Media Matters: Conservative media peddle a raw deal

by Jamison Foser

The conservative punditocracy that has spent the past eight years propping up a president who gave us an illegitimate war and leaves us with an almost unimaginably bad economic crisis apparently grows weary of defending this spectacular failure of a president. And so they have begun to shift their efforts to an easier task: trying to turn Americans against the president who ended the Great Depression, initiated the minimum wage, created Social Security, and helped defeat the Nazis.

Yes, they're trying to bring Franklin Roosevelt down to George W. Bush's level. Good luck with that.

Commentary: At long last, sir, have you left no sense of decency?

By Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers

Even as President George W. Bush was packing up his knick-knacks and calling for the moving van, the White House spin machine was whirring along at Warp 6, doing its best to put a happy face on the sorry history of his eight years in the Oval Office.

The campaign is intended to write a first draft of history and thus forestall an inevitable judgment that the Bush presidency has made the presidencies of Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding and Herbert Hoover look good by comparison.

Social Security False Alarm?

By Dean Baker

Created 01/09/2009 - 9:42am

The headline of a New York Times article tells readers that "Obama Promises Bid to Overhaul Retiree Spending." The first sentence warns that "overhauling Social Security and Medicare would be 'a central part' of his administration’s efforts to contain federal spending, signaling for the first time that he would wade into the thorny politics of entitlement programs."

This certainly makes it appear as though President-elect Obama intends to use the Wall Street-generated crisis as a pretext for cutting Social Security.

Bush's Last Month Sees Unemployment Hit 22%, According to Wingnuttia's Math

By David Sirota

Created 01/09/2009 - 11:36pm

Per the discussion on the right-wing's efforts to slander Franklin Roosevelt, note that though the Bureau of Labor Statistics today [1] reports that the unemployment rate in President Bush's last month is 7.2 percent, if you use the same kind of absurd math conservatives use to berate the New Deal, then the unemployment today is actually around 22 percent.

As University of California historian Eric Rauchway has noted [2], Wingnuttia's leading FDR slanderers like Amity Shlaes and Thomas Sowell base their claims that unemployment during the New Deal didn't go below 20 percent by counting government workers as unemployed. And those claims are being echoed by right-wing rags like the National Review and fringe think tanks like the Heritage Foundation [3]. I want to repeat that: conservatives base their claims that unemployment didn't drop below 20 percent during the pre-WWII New Deal not on the official government data [4] showing otherwise, but by counting government workers in programs like the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps as unemployed.

Not Doing Enough

Why I worry that Obama doesn't realize just how bad things are.

John B. Judis, The New Republic Published: Friday, January 09, 2009

Does Barack Obama understand the seriousness of the economic crisis? Yesterday, he laid out his economic agenda, and it was filled with all sorts of important exhortations and proscriptions. He appropriately condemned the "anything goes" policies of the last administration. He declared that government is now the solution to our woes, not the problem. Still, I worry that the president elect is underestimating the problem he and the country faces.

We may not simply be facing a steep recession like that of the early 1980s, from which we can extricate ourselves in a year or two, but something resembling the Great Depression of the 1930s. For starters, the current crisis is global, which means that one part of the world can't lift the other out of its misery; everyone will go down together, which is what happened in the 1930s. Secondly, the downturn has combined an unusual decline in the real economy--employment in durable-goods manufacturing fell by 21.9 percent from 2000 to 2008--with a financial crash precipitated by the bursting of the housing bubble. The bubble resulted from an attempt to sustain growth and employment in the face of an underlying decline, which, too, is what happened in the late 1920s.

The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted on January 10, 2009, Printed on January 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/118783/

The following is a transcript from an interview from Democracy Now!

For the 50 million Americans with 401(k) retirement plans, 2008 is a year many wish they could forget. Workers saw their 401(k) plans lose between 20 and 30 percent of their value as the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its worst year since the Depression. Between October 2007 and 2008, more than $1 trillion worth of stock value held in 401(k)s and other defined contribution plans were wiped out. For workers nearing retirement, the losses have been devastating.

Meanwhile, several major corporations have recently announced they are suspending matching contributions to workers’ 401(k) plans due to the economic crisis. The firms include FedEx, Motorola, General Motors, Starbucks and Sears. Congress is now considering overhauling the 401(k) program.

A Return to Professionalism

What Obama's Pentagon hires say about his presidential style.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Jan. 8, 2009, at 6:48 PM ET

---

President-elect Barack Obama named the Pentagon's deputy secretaries and undersecretaries today, and, like many of his other appointments, they signal a return to professionalism. It's not a revolution—except that, after the last eight years, restoration is revolutionary.

The nominee for deputy secretary of defense—whose job is to manage the Pentagon, not create policy—is William J. Lynn III, who, during Bill Clinton's presidency, served as the Defense Department's comptroller and director of its office of program analysis and evaluation.

Paul Krugman: The Obama Gap

“I don’t believe it’s too late to change course, but it will be if we don’t take dramatic action as soon as possible. If nothing is done, this recession could linger for years.”

So declared President-elect Barack Obama on Thursday, explaining why the nation needs an extremely aggressive government response to the economic downturn. He’s right. This is the most dangerous economic crisis since the Great Depression, and it could all too easily turn into a prolonged slump.

But Mr. Obama’s prescription doesn’t live up to his diagnosis. The economic plan he’s offering isn’t as strong as his language about the economic threat. In fact, it falls well short of what’s needed.

Billions could go hungry from global warming by 2100

9:00 08 January 2009 by Catherine Brahic

There is a 90% chance that 3 billion people will have to choose between going hungry and moving their families to milder climes because of climate change within 100 years, says new research.

The study forecasts that temperatures at the close of this century are likely to be above those that crippled food supplies on at least three occasions since 1900.

New jobs numbers portray an economy in near free fall

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The U.S. recession gathered steam in December as employers shed another 524,000 jobs, the unemployment rate leapt half a percentage point to 7.2 percent, the length of the average workweek fell to a record low and job losses were spread widely across almost all sectors of the economy, the government said Friday.

December's unemployment rate was the highest since January 1993, and was up by much more than expected over November's rate of 6.7 percent, according to the Labor Department. The December job losses brought the full-year total to more than 2.6 million.

GKSS scientists refute argument of climate sceptics

The global increase of warmer years is no accident

Scientists at the GKSS Research Centre of Geesthacht and the University of Bern have investigated the frequency of warmer than average years between 1880 and 2006 for the first time. The result: the observed increase of warm years after 1990 is not a statistical accident. The results will now be published in the journal „Geophysical Research Letters“.

Between 1880 and 2006 the average global annual temperature was about 15°C. However, in the years after 1990 the frequency of years when this average value was exceeded increased.

President Bush saved U.S. lives? That's only more Karl Rove-style spin

By Richard Clarke

Thursday, January 8th 2009, 11:09 AM

George Bush, still President, is engaging in a legacy tour of media outlets. This comes despite his earlier having said he did not know how history would judge the Iraq war "because we'll all be dead."

Actually, many people are already dead because of Bush, and that is the point to keep in mind when he talks about his legacy.

Among the themes Bush is striking are that through action at home and fighting "them" over there, not over here, his administration stopped terrorist attacks and prevented another 9/11. There is a surface plausibility to those claims, as there has often been with the messaging served up by the Karl Rove spin machine. But let's look beneath the surface of the assertions.

Bush stopped terrorist attacks? Yes, some of the many alleged plots cited by the White House probably would have matured into attacks had not the U.S. intelligence community acted. Many were more aspirational than operational, and others were the pure inventions of FBI informants. (In the Miami Liberty City case, an FBI informant apparently bribed people who previously had no interest in Al Qaeda. When they swore the oath to Osama Bin Laden, they were then arrested for doing so.)

Deadly Deception: The Tobacco Industry's Secondhand Smoke Cover Up

Submitted by Anne Landman on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 15:46.

Many of the of the tobacco industry's underhanded strategies and tactics have been exposed, thanks to landmark legal cases and the hard work of public health advocates. But we are still uncovering the shocking lengths to which the industry has gone to protect itself from public health measures like smoking bans. Now we can thank the city of Pueblo, Colorado for an opportunity to look a little bit deeper into how the industry managed the deadly deceptions around secondhand smoke.

A new study, now the ninth of its type and the most comprehensive one yet, has shown a major reduction in hospital admissions for heart attacks after a smoke-free law was put into effect.

Senate Allies Fault Obama on Stimulus

By PETER BAKER and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan ran into crossfire from his own party in Congress on Thursday, suggesting that quick passage of spending programs and tax cuts could require more time and negotiation than Democrats once hoped.

Senate Democrats complained that major components of his plan were not bold enough and urged more focus on creating jobs and rebuilding the nation’s energy infrastructure rather than cutting taxes.

Just hours earlier, Mr. Obama called for speedy passage of the stimulus measure, warning that the recession “could linger for years” if Congress did not pass his plan within weeks.

US job losses hit record in 2008

More US workers lost jobs last year than in any year since World War II, with employers axing 2.6 million posts and 524,000 in December alone.

The US jobless rate rose to 7.2% in December, the highest in 16 years.

The official data came as plane-maker Boeing said it would cut 4,500 jobs this year at its commercial airline arm due to the global economic slowdown.

US President-elect Barack Obama said that the economic situation is dire and action is urgently needed.

10 Absurd Conservative Myths About Obama's Recovery Plan

By Sara Robinson, Campaign for America's Future
Posted on January 9, 2009, Printed on January 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/118405/

Here it is: our moment of economic truth. We're standing at that historic fork in the road where the nation decides, now and for the foreseeable future, whether it's going to hang on to the catastrophic assumptions of the free-market fundamentalists and rely once more on the nostrums that have so far failed to fix the mess, or take a bold step down a new, more progressive path that will finally re-empower the American people to build an economy that works for us all.

As usual, the conservatives have absolutely no conscience about what they did to create this mess. If they did, they'd all be holed up in their gated communities or on their private islands, embarrassed into silence at best and terrified of peasant uprisings at worst. Instead, they're jetting into D.C. en masse in a last-ditch attempt to head the country off -- or at least make sure that any money that does get spent ends up, as it always has, in their pockets.

Free Market Myth

Regulation is everywhere. Let’s choose who benefits.

by Dean Baker

The extraordinary financial collapse of recent months has been commonly described as a testament to the failure of deregulation. The events are indeed testament to a failure—a failure of public policy. Blaming deregulation is misleading.

In general, political debates over regulation have been wrongly cast as disputes over the extent of regulation, with conservatives assumed to prefer less regulation, while liberals prefer more. In fact conservatives do not necessarily desire less regulation, nor do liberals necessarily desire more. Conservatives support regulatory structures that cause income to flow upward, while liberals support regulatory structures that promote equality. “Less” regulation does not imply greater inequality, nor is the reverse true.

US companies face $409 bln pension deficit--study

NEW YORK, Jan 7 (Reuters) - Volatile markets have saddled U.S. companies with a $409 billion deficit on pension plans, reversing a $60 billion surplus a year earlier, and will cut into earnings in 2009, consulting firm Mercer said.

Sea level rise of 1 meter within 100 years

New research indicates that the ocean could rise in the next 100 years to a meter higher than the current sea level – which is three times higher than predictions from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC. The groundbreaking new results from an international collaboration between researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, England and Finland are published in the scientific journal Climate Dynamics.

Decline of carbon dioxide-gobbling plankton coincided with ancient global cooling

By Hugh Powell

The evolutionary history of diatoms -- abundant oceanic plankton that remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year -- needs to be rewritten, according to a new Cornell study. The findings suggest that after a sudden rise in species numbers, diatoms abruptly declined about 33 million years ago -- trends that coincided with severe global cooling.

Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption

By Marcia Angell

Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial

by Alison Bass

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 260 pp., $24.95

Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs

by Melody Petersen

Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $26.00

Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness

by Christopher Lane

Yale University Press, 263 pp., $27.50; $18.00 (paper)

Recently Senator Charles Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has been looking into financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and the academic physicians who largely determine the market value of prescription drugs. He hasn't had to look very hard.

Take the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.

Innovations in Mexico Lift Up Country's Poor

by Margaret Krome

I sat with my family under a shady ficus tree last week in Melaque, Mexico. Filled with contentment from a good seafood lunch, we fell into the dangerous activity of drawing broad observations about our single week in the country. Nary a donkey or sombrero was among our impressions of Mexico, however, which were not of sleepy agrarian poverty. Rather, we were impressed with the can-do pragmatism, good-humored community and holiday celebrations, effective public services, and healthy-seeming families we met and saw. We particularly commented on the intelligence and optimism among young women we met.

It was interesting, therefore, the next day to read a New York Times magazine, which featured a long story by Tina Rosenberg on Mexico's social welfare innovations of the last decade. Designed to address underlying causes of poverty, and not just alleviate its symptoms, Mexico's initiatives have attracted international acclaim and imitation, including in New York City.

Why Obama Picked Panetta To Run the CIA

He's clean, he knows where the line items are buried, and the director isn't the chief spook anymore.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2009, at 6:54 PM ET

---

The puzzler of the hour: Why is Barack Obama picking Leon Panetta, a former congressman and White House official with no intelligence experience, to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency?

Nothing definitive can be said here—the Obama transition team is a tight-lipped shop (the leak probably came from elsewhere)—but some inferences can be drawn.

First, Panetta was almost certainly not among the president-elect's initial list of prospects. As was widely reported, John Brennan, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, seemed pegged for the job—he'd been candidate Obama's intelligence adviser for nearly a year—until he was linked a bit too closely to President George W. Bush's enhanced-interrogation program and so "withdrew" from the running.

After long decline, U.S. teen birth rates rise again

By Katherine Tandler | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — U.S. teen birth rates rose sharply in 2006, according to figures released Wednesday by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ending a welcome 14-year decline.

While U.S. teen birth rates remained the highest in the industrialized world, the long decline had amounted to a 45 percent reduction since 1991.

According to the figures for 2006, the latest year for which data are available, birth rates for teens aged 15-19 rose by 3.5 percent. This increase marks the largest growth in teen birth rates since 1989-1990.

Thomas Frank: An Unrepentant New Dealer Runs for Congress

Thanks to the media circus swirling around the governor of Illinois and his schemes to fill President-elect Barack Obama's Senate seat, little attention is being paid to the race to succeed Rahm Emanuel as he moves from the House of Representatives to White House chief of staff.

That's a shame, because voters in Mr. Emanuel's district, largely composed of Chicago's North Side, will have the chance to redeem their state's reputation. They will likely have the chance to elect, out of a crowded race, a true reformer in Thomas Geoghegan.

The Ponzi Scheme Presidency

Bush's Legacy of Destruction

by Tom Engelhardt

It may finally be 2009, but in some ways, given these last years, it might as well be 800 BCE.

From the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, the palace walls of the kings who ruled the Assyrian Empire were decorated with vast stone friezes, filled with enough dead bodies to sate any video-game maker and often depicting -- in almost comic strip-style -- various bloody royal victories and conquests. At least one of them shows Assyrian soldiers lopping off the heads of defeated enemies and piling them into pyramids for an early version of what, in the VCE (Vietnam Common Era) of the 1960s, Americans came to know as the "body count."

So I learned recently by wandering through a traveling exhibit of ancient Assyrian art from the British Museum. On the audio tour accompanying the show, one expert pointed out that Assyrian scribes, part of an impressive imperial bureaucracy, carefully counted those heads and recorded the numbers for the greater glory of the king (as, in earlier centuries, Egyptian scribes had recorded counts of severed hands for victorious Pharaohs).

Daily Kos: A Final Communique From the Neocon Bunker

by billmon

Wed Dec 31, 2008 at 10:36:55 AM PST

Talking Points Memo is linking to a story in The Hill reporting the Obama team’s decision to fire 90 or so Bush political appointees at the Pentagon.

This is good news in and of itself (of the "What do you call a hundred lawyers chained together at the bottom of the sea?" variety), but there's also a wonderfully ironic back story to it that The Hill reporter either didn’t notice or didn’t see fit to print.

Can Partisanship Save Citizenship?

In the 1990s, reformers and academics worried about how to improve civic life. But they didn't foresee that technology combined with party politics would renew civic engagement and even elect one of their own.

Henry Farrell | December 31, 2008

Public intellectuals don't agree on much. However, in recent years they seemed to nearly unanimously believe that American public life was in terrible shape. Political scientists debated whether voter turnout in national elections was merely stagnant or was actively declining. Sociologists suggested that television, overwork, and a breakdown in communal ties were undermining participation in both public and social life. There was chronic hand-wringing about the state of political debate, with civic activists proposing that America needed more deliberative dialogue among people with different points of view.

These worries blossomed in the 1990s and continued to grow in the Bush years but now seem badly off target. Voter turnout in 2004 and 2008 was higher than it has been since the 1960s. The Obama campaign mobilized unprecedented numbers of volunteers. A thriving, if contentious public sphere has emerged on the Internet. Young people who a decade ago were volunteering in direct-service organizations but were otherwise disconnected from public life and electoral politics are now fully engaged and activated, not just as voters but as activists.

A Final Report Card on the Reagan Years?

By Sam Pizzigati

Created 01/05/2009 - 8:59am

Our current economic meltdown may finally have ended the era that began when Ronald Reagan became President. Now a new study — from the Congressional Budget Office — helps us understand the inequality that has us melting.

Two days before Christmas, with hardly anyone at all paying much attention, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office delivered up a final report card on the Reagan era. The highest grades? They went, almost exclusively, to the super rich.

You won't, to be sure, find any As, Bs, and Fs in this new Congressional Budget Office report card [1]. And the CBO's researchers certainly didn't set out to grade America on the years since Ronald Reagan became President a generation ago. But they've done just that. On taxes and income distribution, their new report makes vividly clear, the United States desperately "needs improvement."

Poor Math

Is there a better way to measure poverty? Yes.

By Georgia Levenson Keohane
Posted Wednesday, December 31, 2008 - 4:57pm

Not surprisingly in the midst of a long recession, poverty appears to be on the rise. In 2007, 37.3 million Americans, or one in eight, lived below the poverty line and nearly 18 percent of American children were poor. Since then, conditions have only deteriorated. Demand for food stamps has jumped 17 percent in the last year, food banks report a 30 percent rise in requests for emergency food assistance [1], and most states have seen their Medicaid rolls swell [2]. (The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that each 1 percent gain in the unemployment rate adds approximately 1 million people to the Medicaid and State Children's Health Insurance Program rolls [3].)

And yet most people would have difficulty citing the official definition of poverty or how it is calculated. Just how do we define poverty in the United States? Archaically—and largely around food. The current federal poverty measure was developed in the 1960s by Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration. Orshansky examined data from a 1955 Department of Agriculture study that outlined an "Economy Food Plan"—an assumed diet for economically lean times—and estimated that poor Americans spent approximately one-third of their after-tax money on food. Orshansky then devised a simple metric: families with income at least three times the annual cost of basic groceries cleared the poverty hurdle. The rest—families that fell below this threshold—were classified as poor.

Paul Krugman: Fighting Off Depression

“If we don’t act swiftly and boldly,” declared President-elect Barack Obama in his latest weekly address, “we could see a much deeper economic downturn that could lead to double-digit unemployment.” If you ask me, he was understating the case.

The fact is that recent economic numbers have been terrifying, not just in the United States but around the world. Manufacturing, in particular, is plunging everywhere. Banks aren’t lending; businesses and consumers aren’t spending. Let’s not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression.

So will we “act swiftly and boldly” enough to stop that from happening? We’ll soon find out.

Iraq, oil and the Bush administration

Jack Miles
Sunday, January 4, 2009

"I am saddened," former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan wrote in his memoir, "that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

Greenspan was certainly right that in the Bush administration, oil has been a love that dared not speak its name. One searches long and hard in the president's many Iraq speeches to find a single occurrence of the vulgar word "oil." With a Victorian delicacy, the administration has preferred, when it could not avoid the gross topic altogether, to employ polite circumlocutions such as "mineral resources" or lofty obfuscations such as "patrimony."

Stop picking on Jimmy Carter

He suffers from an egregiously unfair reputation. His record, though, shows he was quite a good president.

By Walter Rodgers
from the January 5, 2009 edition

Oakton, Va. - In this season of new resolutions, Americans would do well to rethink their perceptions of Jimmy Carter. President Carter has suffered the misfortune of having his legacy almost entirely shaped by his political enemies rather than by objective reality or a basic sense of American fairness.

Today, Carter is caricatured as a weak-kneed, sweater-wearing puritan who struggled with lust in his heart, presided over a malaised America, and micromanaged even the scheduling of the White House tennis courts. More recently, he's taken heat for his blunt portrayal of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.

Monetarism enters bankruptcy

By Henry C K Liu

The invasive dominance of monetarism in macroeconomics has been total ever since central bankers, led by Alan Greenspan, who from 1987 to 2006 was chairman of the Board of Governors of US Federal Reserve - the head of the global central banking snake by virtue of dollar hegemony - embraced the counterfactual conclusion of Milton Friedman that monetarist measures by the central bank can perpetuate the boom phase of the business cycle indefinitely, banishing the bust phase from finance capitalism altogether.

Going beyond Friedman, Greenspan asserted that a good central bank could perform a monetary miracle simply by adding liquidity to maintain a booming financial market by easing at the slightest hint of market correction. This ignored the fundamental law of finance that if liquidity is exploited to manipulated excess debt as phantom equity on a global scale, liquidity can act as a flammable agent to turn a simple localized credit crunch into a systemic fire storm.

More Groups Than Thought Monitored in Police Spying

New Documents Reveal Md. Program's Reach

By Lisa Rein and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 4, 2009; A01

The Maryland State Police surveillance of advocacy groups was far more extensive than previously acknowledged, with records showing that troopers monitored -- and labeled as terrorists -- activists devoted to such wide-ranging causes as promoting human rights and establishing bike lanes.

Intelligence officers created a voluminous file on Norfolk-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling the group a "security threat" because of concerns that members would disrupt the circus. Angry consumers fighting a 72 percent electricity rate increase in 2006 were targeted. The DC Anti-War Network, which opposes the Iraq war, was designated a white supremacist group, without explanation.

The End of the Financial World as We Know It

By MICHAEL LEWIS and DAVID EINHORN

AMERICANS enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics. We’ve been viewed by the wider world with mistrust and suspicion on other matters, but on the subject of money even our harshest critics have been inclined to believe that we knew what we were doing. They watched our investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet’s college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street.

This is one reason the collapse of our financial system has inspired not merely a national but a global crisis of confidence. Good God, the world seems to be saying, if they don’t know what they are doing with money, who does?

Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what?

Commercial real estate in for tough 2009

By J.W. ELPHINSTONE – 1 day ago

NEW YORK (AP) — The balance of power between landlords and tenants will shift dramatically in 2009.

For landlords, this promises to be a year of intense competition, more bankrupt tenants, and tightfisted lenders. For renters, it looks like a time of abundant choices and tiny — if any — price increases.

From apartments to shopping malls, office towers to dockyard industrial space, the commercial real estate market will be marked by rising vacancy rates and weak to no rent growth. And the choke hold on credit could push many property owners that need to refinance into foreclosure.

Frank Rich: A President Forgotten but Not Gone

WE like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians like Frank Langella. So here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.

The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush’s presidency found that 79 percent of Americans will not miss him after he leaves the White House. He is being forgotten already, even if he’s not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is. It stretches from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship. The discrepancy between the grandeur of the failure and the stature of the man is a puzzlement. We are still trying to compute it.

Making 'Duck Soup' Out of 2009

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

As 2008 ends and this New Year begins, with all its fledgling promise despite turmoil and crisis, it's also that time when the media offers its lists of ten best or worst this and that of the previous year, an exercise that simultaneously entertains and infuriates.

Forced at knifepoint to make such lists, at least ours would be a little different. One would be favorite headlines of the year from The Onion, the hilarious weekly that doesn't bill itself as "America's finest news source" for nothing. If you can read it without laughing, you probably have been paying too much attention to your 401K.

Canada's forests, once huge help on greenhouse gases, now contribute to climate change

Canada's vast forests, once huge absorbers of greenhouse gases, now add to problem

By Howard Witt | Tribune correspondent
January 2, 2009

VANCOUVER — As relentlessly bad as the news about global warming seems to be, with ice at the poles melting faster than scientists had predicted and world temperatures rising higher than expected, there was at least a reservoir of hope stored here in Canada's vast forests.

The country's 1.2 million square miles of trees have been dubbed the "lungs of the planet" by ecologists because they account for more than 7 percent of Earth's total forest lands. They could always be depended upon to suck in vast quantities of carbon dioxide, naturally cleansing the world of much of the harmful heat-trapping gas.

But not anymore.

Will Obama ‘deimperialize’ the presidency?

He has criticized Bush’s attempts to trump Congress, especially on war issues.

By Gail Russell Chaddock | Staff writer / December 31, 2008 edition
Washington

As a US senator and presidential candidate, Barack Obama routinely criticized the accretion of presidential power during the Bush years.

But in the run-up to assuming the presidency himself, the president-elect has gone silent on whether he would roll back powers claimed during the Bush years – or support congressional efforts to do so.