The Distance Between the Parties

The conventional wisdom among many political observers is that Democrats and Republicans should be able to work together to find compromise solutions to pressing problems. Politicians should "put aside their differences." Legislation should be "bipartisan." Effective leaders should be able to "bring people together." It's worth noting, from time to time, the practical and ideological problems with this approach to problem solving. The parties disagree -- as they should; it's why they exist -- and are more polarized now than at any point in modern political history.

Stealth Nationalization

How government programs are saving insurance companies from disaster.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Friday, July 31, 2009, at 3:20 PM ET

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"The truth is, we have a system today that works well for the insurance industry, but it doesn't always work well for you," President Barack Obama said recently, making his case for health care reform. But it turns out the current arrangement, through which employers are supposed to buy coverage from large insurance firms and enlist their employees to cover the costs, isn't working so well for the insurance industry, either. In fact, the system by which insurance coverage is tied to payroll jobs is a huge problem—especially in a period when Americans are less likely to have payroll jobs than they have been in the recent past and when employers are less likely to cover the costs of that insurance. A look at the earnings reports and stock prices of big insurance companies reveals that tying insurance to employment probably isn't a good idea, after all—unless the employer happens to be the government.

Since December 2007, the U.S. economy has lost 6.5 million payroll jobs, or about 4.7 percent of the total. The economy is likely to lose at least 1 million more by the end of this year. When people lose jobs, they frequently lose their insurance. (COBRA allows former employees to continue purchasing insurance for a period of time, but the costs are frequently prohibitive.) So large insurers have been losing millions of members. A chart in a recent Wall Street Journal article shows that seven large insurers have collectively lost 4.34 million members in their "commercial risk" plans since December 2007. ("Commercial risk" or "risk-based membership" generally refers to people whom insurance companies insure directly.)

Family planning a major environmental impact

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Some people who are serious about wanting to reduce their "carbon footprint" on the Earth have one choice available to them that may yield a large long-term benefit – have one less child.

A study by statisticians at Oregon State University concluded that in the United States, the carbon legacy and greenhouse gas impact of an extra child is almost 20 times more important than some of the other environmentally sensitive practices people might employ their entire lives – things like driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs.

How You Finance Goldman Sachs’ Profits

An insider’s view of Wall Street’s rebound.

By Nomi Prins
Tue July 28, 2009 12:28 PM PST

This is perhaps the most important thing I learned over my years working on Wall Street, including as a managing director at Goldman Sachs: Numbers lie. In a normal time, the fact that the numbers generated by the nation's biggest banks can't be trusted might not matter very much to the rest of us. But since the record bank profits we're now hearing about are essentially created by massive federal funding, perhaps it behooves us to dig beneath their data. On July 27, 10 congressmen, led by Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), did just that, writing a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke questioning the Fed's role in Goldman's rapid return to the top of Wall Street.

Why Is a Slate Writer Shilling for Goldman Sachs? Taibbi Shreds the Latest Wall Street PR

By Matt Taibbi, True/Slant
Posted on July 31, 2009, Printed on August 1, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141706/

So you can see why Goldman alums sometimes don’t do very impressively once they leave Goldman. They find themselves in positions where no one questions their premises and it’s hard to get good feedback and pushback. (This is why Paulson employed telephone banks of analysts to call Wall Street to solicit opinions.) Outside of the Goldman womb of debate and ideas, bankers and traders lack perspective. You might say that no Goldman is an island. -- Will Everyone Please Shut Up About Goldman Sachs? | The Big Money, Slate.

And the winner of this month’s Most Retarded Horseshit Written In Defense of Goldman Sachs award goes to… Heidi Moore at Big Money! Come on down, Heidi!

This stuff is just getting funnier and funnier. Now that both Michael Lewis and Joe Hagan at New York have piled on and hammered the “magical” Wall Street bank’s reputation, the tearful, wounded apologies on the bank’s behalf are trickling in with some more urgency, especially now that, as Moore puts it, the bank faces the specter of “disastrously populist” hearings in the Senate for (and Moore left out this part) selling crap mortgages while shorting them at the same time.

Farmer saves $200,000 with poo power

By Ayesha Tejpar
CNN

ROCKWOOD, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- Four generations of Saylors have worked the family's dairy farm for nearly a century, but for the past three years, the cows have been doing something besides providing milk: They've been helping power the place.

Growing up on the sprawling spread 90 minutes from Pittsburgh, 36-year-old farmer Shawn Saylor developed into a self-described science buff.

Paul Krugman: Health Care Realities

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Representative Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.”

It’s a funny story — but it illustrates the extent to which health reform must climb a wall of misinformation. It’s not just that many Americans don’t understand what President Obama is proposing; many people don’t understand the way American health care works right now. They don’t understand, in particular, that getting the government involved in health care wouldn’t be a radical step: the government is already deeply involved, even in private insurance.

And that government involvement is the only reason our system works at all.

Fox, WSJ personalities shocked by arts grants, but Bush funded same groups

Several media figures on Fox News and Fox Business -- including Glenn Beck -- have blasted the National Endowment for the Arts for awarding Recovery Act grants to San Francisco arts organizations, claiming the grants will pay for "porn." However, those personalities ignored significant facts: Direct grants were only made to organizations that were screened to receive funding in the past, and every group they criticized previously received tens of thousands of dollars from the Bush administration.

Here's the truth: 'Birther' claims are just plain nuts

By Steven Thomma | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The false allegation that President Barack Obama was born in another country is more than a fact-free hit job.

Marked by accusations and backstabbing, it's the story of how a small but intense movement called "birthers" rose from a handful of people prone to seeing conspiracies, aided by the Internet, magnified without evidence by eager radio and cable TV hosts, and eventually ratified by a small group of Republican politicians working to keep the story alive on the floors of Congress and the campaign trails of the Midwest.

Global curbs on overfishing are beginning to work

Scientists have joined forces in a groundbreaking assessment of the status of marine fisheries and ecosystems.

31 July 2009

Australian Beth Fulton, a fishery ecosystem scientist from the CSIRO Wealth from Oceans Flagship, was among an international team of 19 co-authors of a report on a two-year study, led by US scientists Dr Boris Worm of Dalhousie University and Dr Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington.

The study shows that steps taken to curb overfishing are beginning to succeed in five of the 10 large marine ecosystems they examined. The paper, which appears in the 31 July issue of the journal Science, provides new hope for rebuilding troubled fisheries.

Book Excerpt: ‘Empire of Illusion’

Read this brilliant and humorous chapter from Chris Hedges’ new book and marvel as the Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent makes sense of reality television.

Adapted from “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,” available from Nation Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2009.

Celebrity worship banishes reality. And this adulation is pervasive. It is dressed up in the language of the Christian Right, which builds around its leaders, people like Pat Robertson or Joel Olsteen, the aura of stardom, fame and celebrity power. These Christian celebrities travel in private jets and limousines. They are surrounded by retinues of bodyguards, have television programs where they cultivate the same false intimacy with the audience, and, like all successful celebrities, amass personal fortunes. The frenzy around political messiahs, or the devotion of millions of women to Oprah Winfrey, is all part of the yearning to see ourselves in those we worship. We seek to be like them. We seek to make them like us. If Jesus and The Purpose Driven Life won’t make us a celebrity, then Tony Robbins or positive psychologists or reality television will. We are waiting for our cue to walk onstage and be admired and envied, to become known and celebrated.

“What does the contemporary self want?” asked critic William Deresiewicz:

The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge —broadband tipping the Web from text to image; social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider—the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves—by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self in Romanticism was sincerity, and in modernism was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.

Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire and 10 Ways to Do It

By Chalmers Johnson, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on July 31, 2009, Printed on July 31, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141689/

However ambitious President Barack Obama's domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.

Recovery act-funded research projects aid communities across the country

Money at work funding jobs, construction, education and research

In the five months since passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), thousands of research-related awards have been made, supporting important scientific efforts across the country. ARRA delivered the largest increase in basic research funding in American history - $21.5 billion. The bulk of the money is for scientific research and education projects, while $3.5 billion is allocated for research facilities and capital equipment. Universities are helping researchers apply for ARRA funding and the federal science agencies tasked with distributing that money are reviewing tens of thousands of grant applications – all in a compressed timeframe and under new reporting requirements. As a result, in every state and the District of Columbia, ARRA-funded research grants are creating jobs, allowing the purchase of equipment, and supporting science-related construction projects.

Exclusive: Earmark critic steered cash to blimp research

John Bresnahan
Thu Jul 30, 5:19 am ET

Rep. Pete Sessions — the chief of the Republicans’ campaign arm in the House — says on his website that earmarks have become “a symbol of a broken Washington to the American people.”

Yet in 2008, Sessions himself steered a $1.6 million earmark for dirigible research to an Illinois company whose president acknowledges having no experience in government contracting, let alone in building blimps.

What the company did have: the help of Adrian Plesha, a former Sessions aide with a criminal record who has made more than $446,000 lobbying on its behalf.

The Health Care Bill Dies?

The AP reports that “after weeks of secretive talks, a bipartisan group in the Senate edged closer Monday to a health care compromise that omits two key Democratic priorities but incorporates provisions to slow the explosive rise in medical costs.” The deal was likely to “exclude a requirement many congressional Democrats seek for large businesses to offer coverage to their workers” and a “provision for a government insurance option.” The Wall Street Journal says that “individuals familiar with the negotiations suggested” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus “would like to unveil a deal later this week. But unclear Monday was whether” ranking Republican Sen. Charles Grassley “would sign onto the deal and pave the way for committee action next week.”

via USNews.com: Political Bulletin: Tuesday, July 28, 2009.

Well, as the French would say… Quelle surprise!

It’s funny, earlier this summer I was watching the Federer-Roddick Wimbledon Final. Great match in a way, final set was 30 games long, one of the all-time epic battles. And yet, as I watched it, I thought to myself, “This has to be the least suspenseful epic sporting event of all time.” Because there was never any doubt in my mind that Federer was going to win the match. I simply could not envision a scenario where anything else than a Federer victory could happen. I think I even turned it off at 7-7 in the final set, figuring I could catch Federer’s award ceremony later on.

Capitalism, Sarah Palin-Style

by Naomi Klein

The following was adapted from a speech on May 2, 2009 at The Progressive [1]’s 100th anniversary conference and originally printed in The Progressive magazine, August 2009 issue:

We are in a progressive moment, a moment when the ground is shifting beneath our feet, and anything is possible. What we considered unimaginable about what could be said and hoped for a year ago is now possible. At a time like this, it is absolutely critical that we be as clear as we possibly can be about what it is that we want because we might just get it.

So the stakes are high.

How Firms Wooed a U.S. Agency With Billions to Invest

By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON — As a New York money manager and investment banker at four Wall Street firms, Charles E. F. Millard never reached superstar status. But he was treated like one when he arrived in Washington in May 2007, to run the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal agency that oversees $50 billion in retirement funds.

BlackRock, one of the world’s largest money-management firms, assigned a high school classmate of Mr. Millard’s to stay in close contact with him, and it made sure to place him next to its legendary founder, Laurence D. Fink, at a charity dinner at Chelsea Piers. A top executive at Goldman Sachs frequently called and sent e-mail messages, inviting Mr. Millard out to the Mandarin Oriental and the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, even helping him hunt for his next Wall Street job.

Both firms were hoping to win contracts to manage a chunk of that $50 billion. The extensive wooing paid off when a selection committee of three, including Mr. Millard, picked BlackRock and Goldman from among 16 bidders to manage nearly $1.6 billion and to advise the agency, which Mr. Millard ran until January.

Bill Kristol admits govt.-run health care can be better than private

By David Edwards and Daniel Tencer

Published: July 28, 2009
Updated 1 day ago

Weekly Standard editor and Fox News pundit Bill Kristol got booed heavily on The Daily Show Monday night when he said that ordinary Americans don’t “deserve” the same standard of health care that soldiers receive.

But the show’s truly revealing moment came when host Jon Stewart caught Kristol — long an opponent of public health care — admitting that government-run health care for soldiers is superior to private health plans.

Bill Kristol admits govt.-run health care can be better than private

By David Edwards and Daniel Tencer

Published: July 28, 2009
Updated 1 day ago

Weekly Standard editor and Fox News pundit Bill Kristol got booed heavily on The Daily Show Monday night when he said that ordinary Americans don’t “deserve” the same standard of health care that soldiers receive.

But the show’s truly revealing moment came when host Jon Stewart caught Kristol — long an opponent of public health care — admitting that government-run health care for soldiers is superior to private health plans.

Humans "damaging the oceans"

Mounting evidence that human activity is changing the world’s oceans in profound and damaging ways is outlined in a new scientific discussion paper released today.

Man-made carbon emissions “are affecting marine biological processes from genes to ecosystems over scales from rock pools to ocean basins, impacting ecosystem services and threatening human food security,” the study by Professor Mike Kingsford of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University and colleague Dr Andrew Brierley of St Andrews University, Scotland, warns.

Their review, published in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology, says that rates of physical change in the oceans are unprecedented in some cases, and change in ocean life is likely to be equally quick.

Why Did NYT Do a Puff Piece on Finance Members Holding Up Health Reform?

By: Scarecrow
Monday July 27, 2009 10:31 pm

The New York Times has done some excellent reporting lately, particulary by David Leonhardt, on the health care reform debates. Sunday's half-page editorial summary of the bills and issues was also excellent.

So unless this article is meant to mock Baucus' nightmare team, it is bewildering that the Times would allow itself to be used by the Senate Finance Committee to cover for the continuing failure of the "coalition of the unwilling" to produce a proposal that isn't an insult to the millions of Americans waiting for real reforms.

Thomas Frank: The Gates of Political Distraction

Obama’s mistake was falling for a culture war diversion.

By THOMAS FRANK

The essential point about Gates-gate, or the tempest over last week’s arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., is this: Most liberal commentary on the subject has taken race as its theme. Conservative commentators, by contrast, have furiously hit the class button.

Liberals, by and large, immediately plugged the event into their unfair-racial-profiling template, and proceeded to call for blacks and whites to “listen to each other’s narratives” and other such anodyne niceties even after it started to seem that police racism was probably not what caused the incident.

Conservatives, meanwhile, were following their own “narrative,” the one in which racism is often exaggerated and the real victim is the unassuming common man scorned by the deference-demanding “liberal elite.” Commentators on the right zeroed in on the fact that Mr. Gates is an “Ivy League big shot,” a “limousine liberal,” and a star professor at Harvard, an institution they regard with special loathing.

In Sickness and in Wealth

How America's rising income inequality figures in to the debate over health care.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Tuesday, July 28, 2009, at 1:15 PM ET

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The debate about bank bailouts and health care is missing a critical piece of context: The American economy hasn't been working for the working- and middle class for decades. It is impossible to determine who should pay for what or whether it is "fair" to ask the wealthy to contribute more to the health care of those who are uninsured, without better understanding the winners and losers in the U.S. economy over the past several decades.

One of the great accomplishments of the American economy, or at least the mythology so claims, is the creation of an enormous middle class after World War II. Americans all shared in the wealth generated by the most dynamic economy the world had ever seen. At one end of the economic spectrum, we reduced the number of people living in poverty, while at the other end, we applauded those whose work benefited the entire economy.

Obama-Haters Becoming Increasingly...Racial In Their Rhetoric

By Eric Kleefeld - July 28, 2009, 3:34PM

An interesting pattern has emerged in the last few weeks, as President Obama's ratings have started to come down to Earth: You can really see a type of Obama-hatred out there that really does cross over into a purely racial territory.

This has gotten especially worse in the aftermath of Obama's comments and subsequent mea culpa on the Henry Louis Gates arrest, but the pattern has been there all the same. You can look back to the 2008 campaign, with the Jeremiah Wright controversies, the phony rumors of a tape of Michelle Obama defaming whites, and the slow but steady emergence of the Birthers. And these days, the Birthers seem to be getting more and more bellicose.

How to Solve the Housing Crisis

Rather than throwing families out of foreclosed homes, US laws should be changed to allow them to stay and rent

Winston Churchill supposedly said: "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have tried everything else." This may prove to be an accurate description of the response to the foreclosure crisis that has followed the collapse of the housing bubble.

The folks in Washington have developed a series of complex mortgage modification schemes designed to keep people in their homes. George Bush put forward the first plan in the summer of 2007. It was entirely voluntary for lenders and came with no government money.

Last summer, Congress developed a package that committed up to $300bn in loan guarantees [1] to support modification efforts. Eight months after the plan went into effect, there were fewer than 1,000 applications and only 52 completed modifications.

New Survey Report Reveals Truth Behind Excessive Credit Card Debt in the United States

Findings Show Skyrocketing Costs, Dwindling Savings, Stagnant Wages and Medical Debt Major Factors

WASHINGTON - July 28 - As the recession continues to squeeze financially vulnerable American households, they are turning to credit cards to make ends meet, according to "The Plastic Safety Net: How Households are Coping in a Fragile Economy," a new report published today by Demos, a national research and policy center.

This is Demos' second national survey examining credit card debt among low- and middle-income households--those whose incomes fell between 50 percent and 120 percent of local median income. It provides new information about why households are in credit card debt, how long they have carried their debt, and the impact this debt has had on their economic security.

Health Care For The Blue Dogs

By Jacob S. Hacker

Created 07/28/2009 - 1:03pm

The fate of health-care reform hangs on what President Obama and leading Democrats do in the next few weeks. In particular, it hinges on an effective response to moderate Democrats in the House -- known as "Blue Dogs" -- who are threatening [1] to jump ship.

The main worry expressed by the Blue Dogs is that the Congressional Budget Office has predicted [2] that leading bills on Capitol Hill won't bring down medical inflation. The irony is that the Blue Dogs' argument -- that a new public insurance plan designed to compete with private insurers should be smaller and less powerful, and that Medicare and this new plan should pay more generous rates to rural providers -- would make reform more expensive, not less. The further irony is that the federal premium assistance that the Blue Dogs worry is too costly is the reform that would make health-care affordable for a large share of their constituents.

The Blue Dogs are right to hold Obama [3] and Democratic leaders to their commitment to real cost control. But they are wrong to see this goal as conflicting with a new national public health insurance plan for Americans younger than 65. In fact, such a plan, empowered to work with Medicare, is Congress's single most powerful lever for reforming the way care is paid for and delivered. With appropriate authority, it can encourage private plans to develop innovations in payment and care coordination that could spread through the private sector, as have past public-sector innovations.

Study finds significant number of kids experience family homelessness

Those from homeless families more likely to suffer mental health problems

Amy Albin | 7/27/2009 9:40:00 AM

A new multisite study by UCLA and RAND Corp. researchers and colleagues has found that 7 percent of fifth-graders and their families have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives and that the occurrence is even higher — 11 percent — for African American children and those from the poorest households.

The study also found that children who had experienced homelessness at some point during their lives were significantly more likely to have an emotional, behavioral or developmental problem; were more likely to have witnessed serious violence with a knife or a gun; and were more likely to have received mental health care.

Actions taken over the next decade to demonstrate and deploy key technologies will determine US energy future

WASHINGTON -- With a sustained national commitment, the United States could obtain substantial energy-efficiency improvements, new sources of energy, and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions through the accelerated deployment of existing and emerging energy technologies, according to AMERICA'S ENERGY FUTURE: TECHNOLOGY AND TRANSFORMATION, the capstone report of the America's Energy Future project of the National Research Council, the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering. Initiating deployment of these technologies is urgent; actions taken -- or not taken -- between now and 2020 to develop and demonstrate several key technologies will largely determine the nation's energy options for many decades to come.

Deploying existing energy-efficiency technologies is a near-term and low-cost way to reduce U.S. energy demand, the report says. Fully deploying these technologies in buildings alone could save enough power to eliminate the need for new electricity generating plants to meet growing U.S. demand. However, some new plants would likely still be needed to address regional supply imbalances, replace obsolete technology, or present more environmentally friendly sources of electricity. Deployment of efficiency technologies in the building, industrial, and transportation sectors could reduce projected U.S. energy use by 15 percent in 2020 and by 30 percent in 2030. Even greater energy savings would be possible with more aggressive policies and incentives.

Guantánamo Bay: the inside story

There’s a McDonald’s on the high street, suburban houses, rats the size of dogs, and 229 of the world’s most high-profile prisoners. Six months after President Obama declared that he would close it down, Naomi Wolf heads to Guantánamo Bay to see whether anything has changed

Naomi Wolf

Six months ago this week President Obama, on his second day in office, promised to close the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, and to undo the secretive and coercive detention and interrogation policies of George W. Bush. But has Obama been as good as his word?

I went to Guantánamo last month to see for myself what difference, if any, Obama’s election had made. My trip was surreal from start to end. I was in line for the rotating junket to the island, and had been given a date by a nervous-sounding and very young Lieutenant Cody Starken. I signed papers that committed me to not reporting classified information — on pain of prosecution. Then I got on a tiny aircraft — unmarked on any announcement board — out of Fort Lauderdale airport.

Middle-class suicide

By Julian Delasantellis

It's pretty much par for the course for science fiction to tell tales of a bleak and nightmarish future, but even so, Ridley Scott's 1982 movie Blade Runner, from the Philip K Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? really piled it on with the dystopian delights.

Set in the year 2019, in a Los Angeles with a population of 100 million (10 times its current population), the movie shows what happens when a society allows its middle class to wither and die. Here, Los Angeles has been rent into two socioeconomic classes with almost no regular contact - a small, far-off wealthy class growing ever fatter and happier on the backs of its slave labor android workforce mining the natural resources of the outer planets, and a vast, polyglot lower class, speaking a bastardized English composed of parts of all the languages of the immigrant communities competing with each other for what few of society's crumbs are available to them. All this is happening amidst a grossly polluted urban landscape where toxic rain regularly falls on the unfortunates.

CSI: Watergate

Has an amateur historian found the key to the lost 18 ½ minutes?

—By David Corn

ON JUNE 20, 1972, President Richard Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, met in Nixon's hideaway office at the Old Executive Office Building. Three days earlier, White House-connected dirty tricksters had been nabbed breaking into the Democratic National Committee's Watergate offices, and the 79-minute-long conversation—with Nixon's secret taping system running and Haldeman taking his typically meticulous notes on a tablet of yellow lined paper with a ballpoint pen—at one point turned toward the break-in and how to craft a counterattack. What exactly the two men said to one another would become one of the great political mysteries of the 20th century: Sometime during the Watergate scandal, 18 ½ minutes were suspiciously erased from the tape recording of this meeting.

Paul Krugman: An Incoherent Truth

Right now the fate of health care reform seems to rest in the hands of relatively conservative Democrats — mainly members of the Blue Dog Coalition, created in 1995. And you might be tempted to say that President Obama needs to give those Democrats what they want.

But he can’t — because the Blue Dogs aren’t making sense.

To grasp the problem, you need to understand the outline of the proposed reform (all of the Democratic plans on the table agree on the essentials.)

Reform, if it happens, will rest on four main pillars: regulation, mandates, subsidies and competition.

New predictions for sea level rise

Fossil coral data and temperature records derived from ice-core measurements have been used to place better constraints on future sea level rise, and to test sea level projections.

The results are published today in Nature Geoscience and predict that the amount of sea level rise by the end of this century will be between 7- 82 cm – depending on the amount of warming that occurs – a figure similar to that projected by the IPCC report of 2007.

Placing limits on the amount of sea level rise over the next century is one of the most pressing challenges for climate scientists. The uncertainties around different methods to achieve accurate predictions are highly contentious because the response of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to warming is not well understood.

University has grand designs to build a house of straw

Could straw houses be the buildings of the future?

That’s what researchers at the University of Bath will be testing this summer by constructing a “BaleHaus” made of prefabricated straw bale and hemp cladding panels on campus.

And people around the world will be able to watch its progress online via “Strawcam” from Monday 20 July. The BaleHaus website also features blogs, videos, photos and lots of other information about the project.

Straw is the ultimate environmentally-friendly building material since it is renewable and is a by-product of farming.

Bush Era Horrors Will Haunt Us Until We Truly Face Them

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on July 27, 2009, Printed on July 27, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141568/

We've just passed through the CIA assassination flap, already fading from the news after less than two weeks of media attention. Broken in several major newspapers, here's how the story goes: the Agency, evidently under Vice President Dick Cheney's orders, didn't inform Congress that, to assassinate al-Qaeda leaders, it was trying to develop and deploy global death squads. (Of course, just about no one is going to call them that, but the description fits.) Congress is now in high dudgeon. The CIA didn't keep that body's "Gang of Eight" informed. A House investigation is now underway.

We're told that the CIA -- being the president's private army and part of the executive branch of our government -- has committed a heinous dereliction of duty. In fact, not keeping key congressional figures up to date on the developing program could even "be illegal," according to Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin. (Not that Congress, when informed of Bush administration extreme acts, ever did much of anything anyway.)

Bill Moyers: Dangerous Alliance of Health Industry and Right-Wingers Will Stop at Nothing to Derail Progressive Reforms

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, AlterNet
Posted on July 27, 2009, Printed on July 27, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141566/

Push finally came to shove in Washington this past week as the battle for health care escalated from scattered sniper fire into all-out combat. If it all seems to be getting more and more confusing, join the club. It's hard to see what's happening through all the gun smoke.

The Republicans have more than health care reform in their bombsights -- they want a loss for Obama so crushing it will bring the administration to its knees and restore GOP control of Congress after next year's elections.

In the words of Republican Senator Jim DeMint, "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

The Recession Is Over

Now what we need is a new kind of recovery.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Monday, July 27, 2009, at 11:51 AM ET

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In Westport, Mass., about 60 miles southwest of Boston, traffic crawls along Route 6 as drivers make their way to the nearby Atlantic beaches like Horseneck or Baker's. A 10-worker crew pouring and raking asphalt onto the road slows their progress. It's the kind of small annoyance drivers nationwide face each summer. It's also one small manifestation of President Barack Obama's ambitious strategy for jump-starting the economy.

In April, the P.J. Keating Co., a construction firm based in Lunenburg, Mass., bid on about a dozen stimulus projects funded through the U.S. Transportation Department. It won two contracts, including this $4.06 million job, rescuing what would have been a dismal year for P.J. Keating, says David Baker, 36, a manager of construction operations. As business dwindled over the past two years, the firm laid off about a dozen people. "We definitely would have been faced with another half-dozen layoffs had we not gotten these stimulus projects," Baker says. Instead, the company kept all its remaining 300 employees and hired five new ones. Ordinarily, a few government-funded jobs, like traffic on Route 6, wouldn't be noteworthy. But the tableau neatly encapsulates the promise—and pitfalls—of an economy at an inflection point.

The War Being Waged on the TARP Watchdog's Independence

by Glenn Greenwald

Neil Barofsky, the chief watchdog over the $700 billion TARP bank bailout program, is one of those rare creatures in Washington: he takes very seriously his responsibilities of independent oversight and accountability. A career prosecutor, Barofsky is a life-long Democrat who donated money to Obama's presidential campaign. But ever since he was appointed to head the oversight office created by Congress when it enacted TARP -- an office designed to ensure transparency and accountability at the Treasury Department and in the banking industry -- he has repeatedly clashed with Obama's Treasury officials over their lack of transparency in how the trillions of dollars in TARP-related funds are being sent to and used by the banking industry. So seriously does Barofsky take his oversight duties that, as a Washington Post profile noted in March, "he refuses to eat with senior administration officials in the [Tre

Soldiers in Colorado slayings tell of Iraq horrors

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Soldiers from an Army unit that had 10 infantrymen accused of murder, attempted murder or manslaughter after returning to civilian life described a breakdown in discipline during their Iraq deployment in which troops murdered civilians, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Some Fort Carson, Colo.-based soldiers have had trouble adjusting to life back in the United States, saying they refused to seek help, or were belittled or punished for seeking help. Others say they were ignored by their commanders, or coped through drug and alcohol abuse before they allegedly committed crimes, The Gazette of Colorado Springs said.

Congressman Eric Cantor, R-Unethical

posted by John Nichols on 07/24/2009 @ 07:40am

Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor has taken a lead in Republican attacks on expanding role of the federal government.

But there are some expansions of government that do not bother the conservative stalwart.

For instance, Cantor does not appear to have any problem with the government funding his political projects.

What You Might Not Know About the Recovery

By JOE BIDEN

Washington

SIX months ago, when President Obama and I took office, we were confronted with an economic crisis unparalleled in our lifetime. The nation was hemorrhaging more than 700,000 jobs a month, the housing market was in free fall, and the fate of the financial system hung in the balance. Credible economists were handicapping the probability of a depression. The actions we took — passing the Recovery Act, stabilizing the banking system, pressing to get credit flowing again and helping responsible homeowners — brought us back from the precipice. Monthly job losses are down, financial markets are improved, and economic contraction has slowed. We still have a long way to go, but clearly we are closer to recovery today than we were in January. The Recovery Act has been critical to that progress.

Notwithstanding this progress, the nature of the Recovery Act remains misunderstood by many, and misconstrued by others: critics have suggested that the entire $787 billion is being spent on pet programs. As the person leading the administration’s efforts to put the Recovery Act into effect, I want to set the record straight.

The single largest part of the Recovery Act — more than one-third of it — is tax cuts: 95 percent of working Americans have seen their taxes go down as a result of the act. The second-largest part — just under a third — is direct relief to state governments and individuals. The money is allowing state governments to avoid laying off teachers (14,000 in New York City alone), firefighters and police officers and preventing states’ budget gaps from growing wider.

The Wall Street Rally: Watch Your Wallets

Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up To Me, the precocious 1966 novel by the late Richard Farina, defined the late 1960s counterculture. The stock market rally that's pushed the Dow Jones Industrial Average back above 9000 for the first time since early January could be given the same title, and it might well come to define the much-wished-for financial recovery.

What's pushing the stock market upward? Mainly, unexpectedly positive second-quarter corporate profits. But those profits aren't being powered by consumers who have suddenly found themselves with a lot more money in their pockets. The profits are coming from dramatic cost-cutting -- including, most notably, payroll cuts. If a firm cuts its costs enough, it can show a profit even if its sales are still in the basement.

High frequency traders – a phoney explanation when nobody seems to know the real explanation

Goldman Sachs made 5.7 billion dollars of trading revenue in the last quarter. That run rate (over 22 billion per annum) is almost as much as the pre-crisis peak.

$22 billion per annum is roughly $200 per year per household in the United States.

If it is someone’s trading revenue it presumably comes out of someone else’s pocket so measuring it per household is appropriate.

Spitzer: Federal Reserve is ‘a Ponzi scheme, an inside job’

Posted By Daniel Tencer On July 25, 2009 @ 10:15 pm In

The Federal Reserve — the quasi-autonomous body that controls the US’s money supply — is a “Ponzi scheme” that created “bubble after bubble” in the US economy and needs to be held accountable for its actions, says Eliot Spitzer, the former governor and attorney-general of New York.

In a wide-ranging discussion of the bank bailouts on MSNBC’s Morning Meeting, host Dylan Ratigan described the process by which the Federal Reserve exchanged $13.9 trillion of bad bank debt for cash that it gave to the struggling banks.

Spitzer — who built a reputation as “the Sheriff of Wall Street” for his zealous prosecutions of corporate crime as New York’s attorney-general and then resigned as the state’s governor over revelations he had paid for prostitutes — seemed to agree with Ratigan that the bank bailout amounts to “America’s greatest theft and cover-up ever.”

Lies, damn lies

Murdoch’s papers have relentlessly assaulted common truth and decency, but their most successful war has been on journalism itself

Dow's back at 9,000: Does that mean the recession's over?

Economists say the stock-market milestone crystalizes a new phase in the retreat that's wiped out trillions of dollars in wealth, sent unemployment soaring and vaporized home equity. However, the economy remains in a shambles, they say, and forecasts call for a slow and weak recovery that will leave millions jobless across the country for years.

Blue Dogs Fill Their Bowls with Cash

Moderate Democratic Coalition’s Leverage Draws Interest Across Spectrum

By Josh Israel, Aaron Mehta | July 22, 2009

Whether the subject is health care reform, climate change, or pay-as-you-go budgeting rules, almost everyone, it seems, suddenly wants to talk with the Blue Dogs. President Obama’s White House meeting with members of the fiscally conservative Democratic coalition earlier this week is but the latest indication that the Blue Dogs — 52 members strong — have deftly turned themselves into a key voting bloc at the nexus of power. With them, the Democrats do not need a single Republican to back their legislation; without them, the Democratic agenda would be in serious peril. And as their clout has expanded, fundraising has grown accordingly, not just from traditionally Democratic contributors, but from unexpected quarters as well.

New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit

How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn't do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn't used to define us. But now it's becoming all that we are.

Did you know, for example, that there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? But now our war zones are dominated by private contractors and mercenaries who work for corporations. There are more private contractors in Iraq than American troops, and we pay them generous salaries to do jobs the troops used to do for themselves ­-- like laundry. War is not supposed to turn a profit, but our wars have become boondoggles for weapons manufacturers and connected civilian contractors.

Frank Rich: And That’s Not the Way It Is

WHO exactly was the competition in the race to be the most trusted man in America? Lyndon Johnson? Richard Nixon?

Not to take anything away from Walter Cronkite, but he beat out Henry Kissinger by only four percentage points when a 1974 Roper poll asked Americans whom they most respected. The successive blows of Vietnam and Watergate during the Cronkite ’60s and ’70s shattered the nation’s faith in most of its institutions, public and private, and toppled many of the men who led them. Such was the dearth of trustworthy figures who survived that an unindicted official in a disgraced White House could make the cut.

In death, “the most trusted man in America” has been embalmed in that most comforting of American sweeteners — nostalgia — to the point where his finest, and most discomforting, achievements are being sanitized or forgotten. We’ve heard much sentimental rumination on the bygone heyday of the “mainstream media,” on the cultural fractionalization inflicted by the Internet, and on the lack of any man who could replicate the undisputed moral authority of Uncle Walter. (Women still need not apply, apparently.) But the reason to celebrate Cronkite has little to do with any of this and least of all to do with his avuncular television persona.

Revealed: the secret evidence of global warming Bush tried to hide

Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months.

The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week. President Barack Obama is currently trying to galvanise Congress and the American public to take action to halt catastrophic climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

New Great Game Revisited, Part 2

Iran, China and the New Silk Road

China's block on Iran's full membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization last year might signal that a Beijing-Tehran axis doesn't exist, yet a strategic alliance between the pair is essential to counter Western influence in their domain. For China, Iran is all about Pipelineistan, the Asian Energy Security Grid and the New Silk Road. - Pepe Escobar (Jul 24, '09)

This article concludes a two-part report.

Part 1: Iran and Russia, scorpions in a bottle