GOP Now Running Against Wall Street Bailout They Voted for – Here’s a List of GOP Reps and Senators Who Voted ‘Aye’

Jon Ponder | Sep. 9, 2010

On MSNBC last night, Rachel Maddow looked at the political rationale behind the White House decision to make House Speaker Wanna-Be John Boehner, R-Ohio, the face of the “Party of No” in the midterm elections.

Boehner was chosen, in part, because he is a boozey, overly tanned cartoonish character, but mainly because he was the GOP leader in 2008, back when it was the Bush rubberstamp party. In late September 2008, when the United States financial system was in freefall, Boehner took to the well of the House and tearfully begged the Republican caucus to support the Bush bank bailout of Wall Street and the “too big to fail” banks, officially known as the “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008″:

REP. JOHN BOEHNER, MINORITY LEADER: Think about what happens if we don’t pass this bill, think about what happens to your friends, your neighbors, your constituents. So, I ask all of you, both sides of the aisle: what’s in the best interest of our country? Not what’s in the best interest of our party, not what’s in the best interest of our own re- election– what’s in the best interest of our country? Vote yes.

Chamber of Commerce Accused of Tax Fraud

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — With a war chest rivaling that of the Republican Party itself, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has emerged in the last year as perhaps the Obama administration’s most-well-financed rival on signature policy debates like health care and financial regulation.

Critics on the left have long complained about the chamber’s outsize influence. But now they are taking on the business association directly, charging in a complaint filed Friday with the Internal Revenue Service that it violated tax codes by laundering millions of dollars meant for charitable work from a group with ties to the insurance giant A.I.G.

The complaint was brought by a group called U.S. Chamber Watch, which was created four months ago — with the strong financial backing of labor unions — to scrutinize the Chamber of Commerce’s growing influence and provide a counterbalance.

Guide to the most crucial bank meeting you never heard of

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — International bank regulators from around the globe will meet in the Swiss town of Basel on Sunday to finalize an important agreement that most Americans have never heard of: one to redraw rules so that banks can't bring the world economy to the brink of collapse again.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is leading the U.S. delegation to the so-called Basel III talks. The assembled bank regulators are expected to agree to impose higher capital requirements on big banks. This would force them to keep more money in reserve to cushion against losses, one of the lessons of the near-meltdown in 2008, when banks had far more toxic assets on their books than funds to protect themselves against a downturn.

Democrats' Corporate Cocoon

by Ralph Nader

It is astonishing how many Democrats in the past three months have been making the worst case scenario for their prospects in the November mid-term Congressional elections. Do they believe that the most craven Republican Party in history needs their help in such a self-fulfilling prophecy?

The arguments that the Democratic pundits, along with some elected lawmakers, are giving focus on the slowing of the recessionary economy and the “natural giveback” to the Republicans of the hitherto safe seats that they lost to the Democrats in 2008.

The mass media-exaggerated aura of the Tea Party, pumped by Limbaugh, Hannity and the histrionic Glenn Beck, has put the Democrats in a defensive posture. It is giving the puzzled Republicans an offensive image. I say puzzled because they can’t figure out the many disparate strands of the Tea Party eruption which includes turning on the Republicans and George W. Bush for launching this epidemic of deficits, debt, bailouts and unconstitutional military adventures.

Deficit Commission's Rumored Deal Would Pit Middle-Class Seniors Against the Poor

By Richard Eskow

Created 09/09/2010 - 12:07pm

If back-channel sources are correct, the White House deficit commission is finalizing a deal that would increase Social Security benefits slightly for low-income recipients while cutting them for everyone else. The Commissioners apparently believe that putting this "progressive" gloss on a package of unneeded cuts would allow them to move forward with their predetermined anti-Social Security agenda.

This new proposal would pit middle-class seniors against the elderly poor, forcing them to compete for a stripped-down pool of dollars. The end result would be the one that many Commission members have pursued for years [1]: to cut the most stable and successful program in the Federal government's history.

Accounts of this pending deal come from the top-secret, behind-a-firewall, inside-the-Cone-of-Silence proceedings of the commission itself, which is why they can't be officially confirmed. (Remind me again: Why are such critical issues being debated in secret, only to be presented to Congress for ratification after the November elections?) But if these reports are correct—and there is good reason to believe they are—some members of the Commission presumably believe this strategy would confuse and divide the many Americans who oppose Social Security cuts, while defusing the growing resistance to their actions among progressive members of Congress. [2]

The commissioners have clearly been stung by the nickname bloggers have given them: the "Catfood Commission." [3] This recommendation would take the edge off that name, since they could now claim they've made sure nobody will be eating Purina Old Folks' Chow as a result of their actions. It would also give them chance to bait their opponents: Don't you care about poor people?

The right’s climate denialism is part of something much larger

by David Roberts

9 Sep 2010 10:10 AM

If you read RL Miller's post on "climate zombies" you know that open climate denialism is back in vogue in the GOP. However muted denialism may have gotten in the late 2000s, it has come roaring back -- like everything reactionary -- with the economic downturn.

‘The Manchurian President’: Chicago’s Commie Liberal Puppet

The paranoid style of American politics is alive and well.

By Chip Berlet

America is in the midst of a 21st-century witch hunt. A loose-knit network of right-wing ideological strategists, Republican Party operatives and media demagogues generate the odious smears. Their goal is to stymie the Obama administration’s policy initiatives, capture Congress in November and unseat President Barack Obama in 2012. This propagandizing echoes the scapegoating of liberals, union and community organizers, peace activists, gay people, Jews and people of color during the anti-communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy era.

Paul Krugman: The Wealthy Public-Sector Worker: A Myth Debunked

by: Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co.

Whenever the subject of state and local governments' fiscal plight comes up here in the United States, conservatives engage in spittle-flecked denunciations of unions and their crazy pay packages.

Jonathan Cohn tells us in an online piece for The New Republic, published in August: "Conservatives say that excessive public employee pensions exemplify the greed of unions (which sought these generous benefits for public employees) and inefficiency of government (which agreed to pay them). If local and state governments are struggling financially, these conservatives say, they should figure out some way to reduce or revoke those promised benefits, rather than come to Washington and beg for help from the taxpayers."

Lawmakers From States With Deteriorating Infrastructure Oppose Obama’s Infrastructure Investment

Several Republican lawmakers are trying to claim that Obama’s $50 billion plan to invest in infrastructure is too expensive, at the same time that they’re pushing for an $830 billion tax cut for the richest two percent of Americans. If these lawmakers succeed in blocking the investment, they’ll definitively prove their deficit peacockery, while also perpetuating an ongoing neglect of the country’s infrastructure, which is rapidly deteriorating.

According to the Army Corps of Engineers, it would take a $2.2 trillion investment to get America’s infrastructure into good condition, including $930 billion for roads and bridges and another $160 billion for schools.

Paul Krugman: Things Could Be Worse

TOKYO

“Japan’s problems now are the same as they were in the 1990s, when you were writing about them. It’s depressing.” So declared one economist I spoke to here. “But the Japanese don’t seem all that depressed,” objected another. Both were right — and the conversation crystallized some thoughts I’ve been having about Japan’s situation, and ours.

A decade ago, Japan was a byword for failed economic policies: years after its real estate bubble burst, it was still suffering from chronic deflation and slow growth. Then America had its own bubble, bust and crisis. And these days, Japan’s record doesn’t look that bad to an American eye.

Why not? For all its flaws, Japanese policy limited and contained the damage from a financial bust. And the question in America now is whether we’ll do the same — or whether we will take a hard right turn into economic disaster.

Here's What's the Matter With Kansas

— By Kevin Drum | Fri Sep. 10, 2010 2:00 AM PDT

Why has income inequality grown so explosively over the past 30 years? Why do so many working and middle class voters cast their ballots for a party that's so obviously a captive of corporations and the rich? Why is there no longer any real sustained effort to improve the lot of the middle class?

There's no shortage of answers. There's the "What's the Matter With Kansas" theory. There's the demise of labor unions. There's the well-worn story of the rise of conservative think tanks. There's the impact of globalization on unskilled and semi-skilled labor. There's the growing returns to education in a world that grows more complex every year.

The Wholly Fallible Ben Bernanke

by Dean Baker

Many have noted the resemblance between the Federal Reserve Board and the Catholic church. Both have long traditions of secret convocations: meetings of the open market committee and the College of Cardinals. Both have a revered leader: the chairman of the board of governors and the pope. And both have claims to infallibility.

OK, it is only the pope who can explicitly claim infallibility. In the case of the Fed chair, infallibility is bestowed by the business reporters and politicians who treat every word from the reigning Fed chair as a priceless pearl of wisdom.

This aura of infallibility is especially painful in the current economic situation when error seems to be the new religion of the Fed. Just to remind everyone – since so much denial has dominated the debate – the only reason that we are facing near double-digit unemployment and the worst economic calamity in 70 years is that the Fed was out to lunch in combating the housing bubble.

Christian Right’s Plot To Take Over Hawaii

The religious right’s scheme to take the governorship of Hawaii hangs by a thread…

Hawaii has an open primary system and in a story I wrote last April 22, 2010, Christian Right Claims Both 2010 Hawaii Gubernatorial Candidates I predicted exactly what is now happening–an effort to convince evangelical Christians in Hawaii who are registered as Republicans to cross over in the Democratic Party primary this coming Saturday, September 18, and vote for Democratic Party gubernatorial candidate Mufi Hannemann.

Why Is College So Expensive? The War on Public Universities

By Amy DePaul, AlterNet
Posted on September 9, 2010, Printed on September 10, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147933/

With 220,000 students, 10 campuses strung across America’s most populous state, five medical centers, three national science laboratories and groundbreaking academic research, the University of California (U.C.) has long symbolized excellence in public higher education. But all that may be changing as a result of budget cuts, reduced access and tuition hikes plaguing public colleges in California and across the country.

U.C. English professor and author Christopher Newfield believes there is more to the current crisis than the recent economic downturn; rather, he argues in his book, Unmaking the Public University, that conservative elites have long targeted higher education because of its role in creating a more empowered, democratic and multiracial middle class.

Book claims Churchill deliberately let millions of Indians starve to death

By Agence France-Presse
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010 -- 2:57 am

NEW DELHI — British prime minister Winston Churchill deliberately let millions of Indians starve to death, the author of a new book has claimed, alleging he was motivated in part by racial hatred.

As many as three million people died in the Bengal famine of 1943 after Japan captured neighbouring Burma -- a major source of rice imports -- and British colonial rulers in India stockpiled food for soldiers and war workers.

Time Running Out Faster Than Water, Experts Warn

Monday 06 September 2010

by: Thalif Deen | Inter Press Service | Report

Stockholm - A major weeklong international water conference opened in the Swedish capital Monday with an ominous warning: time is running out faster than fresh water.

If the "massive and complex challenges" facing one of the world's most finite natural resources are not resolved soon, the future looks grimly devastating: scarcities, pollution, droughts, floods, desertification and diseases.

Gunilla Carlsson, the Swedish minister for international development cooperation, described the recent floods in Pakistan as one of the major natural disasters facing that country.

Paul Krugman: In Europe, a Lesson in Contrasts

Tuesday 07 September 2010

by: Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co.

It is strangely comforting to see that the United States is not alone as it struggles in its morass of failed fiscal policy.

P. O'Neill, a regular contributor to the online magazine A Fistful of Euros, has published some good observations on the mess that followed Ireland's 2009 plunge into harsh austerity. He writes that the debt crisis has led to Irish banks, "owning businesses they never expected to, so that they are now operating hotels that they have taken over and selling repossessed farm equipment.

The Right-Wing Has Made It Next to Impossible for Many Women to Get Abortions

For many women, getting access to abortion has become extraordinarily difficult. Conservatives' plan is to make it impossible.

September 8, 2010 | They say it's too easy.

According to 48 percent of American voters, it's "too easy" to have an abortion in this country.

Too easy?

Every year, legislatures introduce hundreds of bills to restrict abortion. Every year, dozens pass. This year has been no exception. The Center for Reproductive Rights published a report on the nearly 50 new laws that have already been passed this year: biased counseling, forced ultrasounds, bans on insurance coverage, parental notification... And it's only September.

The Great American Stickup: How the Political Class Mugged America and Handed the Money Over to Wall St.

By Amy Goodman and Robert Scheer, Democracy Now!
Posted on September 7, 2010, Printed on September 8, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148107/

Goodman: As we continue our discussion on the state of the economy, we’re by veteran journalist and Truthdig.com editor Robert Scheer. His book is just out; it’s called The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street. What is wrong with the economy today? And how did we get here?

Scheer: Well, you know, you say a longtime journalist. I worked for the Los Angeles Times as a national reporter, and I covered these hearings in Washington when the Clinton Administration in the '90s basically fulfilled the promise of the Reagan Revolution. Reagan was not able to reverse the sensible regulations of the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt designed to prevent us from getting into another depression. And those regulations of Glass-Steagall, which Feingold was against -- was for keeping and against reversing, said that investment banks playing with supposedly rich people's money should not be allowed to merge with commercial banks that were using the deposits of people that were insured by the taxpayers and that these were different activities. And Reagan could never pull off that kind of deregulation. In fact, because of the savings and loan scandal at the end of his term, he actually had to sign off on increased financial regulation. But when Clinton came in, he brought in one of the big players on Wall Street, Robert Rubin, who has been head of Goldman Sachs, and basically turned to him and said, "You know, what do I need to do to get Wall Street on my side?" And they said, reverse what they considered to be onerous financial regulation. And Clinton delivered on that. He brought in Rubin then to be his Treasury secretary, who was followed by Lawrence Summers, who’s now the top economics adviser in the Obama White House.

A Sign of the Court’s Polarization: Choice of Clerks

By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — Each year, 36 young lawyers obtain the most coveted credential in American law: a Supreme Court clerkship. Clerking for a justice is a glittering capstone on a résumé that almost always includes outstanding grades at a top law school, service on a law review and a prestigious clerkship with a federal appeals court judge.

Justice Clarence Thomas apparently has one additional requirement. Without exception, the 84 clerks he has chosen over his two decades on the court all first trained with an appeals court judge appointed by a Republican president.

That unbroken ideological commitment is just the most extreme example of a recent and seldom examined form of political polarization on the Supreme Court. These days the more conservative justices are much more likely than were their predecessors to hire clerks who worked for judges appointed by Republicans. And the more liberal justices are more likely than in the past to hire from judges appointed by Democrats.

Yoo's Got Mail?

The Justice Department has finally uncovered emails written by John Yoo, the author of the so-called torture memos. But something's missing.

— By Nick Baumann and Daniel Schulman

Tue Sep. 7, 2010 3:00 AM PDT

When the Justice Department's report on the so-called torture memos was released in February, the agency's internal watchdog noted that the five-year inquiry "had not been routine" and included the intriguing detail that a trove of key documents had been destroyed. These included almost all of Justice Department official John Yoo's emails. The report noted that investigators for the agency's Office of Professional Responsibility had been informed that these records "had been deleted and were not recoverable." Without the emails of one of the primary authors of the memos, the OPR could only cobble together a partial picture of how Bush administration lawyers had crafted a legal rationale for the use of torture. "Given the difficulty OPR experienced in obtaining information over the past five years," the report said, "it remains possible that additional information eventually will surface."

Let Them Eat Meat – But Farm It Properly

The ethical case against eating animal produce once seemed clear. But a new book is an abattoir for dodgy arguments

by George Monbiot

This will not be an easy column to write. I am about to put down 1,200 words in support of a book that starts by attacking me and often returns to this sport. But it has persuaded me that I was wrong. More to the point, it has opened my eyes to some fascinating complexities in what seemed to be a black and white case.

In the Guardian in 2002 I discussed the sharp rise in the number of the world's livestock, and the connection between their consumption of grain and human malnutrition. After reviewing the figures, I concluded that veganism [1] "is the only ethical response to what is arguably the world's most urgent social justice issue". I still believe that the diversion of ever wider tracts of arable land from feeding people to feeding livestock is iniquitous and grotesque. So does the book I'm about to discuss. I no longer believe that the only ethical response is to stop eating meat.

Stiglitz Says Europe Made Wrong Bet With Austerity

By Edith Balazs - Sep 7, 2010

European governments made a “wrong bet” by pushing for austerity after the global recession, resulting in slower economic growth for the region and the U.S., Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said.

“Europe has made a wrong bet with austerity,” Stiglitz, 67, told reporters today in Budapest. If Germany, the U.K. and France remain committed to budget cutting, “that will have systemic consequences for the entire Europe.”

Europe’s economy is at risk of sliding back into recession as governments reduce spending to rein in budget deficits, Stiglitz, a former chief economist at the World Bank and now a professor of economics at Columbia University in New York, said in an interview with Dublin-based RTE Radio on Aug. 24.

America's Empire and Endless Wars Are Destroying the World, and Ruining Our Great Country

By Terrence McNally and Andrew Bacevich, AlterNet
Posted on September 6, 2010, Printed on September 7, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148094/

Andrew Bacevich speaks with a fairly unique mix of experience, authority, passion and wisdom in questioning our nation’s priorities: specifically our willingness to place so much of our national identity, wealth, attention, moral practice, and finally the life and blood of many thousands of our citizens and millions of those of other countries in the hands of our military. A professor of history and international relations at Boston University, Bacevich served twenty-three years in the U.S. Army, retiring with the rank of colonel. He lost his son in Iraq. A graduate of the U. S. Military Academy, he received his Ph. D. in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University. He is the author of several books, including The New American Militarism; The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism; and his newest, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War.

Union jobs disappearing at local, state and national levels, UCLA study finds

The recession is finally taking its toll on national, state and local unionization rates, according to UCLA's annual report on organized labor.

Following an uptick last year, unionization rates fell between July 1, 2009, and June 30, 2010, by just more than half a percentage point in California and by a full percentage point in the five-county Los Angeles metropolitan area, researchers at UCLA's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) found.

"Given the duration and depth of the recession, it was inevitable that union jobs would be hit," said Lauren Appelbaum, the report's lead author and director of research at the IRLE. "Jobs are continuing to disappear, and unionized jobs continue to disappear along with them."

Biden and the False Iraq War Narrative

by Gareth Porter

In an interview on the PBS NewsHour last Wednesday [1], Joe Biden was unwilling to contradict the official narrative of the Iraq War that Gen. David Petraeus and the Bush surge had turned Iraq into a good war after all. That interview serves as a reminder of just how completely the Democratic Party foreign policy elite has adopted that narrative.

The Iraq War story line crafted by the Petraeus and the new counterinsurgency elite in Washington assures the public that U.S. military power in Iraq brought about the cooperation of the Sunnis in Anbar Province, ended sectarian violence in Baghdad and defeated Iranian-backed Shi’a insurgents.

In reality, of course, that’s not what happened at all. It's time to review the relevant history and deconstruct the Petraeus narrative which the Obama administration now appears to have adopted.

GOP Politician Confirms What Was Long Suspected: Republicans Intentionally Feed the Racism, Anger, and Paranoia of the Far Right

By David Corn, Mother Jones Online
Posted on August 4, 2010, Printed on September 6, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147732/

It was the middle of a tough primary contest, and Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) had convened a small meeting with donors who had contributed thousands of dollars to his previous campaigns. But this year, as Inglis faced a challenge from tea party-backed Republican candidates claiming Inglis wasn't sufficiently conservative, these donors hadn't ponied up. Inglis' task: Get them back on the team. "They were upset with me," Inglis recalls. "They are all Glenn Beck watchers." About 90 minutes into the meeting, as he remembers it, "They say, 'Bob, what don't you get? Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as dictator. Health care is part of that. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn [the US] into a Muslim nation.'" Inglis didn't know how to respond.

As he tells this story, the veteran lawmaker is sitting in his congressional office, which he will have to vacate in a few months. On June 22, he was defeated in the primary runoff by Spartanburg County 7th Circuit Solicitor Trey Gowdy, who had assailed Inglis for supposedly straying from his conservative roots, pointing to his vote for the bank bailout and against George W. Bush's surge in Iraq. Inglis, who served six years in Congress during the 1990s as a conservative firebrand before being reelected to the House in 2004, had also ticked off right-wingers in the state's 4th Congressional District by urging tea-party activists to "turn Glenn Beck off" and by calling on Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) to apologize for shouting "You lie!" at Obama during the president's State of the Union address. For this, Inglis, who boasts (literally) a 93 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, received the wrath of the tea party, losing to Gowdy 71 to 29 percent. In the weeks since, Inglis has criticized Republican House leaders for acquiescing to a poisonous, tea party-driven "demagoguery" that he believes will undermine the GOP's long-term credibility. And he's freely recounting his frustrating interactions with tea party types, while noting that Republican leaders are pushing rhetoric tainted with racism, that conservative activists are dabbling in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory nonsense, and that Sarah Palin celebrates ignorance.

Dick Cheney's Oily Dream

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is currently saying that Dick Cheney's vision of policy towards the Middle East after 9/11 was to re-draw the map:

Vice-President Dick Cheney's vision of completely redrawing the map of the Middle East following the 9/11 attacks is "not stupid," and is "possible over time," former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says.

In his new book, A Journey, the former Labour Party leader wrote that Cheney wanted a wholesale reorganization of the political map of the Middle East after 9/11. The vice president "would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it -- Hezbollah, Hamas, etc,"

Paul Krugman: 1938 in 2010

Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.

The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938. Within a few years, of course, the Great Depression was over. But it’s both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938 — instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.

Now, we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just that: the stimulus raised growth while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment — and now it’s fading out.

Wake Up Americans: It's Time to Get Off the Work Treadmill

By John de Graaf, The Progressive
Posted on September 2, 2010, Printed on September 6, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148061/

A few years ago, after finding-my way through an incredible jumble of bicycles outside her building, I met with a University of Amsterdam professor who studies work-life balance. She recounted a conversation she'd just had with the manager of the Dutch division of an American company who had come to Holland from the United States two years earlier:

Professor: Do you notice a difference between the approach to work time and free time here compared to the United States?

Manager: Yes, it dawned on me my second week on the job. It was a Friday evening, eight o'clock, and we had an important shipment to get out on Monday. I called my assistant at home, and told her to call some of the workers to get some things done on the weekend in preparation.

A wise comment on an Open Left thread...

Thanks Glacier for focusing attention on the Brits

This will be a long comment, related to your post but going much deeper. Forgive me perhaps, for hijacking your thread, but this screed has been floating around my brain all week and this seemed like a good place to park it.

The thing about Britain is that their debate is closer to the real meat and potatoes of what this argument is all about. Ours is frustratingly diverted into "Like or Dislike Obama" or "Is the Tea Party Racist" and other tangential questions.

Britain makes it clear: it's really about social democracy vs. neoliberalism.

It is important that an Open Left understand this. This is the debate that is barely allowed to be mentioned on our side of the pond but it's the crucial distinction.

When Paul Krugman argues for Keynesianism he's taking the social democratic side of this argument. But he's not allowed to say so, or at least not willing.

Fox disappears right-wing media's role in forming public's misconceptions about Obama

September 03, 2010 1:33 pm ET — 65 Comments

While discussing the September 6 Newsweek cover that highlights the commonly held and often contradictory misconceptions about Obama, Fox News contributors Angela McGlowan and John Fund disappeared the right-wing media's role in spreading the misinformation and instead attributed the misconceptions to Obama's own behavior. Indeed, Fox News and the right wing media have been at the forefront of advancing the very misinformation about Obama that Newsweek identified.

Mass Extinction Threat: Earth on Verge of Huge Reset Button?

By Jeremy Hsu, LiveScience Senior Writer
posted: 02 September 2010 02:02 pm ET

Mass extinctions have served as huge reset buttons that dramatically changed the diversity of species found in oceans all over the world, according to a comprehensive study of fossil records. The findings suggest humans will live in a very different future if they drive animals to extinction, because the loss of each species can alter entire ecosystems.

Some scientists have speculated that effects of humans — from hunting to climate change — are fueling another great mass extinction. A few go so far as to say we are entering a new geologic epoch, leaving the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch behind and entering the Anthropocene Epoch, marked by major changes to global temperatures and ocean chemistry, increased sediment erosion, and changes in biology that range from altered flowering times to shifts in migration patterns of birds and mammals and potential die-offs of tiny organisms that support the entire marine food chain.

Whistleblower: Fannie Mae Bungled HAMP Anti-Foreclosure Program

By Michael Hudson | August 06, 2010

Fannie Mae executives bungled their stewardship of the federal government’s massive foreclosure-prevention campaign, creating a bureaucratic muddle characterized by “mismanagement and gross waste of public funds,” according to a whistleblower lawsuit by a former Fannie Mae executive and onsultant.

Caroline Herron, a former Fannie vice president who returned to the mortgage giant in 2009 as a high-level consultant, claims that the homeowner-relief effort was marred by delays, missteps and executives preoccupied with their institution’s short-term financial interests.

Frank Rich: Freedom’s Just Another Word

AMONG the few scraps of news to emerge from Barack Obama’s vacation was the anecdote of a Martha’s Vineyard bookseller handing him an advance copy of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Freedom.” The book has since rocketed up the Amazon best-seller list, powered by reviews even more ecstatic than those for Franzen’s last novel, “The Corrections.” But I doubt that the president, a fine writer who draws sustenance from great American writers, has read “Freedom” yet. If he had, he never would have delivered that bloodless speech on Tuesday night.

What was so grievously missing from Obama’s address was any feeling for what has happened to our country during the seven-and-a-half-year war whose “end” he was marking. That legacy of anger and grief is what “Freedom” mainlines to its readers. In chronicling one Midwestern family as it migrates from St. Paul to Washington during the 9/11 decade, Franzen does for our traumatic time what Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” did for the cartoonish go-go 1980s. Or perhaps, more pertinently, what “The Great Gatsby” did for the ominous boom of the 1920s. The heady intoxication of freedom is everywhere in “Freedom,” from extramarital sexual couplings to the consumer nirvana of the iPod to Operation Iraqi Freedom itself. Yet most everyone, regardless of age or calling or politics, is at war — not with terrorists, but with depression, with their consciences and with one another.

The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond

By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes
Sunday, September 5, 2010; B04

Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.

But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war's broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.

Moreover, two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict's most sobering expenses: those in the category of "might have beens," or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only "what if" worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe?

It's Not Enough

Obama's economic policies aren't ambitious enough to reverse America's decline.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Friday, Sept. 3, 2010, at 2:06 PM ET

---

Fears that the United States is on the cusp of a Japanese-style "lost decade" are grossly overstated: We've already had it—from 2000-2010. Sure, the last two years of the decade were defined by a cataclysm of historic proportions that almost made us forget the bad news of the prior eight years.

In addressing the economic meltdown, we embraced remarkable policy responses that addressed the cataclysm but did not deal with the much deeper and more troubling crisis of our already ended lost decade. We confronted the immediate catastrophe, but not the trend line. That trend line is the cause of the justifiable anxiety of the American public.

We resolved the cataclysm by shoveling gobs of money into the financial services sector, consolidating it into a few too-big-to-fail federally guaranteed entities. But we did little or nothing to confront the job loss, income stagnation, and consequential security loss felt by the middle class, dating not just to 2008, but much further back.

Jimmy Breslin on the National Mood

There are these sudden loud noises in the hotel kitchen, one, two, three, probably a tray falling, and then there is so much screaming and a hand holding a gun high in the air and Robert Kennedy, who had walked into the gun, is on the floor with his eyes seeing nothing. On this June night in 1968 he has just won a Presidential primary and suddenly he is fit only for a gravedigger’s dirt.

It happens this way when the claws of madness swipe through the sky. In 1919 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called it for all time, and crashingly so today, when he wrote, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”