Right-wing media and the fringe: A growing history of violence (and denial)

This week, the country's attention was captured by the horrific shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, allegedly by James W. von Brunn, an 88-year-old man with ties to white supremacist and anti-Semitic organizations. The fatal shooting came just two months after an April 7 Department of Homeland Security report detailing potential increases in right-wing extremism.

As Media Matters for America documented, the DHS report was immediately and vehemently rejected by numerous conservative commentators, such as Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, and David Asman, who portrayed it as an illegitimate and politically motivated assault on conservatives. (Media Matters Senior Fellow Karl Frisch puts the attacks in even broader perspective here.)

America's socialism for the rich

The US has a huge corporate safety net, allowing the banks to gamble with impunity, but offers little to struggling individuals

Joseph Stiglitz
Friday 12 June 2009 20.00 BST

With all the talk of "green shoots" of economic recovery, America's banks are pushing back on efforts to regulate them. While politicians talk about their commitment to regulatory reform to prevent a recurrence of the crisis, this is one area where the devil really is in the details – and the banks will muster what muscle they have left to ensure that they have ample room to continue as they have in the past.

The old system worked well for the bankers (if not for their shareholders), so why should they embrace change? Indeed, the efforts to rescue them devoted so little thought to the kind of post-crisis financial system we want that we will end up with a banking system that is less competitive, with the large banks that were too big too fail even larger.

Who Can We Bank On, Who Who Can We Trust, as Crisis Sharpens?

Washington Seems Tethered At The Hip To Wall Street and Does It’s Bidding

by Danny Schechter

Can it possibly be true that the Congress can't walk and chew gum at the same time? This question is prompted by the announcement that financial reform is being pushed back as health care becomes the priority.

This makes me nervous for two reasons. First, it portends a long drawn out legislative battle on health care reform with more time for industry lobbyists and the Congresspersons and Senate persons on their payrolls to compromise away or wreck the change we so deeply need.

Second, it confirms that the lobbyists for financial institutions -- the people responsible for the collapse of our economy -- have been scheming and wrangling to gut the reforms that could stop another economic breakdown. Reviving this industry without restructuring and re-regulating it just guarantees another disaster down the line.

Memo to the Right Wing: Put Up or Shut Up

By Sara Robinson

Created 06/12/2009 - 1:26pm

Dear Conservatives:

Your fellow Americans demand an answer -- and we want it now. Just one simple question:

Are you deliberately trying to start a civil war?

Just answer the question. Yes or no. Don't insult us with elisions, evasions, dithering, qualifications, or conditional answers. We need to know what your intentions are -- and we need to know NOW. People are being shot dead in the streets of America at the rate of several per month now. You may not want responsibility for this -- but the whackadoodles pulling the triggers make no bones about who put them up to this.

You did.

Coal Ash Spills Too Dangerous To Reveal To Public, Says DHS

Just how bad has the coal ash situation gotten in the United States? So bad that the Department of Homeland Security has told Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) that her committee can't publicly disclose the location of coal ash dumps across the country.

The pollution is so toxic, so dangerous, that an enemy of the United States -- or a storm or some other disrupting event -- could easily cause them to spill out and lay waste to any area nearby.

Naomi Klein: The Financial Crisis Presents a Huge Opportunity for Change -- We Can't Let Obama Blow It

The above is the text of Naomi Klein's speech to the Momentum Plenary at the America's Future Now conference in Washington. It has been edited for length and clarity.

[The previous speech by activist Gabriela Sanchez] made me think of this idea of whether we should have Obama's back, or whether we should be pushing him further. You know Bob says both, and I think that's a good answer, but I also want to say something else, which is, Rahm Emanuel has Barack Obama's back. He is a great politician, Obama. He's doing fine and has people like Gabriela Sanchez and the people who work with her, who need us to have their back. It's a basic principle. A solidarity.

The president of the most powerful country in the world is doing all right. But there are a lot of people in this country who are not doing all right, and we need to rediscover these basic principles of solidarity in this moment more than any other.

Scrutiny of Bank of America's Merrill purchase intensifies

By Christina Rexrode | The Charlotte Observer

Lawmakers blitzed Bank of America chief executive Ken Lewis on Thursday about why he didn't alert shareholders to the deepening troubles behind his deal to buy Merrill Lynch and about whether he tried to pass blame to regulators.

Critics on the House panel said Lewis was trying to play the victim, blaming the government for making him take on a company with mounting losses that he tried to abandon. But Lewis also had supporters on the panel, who tried to cajole him into laying more of the blame on the government.

Another Look at the Dems’ Tobacco Bill

he Democrats’ bill placing the tobacco industry under the oversight of the Food and Drug Administration is on its way to the White House, having passed the Senate today, and party leaders are patting themselves on the back for their accomplishment. (Some lawmakers, after all, have been pushing this concept for decades.)

But Paul Smalera, writing in Slate this week, has another approach to the legislation that’s worth a look.

Paul Krugman: The Big Hate

Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Goodbye to Cheap Oil

Buckle your seatbelt, you may be going nowhere -- and it could be a very bumpy ride. Oil futures have just passed $71 for a barrel of "light, sweet crude oil" (sweet for energy stocks, anyway) on its way to... well, we don't know exactly where, but it won't feel good, not at the pump and not in the economy either. In the Midwest and scattered other locations, gas prices are already at the edge of $3.00 a gallon and the height of summer isn't even upon us.

Much of this sudden rise has been fueled by OPEC production cuts, investor dreams of a global economic recovery (and so a heightened desire for energy), and the enthusiasm of market speculators. Explain it as you will, the price of crude, which hit a low of about $32 a barrel in December, as the planet seemed to meltdown economically, has doubled in recent months.

What Happened to Single Payer?

As Congress dives head first into what has fast become a thorny debate over health care reform, the key Democrats in the discussion have insisted that all options remain on the table.

All, that is, except one.

Universal, single-payer health care — the idea that the government will cover everyone’s medical bills using taxpayer dollars — was dismissed by leading Democrats long before any details of their reform plans have been finalized. In the Senate Finance Committee, for example, a series of health reform discussions this year included input from academics, retirees, health insurers and other industry representatives, but no single-payer advocates were invited. Last month, the White House’s top health official told lawmakers that President Obama rejects the model altogether.

A Republican to Save Us

By Robert Scheer

You probably don’t know much about Sheila Bair, but she is looking out for you, and that is why the big guys on Wall Street and their allies in the Obama administration are out to get her.

Bair is the Republican whom President Obama reappointed to head the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., but she is protecting the interest of taxpayers as no Democrat has in this administration, and she needs your support. Huge financial decisions are being made by this government, involving trillions in future obligations of U.S. taxpayers, and Bair has been a rare effective voice for the interests of ordinary folk.

Tragedy at the Holocaust Museum: Stand Up To Terrorism

By Sara Robinson

Created 06/10/2009 - 10:14pm

Summary:

You have to go back a long, long way in American history before you come to a place where you find incidents like this happening an average of once every two weeks.This escalating level of violence is adding data points to a potentially emergent pattern that we need to be looking at and preparing for. So far, there are at least five things I'm particularly concerned about.

The storm I've been warning about [1] is coming in faster now. It is time for the right to stand up against the escalating tide of violence fueled by its own rhetoric.

First ever worldwide census analysis of caribou/reindeer numbers reveals dramatic decline

Worldwide decline in caribou/reindeer numbers

Caribou and reindeer numbers worldwide have plunged almost 60% in the last three decades.

The dramatic revelation came out of the first ever comprehensive census analysis of this iconic species carried out by biologists at the University of Alberta.

Break the Banks, for the Good of the People

Bailing out the big US banks has done nothing to improve them

by Joseph E. Stiglitz

With all the talk of "green shoots" of economic recovery, America's banks are resisting efforts to regulate them. While politicians talk about their commitment to regulatory reform to prevent a recurrence of the crisis, this is one area where the devil really is in the details - and the banks will muster what muscle they have left to ensure that they have ample room to continue as they have in the past.

The old system worked well for the banks so why should they embrace change? Indeed, the efforts to rescue them devoted such little thought to the kind of post-crisis financial system we want, that we will end up with a banking system that is less competitive, with the large banks that were "too big to fail" even larger.

Antibiotics, antimicrobials and antifungals in waterways

Detrimental effects of anti-infectives on aquatic microbiota are possible

Montreal, June 9, 2009 – Antibiotics, antimicrobials and antifungals are seeping into the waterways of North America, Europe and East Asia, according to an investigation published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP). Authored by Université de Montréal and Environment Canada researchers, the review found that consumption of anti-infectives for human and agriculture use contributes to their release into the environment and even into drinking water.

"Anti-infectives are constantly discharged, at trace levels, in natural waters near urban centres and agricultural areas," says senior author Sébastien Sauvé, a Université de Montréal professor of environmental analytical chemistry. "Their potential contribution to the spread of anti-infective resistance in bacteria and other effects on aquatic biota is a cause for concern."

Black Tide

Just days before Christmas last year, an environmental disaster one hundred times the size of the Exxon Valdez (yes, you read that right) unfolded on a riverbank in eastern Tennessee. A wave of poisonous sludge buried a town…along with the myth of clean coal

By Sean Flynn

Tom Grizzard shot his first two geese in the fall of 1961, one in the morning and the other in the evening, and both from the tip of a slim peninsula bordered by the Emory River to the east and a spring-fed inlet to the west. The morning kill landed on a small island where Tom and his father would forage for arrowheads left by the Cherokee, and the other, the twilight bird, flopped into a shallow pond of gray sludge across the channel.

When Tom was a boy, back in the ’40s, that pond had been a swimming hole, a clean pool notched into the edge of the Emory. But then, in the ’50s, the Tennessee Valley Authority built the Kingston Fossil Plant on the spot where the Emory empties into the Clinch and just north of the town, Kingston, for which it was named. It was the largest power station in the world: nine boilers that fed steam into nine turbines that spun 1,400 megawatts of electricity out through miles and miles of wire to the nuclear labs down the road at Oak Ridge and farther still, into the hills and hollows of east Tennessee and Kentucky. The boilers were fired with coal, 14,000 tons a day brought in by trains a hundred cars long, and when the coal burned it left piles of ash that had to be disposed of somewhere, which happened to be on top of Tom’s old swimming hole. Bulldozers pushed clay into a low dike surrounding the spot where Tom used to splash and then filled the cavity with fly ash, the finer particles that fluttered up into the flues. The ash was then watered to keep it from blowing all over Roane County, which gave it the consistency and color of hardening cement.

Let's Get It Straight, Hank Paulsen Is a *** Who Took Down the Economy

By Matt Taibbi, True/Slant
Posted on June 9, 2009, Printed on June 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140522/

"Hank Paulson is a national hero. I said it last October and I'm sticking by it. And now, there's actual evidence to back me up. The TARP bailout worked. The Wall Street crisis is over." -- by Evan Newmark from "Mean Street: It's Time to Enshrine Hank Paulson as National Hero" -- Wall Street Journal.

So here's the letter I wrote to the Wall Street Journal after reading Evan Newmark's paean to Hank Paulson last week:

Dear WSJ,

Just out of curiosity -- did Evan Newmark ever work for Goldman, Sachs? And if the answer to the question is yes, don't you think that might have been a good fact to disclose before he fellated Hank Paulson in his "Mean Street" column?

Sincerely,
Matt Taibbi

Can you imagine what a craven, bumlicking ass-goblin you'd have to be to get a job working for the Wall Street Journal, not mention up front that you used to be a Goldman, Sachs managing director, and then write a lengthy article calling your former boss a "national hero" -- in the middle of a sweeping financial crisis, one in which half the world is in a panic and the unemployment rate just hit a 25-year high? Behavior like this, you usually don't see it outside prison trusties who spend their evenings shining the guards' boots. I can't even think of a political press secretary who would sink that low. Hank Paulson, a hero?

PZ Myers on the origins of empathy and morality

Katherine Kersten, Minnesota's little pillock

Posted on: June 8, 2009 5:02 PM, by PZ Myers

Minnesota has more than a few local conservative wingnuts; there are a few very popular blogs emanating from these parts to testify that, and in addition, the major metropolitan newspaper, the Star Tribune, has a shrill blitherer they regularly put front and center who has most of us scratching our heads in wonder that they keep such an incompetent hack on the staff. All the Minnesotan readers here know already who I'm talking about, and I don't even need to mention her name…but for all of you lucky out-of-staters, I'll fill you in: it's Katherine Kersten. "Who?", you all say, and that's definitely the right attitude. But we locals have to deal with the spike in our blood pressure when we read the paper and stumble across her byline.

What brings up this keening harpy of the right today is that she published another of her inane columns this weekend, and her target is atheism. She doesn't like it, nosir.

Drinking Water From Air Humidity

ScienceDaily (June 8, 2009) — Not a plant to be seen, the desert ground is too dry. But the air contains water, and research scientists have found a way of obtaining drinking water from air humidity. The system is based completely on renewable energy and is therefore autonomous.

Paul Krugman: Gordon the Unlucky

What would have happened if hanging chads and the Supreme Court hadn’t denied Al Gore the White House in 2000? Many things would clearly have been different over the next eight years.

But one thing would probably have been the same: There would have been a huge housing bubble and a financial crisis when the bubble burst. And if Democrats had been in power when the bad news arrived, they would have taken the blame, even though things would surely have been as bad or worse under Republican rule.

People Choose News That Fits Their Views

News readers gorge on media messages that fit their pre-existing views, rather than graze on a wider range of perspectives. In other words, they consume what they agree with, researchers say.

The finding comes out of a recent study which tracked how college students spent their time reading media articles on hot-button issues such as abortion or gun ownership.

Unsurprisingly, students gravitated toward articles that supported their views.

The Bond War

Why Paul Krugman and Niall Ferguson are hammering each other about T-Bill interest rates.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Thursday, June 4, 2009, at 4:25 PM ET

It's fair to say that 10-year and 30-year Treasury bonds are not subjects that enthrall the American public the way, say, Kate Gosselin does. In the last six months, however, the state of those bonds has become the subject of feverish argument in the economic elite. The interest rate of the 10-year Treasury bond has spiked from 2.07 percent in December 2008, when the world was falling apart, to a recent high of 3.715 percent on June 1—a 79 percent increase. The 30-year bond has risen from 2.5 percent last December to about 4.5 percent today. Now factions led by economist Paul Krugman and historian Niall Ferguson are feuding bitterly about the import of these charts. In late April, Krugman and Ferguson squared off at a New York Review of Books/PEN panel, and they've continued with an op-ed war in the Financial Times and New York Times (Ferguson here and Krugman here).

Lobbyists and agency rivals fight to shape the new Wall St

The Obama administration is grappling with inter-agency turf wars and an intensive rearguard lobbying effort by Wall Street as it tries to finalise its sweeping reform of financial regulation in the US.

Officers at the Treasury are hoping to announce a new framework of inter-locking agencies, including increased powers for the Federal Reserve to intervene to prevent firms growing so big that they risk the stability of the financial system. But the signs point to a messy compromise that could dilute some of the initial hopes for a comprehensive, get-tough regime.

The Economy Is Still at the Brink

By SANDY B. LEWIS and WILLIAM D. COHAN

Published: June 6, 2009

WHETHER at a fund-raising dinner for wealthy supporters in Beverly Hills, or at an Air Force base in Nevada, or at Charlie Rose’s table in New York City, President Obama is conducting an all-out campaign to try to make us feel a whole lot better about the economy as quickly as possible. “It’s safe to say we have stepped back from the brink, that there is some calm that didn’t exist before,” he told donors at the Beverly Hilton Hotel late last month.

Science reinvents the economy: Predicting the big one

According to classical models of economics, financial crises don't happen. People, firms and other economic "agents" act rationally, in their own self-interest and with profound insight. They would never be duped into investing in a market that was enormously inflated and about to crash. The result is a stable, self-correcting equilibrium. Prices too high? People stop investing. Too low? People start buying again.

Clearly, then, there is a lot wrong with classical economics. "Most economic analysis still takes place within a totally inadequate set of concepts," says Jean-Phillippe Bouchaud, physicist and co-founder of the hedge fund Capital Fund Management in Paris, France. "Theories of finance can learn a lot by connections to the rest of science."

Deadly bat disease spreading fast, scientists warn Congress

By Carrie Wells | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — A mysterious disease that's killing tens of thousands of bats in the Northeast is spreading so fast that it could reach California within five years, biologists and officials of the Agriculture and Interior departments told lawmakers Thursday.

"Never in my wildest imagination would I have dreamed of anything that could pose this serious a threat to America's bats," Merlin Tuttle, a biologist with Bat Conservation International who's studied the creatures for 50 years, told two House of Representatives subcommittees.