Beck's Guest List Included White Supremacists, Other Extremists

Conservative radio and television talk show host Glenn Beck has made his reputation and fortune in part by taking innocent if not strictly professional relations and turning them into major political scandals. His crusades against Obama administration advisers Patrick Gaspard and Van Jones, who has since resigned, stand out as crowning achievements of the guilt-by-association game.

What happens, however, when one looks closely at the people Beck has chosen to invite onto his show, and to whom he has lent his megaphone?

Copenhagen: Getting past the urgency trap

Saturday, November 21, 2009
-- by Sara

Note: Some of you have wondered where I went. Starting October 1, I went on a much-needed blogging sabbatical to work on my thesis. The current plan is to be back blogging at least weekly starting the first week of January. I had no idea how much I needed the rest. Really.

(Thanks for all the lovely notes enquiring about my disappearance -- I do feel well-missed. And my health is not just good, but robust.)

The article below appeared earlier this week at Grist.

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Copenhagen’s still three weeks away, but climate activists are already voicing their enormous disappointment about everything that’s not going to get done there. The heat is rising, and we’re all feeling the overwhelming urgency to get a strong global agreement that will get the laggards off their butts and launch the structural reformations most of us know we need to fix the problem. A lot of us, it seems, loaded all our highest hopes onto this one conference, wanting desperately to believe that this would finally be the moment the long-awaited Grand Transformation would occur.

But the hard truth of the matter is this: change of this magnitude never happens with a single conference, a single treaty, or even a single disaster. The structural changes required to get us off carbon and onto a truly sustainable footing challenge the economic assumptions that humans have lived by for 2500 years. Change that wide and deep will be the work of an entire century, maybe two. (If we’re smart and lucky, our grandchildren may live to see it mostly done.) All of us are well aware of the precarious time crunch we’re under here; but humans change only as fast as they change, and forcing the issue isn’t likely to help. And it may even hurt us in the long run.

Kelo outcome shows Atlantic Yards risk

The outcome of New York's embattled eminent domain development projects is called into question by the economic development project which made them possible.

The Pfizer research facility at the center of the Kelo v. New London Supreme Court decision is closing, taking over 1,400 jobs with it. The 5-4 Kelo decision allowed New London, CT to use eminent domain to condemn private property for the "public purpose" of commercial development near a new Pfizer research facility. The city, which gave Pfizer a property tax break of 80% for the first ten years, spent $80 million preparing the seized property to build the condominiums and hotels they promised to draw Pfizer into town. Development was supposed to bring 3,000 jobs to the area.

Coal-Fueled Chamber Of Commerce Demands Lawmakers Defeat Health Reform In Order To ‘Stop’ Clean Energy Bill

Corporate front groups and large business trade associations are funneling their resources into defeating health reform. Even though health reform will lower costs for small businesses and boost worker productivity economy-wide, it appears that corporate entities influenced by major polluters are hoping that the defeat of health care legislation will slow President Obama’s agenda and derail their true enemy: clean energy reform.

Bill Moyers Tells a Tale of Two Quagmires: Vietnam & Afghanistan

posted by John Nichols on 11/21/2009 @ 09:34am

Bill Moyers, who was at the side of President Lyndon Johnson at the time when disastrous decisions were being made to escalate the U.S. presence in the quagmire that was Vietnam, used his experience to speak Friday night to President Barack Obama about what could be an equally disastrous decision to escalate the U.S. presence in the quagmire that is Afghanistan.

"Our country wonders this weekend what is on President Obama's mind," Moyers began, at the opening of a remarkable hour of television. "He is apparently, about to bring months of deliberation to a close and answer General Stanley McChrystal's request for more troops in Afghanistan. When he finally announces how many, why, and at what cost, he will most likely have defined his presidency, for the consequences will be far-reaching and unpredictable. As I read and listen and wait with all of you for answers, I have been thinking about the mind of another president, Lyndon B. Johnson."

America's House of Lords Debates Health Care

by Steven Hill

The health care debate has been like a tennis match, bouncing from the Senate to the House and back again. Now it's back in the Senate, as the United States tries to end its status as the only advanced economy without universal health care for its people. One hundred Senators from 50 states will decide what lives and what dies, health-care wise.

With so much at stake, it makes sense to ask: who are these 100 Senators? Might that give us a clue as to what to expect from America's upper chamber?

For starters, this "representative" body hardly looks or thinks like the rest of the nation. Only seventeen are women, while the United States is majority female. Only five are Hispanic, black, or Asian American, even as the nationwide melting pot has become one-third minority.

A Show About Nothing: The Placeholder Presidency of Barack Obama

by David Michael Green

Hey, remember Seinfeld? Remember how it billed itself as a "show about nothing", and how, in fact, that's what it was?

I think we're at the point now where it's become inescapable that the Obama presidency is also a show about nothing.

It's the same as Seinfeld. Except for two things.

First, unlike Seinfeld, it bills itself as a show about something, if not everything (remember Mr. Bigtime Change from just last year?).

And, second, the nothingness of the Obama administration is not very goddam funny, thanks just the same.

Naomi Klein: 'No Logo' Revisited

By Naomi Klein, Picador Press
Posted on November 21, 2009, Printed on November 21, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144106/

The following is from the new introduction to the 10th Anniversary Edition of Naomi Klein's classic book, "No Logo (Picador, 2009)"

As I write this introduction, thinking about how much branding has changed in ten years, a couple of developments seem worth mentioning off the top. In May of 2009, Absolut Vodka launched a limited-edition line called "Absolut No Label." The company's global public relations manager Kristina Hagbard explains that, "for the first time we dare to face the world completely naked. We launch a bottle with no label and no logo, to manifest the idea that no matter what's on the outside, it's the inside that really matters ... We encourage people to think twice about their prejudice, because in an Absolut world, there are no labels."

A few months later, Starbucks tried to avoid being judged by its own label by opening its first unbranded coffee shop in Seattle, called 15th Avenue E Coffee and Tea. This "stealth Starbucks" (as the anomalous outlet immediately became known) was decorated with "one-of-a-kind" fixtures and customers were invited to bring in their own music for the stereo system as well as their own pet social causes -- all to help develop what the company called "a community personality." Customers had to look hard to find the small print on the menus: "inspired by Starbucks." Tim Pfeiffer, a Starbucks senior vice president, explained that unlike the ordinary Starbucks outlet that used to occupy the very same piece of retail space, "This one is definitely a little neighborhood coffee shop." After spending two decades blasting its logo onto 16,000 stores worldwide, Starbucks was now trying to escape its own brand.

CRA Bashing, Nth Generation

The Community Reinvestment Act is a law originally passed in 1977 that directed federal regulatory agencies to ensure that the banks they supervised were not discriminating against particular communities in making credit available.The onset of the subprime mortgage crisis triggered a flood of sloppy, lazy attacks on the CRA claiming that since the crisis was created by excess lending to the poor, and the CRA was intended to increase lending to the poor, the CRA must have caused the crisis. These arguments suffered from a mistaken premise (subprime lending had a modest negative correlation with income, but many subprime loans were used by the middle class to buy expensive houses in the suburbs and exurbs of California and Nevada) and a failure to check their facts (“Only six percent of all the higher-priced loans were extended by CRA-covered lenders to lower-income borrowers or neighborhoods in their CRA assessment areas, the local geographies that are the primary focus for CRA evaluation purposes.” — Randall Kroszner, former Fed governor appointed by President George W. Bush, in a Federal Reserve study that also found that subprime loan performance was no worse in CRA-covered zip codes than in slightly more affluent zip codes not covered by the CRA.)

Paul Krugman: The Big Squander

Earlier this week, the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, a k a, the bank bailout fund, released his report on the 2008 rescue of the American International Group, the insurer. The gist of the report is that government officials made no serious attempt to extract concessions from bankers, even though these bankers received huge benefits from the rescue. And more than money was lost. By making what was in effect a multibillion-dollar gift to Wall Street, policy makers undermined their own credibility — and put the broader economy at risk.

Eliot Spitzer: Obama Economic Policies Ineffective, A Continuation Of Bush

Are Obama's economic policies actually working?

Intelligence Squared posed this question to six policy experts at a debate in New York this week. The statement, "Obama's economic policies are working effectively," was defended by Lawrence Mishel from the Economic Policy Institute; investor and former 'Car Czar' Steven Rattner; and Mark Zandi, the chief economist and co-founder of Moody's Economy.com.

What Is So Patriotic About Hysteria?

By Joe Conason

The loudest voices on the right never tire of telling us that they are the truest patriots. They claim to be the deepest believers in our system, the strongest defenders of our Constitution, the most upbeat, bold and courageous Americans anywhere. But now that the government is finally prepared to put the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 terror attacks on trial, these same patriots are the first to spread doubt, instigate anxiety and abandon constitutional principles.

When did fear-mongering in a time of war become an act of patriotism?

Economists Opposing Fed Audit Have Undisclosed Fed Ties

As the debate over an audit of the Federal Reserve intensifies in the House, one camp is trotting out eight academics that it calls a "political cross section of prominent economists."

A review of their backgrounds shows they are anything but.

On the crest of wave energy

Engineers use aerospace approach to design wave energy system

The ocean is a potentially vast source of electric power, yet as engineers test new technologies for capturing it, the devices are plagued by battering storms, limited efficiency, and the need to be tethered to the seafloor.

Now, a team of aerospace engineers is applying the principles that keep airplanes aloft to create a new wave-energy system that is durable, extremely efficient, and can be placed anywhere in the ocean, regardless of depth.

While still in early design stages, computer and scale-model tests of the system suggest higher efficiencies than wind turbines. The system is designed to effectively cancel incoming waves, capturing their energy while flattening them out, providing an added application as a storm-wave breaker.

The Tea Party's Favorite Doctors

They’re not just against health care reform. They think Obama may have hypnotized voters and that climate legislation threatens your health.

—By Stephanie Mencimer
Wed November 18, 2009 3:00 AM PST

Most tea party protests against health care reform feature a standard cast of characters. Revolution-era patriots in greatcoats and tricorne hats; LaRouchies handing out pictures of Obama with a Hitler mustache; the people with the giant fetus signs; and some guy dressed as an actual tea bag. Then, there are the doctors. Real doctors. They wear white coats and they look respectable. And many of them come from a group with a respectable-sounding name—the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.

How Limousine Liberals, Water Oligarchs and Even Sean Hannity Are Hijacking Our Water Supply

By Yasha Levine, AlterNet
Posted on November 19, 2009, Printed on November 19, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144020/

A group of water oligarchs in California have engineered a disastrous deregulation and privatization scheme. And they've pulled in hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars without causing much public outrage. The amount of power and control they wield over California's most precious resource, water, should shock and frighten us -- and it would, if more people were aware of it. But here is the scary thing: They are plotting to gain an even larger share of California's increasingly-scarce, over-tapped water supply, which will surely lead to shortages, higher prices and untold destruction to California's environment.

Is House Health Care Bill a Threat to Our Constitution?

By Barry W. Lynn, Americans United for Separation of Church and State
Posted on November 18, 2009, Printed on November 19, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144045/

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece was delivered as a statement at a press conference called by the Religious Coaltion for Reproductive Choice at the National Press Club on November 16, 2009. The topic was the anti-choice amendment, authored by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., that was attached to the House health-care reform bill.

In the United States, the institutions of government and religion are separate.

This is not just my opinion. It is the law of the land. Our Constitution prohibits Congress from making laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” The Supreme Court has stated more than once that laws must not advance religion or have a religious purpose.

How surprising and appalling, then, to see that a provision designed to curtail women’s right to abortion was slipped into the health-care bill at the behest of a powerful religious group, a provision that reflects the doctrines of that group.

Former evangelist: Religious right is ‘trawling for assassins’

By David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 -- 12:04 pm

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is concerned that President Obama's trip abroad has served to bring out "the unhinged among the president's critics."

Not only have the Wall Street Journal and the hosts of Fox News been issuing their usual dark mutterings, but a new slogan has began appearing on bumper stickers, tshirts, and even teddy bears: "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8."

The Weekly Standard's ACLU Smear Indicts Only Itself

by Glenn Greenwald

Even for The Weekly Standard, this bitter, juvenile McCarthyite attack on the ACLUcirca 2002 that anyone who believes in the Constitution -- i.e., radical "far leftist" doctrines such as "trials" and "due process" -- secretly harbors love for the Terrorists and hatred for America ("The ACLU has worked diligently to undermine America's stance in what was formerly known as the 'war on terror,' and has even been willing to disseminate propaganda on behalf of our jihadist enemies"). What the article actually -- and ironically -- reveals is how much contempt The Weekly Standard and much of America's Right has for the nation's core political values and how, in the process, they do more to aid Islamic extremists than even those who directly fund and advocate for them. by Thomas Joscelyn sputters with so much fact-free, impotent, and self-defeating rage that it's hard to believe it was printed. Right in the headline, it oh-so-cleverly smears the ACLU as "Al Qaeda's Civil Liberties Union"; it ends by proclaiming the group to be "al Qaeda's useful idiots"; and it's filled in the middle with all sorts of trite innuendo

The Problem With A Jobs Bill – And Everything Else

By Dave Johnson

Created 11/18/2009 - 2:57pm

The country needs a jobs program and needs it right now. Cash for Caulkers [1] would be a good start. A new Civilian Conservation Corps would be another. But let's not allow a jobs program to cover over the need for real changes in the structure and core principles of our economy.

Yes, an effective jobs program can help people hold out a while longer - until necessary changes are made. It can make the unemployment rate will look better, for a while, and maybe the GDP will climb a little bit. But our low-wage, everything-to-the-top economy is not sustainable and needs to be redesigned and reregulated. The economy has to be changed so that it works for all of us, instead of just a few.

Archives To Proceed with CSI-ish Watergate Test

— By David Corn | Wed November 18, 2009 11:14 AM PST

In July, I was the first to report that the National Archives was considering conducting high-tech forensic tests on two pages of presidential records that could provide key clues to one of the great political mysteries in US history: what was on the 18 1/2 minutes of White House tapes suspiciously erased during the Watergate scandal? Last year, Phil Mellinger, a one-time National Security Agency systems analyst and Watergate researcher, made an intriguing discovery—that meeting notes written by H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon's chief of staff, seemed to contain a gap corresponding to the gap in the recording of the infamous June 20, 1972 conversation during which Nixon and Haldeman discussed the Watergate break-in. Mellinger asked the Archives to test other pages of Haldeman notes from this meeting to determine if indented writing could be found on these pages. The goal would be to find impressions indicating what Haldeman had written on possibly missing pages that covered the part of the conversation obliterated from the tapes. On Wednesday, the National Archives announced it was proceeding with the testing Mellinger requested.

Who Are You and What Have You Done With the Community Organizer We Elected President?

By Robert Scheer

What’s up with Barack Obama? The candidate for change once promised to take on the powerful banking interests but is now doing their bidding. Finally, a leading Democrat, in this case Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, has a good idea for monitoring the Wall Street fat cats who all but destroyed the American economy, and the Obama administration condemns it.

Dodd wants to take supervisory power from the Federal Reserve, which is controlled by the banks it pretends to monitor, and put it in the hands of a new independent agency. That makes sense given the Fed’s abject failure to properly monitor the financial sector over the past decade as that industry got drunk on greed. As Dodd’s spokeswoman Kirstin Brost put it: “The Federal Reserve flat out failed at supervising the largest, most complex firms.” But White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee frets that taking power from the Fed would cause financial industry “nervousness.” Isn’t that the whole point of government regulation—to make the bandits look over their shoulders before they launch their next destructive scam?

The Debt Economy

by James Surowiecki

November 23, 2009

John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that all financial crises are the result of “debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale.” The recent financial crisis was no exception, with everyone—homeowners, private-equity investors, our biggest banks—taking on enormous amounts of debt. If it’s frustrating that the government is footing the bill to clean up the mess, it’s even worse that the government helped pay for the debt binge that created the mess in the first place, thanks to a tax system that actually subsidizes borrowing. Debt didn’t get dangerously out of scale because the system was broken. It got out of scale, in part, because the system worked.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs -- Finally

By Robert Borosage

Created 11/18/2009 - 10:56am

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gets it. No wonder she drives the wingnuts batty.

With the Senate befuddled by the antics of Joe Lieberman and Max Baucus on health care and the White House Clintonistas lobbying President Obama to devote his January State of the Union address to deficit reduction, Pelosi ladled up [1] a portion of common sense. Unemployment is over 10 percent and rising. It is time to focus on jobs. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid added his support. The President announced a job summit for December. Democrats finally got the subject right.

The need is clear. One in six workers is unemployed, has given up looking or is forced to work part-time. For young workers aged 16 to 24, unemployment is 19 percent. For young African Americans, unemployment is at 30 percent. And as Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke testified [2] yesterday, we're likely to see—at best—a slow recovery with no new job growth. That exacts a devastating toll in hopes crushed, families stressed, young people stalled, and poverty and hunger spreading.

Study: Stupak Amendment Will Eliminate Abortion Coverage 'Over Time For All Women'

A new study by the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services adds some expert imprimatur to what many progressives have been saying all along: The Stupak amendment to the House health care bill--which will prevent millions of women from buying health insurance policies that cover abortion--is likely to have consequences that reach far beyond its supposedly intended scope.

Dollar doing the right thing

Scroll down to get to the point of this story--Dictynna

By Julian Delasantellis

[...]

Like the German battleship Bismarck, all of Murdoch's considerable media firepower - from The Times of London to the Wall Street Journal to the New York Post to Fox News and more - are spending sunup to sundown firing on the supposedly poor greenback, before handing the franchise over to the night shift for another round of poundings.

Thomas Frank: The Persecution of Sarah Palin

Her memoir is full of vindictiveness and score-settling.

By THOMAS FRANK

Maybe in their business lives, conservatives are the stern, unforgiving masters of capitalist lore. But when it comes to politics, oh, do they love a whiner!

It is her mastery of the lament that explained former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s appeal last year, and now her knack for self-pity is on full display in her book, “Going Rogue.” This is the memoir as prolonged, keening wail, larded with petty vindictiveness. With an impressive attention to detail, Ms. Palin settles every score, answers every criticism; locates a scapegoat for every foul-up, and fastens an insult on every critic, down to the last obscure Palin-doubter back in Alaska.

From Ms. Palin’s masterwork, we learn that the personal really is the political. Every encounter with a critic seems to be a skirmish in the culture wars, from the Alaska debate moderator who didn’t play fair once to the “wealthy, effete young chap” who ran against her for governor but who, in one of the quickest transitions from anti-snob to snob in all of literature, is also said to have served as “our limo driver at [her husband] Todd’s cousin’s wedding.”

Big Think Interview with Rick Perlstein

Rick Perlstein: I’m Rick Perlstein. I’m the author of “Nixonland.”

Question: Has Obama succeeded on his promise of being a “post-partisan” President?

Rick Perlstein: Well, the problem with Obama’s post-partisan agenda is that he came into it. He came into his presidency at a time when millions of Americans, perhaps even tens of millions of Americans don’t consider a democrat president legitimate. Don’t consider liberalism legitimate. Don’t consider the idea of the state forming new programs to help people legitimate. So, he’s in a situation a lot like, you know, Abraham Lincoln faced in 1860 when you had millions of Americans who didn’t even consider what was going in Washington to have anything to do with them.

Discretion and financial regulation

An enduring truth about financial regulation is this: Given the discretion to do so, financial regulators will always do the wrong thing.

It's easy to explain why. In good times, regulators have every incentive to take banks at their optimistic word on asset valuations, and therefore on bank capitalization. It is almost impossible for bank regulators to be "tough" in good times, for the same reason it is almost impossible for mutual fund managers to be bearish through a bubble. A "conservative" bank examiner who lowballs valuation estimates will inevitably face angry pushback from the regulated bank. Moreover, the examiner will be "proven wrong", again and again, until she loses her job. Her fuddyduddy theories about cash flow and credit analysis will not withstand empirical scrutiny, as crappy credits continually perform while asset prices rise. Valuations can remain irrational much longer than a regulator can remain employed.

The Ugly Truth about Jobs

By Robert Parry
November 17, 2009

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke has given Americans a glimpse of the ugly truth about their future job prospects. Simply put, companies have found that they can shed workers and rely on technological advances and overseas factories to operate with a lot fewer U.S. employees.

Bernanke told the Economic Club of New York on Monday that some U.S. companies might begin to add workers to meet rising demand, but he added that “other firms, facing difficult financial conditions and intense pressure to cut costs, seem to have found longer-lasting, efficiency-enhancing changes that allowed them to reduce their workforces. …

“To the extent that firms are able to find further cost-cutting measures as output expands, they may delay hiring.”

Who Are the Blue Dogs?

By Michael Tomasky

A crucial fact about today's Congress, and one that even many politically astute observers may not fully appreciate, rests in the vast ideological differences between the two congressional parties. I don't mean by this that the Democrats have become uniformly liberal and the Republicans uniformly conservative, which is the standard grievance issued by the press, but rather that only the latter has happened—and that it has happened with surprising speed.

Consider, for example, a comparison of the makeup of the House of Representatives today versus twenty years ago, looking at the 101st Congress (1989–1990) and the current 111th Congress. The parties' numbers of seats in both congresses is about the same: the Democrats had a 261–174 advantage in 1989 and enjoy a 258–177 margin today. But the changes in how each party got to those numbers reveals a great deal.

Christian Bootcamp Seeks to Arm Home-Schooled Youths for "Spiritual Warfare"

By Eleanor Bader, RH Reality Check
Posted on November 16, 2009, Printed on November 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/143975/

Rev. Rusty Lee Thomas, Assistant Director of Operation Save America, is worried. According to studies by the Barna Research Group, California pollsters specializing in tracking religious and spiritual attitudes, only nine percent of teenaged Christians believe in moral absolutes. What’s more, Barna reports that the vast majority of kids raised Christian will abandon all or part of their faith by the time they finish high school. "Assembly of God leaders estimate between 65 and 70 percent will depart, while the Southern Baptist Council on Family Life estimates roughly 88 percent will leave," Thomas writes.

To remedy this, Thomas' Elijah Ministries has started the Kingdom Leadership Institute, a weeklong ideological boot camp for home-schooled Christians between the ages of 14 and 21. His recently released book, The Kingdom Leadership Institute Manual, is a roadmap for their training and a fascinating -- if twisted -- look at the concerns of far right evangelicals, complete with a game plan for action.

Sarah Palin's Poison: The Secret of Her Right-Wing Success

By Richard Kim and Betsy Reed, The Nation
Posted on November 14, 2009, Printed on November 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143922/

This article is adapted from Going Rouge: Sarah Palin--An American Nightmare, edited by Richard Kim and Betsy Reed, available only by direct order from OR Books.

In one way of looking at it, Sarah Palin is the best thing that ever happened to the Democratic Party.

Electorally, she is the GOP gift that keeps on giving. First there was Campaign 2008, which flamed out with her car-crash Katie Couric interview just as spectacularly as it had begun, three weeks earlier, with her star turn at the Republican convention. More recently, in the November 3 elections this year, she played a crucial role in delivering the Democrats one of their few victories. Palin and her culture-war comrades Rush Limbaugh, Dick Armey and Glenn Beck took up the cause of Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman in the 23rd District Congressional race in New York. As a result the moderate, prochoice Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, bowed out, endorsing Democrat Bill Owens. Hoffman was unable to convince the district's overwhelmingly white rural voters that banning abortions and gay marriage and bashing government held the answers to their concerns, and on election day the Democrat triumphed, capturing a district that had been in Republican hands since the nineteenth century.

Tea partiers punk’d into supporting removal of white people from US

A speaker at an anti-immigration rally in Minneapolis this past weekend got the crowd to support more than just the deportation of all illegal immigrants -- he got them cheering for the eviction of all European-descended immigrants to America who "stole this land through genocide and ethnic cleansing."

A crowd of some 40 people showed up to the steps of the Minnesota State Capitol on Saturday to protest proposed reform of US immigration law. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Friday that the Obama administration was pushing for immigration reform that would create a pathway for the legalization of undocumented immigrants.

Nanoparticles used in common household items caused genetic damage in mice

Titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles, found in everything from cosmetics to sunscreen to paint to vitamins, caused systemic genetic damage in mice, according to a comprehensive study conducted by researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The TiO2 nanoparticles induced single- and double-strand DNA breaks and also caused chromosomal damage as well as inflammation, all of which increase the risk for cancer. The UCLA study is the first to show that the nanoparticles had such an effect, said Robert Schiestl, a professor of pathology, radiation oncology and environmental health sciences, a Jonsson Cancer Center scientist and the study's senior author.

Investors Cut Back US Stocks, Seeking Bigger Growth Abroad

Even as the US market continues to rally, many institutional investors are trimming their US holdings and putting more money in foreign stocks—especially those in emerging markets.

Expectations that the US economy faces slow growth in the years ahead—which likely means tepid gains for domestic stocks—have prompted more investors to look abroad for better growth opportunities

Paul Krugman: World Out of Balance

International travel by world leaders is mainly about making symbolic gestures. Nobody expects President Obama to come back from China with major new agreements, on economic policy or anything else.

But let’s hope that when the cameras aren’t rolling Mr. Obama and his hosts engage in some frank talk about currency policy. For the problem of international trade imbalances is about to get substantially worse. And there’s a potentially ugly confrontation looming unless China mends its ways.

Some background: Most of the world’s major currencies “float” against one another. That is, their relative values move up or down depending on market forces. That doesn’t necessarily mean that governments pursue pure hands-off policies: countries sometimes limit capital outflows when there’s a run on their currency (as Iceland did last year) or take steps to discourage hot-money inflows when they fear that speculators love their economies not wisely but too well (which is what Brazil is doing right now). But these days most nations try to keep the value of their currency in line with long-term economic fundamentals.

Echoing a right-wing blog, Doocy repeatedly claimed Obama's bow was unprecedented

November 16, 2009 11:04 am ET — 30 Comments

In reporting on the manner in which President Obama greeted Japanese Emperor Akihito, Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy repeatedly claimed that "dating back to the very founding of this Republic, American leaders do not bow to leaders of other countries." In fact, Obama's greeting was far from unprecedented, as several past Presidents have bowed while greeting foreign leaders. Additionally, in reporting on Obama's bow, Fox & Friends repeatedly cited right-wing blog Hot Air in their reports on Obama's greeting.

Why the Afghan Surge Will Fail

Before the Obama administration buys into General Stanley McChrystal's escalation strategy, it might spend some time examining the August 12 battle of Dananeh, a scruffy little town of 2,000 perched at the entrance to the Naw Zad Valley in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province.

Dananeh is a textbook example of why counterinsurgency won't work in that country, as well as a case study in military thinking straight out of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

Home Builders (You Heard That Right) Get a Gift

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

ON Nov. 6, President Obama signed the Worker, Homeownership and Business Assistance Act of 2009 into law, extending unemployment benefits by 20 weeks and renewing the first-time homebuyer tax credit until next April.

But tucked inside the law was another prize: a tax break that lets big companies offset losses incurred in 2008 and 2009 against profits booked as far back as 2004. The tax cuts will generate corporate refunds or relief worth about $33 billion, according to an administration estimate.

Before the bill became law, the so-called look-back on losses was limited to small businesses and could be used to counterbalance just two years of profits. Now the profit offset goes back five years, and the law allows big companies to take advantage of it, too. The only companies that can’t participate are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and any institution that took money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Welcome, comrade Maobama

A truly wicked piece--Dictynna

By Pepe Escobar

BEIJING - Dear comrade Maobama,

It's such an honor to receive you here in the northern capital of the Middle Kingdom as you pay tribute to the hub of the already developing 21st-century multipolar world.

Excuse us if we may diverge for a while from the outlines of established diplomatic finesse, but as we fully admire your integrity, honesty and magnificent intellectual accomplishments, allow us to address you with a measured degree of frankness.

In House, Many Spoke With One Voice: Lobbyists’

By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that was no accident.

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.

E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans.

The lobbyists, employed by Genentech and by two Washington law firms, were remarkably successful in getting the statements printed in the Congressional Record under the names of different members of Congress.

The Fed Is Responsible for 10.2 Percent Unemployment in the Same Way That Al Queda Was Responsible for September 11th

The reason for repeating the obvious is that David Ignatius in the Washington Post is trying to rewrite history on this topic. He belittles people who hold the Fed responsible for the economic downturn:

"With unemployment above 10 percent, the public is angry about last year's financial crunch -- and looking for people to blame. The Fed is just elitist enough, and Bernanke is just enough of a professorial egghead, to make them targets for popular anger."

Financial crisis investigators are taking Wall Street names

By Greg Gordon and Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Leaders of a congressional commission investigating the causes of the recent financial crisis are threatening to publicly identify any company or government agency that stalls in voluntarily producing requested documents.

Phil Angelides, the chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, told McClatchy in an interview that the panel would investigate the role that Wall Street firms played in causing the crisis to mushroom.

Glenn Greenwald: The Right's Textbook 'Surrender to Terrorists'

"We're too scared to have real trials in our country" is a level of cowardice unmatched in the world.

by Glenn Greenwald

Understanding and Combatting Terrorism, USMC Major S.M. Grass, 1989:

Terrorism is a psychological weapon and is directed to create a general climate of fear. As one definition cogently notes, "terror is a natural phenomenon, terrorism is the conscious exploitation of it." Terrorism utilizes violence to coerce governments and their people by inducing fear.

William Josiger, Fear Factor: The Impact of Terrorism on Public Opinion in the United States and Great Britain, 2006:

At its heart terrorism is about fear. While terrorist attacks destroy, maim and kill, the intended audience for these attacks is almost always the whole body politic and the terrorist's goal is to strike fear into their hearts.

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GOP House Leader John Boehner, condemning Obama's decision to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York for trial, yesterday:

The Obama Administration’s irresponsible decision to prosecute the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks in New York City puts the interests of liberal special interest groups before the safety and security of the American people.

The Board Of The ‘Voice Of Business’ Is A Republican Money Machine

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which purports to be “the voice of business,” is run by a Republican money machine. As the nation’s largest lobbying shop, the Chamber is spending millions of dollars from its corporate members against President Obama’s progressive agenda of health care, energy, and financial reform. The Chamber claims that the “board’s membership is as diverse as the nation’s business community itself,” but this is false.

Frank Rich: The Missing Link From Killeen to Kabul

THE dead at Fort Hood had not even been laid to rest when their massacre became yet another political battle cry for the self-proclaimed patriots of the American right.

Their verdict was unambiguous: Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an American-born psychiatrist of Palestinian parentage who sent e-mail to a radical imam, was a terrorist. And he did not act alone. His co-conspirators included our military brass, the Defense Department, the F.B.I., the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and, of course, the liberal media and the Obama administration. All these institutions had failed to heed the warning signs raised by Hasan’s behavior and activities because they are blinded by political correctness toward Muslims, too eager to portray criminals as sympathetic victims of social injustice, and too cowardly to call out evil when it strikes 42 innocents in cold blood.

The invective aimed at these heinous P.C. pantywaists nearly matched that aimed at Hasan. Joe Lieberman announced hearings to investigate the Army for its dereliction of duty on homeland security. Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, vowed to unmask cover-ups in the White House and at the C.I.A. The Weekly Standard blog published a broadside damning the F.B.I. for neglecting the “broader terrorist plot” of which Hasan was only one of the connected dots. Jerome Corsi, the major-domo of the successful Swift-boating of John Kerry, unearthed what he said was proof that Hasan had advised President Obama during the transition.

Welcome home, war

By Alfred W McCoy

In his approach to National Security Agency surveillance, as well as Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) renditions, drone assassinations, and military detention, President Barack Obama has to a surprising extent embraced the expanded executive powers championed by his conservative predecessor, George W Bush.

This bipartisan affirmation of the imperial executive could "reverberate for generations", warns Jack Balkin, a specialist on First Amendment freedoms at Yale Law School. And consider these but some of the early fruits from the hybrid seeds that the "war on terror" has planted on American soil. Yet surprisingly few Americans seem aware of the toll that this already endless war has taken on our civil liberties.