to ACORN’s accusation.”