Third Way Document Proves Democratic Party Supports Institutionalized Looting by Banks

It is one thing to suspect that something is rotten in Denmark, quite another to have proof. Ever since Obama appointed his Rubinite economics team, it was blindingly obvious that he was aligning himself with Wall Street. The strength of the connection became even more evident in March 2009, when Team Obama embarked on its “stress test” charade and bank stock cheerleading. Rather than bring vested banking interests to heel, the administration instead chose to reconstitute, as much as possible, the very same industry whose reckless pursuit of profit had thrown the world economy off the cliff.

But now we see evidence in a new paper by the think tank Third Way of an even deeper commitment to pro-financier policies. The Democratic party has made clear that it supports institutionalized looting by banks, via the innocuous-seemeing device of rejecting the idea of writedowns on bonds they hold.

Starve The Beast II: The Boehner Plan For Perpetual Debt Crisis

By Bill Scher, July 28, 2011 - 1:43pm ET

There's not a whole lot of difference between the proposals from Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The amount of new cuts is about the same, though the Senate proposal looks bigger because it (properly) includes savings from the war drawdowns in its total savings.

But there is one other key difference which speaks to the overall Republican strategy to shackle our government so it no longer can build our infrastructure, invest in advanced research, generate green energy, alleviate poverty and educate the next generation.

Paul Krugman: The Centrist Cop-Out

The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.

As I said, it’s not complicated. Yet many people in the news media apparently can’t bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality. News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of “centrist” uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.

Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.” But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?

“Is Standard and Poor’s Manipulating US Debt Rating to Escape Liability for the Mortgage Crisis?”

By Scarecrow and Jane Hamsher. Cross posted from FireDogLake

The Politico headline says it all: U.S. credit downgrade worries Obama, Congress more than default

It’s not the default that strikes the most fear in the White House and Congress these days. It’s the downgrade

As Robert Reich notes, Standard and Poors is the “biggest driver in the deficit battle.” Why would anyone care what the corrupt and disgraced organizations who quite nearly brought down the world economy think about anything at this point?

An Interview with Chris Hedges

By David Barsamian, August 2011 issue

Q: You gave the commencement address at a college in Illinois two months after Bush launched the Iraq War. That rubbed your editors at The New York Times the wrong way. Why?

Hedges: Because I was booed off the stage. The Progressive actually ran a transcript of the whole talk with what people shouted in brackets. The Times editors were pressured to respond, and they responded by calling me into the office and giving me a formal written reprimand for impugning the impartiality of The New York Times. We were members of the Newspaper Guild, and the process is that you give the employee a written warning and then, under Guild rules, the next time the employee violates that warning, you can fire them. So once I was handed that written warning, it was terminal, because I wasn’t about to stop speaking out against the Iraq War. I approached Hamilton Fish at the Nation Institute about becoming a senior fellow there and leaving the Times. I did leave the Times; I wasn’t fired. But if I had stayed long enough, I would have been fired. That was inevitable.

GDP numbers make double dip threat real

Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns

I have stopped reporting the quarterly GDP numbers but this last reading bears mentioning. The US Bureau of Economic Analysis reported the following at 830AM ET:

Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate of 1.3 percent in the second quarter of 2011, (that is, from the first quarter to the second quarter), according to the "advance" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the first quarter, real GDP increased 0.4 percent.

The immediate reaction was a drop in the dollar to record lows against the Japanese yen and Swiss franc, a drop in Ten-year yields to 2.88%, a drop in the Dow Futures to –137 and a rise in the Gold price by $10 to $1626.

Lakoff: How to Rescue the American Dream from the GOP's Nightmare

By George Lakoff and Glenn W. Smith, AlterNet
Posted on July 28, 2011, Printed on July 30, 2011

Democracy, in the American tradition, has been defined by a simple morality: We Americans care about our fellow citizens, we act on that care and build trust, and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families, our friends and our neighbors, but for our country, for each other, for people we have never met and never will meet.

American democracy has, over our history, called upon citizens to share an equal responsibility to work together to secure a safe and prosperous future for their families and nation. This is the central work of our democracy and it is a public enterprise. This, the American Dream, is the dream of a functioning democracy.

How Shadowy Right-Wing Front Groups Engineered Our National Embrace Of Debt Reduction Over Job Creation

By Lee Fang on Jul 28, 2011 at 7:50 pm

For the entire year, as a sluggish economy sputters by and states continue to struggle with falling revenue, the conversation in Congress has centered solely on spending reduction. Earlier this year, we witnessed looming government-showdown duels between competing spending reduction plans. Now with the debt ceiling debate, the only two options are a choice between a package of painful cuts and a package of deeply draconian cuts. There has been no lively discussion of new policy ideas for job creation, foreclosure mitigation, or how to spur demand, the key driver of economic recovery.

The 6 Biggest Lies About the U.S. Debt

By Arun Gupta, AlterNet
Posted on July 28, 2011, Printed on July 30, 2011

Editor's Note: This article has been corrected to reflect more accurate calculations.

There is one simple truth about the discussion of the looming U.S. debt crisis: it is largely a compendium of half-truths, distortions, myths and outright lies.

For example, is it true that the U.S. debt is unsustainable, which is spurring the budget-cutting fever? Far from it. While U.S. debt is at one of its highest levels ever in terms of gross domestic product, the estimated interest payments for all of 2011 on the $14.3 trillion public debt will be a mere $430 billion. This is only 18 percent more than the $364 billion paid way back in 1998, while the U.S. economy has grown nearly 30 percent since then. Rock-bottom interest rates on U.S. government debt account for the low payments today, but the practical effect is that servicing the debt as a percentage of GDP is near the lowest it’s been in decades.

Or what about hysterical headlines like “U.S. Debt Default Looms” (courtesy of NPR) unless Democrats and Republicans agree to raise the debt ceiling? They are completely untrue. Richard Wolff, professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, says, if there is no agreement by Aug. 2 to allow the U.S. Treasury to borrow more funds, then “the government instead would choose among cutbacks on various expenditures such as state and local aid, medical aid, for war, for infrastructure. It would extraordinarily unusual for a government in such a situation to attack its creditors.”

Revisions show deeper 2007-2009 recession

Martin Crutsinger, AP Economics Writer, On Friday July 29, 2011, 9:33 am EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The 2007-2009 recession, already in the record books as the worst in the 66 years since the end of World War II, was even worse than previously thought.

From the start of the recession at the end of 2007 to the end in June of 2009, the U.S. economy shrank 5.1 percent. That is 1 percentage point worse than the previous estimate that the recession reduced total output during that period by 4.1 percent.

Extremists flocking to Facebook for recruits

By PAISLEY DODDS - Associated Press | AP – Fri, Jul 29, 2011

LONDON (AP) — When the English Defense League sprang to life two years ago, it had fewer than 50 members — a rough-and-tumble bunch of mostly white guys shouting from a street corner about what they viewed as uncontrolled Muslim immigration.

Now, the far-right group mentioned by confessed Norway gunman Anders Behring Breivik as an inspiration says its ranks have swollen to more than 10,000 people, a spectacular rise its leaders attribute to the immense global power of Facebook and other social networking sites.

Evil Corporate Tax Holiday Gains Bipartisan Support

The madness that is the proposed tax repatriation holiday is continuing and gathering steam. More and more members of congress are coming out of the woodwork, scratching their chins in contemplative consideration as it were, pretending that they’ve just realized what a great day a corporate tax holiday would be – not that they’ve taken gazillions of dollars from the firms lobbying for it or anything.

A Short Comment on Keynes

Josh Marshall | July 28, 2011, 12:23PM

Since we're talking about Keynes today and the new Era of Austerity, which I fear is quite real, I thought I'd put in my two cents. There seems little doubt that Keynes has taken a mighty hit. But my read of the situation is that the hit is almost entirely in the realm of politics rather than economics.

Of course, there's Keynesianism and Keynesianism. But I'm talking about the broad proposition of that in the face of a dramatic shortfall in demand following an economic crisis, the government plays a critical role as the provider of demand of last resort in getting an economy back on its feet.

Greek debt crisis a Goldman Sachs economic coup?

Posted on 07.28.11
By Stephen C. Webster

Journalist, entrepreneur and Russia Today opinion host Max Keiser traveled to Greece recently for a film project that looks at how the country came to be on the verge of default.

Once Unthinkable, Breakup of Big Banks Now Seems Feasible

by Jesse Eisinger
ProPublica, July 27, 2011, 3:50 p.m.

What was made can be unmade.

JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo may have venerable names, but they and the pseudo-venerable Citigroup and Bank of America are all products of countless mergers and agglomerations.

Solar toilet turns sewage into power

Melissae Fellet, reporter

Combine sunlight and sewage and what do you get? Sanitation, of course.

Michael Hoffmann at the California Institute of Technology has been experimenting with solar-powered water treatment on a small scale. Now he plans to incorporate this technology into a portable toilet.

Sunlight powers an electrochemical reaction with human waste in water that generates microbe-killing oxidants and releases hydrogen gas. The researchers plan to collect the hydrogen in a fuel cell to power a light or possibly even a self-cleaning mechanism.

Getting 50-year-old Americans as healthy as Europeans could save Medicare and Medicaid $632 billion by 2050

Middle-age health differences responsible for life-expectancy gap

Forty years ago, Americans could expect to live slightly longer than Europeans. This has since reversed: in spite of similar levels of economic development, Americans now live about a year-and-a-half less, on average, than their Western European counterparts, and also less than people in most other developed nations. How did Americans fall behind?

A study in the July 2011 issue of Social Science & Medicine is the first to calculate the fiscal consequences of the growing life expectancy gap over the next few decades. The study also pinpoints the crucial age at which U.S. life expectancy starts to deteriorate.

At the DHS, One Analyst For Many Right-Wing Extremists

With Norway still in mourning, the Southern Poverty Law Center has published an interview showing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has just one analyst studying the threat from domestic terror. There used to be six, but the department effectively dismantled the unit in the face of a conservative firestorm to a leaked 2009 report on right-wing extremism. Daryl Johnson, the GOP analyst who headed the unit, urged DHS in vain to pay more attention to the threat from the right. A list of the almost 100 instances of right-wing violence in the last 15 years here.

Raising Medicare age won't work

By Theodore R. Marmor and Jerry L. Mashaw

Just when there seemed to be no more dopey ideas for reducing America's deficit, another one appeared.

Raising the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67, according to Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I., Conn.) and Tom Coburn (R., Okla.), would save Medicare billions over the next decade and more. This was part of a package of proposals to reduce Medicare spending, including combining hospital and doctor coverage, changing deductibles, charging wealthier seniors more, increasing premiums, and cutting hospital debt payments. But the change in the eligibility age deserves the sharpest criticism, especially given that President Obama appears willing to consider it.

Economic Armageddon: Gretchen Morgensen on How Wall Street Broke the Economy

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet
Posted on July 26, 2011, Printed on July 29, 2011

Gretchen Morgensen was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her "trenchant and incisive" coverage of Wall Street and has been on that beat ever since. Her new book, Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon (written with Joshua Rosner), lays out the toxic interplay between Washington, Wall Street and corrupt mortgage lenders that led to the meltdown. It examines how the watchdogs who were supposed to protect us from financial harm were actually complicit in creating the crisis.

Gretchen Morgenson is a business reporter and columnist at the New York Times, where she also serves as assistant business and financial editor. Prior to joining the Times in 1998, she worked as a broker at Dean Witter in the 1980s, and as a reporter at Forbes, Worth, and Money magazines.

Terrence McNally: What do you consider your path to the work you do today?

Gretchen Morgensen: I worked on Wall Street for three years, not a long time, but I did get a really good sense of how that place operates. People on Wall Street are extremely smart, aggressive and creative. They are also the intermediary for a lot of companies trying to raise capital, and can be a real facilitator for good. But in this crisis, that got started with a vengeance in the early ‘90s and built up to where we were in 2008 when many of these firms had to be taken over, Wall Street has had more of a pernicious impact. Some of their creativity has been used not to benefit investors, not to benefit Main Street, but simply to benefit themselves.

Two Can Play

By James Kwak

Quick, what was the greatest conservative accomplishment of the George W. Bush presidency? It wasn’t Medicare Part D: that was a clever way to steal a Democratic issue and pass it in a form that was friendly to the pharmaceutical industry. It wasn’t Roberts and Alito: yes, they are young and conservative, but the majority is still only 5-4. It wasn’t Social Security privatization: that didn’t happen. Iraq? Getting political support to invade Iraq was a major coup, but everything went downhill from there.

The answer is obvious: the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Together, they were a wish list of conservative tax policy: a reduction in the top marginal income tax rate from 39.1 percent to 35 percent; a reduction in the top rates for capital gains and dividends to 15 percent; much higher contribution limits for tax-preferred retirement accounts (meaning that if you have enough money to save, you can shield more of it from taxes); and eventual elimination of the estate tax. In total, when fully phased in, the Bush-era tax cuts sliced almost 3 percent of GDP out of federal government revenues.*

GOP Congressman: If We Take The Senate And White House In 2012, The EPA Will Be ‘Discontinued’

By Lee Fang on Jul 27, 2011 at 4:00 pm

As ThinkProgress has extensively reported, the new Republican Congress, elected with tens of millions in polluter-funded attack ads, campaign contributions, and shadowy front groups, has made weakening environmental safeguards, particularly from the EPA, a top priority. Now, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) is making it even more explicit: if Americans elect more Republicans to office in the 2012 elections, the GOP will get rid of the EPA.

Debt Madness Was Always About Killing Social Security

Posted on Jul 27, 2011
By Robert Scheer

This phony debt crisis has now passed through the looking glass into the realm where madness reigns. What should have been an uneventful moment in which lawmakers make good on the nation’s contractual obligations has instead been seized upon by Republican hypocrites as a moment to settle ideological scores that have nothing to do with the debt.

Hypocrites, because their radical free market ideology, and the resulting total deregulation of the financial markets, is what caused the debt to spiral out of control this last decade. That and the wars George W. Bush launched but didn’t have the integrity to responsibly finance. The consequence was a banking bubble and crash leading to a 50 percent run-up of the debt that has nothing to do with the “entitlements” that those same Republicans have always wanted to destroy.

Even Barack Obama has put cuts in those programs into play, warning ominously that a failure to lift the debt ceiling could cause the government to stop sending out Social Security checks. Why, when the Social Security trust fund is fully funded for the next quarter-century and is owed money by the U.S. Treasury rather than the other way around? Why would we pay foreign creditors before American seniors? The answer, offered as conventional wisdom by leaders of both parties, is that we cannot endanger our credit by failing to back our bonds, even though the Republicans have aroused the alarm of the main U.S. credit rating agencies by their brinkmanship on the debt.

Economists say U.S. debt may not be as high as you think

By James Rosen | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Economists dismayed by the debt-ceiling pyrotechnics on Capitol Hill and at the White House say that political leaders' failure to deal with the short-term crisis bodes poorly for their ability to confront another looming fiscal disaster.

And the problem is compounded, many economists say, by how the United States calculates its debt.

In trying to understand the debt ceiling — a subject many people had never considered before this summer — it helps to know a few things about the layers that make up the United States' $14.34 trillion mountain of debt.

Paul Krugman: The Cult That Is Destroying America

Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system.

And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are.

So This Is Despair

Tuesday 26 July 2011
by: William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.- Flannery O'Connor

It is difficult to describe this emotion. I’m used to disappointment, fairly comfortable with heartbreak, and am well acquainted with rage. Over the course of my lifetime, my presidents have been Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and now Obama…and each, in his own way, has been worse than the last.

How can I say that? Easy. The problems of Nixon are still with us, and have grown worse by orders of magnitude through each successive administration. Certain presidents have exacerbated the situation beyond their expected purview, but generally speaking, each one has adopted the worst ideas of his predecessor, and in nearly every instance, has made those problems worse.

But this…this is too much.

Study: Union decline accounts for much of the rise in wage inequality

WASHINGTON, DC, July 21, 2011 — Union membership in America has declined significantly since the early 1970s, and that plunge explains approximately a fifth of the increase in hourly wage inequality among women and about a third among men, according to a new study in the August issue of the American Sociological Review.

"Our study underscores the role of unions as an equalizing force in the labor market," said study author Bruce Western, a professor of sociology at Harvard University. "Most researchers studying wage inequality have focused on the effects of educational stratification—pay differences based on level of education—and have generally under-emphasized the impact of unions."

Cutting social security by stealth

Shaving the consumer price index that is supposed to keep benefits in line with inflation is an old scam of economists

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk, Monday 25 July 2011 19.01 BST

There is a full-fledged drive to cut social security benefits by lowering the annual cost of living adjustment for people already receiving benefits. The plan involves changing the index for calculating the cost of living. The new index, which is known as the "chained consumer price index" (CCPI), typically shows a rate of inflation 0.3 percentage points less than the CPI currently used to adjust benefits.

A reduction of 0.3 percentage points in benefits may seem small, but this will accumulate through time. After being retired ten years, benefits will be almost 3% lower with the CCPI. After 20 years, the loss will be near 6%, and after 30 years, the reduction in benefits will be close to 9%. This is a serious loss of income for seniors, the vast majority of whom rely on social security for most of their income.

‘We Get The Sacrifice, They Get The Wealth’: A Fired-Up Pelosi Tears Into GOP Deficit Plan

Evan McMorris-Santoro | July 26, 2011, 1:18PM

Speaking to a crowd of union workers on Capitol Hill today, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi unloaded on Republican plans to lower the deficit through deep cuts to government services in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. Frustrations are running high in Congress with the default deadline rapidly approaching, and Pelosi spoke with a fire that suggested the endless debate over the debt ceiling is taking its toll on her patience.

Marshall Auerback: Worse Than Hoover

By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.

It’s actually a bit over the top and unfair to compare Barack Obama with Herbert Hoover – unfair that is, to the memory of Herbert Hoover. The received image of the latter is the dour, technocrat who looked on with indifference while the country went to pieces. This is actually an exaggeration. As Kevin Baker convincingly argued in his Harper’s Magazine piece, “Barack Hoover Obama”, President Hoover did try to organize national, voluntary efforts to hire the unemployed, provide charity, and sought to create a private banking pool. When these efforts collapsed or fell short, he started a dozen Home Loan Discount Banks to help individuals refinance their mortgages and save their homes. Indeed, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which became famous for its exploits under FDR and Jesse Jones, was actually created by Hoover. Often tarred with the liquidationist philosophy of his Treasury Secretary, the establishment of the RFC was, as Baker suggested, “a direct rebuttal to Andrew Mellon’s prescription of creative destruction. Rather than liquidating banks, railroads, and agricultural cooperatives, the RFC would lend them money to stay afloat.”

The Right Wing Playbook on Anti-Muslim Extremism

Introduction

Under the guise of defending freedom and American values, right-wing anti-Muslim activists are campaigning to prevent Muslim-Americans from freely worshiping and practicing their religion, curtail their political rights, and even compel their deportation. A growing faction in the American Right claims that Muslim-Americans, who comprise just 1% of the population, are subverting the Constitution and taking over the country. These accusations have helped to foster anti-Muslim hostility, reflected in the rise of anti-Muslim prejudice and increased attacks on Muslim-Americans and houses of worship. Tied in with hatred of President Obama, fear of religious diversity and hostility toward immigrants and gays, anti-Muslim rhetoric and paranoia has become a mainstream if not ubiquitous part of the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

A Reading List for Following the Debt Ceiling Drama

by Braden Goyette
ProPublica, July 27, 2011, 12:15 p.m.

We’re updating this reading list continuously as new stories and resources on the debt ceiling debate come out. The most recent updates are starred (*).

Congress has until a week from today to raise the debt ceiling, the cap on the amount of money the Treasury can borrow to pay the government's bills. As the clock keeps ticking, you may still have unanswered questions. How dire could the consequences of not raising the debt ceiling be? What are the possible solutions? Here's a reading list to help you keep up.

The Chart That Should Accompany All Discussions of the Debt Ceiling

Jul 25 2011, 10:58 AM ET

It's this one, from yesterday's New York Times. Click for a more detailed view, though it's pretty clear as is.

[...]

It's based on data from the Congressional Budget Office and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Its significance is not partisan (who's "to blame" for the deficit) but intellectual. It demonstrates the utter incoherence of being very concerned about a structural federal deficit but ruling out of consideration the policy that was largest single contributor to that deficit, namely the Bush-era tax cuts.

Why Do Conservatives Hate High-Speed Rail? 5 Reasons Right-Wingers Are Sabotaging Public Transportation Projects

By Sarah Jaffe, AlterNet
Posted on July 22, 2011, Printed on July 27, 2011

High-speed rail is one of the rare areas where business, labor, and environmental activists are often in agreement. Republican transportation secretary Ray LaHood is a fan, as are, of course, President Obama and Vice-President Biden.

But Tea Party-supported governors like Scott Walker in Wisconsin, John Kasich in Ohio and Rick Scott in Florida have made headlines by refusing billions in federal stimulus dollars aimed at creating new high-speed train lines between major cities.

Minority Rules: Scientists Discover Tipping Point for the Spread of Ideas

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.

Spare the rod and develop the child

Study suggests non-corporal discipline aids children's executive-functioning ability

TORONTO, ON – Children in a school that uses corporal punishment performed significantly worse in tasks involving "executive functioning" – psychological processes such as planning, abstract thinking, and delaying gratification – than those in a school relying on milder disciplinary measures such as time-outs, according to a new study involving two private schools in a West African country.

The findings, published by the journal Social Development, suggest that a harshly punitive environment may have long-term detrimental effects on children's verbal intelligence and their executive-functioning ability. As a result, children exposed to a harshly punitive environment may be at risk for behavioral problems related to deficits in executive-functioning, the study indicates.

New Court Filing Reveals How the 2004 Ohio Presidential Election Was Hacked

Monday 25 July 2011
by: Bob Fritakis, The Free Press [3] | Report

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.

Mike Lee: I Want America’s ‘House To Come Down’ Unless Congress Votes To Rewrite Constitution

By Ian Millhiser on Jul 25, 2011 at 7:23 pm

In an interview on MSNBC’s Hardball Monday evening, tenther Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) admitted that he is using the threat of a catastrophic default to extort the nation into rewriting the Constitution to force a permanent era of conservative governance:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: How many days do you think we have, on the outside, to get this debt ceiling through before we have a problem? How many days?

LEE: I don’t know, maybe ten days.

Now it's the lawyers' turn to be sucked into the phone-hacking scandal

Leading lawyers feel client information may have been intercepted after their names were found in Glenn Mulcaire's file

Now it's the turn of lawyers and the legal process to be sucked into the phone-hacking vortex. The Law Society has even suggested justice itself is under threat, implying messages could have been intercepted with the intention of influencing court cases.

Several prominent solicitors fear their mobile phones have been hacked. Some have been formally informed of the risk by police after detectives discovered their numbers among a private investigator's notes.

Michael Hudson: Mr. Obama’s Scare Tactics to Get Democrats to Vote for His Republican Wall Street Plan

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College

You know that the debt kerfuffle is as staged as melodramatically as a World Wrestling Federation exhibition when Mr. Obama makes the blatantly empty threat that if Congress does not “tackle the tough challenges of entitlement and tax reform,” there won’t be money to pay Social Security checks next month. In his debt speech last night (July 25), he threatened that if “we default, we would not have enough money to pay all of our bills – bills that include monthly Social Security checks, veterans’ benefits, and the government contracts we’ve signed with thousands of businesses.”

This is not remotely true. But it has become the scare theme for over a week now, ever since the President used almost the same words in his interview with CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley.

The Republican Wreckage

House Republicans have lost sight of the country’s welfare. It’s hard to conclude anything else from their latest actions, including the House speaker’s dismissal of President Obama’s plea for compromise Monday night. They have largely succeeded in their campaign to ransom America’s economy for the biggest spending cuts in a generation. They have warped an exercise in paying off current debt into an argument about future spending. Yet, when they win another concession, they walk away.

This increasingly reckless game has pushed the nation to the brink of ruinous default. The Republicans have dimmed the futures of millions of jobless Americans, whose hopes for work grow more out of reach as government job programs are cut and interest rates begin to rise. They have made the federal government a laughingstock around the globe.

Arkansas High School Decides to Appoint White Co-Valedictorian Because Actual Valedictorian Is Black

OK, see if you can wrap your head around the (racist) logic here. Kymberly Wimberly was the top student at McGehee Secondary School in Little Rock, Arkansas. So, the school named her valedictorian. And then shortly after that they decided to name a co-valedictorian. Why? Because the other student had equally as high a GPA? Nope. The reason it seems has to do with the fact that Wimberly is a black student.

California man, who saved Japanese farms during WWII, turns 100

By Stephen Magagnini
smagagnini@sacbee.com
Published: Monday, Jul. 25, 2011 - 12:00 am | Page 1B Last Modified: Monday, Jul. 25, 2011 - 8:03 am

More than 150 relatives, friends and neighbors filled Florin Community Center on Sunday to celebrate a true American war hero.Bob Fletcher – who officially turns 100 on Tuesday – didn't see combat in World War II. But he was shot at for being a Japanese sympathizer when he quit his job to save three local Japanese American farms whose owners were sent to internment camps.

House Republicans consider high-skills immigration bill

Bill would eliminate the per-country caps on green cards, which could reduce wait times for Indian and Chinese workers

By Patrick Thibodeau | Computerworld

The negotiations to strike a deal on the debt ceiling may be getting all the attention in Congress, but there are also new efforts by lawmakers to address high-skill immigration issues. First, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee have circulated a discussion draft of a bill that would eliminate the per-country caps on green cards, according to a copy of the document seen by Computerworld. This proposal may well amount to the GOP alternative to a Democratic plan offered in June by Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), whose district includes Silicon Valley.

Walker cuts DMV in Dem districts now that voter ID is passed

Brazen power grab. That's the only way to describe Koch whore Gov. Scott Walker's latest attack on working families in Wisconsin.

Progressivetoo reports,

The Wisconsin legislature is finalizing a bill to close ten Department of Motor Vehicle centers located in Democratic districts within the state. The money saved will be used to extend operating hours at DMV centers in Republican districts. These cuts come on the heels of new voter ID laws that require voters to present a state-issued photo identification card at the poll booths.

Paul Krugman: Messing With Medicare

At the time of writing, President Obama’s hoped-for “Grand Bargain” with Republicans is apparently dead. And I say good riddance. I’m no more eager than other rational people (a category that fails to include many Congressional Republicans) to see what happens if the debt limit isn’t raised. But what the president was offering to the G.O.P., especially on Medicare, was a very bad deal for America.

Specifically, according to many reports, the president offered both means-testing of Medicare benefits and a rise in the age of Medicare eligibility. The first would be bad policy; the second would be terrible policy. And it would almost surely be terrible politics, too.

The crucial thing to remember, when we talk about Medicare, is that our goal isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, defined in terms of some arbitrary number. Our goal should be, instead, to give Americans the health care they need at a price the country can afford. And throwing Americans in their mid-60s off Medicare moves us away from that goal, not toward it.

Why Prosecutors Don't Go After Wall Street

July 13, 2011

When the energy giant Enron collapsed 10 years ago, top executives of the company faced criminal prosecution, and many served lengthy prison terms. In the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, hundreds of bankers went to jail.

But the financial meltdown of 2008 hasn't generated a single prosecution of high-level Wall Street players — even though the Securities and Exchange Commission has brought civil cases against some companies and reached financial settlements.

How the Murdoch press keeps Australia's dirty secret

12 May 2011

The illegal eavesdropping on famous people by the News of the World is said to be Rupert Murdoch’s Watergate. But is it the crime by which Murdoch ought to be known? In his native land, Australia, Murdoch controls 70 per cent of the capital city press. Australia is the world’s first murdochracy, in which smear by media is power.

The most enduring and insidious Murdoch campaign has been against the Aboriginal people, who were dispossessed by the arrival of the British in the late 18th century and have never been allowed to recover. “Nigger hunts” continued into the 1960s and beyond. The officially-inspired theft of children from Aboriginal families, justified by the racist theories of the eugenics movement, produced those known as the Stolen Generation and in 1997 was identified as genocide. Today, the first Australians have the shortest life expectancy of any of the world’s 90 indigenous peoples. Australia imprisons Aborigines at five times the rate South Africa during the apartheid years. In the state of Western Australia, the figure is eight times the apartheid rate.

Social Security Isn't an Entitlement, It's a Promise

By Steven D, BooMan Tribune
Posted on July 25, 2011, Printed on July 25, 2011

Last night in Youngstown, Ohio, 200 or so people, seniors and activists and politicians, met at a town-hall event at United Baptist Church. Senator Sherrod Brown appeared and spoke at the event that was sponsored by the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. The message from the people of Youngstown who attended was clear. Here\'s the takeaway quote from Carolyn Williams of Youngstown:

“Social Security is not an entitlement; it is a promise to the American people who have paid into the system,” Williams told [the audience]. [...]

“Proposed cuts will force recipients to pay higher insurance premiums and co-pays, and deny us money for essentials like prescription drugs and groceries.”

Williams has reason to be angry with all the talk in Washington about cutting Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.

10 of America's Most Dangerous Hatemongers

By Robert Steinback, SPLC Intelligence Report
Posted on July 21, 2011, Printed on July 25, 2011

The apparent recent surge in popular anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States has been driven by a surprisingly small and, for the most part, closely knit cadre of activists. Their influence extends far beyond their limited numbers, in part because of an amenable legion of right-wing media personalities — and lately, politicians like U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who held controversial hearings into the radicalization of American Muslims this March —who are eager to promote them as impartial experts or grassroots leaders. Yet a close look at their rhetoric reveals how doggedly this group works to provoke and guide populist anger over what is seen as the threat posed by the 0.6% of Americans who are Muslim — an agenda that goes beyond reasonable concern about terrorism into the realm of demonization.