New York Times: "Race" Means "Class"

by billmon
Wed Apr 14, 2010 at 06:50:10 PM PDT

Proving once again that no power on earth can force the "newspaper of record" to recognize what it is determined to ignore, the New York Times tonight released the results of a major survey of the teabagger movement. The paper's considered judgement:

Their fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.

Maddow: Fox Uses ‘Flagrantly Bogus Stories’ to Provoke White Racism

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow called out Fox News for its role in promoting reports about Shirley Sherrod and ACORN that proved to be distorted.

July 24, 2010 | MSNBC's Rachel Maddow called out Fox News on Thursday for its role in promoting reports about Shirley Sherrod and ACORN that proved to be distorted. She charged that the network "continually campaigns on flagrantly bogus stories designed to make white Americans fear black Americans."

"I showed up in the weirdest place last night," Maddow began. "I was on The O'Reilly Factor. It was very spooky."

On the death of the climate bill

As Jon noted, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has officially announced that there will be no climate bill this year. But Jon's post doesn't fully convey the extent of the capitulation. What's happened is total and complete surrender. There's no silver lining in this cloud.

Not only will the bill not contain any restrictions on greenhouse gases -- not even a watered-down utility-only cap -- it won't even contain the two other key policies that would have moved clean energy forward: the Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) and the energy efficiency standards.

No To Oligarchy

Bernie Sanders | July 22, 2010

The American people are hurting. As a result of the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, millions of Americans have lost their jobs, homes, life savings and their ability to get a higher education. Today, some 22 percent of our children live in poverty, and millions more have become dependent on food stamps for their food.

And while the Great Wall Street Recession has devastated the middle class, the truth is that working families have been experiencing a decline for decades. During the Bush years alone, from 2000-2008, median family income dropped by nearly $2,200 and millions lost their health insurance. Today, because of stagnating wages and higher costs for basic necessities, the average two-wage-earner family has less disposable income than a one-wage-earner family did a generation ago. The average American today is underpaid, overworked and stressed out as to what the future will bring for his or her children. For many, the American dream has become a nightmare.

The Geek Labyrinth

The most frightening thing about our unfathomably complex intelligence bureaucracy.

By Fred KaplanPosted Thursday, July 22, 2010, at 6:18 PM ET

Don't believe the cynics, the lazybones, the tree-full-of-owls academics, or the apparatchik-apologists who dismiss it as simplistic, pointless, wrongheaded, or dangerous. The Washington Post's three-part series this week on "Top Secret America" is as important as the paper's PR campaign suggests. (Disclosure: The Washington Post Co. owns Slate.)

The culmination of a two-year probe by Dana Priest, one of the country's best military reporters, and William M. Arkin, a national-security sleuth of unparalleled ingenuity, the series lays out—in (occasionally numbing) detail—the vast proliferation of supersecret enterprises, and the compartmentalized security clearances that go with them, since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Veggieworld: Why eating greens won't save the planet

IF YOU'RE a typical westerner, you ate nearly 100 kilograms of meat last year. This was almost certainly the costliest part of your diet, especially in environmental terms. The clamour for people to eat less meat to save the planet is growing ever louder. "Less meat = less heat", proclaimed Paul McCartney in the run-up to last December's conference on global warming in Copenhagen. And this magazine recently recommended eating less meat as a way to reduce our environmental footprint.

Big Falsehoods: An updated guide to Andrew Breitbart's lies, smears, and distortions

July 21, 2010 3:24 pm ET — 9 Comments

Following the dissolution of Andrew Breitbart's smear of former Obama administration official Shirley Sherrod, Media Matters provides an updated look at how his sensationalist stories have been based on speculation, gross distortions, and outright falsehoods.

The "video evidence" of Shirley Sherrod's "racism" (NEW)

"Nationwide ACORN child prostitution investigation" (UPDATED)

Our Secret Leviathan

By Joe Conason

Back in the bad old days of the Cold War—when mutual nuclear annihilation was a policy option—a culture of secrecy arose in Washington. What wise observers understood even then was that while governments tried to keep secrets from each other, their chief concern was to keep secrets from their own people.

Considering what had been done in the name of the United States, from Mafia assassination plots against foreign leaders to murder, corruption and coups d’état, that concern was quite sensible. And there was hell to pay when the hidden history began to emerge.

During the nine years since 9/11 the national security state has doubled or tripled in size, with huge annexes in the private sector—and the culture of secrecy has metastasized simultaneously. As The Washington Post reports in a landmark series titled “Top Secret America,” by Dana Priest and William Arkin, the dimensions of the security colossus are stunning. It is nothing less than a fourth branch of government, so large, so powerful and so wealthy that no other branch can even grasp it, let alone control it.

Paul Krugman: Addicted to Bush

For a couple of years, it was the love that dared not speak his name. In 2008, Republican candidates hardly ever mentioned the president still sitting in the White House. After the election, the G.O.P. did its best to shout down all talk about how we got into the mess we’re in, insisting that we needed to look forward, not back. And many in the news media played along, acting as if it was somehow uncouth for Democrats even to mention the Bush era and its legacy.

The truth, however, is that the only problem Republicans ever had with George W. Bush was his low approval rating. They always loved his policies and his governing style — and they want them back. In recent weeks, G.O.P. leaders have come out for a complete return to the Bush agenda, including tax breaks for the rich and financial deregulation. They’ve even resurrected the plan to cut future Social Security benefits.

But they have a problem: how can they embrace President Bush’s policies, given his record? After all, Mr. Bush’s two signature initiatives were tax cuts and the invasion of Iraq; both, in the eyes of the public, were abject failures. Tax cuts never yielded the promised prosperity, but along with other policies — especially the unfunded war in Iraq — they converted a budget surplus into a persistent deficit. Meanwhile, the W.M.D. we invaded Iraq to eliminate turned out not to exist, and by 2008 a majority of the public believed not just that the invasion was a mistake but that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war. What’s a Republican to do?

Protofascism Comes to America

The Rise of the Tea Party

by Ted Rall

Is the Tea Party racist? Democrats who play liberals on TV say it isn't. Vice President Joe Biden says the Tea Party "is not a racist organization" per se, but allows that "at least elements that were involved in some of the Tea Party folks expressed racist views."

Right-wing Congresswoman Michele Bachmann has received permission to form an official Tea Party Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives. It's official. The Tea Party matters.

So: is it racist? Certainly a sizeable minority of Tea Partiers' "take America back" rhetoric is motivated by thinly disguised resentment that a black guy is president. As for the remainder, their tacit tolerance of the intolerant speaks for itself. "Take America back" from whom? You know whom. It ain't white CEOs.

Groundbreaking Sandia study ties climate uncertainties to economies of US states

California, Pacific Northwest and Colorado achieve positive net impacts; other states languish

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A climate-change study at Sandia National Laboratories that models the near-term effects of declining rainfall in each of the 48 U.S. continental states makes clear the economic toll that could occur unless an appropriate amount of initial investment — a kind of upfront insurance payment — is made to forestall much larger economic problems down the road.

Why tie climate change to economics?

“Absent any idea of costs, the need to address climate change seems remote and has a diluted sense of urgency,” study lead George Backus said.

Restoring a Vibrant Middle Class in America

by Brian Miller

Imagine joining friends for a late-night game of Monopoly, but in this game, there’s a twist: At the start of the game, one player gets an entire side of the game board, from Pacific Ave. to Boardwalk, including the Short Line railroad. Instead of pondering easy questions like whether to be the shoe or the thimble, you’re now grappling with a more important question: Do you even stand a chance in such a lopsided game?

As you ponder the fairness of this board game, Congress is debating the very real future of our federal estate tax, a tax on inherited wealth designed in part to prevent one player from owning most of the board before the game even begins.

We’re In A One-and-a-half Dip Recession

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

We’re not in a double-dip recession yet. We’re in a one and a half dip recession.

Consumer confidence is down. Retail sales are down. Home sales are down. Permits for single-family starts are down. The average work week is down. The only things not down are inventories – unsold stuff is piling up in warehouses and inventories of unsold homes are rising – and defaults on loans.

Anti-Immigrant Hard-liners Try to Co-Opt Environmental Movement

By David L. Ostendorf, Imagine 2050
Posted on July 21, 2010, Printed on July 22, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147599/

Who would have thought that the renowned Lester Brown of Worldwatch Institute or Roderick Nash, author of the classic Wilderness and the American Mind, would involve themselves in a portion of the environmental movement that dallies with nativists and white nationalists? Or that the Weeden Foundation, a mainstay funder of numerous environmental groups, might “steer the environmental movement toward a course fueled by bigotry and racism?”

With the release today of “Apply the Brakes: Anti-Immigrant Co-optation of the Environmental Movement,” the Center for New Community has laid these unseemly realities bare, and exposed yet another effort by anti-immigrant forces to corrupt the dialogue on the relationship of immigration to population growth to environmental degradation. As well, the report maps the ties between anti-immigrant interests and environmental groups nationwide.

IMF cancels $268 million Haiti debt

Thu Jul 22, 5:24 am ET

PARIS – The IMF says it has canceled Haiti's $268 million debt and will lend the earthquake-devastated country another $60 million to help it with reconstruction plans.

The International Monetary Fund said Wednesday the decision is part of a plan for long-term reconstruction after the Jan. 12 magnitude-7 quake, which killed as many as 300,000 people.

Another Senate Charade

This note comes courtesy of my friend David Sirota out in Colorado. This is a classic example of how the Senate works. If the public understood better how rigged this game is, and how few issues are actually left to an honest vote in the legislature, I'm pretty sure the pitchfork factor would be twice even what it is now.

The short version of this story: Bernie Sanders had put forth a proposal in the Senate to put a 15 percent cap on credit-card interest. Who isn't in favor of this kind of legislation? The only difference between credit card companies and loan sharks at this point is that you can choose to not patronize a loan shark. As an adult professional in this country one has to have a credit card - it's impossible to rent a car, buy a hotel room, shop online or do countless other things without one.

What do deficit slashers wear under their hair shirts?

It's worthwhile trying to uncover the assumptions made by the economists who demand rapid 'fiscal consolidation'

All intellectual systems rely on assumptions that do not need to be spelled out because all members of that particular intellectual community accept them. These "deep" axioms are implicit in economics as well but, if left unscrutinised, they can steer policymakers into a blind alley. That is what is happening in today's effort, in country after country, to slash spending and bring down budget deficits.

The chief task that John Maynard Keynes set himself in writing his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was to uncover the deep axioms underlying the economic orthodoxy of his day, which assumed away the possibility of persistent mass unemployment. The question he asked of his opponents was: "What must they believe in order to claim that persistent mass unemployment is impossible, so that government 'stimulus' to raise the employment level could do no good?" In answering this question, Keynes reconstructed the orthodox theory – and then proceeded to demolish it.

Senate approves jobless payments to millions

By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer

76 WASHINGTON – State unemployment agencies are gearing up to resume sending unemployment payments to millions of people as Congress moves to ship President Barack Obama a measure to restore lapsed benefits.

After months of increasingly bitter stalemate, the Senate passed the measure Wednesday by a 59-39 vote. Obama is poised to sign the measure into law after a final House vote on Thursday.

Democrats to Propose Extending Bush's Middle-Class Tax Cuts

By Jay Newton-Small / Washington
Wednesday, Jul. 21, 2010

Senate Democrats will soon advance a plan to make permanent President George W. Bush's 2001 tax cuts for middle-class Americans earning less than $200,000, but let the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans expire, two Senate party aides said Tuesday. They will also propose to reinstate a 45% estate tax on individuals for the next two years.

The emerging tax plan is designed, as much as anything else, to clarify the differences between the two parties as they hurtle toward the fall elections. Following on their success with the financial-regulatory-reform bill, Democrats are betting that Republicans will once again take up a legislative battle on behalf of the wealthy. "Republicans are going to have a real choice ahead of them," says a Democratic aide. "Are you for extending these tax cuts for middle-class families or are you against them because you want to protect tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% of Americans?''

Why the US Is So Badly Equipped to Deal with Unemployment

By Dean Baker, ISN
Posted on July 20, 2010, Printed on July 21, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147596/

It has been two-and-a-half years since the recession officially began in the United States. While the economy has been growing for more than a year, unemployment remains near the 10.1 percent peak of October 2009. Few economists predict a rapid decline from its June level of 9.5 percent and, with stimulus being phased down over the next year, it is very plausible that the rate will edge higher in coming months.

The US, unlike most western European countries, is not set up to sustain long periods of high unemployment. Its system of social welfare is very much centered on work. This is most evident with health care. The vast majority of non-elderly people get their health care through employer provided health insurance. Individual policies tend to be very expensive, especially for people with any history of medical problems. When people lose their jobs, they generally lose their health care coverage as well. While there is a public program for low-income families, it doesn’t cover most of the unemployed, and the quality is often quite poor.

The business cycle lives

By Henry C K Liu

On December 18, 2002, I wrote a post to the online economics discussion list Post Keynesian Thought (PKT) about an earlier post of February 11, 2000, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average was heading towards 12,000.

The earlier post challenged the extravagant claim by the Bill Clinton administration Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) Annual Economic Report for 2000 that the business cycle was heading for historical relic status because of effective policies carried out by the Clinton White House.

It’s the End of the World As We Know It

What are 308,367,109 Americans supposed to do?

First of all, despite clamping down on immigration, our population grew by 2.6M people last year. Unfortunately, not only did we not create jobs for those 2.6M new people but we lost about 4M jobs so what are these new people going to do? Not only that, but nobody is talking about the another major job issue: People aren’t retiring! They can’t afford to because the economy is bad - that means there are even less job openings… The pimply-faced kid can’t get a job delivering pizza because his grandpa’s doing it.

There are some brilliant pundits who believe cutting retirement benefits will fix our economy. How will that work exactly? Pay old people less money, don’t cover their medical care and what happens? Then they need money. If they need money, they need to work and if they need to work they increase the supply of labor, which reduces wages and leaves all 308,367,109 of us with less money. Oh sorry, not ALL 308,367,109 - just 308,337,109 - the top 30,000 (0.01%) own the business the other 308,337,109 work at and they will be raking it in because labor is roughly 1/3 of the cost of doing business in America and our great and powerful capitalists have already cut their manufacturing costs by shipping all those jobs overseas, where they pay as little as $1 a day for a human life so now, in order to increase their profits (because profits MUST be increased) they have now turned inward to see what they can shave off in America.

National Security Inc.

The intent of the memorial is to publicly honor the courage of those who died in the line of duty, but it also conceals a deeper story about government in the post-9/11 era: Eight of the 22 were not CIA officers at all. They were private contractors.

To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called "inherently government functions." But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

Liberal? Are we talking about the same thing?

By Michael Goldfarb
Journalist and broadcaster

Is there a more elastic word in the English language than the word liberal?

Is there a more abused, innocent, in-need-of-protection-from-bullies-word than the word liberal?

On either side of the Atlantic - for that matter, wherever English is spoken - liberal means whatever the speaker says it means, although that is often not what the hearer thinks it means. Confusion reigns.

How Amazon Kills Books and Makes Us Stupid

By Colin Robinson, The Nation
Posted on July 19, 2010, Printed on July 20, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147590/

Jeff Bezos loves numbers. In a speech in May to graduates at his alma mater, Princeton University, he recounted a childhood memory: when driving with his grandmother, a heavy smoker, he calculated how many years her addiction would reduce her life expectancy. Announcing the result from the back seat of the car, he expected praise for his deft maths. But his grandmother just burst into tears.

The Amazon founder's geeky obsession with numbers evidently formed early, and despite the glimmer of discomfort revealed by his Princeton anecdote, his fervently quantitative take on the world still predominates. In a letter accompanying the 2009 Amazon annual report, for instance, he sets out a mind-boggling 452 goals for the company in the coming year. The word "revenue" is mentioned only eight times, yet revenue growth is central to the Amazon story. Expanding both internationally and across other products—nonbook sales represent 75 percent of total Amazon turnover—Amazon's global business has increased fifteenfold over the past decade, 28 percent last year alone. Sales in 2009 topped $24.5 billion. To put that in perspective, in 2008 total sales by all US bookstores were less than $17 billion. In other words, the company is significantly larger than the entire American book business.

Report: Afghan, Iraq wars teaching US gang members military combat

By Daniel Tencer
Sunday, July 18th, 2010 -- 2:26 pm

Gang members in the US military are returning home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan armed with knowledge of military tactics, a fact that could threaten the lives of law enforcement officers in the US and worsen the gang problem, according to a new report from the Chicago Sun-Times.

Jeffrey Stoleson, a Wisconsin corrections officer who has completed multiple tours in Iraq, also told the Sun-Times that civilian contractors are a part of the growing drug-gang problem within the US's overseas wars. Stoleson says he was "involved in destroying a large quantity of drugs confiscated from US contractors in Iraq."

The Retirement Nightmare: Half of Americans Have Less Than $2,000 Banked for Their Golden Years

By Scott Thill, AlterNet
Posted on July 16, 2010, Printed on July 20, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147570/

The days of quietly retiring with a nest egg built up from years of savings from a long career on the verge of disappearing. For tens of millions of Americans, facing rising costs, shrinking incomes and growing debts they already have disappeared.

"One out of three working Americans does not have retirement savings beyond Social Security, and about 35% of those over 65 rely almost totally on Social Security alone," Dallas Salisbury, president of the Alliance for Investor Education and the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) , explained to AlterNet. "Of the remaining two-thirds of working Americans that have some retirement savings, 27 percent report less than $1,000, 16 percent between $1,000 and $9,999, 11 percent between $10,000 and $24,999, 12 percent between $25,000-$49,999, and 36 percent $50,000 or more." Perhaps the most shocking number is that half of Americans have $2,000 or less saved for retirement.

Crunch the numbers and you end up with a retirement myth, rather than a money-maker. We face a colder economic reality: Not only are there no astronomical retirement returns coming down the financial pike, but what nuts and nest-eggs families have set aside for their futures have been mostly sucked dry.

Report: U.S. intelligence community inefficient, unmanageable

By the CNN Wire Staff

July 19, 2010 11:52 a.m. EDT

Washington (CNN) -- The September 11, 2001, attacks have led to an intelligence community so large and unwieldy that it's unmanageable and inefficient -- and no one knows how much it costs, according to a two-year investigation by the Washington Post.

Ahead of the publication, many in the intelligence community worried that the stories would disclose too much information about contractors and the classified tasks they handle.

Paul Krugman: The Pundit Delusion

The latest hot political topic is the “Obama paradox” — the supposedly mysterious disconnect between the president’s achievements and his numbers. The line goes like this: The administration has had multiple big victories in Congress, most notably on health reform, yet President Obama’s approval rating is weak. What follows is speculation about what’s holding his numbers down: He’s too liberal for a center-right nation. No, he’s too intellectual, too Mr. Spock, for voters who want more passion. And so on.

But the only real puzzle here is the persistence of the pundit delusion, the belief that the stuff of daily political reporting — who won the news cycle, who had the snappiest comeback — actually matters.

This delusion is, of course, most prevalent among pundits themselves, but it’s also widespread among political operatives. And I’d argue that susceptibility to the pundit delusion is part of the Obama administration’s problem.

Deficits of Mass Destruction

Christopher Hayes

July 15, 2010 | This article appeared in the August 2/9, 2010 edition of The Nation.

If you've been paying attention this past decade, it won't surprise you to learn that the country's policy elites are in the midst of a destructive, well-nigh unhinged discussion about the future of the nation. But even by the degraded standards of the Washington establishment, the growing panic over government debt is shocking.

First, the facts. Nearly the entire deficit for this year and those projected into the near and medium terms are the result of three things: the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the recession. The solution to our fiscal situation is: end the wars, allow the tax cuts to expire and restore robust growth. Our long-term structural deficits will require us to control healthcare inflation the way countries with single-payer systems do.

The Real Reason Geithner Is Afraid of Elizabeth Warren

As reported on HuffPost last week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has expressed opposition to the possible nomination of Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a source with knowledge of Geithner's views.

One can assume that Geithner, being very close to the nation's biggest banks, is concerned that Warren, if chosen, will exercise her new policing and enforcement powers to restrict those abusive practices at our commercial banks that have been harmful to consumers and depositors.

Certainly, Warren is not the commercial banking industry's first pick to serve in this new role. And unlike other legislation in which an industry's lobbying effort would naturally slow or cease once the legislation is passed, the new financial reform bill is continuing to attract enormous lobbying action from the banks. The reason is simple. The bill has been written to put a great deal of power as to how strongly it is implemented in the hands of its regulators, some of which remain to be chosen. The bank lobby will work incredibly hard to see that Warren, the person most responsible for initiating and fighting for the idea of a consumer financial protection group, is denied the opportunity to head it.

10 Most Horrifying, Absurd Things in the GOP State Platforms

By Tana Ganeva, AlterNet
Posted on July 16, 2010, Printed on July 20, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147579/

The GOP leadership's plan for addressing the nation's problems is to make them worse in order to screw over Obama and Democrats. Republicans at the state level, however, have introduced more proactive solutions to America's ills. These include outlawing oral sex and porn, taking a stand against the New World Order, and, of course, granting fetuses greater rights than women.

Republican state platforms don't have a direct impact on national politics: they're way too weird for the GOP leadership, which has to balance pandering to the crazy right-wing with wooing independents. But since the state platforms are mostly cobbled together in town halls, they're a good gauge of what inspires activists on the ground -- an important guide to Republican politics in an election year that's seen many GOP fixtures felled by Tea Party right-wingers. (In May, Maine Tea Partiers staged a bloodless coup at the GOP platform town halls, replacing the traditional, bland party platform with a statement of principles soaked in Glenn Beckian paranoia.)

Tax Aversion and the Legacy of Slavery

An essay by Robin L. Einhorn
author of American Taxation, American Slavery

The evidence is clear, and especially around April 15. Americans hate everything about taxation—with a passion. We sometimes tell pollsters we are willing to pay higher taxes to get better public services from our governments (schools, roads, and so on), but, in a "read my lips" political culture, no campaign promise works better than the promise to cut taxes. The hatred at issue has little to do with the actual cost of the taxes. We are willing to pay hefty premiums to private HMOs, but not the taxes to finance a national healthcare system. Intermittent rounds of hoopla aside, it has very little to do with the behavior of the Internal Revenue Service either. We tolerate the hardball nastiness of the private collection agency but work ourselves into a rage at the very idea that the IRS will get serious about tax evasion. Most strangely, American antitax attitudes seem unrelated to the distribution of tax burdens. Middle-income people who pay big chunks of their earnings in payroll and sales taxes will support tax cuts for millionaires (estate tax abolition, low capital gains rates), which not only threaten the funding for the services on which they depend—but may even increase their taxes!

Chart Of The Day

David Kurtz | July 16, 2010, 11:50AM

I'm not sure it's sunk in yet within the political class (outside of economists) how horrible the prospects are for bringing the unemployment rate back to pre-Great Recession levels any time soon. And by soon, I don't mean November 2010. We're talking more like November 2015 or November 2020.

Frank Rich: The Good News About Mel Gibson

FOR Fourth of July weekend fireworks, even Macy’s couldn’t top the spittle-spangled eruptions of Mel Gibson. The clandestine recordings of his serial audio assaults on his gal pal were instant Web and cable-TV sensations — at once a worthy rival to Hollywood’s official holiday releases and a compelling sequel to his fabled anti- Semitic rant of 2006. A true showman, Gibson offered vitriol for nearly all tastes, aiming his profane fusillade at women, blacks and Latinos alike. The invective was tied together by a domestic violence subplot worthy of “Lethal Weapon.” There was even a surprise comic coda, courtesy of Whoopi Goldberg, who, alone among Gibson’s showbiz peers, used her television platform on “The View” to defend her buddy’s good character.