'Brooks Brothers riot alumni' spotted at anti-health rally

On November 19, 2000, a funny thing happened in Florida. You may remember this.

An angry mob of conservatives staged a riot inside a Miami-Dade County polling office and managed to shut down the most crucial Bush v. Gore recount in the country.

It was later discovered that some of these individuals were on the Bush recount committee’s payroll. They were just a few of "at least 750" Republican operatives flown in from around the country on the GOP's dollar.

What this country needs is an outburst of common sense

By Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers

If ever there were a time for comprehensive health care reform, it's now, and yet the forces of darkness are lining up against this urgent need, buttressed by lies, mobs inflamed by those lies and millions of dollars changing hands and changing votes in Washington, D.C.

The idea that doing nothing and going on without changing the way this country's health care is delivered works to the benefit only of the insurance companies, the giant health care providers and the big pharmaceutical companies.

Female supervisors more susceptible to workplace sexual harassment

Study is first to examine trend over time and clearly demonstrate use of harassment as a workplace equalizer

SAN FRANCISCO — Women who hold supervisory positions are more likely to be sexually harassed at work, according to the first-ever, large-scale longitudinal study to examine workplace power, gender and sexual harassment.

The study, which will be presented at the 104th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, reveals that nearly fifty percent of women supervisors, but only one-third of women who do not supervise others, reported sexual harassment in the workplace. In more conservative models with stringent statistical controls, women supervisors were 137 percent more likely to be sexually harassed than women who did not hold managerial roles. While supervisory status increased the likelihood of harassment among women, it did not significantly impact the likelihood for men.

The real reason for Obama’s $2.4 billion electric car grants

More than half of the money goes to battery manufacturing. US-made hybrids are currently dependent on batteries made abroad.

By Peter Grier | Staff writer/ August 5, 2009 edition

Washington

Want to know why the Obama administration’s announcement of $2.4 billion in electric vehicle grants could be very important? It’s simple: The commitment show that Washington may be getting serious about keeping batteries from becoming the new oil.

Right now, overseas manufacturers, primarily in Asia, are the world leaders in the mass production of advanced vehicle batteries. Even US-made hybrids such as the Ford Fusion have a foreign battery at their core.

In a wing-nut world, Granny is toast

By Ellen Goodman | August 7, 2009

I AM AS HAPPY as anyone at signs of an economic recovery. But I confess to having mixed feelings about the resurgence of the wing-nut industry.

We now have “The Birthers’’ manufacturing myths that President Obama was not born in the United States and therefore is serving illegally. They are following the business plan of those earlier entrepreneurs selling the idea that Obama had killed his grandma. Consider the scare-biz Internet scribe who penned the memorable line: “Obama flies to Hawaii to visit his grandmother and just a few days later she winds up dead. Coincidence?’’

But now the industry has ratcheted up from accusing Obama of killing his grandma to accusing him of trying to kill your grandma.

Keep shovelling that stimulus

Joseph Stiglitz
From Friday's Globe and Mail
Thursday, Aug. 06, 2009 06:46PM EDT

The green shoots of economic recovery that many people spied this spring have turned brown, prompting concerns about whether the policy of jump-starting the U.S. economy through massive fiscal stimulus has failed.

People are asking: Has Keynesian economics been proven wrong, now that it has been put to the test? The question, however, only makes sense if Keynesian economics had really been tried.

What the Mainstream Press Can Learn from Matt Taibbi's Takedown of Goldman Sachs

By Dean Starkman, Columbia Journalism Review
Posted on August 8, 2009, Printed on August 8, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141852/

Mainstream financial journalism is doing its level, eye-rolling, heavy-sighing best to stuff Matt Taibbi back into the alt-press hole he came from, but he’s not going along with it, and the mainstreamers in any case are making a big mistake.

The Rolling Stone writer cemented his status as the enfant terrible of the business press with “The Great American Bubble Machine,” a 10,000-word excoriation of Goldman Sachs, a muckraker’s-eye view of Goldman history, exploring the bank’s and Wall Street’s contributions to various financial disasters, starting with the Great Depression, skipping to the Tech Wreck, the Mortgage Wreck, the oil bubble of 2008, the bailout, and the looming cap-and-trade plan. Salted with “fuck”s, “shit”s and written with brio and hyperbole in the New Journalism tradition, it caught the financial community, which very much includes the financial media, utterly off-guard, unused as it is to hearing its flagship described as a “giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.”

The West has its own suicide bombers

By John Feffer

The actor Will Smith is no one's image of a suicide bomber. With his boyish face, he has often played comic roles. Even as the last man on earth in I Am Legend, he retains a wise-cracking, ironic demeanor. And yet, surrounded by a horde of hyperactive vampires at the end of that film, Smith clasps a live grenade to his chest and throws himself at the enemy in a final burst of heroic sacrifice.

Wait a second: surely that wasn't a suicide bombing? Will Smith wasn't reciting suraswore for their suicide missions. He wasn't playing a religious fanatic or a political extremist. Will Smith was the hero of the film. So how could he be a suicide bomber? After all, he's one of us, isn't he? from the Koran. He wasn't sporting one of those rising-sun headbands that the Japanese kamikaze

The Enthusiasm Gap

Why liberals should not be disappointed with the current lackluster health care legislation.

Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic Published: Friday, August 07, 2009

The news about health care is a little confusing these days. While polls show that Americans still support the key elements of health care reform that President Obama and his allies are trying to enact, there have been numerous reports of conservative activists showing up at congressional town halls across the country, protesting those same plans with an energy not matched by the other side.

The imbalance may simply reflect the media's preoccupation with conflict and confrontation. Liberal rallies in favor of reform have garnered no similar attention, although they've attracted hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of people. But I suspect the enthusiasm gap is at least partly real--that the hate for the plans moving through Congress runs much stronger than the love, that the people fighting to stop these bills feel more intensely, and have more determination, than those fighting to pass them.

Republicans Propagating Falsehoods in Attacks on Health-Care Reform

By Steven Pearlstein
Friday, August 7, 2009

As a columnist who regularly dishes out sharp criticism, I try not to question the motives of people with whom I don't agree. Today, I'm going to step over that line.

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

There are lots of valid criticisms that can be made against the health reform plans moving through Congress -- I've made a few myself. But there is no credible way to look at what has been proposed by the president or any congressional committee and conclude that these will result in a government takeover of the health-care system. That is a flat-out lie whose only purpose is to scare the public and stop political conversation.

Ten Telltale Signs of Republican Disease

A recent Daily Kos poll indicated 58 percent of Republicans either believe President Obama isn't a US citizen or aren't sure. Out here on the left coast, we don't know many Republicans, so it's hard for us to understand how they can be that stupid.

There may be a medical explanation. Perhaps the Republican daily diet of whoppers has caused organic brain rot, a variant of mad cow disease. On the other hand, their failure to accept reality might be psychological, early onset dementia resulting from excessive exposure to Fox News and hate radio.

The Last Abortion Doctor

For thirty-six years, Warren Hern has been one of the few doctors in America to specialize in late abortions. George Tiller was another. And when Dr. Tiller was murdered that Sunday in church, Warren Hern became the only one left.

By: John H. Richardson

The young couple flew into Wichita bearing, in the lovely swell of the wife's belly, a burden of grief. They came from a religious tradition where large families are celebrated, and they wanted this baby, and it was very late in her pregnancy. But the doctors recommended abortion. They said that with her complications, there were only two men skilled enough to pull it off. One was George Tiller, a Wichita doctor who specialized in late abortions.

They arrived in Wichita on Sunday, May 31. As they drove to their hotel, a Holiday Inn just two blocks from the Reformation Lutheran Church, they saw television cameras. They wondered what was going on, a passing curiosity quickly forgotten.

But when they got to their room, the phone was ringing. Her father was on the line. "There was some doctor who was shot who does abortions," he said.

Barbara Ehrenreich: The Destruction of the Black Middle Class

Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammed

To judge from most of the commentary on the Gates-Crowley affair, you would think that a "black elite" has gotten dangerously out of hand. First Gates (Cambridge, Yale, Harvard) showed insufficient deference to Crowley, then Obama (Occidental, Harvard) piled on to accuse the police of having acted "stupidly." Was this "the end of white America" which the Atlantic had warned of in its January/February cover story? Or had the injuries of class – working class in Crowley’s case – finally trumped the grievances of race?

Left out of the ensuing tangle of commentary on race and class has been the increasing impoverishment—or, we should say, re-impoverishment--of African Americans as a group. In fact, the most salient and lasting effect of the current recession may turn out to be the decimation of the black middle class. According to a study by Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy, 33 percent of the black middle class was already in danger of falling out of the middle class at the start of the recession. Gates and Obama, along with Oprah and Cosby, will no doubt remain in place, but millions of the black equivalents of Officer Crowley – from factory workers to bank tellers and white collar managers – are sliding down toward destitution.

Digby: Goats

Ezra sez:

There's been a lot of skepticism about the White House's strategy of cutting deals in which industry players voluntarily promise to save money over the next 10 years. The skepticism is simple enough: If the pharmaceutical companies are willing to save $80 billion as a favor to Barack Obama, that suggests there's a lot more than $80 billion that could, and probably should, be saved. As Nancy Pelosi told me, "The minute the drug companies settled for $80 billion, we knew it was $160 billion. Right? If they're giving away $80 billion?" A few minutes later, she suggested that maybe those agreements weren't inviolable. "The president made the agreements he made," she said. "And maybe we'll be limited by that. But maybe not!"

Maddow calls out GOP operatives behind healthcare mobs

On Wednesday night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow named names and called out Republican operatives and organizations that are “generating exploitative, manufactured, strategically deployed outrage” to benefit their corporate clientele.

These political consultants and big-money backers are selling “crazy, disprovable, but nevertheless endlessly stoked conspiracy theories that health care reform is communism, that it’s a secret plot to kill your grandpa, that it’s a government takeover, it’s something called Obama-care. It’s going to mandate abortions. It’s going to mandate sex change operations.”

Scientists doubt inventor's global cooling idea — but what if it works?

By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Ron Ace says that his breakthrough moments have come at unexpected times — while he lay in bed, eased his aging Cadillac across the Chesapeake Bay bridge or steered a tractor around his rustic, five-acre property.

In the seclusion of his Maryland home, Ace has spent three years glued to the Internet, studying the Earth's climate cycles and careening from one epiphany to another — a 69-year-old loner with the moxie to try to solve one of the greatest threats to mankind.

Paul Krugman: The Town Hall Mob

There’s a famous Norman Rockwell painting titled “Freedom of Speech,” depicting an idealized American town meeting. The painting, part of a series illustrating F.D.R.’s “Four Freedoms,” shows an ordinary citizen expressing an unpopular opinion. His neighbors obviously don’t like what he’s saying, but they’re letting him speak his mind.

That’s a far cry from what has been happening at recent town halls, where angry protesters — some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!” — have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.

Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.

Fascist America: Are We There Yet?

By Sara Robinson

Created 08/06/2009 - 1:23am

All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history's worst dictators. With each new outrage, the small handful of us who'd made ourselves experts on right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we there yet?

And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of reassurance. "Wellll...we're on a bad road, and if we don't change course, we could end up there soon enough. But there's also still plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don't worry. As bad as this looks: no -- we are not there yet."

'Green' energy from algae

KIT 'algae platform' develops efficient photoreactors and novel cell decomposition methods

In view of the shortage of petrochemical resources and climate change, development of CO₂-neutral sustainable fuels is one of the most urgent challenges of our times. Energy plants like rape or oil palm are being discussed fervently, as they may also be used for food production. Hence, cultivation of microalgae may contribute decisively to tomorrow's energy supply. For energy production from microalgae, KIT scientists are developing closed photo-bioreactors and novel cell disruption methods.

Microalgae are monocellular, plant-like organisms engaged in photosynthesis and converting carbon dioxide (CO₂) into biomass. From this biomass, both potential resources and active substances as well as fuels like biodiesel may be produced. While growing, algae take up the amount of CO₂ that is later released again when they are used for energy production. Hence, energy from algae can be produced in a CO₂-neutral manner contrary to conventional energy carriers.

Meat, climate change, and industry tripe

Washington Post food-politics columnist Ezra Klein has taken a stand: people should eat less meat, because of its vast greenhouse gas footprint. To make his case, Ezra cited the FAO’s landmark “Livestock’s Long Shadow” report, which found that global meat production is responsible for 18 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions.

To be honest, when I read Ezra’s column, I thought, “yeah, and?” Of course we should eat less meat. But how far will individual choice take us? Shouldn’t we focus on forcing the meat industry to pay up for its massive externalities, including its contribution to climate change? Yet this eat-less-meat plea ended up generating more controversy than I thought possible.

Unconscionable Math

July 28, 2009 by Taunter

The House hearings on rescission – the retroactive cancellation of individual health insurance policies – were over a month ago, but after its initial run through Daily Kos it seems to have waited a bit before popping up on Baseline and Slate. James Kwak at Baseline described the practice as rare, affecting only 0.5% of the population. The faint light bulb above my head began to flicker: could that be true…that’s not rare – that is amazingly common.

It is. In fact, from Don Hamm’s (CEO of Assurant) prepared testimony, with the company logo nicely on the front of it in the original:

Rescission is rare. It affects less than one-half of one percent of people we cover. Yet, it is one of many protections supporting the affordability and viability of individual health insurance in the United States under our current system.

What tangled webs we weave…

Thomas Frank: ‘Blue Dogs’ or Corporate Shills?

Blue Dogs run for profit.
By THOMAS FRANK

Capitalism is said to be in terrible trouble these days, with the profit motive suffering rampant badmouthing. Entrepreneurs are facing criticism, damnable criticism. And this criticism must stop.

If we don’t watch what we say, some warn, the supermen who shoulder the world will soon grow tired of our taunting, will shrug off their burden and walk righteously away, leaving us lesser mortals to stew in our resentment and envy.

Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder

By Jeremy Scahill
August 4, 2009

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting "illegal" or "unlawful" weapons into the country on Prince's private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.

Study Finds Rich U.S. Energy-Efficiency Potential

The potential for energy-efficiency improvements throughout the U.S. economy is huge and entirely within reach if annual investments increase fivefold, according to a new McKinsey & Company report.

The global consulting firm estimates that $520 billion in investments would reduce U.S. non-transportation energy usage by 9.1 quadrillion BTUs by 2020 - roughly 23 percent of projected demand. As a result, the U.S. economy would save more than $1.2 trillion and avoid the release of some 1.1 gigatons of annual greenhouse gases, an amount equal to replacing 1,000 conventional 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants with renewable energy.

The horror of Hiroshima lives on

By Frida Berrigan

I can't help myself. I still think it's worth bringing up, even for the 64th time. I'm talking, of course, about the atomic obliteration, at the end of a terrible, world-rending war, of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and 9, 1945, whose anniversaries - if that's even the appropriate word for it - are once again upon us.

In this, at least, I know I'm not a typical American: Hiroshima and Nagasaki still seem all too real to me. As the child of anti-nuclear activists, I was raised to pay attention to two significant dates in American history - the day when the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress bomber named after the pilot's mother, dropped Little Boy, a five-ton uranium explosion bomb, on Hiroshima; and the moment, three days later, when another plane, jokingly named Bock's Car (after the plane's original pilot), dropped Fat Man (a moniker supposedly given it in honor of former British prime minister Winston Churchill), a more complex plutonium implosion bomb, on Nagasaki.

Goldman Sachs, the lords of time

By Julian Delasantellis

Just for the moment, let's pretend that James Cameron's 1984 The Terminator was being made for the first time today, and, instead of the evil robots emerging from the fatally misguided foundries of Cyberdyne Systems, they came from the dark laboratories of Goldman Sachs.

From out of the future, a warrior is sent back in time to warn the present.

"You still don't get it, do you? They'll find your money!! That's what they do! That's all they do! You can't stop them! They'll wait for you! They'll reach down into your bank account and tear its f*&^*^g balance out!"

Incoming AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka vows tougher labor politics

Richard Trumka admits that unions were outmaneuvered on a key element of the Employee Free Choice Act — a bill making it easier for workers to organize.

But the all-but-certain incoming president of the AFL-CIO says that legislative black eye will also carry a price — and warns that the business community and both parties ought to prepare for a more aggressive brand of labor politics once he’s in charge.

Bashing Obama on Taxes

By Robert Parry
August 3, 2009

Across the cable TV news shows on Monday was a smirking cynicism about President Barack Obama supposedly reneging on his campaign pledge not to raise taxes on the middle-class, but this new conventional wisdom rested on a weak foundation.

The cable news programs supported their contention with snippets of weekend interviews with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, although the actual comments didn’t really support the conclusions.

ABC News’ “This Week” got the ball rolling with an off-point Internet headline for its Sunday show, “Geithner Won’t Rule Out New Taxes for the Middle Class.” But Geithner appears to have been referring to “new revenues,” not necessarily a tax on the middle class.

Paul Krugman: Rewarding Bad Actors

Americans are angry at Wall Street, and rightly so. First the financial industry plunged us into economic crisis, then it was bailed out at taxpayer expense. And now, with the economy still deeply depressed, the industry is paying itself gigantic bonuses. If you aren’t outraged, you haven’t been paying attention.

But crashing the economy and fleecing the taxpayer aren’t Wall Street’s only sins. Even before the crisis and the bailouts, many financial-industry high-fliers made fortunes through activities that were worthless if not destructive from a social point of view.

And they’re still at it. Consider two recent news stories.

Malkin distorts Michelle Obama biography to attack her and her father as corrupt

August 01, 2009 8:02 pm ET — 128 Comments

In her new book, Culture of Corruption, conservative columnist Michelle Malkin claims that first lady Michelle Obama "was literally born into the Chicago political corruptocracy," suggesting that because her father was a volunteer precinct captain and held a city job, she was a party to cronyism and embraced the practice. In fact, the biography of Michelle Obama that Malkin cites to make this case actually argued that the first lady's experience in the "powerful political machine" of Richard J. Daley made her and her family "extremely cynical about politics and politicians" until they met "Barack [Obama], whose political career was pushed in part by a coalition of people who had grown up in opposition to Daley and whose goal was breaking the Machine."

Finally the Feds Crack Down on Right-Wing Terrorists

By James Ridgeway, Mother Jones Online
Posted on August 3, 2009, Printed on August 3, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141719/

When the Department of Homeland Security warned in April that the financial crisis and Barack Obama's election were inflaming right-wing extremists, many conservatives were outraged. But a spate of high-profile murders this year has prompted questions about whether the government should have been more proactive. In April, Richard Poplawski, a 22-year-old frequenter of white supremacist websites, was charged with fatally shooting three Pittsburgh cops. In May, former militiaman Scott Roeder was accused of gunning down abortion doctor George Tiller (he pleaded not guilty this week). In June, 88-year-old neo-Nazi James von Brunn allegedly killed an African American security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Only then did the government spring into action. Later that month, federal agents in three states moved against a prominent far-right leader and his associates, with almost no attention from the national press.

Howard Dean: How Republican Attack Dogs Plan to Thwart Health Reform

By Howard Dean, Chelsea Green Publishing
Posted on August 3, 2009, Printed on August 3, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141713/

Editor’s note: In his new book, Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Health Reform, the physician and former presidential candidate devotes a chapter to the forces arrayed against substantive health reform -- the insurance industry, big business, some pharmaceutical companies and political conservatives. The following is an excerpt in which he discusses the long fight against progress mounted by conservatives.

During the early 1990s, under the leadership of Representative Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and Senator Bob Dole (R-KS) and bolstered by the ideological support of the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and Manhattan Institute, Republicans successfully defeated President Clinton’s health reform effort. Conservatives of all stripes argued that healthcare reform was “creeping socialism” or “big government,” denied the existence of a healthcare crisis, or co-opted the term reform to push their own agendas and dilute support for a comprehensive solution to the nation’s healthcare crisis.

Digby: Pushing From The left

I don't know where this is coming from, but I've just received several emails telling me that I'm a Dem whore, loser, stupid, boring useless piece of garbage for refusing to acknowledge that Nancy Pelosi agreed to allow a floor vote on single payer bill in the house. Please accept my apologies. I forget to check my blogging instructions this morning and neither did I happen to see this piece of information. (But it's always a good move to assume my bad faith and despicable motivations anyway.)

"I think in three or four years, everyone will owe President Obama a big thanks.”

Buffett shines at Iowa gala

By Bob Eschliman, WORLD-HERALD NEWS SERVICE

URBANDALE, Iowa — While the purpose of Thursday's gathering at the Homemakers Furniture store here was to celebrate the reopening of the remodeled and expanded store, most of the invitation-only guests were mainly interested in one man.

Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., was there because Homemakers is owned by Nebraska Furniture Mart. The Omaha-based Mart is part of Berkshire Hathaway.

Obama: Recession will pass, thanks to stimulus

President Barack Obama said on Saturday that new economic data indicated a huge stimulus package approved in February had helped “put the brakes” on a deep recession and offers hope for the future.

Obama, speaking in his weekly radio address, referred to figures released Friday that showed a narrower-than-expected 1.0 percent decline in GDP in the second quarter.

Iraqi death toll down in July after US handover

Violent deaths in Iraq fell by a third in July, the first month that Iraqi police and troops were in charge of security in urban areas since the 2003 US-led invasion, official figures showed Saturday.

A total of 275 Iraqis lost their lives last month, according to statistics compiled by the interior, defence and health ministries, compared to 437 deaths in June.

Holt on anthrax mailings: Investigate the investigators

Until the US holds a “broader inquiry” into the investigation of the 2001 anthrax mailings, US House Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) won’t be satisfied that there isn’t a mass killer on the loose in his home town.

Holt — whose 12th Congressional district of New Jersey includes a postal facility from which some of the anthrax letters were mailed during the 2001 biological terrorism scare — says that the FBI “suffers from a credibility gap” because of the many mistakes made by the bureau during its long investigation into the first serious case of biological terrorism on American soil.

Frank Rich: Small Beer, Big Hangover

THE comforting thing about each “national conversation on race” is that the “teachable moment” passes before any serious conversation can get going.

This one ended with a burp. The debate about which brew would best give President Obama Joe Six-Pack cred in his White House beer op with Harvard’s town-and-gown antagonists hit the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Had Obama picked a brand evoking an elitist whiff of John Kerry — Stella Artois, perhaps? — we’d have another week of coverage dissecting his biggest political gaffe since rolling a gutter ball at a Pennsylvania bowling alley.

You can’t blame Obama if he’s perplexed about the recent events. He answers a single, legitimate race-based question at the end of a news conference and is roundly condemned for “stepping on his own message” about health care. It was the noisiest sector of the news media that did much of the stepping. “Health care is bad for ratings,” explained one cable anchor, Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC, with refreshing public candor. What a relief, then, to drop dreary debates about the public option and declare a national conversation about black-white fisticuffs. Especially when this particular incident is truly small beer next to the far more traumatic national sea change on race that will keep sowing conflict and anger long after Henry Louis Gates Jr. finishes his proposed documentary on racial profiling.

Bombshell: Bin Laden worked for US till 9/11

by lukery

Fri Jul 31, 2009 at 05:01:42 AM PDT

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript).

In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained 'intimate relations' with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, "all the way until that day of September 11."

These 'intimate relations' included using Bin Laden for 'operations' in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These 'operations' involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner "as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict," that is, fighting 'enemies' via proxies.

Right-Wing Harassment Strategy Against Dems Detailed In Memo: ‘Yell,’ ‘Stand Up And Shout Out,’ ‘Rattle Him’

This morning, Politico reported that Democratic members of Congress are increasingly being harassed by “angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior” at local town halls. For example, in one incident, right-wing protesters surrounded Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY) and forced police officers to have to escort him to his car for safety.

This growing phenomenon is often marked by violence and absurdity. Recently, right-wing demonstrators hung Rep. Frank Kratovil (D-MD) in effigy outside of his office. Missing from the reporting of these stories is the fact that much of these protests are coordinated by public relations firms and lobbyists who have a stake in opposing President Obama’s reforms.