Iran’s nuclear threat is a lie

John Pilger

Published 01 October 2009

Obama's "showdown" with Iran has another agenda. The media have been tasked with preparing the public for endless war

In 2001, the Observer published a series of reports that claimed an "Iraqi connection" to al-Qaeda, even describing the base in Iraq where the training of terrorists took place and a facility where anthrax was being manufactured as a weapon of mass destruction. It was all false. Supplied by US intelligence and Iraqi exiles, planted stories in the British and US media helped George Bush and Tony Blair to launch an illegal invasion which caused, according to the most recent study, 1.3 million deaths.

Something similar is happening over Iran: the same syncopation of government and media "revelations", the same manufacture of a sense of crisis. "Showdown looms with Iran over secret nuclear plant", declared the Guardian on 26 September. "Showdown" is the theme. High noon. The clock ticking. Good versus evil. Add a smooth new US president who has "put paid to the Bush years". An immediate echo is the notorious Guardian front page of 22 May 2007: "Iran's secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq". Based on unsubstantiated claims by the Pentagon, the writer Simon Tisdall presented as fact an Iranian "plan" to wage war on, and defeat, US forces in Iraq by September of that year - a demonstrable falsehood for which there has been no retraction.

Better world: Top tech for a cleaner planet

There's a lot more to green technology than renewable energy. From more efficient aircraft to thread made from chicken feathers, the world is awash with ingenious ideas. So we have scoured research labs and start-ups, and made some hard choices. Here you will find our pick of the best ideas to make our planet a more energy-efficient place

Pee-n-grow

Manufacturing artificial fertiliser is a highly energy intensive process that consumes roughly 1 per cent of the world's energy supply. As odd as it sounds, using sterile, nitrogen-rich human urine instead could prevent the emission of more than 180 million tonnes of C0₂ each year. Urine collection systems with basement storage tanks have been built by the Stockholm Environmental Institute in more than 800 apartments in rural China, saving an estimated 20 tonnes of C0₂ emissions annually.

China: available now

Magnetic fridge

The two biggest consumers of electricity in the home - air conditioners and refrigerators - may soon become much more energy efficient thanks to a new method of cooling. Magnetic refrigeration subjects metal alloys to a magnetic field, causing them to cool down. Camfridge, based in Cambridge, UK, says its fridges and air conditioners will cut energy usage by around 40 per cent in comparison with conventional models.

Cambridge, UK: under development

Despite Iran progress, Obama faces a world of hard trouble

By Steven Thomma | McClatchy Newspapers

When Iran agreed Thursday to let inspectors into its previously secret nuclear plant, it appeared to be at least a small victory for the United States and the coalition trying to stop the rogue nation from getting nuclear weapons. But it was just one step on a long road with the Iranians. And it was just one spot on the globe.

Population growth is not a problem - it's among those who consume the least. So why isn't anyone targeting the very rich?

by George Monbiot

It's no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it's about the only environmental issue for which they can't be blamed. The brilliant Earth systems scientist James Lovelock [1], for instance, claimed last month that "those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational." But it's Lovelock who is being ignorant and irrational.

A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization [2] shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for instance, sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world's population growth and just 2.4% of the growth in CO₂. North America turned out only 4% of the extra people, but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three percent of the world's population growth happened in places with very low emissions.

Obama pwns Bush-Cheney on Iran; First day of Talks Yields Significant Confidence-Building Steps

For 8 years, Bush-Cheney practiced what I call "belligerent Ostrichism" toward Iran. They refused to talk to Tehran. They wanted to ratchet up sanctions on it. Bush sent 2 aircraft carriers to the Gulf to menace Iran. Bush's spokesmen professed themselves afraid of Iran's unarmed little speedboats in the Gulf. Aside from issuing threats to attack and destroy Iran the way they did Iraq, Bush-Cheney had nothing else to say on the matter. During the 8 years, Iran went from being able to enrich to .2% to being able to enrich to 3.8%, and increased its stock of centrifuges significantly. Bush-Cheney gesticulated and grimaced and fainted away at the horror of it all, but they accomplished diddly-squat.

Media Matters: Right-wing media lynch mob gay-baits White House, facts be damned

For the better part of a week, conservatives in the media have been on a witch hunt for Kevin Jennings, the director of the Department of Education's Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Led by Fox News, the right-wing media have claimed that 21 years ago, when Jennings was a 24-year-old teacher at Concord Academy in Massachusetts, he "cover[ed] up statutory rape" by not reporting to authorities a conversation he had with a student who told him about being involved with an "older man."

The attacks on Jennings, the latest Obama administration official in the right's crosshairs, have been disgusting, misleading, baseless, and at times pointedly anti-gay.

Walmart Tops State Assistance Rolls in Ohio

Free enterprise isn't really free enterprise when American taxpayers are subsidizing corporations.

But in Ohio, responsible employers are being undercut by irresponsible big businesses who rely on the state to make up for the wages or health care they don’t provide to their workers.

And no surprise to regular readers of this blog--Walmart is at the top of the list.

The secret world beneath Sin City

The state of Nevada has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the US.

But even though there are more than 14,000 homeless people in Las Vegas, it is easy to spend a weekend in Sin City and never see signs of a crisis.

Rolling Stone Reports that Naked Short Selling Killed Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers

Posted on 01 October 2009 by Mark Mitchell

Matt Taibbi has published a story in Rolling Stone magazine that nobody should miss. It’s not yet available on-line, so you’ll have to pick it up at the newsstands, but here’s a quick summary.

Taibbi writes:

“On Tuesday, March 11^th, 2008, somebody – nobody knows who – made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half of their value in nine days or less. It was madness – “like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets,” according to one financial analyst.”

Bear’s stock would have to drop by more than half in a matter of days for the mystery figure to make a profit. And that is what happened.

Big Pork and Sen. Grassley: the Danes want you to know your hogs don’t need endless antibiotics

According to the meat industry, the debate over legislation pending in the House that would ban the use of sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics comes down to a simple “fact”: hog-farming on any scale without sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics is impossible. The National Pork Producers Council says so. The American Veterinary Medical Association says so. Heck, even GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa says so.

For the record, these folks also say that livestock producers don’t really use 70% of all antibiotics distributed in the US as the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates. And you know what, we have no idea if they’re right. What many people don’t realize is that antibiotic use by American livestock producers is one of the best kept secrets on the planet. The UCS had to deduce that number based on US sales of antibiotics combined with data from a country that does publish figures on antibiotics use in livestock: Canada. That’s right. No one in the US, not the government, not industry—no one—has any responsibility to tell Americans how much antibiotics is actually in their meat. We’re just to supposed to Take Industry’s Word For It that everything’s peachy.

The Truth About Jobs That No One Wants To Tell You

Unemployment will almost certainly in double-digits next year -- and may remain there for some time. And for every person who shows up as unemployed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' household survey, you can bet there's another either too discouraged to look for work or working part time who'd rather have a full-time job or else taking home less pay than before (I'm in the last category, now that the University of California has instituted pay cuts). And there's yet another person who's more fearful that he or she will be next to lose a job.

In other words, ten percent unemployment really means twenty percent underemployment or anxious employment. All of which translates directly into late payments on mortgages, credit cards, auto and student loans, and loss of health insurance. It also means sleeplessness for tens of millions of Americans. And, of course, fewer purchases (more on this in a moment).

How to limit risk of climate catastrophe

Comprehensive analysis of the odds of climate outcomes under different policy scenarios shows significant benefits from early actions.

David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

A new analysis of climate risk, published by researchers at MIT and elsewhere, shows that even moderate carbon-reduction policies now can substantially lower the risk of future climate change. It also shows that quick, global emissions reductions would be required in order to provide a good chance of avoiding a temperature increase of more than 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level — a widely discussed target. But without prompt action, they found, extreme changes could soon become much more difficult, if not impossible, to control.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT): ACORN vs. Defense Contractors

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

(Editor's note: The following is a pending amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to the defense appropriations bill. Here is his floor statement.)

Mr. President, this country has a $12 trillion national debt, and this year, we are running up the largest deficit in the history of our country. The taxpayers of this country want to know that the money we expend -- whether it is for defense, housing, education, or any other purpose - is spent as wisely and as cost effectively as possible. They also want to know that the corporations and institutions and individuals who receive this funding are honest and trustworthy in terms of how they expend these federal dollars.

Mr. President, several weeks ago, as you'll recall, the Senate voted to prohibit any funding going to an organization called ACORN. This decision was largely motivated by a videotape which showed employees of ACORN involved in an outrageous and absurd discussion with actors who were posing, as I understand it, as a prostitute and a pimp. Those employees, appropriately enough, were fired. As I understand it, over a period of 15 years, ACORN has received about $53 million to promote affordable housing and encourage voter registration.

BOOK REVIEW: Named and shamed

Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy by Barry Ritholtz with Aaron Task

Reviewed by Muhammad Cohen

For the past three decades, finance replaced doctor or lawyer as the smart career choice. The cleverest people gravitated to business schools and then to Wall Street, some detouring to Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom. So how did these masters of the universe create the worst global economic misery in 80 years?

It was stupidity and arrogance, pure and simple, fund manager and TheStreet.com columnist Barry Ritholtz contends in Bailout Nation, the same traits that led a previous generation of America's best and brightest to the tragedy of Vietnam (and a group of more recent, less illustrious ideologues to the debacle in Iraq). At least Camelot's villains thought they were doing good for the world. The modern bankers and traders and quants and arbs who acted so irresponsibly, almost exclusively with other people's money, were simply trying to make themselves obscenely wealthy.

Jumpin' Jack Verdi, it's a gas, gas, gas

By Pepe Escobar

BRUSSELS - Oil and natural gas prices may be relatively low right now, but don't be fooled. The new great game of the 21st century is always over energy and it's taking place on an immense chessboard called Eurasia. Its squares are defined by the networks of pipelines being laid across the oil heartlands of the planet. Call it Pipelineistan. If, in Asia, the stakes in this game are already impossibly high, the same applies to the "Euro" part of the great Eurasian landmass - the richest industrial area on the planet. Think of this as the real political thriller of our time.

The movie of the week in Brussels is: When NATO Meets Pipelineistan. Though you won't find it in any headlines, at virtually every recent summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Washington has been maneuvering to involve reluctant Europeans ever more deeply in the business of protecting Pipelineistan. This is already happening, of course, in Afghanistan, where a promised pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India, the TAPI pipeline, has not even been built. And it's about to happen at the borders of Europe, again around pipelines that have not yet been built.

Paul Krugman: Mission Not Accomplished

Stocks are up. Ben Bernanke says that the recession is over. And I sense a growing willingness among movers and shakers to declare “Mission Accomplished” when it comes to fighting the slump. It’s time, I keep hearing, to shift our focus from economic stimulus to the budget deficit.

No, it isn’t. And the complacency now setting in over the state of the economy is both foolish and dangerous.

Yes, the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration have pulled us “back from the brink” — the title of a new paper by Christina Romer, who leads the Council of Economic Advisers. She argues convincingly that expansionary policy saved us from a possible replay of the Great Depression.

Break the Banks

Why don't any of the Obama administration's financial reforms help middle-class Americans?

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009, at 11:29 AM ET

---

The Obama administration, which has spent much of the past year bailing out banks and protecting the markets, has done shockingly little to help the middle class that has borne the brunt of the financial meltdown. Two acts are particularly revealing. First, the administration failed to go to the mat to give judges the power to reform mortgages in the bankruptcy context. The administration barely winced as the Senate caved to the banks on this critical issue, risking no political capital to protect one of the few reforms that could have totally transformed the mortgage crisis. As the foreclosure wave continues, and as adjustable-rate mortgages hit reset points that are going to cause havoc for millions of additional families, this failure of political leadership by the administration stands as one of the early warning signs that things were amiss.

The second act is the recent—equally difficult to understand—concession to the banks, allowing them not to be required to offer what are called "plain vanilla" mortgages and other products to consumers. These products are simpler, more understandable, less ridden with fees, and less prone to long-term risk than most of what banks try to sell consumers on a regular basis. These are the very products consumers need.

Top Things You Think You Know About Iran That Are Not True

by Informed Comment

by Juan Cole

Thursday is a fateful day for the world, as the US, other members of the United Nations Security Council, and Germany meet in Geneva with Iran [1] in a bid to resolve outstanding issues. Although Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had earlier attempted to put the nuclear issue off the bargaining table, this rhetorical flourish was a mere opening gambit and nuclear issues will certainly dominate the talks. As Henry Kissinger pointed out, these talks are just beginning and there are highly unlikely to be any breakthroughs for a very long time. Diplomacy is a marathon, not a sprint.

But on this occasion, I thought I'd take the opportunity to list some things that people tend to think they know about Iran, but for which the evidence is shaky.

An Estate Tax Victory by Any Other Name

by Chuck Collins

Sometimes you can't declare victory until the other side concedes defeat. That's what happened Monday in the decade-long struggle over the future of the federal estate tax, our nation's only levy on inherited wealth.

The coalition of corporate lobbyists and wealthy families, including the U.S Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Businesses, dropped their long standing call for complete abolition of the tax [1], shifting their lobby resources into weakening the law.

A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That an Innocent Man Was Tortured to Make False Confessions

by Andy Worthington

In four years of researching and writing about Guantánamo, I have become used to uncovering shocking information, but for sheer cynicism, I am struggling to think of anything that compares to the revelations contained in the unclassified ruling in the habeas corpus petition of Fouad al-Rabiah, a Kuwaiti prisoner whose release was ordered last week by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly (PDF [1]). In the ruling, to put it bluntly, it was revealed that the US government tortured an innocent man to extract false confessions and then threatened him until he obligingly repeated those lies as though they were the truth.

The Public Option At Risk

By Jacob S. Hacker

Created 10/01/2009 - 1:44pm

In my interview with Laura Flanders of GritTV, I analyze the prospects for the public option in the Senate in the wake of the Senate Finance Committee's two votes against public option proposals this week.

I'm baffled, as I said in the interview, about how Democrats can think that it is good public policy to force Americans to buy private health insurance without doing anything to make sure that the health insurance is affordable.

FACT CHECK: Loose facts in health horror story

By CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press Writer Calvin Woodward, Associated Press Writer Wed Sep 30, 8:09 pm ET

WASHINGTON – Shona Holmes is the Harry and Louise of this year's health care debate, only unlike the fictional folks who memorably trashed the Clinton-era health plan in advocacy ads 15 years ago, Holmes is real.

But her story? It's not quite the slam-dunk indictment of socialized medicine that's been portrayed by Republican lawmakers and their allies.

Holmes, a Canadian living under that country's single-payer system, has said flatly that her brain tumor would have killed her if she'd accepted her fate in Canada — a wait of four months for one specialist and six months for another. Instead she went to the U.S. and had successful surgery.

UT Knoxville and ORNL researchers reveal key to how bacteria clear mercury pollution

KNOXVILLE -- Mercury pollution is a persistent problem in the environment. Human activity has lead to increasingly large accumulations of the toxic chemical, especially in waterways, where fish and shellfish tend to act as sponges for the heavy metal.

It's that persistent and toxic nature that has flummoxed scientists for years in the quest to find ways to mitigate the dangers posed by the buildup of mercury in its most toxic form, methylmercury.

A new discovery by scientists at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, however, has shed new light on one of nature's best mercury fighters: bacteria.

Plain Talk: Banks too big to fail? Break ’em up

The Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy recently gave its first-ever "Golden Throne Award" to the president and CEO of the American Bankers Association, Edward Yingling.

Suffice it to say that Yingling wasn't thrilled.

The War on Language

Posted on Sep 28, 2009

By Chris Hedges

There is a scene in “Othello” when the Moor is so consumed by jealousy and rage that he loses the eloquence and poetry that make him the most articulate man in Venice. He turns to the audience, shortly before he murders Desdemona, and sputters, “Goats and monkeys!” Othello fell prey to wild self-delusion and unchecked rage, and his words became captive to hollow clichés. The debasement of language, which Shakespeare understood was a prelude to violence, is the curse of modernity. We have stopped communicating, even with ourselves. And the consequences will be as extreme as in the Shakespearean tragedy.

Those who seek to dominate our behavior first seek to dominate our speech. They seek to obscure meaning. They make war on language. And the English- and Arabic-speaking worlds are each beset with a similar assault on language. The graffiti on the mud walls of Gaza that calls for holy war or the crude rants of Islamic militants are expressed in a simplified, impoverished form of Arabic. This is not the classical language of 1,500 years of science, poetry and philosophy. It is an argot of clichés, distorted Quranic verses and slogans. This Arabic is no more comprehensible to the literate in the Arab world than the carnival barking that pollutes our airwaves is comprehensible to our literate classes. The reduction of popular discourse to banalities, exacerbated by the elite’s retreat into obscure, specialized jargon, creates internal walls that thwart real communication. This breakdown in language makes reflection and debate impossible. It transforms foreign cultures, which we lack the capacity to investigate, into reversed images of ourselves. If we represent virtue, progress and justice, as our clichés constantly assure us, then the Arabs, or the Iranians, or anyone else we deem hostile, represent evil, backwardness and injustice. An impoverished language solidifies a binary world and renders us children with weapons.

Exposing How the Government Lied about National Security Letters and the Patriot Act

Last week, I was honored to be invited to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Patriot Act, a new endeavor for the Center for Media and Democracy, even though CMD has covered national security-related issues in its books and on SourceWatch.

One of the reasons I was so pleased to be able to join CMD is because in Washington, DC, I saw first-hand how propaganda and selective disclosures were used to influence and distort public opinion. In my testimony, I highlighted examples from the Patriot Act debate in 2005 where key information was hidden while the bill for reauthorization was being publicly debated, and did not come out until after the bill had passed.

ACORN Foresaw the Foreclosure Crisis in 2001

The grassroots group helped Oakland pass a tough anti-predatory lending law that would have halted the housing crisis before it started. Then subprime lenders started making campaign contributions in Sacramento.

By Robert Gammon

September 29, 2009

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now has been a favorite whipping boy of Fox News for a long time. And it's no secret that the right-wing attacks have worked. A few weeks ago, Congress voted to defund the group after a pair of young Republican operatives went undercover and caught ACORN workers engaged in fraud. And although the group immediately fired the workers, Democrats have sought to distance themselves ever since. But before they completely turn their backs on ACORN, they should remember that while the group has made mistakes over the years, it also was way out in front of the foreclosure crisis. In fact, if politicians had listened, the global financial meltdown might never have happened.

Back in the late 1990s, ACORN was acutely aware of the grave dangers posed by subprime mortgage lending because of the group's close work with low-income property owners. ACORN officials were witnessing first-hand how unscrupulous lenders were enticing people to buy homes they couldn't afford and advising long-time homeowners to strip out all of the equity in their homes. The group then saw those very same people lose everything when their subprime mortgages kicked in and low-income neighborhoods were devastated.

UPDATE: The 'Mysterious' Firm Policing Montana & hired to fill its empty jail is BLACKWATER

Posted by debbierlus in General Discussion
Wed Sep 30th 2009, 08:43 PM

I posted earlier that the following article with links from Rawstory & an AP Story:

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/...

Unknown private security company has been hired to fill the empty 27 million dollar jail. They showed up and started to police small Montana town....(go to the above link for full story)...

Well, a little sleuthing and a nod and cough/cough from Torn_Scorned_Ignored (thank you!)pointed to the formerly unknown company's (American Police Force) webpage:

APF head Hilton has history of legal trouble

Michael Hilton of American Police Force arrived in Hardin with promises of Mercedes police cars and expertise in operating prisons. He delivered the cars last week, but may have learned about prisons following a 1993 conviction for grand theft.

Public records from police and state and federal courts in California show that Michael Anthony Hilton, using that name and more than a dozen aliases over several years, is cited in multiple criminal, civil and bankruptcy cases, and was sentenced in 1993 to two years in state prison in California.

US secretly tried to make deal with Goldman Sachs in wake of financial crisis

Warren Buffett balked at conflict of interest

BREAKING 10:08 AM ET:Vanity Fair will report in the next issue of the magazine that US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson -- a former head of the investment bank Goldman Sachs -- tried to orchestrate secretive deals in the midst of the financial crisis but got blowback from prominent investor Warren Buffett. The following press release was obtained by Raw Story; the magazine appears today on newsstands in New York and Los Angeles.

Economists for an Imaginary World

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

"The worldly philosophers" was economist Robert Heilbroner's term for such great economic thinkers as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. Today's free-market economists, by contrast, aren't merely not philosophers. They're not even worldly.

Has any group of professionals ever been so spectacularly wrong? Pre-Copernican astronomers and cosmologists, I suppose, and for the same reason, really: They had an entire, internally consistent, theoretically rich system that described the universe. They were wrong -- the sun and other celestial bodies save the moon didn't actually revolve around the Earth, as they insisted -- but no matter. It was a thing of beauty, their cosmic order. A vast faith was sustained in part by their pseudo-science, a faith from which such free thinkers as Galileo deviated at their own risk.

Thomas Frank: Obama and the K Street Set

Whatever happened to 'change'?

By Thomas Frank

There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery's version of the Barack Obama "Hope" poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama's Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists' Washington, the place we learned to despise during the last administration.

But our anger diminished while K Street kept on going. Now the Washington Post, that great barometer of the capital's consensus, has taken on what can only be described as a worshipful attitude toward the lobbyist set. And as its journalistic leader ushers in a new era, the attitude of the capital changes: Let us give thanks that our lobbyists are prosperous.

Why Are We Lying to Ourselves About Our Catastrophic Economic Meltdown?

By Arun Gupta, AlterNet
Posted on September 29, 2009, Printed on September 30, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/142975/

Over the last year, the world has received a crash course in real-world capitalism as the follies of Wall Street nearly torpedoed the global economy, which had to be rescued by a trillion-dollar government handout.

Economics, the study of systems of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services, touches virtually facet of our lives from work, recreation and home life to entertainment, culture and social relations.

Off with their blinkered heads

By Julian Delasantellis

The Quaker adage to "speak truth to power" can frequently seem easier in theory than in practice. If you doubt that, ask Sir Thomas Moore. For most of his life he was King Henry VIII's teacher and guide to the disciplines we now call the enlightenment, but after Sir Thomas refused to go along with Henry's creation of the Church of England in order that the monarch could legally marry Anne Boleyn, it was off with Tommy's head, on July 6, 1535.

But that was 475 years ago, before the execution of Charles I for treason in 1649, before the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that made England forevermore a parliamentary democracy. Surely, in this enlightened time, a courtier can offer a true and heartfelt opinion, within the bounds of good taste and propriety, and not have to worry about those hard to remove bloodstains from his shirtcollar.

Newsmax columnist: Military coup "to resolve the 'Obama problem' " is not "unrealistic"

September 29, 2009 5:57 pm ET by Terry Krepel

From John L. Perry's September 29 Newsmax column:

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America's military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the "Obama problem." Don't dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn't the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn't mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it.

[...]

Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a "family intervention," with some form of limited, shared responsibility?

Are Insurers Exploiting Health Care Debate To Mislead Seniors And Drum Up Business?

A mailer being sent by health insurers to seniors, and obtained by TPMmuckraker, seeks to exploit fears about Congressional changes to the health care system to sell supplemental insurance. And it contains false claims about "new" reductions in Medicare benefits imposed by Congress.

Yesterday, 66-year-old Donna Price of Battle Ground, Washington, received this official-looking mailer in a pull-apart envelope from direct mail firm Target Leads (aka TL Service Center).

An Inside Look at How Goldman Sachs Lobbies the Senate

The SEC is holding a public round table Tuesday to explore several issues around securities lending, which has expanded into a big moneymaker for Wall Street firms and pension funds. Regulation hasn’t kept pace, some industry participants contend.Securities lending is central to the practice of short selling, in which investors borrow shares and sell them in a bet that the price will decline. Short sellers later hope to buy back the shares at a lower price and return them to the securities lender, booking a profit. Lending and borrowing also help market makers keep stock trading functioning smoothly.

via SEC Weighs New Rules for Lending of Securities – WSJ.com.

Later on this week I have a story coming out in Rolling Stone that looks at the history of the Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers collapses. The story ends up being more about naked short-selling and the role it played in those incidents than I had originally planned — when I first started looking at the story months ago, I had some other issues in mind, but it turns out that there’s no way to talk about Bear and Lehman without going into the weeds of naked short-selling, and to do that takes up a lot of magazine inches. So among other things, this issue takes up a lot of space in the upcoming story.

Democrats help Republicans kill public healthcare option in committee

WASHINGTON – Liberal Democrats failed Tuesday to inject a government-run insurance option into sweeping health care legislation taking shape in the Senate Finance Committee, despite widespread accusations that private insurers routinely deny coverage in pursuit of higher profits.

The 15-8 rejection marked a victory for Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the committee chairman, who is hoping to push his middle-of-the-road measure through the panel by week’s end. It also kept alive the possibility that at least one Republican may yet swing behind the bill, a key goal of both Baucus and the White House.

Pollution Travels the Globe, Study Confirms

By LiveScience Staff

posted: 29 September 2009 03:23 pm ET

Smog and air pollution from factories can have a negative impact on the air in faraway regions of the world, a new report finds.

In the coming decades, man-made emissions are expected to rise in East Asia and a growing number of countries may feel the effects even as industrialized countries work to tighten environmental protection standards, according to the National Research Council report.

Researchers analyzed meteorological and chemical data and discovered that some pollutant plumes in the United States can be traced back to Asia. One study found that a polluted air mass took about eight days to travel from East Asia to central Oregon.

The Public Option Is Nothing To Fear

Republican opponents of a public option for US healthcare are defending the insurance industry, not conservative principles

by Dean Baker

Back in the good old days, the conservatives were the folks who favoured individual choice. Not any more. In the current healthcare debate, the top priority of the so-called conservatives is to deny people choice. They want to make sure that Americans do not have the option to buy into a Medicare-type public healthcare plan. These alleged conservatives have come up with a variety of arguments against allowing people the Medicare-type option, but the only one that makes sense is that they work for the insurance industry.

The argument against a Medicare-type option always begins with the assertion that the government can't do anything. This is a peculiar claim given the popularity of Medicare, but it also makes no sense as an argument against giving people a buy-in option. Suppose the government gives people the option to buy into its really bad plan. Everyone would just stick with the good private plans we have now, right?

The Case of the Missing Torture Documents

Did ten classified Bush-era documents go missing from a super-secure government facility?

—By Nick Baumann

Mon September 28, 2009 4:00 AM PST

Classified Bush-era documents on the administration's controversial interrogation and rendition programs are missing, according to a recent court filing submitted by the Obama Justice Department. But a Justice Department spokeswoman says the documents may not actually be gone; they may never have existed—even though Bush administration records say that they do. Welcome to the Case of the Disappearing Torture Documents. This is more than just a bureaucratic whodunit. There's a possibility that government officials purposely destroyed records pertaining to detainee abuse.

Right-Wing Conference Tells Activists To Get Their Guns Ready For ‘Bloody Battle’ With Obama The Nazi

At the How To Take Back America Conference last weekend, conservative speaker Kitty Werthmann led a workshop called “How to recognize living under Nazis & Communists.” Announcing the panel in a column preceding the conference, talk show host Janet Porter gushed how Werthmann’s description of Austria in the 1930s is a “mirror to America” today — noting “They had Joseph Goebbels; we have Mark Lloyd, the diversity czar.” The room was packed over capacity to hear Werthmann, who grew up as a Christian in Austria and serves as Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum South Dakota President.

Fed to work with lawmakers on naming borrowers

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Reserve is willing to work with U.S. lawmakers on ways to release names of companies that borrow from the central bank after a time lag so the disclosures do not disrupt markets, a Fed official said.

Scott Alvarez, the Fed's general counsel, told the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee on Friday that the idea was "something that we're giving serious consideration with and we'd be happy to work with you on."

Paul Krugman: Cassandras of Climate

Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’re hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.

And here’s the thing: I’m not engaging in hyperbole. These days, dire warnings aren’t the delusional raving of cranks. They’re what come out of the most widely respected climate models, devised by the leading researchers. The prognosis for the planet has gotten much, much worse in just the last few years.

What’s driving this new pessimism? Partly it’s the fact that some predicted changes, like a decline in Arctic Sea ice, are happening much faster than expected. Partly it’s growing evidence that feedback loops amplifying the effects of man-made greenhouse gas emissions are stronger than previously realized. For example, it has long been understood that global warming will cause the tundra to thaw, releasing carbon dioxide, which will cause even more warming, but new research shows far more carbon locked in the permafrost than previously thought, which means a much bigger feedback effect.

In failed bid to salvage O'Keefe's credibility, Wallace attacks Media Matters

September 27, 2009 3:01 pm ET — 78 Comments

On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace helped videographer James O'Keefe defend his dwindling credibility by advancing several of O'Keefe's claims without noting that they are contradicted by readily available evidence. Wallace suggested that O'Keefe "denies reports" by Media Matters that O'Keefe, in Wallace's words, "got any money from conservative backers" -- without noting that the evidence Media Matters highlighted consisted of public statements by conservatives that they had funded O'Keefe in the past or planned to raise money for O'Keefe and his partner, Hannah Giles, in the future.

Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?

By PAUL TOUGH

“Come on, Abigail.”

“No, wait!” Abigail said. “I’m not finished!” She was bent low over her clipboard, a stubby pencil in her hand, slowly scratching out the letters in the book’s title, one by one: T H E. . . .

“Abigail, we’re waiting!” Jocelyn said, staring forcefully at her classmate. Henry, sitting next to her, sighed dramatically.

“I’m going as fast as I can!” Abigail said, looking harried. She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and plowed ahead: V E R Y. . . .

The three children were seated at their classroom’s listening center, where their assignment was to leaf through a book together while listening on headphones to a CD with the voice of a teacher reading it aloud. The book in question was lying on the table in front of Jocelyn, and every few seconds, Abigail would jump up and lean over Jocelyn to peer at the cover, checking what came next in the title. Then she would dive back to the paper on her clipboard, and her pencil would carefully shape yet another letter: H U N. . . .

Morals Class Is Starting; Please Pass the Popcorn

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: September 25, 2009

Many of the 14,000 or so students who have taken Harvard’s wildly popular course “Justice” with Michael J. Sandel over the years have heard the rumor that their professor has a television avatar: Montgomery Burns, Homer Simpson’s soulless ghoul of a boss at Springfield’s nuclear power plant.

The joke, of course, is that Mr. Sandel — who at one time or another taught several future writers for Fox’s “Simpsons” and shares a receding hairline with the evil-minded cartoon character — is the anti-Burns, a moral philosopher who has devoted his life to pondering what is the right thing to do.

Who's Paying to Kill Health Reform?

In watching town hall after town hall, many of us have looked at attendees frantically spouting nonsense about "death panels" and comparing the public health insurance option to Hitler and wondered, "where do they get these people?"

The Mystique of 'Free Market' Obama

By Jeff Cohen
September 26, 2009

Editor’s Note: There is a debate forming between those on the Left (like Michael Moore) who believe that it’s a mistake to think that President Obama can implement change while progressives mostly sit on their hands and a more critical faction that wants to demand that Obama do what he promised in Campaign 2008.

Moore’s side believes that Obama (an African-American male raised by a single mother) wants to do the right thing for average Americans but faces enormous obstacles from an entrenched political/media structure anchored in the econmic status quo. This structure possesses a potent propaganda machine that can stir up lots of mischief, while the progressives have largely ignored the need for a countervailing media structure.

The Moore side takes the view that it is unrealistic to expect that Obama can defeat this legion of powerful adversaries as a lone ranger. Appearing on television (to promote his new documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story”), Moore wondered what happened to the millions of Americans who voted for Obama but have since retreated into the shadows.

In this guest essay, media critic Jeff Cohen takes the opposing view, suggesting that progressives should get much tougher on Obama:

No matter what the facts are, some liberal activists and leaders persist in seeing President Obama as a principled progressive reformer who lives and breathes the campaign rhetoric about “change you can believe in.”

When he compromises, it’s not Obama’s fault – it’s the opposition. Retreat is never a sell-out but a shrewd tactic, part of some secret long-range strategy for triumphant reform.

He’s been in the White House eight months. It’s time for activists take a harder look at Obama. And a more assertive posture toward him.

U.S. Job Seekers Exceed Openings by Record Ratio

By PETER S. GOODMAN

Despite signs that the economy has resumed growing, unemployed Americans now confront a job market that is bleaker than ever in the current recession, and employment prospects are still getting worse.

Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government began tracking open positions in 2000. According to the Labor Department’s latest numbers, from July, only 2.4 million full-time permanent jobs were open, with 14.5 million people officially unemployed.

And even though the pace of layoffs is slowing, many companies remain anxious about growth prospects in the months ahead, making them reluctant to add to their payrolls.

As Subprime Lending Crisis Unfolded, Watchdog Fed Didn't Bother Barking

By Binyamin Appelbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 27, 2009

The visits had a ritual quality. Three times a year, a coalition of Chicago community groups met with the Federal Reserve and other banking regulators to warn about the growing prevalence of abusive mortgage lending.

They began to present research in 1999 showing that large banking companies including Wells Fargo and Citigroup had created subprime businesses wholly focused on making loans at high interest rates, largely in the black and Hispanic neighborhoods to the south and west of downtown Chicago.

The groups pleaded for regulators to act.

Frank Rich: Obama at the Precipice

THE most intriguing, and possibly most fateful, news of last week could not be found in the health care horse-trading in Congress, or in the international zoo at the United Nations, or in the Iran slapdown in Pittsburgh. It was an item tucked into a blog at ABCNews.com. George Stephanopoulos reported that the new “must-read book” for President Obama’s war team is “Lessons in Disaster” by Gordon M. Goldstein, a foreign-policy scholar who had collaborated with McGeorge Bundy, the Kennedy-Johnson national security adviser, on writing a Robert McNamara-style mea culpa about his role as an architect of the Vietnam War.

Bundy left his memoir unfinished at his death in 1996. Goldstein’s book, drawn from Bundy’s ruminations and deep new research, is full of fresh information on how the best and the brightest led America into the fiasco. “Lessons in Disaster” caused only a modest stir when published in November, but The Times Book Review cheered it as “an extraordinary cautionary tale for all Americans.” The reviewer was, of all people, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose career began in Vietnam and who would later be charged with the Afghanistan-Pakistan crisis by the new Obama administration.