Billmon: Godwin Takes the Day Off

by billmon

Wed Oct 07, 2009 at 07:49:26 AM PDT

Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations . . . The committee in charge of updating the bestselling version, the NIV, is dominated by professors and higher-educated participants who can be expected to be liberal and feminist in outlook. As a result, the revision and replacement of the NIV will be influenced more by political correctness and other liberal distortions than by genuine examination of the oldest manuscripts. As a result of these political influences, it becomes desirable to develop a conservative translation that can serve, at a minimum, as a bulwark against the liberal manipulation of meaning in future versions.

Conservative Bible Project
Conservapedia
October 2009

The Lost Generation

Bright, eager—and unwanted. While unemployment is ravaging just about every part of the global workforce, the most enduring harm is being done to young people who can't grab onto the first rung of the career ladder.

Affected are a range of young people, from high school dropouts, to college grads, to newly minted lawyers and MBAs across the developed world from Britain to Japan. One indication: In the U.S., the unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds has climbed to more than 18%, from 13% a year ago.

Unapologetic

by Jed Lewison

Share this on Twitter - Unapologetic

Sat Oct 10, 2009 at 03:00:04 PM PDT

On Thursday, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) delivered one of the all-time greatest floor speeches ever from the floor of the U.S. House, challenging Republican obstructionists -- and the Democrats who enable them. The great thing about it wasn't that Grayson was saying anything particularly new. It was that finally someone with some power was saying everything that we already know about the GOP and Dems who play ball with them. If you haven't seen it yet, you've got to watch it.

Yesterday on Countdown, Lawrence O'Donnell interviewed Grayson on why he gave the speech and how it has been received. True to form, Grayson was a straight shooter, and managed to rip off a number of good lines, including one on perhaps the most important thing for Dems to remember: you don't beat Republicans by being a Republican.

Who's in Big Brother's Database?

By James Bamford

The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency

by Matthew M. Aid

Bloomsbury, 423 pp., $30.00

On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Derivatives Lobby Links With New Democrats to Blunt Obama Plan

By Dawn Kopecki, Matthew Leising and Shannon D. Harrington

Oct. 9 (Bloomberg) -- As President Barack Obama vowed in a Sept. 14 speech in New York’s Federal Hall to correct “reckless behavior and unchecked excess” on Wall Street, Mike McMahon and Barney Frank sat in the audience discussing how to ease proposed rules for the $592 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market.

Side by side at 26 Wall St., across from the New York Stock Exchange, freshman congressman McMahon told House Financial Services Committee Chairman Frank he was worried that Obama’s derivatives plan, released in August, would penalize a wide swath of U.S. corporations and could push jobs in his home district overseas, McMahon said in an interview.

In Washington, The Revolving Door Is Hazardous to Your Health

by Bill Moyers & Michael Winship

On Tuesday, October 13, the Senate Finance Committee finally is scheduled to vote on its version of health care insurance reform. And therein lies yet another story in the endless saga of money and politics.

In most polls, the majority of Americans favor a non-profit alternative -- like Medicare -- that would give the private health industry some competition. So if so many of us, including President Obama himself, want that public option, how come we're not getting one?

Bill Moyers talks with Marcy Kaptur and Simon Johnson

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL.

I sat in a theater packed with passionate moviegoers, every one of them seemingly aghast at the Wall Street skullduggery exposed by Michael Moore in his latest film. It's called 'Capitalism: A Love Story.' Here's an excerpt:

MICHAEL MOORE: We're here to get the money back for the American People. Do you think it's too harsh to call what has happened here a coup d'état? A financial coup d'état?

MARCY KAPTUR: That's, no. Because I think that's what's happened. Um, a financial coup d'état?

MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah.

MARCY KAPTUR: I could agree with that. I could agree with that. Because the people here really aren't in charge. Wall Street is in charge.

BILL MOYERS: That's the progressive Representative from Ohio, Marcy Kaptur, she's with me now. She has a Masters from the University of Michigan, did graduate study at M.I.T. and still lives in the same house in the Toledo working class neighborhood where she grew up.

Too Politically Connected To Fail In Any Crisis

Over the past 30 years Wall Street captured the thinking of official Washington, persuading policymakers on both sides of the aisle not to regulate (derivatives), to deregulate (Gramm-Leach-Bliley), not enforce existing safety and soundness regulations (VaR), and to stand idly by while millions of consumers were misled into life-ruining financial decisions (Alan Greenspan).

This was pervasive cultural capture or, to be blunter, mind control. But when the crisis broke it was not enough. Having powerful people generally on your side is not what you need when all hell breaks loose in financial markets. Official decisions will be made fast, under great pressure, and by a small group of people standing up in the Oval Office.

MSU research: Small classes have long-term benefit for all students

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Providing small classes for at least several consecutive grades starting in early elementary school gives students the best chance to succeed in later grades, according to groundbreaking new research from a Michigan State University scholar.

The research by Spyros Konstantopoulos, associate professor of education, is the first to examine the effects of class size over a sustained period and for all levels of students – from low- to high-achievers. The study appears in the American Journal of Education.

F.H.A. Problems Raising Concern of Policy Makers

By DAVID STREITFELD and LOUISE STORY

Published: October 8, 2009

A year after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac teetered, industry executives and Washington policy makers are worrying that another government mortgage giant could be the next housing domino.

Problems at the Federal Housing Administration, which guarantees mortgages with low down payments, are becoming so acute that some experts warn the agency might need a federal bailout. Problems at the Federal Housing Administration, which guarantees mortgages with low down payments, are becoming so acute that some experts warn the agency might need a federal bailout.

Glenn Greenwald: A historian's account of Democrats and Bush-era war crimes

The American Propsect's Adam Serwer notes that, yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman successfully inserted into the Homeland Security appropriations bill an amendment -- supported by the Obama White House -- to provide an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act's mandates by authorizing the Defense Secretary to suppress long-concealed photographs of detainee abuse. Two courts had ruled -- unanimously -- that the American people have the right to see these photographs under FOIA, a 40-year-old law championed by the Democrats in the LBJ era and long considered a crowning jewel in their legislative achievements. But this Lieberman amendment, which is now likely to pass, undermines all of that and -- as EBay founder Pierre Omidyar put it today -- its central purpose is to "legalize suppression" of evidence of American war crimes.

Paul Krugman: The Uneducated American

If you had to explain America’s economic success with one word, that word would be “education.” In the 19th century, America led the way in universal basic education. Then, as other nations followed suit, the “high school revolution” of the early 20th century took us to a whole new level. And in the years after World War II, America established a commanding position in higher education.

But that was then. The rise of American education was, overwhelmingly, the rise of public education — and for the past 30 years our political scene has been dominated by the view that any and all government spending is a waste of taxpayer dollars. Education, as one of the largest components of public spending, has inevitably suffered.

Until now, the results of educational neglect have been gradual — a slow-motion erosion of America’s relative position. But things are about to get much worse, as the economic crisis — its effects exacerbated by the penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior that passes for “fiscal responsibility” in Washington — deals a severe blow to education across the board.

Medical Malpractice in the Health Care Debate: Sucking Us Back Into the "Tort Reform" Bog?

Submitted by Anne Landman on October 5, 2009 - 3:00pm.

The current debate over health insurance reform has led to renewed calls by conservatives for tort reform, which they point to as the best way to decrease the cost of medical malpractice cases. "Tort reform" refers to any changes in liability laws that place higher burdens on people injured by products or services, erect barriers to keep their grievances out of the court system and generally tilt the legal playing field in favor of big businesses. Ample information, like that put out by Public Citizen, SourceWatch and investigative reports from other news sources have demonstrated that the so-called "tort reform movement" is actually a massive, corporate-funded, fake "grassroots" campaign perpetrated by American industry to try and restrict citizens' access to the legal system for redress against harms caused by defective products and negligent practices.

Good Billions After Bad

As the Bush administration waned, the Treasury shoveled more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in tarp funds into the financial system—without restrictions, accountability, or even common sense. The authors reveal how much of it ended up in the wrong hands, doing the opposite of what was needed.

By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele

October 2009

Just inside the entrance to the U.S. Treasury, on the other side of a forbidding array of guard stations and scanners that control access to the Greek Revival building, lies one of the most beautiful interior spaces in all of Washington. Ornate bronze doors open inward to a two-story-high chamber. Chandeliers line the coffered ceiling, casting a soft glow on the marble walls and richly inlaid marble floor.

In this room, starting in 1869 and for many decades thereafter, the U.S. government conducted many of its financial transactions. Bags of gold, silver, and paper currency arrived here by horse-drawn vans and were carted upstairs to the vaults. On the busy trading floor, Treasury clerks supplied commercial banks with coins and currency, exchanged old bills for new, cashed checks, redeemed savings bonds, and took in government receipts. In those days, anyone could observe all this activity firsthand—could actually witness the government and the nation’s bankers doing business. The public space where this occurred became known as the Cash Room.

Another faux issue: Obama's 'czars' are nothing new

By William Douglas | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama isn't skirting the U.S. Constitution or abusing his authority by appointing so-called "czars," or policy coordinators, to oversee certain issues or problems, a Senate panel was told Tuesday.

Conservative talk show hosts and some mostly Republican lawmakers have accused Obama of embarking on an unprecedented czar-appointment spree in a bid to circumvent Congress' authority over top executive appointments, to dodge congressional oversight and to consolidate power in the White House.

Support Is Building for a Tax Credit to Help Hiring

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

The idea of a tax credit for companies that create new jobs, something the federal government has not tried since the 1970s, is gaining support among economists and Washington officials grappling with the highest unemployment in a generation.

The proposal has some bipartisan appeal among politicians eager both to help their unemployed constituents and to encourage small-business development. Legislators on Capitol Hill and President Obama’s economic team have been quietly researching the policy for several weeks.

“There is a lot of traction for this kind of idea,” said Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Republican whip. “If the White House will take the lead on this, I’m fairly positive it would be welcomed in a bipartisan fashion.”

Recovering the New Deal Ideal

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, October 7, 2009

A disquieting phrase has entered our economic lexicon: "new normal." The "new normal" economy that emerges from our recovery, many economists fear, won't look like the old normal, the American economy of the past couple of decades. It will look worse.

This is not, after all, a normal recession but a recession prompted by a banking meltdown. To gauge what that means for a recovery, consider the conclusions of a recent International Monetary Fund report that looked at 88 banking crises around the world over the past four decades. It found, on average, that seven years after these crises, the economic output of the affected nations was still 10 percent below what it would have been had the crisis not happened.

Re: Obama's Email Problem

Two watchdog groups want answers on how millions of Bush-era messages vanished—and they're losing patience with the White House.

—By Nick Baumann

Wed October 7, 2009 3:49 AM PST

An old problem is back in Barack Obama's inbox: What to do about millions of missing Bush-era emails?

In March, two Washington watchdog groups agreed to suspend a lawsuit against the White House—a case the Obama administration inherited from its predecessor—that aimed to force the government to recover the emails and modernize its archiving of electronic documents. At the time, the Obama administration had indicated it was willing to work toward a settlement. But months have passed with little progress and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive now say they are beginning to lose patience with the White House and are considering reviving the case. At stake are records that could shed light on controversies including the lead-up to the Iraq War and the leaking of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert CIA identity.

We Interact with 100,000+ Chemicals, and the Dangers Are Barely Understood

By Monona Rossol, AlterNet
Posted on October 7, 2009, Printed on October 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143130/

Last month, the Chemical Abstract Service, an agency that registers every new chemical as it is invented or discovered, assigned a registry number to the 50 millionth chemical. It's a landmark to be sure, but not one we're likely to look back on fondly.

The Chemical Abstract Service began to register chemicals in 1956, and it took 33 years to register the first 10 million new chemicals.

They identified these chemicals primarily from research papers accumulated from worldwide sources. But the last 10 million chemicals were registered in nine months at the rate of 25 per minute!

THE ROVING EYE: Stuck in Kabul, with Saigon blues again

By Pepe Escobar

Some things never change. It was "only" eight years ago that the George W Bush administration unleashed its mini-shock and awe over Afghanistan to, in theory, smash the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Stuck inside of Kabul with the Saigon blues again, the "overseas contingency operations" of the Barack Obama administration continue to perpetrate a myth; never shall the words "Afghanistan" and "oil" be mentioned in the same sentence.

Instead, what is played to the jaded Washington galleries is the shabby spectacle of the dance of the generals - the serpent biting its own tail of the show of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, National Security Adviser retired General Jim Jones and General Stanley McChrystal, the top man in Afghanistan. Add to it extended, "analytical" corporate media reports of the "Has Obama lost his mojo?" kind; and the grandiose "Amanpour" at George Washington University collecting platitudes from the Pentagon supremo Robert Gates-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton combo.

AP Poll: Health care overhaul has a pulse

By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR and TREVOR TOMPSON, Associated Press Wed Oct 7, 12:49 pm ET

WASHINGTON – The fever has broken. The patient is out of intensive care. But if you're President Barack Obama, you can't stop pacing the waiting room. Health care overhaul is still in guarded condition.

The latest Associated Press-GfK poll has found that opposition to Obama's health care remake dropped dramatically in just a matter of weeks. Still, Americans remain divided over complex legislation that Democrats are advancing in Congress.

Conservative Majority in Supreme Court Threatens Our Politics and Most Basic Freedoms

By , Think Progress
Posted on October 6, 2009, Printed on October 6, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143100/

by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Ian Milhiser, and Zaid Jilani

October 5 marks the beginning of a new Supreme Court term, a session that will marked by high-profile cases that the Court's conservative majority could use to reshape the law. In its first full term together, the Roberts Court's conservative bloc immediately began cutting back on women's reproductive freedom, entrenching public school segregation, and undermining equal pay in the workforce, among other things, prompting retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to comment that she fears that some of her decisions "are being dismantled" by the current, more conservative-leaning court. "If you think you've been helpful, and then it's dismantled, you think, 'Oh, dear,'" she said. "But life goes on. It's not always positive." Yet while the conservative justices are perfectly willing to thumb their noses at precedent, they occasionally restrain themselves from politically-charged rulings likely to inspire a congressional backlash. Last term, for example, the Court pleasantly surprised the civil rights community by resisting the temptation to eviscerate two landmark prohibitions on race discrimination. This term, the Court has already agreed to hear more potentially-earthshaking cases than it has in years; the only question is how aggressive the Court will be in pushing its right-wing agenda.

APPF's Dubious Story Gets Even More Dubious

We've known since last week that the story surrounding a deal that handed an empty jail in Hardin, MT, to shadowy private security company American Private Police Force just wasn't adding up. Today, it became still more clear that APPF has a lot of explaining to do.

The demise of the dollar

In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading

By Robert Fisk

Tuesday, 6 October 2009

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The Washington Post Needs to Come Clean on Net Neutrality

by Timothy Karr

A Washington Post blog post published Monday hits on one central reason for making Net Neutrality the law.

In "Protecting Free Speech in the Digital Age [1], " guest blogger Dawn Nunziato says that free speech on the Internet is too important to be subject to the whims of powerful phone and cable companies -- companies that have already demonstrated their willingness to block new ideas and innovations via the Web.

Nunziato is spot on. But a blog post doesn't go nearly far enough to right the wrong the Post’s editors committed the Monday before, when they printed a full-fledged editorial [2] against Net Neutrality without revealing to readers that the Washington Post Co. has an economic incentive to block online speech.

White House angry at General Stanley McChrystal speech on Afghanistan

According to sources close to the administration, Gen McChrystal shocked and angered presidential advisers with the bluntness of a speech given in London last week.

The next day he was summoned to an awkward 25-minute face-to-face meeting on board Air Force One on the tarmac in Copenhagen, where the president had arrived to tout Chicago's unsuccessful Olympic bid.

Acidic clouds nourish world's oceans

Scientists at the University of Leeds have proved that acid in the atmosphere breaks down large particles of iron found in dust into small and extremely soluble iron nanoparticles, which are more readily used by plankton.

This is an important finding because lack of iron can be a limiting factor for plankton growth in the ocean - especially in the southern oceans and parts of the eastern Pacific. Addition of such iron nanoparticles would trigger increased absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Paul Krugman: The Politics of Spite

There was what President Obama likes to call a teachable moment last week, when the International Olympic Committee rejected Chicago’s bid to be host of the 2016 Summer Games.

“Cheers erupted” at the headquarters of the conservative Weekly Standard, according to a blog post by a member of the magazine’s staff, with the headline “Obama loses! Obama loses!” Rush Limbaugh declared himself “gleeful.” “World Rejects Obama,” gloated the Drudge Report. And so on.

So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.

But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for America.

Here's the Skinny on Why Wal-Mart Is So Evil (and Has Made Such a Killing)

By David Moberg, In These Times
Posted on October 3, 2009, Printed on October 5, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143009/

The success of Wal-Mart is in many ways paradoxical. The world’s biggest corporation -- and one of the most technologically sophisticated -- emerged from the poor, rural backwaters of Arkansas, a state regularly at the bottom of most state achievement rankings. Increasingly global in procurement and sales, it grew from a base that was racially homogenous -- a result of the violent expulsion of African-Americans -- and suspicious of all outsiders. A company that plays on “family values” is based in a region with one of the highest divorce rates in the United States. A region of low-income families adhering to a range of anti-materialist Protestant faiths gives birth to this colossus of consumerism. And the list goes on.

But as a business, it does a lot of things right, even if the social consequences are often wrong. Now, adding valuable new analyses to a growing literature on a company both deeply loved and passionately hated, two historians offer distinctive, if overlapping, accounts of what Sam Walton hath wrought. Both books are essential reading for understanding not just Wal-Mart, but also America’s general political and economic trajectory.

We've Given Trillions to the Super Rich -- There Are Many Better Uses for Your Money

By Matt Bivens, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on October 5, 2009, Printed on October 5, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143074/

There are many possible responses to the news that we have committed more than four trillion public dollars to Wall Street.

Mine is a roar of admiration.

Four trillion dollars! Holy hell! I didn't even know that was possible!

U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

After all, the cost of World War II in inflation-adjusted dollars was $4 trillion. This bailout thing is just getting started, and already we've burned through that.

New doubt on US's Iran plant claim

By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - An Iranian assertion that construction on its second uranium-enrichment facility began only last year and further analysis of satellite photos of the site have cast fresh doubts on the Barack Obama administration's charge that the construction of the plant near the holy city of Qom involved a covert decision to violate Iran's obligations to report immediately to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on any decision to build a new facility.

At a September 25 briefing on the site, senior administration officials refused to provide any specific information to back up the claim that construction had begun before the March 2007 Iranian withdrawal from an agreement requiring that it inform the IAEA immediately of any decision to build a nuclear facility.

Rethink the Patriot Act

Let's restore constitutional safeguards, protect civil liberties

by Susan Goering

Remember the Patriot Act?

How could librarian Peter Chase ever forget. In 2005, Mr. Chase, the director of the Plainville, Conn., public library and then-vice president of a consortium of 26 Connecticut libraries, received an FBI demand for library patron records via a National Security Letter authorized under the Patriot Act. The FBI also imposed a gag order prohibiting him from speaking to anyone about the demand - including Congress, when the Patriot Act was up for reauthorization in 2005.

Now, thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union, Mr. Chase has finally won the legal battle and has torn the Bush administration's tape from his mouth. So he's speaking out, and this is what he has to say: "The government was telling Congress that it didn't use the Patriot Act against libraries and that no one's rights had been violated. I felt that I just could not be part of this fraud being foisted on our nation."

Commentary: Now's the time for Obama to just say 'no'

By Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers

There are times when less is more and more is the wrong answer, and right now in Afghanistan would seem to be one of those times.

There are a lot of theories and proposals flying around as President Barack Obama and his national security advisers debate what our military and civilian arms of the government can do with the eight-year old war in Afghanistan.

Wanted: Leadership on Jobs

By every meaningful measure, the weak job market deteriorated further in September. Federal stimulus spending has prevented an even worse decline. But that is cold comfort for the tens of millions of working men and women for whom conditions are bleak and getting bleaker, and for the millions more who are destined to lose their jobs — or to have their hours and compensation cut — in the months and years to come.

Congress must enact emergency unemployment benefits without delay. Equally important, the Obama administration must flesh out its commitment to ensure that economic recovery does not leave middle-class and low-income families behind.

Inside the Crisis

by Ryan Lizza
October 12, 2009

In early August, Lawrence H. Summers, President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, accompanied Vice-President Joseph Biden aboard Air Force Two on a trip to Detroit. Michigan has a fifteen-per-cent unemployment rate, the highest in America, and Detroit has become virtually a ward of the federal government: the United States now owns ten per cent of Chrysler and sixty-one per cent of General Motors. The purpose of Biden’s trip was to announce an additional $2.4 billion in federal grants, to help jump-start the electric-car industry; more than a billion will go to battery and auto manufacturers in Michigan.

Summers, who is the director of the National Economic Council, the White House office that coordinates all economic policy in the Obama Administration, has rarely traveled outside Washington this year, and was in Detroit on a fact-finding mission. After nearly a year of debate about how much federal intervention was needed to beat back the recession—a debate that started during the end of the Presidential campaign—he was somewhat optimistic. The principal measures that Obama had taken—implementing the stimulus package, rescuing the banks, restructuring the automakers—had begun to stabilize the economy. In a speech three weeks earlier, Summers had put it this way: “We were at the brink of catastrophe at the beginning of the year, but we have walked some substantial distance back from the abyss.” It seemed like a good moment to check in on the government’s investments in Michigan.

U.S. Job Losses May Be Even Larger, Model Breaks Down

Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. economic slump earlier this year was so severe it short-circuited the government’s model for calculating payrolls, raising the risk that today’s jobs report may be too optimistic.

About 824,000 more jobs may be subtracted from the payroll count for the 12 months through last March when the figures are officially revised early next year, a Labor Department report showed today. The revision would be the biggest since at least 1991.

After More Job Losses, Democrats Move to Extend Benefits

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON — In the wake of further job losses in September, President Obama on Saturday called the new figures “sobering” and said that he was working with his economic advisers “to explore additional options to promote job creation.”

Mr. Obama suggested that a health care overhaul would help revive the economy and create jobs. The president’s remarks, in his weekly radio and Internet address, came as the White House and Congressional Democrats considered steps to help the unemployed, including extending enhanced unemployment benefits past December, continuing a tax credit for workers who have been laid off and extending a tax credit for first-time home buyers.

The jobless numbers, released by the Labor Department on Friday, showed that the unemployment rate for September had risen to 9.8 percent from 9.7 percent and that 263,000 jobs were lost last month.

Frank Rich: The Rabbit Ragu Democrats

IN the annals of American excess, there often arrives a moment when those with too much money, too much clout and too much hubris just can’t stop themselves from tempting the fates. They throw an over-the-top party in public, or parade their wealth and power before the press, and the next thing you know their world, and sometimes ours, has crashed.

In the go-go Reagan 1980s, the junk bond king Michael Milken bedazzled investors with lavish Predators’ Balls in Beverly Hills. Sure enough, he and Wall Street would end the decade in ruin. Back East, the financier Saul Steinberg celebrated his 50th birthday in 1989 with a $1 million party in the Hamptons. “Honey, if this moment were a stock, I’d short it,” he said when toasting his wife. He would soon suffer a stroke and see his company go bankrupt.

Steinberg sold his vast New York apartment to the private equity titan Stephen Schwarzman. In February 2007, Schwarzman marked his 60th birthday with a highly visible multimillion-dollar bacchanal in the Park Avenue Armory. Though Schwarzman hasn’t suffered much since — he is tied for 50th on the new Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans — his bash presaged the bust to come. He became, as James Stewart wrote in The New Yorker, “the designated villain of an era on Wall Street — an era of rapacious capitalists and heedless self-indulgence.”

Politicians beware: Oil photo exhibit opens in DC

By BRETT ZONGKER, Associated Press Writer
Writer Sat Oct 3, 11:52 am ET

WASHINGTON – Politicians, cover your eyes.

The first exhibit of 56 large-scale color landscapes from Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky chronicling the impact of oil made its debut Saturday at Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art — less than a block from the White House. The show, chronicling the world's predominant energy source, can't help carrying a political zing.

"Edward Burtynsky: Oil," opens at the privately funded museum as Congress is struggling with a climate bill that could include a "cap and trade" system to reduce greenhouse gases. Critics say it could drive up energy costs.