Steele’s Fuzzy Math: Obama Administration Created $10 Trillion National Deficit

Earlier today on Fox News, RNC Chairman Michael Steele was asked whether Republicans would borrow from President Clinton’s famous catch-phrase during the 1992 campaign, “it’s the economy stupid,” in the run-up to the 2010 election. Steele proceeded to launch into a rambling answer that used fuzzy math to assert that, in only six months, President Obama has added “10 trillion dollars” to the national deficit, while President Bush is to blame for only “a trillion”:

STEELE: They love going back to George Bush and his deficit that was inherited. Great. I’ll take George Bush’s deficit right now of a trillion dollars over the 10 trillion dollars that this administration has created in just six months.

Beyond the Palin

Why the GOP is falling out of love with gun-toting, churchgoing, working-class whites.

By Rick Perlstein | NEWSWEEK

Published Jul 10, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Jul 20, 2009

The conservative opinion elite is divided—irreconcilably so—about Sarah Palin's decision to quit the Alaska governorship. One faction says good riddance: The Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer had already judged her unfit for national office 24 hours before her announcement, and The New York Times's Ross Douthat now refers to her "brief sojourn on the national stage" in the past tense. On the other side, the Post's William Kristol called Palin's quitting a "high-risk move" designed to catapult her to greater public prominence. Taking the longer view, though, the clash is symptomatic of the deepest strategic debate in Republican circles since the disciples of the Reagan revolution captured Congress in 1994.

Digby: Friday Night News Dump

Not that it matters, since the showboating Senators had to have a dramatic hearing with the CBO chief before the committees were finished and the resultant headlines have been disseminated as if they came down from Mt Sinai, but this was released last night by the From the House Energy, Ways and Means and Education and Labor committees

For Immediate Release:

July 17, 2009

CBO Scores Confirms Deficit Neutrality of Health Reform Bill

Washington, D.C. -- The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released estimates this evening confirming for the first time that H.R. 3200, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act, is deficit neutral over the 10-year budget window – and even produces a $6 billion surplus. CBO estimated more than $550 billion in gross Medicare and Medicaid savings. More importantly, the bill includes a comprehensive array of delivery reforms to set the stage for lowering the future growth in health care costs.

California Dream Transformed into a Nightmare

NPR had a tremendously important program today about a major contributor to why California's budget problems are so dire.

It's not just Proposition 13. And it's not just the dysfunctional state government. One of the biggest problems in California is the overcrowded prisons that eat more than $10 billion each and every year on a totally broken and overwhelmed system.

The biggest culprit? The tough-on-crime laws that imprison more and more people for longer times without any programs that might break the cycle. Other contributors? The powerful Prison Guard union which lobbies for higher pay for increasingly dangerous duty based on the growing prison population who are facing increasing draconian sentences with no reason to believe anything will ever get better.

So Happy Together

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been a harmonious team. So far.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, July 17, 2009, at 6:35 PM ET

Now that Hillary Clinton has delivered her maiden major address, what can we say about the Obama administration's foreign policy and his secretary of state's role in shaping it? Did she say anything distinctive from what President Barack Obama has been saying? Is it true, as many have written, that she's been on the outs with the White House, and did this speech put her back in or carve an enclave for her own influence and ambitions?

Mystery methane belched out by megacities

The Los Angeles metropolitan area belches far more methane into its air than scientists had previously realised. If other megacities are equally profligate, urban methane emissions may represent a surprisingly important source of this potent greenhouse gas.

Atmospheric researchers have long had good estimates of global methane emissions, but less is known about exactly where these emissions come from, particularly in urban areas.

Glenn Greenwald: Celebrating Cronkite While Ignoring What He Did

"The Vietcong did not win by a knockout [in the Tet Offensive], but neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw. . . . We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. . . .

"For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. . . . To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past" -- Walter Cronkite, CBS Evening News, February 27, 1968 [1].

"I think there are a lot of critics who think that [in the run-up to the Iraq War] . . . . if we did not stand up and say this is bogus, and you're a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn't do our job. I respectfully disagree. It's not our role" -- David Gregory, MSNBC, May 28, 2008 [2].

When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam died, media stars everywhere commemorated his death as though he were one of them -- as though they do what he did -- even though he had nothing but bottomless, intense disdain for everything they do. As he put it in a 2005 speech to students at the Columbia School of Journalism [3]: "the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be . . . . By and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are."

In that same speech, Halberstam cited as the "proudest moment" of his career a bitter argument he had in 1963 with U.S. Generals in Vietnam, by which point, as a young reporter, he was already considered an "enemy" of the Kennedy White House for routinely contradicting the White House's claims about the war (the President himself asked his editor to pull Halberstam from reporting on Vietnam).

A Real Win for Single-Payer Advocates

posted by John Nichols on 07/17/2009 @ 12:33pm

Canada did not establish its national health care program with a bold, immediate political move by the federal government.

The initial progress came at the provincial level, led by the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation's Tommy Douglas when he served from 1941 to 1960 premier of Saskatchewan. The universal, publicly-funded "single-payer" health care system that Douglas and his socialist allies developed in Saskatchewan proved to be so successful and so popular that it was eventually adopted by other provinces and, ultimately, by Canada's federal government.

For his efforts, Douglas would be hailed in a national survey as "The Greatest Canadian" of all time. But Douglas' regional initiative also offers a lesson for Americans.

Those of us who know that the only real cure for what ails the U.S. health care system is a universal public plan that provides health care for all Americans while controlling costs recognize the frustrating reality that there are many economic and political barriers to the federal action that would create a single-payer system. This makes clearing the way experimentation at the state level all the more important.

Richard A. Clarke: Targeting Terrorists

Washington is embroiled in a manic swing of opinion about the efficacy of covert action, including targeted assassinations. Richard A. Clarke on the delicate balance between the rule of law and running an effective intelligence agency.

By RICHARD A. CLARKE

Not since 1975 when the Church Commission investigated Nixon-era abuses in intelligence agencies, have such unusual things occurred in the world of Washington intelligence agencies as in these past few weeks. The Democratic House of Representatives threatened to pass an intelligence authorization bill which the Democratic White House has promised to veto. The former Democratic congressman who now heads the Central Intelligence Agency has been having a public disagreement with leading House Democrats about whether the CIA lies to Congress. There is a controversy about a secret CIA program to do something most Americans presumably want the CIA to do, to kill al Qaeda terrorists. The attorney general is rumored to be looking for a special prosecutor to investigate CIA interrogators, even though the president seemed to have earlier told CIA employees that there would be no prosecutions about alleged torture. Former CIA employees are publicly trotting out the claim that all of this attention “hurts the Agency’s morale” and that damage could result in another successful terrorist attack on the U.S. Even seasoned Washington policy wonks are finding it hard to navigate their way through all of those stories and make some sense of what has been going on.

Unless we understand what all of this drama is really about, we will not get the delicate balance right between the needs of a democracy and the rule of law on one side and the requirements of a secret intelligence service on the other. And this democracy needs a functioning secret intelligence service to protect it against the current genres of threat.

Walter Cronkite, Iconic Anchorman, Dies

By Brian Stelter

Walter Cronkite, an iconic CBS News journalist who defined the role of anchorman for a generation of television viewers, died Friday at the age of 92, his family said.

“My father, Walter Cronkite, died,” his son Chip said just before 8 p.m. Eastern. CBS interrupted prime time programming to show an obituary for the man who defined the network’s news division for decades. Read an obituary by Douglas Martin here.

Health Reform: The Fateful Moment

By Theodore R. Marmor, Jonathan Oberlander

Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis

by Senator Tom Daschle, with Scott S. Greenberger and Jeanne M. Lambrew

Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, 226 pp., $23.95

Barack Obama has long emphasized the importance of reforming American medical care, both as a candidate in the 2008 election and as president. During the month of June, however, he dramatically increased his efforts to secure major reform legislation by the end of the year.

The President is using his oratorical skills to rally support for reform. In a series of speeches and town hall meetings, Obama made his case for expanding insurance coverage and controlling medical spending. Speaking before the annual meeting of the American Medical Association in Chicago on June 15, for example, he painted a familiar, distressing portrait of a health care system that costs too much, leaves too many Americans without adequate insurance, and too often provides substandard care.

Report: ‘No geographical limitations’ on CIA assassination program

The Central Intelligence Agency’s secret assassination squad was allowed to operate anywhere in the world, including the United States, according to a Thursday report in The Washington Post.

“The plan to deploy small teams of assassins grew out of the CIA’s early efforts to battle al-Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,” the paper reported. “A secret document known as a ‘presidential finding’ was signed by President George W. Bush that same month, granting the agency broad authority to use deadly force against bin Laden as well as other senior members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.”

The real price of Goldman’s giganto-profits

So what’s wrong with Goldman posting $3.44 billion in second-quarter profits, what’s wrong with the company so far earmarking $11.4 billion in compensation for its employees? What’s wrong is that this is not free-market earnings but an almost pure state subsidy.

Last year, when Hank Paulson told us all that the planet would explode if we didn’t fork over a gazillion dollars to Wall Street immediately, the entire rationale not only for TARP but for the whole galaxy of lesser-known state crutches and safety nets quietly ushered in later on was that Wall Street, once rescued, would pump money back into the economy, create jobs, and initiate a widespread recovery. This, we were told, was the reason we needed to pilfer massive amounts of middle-class tax revenue and hand it over to the same guys who had just blown up the financial world. We’d save their asses, they’d save ours. That was the deal.

Paul Krugman: The Joy of Sachs

The American economy remains in dire straits, with one worker in six unemployed or underemployed. Yet Goldman Sachs just reported record quarterly profits — and it’s preparing to hand out huge bonuses, comparable to what it was paying before the crisis. What does this contrast tell us?

First, it tells us that Goldman is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America.

Second, it shows that Wall Street’s bad habits — above all, the system of compensation that helped cause the financial crisis — have not gone away.

What would Pat Buchanan have to say to get himself fired from MSNBC?

June 08, 2009 11:31 am ET

In the weeks since President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, one question has consumed the news media, particularly conservatives in the media: Imagine what would happen if a white man had said the reverse of Sotomayor's famous (and famously distorted) "wise Latina" comment. Media commentators have insisted that such a white man would be denounced as a racist and run out of town on a rail.

That's nonsense. First of all, Sotomayor's actual comments were far more innocuous than the media's portrayal of them would suggest; she was merely noting the importance of judicial diversity in cases involving discrimination, a sentiment that is consistent with statements by numerous prominent conservatives. Second, as Reason magazine's Julian Sanchez has noted, "[I]t would be weird for a white man to say it because it's probably not true that the experience of growing up as a white male in the United States specifically enhances one's understanding of what it means to be a disfavored minority."

Report: Bush admin 'blacklisted liberal groups'

In a blow to the notion of meritocratic government, applicants to the Justice Department's internships and Honors Program were widely rejected if their resumes included the names of liberal groups on a departmental blacklist, the Washington Blade reports.

New geothermal heat extraction process to deliver clean power generation

PNNL's advanced heat recovery method makes most of low-temp 'hot rock' resources

RICHLAND, Wash. – A new method for capturing significantly more heat from low-temperature geothermal resources holds promise for generating virtually pollution-free electrical energy. Scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will determine if their innovative approach can safely and economically extract and convert heat from vast untapped geothermal resources.

Mathematical Model Shows Why Defeating Insurgent Groups Like Taliban is So Difficult

Study in INFORMS journal Operations Research

HANOVER, MD, July 16, 2009 – Insurgent groups like the Taliban can only be effectively engaged with timely and accurate military intelligence, and even good intelligence may only succeed in containing the insurgency, not defeating it, according to a new study in the current issue of Operations Research, a flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®).

“Why Defeating Insurgencies is Hard: The Effect of Intelligence in Counterinsurgency Operations – A Best-Case Scenario” is by Moshe Kress and Roberto Szechtman of the Naval Postgraduate School. The study appears in the current issue of Operations Research.

The study is the first of its kind to combine military intelligence, attrition and civilian population behavior in a unified model of counterinsurgency dynamics.

Digby: Not Your Grandfather's Bigotry

Liberals who follow politics closely are no doubt disoriented to see someone as accomplished as Sonia Sotomayor attacked for being a bullying racist by a bunch of racist bullies, but I think we should probably get a grip and understand that this is what racism looks like in 2009. The assertion of white male privilege through whining victimization is one of the main ways it will be manifested going forward. And it's quite effective --- it appeals to people's own hidden prejudices in a way that doesn't socially embarrass them and allows them to use fairness as a weapon, which is a great relief to bigots who have been on the defensive for decades.

Our Economy Needs at Least $2 Trillion in Stimulus Spending Right Now

By Dean Baker, The Guardian
Posted on July 16, 2009, Printed on July 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141344/

When her husband was in the oval office Laura Bush launched an initiative to promote literacy across the country. Unfortunately, there was no comparable effort to promote numeracy in our nation's capital. This has been evident in the discussion of the stimulus among politicians and commentators in the week since the June job numbers were released.

Republicans were anxious to pronounce the stimulus a failure, while Democrats insisted that the package just needed more time, pointing out that most of the money had not yet been spent. Neither assertion can withstand the test of third grade arithmetic.

Thomas Frank: Poor, Persecuted Sarah Palin

The GOP embraces the culture of victimhood.

When Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin announced her resignation two weeks ago it was after a series of strange, petty bouts with her detractors. Many "frivolous ethics violations" had been alleged against her, she noted. David Letterman had told an ugly joke about her daughter. A blogger had posted something that was probably not true. Someone had photoshopped a radio talker's face onto a picture of her baby -- a "malicious desecration" of the image, in the words of Ms. Palin's spokeswoman.

Team Palin got duly indignant at each of these. They took special, detailed offense. They issued statements magnifying their wounds. And, finally, the governor resigned her office, a good woman cruelly wronged.

Market-style incentives to increase school choice have opposite effect

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – A market-based approach to increasing school choice actually leads to fewer educational opportunities, particularly for disadvantaged students in urban areas, according to a University of Illinois expert in education.

As schools compete for students to improve their market position, the demands of the market often trump specific educational policy goals such as increased equality and access to better-performing schools, according to Christopher Lubienski, a professor of educational organization and leadership at the U. of I. College of Education and primary author of the study published in the August issue of the American Journal of Education. The study examined school options in three major metropolitan areas.

The 10 Dumbest Things Republicans Have Said About the Sotomayor Hearings

By AlterNet Staff, AlterNet
Posted on July 15, 2009, Printed on July 15, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141321/

At her Senate confirmation hearing yesterday, judicial nominee Sonia Sotomayor had to keep a straight face while Republicans heaped shame upon their party with a flood of ridiculous questions, unjustified jabs and pointless rants.

From sexist attacks about Sotomayor's "temperament" to a rigorous interrogation about the definition of nunchucks, GOPers came up with a multitude of embarrassing ways to try to hinder the Supreme Court nominee's confirmation.

AIG and Goldman Get Bailouts and Second Chances, But If You're Poor You're on Your Own

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on July 14, 2009, Printed on July 15, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141275/

Tearyan Brown became a father when he was 16. He did what a lot of inner-city kids desperate to make money do. He sold drugs. He was arrested and sent to jail three years later for dealing marijuana and PCP on the streets of Trenton, N.J., mostly to white kids driving in from the suburbs. It was a job which saw him robbed at gunpoint and stabbed in the chest. But it made him about $1,400 a week.

Brown, when he got out after three and a half years, was done with street life. He got a job as a security guard and then as a fork lift operator. He eventually made about $30,000 a year. He shepherded his son through high school, then college and a master’s degree. His boy, now 24, is a high school teacher in Texas. Brown would not leave the streets of Trenton but his son would. It made him proud. It gave him hope.

Spitzer Says Banks Made ‘Bloody Fortune’ on U.S. Aid

By Laura Marcinek, Michael McKee and Deirdre Bolton

July 14 (Bloomberg) -- Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor and attorney general, said U.S. banks made a “bloody fortune” while receiving taxpayer money without a proven benefit to the wider economy.

Politicians understand the “populist rage” with excesses in the financial industry and in this case the “public is right,” Spitzer said in a Bloomberg Television interview today. “We have saved financial services, we have not created a single job. We are still bleeding jobs.”

State of Fear

State governments are in even more trouble than they seem to be. Here's how to save them.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Monday, July 13, 2009, at 2:56 PM ET

---

For those who were worried that Wall Street had perhaps lost its creative juices after its recent spasm of busts and bailouts, fear no more. At the beginning of the month, California ran out of cash and began issuing funny-money IOUs to its creditors. As soon as that happened, the smart guys on Wall Street created a whole new market trading the IOUs. No doubt the IOUs will soon be bundled into more exotic financial instruments, which will be cut up into tranches, graded lazily by the ratings industry, and sold off to unsuspecting investors in Abu Dhabi and Helsinki.

What a perfect metaphor for our economic circumstances! California is literally drowning in red ink and political gridlock, with deficit figures that are staggering and portend worse news for the future at the same time that a bailed-out Wall Street is profiting from a new, and essentially useless, trading vehicle.

But the worse news is that what we are seeing in California is what other states—perhaps most of them—will go through soon. States are being squeezed in two directions. Rapidly declining tax revenues are creating short-term cash flow crises. Meanwhile, their long-term pension obligations are rising rapidly, even as the pension funds that were supposed to cover them have been devastated by the Wall Street decline, creating enormous long-term unfunded liabilities. These two forces are creating both short-term and long-term pain for states.

CIA Vet: Agency Doesn't Need Secret Program To Target al Qaeda

By Zachary Roth - July 13, 2009, 3:57PM

Earlier today, we raised a few questions about the notion that the secret CIA program that Dick Cheney reportedly withheld from Congress concerned an effort to kill or capture al Qaeda leaders. And now a top counter-terror expert is doing the same.

Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, told TPMmuckraker that because we've been in a state of war against al Qaeda since just after September 11, there would have been no need for a secret CIA program that received special legal authorization.

The Planet's Future: Climate Change 'Will Cause Civilisation to Collapse'

Authoritative new study sets out a grim vision of shortages and violence – but amid all the gloom, there is some hope too

by Jonathan Owen

An effort on the scale of the Apollo mission that sent men to the Moon is needed if humanity is to have a fighting chance of surviving the ravages of climate change. The stakes are high, as, without sustainable growth, "billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilisation will collapse".

This is the stark warning from the biggest single report to look at the future of the planet - obtained by The Independent on Sunday ahead of its official publication next month. Backed by a diverse range of leading organisations such as Unesco, the World Bank, the US army and the Rockefeller Foundation, the 2009 State of the Future report runs to 6,700 pages and draws on contributions from 2,700 experts around the globe. Its findings are described by Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UN, as providing "invaluable insights into the future for the United Nations, its member states, and civil society".

The Politics of Pecora

posted by Christopher Hayes on 07/13/2009 @ 11:35am

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Buzz up!
  • Buzzflash
  • del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Mixx it!
  • Reddit

  What is this?

• Take Action
• Comments (14)
• 
  
• Subscribe Now

Text Size

• A
• A
• A

If there's one thing that everyone seems to agree on, it's that the current financial crisis is complicated. There's two problems with this. First, it's not, fundamentally, true. The causes for the crisis are fairly simple when you strip away the artifice and lingo. (Most notably an $8 trillion housing bubble that the financial over-class insisted wasn't a bubble.) But more importantly, the perceived complexity of the issues are being cynically manipulated by those responsible to stem the tide of popular anger and insulate themselves from the wholesale reforms that are necessary.

In a piece on the bailout, Matt Taibbi referred to this posture of condescension as the "eye-roll." As soon as you ask a question -- why did you think housing prices would go up forever -- you are treated to the eye-roll which is the posture of those in power to the supposed ignorance and idiocy of those attempting to figure out just how they broke the world.

Paul Krugman: Boiling the Frog

Is America on its way to becoming a boiled frog?

I’m referring, of course, to the proverbial frog that, placed in a pot of cold water that is gradually heated, never realizes the danger it’s in and is boiled alive. Real frogs will, in fact, jump out of the pot — but never mind. The hypothetical boiled frog is a useful metaphor for a very real problem: the difficulty of responding to disasters that creep up on you a bit at a time.

And creeping disasters are what we mostly face these days.

Cassavas get cyanide hike from carbon emissions

ONE of Africa's most important food crops is likely to become increasingly toxic as a result of carbon emissions.

Cassava is a staple for more than half a billion of the world's poorest people. It is promoted by UN agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization as a saviour for Africa because it grows well in droughts. But now research shows that increasing carbon dioxide in the air boosts cyanide levels in its leaves.

The Disease of Permanent War

Posted on May 18, 2009

By Chris Hedges

The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become impotent. The collapse of liberalism, whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Weimar Germany, ushers in an age of moral nihilism. This moral nihilism comes is many colors and hues. It rants and thunders in a variety of slogans, languages and ideologies. It can manifest itself in fascist salutes, communist show trials or Christian crusades. It is, at its core, all the same. It is the crude, terrifying tirade of mediocrities who find their identities and power in the perpetuation of permanent war.

It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, which killed the liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, ones that held great promise in the early part of the 20th century in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. It is a state of permanent war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the United States. The moral and intellectual trolls—the Dick Cheneys, the Avigdor Liebermans, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads—personify the moral nihilism of perpetual war. They manipulate fear and paranoia. They abolish civil liberties in the name of national security. They crush legitimate dissent. They bilk state treasuries. They stoke racism.

Snooping through the power socket

Power sockets can be used to eavesdrop on what people type on a computer.

Security researchers found that poor shielding on some keyboard cables means useful data can be leaked about each character typed.

By analysing the information leaking onto power circuits, the researchers could see what a target was typing.

The attack has been demonstrated to work at a distance of up to 15m, but refinement may mean it could work over much longer distances.

'The Select Few' Are Cashing in: Shocking Corruption at the Washington Post

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, AlterNet
Posted on July 12, 2009, Printed on July 13, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141258/

If you want to know what really matters in Washington, don't go to Capitol Hill for one of those hearings, or pay attention to those staged White House "town meetings." They're just for show. What really happens -- the serious business of Washington -- happens in the shadows, out of sight, off the record. Only occasionally -- and usually only because someone high up stumbles -- do we get a glimpse of just how pervasive the corruption has become.

Case in point: Katharine Weymouth, the publisher of The Washington Post -- one of the most powerful people in DC -- invited top officials from the White House, the Cabinet and Congress to her home for an intimate, off-the-record dinner to discuss health care reform with some of her reporters and editors covering the story.

Rebuilding Something Better

By Barack Obama
Sunday, July 12, 2009

Nearly six months ago, my administration took office amid the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. At the time, we were losing, on average, 700,000 jobs a month. And many feared that our financial system was on the verge of collapse.

The swift and aggressive action we took in those first few months has helped pull our financial system and our economy back from the brink. We took steps to restart lending to families and businesses, stabilize our major financial institutions, and help homeowners stay in their homes and pay their mortgages. We also passed the most sweeping economic recovery plan in our nation's history.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was not expected to restore the economy to full health on its own but to provide the boost necessary to stop the free fall. So far, it has done that. It was, from the start, a two-year program, and it will steadily save and create jobs as it ramps up over this summer and fall. We must let it work the way it's supposed to, with the understanding that in any recession, unemployment tends to recover more slowly than other measures of economic activity.

Fire Proof

The New Haven firefighter is no stranger to employment disputes.

By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Friday, July 10, 2009, at 6:50 PM ET

---

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have announced that Frank Ricci, the firefighter who recently prevailed in his "reverse discrimination" lawsuit against the city of New Haven, Conn., will testify at Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings. Ricci has become a sort of folk hero for white men everywhere, having dared to stand up against the evils of affirmative action and race-based employment preferences. Next week, he will be called on to make the point, as David Paul Kuhn put it, that Sotomayor, for all her talk of empathy and the real-world impact of judicial decisions, "demonstrated no empathy for the 'real-world consequences' of affirmative action on Ricci."

Ricci is invariably painted as a reluctant standard-bearer; a hardworking man driven to litigation only when his dreams of promotion were shattered by a system that persecutes white men. This is the narrative we will hear next week, but it somewhat oversimplifies Ricci's actual employment story. For instance, it's not precisely true, as this one account would have it, that Frank Ricci "never once [sought] special treatment for his dyslexia challenge." In point of fact, Ricci sued over it.

Digby: Immunization Program

Needless to say, Greenwald has the definitive overview of the DOJ IG report and Emptywheel has begun the examination of the deep weeds. Ackerman is breaking it all down into choice tasty bits for easy consumption. No need to reiterate any of that here. Just click those links for the full catastrophe.

I would just like to highlight one paragraph of Glenn's post simply because, to me, it is at the very heart of the issue:

These were not legal opinions in any sense of the word. What happened, instead, is clear: Cheney and Addington knew that Yoo was a hardened ideologue who would authorize anything they wanted. So they purposely chose only him -- a low-level Assistant Attorney General -- to be "read into" the program, and then used his memos to give themselves legal cover. The same thing happened in the realm of torture. This is what reveals how corrupt is the claim that Bush officials cannot be held accountable for the laws they broke because they had DOJ lawyers telling them it was legal. These legal opinions were anything but exercises in good faith. They were nothing more than bureaucratic cover to commit crimes, and -- as the IG Report makes clear -- ones that were as factually inaccurate as they were legally flawed (yet John Yoo remains on the faculty of Berkeley Law).

Three Polar Politics In Post-Petroleum America

Thu, 07/09/2009 - 9:26pm — Stirling Newberry

It would be easy to hope that this downturn represents the final capitulation of the Bush years, and that once we work away the excess, that there will be a new age after it. However, this is not what the numbers indicate. While selling self-spin and hope may be the province of those who hope to curry favor with the powers that be, or with masses of people desperate to believe that this is as bad as it will get, hard slabs of reality are my stock and trade.

Let me introduce you to post-petroleum thesis.

Breaking: FBI Arrest Opens Goldman-Sachs' Pandora's Box

by bobswern
Mon Jul 06, 2009 at 02:51:26 AM PDT

Up until about two weeks ago, Matt Taibbi's favorite Goldman Sachs' market observers, the folks over at the Zero Hedge blog, had been continually commenting over the past six-plus months about how Goldman had all but cornered the market on program trading within the NY Stock Exchange. (Program trading is the automated stock trading via computers by firms specially authorized by the NYSE to facilitate same.) Clearly, according to Zero Hedge publisher Tyler Durden, something was up.

A couple of months ago, we also learned through Zero Hedge that Goldman had profited greatly from a sweetheart deal with the federal government concerning a new program instituted by the Feds known as "The Supplemental Liquidity Provider" Program ("SLP"), launched this past Thanksgiving, which was supposed to provide "market liquidity" (i.e.: an ongoing, active market) for selected groups of 500 different NYSE stocks per SLP participant. As Durden pointed out to all who were interested, it certainly appeared to him that Goldman was the only active participant in the program.

Breaking: FBI Arrest Opens Goldman-Sachs' Pandora's Box

by bobswern
Mon Jul 06, 2009 at 02:51:26 AM PDT

Up until about two weeks ago, Matt Taibbi's favorite Goldman Sachs' market observers, the folks over at the Zero Hedge blog, had been continually commenting over the past six-plus months about how Goldman had all but cornered the market on program trading within the NY Stock Exchange. (Program trading is the automated stock trading via computers by firms specially authorized by the NYSE to facilitate same.) Clearly, according to Zero Hedge publisher Tyler Durden, something was up.

A couple of months ago, we also learned through Zero Hedge that Goldman had profited greatly from a sweetheart deal with the federal government concerning a new program instituted by the Feds known as "The Supplemental Liquidity Provider" Program ("SLP"), launched this past Thanksgiving, which was supposed to provide "market liquidity" (i.e.: an ongoing, active market) for selected groups of 500 different NYSE stocks per SLP participant. As Durden pointed out to all who were interested, it certainly appeared to him that Goldman was the only active participant in the program.

Lunch with the FT: Larry Summers

By Chrystia Freeland

Published: July 10 2009 22:05 | Last updated: July 11 2009 02:42

Larry Summers, director of the US president’s National Economic Council, usually eats at his White House desk or sitting around a nearby table with other members of the economic team. But today, for Lunch with the FT, Summers’ aides have persuaded him to walk down the stairs to the Ward Room, a windowless alcove near the White House mess. The dark-wood panelling and nautically themed paintings are meant to evoke a naval officer’s dining room but these grace notes are muted by the plastic cutlery, paper plates and drinks sipped straight from their plastic bottles.

New Evidence Surfaces in Post-Katrina Crimes

Television news reports are casting new light on the violence that flourished in New Orleans in the anarchic days after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The reports -- broadcast Thursday by WTAE TV in Pittsburgh [1] and WDSU in New Orleans [2] -- focus on two unsolved crimes: the near-fatal shooting of Donnell Herrington, who was allegedly attacked by a group of white vigilantes in the Algiers Point neighborhood, and the murder of Henry Glover, whose charred remains were discovered on a Mississippi River levee. Both victims are African American.

The Human Equation

Vice President Joe Biden told us this week that the Obama administration “misread how bad the economy was” in the immediate aftermath of the inauguration.

Puh-leeze. Mr. Biden and President Obama won the election because the economy was cratering so badly there were fears we might be entering another depression. No one understood that better than the two of them. Mr. Obama tried to clean up the vice president’s remarks by saying his team hadn’t misread what was happening, but rather “we had incomplete information.”

That doesn’t hold water, either. The president has got the second coming of the best and the brightest working for him down there in Washington (think of Larry Summers as the latter-day Robert McNamara), and they’re crunching numbers every which way they can. They’ve got more than enough data. They understand the theories and the formulas as well as anyone. But they’re not coming up with the right answers because they’re missing the same thing that McNamara and his fellow technocrats were missing back in the 1960s: the human equation.

Former CIGNA executive says Michael Moore was right all along

by citisven
Sat Jul 11, 2009 at 12:18:24 AM PDT

Ok, so haven't seen anyone write about this, and while we right here all know that the insurance companies literally go over dead bodies in their profiteering ways, in an interview with Bill Moyers that aired tonight on PBS, Wendell Potter, former Head of Corporate Communications at CIGNA, admits that Michael Moore nailed it on the head in his movie, Sicko. It's a 30 minute interview that comes close to a confessional of the health insurance industry's enslavement to Wall Street, and I really really hope everybody in this country gets to see this. It's the only thing you'll ever need to show if anyone ever questions the public option or rambles on about the dangers of government bureaucrats. IT'S THE ONLY TV YOU'LL EVER NEED TO WATCH TO KNOW THAT WE'VE BEEN COLLECTIVELY GETTING JACKED.

Frank Rich: She Broke the G.O.P. and Now She Owns It

SARAH PALIN and Al Sharpton don’t ordinarily have much in common, but they achieved a rare harmonic convergence at Michael Jackson’s memorial service. When Sharpton told the singer’s children it was their daddy’s adversaries, not their daddy, who were “strange,” he was channeling the pugnacious argument the Alaska governor had made the week before. There was nothing strange about her decision to quit in midterm, Palin told America. What’s strange — or “insane,” in her lingo — are the critics who dare question her erratic behavior on the national stage.

Sharpton’s bashing of Jackson’s naysayers received the biggest ovation of the entire show. Palin’s combative resignation soliloquy, though much mocked by prognosticators of all political persuasions, has an equally vociferous and more powerful constituency. In the aftermath of her decision to drop out and cash in, Palin’s standing in the G.O.P. actually rose in the USA Today/Gallup poll. No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base” of the Republican Party that liberals and conservatives alike tend to ghettoize as a rump backwater minority. It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it in the Barack Obama era.