...The term Jumbo Shrimp has always amazed me. What is a Jumbo Shrimp? I mean, it's like Military Intelligence - the words don't go together, man.

¶ 8:05 PM 0 comments links to this post

..after President Obama denounced Wall Street bonuses as "shameful" on Thursday, the way was clear for the rest of the political class to pour gasoline on the bonfire being prepared for the offending bankers. Senator Chris Dodd, former "friend" of mortgage banker Angelo Mozilo, ranted that the Treasury should somehow confiscate the bonuses.

Senator Claire McCaskill rolled out legislation to put a compensation cap of $400,000 on executives whose firms receive bailout money. She also proposes creating a court to restrain their "massive self-indulgences." The Senator from Missouri then spoke of "a bunch of idiots on Wall Street." Insofar as the Congress is blithely waving more than $800 billion of cats-and-dogs "stimulus" spending into the air, the American people can be forgiven for asking who are the greater fools.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has begun a formal investigation into the bonuses and the negotiating details of Bank of America's takeover of Merrill Lynch. In short, Mr. Cuomo is putting BofA head Ken Lewis and Merrill's John Thain in the legal crosshairs. Watching this spectacle, Mr. Obama should consider that there may be a price for letting the populist flames burn out of control during a deep recession.

In our experience, political nuance has never been the strong suit of Wall Street executives. John Thain's year-end bonuses to Merrill Lynch executives, whatever their rationale, reflected an acute case of political tin ear. If the excesses of his office-decorating take this Wall Street practice the way of the dodo, we won't weep.

Yet the hard truth remains that whether on Wall Street or across the American business landscape, compensation levels are a business judgment made under the pressure of competition. The "idiots" notwithstanding, Wall Street has lots of highly talented financial minds and mobility among firms based on compensation is routine.

If Congress is going to start setting legal limits on salaries and bonuses in the U.S., it is going to drive talent out of Bank of America and these other banks and into institutions without such limits, perhaps abroad. The same goes for Attorney General Cuomo's implied threat of prosecutions...

¶ 7:43 PM 0 comments links to this post

WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner picked a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist as a top aide Tuesday, the same day he announced rules aimed at reducing the role of lobbyists in agency decisions...

¶ 11:06 AM 0 comments links to this post

The centrists get it. This political fight is between the "centrists" and the people. They want it all, they want it all, and they want it now. Liberals have to get bupkis before Obama gets a single Republican vote. If liberals were smart, they would draw the line here and tell President Obama that if he makes more concessions, they walk, and he gets nothing from them and will have to govern as a Republican from here on in. Last time that happened was NAFTA, and the Democrats are still smarting over how long they were out of power. So it won't happen now. So America, bend over and lube up, because you are about to feel the Unity Pony...

¶ 10:24 PM 0 comments links to this post

Defense Department Establishes Civilian Expeditionary Workforce
By Gerry J. Gilmore
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27, 2009 – The Defense Department is forming a civilian expeditionary workforce that will be trained and equipped to deploy overseas in support of military missions worldwide, according to department officials.

The intent of the program “is to maximize the use of the civilian workforce to allow military personnel to be fully utilized for operational requirements,” according to a Defense Department statement.

Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England signed Defense Department Directive 1404.10, which outlines and provides guidance about the program, on Jan. 23.

Certain duty positions may be designated by the various Defense Department components to participate in the program. If a position is designated, the employee will be asked to sign an agreement that they will deploy if called upon to do so. If the employee does not wish to deploy, every effort will be made to reassign the employee to a nondeploying position.

The directive emphasizes, however, that volunteers be sought first for any expeditionary requirements, before requiring anyone to serve involuntarily or on short notice. Overseas duty tours shall not exceed two years.

Employees in deployable-designated positions will be trained, equipped and prepared to serve overseas in support of humanitarian, reconstruction and, if absolutely necessary, combat-support missions.

The program also is open to former and retired civilian employees who agree to return to federal service on a time-limited status to serve overseas or to fill in for people deployed overseas.

Program participants are eligible for military medical support while serving in their overseas duty station.

All participants will undergo pre- and post-deployment medical testing, including physical and psychological exams.

Defense civilians reassigned from their normal duty to serve overseas will be granted the right to return to the positions they held prior to their deployment or to a position of similar grade, level and responsibility within the same organization, regardless of the deployment length .

Families of deployed Defense Department civilian employees shall be supported and provided with information on benefits and entitlements and issues likely to be faced by the employee during and upon return from a deployment.

Defense civilian employees who participate in the expeditionary program shall be treated with high regard as an indication of the department’s respect for those who serve expeditionary requirements.

Expeditionary program participants’ service and experience shall be valued, respected and recognized as career-enhancing.

Participants who meet program requirements would be eligible to receive the Secretary of Defense Medal for the Global War on Terrorism.

¶ 9:33 PM 0 comments links to this post

Despite a drop in its fourth-quarter earnings and collapsing oil prices, Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, still managed to set a record as the most profitable American corporation ever last year...

“Exxon kept its head when everyone else was going crazy going to alternatives and drilling more,” said Mr. Flynn, at Alaron Trading. “But Exxon knew after every boom comes a bust and focused on the future.”

¶ 12:34 PM 0 comments links to this post

...Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, has declared that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Indeed. F.D.R. was able to enact Social Security in part because the Great Depression highlighted the need for a stronger social safety net. And the current crisis presents a real opportunity to fix the gaping holes that remain in that safety net, especially with regard to health care.

And Mr. Obama really, really doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes of Bill Clinton, whose health care push failed politically partly because he moved too slowly: by the time his administration was ready to submit legislation, the economy was recovering from recession and the sense of urgency was fading.

One more thing. There’s a populist rage building in this country, as Americans see bankers getting huge bailouts while ordinary citizens suffer.

I agree with administration officials who argue that these financial bailouts are necessary (though I have problems with the specifics). But I also agree with Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who argues that — as a matter of political necessity as well as social justice — aid to bankers has to be linked to a strengthening of the social safety net, so that Americans can see that the government is ready to help everyone, not just the rich and powerful.

The bottom line, then, is that this is no time to let campaign promises of guaranteed health care be quietly forgotten. It is, instead, a time to put the push for universal care front and center. Health care now!

¶ 6:47 AM 0 comments links to this post

...Temperatures are rising in the North Atlantic, and the permafrost soil in Siberia, Canada and Alaska is softening. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Arctic is subject to "stronger and faster warming than any other region."

Arctic animal and plant species must adjust to far more extreme changes than elsewhere -- or face the threat of extinction. It is not surprising that the polar bear has become a symbol of climate change.

People also live in the Arctic region. The Inuit are the ancestral settlers of the north. They number about 100,000 and are scattered across Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Siberia. Their familiar habitat is sinking as the permafrost soil softens.

Some stand to benefit from the end of the ice era. As if awakening from a deep sleep, the five nations bordering the Arctic -- the United States, Russia, Canada, Norway and Denmark -- are already grasping for new riches:

* As the wheat farming zone shifts farther to the north in Siberia, the Russians are looking forward to rich harvests.

* Farmers in Greenland recently began growing potatoes and broccoli, making the territory less dependant on shipments from the south.

* US aluminum producer Alcoa plans to build a huge aluminum smelter near Greenland's capital city, Nuuk. Hydroelectric power from melting glaciers will provide the electricity for the plant.

* As the ice melts, previously impassable shipping routes become navigable. Large amounts of money and effort are already being poured into expanding ports like Murmansk, Churchill and Hammerfest.

* Most of all, the Arctic is releasing unimagined amounts of resources, especially oil and gas, but also various ores.

...From the pragmatists' standpoint, the Arctic Ocean is opening up at just the right time. Exploding prices are fueling an onslaught on the riches of the North. The British-Dutch energy conglomerate Shell, for example, spent a record sum of $2 billion (€1.4 billion) for licenses in the Chukchi Sea north of the Bering Strait.

Energy multinational BP recently spent $1 billion (€700 million) for oil exploration rights in the pack ice in Canada's Mackenzie River estuary region. A $16.2 billion (€11.3 billion) pipeline will connect the new energy-producing region with areas to the south. The Danish company DONG Energy A/S began collecting seismic data in Disko Bay on the west coast of Greenland.

A forecast issued by the US Geological Survey (USGS) in July has ignited both fascination and greed. For the first time, the agency provided a detailed estimate of the Arctic region's oil and gas potential. The USGS concludes that the region north of the Arctic Circle holds the equivalent of 412 billion barrels of oil, or close to one-quarter of the world's undiscovered but technically reachable oil and gas reserves. This is significantly more than proven reserves in Saudi Arabia...

...While an ice sheet on Antarctica began to grow some 20 million years ago, the current ice age is said to have started about 2.58 million years ago. During the late Pliocene the spread of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere began. Since then, the world has seen cycles of glaciation with ice sheets advancing and retreating on 40,000- and 100,000-year time scales called glacials (glacial advance) and interglacials (glacial retreat). The earth is currently in an interglacial, and the last glacial period ended about 10,000 years ago. All that remains of the continental ice sheets are the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets...

¶ 8:41 PM 0 comments links to this post

Smiling, happy people

WASHINGTON -- Government officials seeking to revamp the U.S. financial bailout have discussed spending another $1 trillion to $2 trillion to help restore banks to health, according to people familiar with the matter...

¶ 6:53 AM 0 comments links to this post

...The war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with Afghanistan. It has only to do with war. Any war. Anywhere. Any reason at all will do.

It's a jobs program.

From Congress to Pentagon to Defense Industry . . . the old double play. The money flows by the hundreds of billions, keeping industry busy, keeping materiel flowing, keeping campaign coffers full, keeping jobs going in every single Congressional District in the nation. This sacred bastion of money and power behind the American government and American nation is the true shadow government. No American President will ever be permitted to shut it down...

¶ 9:39 PM 0 comments links to this post

...Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority.

Participants on the October 17 call -- including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG -- were urged to persuade their clients to send "large contributions" to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.

Bernie Marcus, the charismatic co-founder of Home Depot, led the call along with Rick Berman, an aggressive EFCA opponent and founder of the Center for Union Facts. Over the course of an hour, the two framed the legislation as an existential threat to American capitalism, or worse.

"This is the demise of a civilization," said Marcus. "This is how a civilization disappears. I am sitting here as an elder statesman and I'm watching this happen and I don't believe it..."

...France. Where everyone gets good healthcare. My, that's just absolutely barbaric, isn't it?

¶ 9:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

...Meanwhile, kinetic is moving in other directions, too. "Afghanistan's kinetic action" was the somewhat cryptic headline on a piece the other day in Stars and Stripes, the independent news source for the US military community.

The lead was a little more enlightening, if not heartening: "Taliban fighters have turned increasingly to roadside bombs and other deadly tactics to combat U.S. soldiers and other NATO-led troops in southern Afghanistan, military officials say."

With such a grim story, no wonder there was a resort to euphemism.

By contrast, a "nonkinetic" operation is one with no shooting or bombing.

Thus the Navy Times quoted Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, commander of 5th Fleet and Combined Maritime Forces, on efforts to combat piracy off the coast of Somalia: "The most effective measures we've seen ... are non-kinetic..."

...Five programs account for half of the growth in weapons spending, Gates said. The five programs are Boeing’s Future Combat Systems; General Dynamics’ and Northrop Grumman’s Virginia-class attack submarines; Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter; the Pentagon’s primary satellite-launch program, which is an effort shared by Lockheed Martin and Boeing; and a multi-contractor program to destroy the U.S. stockpile of chemical weapons.

¶ 6:57 AM 0 comments links to this post

The United Nations’ crime and drug watchdog has indications that money made in illicit drug trade has been used to keep banks afloat in the global financial crisis, its head was quoted as saying on Sunday.

Vienna-based UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa said in an interview released by Austrian weekly Profil that drug money often became the only available capital when the crisis spiralled out of control last year.

“In many instances, drug money is currently the only liquid investment capital,” Costa was quoted as saying by Profil. “In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor.”

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime had found evidence that “interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities,” Costa was quoted as saying. There were “signs that some banks were rescued in that way.”

Profil said Costa declined to identify countries or banks which may have received drug money and gave no indication how much cash might be involved. He only said Austria was not on top of his list, Profil said...

¶ 6:33 AM 0 comments links to this post

Brits Shoot at UFOs, Ex-official Says
January 27, 2009
United Press International

LONDON -- A former official with the British Ministry of Defense said military pilots in the country have been shooting at UFOs since the 1980s.

Nick Pope, former head of the Ministry of Defense's UFO project, said UFOs have been fired upon but none have been brought down or captured by the Royal Air Force, The Daily Telegraph reported Monday.

"There was a faction in the MoD who said 'We want to shoot down a UFO and that will resolve the issue one way or another,'" Pope said. "We know of cases where the order has been given to shoot down -- with little effect to the UFO."

Pope said pilots only fired upon UFOs in cases where the objects appeared threatening.

"In the case of UFOs, whether the object is causing a threat is very much a pilot's judgment call. The public won't know unless it comes down in a heavily populated area," he said.

¶ 8:56 PM 0 comments links to this post

...it was Phil Gramm, John McCain’s economic guru, who told us last summer that the pain was all in our heads, that this was a “mental recession.”

The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.

The Republican answer to this turmoil?

Tax cuts.

They need to go into rehab.

The question that I would like answered is why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class. (Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk about class warfare.

A stark example of this unholy collaboration between the G.O.P. and the very wealthy was on display in the pages of this newspaper on Jan. 18. The Times’s Mike McIntire wrote an article about the first wave of federal bailout money for the financial industry, which was handed over by the Bush administration with hardly any strings attached. (Congress, under the control of the Democrats, should never have allowed this to happen, but the Democrats are as committed to fecklessness as the Republicans are to tax cuts.)

The public was told that the money would be used to loosen the frozen credit markets and thus help revive the economy. But as the article pointed out, there were bankers with other ideas. John C. Hope III, the chairman of the Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, in an address to Wall Street fat cats gathered at the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton, said:

“Make more loans? We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.”

How’s that for arrogance and contempt for the public interest? Mr. Hope’s bank received $300 million in taxpayer bailout money.

The same article quoted Walter M. Pressey, president of Boston Private Wealth Management, which Mr. McIntire described as a healthy bank with a mostly affluent clientele. It received $154 million in taxpayer money.

“With that capital in hand,” said Mr. Pressey, “not only do we feel comfortable that we can ride out the recession, but we also feel that we’ll be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves once this recession is sorted out.”

Take advantage, indeed. That, in a nutshell, is what the plutocracy is all about: taking unfair advantage.

When the G.O.P. talks, nobody should listen. Republicans have argued, with the collaboration of much of the media, that they could radically cut taxes while simultaneously balancing the federal budget, when, in fact, big income-tax cuts inevitably lead to big budget deficits. We listened to the G.O.P. and what do we have now? A trillion-dollar-plus deficit and an economy in shambles.

This is the party that preached fiscal discipline and then cut taxes in time of war. This is the party that still wants to put the torch to Social Security and Medicare. This is a party that, given a choice between Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, would choose Ronald Reagan in a heartbeat.

Why is anyone still listening?

¶ 6:40 AM 0 comments links to this post

During December 2008, negative equatorial sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies strengthened across the central and east-central Pacific Ocean (Fig. 1). Correspondingly, the latest weekly SST index values were -0.3°C in Niño-1+2, -0.9°C in Niño 3, -1.1°C in Niño 3.4, and -0.7°C in Niño 4 (Fig. 2). The subsurface oceanic heat content anomalies (average temperatures in the upper 300m of the ocean, Fig. 3) also became increasingly negative as below-average temperatures at thermocline depth strengthened in the central and eastern Pacific (Fig. 4). Convection remained suppressed near the International Date Line, and became more persistent near Indonesia during December. Low-level easterly winds and upper-level westerly winds also strengthened across the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Collectively, these oceanic and atmospheric anomalies reflect the development of La Niña.

Nearly all of the recent forecasts for the Niño-3.4 region indicate a continuation of below-average SSTs through the first half of 2009, with at least one-half predicting La Niña conditions throughout the period (Fig. 5). While the magnitude of cooling remains uncertain, NOAA’s official La Niña threshold (3-month average of the Niño-3.4 index less than or equal to -0.5°C) is expected be met at least through January-March 2009. Therefore, based on current observations, recent trends, and model forecasts, La Niña conditions are likely to continue into the Northern Hemisphere Spring 2009...

¶ 3:10 PM 0 comments links to this post

...on Feb. 10, 2007, when, on another frigid day, he announced his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Ill. Citing “our mounting debts” and “hard choices,” he talked of how “each of us, in our own lives, will have to accept responsibility” and “some measure of sacrifice.” His campaign, he said then, “has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship.” But the press, convinced that Obama was a sideshow to the inevitable Clinton-Giuliani presidential standoff, didn’t parse his words all that carefully, and neither did a public still maxing out on its gluttonous holiday from economic history. However inadvertently, Time magazine had captured the self-indulgent tenor of the times when, weeks earlier, it slapped some reflective Mylar on its cover and declared that the 2006 Person of the Year was “You.”

It was in keeping with the unhinged spirit of the boom that three days after Obama’s Springfield declaration, a Wall Street baron, Steven Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, a private equity and hedge fund, celebrated his 60th birthday with some 350 guests in the vast Seventh Regiment Armory on Manhattan’s East Side. To appreciate the degree of ostentation and taste, you need only know that Rod Stewart was the headliner, at an estimated cost of $1 million.

That same week the National Association of Realtors told less well-heeled Americans not to fret about its report that median home prices had fallen in 73 metro areas during the final quarter of 2006. “The bottom appears to have already occurred,” said one of the N.A.R. economists. Another predicted: “When we get the figures for this spring, I expect to see a discernible improvement in both sales and prices.”

We have discerned what happened to those sales and prices ever since. As for the Blackstone Group, it went public four months after its leader’s 60th birthday revels. Its shares have since lost 85 percent of their value, and Schwarzman’s bash has become a well-worn symbol of our deflated Gilded Age.

Yet the values of the bubble remain entrenched even as Obama takes office. In the upper echelons, we can find fresh examples of greed and irresponsibility daily even without dipping into the growing pool of those money “managers” who spirited victims to Bernie Madoff.

Last week’s object lesson was John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch. He was lionized as a rare Wall Street savior as recently as September, when he helped seal the deal that sped his teetering firm into the safe embrace of Bank of America on the same weekend Lehman Brothers died. Since then we’ve learned that even as he was laying off Merrill employees by the thousands, he was lobbying (unsuccessfully) for a personal bonus as high as $30 million and spending $1.22 million of company cash on refurbishing his office, an instantly notorious $1,405 trashcan included.

Thain resigned on Thursday. Only then did we learn that he doled out billions in secret, last-minute bonuses to his staff last month, just before Bank of America took over and just before the government ponied up a second bailout to cover Merrill’s unexpected $15 billion fourth-quarter loss. So far American taxpayers have spent $45 billion on this mess, and that’s only our down payment.

In less lofty precincts of the American economic spectrum, the numbers may be different but the ethos has often been similar. As Wall Street titans grabbed bonuses based on illusory, short-term paper profits, so regular Americans took on all kinds of debt wildly disproportionate to their assets and income. The nearly $1 trillion in unpaid credit-card balances is now on deck to be the next big crash.

This debt-ridden national binge of greed and irresponsibility washed over our culture not just through the Marie Antoinette antics of a Schwarzman and a Thain but in mass forms of conspicuous consumption and entertainment. Cable networks like Bravo, A&E, TLC and HGTV produced an avalanche of creepy programming catering to the decade’s housing bubble alone — an orgiastic genre that might be called Subprime Pornography. Some of the series — “Flip This House,” “Flip That House,” “Sell This House,” “My House Is Worth What?” — still play on even as more and more house owners are being flipped into destitute homelessness.

The austerity of Obama’s Inaugural Address seemed a tonal corrective to the glitz and the glut. The speech was, as my friend Jack Viertel, a theater producer, put it, “stoic, stern, crafted in slabs of granite, a slimmed-down sinewy thing entirely evolved away from the kind of Pre-Raphaelite style of his earlier oration.” Some of the same critics who once accused Obama of sounding too much like a wimpy purveyor of Kumbaya now faulted him for not rebooting those golden oldies of the campaign trail as he took his oath. But he is no longer campaigning, and the moment for stadium cheers has passed.

If we’ve learned anything since the election, it is this: We have not remotely seen the bottom of this economy, and no one has a silver bullet to arrest the plunge, the hyped brains in the new White House included. Most economists failed to anticipate the disaster, after all, and our tax-challenged incoming Treasury Secretary may prove as evanescent as past saviors du jour. As we applauded Thain in September, we were also desperately trying to convince ourselves that Warren Buffett’s $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs would turn the tide, and that Hank Paulson, as Newsweek wrote in a cover story titled “King Henry,” would be the “right man at the right time.”

Obama couldn’t give us F.D.R.’s first inaugural address because we are not yet where America was in 1933 — in its fourth year of downturn after the crash of ’29, with an unemployment rate of 25 percent. But no one knows for sure that we cannot end up there...

...Although hardly a household name, he secured a longstanding role as an elder statesman on Wall Street, allowing him to land on important boards and commissions where his opinions helped shape securities regulations. Along the way, he snared a coveted spot as the chairman of a major stock exchange, Nasdaq.

And his employees say he treated them like family.

There was, of course, another side to Mr. Madoff, who is 70. Reclusive, at times standoffish and aloof, this Bernie rarely rubbed elbows in Manhattan’s cocktail circuit or at Palm Beach balls. This Bernie was quiet, controlled and closely attuned to his image, down to the most minute details.

He was, for instance, an avid collector of vintage watches and took time each morning to match his wedding ring — he owned at least two — to the platinum or gold watch band he was wearing that day.

Per his directives, the décor in his firm’s New York and London offices was stark. Black, white and gray — or “icily cold modern,” as one frequent visitor to the New York operation described it.

Despite nurturing a familial atmosphere in his offices, he installed two cameras on the small trading floor of the firm’s London operations so he could monitor the unit remotely from New York.

This Bernie also ran a money management business on the side for decades that he kept hidden far from colleagues, competitors and regulators.

While he managed billions of dollars for individuals and foundations, he shunned one-on-one meetings with most of his investors, wrapping himself in an Oz-like aura, making him even more desirable to those seeking access.

So who was the real Bernie Madoff? And what could have driven him to choreograph a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, to which he is said to have confessed?

An easy answer is that Mr. Madoff was a charlatan of epic proportions, a greedy manipulator so hungry to accumulate wealth that he did not care whom he hurt to get what he wanted.

But some analysts say that a more complex and layered observation of his actions involves linking the world of white-collar finance to the world of serial criminals.

They wonder whether good old Bernie Madoff might have stolen simply for the fun of it, exploiting every relationship in his life for decades while studiously manipulating financial regulators...

¶ 10:58 AM 0 comments links to this post

...The battle over whether the president could keep his BlackBerry has been fueled to a large degree by Mr. Obama himself, who mentioned it again and again. He would not take no for an answer. In an interview this month, he worried aloud, “They’re going to pry it out of my hands.”

Mr. Obama received his BlackBerry on Tuesday, but officials declined to specify what kind. In a conversation with reporters on Thursday evening, he said, “I don’t think it’s actually up and running yet.”

Throughout the transition, several of his aides talked openly about Mr. Obama’s obsession with keeping his BlackBerry. And some of them, when speaking privately, said they were eager to have his device taken away so the case could be closed...

¶ 6:12 PM 0 comments links to this post

The nomination of William Lynn as Deputy Secretary of Defense has placed Barack Obama under the burn of political heat just days into the presidency.

Having lobbied the government on behalf of the defense industry giant Raytheon, Lynn's appointment violates the newly-instituted ethics guidelines that the president applied to his staff shortly after taking office. Questioned about the transgression, the White House said Lynn was being granted a waiver.

But there is a second layer to the Lynn issue that also is leaving a bad taste in the mouths of Democrats, good government groups and Republicans eager to cry hypocrisy. Raytheon is no mom-and-pop defense contractor shop. It is the type of industry behemoth that protesters of the Iraq invasion bemoaned for profiting off of the war and encouraging militarization. And as the man who led "the company's strategic planning and [oversaw] the government relations activity," Lynn was intimately involved.

¶ 12:42 PM 0 comments links to this post

...A more profound explanation for the rise of George W. Bush came as I studied the concerted effort to convince the public that he was independent of, and often in disagreement with, his father. The reason for this, it turned out, was that exactly the opposite was true. W. may have been bumptious where his father was discreet, but in fact the son hewed closely to a playbook that guided his father and even his grandfather.

Over much of the last century, the Bushes have been serving the aims of a very narrow segment from within America's wealthiest interests and families -- typically through involvement in the most anti-New Deal investment banking circles, in the creation of a civilian intelligence service after World War II, and in some of that service's most secretive and still-unacknowledged operations.

Through declassified documents and interviews, I unearthed evidence that George W. Bush's father, the 41st president of the United States, had been working for the intelligence services no less than two decades before he was named CIA director in 1976. Time and again, Bush 41 and his allies have participated in clandestine operations to force presidents to do the bidding of oil and other resource-extraction interests, military contractors and financiers. Whenever a president showed independence or sought reforms that threatened entrenched interests, this group helped to ensure that he was politically attacked and neutralized, or even removed from office, through one means or another.

We are not dealing here with what are commonly dismissed as "conspiracy theories." We are dealing with a reality that is much more subtle, layered and pervasive -- a matrix of power in which crude conspiracies are rarely necessary and in which the execution or subsequent cover-up of anti-democratic acts become practically a norm.

In 1953, 23 years before he became CIA director as a supposed neophyte, George H.W. Bush began preparing to launch an oil-exploration company called Zapata Offshore. His father, investment banker Prescott Bush, had just taken a Senate seat from Connecticut; and his father's close friend Allen Dulles had just taken over the CIA. A staff CIA officer, Thomas J. Devine, purportedly "resigned" to go into the oil business with young George.

Bush then began to travel around the world. His itineraries had little apparent relationship to his limited and perennially unprofitable business enterprises. But they do make sense if the object was intelligence work. When his company at last put a few oil rigs in place, they ended up in highly sensitive spots, such as just off Castro's Cuba before the Bay of Pigs invasion.

As part of his travels, Bush senior even appeared in Dallas on the morning of the Kennedy assassination, although he would famously claim that he could not recall where he was at that historic moment. After leaving the city, he called the FBI with a false tip about a possible assassin, pointedly emphasizing that he was calling from outside Dallas. It is also intriguing to learn that an old friend of Bush's, a White Russian émigré with intelligence connections, shepherded Lee Harvey Oswald upon his return to America in the year preceding the assassination. In any event, when Lyndon Johnson replaced Kennedy, the oilmen and the intelligence-military establishment once again had a friend in the White House.

The pattern continued. New evidence suggests that Bush senior and his associates in the intelligence services, far from being the loyalists to Richard Nixon they claimed to be, had turned on the 35th president early in his administration, unceasingly working to weaken and eventually force him out. These efforts culminated in what appears to have been a deliberately botched Watergate office burglary -- led by former CIA officers.

Ironically, Nixon's career had been launched with the quiet backing of Wall Street finance figures upset with the man Nixon would defeat, a leading congressional supporter of banking reform, and Prescott Bush himself had played a key role. Yet, when Nixon finally achieved the presidency, he became surprisingly resistant to pressure from the very power centers that had helped him get to the top. He turned a deaf ear to the demands of the oil industry, battled with the CIA and cut the Pentagon out of the loop as he (and his aide Henry Kissinger) negotiated secretly with Moscow and Beijing.

These acts estranged Nixon from those who felt he had betrayed his sponsors -- men who had the means to do him in. Bush senior, it turns out, was closely allied with the surprising number of White House officials with covert ties to the intelligence service that surrounded Nixon. Through it all, Bush senior would routinely claim to be "out of the loop," as he would later pretend during the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan era, although we know that as vice president he was at the center of that and other abuses of power.

None of this let up after Nixon was forced to resign. His pliant successor, Gerald Ford, brought in young staffers named Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and the two participated in the so-called Halloween massacre, which saw the administration veer in a far-right direction on foreign policy, a development that paved the way for the appointment of Bush senior as CIA director. This happened just as Congress was launched into the deepest investigation ever of intelligence abuses, and public voices were clamoring to reopen official inquiries into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

Then came Jimmy Carter, whose plans to reform the CIA were an echo of JFK's intent to scatter the CIA to the winds after the ruinous Bay of Pigs invasion. When Carter defeated Ford, ousted Bush from the CIA helm and sought to bring the intelligence juggernaut under control, he ended up deeply compromised by complex financial shenanigans orchestrated by figures from the same intelligence circles -- and undermined by the crisis with Iran, exacerbated by covert dissident CIA elements tied to Bush. Carter was a one-term president, defeated by a ticket with none other than George H.W. Bush, backed by a phalanx of CIA officers, as vice president. And then Bush senior became president himself.

Bill Clinton apparently grasped the pattern. He cultivated a friendly relationship with the elder Bush and instituted virtually no significant reforms in, or issued challenges to, either the intelligence or military establishments.

All this is relevant today because the furtive forces and pressures that haunted, and ultimately dominated, these past presidents have not abated.

Indeed, what the presidency of George W. Bush truly represented was the unfettered, most reckless manifestation of the objectives this group has pursued for many decades...

¶ 8:08 AM 0 comments links to this post

Earlier this week, Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-MN) explained that funding for mass transit infrastructure projects was nixed from the stimulus proposal in order to make room for tax cuts. Despite the fact that tax cuts already comprise a bulky 33 percent of the stimulus (compared to only 7.5 percent for transportation infrastructure), conservatives are pressuring President Obama to include even more.

Tonight on the Rachel Maddow Show, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) said the amount of infrastructure spending in the legislation is “not enough.” He argued that if the Republicans are recycling failed ideas of the past, “we don’t need to buy them off with $300 billion in tax cuts.” DeFazio said Democrats in Congress originally proposed more for infrastructure spending, but the effort was shot down by Obama advisers...

...Maddow noted Obama speaks “very highly” of infrastructure. “If there’s a distance between him and his advisers,” she said, then that’s a problem. DeFazio responded, “He needs to know it, and that’s why I’m speaking out.”

¶ 11:07 PM 0 comments links to this post

Just days after taking office vowing to end the political era of "petty grievances," President Obama ran into mounting GOP opposition yesterday to an economic stimulus plan that he had hoped would receive broad bipartisan support.

Republicans accused Democrats of abandoning the new president's pledge, ignoring his call for bipartisan comity and shutting them out of the process by writing the $850 billion legislation. The first drafts of the plan would result in more spending on favored Democratic agenda items, such as federal funding of the arts, they said, but would do little to stimulate the ailing economy.

The GOP's shrunken numbers, particularly in the Senate, will make it difficult for Republicans to stop the stimulus bill, but the growing GOP doubts mean that Obama's first major initiative could be passed on a largely party-line vote -- little different from the past 16 years of partisan sniping in the Clinton and Bush eras...

...In response to an unprecedented economic crisis — or, more accurately, a crisis whose only real precedent is the Great Depression — Mr. Obama did what people in Washington do when they want to sound serious: he spoke, more or less in the abstract, of the need to make hard choices and stand up to special interests.

That’s not enough. In fact, it’s not even right.

Thus, in his speech Mr. Obama attributed the economic crisis in part to “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age” — but I have no idea what he meant. This is, first and foremost, a crisis brought on by a runaway financial industry. And if we failed to rein in that industry, it wasn’t because Americans “collectively” refused to make hard choices; the American public had no idea what was going on, and the people who did know what was going on mostly thought deregulation was a great idea.

Or consider this statement from Mr. Obama: “Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed.”

The first part of this passage was almost surely intended as a paraphrase of words that John Maynard Keynes wrote as the world was plunging into the Great Depression — and it was a great relief, after decades of knee-jerk denunciations of government, to hear a new president giving a shout-out to Keynes. “The resources of nature and men’s devices,” Keynes wrote, “are just as fertile and productive as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for everyone a high standard of life. ... But today we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.”

But something was lost in translation. Mr. Obama and Keynes both assert that we’re failing to make use of our economic capacity. But Keynes’s insight — that we’re in a “muddle” that needs to be fixed — somehow was replaced with standard we’re-all-at-fault, let’s-get-tough-on-ourselves boilerplate.

Remember, Herbert Hoover didn’t have a problem making unpleasant decisions: he had the courage and toughness to slash spending and raise taxes in the face of the Great Depression. Unfortunately, that just made things worse...

...Although the Pentagon has said that dozens of released Guantánamo detainees have “returned to the fight,” its claim is difficult to document, and has been met with skepticism...

¶ 6:46 AM 0 comments links to this post

Bernard L. Madoff was once the chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. He was one of the most important market makers on Wall Street. And he managed what was, by some estimates, the largest hedge fund on the planet.

Yes, Bernard Madoff was an impressive man. That much was clear even before we learned that his $50 billion Ponzi scheme may have been orchestrated in cahoots with the most powerful, sophisticated, and indiscriminately murderous organized crime syndicate the world has ever known.

Charles Gasparino (citing “speculation” from investigators) reported last week on CNBC that the Russian Mafia might have been partners in Madoff’s larcenous fund business. Or perhaps the Mob had an even greater interest in Madoff’s market making operation, as some of our sources have told us in recent weeks.

Either way, there is a certain cachet.

But it wasn’t just pierogies and pistol-packing wiseguys in purple suits. Mr. Madoff was also a dedicated public servant, volunteering countless hours at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Indeed, Madoff seems to have written many of the SEC’s rules. For example, Madoff was the principal author of an SEC rule that exempted market makers (i.e. Madoff) from various regulations governing short sellers (i.e. Madoff’s friends).

Madoff’s rule ensured that market makers (Madoff) could, among other things, engage in so-called “naked short selling.” To sell “naked” is to sell stock that one does not actually possess. That is “phantom stock,” according to the SEC Chairman and many others.

Sometimes, short sellers (who profit when shares lose value) offload massive amounts of phantom stock to drive down prices, destroy pubic companies, or even crash the market. That is why there used to be restrictions.

At any rate, I don’t think Madoff had an office at the SEC. He certainly was not employed there. But the SEC was glad to have Madoff write a rule exempting Madoff from the rules. The formal name of the rule is, “the option market maker exception to Rule 203(b)1,” but the SEC was so thankful that it named the rule after the great man himself.

It was called, “The Madoff Exception.”

After Madoff wrote that rule, market makers (e.g., Madoff) proceeded to “rent” their exemption to hedge funds (i.e. friends-of-Madoff).

It remained against the law for hedge funds to sell phantom stock to manipulate the markets. It was also against the law for market makers to help hedge funds orchestrate such schemes. But under the Madoff regulatory regime, unscrupulous short sellers (i.e. friends-of-Madoff) could engage in this illegal activity so long as they did so with the illegal connivance of a law-breaking market maker (i.e. Madoff).

A few months ago, this naked short selling was implicated–by numerous academics, the U.S. Chamber of Chamber of Commerce, the Secretary of the Treasury, the CEOs of Wall Street’s biggest banks, respected law firms, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and numerous congressmen – in the near total collapse of the American financial system.

The SEC has not prosecuted anybody for this. After all, there is an “exception.”

It is unclear whether the SEC will continue to name this “exception” after a man who might have absconded with 50 billion dollars (a sum that exceeds the gross domestic product of Pakistan) in league with the Russian Mob, an organization that is said to be in the market for a nuclear bomb – in addition to narcotics, sex slaves and, yes, phantom stock.

In any case, the major news organizations seem to have lost interest.

¶ 9:15 PM 0 comments links to this post

1. Ordinary taxpayers would like an answer to this question: Why have they been billed more than $45 billion to rescue Citigroup from failure when, as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, you were its primary supervisor? Three major problems led to Citigroup’s downfall: bad investment policy; overexpansion, which overwhelmed Citigroup’s management; and an inadequate capital base. Why was Citigroup’s supervision inadequate to deal with these problems?

2. The Treasury and Federal Reserve have been selecting which companies in American industry and finance will get taxpayer money. What criteria do you use to decide?

3. During the banking crisis of the late 1980s, assets of failed savings and loans were acquired by the government’s Resolution Trust Corporation. The trust corporation then sold off the assets in an orderly fashion. Would you consider requesting Congress to revive the Resolution Trust Corporation, so you would not have to decide which companies to save and which not to save? Would you consider re-establishing the trust corporation now for commercial banks that are likely to fail?

— ANNA JACOBSON SCHWARTZ, an economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the author, with Milton Friedman, of “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867 to 1960”

...

1. In the past, you have praised the “resiliency” of the American financial system. But a resilient financial system would demand that banks maintain stricter capital standards in normal times so that when a crisis hits, they don’t all have to tighten lending at the same time. What exactly did you mean by “resiliency”?

— ROBERT SHILLER, professor of economics at Yale

...

1. This country has long benefited from the world’s confidence in our financial markets. Are financial regulatory reforms necessary now to restore investors’ confidence and revive our economy?

2. Should debt securities that are held by regulated banks and pension funds be rated by multiple independent credit reports that have been commissioned by a federal agency, or should we continue to let the issuers of debts decide who will rate their risks?

3. Should large financial institutions incur higher reserve requirements or other regulatory penalties when they become “too big to fail”?

— ROGER B. MYERSON, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a winner of the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

Old-fashioned voodoo economics — the belief in tax-cut magic — has been banished from civilized discourse. The supply-side cult has shrunk to the point that it contains only cranks, charlatans, and Republicans...

...But recent news reports suggest that many influential people, including Federal Reserve officials, bank regulators, and, possibly, members of the incoming Obama administration, have become devotees of a new kind of voodoo: the belief that by performing elaborate financial rituals we can keep dead banks walking.

To explain the issue, let me describe the position of a hypothetical bank that I’ll call Gothamgroup, or Gotham for short.

On paper, Gotham has $2 trillion in assets and $1.9 trillion in liabilities, so that it has a net worth of $100 billion. But a substantial fraction of its assets — say, $400 billion worth — are mortgage-backed securities and other toxic waste. If the bank tried to sell these assets, it would get no more than $200 billion.

So Gotham is a zombie bank: it’s still operating, but the reality is that it has already gone bust. Its stock isn’t totally worthless — it still has a market capitalization of $20 billion — but that value is entirely based on the hope that shareholders will be rescued by a government bailout.

Why would the government bail Gotham out? Because it plays a central role in the financial system. When Lehman was allowed to fail, financial markets froze, and for a few weeks the world economy teetered on the edge of collapse. Since we don’t want a repeat performance, Gotham has to be kept functioning. But how can that be done?

Well, the government could simply give Gotham a couple of hundred billion dollars, enough to make it solvent again. But this would, of course, be a huge gift to Gotham’s current shareholders — and it would also encourage excessive risk-taking in the future. Still, the possibility of such a gift is what’s now supporting Gotham’s stock price.

A better approach would be to do what the government did with zombie savings and loans at the end of the 1980s: it seized the defunct banks, cleaning out the shareholders. Then it transferred their bad assets to a special institution, the Resolution Trust Corporation; paid off enough of the banks’ debts to make them solvent; and sold the fixed-up banks to new owners.

The current buzz suggests, however, that policy makers aren’t willing to take either of these approaches. Instead, they’re reportedly gravitating toward a compromise approach: moving toxic waste from private banks’ balance sheets to a publicly owned “bad bank” or “aggregator bank” that would resemble the Resolution Trust Corporation, but without seizing the banks first...

...In my example, Gothamgroup is insolvent because the alleged $400 billion of toxic waste on its books is actually worth only $200 billion. The only way a government purchase of that toxic waste can make Gotham solvent again is if the government pays much more than private buyers are willing to offer.

Now, maybe private buyers aren’t willing to pay what toxic waste is really worth: “We don’t have really any rational pricing right now for some of these asset categories,” Ms. Bair says. But should the government be in the business of declaring that it knows better than the market what assets are worth? And is it really likely that paying “fair value,” whatever that means, would be enough to make Gotham solvent again?

What I suspect is that policy makers — possibly without realizing it — are gearing up to attempt a bait-and-switch: a policy that looks like the cleanup of the savings and loans, but in practice amounts to making huge gifts to bank shareholders at taxpayer expense, disguised as “fair value” purchases of toxic assets...

...Why go through these contortions? The answer seems to be that Washington remains deathly afraid of the N-word — nationalization. The truth is that Gothamgroup and its sister institutions are already wards of the state, utterly dependent on taxpayer support; but nobody wants to recognize that fact and implement the obvious solution: an explicit, though temporary, government takeover. Hence the popularity of the new voodoo, which claims, as I said, that elaborate financial rituals can reanimate dead banks.

Unfortunately, the price of this retreat into superstition may be high. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that taxpayers are about to get another raw deal — and that we’re about to get another financial rescue plan that fails to do the job.

¶ 6:45 AM 0 comments links to this post

“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply...”

¶ 9:53 PM 0 comments links to this post

...Having already taken an initial shot at Obama's choice for Secretary of the Department of Education by recommending a reading of Greg Palast's article, "Obama Slam-Duncans Education," readers here might want to get some more details about just how outrageously loathsome Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Arne Duncan is by reading Andy Kroll's article, "The Duncan Doctrine: The Military-Corporate Legacy of the New Secretary of Education."

...Congratulations. You suckered the Left, you suckered the progressives, you even suckered some conservatives. You suckered a damaged, hurting, wanting nation with your rhetoric. I would use harsh language to describe those who voted for you, but I just cannot bring myself to do that; not now, anyway. The American people were so desperate to escape the spiral of decay into which this country had been falling because of the Bush Administration that they simply could not see the awful maw of an imprudent choice standing before them in the fineries of salvation and rectitude you so masterfully wore.

...You are not an imbecile; you ought to know better. Take a hard look at your cabal about whom I have already written and warned: Zionist thug Rahm Emanuel; paramilitary law enforcement enabler Eric Holder; AIPAC and Project for the New American Century maven Dennis Ross; Chicago slumlord Valerie Jarrett; Israeli military violence apologist Joseph "I Am a Zionist!" Biden; agri-business shill Tom Vilsack; war management flop Robert Gates; and Federal Reserve Open Market Committee bagman Timothy Geithner, to name just a few. And let us not forget your comfort level with a couple of the worst of the Bush people serving as holdovers: that wrecking ball of privacy rights, Robert Mueller, from whom you could demand resignation (oh, yes you could), and monetary policy failure Ben Bernanke, whose tenure you could repudiate for his staggering mismanagement and malfeasance (thereby eviscerating him and the other Fed Governors of any backing to proceed with yet another round of catastrophically bad, "accommodative" monetary policy). You even plan to corporatize and militarize NASA.

How many ways through these choices can you flout the principles and dismiss the hopes of your wide base of support before people see you for what you really are?

That rhetorical question need not be answered: for years, George W. Bush did it to honest, decent, genuine conservatives. You will have perhaps not as many, but quite a few, to do the same to honest, decent, genuine liberals and other progressive sorts...

¶ 9:41 PM 2 comments links to this post

...The Fox and Friends news models have recently warned America of an new impeding, dangerous threat to the United States via Great Britain and Europe. As if the threat of Al Qaeda, or as some like to say 'Al CIA-da,' could not have gotten anymore cartoonish, we are now supposed to be on the look out for the 'white Al Qaeda.'

The reports of the white Al Qaeda primarily stemmed from an obscure article from The Scotsman, with the wild claim that around 1,500 British non-Muslim have converted to Islam and been recruited by Al Qaeda. The claims appear largely unsubstantial and aside from Lord Carlile, and independent reviewer of anti-terrorism legislation, their sources are vague and unnamed. In fact, the entire article reeks of fear mongering propaganda, much like the Fox and Friends report...

It was only three years ago when two British SAS soldiers were arrested in Basra after impersonating Arabs and shooting Iraqi policemen. A dramatic, but unsuccessful rescue attempt was staged as British Army tanks crushed a prison wall, only to find the prisoners were being detained elsewhere. The whole incident was a nightmare public relations debacle for the British but went largely unreported here in the mainstream media.

Ironically, the Scotsman was one of the main media outlets that tried to explain away the claim that the two SAS soldiers were more than likely staging false flag terror attacks. I would think that the British press would be quick to downplay the fact that they could have homegrown terrorism from people not normally thought to engage in terrorist activities operating in the UK. I would also think that the British press would rather not give anymore conspiracy theory fodder to those that think that the 7/7 bombings were an inside job carried out by British intelligence.

...Here we have what looks to be typical Al Qaeda training video that American intelligence just happened to stumble upon, and yet the Fox news models give us zero background on the video. By the way, If you don't know the story behind the questionable authenticity of the Al Qaeda tapes or Al Qaeda in general then you should read this and this.

We also have a certain subtle talking point in the mainstream media that supporters of presidential candidate Congressman Dr. Ron Paul are dangerous, and could be prone to violent acts of homegrown acts of terrorism. Well, many Ron Paul supporters are young, white and idealistic, just like those crafty 'white Al Qaeda,' except that there is zero evidence that a Ron Paul supporter would be prone to violent and homegrown acts of terrorism!

To add to all of this nonsense, we had the most dangerous man in America, Department of Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, confirming that yes he believes in the 'white Al Qaeda', and that he also believes that America faces the threat of homegrown terrorists. And finally we have the Violent Radicalisation and Home Grown Terrorism Prevention Act (also known as the 'though-crime bill'), which is soon going to be voted on, and possibly passed by our cowardly and mostly treasonous Congress. This bill, which uses vague, Orwellian-esqe language, is know by civil activists as the 'Patriot Act Lite...'

¶ 6:42 PM 0 comments links to this post

...I really, really wish Obama would stop using language that suggests that he thinks the Republicons are right about Social Security. Social Security is paid for. Social Security is not the thing that is sucking the life out of our economy. It's the people who keep attacking "entitlements" who are doing that. There are a lot of big, systemic things that need to be addressed if we are really going to restore our economy to something most of us can live with. (And in the meantime, it sure wouldn't hurt to quit wasting money on crap like this.) We need people to be talking about why those big social programs are good for the economy, not reinforcing the Village-Republicon consensus. For dog's sake, people, Britain had just been through the Great Depression and had the hell bombed out of it by the Nazis and was not just broke but in debt and they still managed to create the NHS...

¶ 11:10 AM 0 comments links to this post

...President-elect Barack Obama is riding a powerful wave of optimism into the White House, with Americans confident he can turn the economy around but prepared to give him years to deal with the crush of problems he faces starting Tuesday, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll...

¶ 5:47 PM 0 comments links to this post

...nothing has changed and that voter fraud is alive and well. But this time around, the PTB had pre-selected Obama to win -- his campaign contributions were almost double that of McCain's for example, and that amount of money surely didn't come from the grassroots (see chart below) -- so in fact, this was a psy-ops coup: Americans being hypnotized into believing the hope/change rhetoric. This quashed the cries of foul-play as if election fraud was somehow magically eliminated overnight, regardless of the fact that there was zero evidence of substantial reforms in voting.

So, as it turns out, Obama actually DID receive the majority of votes. The people fell for this charade. The result is that the general population has been lulled into a false sense of security about the true state of democracy in this country. A brilliant move by the PTB.

The charade s unsustainable though, because Obama will just continue everything as it was before, albeit with a few crumbs of change (closing Guantanamo, and reversing some of Bush's presidential directives) in an attempt to quell dissent. How long that might last is up for debate.

My guess is that the economic woes of the country are going to accelerate to a critical level this year, and that something will need to happen to divert attention -- another false flag event and/or major war, which will keep Obama in the driver's seat whilst taking the heat off him concurrently.

¶ 5:08 PM 0 comments links to this post

At the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton last November, John C. Hope III, the chairman of Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, stood before a ballroom full of Wall Street analysts and explained how his bank intended to use its $300 million in federal bailout money.

“Make more loans?” Mr. Hope said. “We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.”

...Congress approved the $700 billion rescue plan with the idea that banks would help struggling borrowers and increase lending to stimulate the economy, and many lawmakers want to know how the first half of that money has been spent before approving the second half. But many banks that have received bailout money so far are reluctant to lend, worrying that if new loans go bad, they will be in worse shape if the economy deteriorates.

Indeed, as mounting losses at major banks like Citigroup and Bank of America in the last week have underscored, regulators are still searching for ways to stabilize the banking system. The Obama administration could be forced early on to come up with a systemic solution, getting bad loans off balance sheets as a way to encourage banks to begin lending, which most economists say is essential to get businesses and consumers spending again.

Individually, banks that received some of the first $350 billion from the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, have offered few public details about how they plan to spend the money, and they are not required to disclose what they do with it. But in conversations behind closed doors with investment analysts, some bankers have been candid about their intentions.

Most of the banks that received the money are far smaller than behemoths like Citigroup or Bank of America. A review of investor presentations and conference calls by executives of some two dozen banks around the country found that few cited lending as a priority. An overwhelming majority saw the bailout program as a no-strings-attached windfall that could be used to pay down debt, acquire other businesses or invest for the future.

Speaking at the FBR Capital Markets conference in New York in December, Walter M. Pressey, president of Boston Private Wealth Management, a healthy bank with a mostly affluent clientele, said there were no immediate plans to do much with the $154 million it received from the Treasury.

“With that capital in hand, not only do we feel comfortable that we can ride out the recession,” he said, “but we also feel that we’ll be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves once this recession is sorted out...”

¶ 3:18 PM 0 comments links to this post

...Is it really that hard -- especially for people who pretend to be experts in this controversy -- to tell the difference between (a) whether the President had the authority to eavesdrop on Americans in violation of a Congressional statute and (b) whether the Congress is constitutionally permitted to enact a statute authorizing warrantless eavesdropping? Apparently it is hard, because hordes of right-wing advocates, including those who claim to be "legal experts," are falsely claiming today that the FISA court did (a) (namely: found that the President had the power to order warrantless eavesdropping in violation of a statute), rather than what the court actually did: (b) (found that the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit Congress from legalizing warrantless eavesdropping)...

¶ 8:17 AM 0 comments links to this post

...if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.

Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies.

At the Justice Department, for example, political appointees illegally reserved nonpolitical positions for “right-thinking Americans” — their term, not mine — and there’s strong evidence that officials used their positions both to undermine the protection of minority voting rights and to persecute Democratic politicians.

The hiring process at Justice echoed the hiring process during the occupation of Iraq — an occupation whose success was supposedly essential to national security — in which applicants were judged by their politics, their personal loyalty to President Bush and, according to some reports, by their views on Roe v. Wade, rather than by their ability to do the job.

Speaking of Iraq, let’s also not forget that country’s failed reconstruction: the Bush administration handed billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to politically connected companies, companies that then failed to deliver. And why should they have bothered to do their jobs? Any government official who tried to enforce accountability on, say, Halliburton quickly found his or her career derailed.

There’s much, much more. By my count, at least six important government agencies experienced major scandals over the past eight years — in most cases, scandals that were never properly investigated. And then there was the biggest scandal of all: Does anyone seriously doubt that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into invading Iraq?

Why, then, shouldn’t we have an official inquiry into abuses during the Bush years?

One answer you hear is that pursuing the truth would be divisive, that it would exacerbate partisanship. But if partisanship is so terrible, shouldn’t there be some penalty for the Bush administration’s politicization of every aspect of government?

Alternatively, we’re told that we don’t have to dwell on past abuses, because we won’t repeat them. But no important figure in the Bush administration, or among that administration’s political allies, has expressed remorse for breaking the law. What makes anyone think that they or their political heirs won’t do it all over again, given the chance?

In fact, we’ve already seen this movie. During the Reagan years, the Iran-contra conspirators violated the Constitution in the name of national security. But the first President Bush pardoned the major malefactors, and when the White House finally changed hands the political and media establishment gave Bill Clinton the same advice it’s giving Mr. Obama: let sleeping scandals lie. Sure enough, the second Bush administration picked up right where the Iran-contra conspirators left off — which isn’t too surprising when you bear in mind that Mr. Bush actually hired some of those conspirators.

Now, it’s true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we’ll guarantee that they will happen again.

Meanwhile, about Mr. Obama: while it’s probably in his short-term political interests to forgive and forget, next week he’s going to swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That’s not a conditional oath to be honored only when it’s convenient.

And to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent decision to let the previous administration get away with crime. Consequences aside, that’s not a decision he has the right to make.

¶ 5:06 PM 0 comments links to this post

...Katrina registers within him as a failure to take symbolic action (“Could I have done something differently, like land Air Force One either in New Orleans or Baton Rouge?”). The Iraq War is a string of unfortunate “rhetoric” and symbolism. (“Clearly putting a ‘Mission Accomplished’ on an aircraft carrier was a mistake.”) Abu Ghraib: “a huge disappointment.” Not finding weapons of mass destruction: “a significant disappointment.” Weak, watered-down words from a man who seems utterly disconnected from what will soon be his legacy.

This is a man who throughout his adult life has been in flight – into alcohol, into religion, into ideology (he still manages to wax rhapsodic about tax cuts) – into behaviors and intellectual postures generally that allow him to escape the necessity of looking at reality and engaging fully and honestly with it. How I wish he were nothing more than a fictional character, a foil perhaps for Jack Bauer.

As a TV show, Bush’s presidency might have been entertaining. His performance on Monday morning was just sad. Now that it’s all over, it is hard not to feel pity for this limited character as he leaves the stage, so obviously worn down with his running, so obviously embittered, so obviously incapable, for the life of him, of seeing where he went wrong.

¶ 6:55 AM 0 comments links to this post

So now we find out that "Harry Reid contacted Rod Blagojevich to oppose a roster of African American candidates because he considered them 'unelectable.'" And we have Reid fiddling with the law to prevent seating Blagojevich's actual pick: a corrupt, egotistical black Chicago pol. This is, in turn, putting progressive Al Franken's seat at risk. Say what? Reid is the Senate Majority Leader. Why is he acting like a two-bit crook?

There have been other moments of "wha?" FISA, Iraq, running interference for the oil and coal industries, and on, and on. And Reid isn't just a Democrat from a conservative state--he's the Senate Democratic Leader, chosen by the Senate Democrats. I've been watching Reid, now, for years, make excuses to Democratic voters, most of whom are far more liberal than Reid. It seemed for a while that he might be a wimp. Only how could a wimp become Senate Majority Leader or retain his seat while consistently opposing his party's own constituency? No, Reid is pursing a conservative agenda and he's doing it with the support of a substantial faction of the Senate Democrats, who chose Reid, by their arcane institutional process (which seems to be secret) to lead them. Which means, not only has Reid sold out his party's rank and file, not only is he corrupt in some well-concealed way, but a substantial faction of the Senate Democrats are, too...

¶ 10:25 PM 0 comments links to this post

...Obama said that he has made clear to his advisers that some of the difficult choices--particularly in regards to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare - should be made on his watch. "We've kicked this can down the road and now we are at the end of the road," he said...

¶ 9:18 PM 0 comments links to this post

...What if the Bush administration during Hurricane Katrina deliberately withheld federal disaster assistance from Louisiana and New Orleans to give time for their smear campaign against Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin to work.

And what if the Bush administration and right-wing pundits deliberately slandered and defamed these two Louisiana Democrats so Republicans would have a better chance of defeating one or both in the next Louisiana election?

And what if this was orchestrated at the highest levels of the Bush administration?

And in combination with this White House/right-wing news media smear campaign, what if top Bush officials, espeically at DHS, actually sabotaged efforts by FEMA's director and the FEMA disaster coordinator at the FEMA command center in Baton Rouge as they tried to do their job and get desperately needed supplies and personnel into New Orleans after it flooded?

And what if some of the FEMA supplies and personnel that were meant for Louisiana and the flooded city of New Orleans were shifted to Mississippi and Alabama instead, two Gulf Coast states also in the path of Katrina, but both with Republican governors?

Get the picture?

In other words, for the Bush White House's (Karl Rove's) smear campaign against Louisiana Democrats to work then things had to get much worse in Louisiana and New Orleans instead of getting better. Because how could their malicious and wholly unfounded smear campaign succeed if federal disaster relief supplies and personnel made it into New Orleans fast and people were rescued expeditiously with minimum loss of life and suffering?

Nope. What the Bush administration did (or failed to do) during Hurricane Katrina was deliberate, premeditated and criminal...for purely partisan political purposes...and American citizens died.

¶ 6:58 AM 0 comments links to this post

...Another month, another half-million Americans out of work. The ranks of the unemployed have now stretched beyond 11 million, and millions more are underemployed — working part time, for example, because they can’t find full-time jobs.

As bad as this sounds, the reality confronting working men and women is actually significantly worse. Some 2.6 million jobs have been lost since December 2007, and as the Economic Policy Institute tells us:

“Just to keep up with the ever-expanding labor force, the economy would have needed to create 1.5 million jobs over the last 12 months. This means that the 2.6 million jobs lost leaves us over 4 million jobs short of what the economy required to provide employment for the American work force.”

We’re in employment quicksand. The official unemployment rate (a notoriously rosy statistic) is 7.2 percent. But more than one in every eight workers in America is jobless or underemployed. That’s 21 million people. And it’s not even counting the so-called discouraged workers, who have given up looking for a job.

More than a million jobs were lost in November and December, and millions more are projected to vanish this year. When the November job losses were announced, David Leonhardt wrote in The Times’s blog, Economix:

“The share of all men ages 16 and over who are working is now at its lowest level since the government began keeping statistics in the 1940s. The share of women with jobs has fallen almost two percentage points from the peak it reached in 2000. At no other point in the past 50 years has the share of employed women fallen so much from its peak.”

This is an emergency. There is one overriding mission for the incoming Obama administration when it comes to dealing with the economy, and that’s putting Americans back to work. Forget the G.O.P.’s mania for tax cuts. Forget, for the time being (but not forever), the ballooning budget deficits. Forget the feel-good but doomed-to-fail effort to play nice-nice with the rabid partisans of the right who were the ones most responsible for ruining the economy in the first place.

Put the people back to work!

To do that, Democrats will have to overcome their natural timidity. They will have to fend off the Republican opposition in Congress and set in motion an enormous surge of public spending aimed at creating jobs, jobs, jobs.

Each new surge of job losses is an additional violent assault on the already profoundly damaged economy. Idle workers do not pay taxes and that ratchets up budget deficits at the federal, state and local levels. They draw down unemployment benefits and further strain the Medicaid rolls. In many cases, they are forced to turn to food stamps for their families’ daily bread. And, of course, they stop purchasing cars and homes, goods and services.

The economy will not be saved by putting a pitiful $500 into the hands of the average taxpayer. And it won’t be saved by gift-wrapped concessions to the G.O.P. in the form of business tax cuts that the president-elect is said to be considering.

With credit tight, savings depleted, the stock market in the tank and home prices in a state of collapse, the only way to get real money into the hands of ordinary Americans (and thus back into the economy) is through employment. The way to truly stimulate the economy and save the jobs of anxiety-ridden workers who are still employed is to get the unemployed back to work as soon as possible.

And the way to create jobs is through infrastructure investments (building and repairing roads, bridges, tunnels and water and sewer systems); and by investing in 21st-century clean energy initiatives, in public transportation systems, and in school construction; and by providing access to health care for the millions who don’t have it.

In other words, by investing in the people and the enormous productive capacity of the United States.

Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa was blunt this week after he and other Senate Democrats met with Obama aides to discuss the president-elect’s stimulus package. “There is only one thing we have got to do in the stimulus, and that is how can we create jobs,” he said.

Referring to Mr. Obama’s national economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, Mr. Harkin added: “I am a little concerned by the way that Mr. Summers and others are going at this in that, to me, it still looks like a little more of this trickle down. If we just put it in at the top, it’s going to trickle down.”

Been there. Done that. Didn’t work.

The madness of trickle down and its corollaries ruined the economy and millions of Americans with it. President-elect Obama ran to the mantra of change. One hopes he is not too timid to deliver.

¶ 9:31 PM 0 comments links to this post

...there’s a good idea floating around that takes its cue from the legendary Willie Sutton. Why not go where the money is?

The economist Dean Baker is a strong advocate of a financial transactions tax. This would impose a small fee — ranging up to, say, 0.25 percent — on the sale or transfer of stocks, bonds and other financial assets, including the seemingly endless variety of exotic financial instruments that have been in the news so much lately.

According to Mr. Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, the fees would raise a ton of money, perhaps $100 billion or more annually — money that the government sorely needs.

But there’s another intriguing element to the proposal. While the fees would be a trivial expense for what the general public tends to think of as ordinary traders — people investing in stocks, bonds or other assets for some reasonable period of time — they would amount to a much heavier lift for speculators, the folks who bring a manic quality to the markets, who treat it like a casino.

“It raises money in a way that comes primarily at the expense of speculation,” said Mr. Baker. “The fees would be a considerable expense for someone who is buying futures, or a stock, or any asset at 2 o’clock and then selling it at 3. The more you trade, the more you pay.

“For the typical person holding stock, who is planning to hold it for a long period of time, paying the quarter of one percent on a trade is just not that big a deal.”

The fees, though small, could amount to a big deal for speculators because in addition to the volume of their trades they often make their money on very small margins. Someone who buys an asset and then sells it an hour later at a one percent appreciation might feel quite pleased. He or she would be less pleased at having to pay a quarter-percent fee to purchase the asset in the first place and then another quarter percent to sell it.

This, according to Mr. Baker, is part of the beauty of the transfer tax; it tends to curb at least some speculation. “It’s a very progressive tax,” he said, “that discourages nonproductive activity.”

A hallmark of the Bush years has been the rampant irresponsibility — by the White House, Congress and the general public — when it comes to matters of finance. The costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were placed on credit cards and off the books. Their ultimate overall costs will be in the trillions.

Incredibly, President Bush and Congress cut taxes in wartime, which is insane.

Budget deficits and the national debt are streaking toward the moon. And the only remedy anyone has come up with for fending off Great Depression II has been deficit spending on a scale reminiscent of World War II.

Excuse me, but did somebody say the baby boomers are about to start retiring?

Maybe the piper will never have to be paid. Maybe the deficits will someday magically right themselves. Maybe some prosperous future generation will be more than happy to clean up the mess we left behind.

If none of that is true, we should start looking now for some real money somewhere. A stock transfer tax is not a bad place to start.

¶ 9:36 PM 2 comments links to this post

Nearly seventy ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called “the Red Army” held the millions of the town’s inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.

Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.

This is the description that would now appear in the history books – if the Germans had won the war.

Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in our media, which are being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas terrorists use the inhabitants of Gaza as “hostages” and exploit the women and children as “human shields”, they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured.

In this war, as in any modern war, propaganda plays a major role. The disparity between the forces, between the Israeli army - with its airplanes, gunships, drones, warships, artillery and tanks - and the few thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a thousand, perhaps one to a million. In the political arena the gap between them is even wider. But in the propaganda war, the gap is almost infinite.

Almost all the Western media initially repeated the official Israeli propaganda line. They almost entirely ignored the Palestinian side of the story, not to mention the daily demonstrations of the Israeli peace camp. The rationale of the Israeli government (“The state must defend its citizens against the Qassam rockets”) has been accepted as the whole truth. The view from the other side, that the Qassams are a retaliation for the siege that starves the one and a half million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, was not mentioned at all...

¶ 5:37 PM 0 comments links to this post

...Open wi-fi is a terrorist tool and has to be shut down, right this second. That's the conclusion, at least, of the Mumbai police. Starting today, the Times of India reports, "several police teams, armed with laptops and internet-enabled mobile phones, will randomly visit homes to detect unprotected networks."

"If a particular place's wi-fi is not password-protected or secured then the policemen at the spot has the authority to issue notice to the owner of the wi-fi connection directing him to secure the connection," deputy commissioner of police Sanjay Mohite tells The Hindu. Repeat wi-fi offenders may receive "notices under the Criminal Procedure Code," another senior officer warns the Times.

Mohite notes that e-mails taking credit for terror attacks in New Delhi and Ahmedabad were sent through open wireless networks. "Unprotected IP addresses can be misused for cyber crimes,'' he says. Other Indian cities now require cyber cafes to install surveillance cameras, and to collect identification from all customers...

¶ 6:50 AM 0 comments links to this post

In 1932, when the American public voted President Herbert Hoover out of office, they were searching for an end to the economic chaos and unemployment that had gripped the nation for two years. They turned to a man promising a better life than the one they had known since the beginning of the Great Depression — Franklin D. Roosevelt.

When FDR took office, he immediately commenced a massive revitalization of the nation's economy. In response to the depression that hung over the nation in the early 1930s, President Roosevelt created many programs designed to put Americans back to work.

Roosevelt was not interested in the dole. He was was determined, rather, to preserve the pride of American workers in their own ability to earn a living, so he concentrated on creating jobs.

In his first 100 days in office, President Roosevelt approved several measures as part of his "New Deal," including the Emergency Conservation Work Act (ECW), better known as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). With that action, he brought together the nation's young men and the land in an effort to save them both. Roosevelt proposed to recruit thousands of unemployed young men, enlist them in a peacetime army, and send them to battle the erosion and destruction of the nation's natural resources. More than any other New Deal agency, the CCC is considered to be an extension of Roosevelt's personal philosophy.

The speed with which the plan moved through proposal, authorization, implementation, and operation was certainly a miracle of cooperation among all the agencies and branches of the federal government. From FDR's inauguration on March 4, 1933, to the induction of the first CCC enrollee, only 37 days had elapsed.

The CCC, also known as Roosevelt's Tree Army, was credited with renewing the nation's decimated forests by planting an estimated three billion trees from 1933 to 1942. This was crucial, especially in states affected by the Dust Bowl, where reforestation was necessary to break the wind, hold water in the soil, and hold the soil in place. So far reaching was the CCC's reforestation program that it was responsible for more than half the reforestation, public and private, accomplished in the nation's history.

...By 1942, there was hardly a state that could not boast of permanent projects left as markers by the CCC. The CCC worked on improving millions of acres of federal and state lands, as well as parks. New roads were built, telephone lines strung, and trees planted.

CCC projects included:

* more than 3,470 fire towers erected;
* 97,000 miles of fire roads built;
* 4,235,000 man-days devoted to fighting fires;
* more than 3 billion trees planted;
* 7,153,000 man days expended on protecting the natural habitats of wildlife; 83 camps in 15 Western states assigned 45 projects of that nature;
* 46 camps assigned to work under the direction of the U.S. Bureau of Agriculture Engineering;
* more than 84,400,000 acres of good agricultural land receive manmade drainage systems; Indian enrollees do much of that work;
* 1,240,000 man-days of emergency work completed during floods of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys;
* disease and insect control;
* forest improvement — timber stand inventories, surveying, and reforestation;
* forest recreation development — campgrounds built, complete with picnic shelters, swimming pools, fireplaces, and restrooms.

...The Civilian Conservation Corps was one of the most successful New Deal programs of the Great Depression. It existed for fewer than 10 years, but left a legacy of strong, handsome roads, bridges, and buildings throughout the United States. Between 1933 and 1941, more than 3,000,000 men served in the CCC...

¶ 9:18 PM 0 comments links to this post

I always like to say our health care system is not broken, it's working perfectly. Just not for us. And it is true. The American health care system is doing exactly what it was designed to do - make a fortune for a few people.

You can apply this same principle to every major part of the American experience - our media is working flawlessly at keeping the vast majority of Americans misinformed. And even our government is working flawlessly at preserving its own power and protecting the interests of those it serves. It is from within this framework that we must assess George Bush's presidency.

I have repeatedly heard people refer to Bush as a failed president. Indeed, that is probably how he will go down in history. But to be accurate, we must separate our failure, and that of our country's, from those of the Bush administration, those who enabled him, and those whose interest he serves.

For it is from their perspective, we must admit, George Bush's presidency was a raging success. With the help of a complicit and feckless Democratic congress, and a compliant media, George Bush got almost everything he wanted.

And while we, both as progressives and Americans, may be choking on the products of his success, for those he represents, the country is now a far more agreeable place then it was eight years ago. Sure, the last few months have seen economic turmoil and insecurity even for the perversely wealthy. But even there things are looking up as Henry Paulson comes to their rescue - with our money.

All in all, from the point of view of the greedy, parasite class who feeds off the commonwealth of our country and its people, the Bush Republicans and the faux opposition we sometimes call the Democrats have worked perfectly.

Here's a very brief and incomplete list of Bushco's successes:

In eight years, almost completely unimpeded by Democrats, and in many cases, he couldn't have done it without them, Bush dramatically changed this country to the benefit of the parasite class. From gutting environmental policy, to ridiculous tax cuts, to numerous bills that only benefited the monied interests, Bush helped corporate America make more profit than in human history. And I'm not even including the oil, gas, and coal industry. From bankruptcy reform, the energy bill, to the the medicare bill, Bush pushed through major legislation that eliminated oversight, hurt consumers, and weakened our democracy. Then, throw in two Supremes who love corporate power and God, and all I can say is, good job George.

Probably his greatest success, however, was letting 911 happen. I don't know how they did it, but, despite a plethora of warnings, they actually managed to let 4 planes get hijacked at once, and fly unimpeded into three major sites including the World Trade Towers. Excellent.

From that single act, Bush was able to conquer two countries, seize about 45 trillion dollars in Iraqi oil, depending on the ppb this week, and turn the country into a war mongering, war profiteering, national security police state. Oh Mr Bush, you will always be VIP at the Petroleum Club.

Yes, Bush's base has made trillions of dollars from his actions and policies. Kudos. A very successful presidency indeed.

Who has failed on the other hand, is us.

We in the progressive netroots, and specifically here at Daily Kos, have failed repeatedly to do much of anything. We raised a bunch of money to elect better Democrats. Most lost, some were good, but others turned out to be no better than the Democrats we were trying to get rid of.

Tried to get rid of Lieberman - failed. Tried to stop Supreme court appointments - failed. Tried to stop numerous, unbelievable bills like the Military Commissions act - failed. Tried to pressure congress to end the Iraq war and prevent the "surge" - failed.

I'm sure many would love to take credit for the victory of the Dems in 2006 and Obama in 2008. But, while we did kick in some needed cash, any honest assessment of the 2006 midterm elections would recognize that the Republicans deserve more credit for losing than the Democrats deserve for winning. Far more.

And while Obama deserves ample credit for kicking John McCain's ass, his campaign pretty much bypassed Daily Kos and the netroots. We did, again, do a good job of raising money here, but I certainly wouldn't try to claim credit for Obama's victory. I have little doubt that Obama would have won regardless of whether Daily Kos existed or not.

Now, I know some will be offended by my dismal assessment of our performance. But I believe it is the hard truth. Sure, there have been mini victories along the way. And there's no doubt we gave the Dems a little boost. But the honest truth is, we have failed to impose our will in any meaningful way on the actors in Washington. That's just a fact. And if Obama turns out to be the progressive we all hoped he would, we should call ourselves lucky.

Right now, in Washington, every major interests group is maneuvering to secure their interests in the new Congress and the Obama administration. They are pressuring, threatening, and bribing politicians with campaign cash to make sure they aren't the big losers in the next 4 years.

But not us. We are merely bystanders. Hooing and hawing at what we see with no real means to affect it. And while a great deal of uncertainty exists over what Obama will actually do, I see no indication that the progressive agenda is driving anything in Washington. In fact, it seems as though we didn't win an election at all. It seems we have been shown the door.

By the most optimistic assessment, it's as though we have only one progressive in Washington. Barack Obama, and he's playing at not letting on that he's a progressive.

This is unfortunate. I believe we not only defeated Republicans this year, but we defeated an idea, an ideology if you will. But in Washington you would never know it. Lost in all the conciliatory language of bipartisanship is the reality that we were right all along, that progressive policies are best, and that we predicted much of what has come to pass.

Lost is any sense of accountability. We have so much work to do. We cannot risk waiting to find out what Obama is really going to do. And we sure can't afford the kind of blind loyalty and sycophantism on display here.

I believe in us. Not Washington or any politician to fight for our rights and needs. All I care about is what maximizes people power, and how we, a bunch of ordinary, yet extraordinarily informed citizens can change our government.

Anything that reduces our power as Americans to force our government to do the right thing and work for us is the enemy. Period. We are fighting for our lives. It is deadly serious. In some countries, the parasite class kills Democrats. And they will not give up their piece of the pie without a fight.

Obama said he needs our help. We need to get serious and give it to him. But when he's wrong, we need to make him fear us. That is political power. And if you don't have the stomach for it, then keep posting cat pictures.

And if you really believe that the powers behind George Bush and Dick Cheney, the oil companies, the defense companies, the bankers, are just going to retire now that his presidency is over, then you need to get out of politics.

I am not a religious person, but the only word I can find to describe these people is evil. And there is no "coming together" or "finding common ground" with evil. They hate us. They wish we were dead. In other countries, people like us, people who just want justice and fairness for everyone, end up dead.

In the US, they don't have to kill us because we have no power.

So as you flood diaries about your favorite songs, or pooties, or why so and so is upset with so and so, remember, George Bush kicked our asses. He got what he wanted. Us, we're just hoping one guy will save us.

¶ 8:55 PM 0 comments links to this post

...First, Mr. Obama should scrap his proposal for $150 billion in business tax cuts, which would do little to help the economy. Ideally he’d scrap the proposed $150 billion payroll tax cut as well, though I’m aware that it was a campaign promise.

Money not squandered on ineffective tax cuts could be used to provide further relief to Americans in distress — enhanced unemployment benefits, expanded Medicaid and more. And why not get an early start on the insurance subsidies — probably running at $100 billion or more per year — that will be essential if we’re going to achieve universal health care?

...The Romer-Bernstein report acknowledges that “a dollar of infrastructure spending is more effective in creating jobs than a dollar of tax cuts.” It argues, however, that “there is a limit on how much government investment can be carried out efficiently in a short time frame.” But why does the time frame have to be short?

As far as I can tell, Mr. Obama’s planners have focused on investment projects that will deliver their main jobs boost over the next two years. But since unemployment is likely to remain high well beyond that two-year window, the plan should also include longer-term investment projects.

And bear in mind that even a project that delivers its main punch in, say, 2011 can provide significant economic support in earlier years. If Mr. Obama drops the “jump-start” metaphor, if he accepts the reality that we need a multi-year program rather than a short burst of activity, he can create a lot more jobs through government investment, even in the near term.

Still, shouldn’t Mr. Obama wait for proof that a bigger, longer-term plan is needed? No. Right now the investment portion of the Obama plan is limited by a shortage of “shovel ready” projects, projects ready to go on short notice. A lot more investment can be under way by late 2010 or 2011 if Mr. Obama gives the go-ahead now — but if he waits too long before deciding, that window of opportunity will be gone.

One more thing: even with the Obama plan, the Romer-Bernstein report predicts an average unemployment rate of 7.3 percent over the next three years. That’s a scary number, big enough to pose a real risk that the U.S. economy will get stuck in a Japan-type deflationary trap.

So my advice to the Obama team is to scrap the business tax cuts, and, more important, to deal with the threat of doing too little by doing more. And the way to do more is to stop talking about jump-starts and look more broadly at the possibilities for government investment.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama signaled in an interview broadcast Sunday that he was unlikely to authorize a broad inquiry into Bush administration programs like domestic eavesdropping or the treatment of terrorism suspects...

Mr. Obama added that he also had “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

“And part of my job,” he continued, “is to make sure that, for example, at the C.I.A., you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got spend their all their time looking over their shoulders.”

The Bush administration has authorized interrogation tactics like waterboarding that critics say skirted federal laws and international treaties, and domestic wiretapping without warrants. But the details of those programs have never been made public, and administration officials have said their actions were legal under a president’s wartime powers...

The issue will also be an important early test of his relationship with conservatives in Congress and the country’s intelligence agencies; both groups oppose any further review.

On other terrorism issues, Mr. Obama suggested in the interview that his approach might be more measured. He said the closing of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which once seemed to be an early top objective, was not likely to happen during the first 100 days of his administration.

“It is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize,” Mr. Obama said, “and we are going to get it done. But part of the challenge that you have is that you have a bunch of folks that have been detained, many of whom who may be very dangerous, who have not been put on trial or have not gone through some adjudication.”

... Lawyers who represented Bush administration officials over the years expressed little surprise that Mr. Obama’s legal and national security team had lost whatever appetite it might have had for delving into alleged misdeeds of the Bush years.

“A new president doesn’t want to look vengeful,” said a former Bush White House lawyer, Bradford A. Berenson, who was a Harvard law classmate of Mr. Obama and has represented administration figures as a private lawyer, “and the last thing a new administration wants to do is spend its time and energy rehashing the perceived sins of the old one.

“No matter how much the Obama administration’s most extreme supporters may be screaming for blood, the president himself doesn’t seem to share that bloodlust.”

Moreover, any effort to conduct a wider re-examination would almost certainly provoke a backlash at the country’s intelligence agencies.

Mark Lowenthal, who was the assistant director for analysis and production at the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2005, said if agents were criminally investigated for doing something that top Bush administration officials asked them to do and that they were assured was legal, intelligence officers would be less willing to take risks to protect the country.

“There are just huge costs to the day-to-day operation of intelligence,” Mr. Lowenthal, now the president of the Intelligence and Security Academy, said of a potential investigation. He added that he saw no benefit to such an effort because, he said, the public was not clamoring for it..."

¶ 6:43 AM 0 comments links to this post

...Whatever else one might want to say about this "centrist" approach, the absolute last thing one can say about it is that there's anything "new" or "remarkable" about it. The notion that Democrats must spurn their left-wing base and move to the "non-ideological" center is the most conventional of conventional Beltway wisdom (which is why Ignatius, the most conventional of Beltway pundits, is preaching it). That's how Democrats earn their Seriousness credentials, and it's been that way for decades...

¶ 6:38 PM 0 comments links to this post

The military invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli Forces bears a direct relation to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves.

This is a war of conquest. Discovered in 2000, there are extensive gas reserves off the Gaza coastline.

British Gas (BG Group) and its partner, the Athens based Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC) owned by Lebanon's Sabbagh and Koury families, were granted oil and gas exploration rights in a 25 year agreement signed in November 1999 with the Palestinian Authority.

The rights to the offshore gas field are respectively British Gas (60 percent); Consolidated Contractors (CCC) (30 percent); and the Investment Fund of the Palestinian Authority (10 percent). (Haaretz, October 21, 2007).

The PA-BG-CCC agreement includes field development and the construction of a gas pipeline.(Middle East Economic Digest, Jan 5, 2001).

The BG licence covers the entire Gazan offshore marine area, which is contiguous to several Israeli offshore gas facilities. (See Map below). It should be noted that 60 percent of the gas reserves along the Gaza-Israel coastline belong to Palestine.

The BG Group drilled two wells in 2000: Gaza Marine-1 and Gaza Marine-2. Reserves are estimated by British Gas to be of the order of 1.4 trillion cubic feet, valued at approximately 4 billion dollars. These are the figures made public by British Gas. The size of Palestine's gas reserves could be much larger...

¶ 6:10 PM 0 comments links to this post

...The terrain to be mined would include not just the usual Wall Street suspects and their Congressional and regulatory enablers but also the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a strangely neglected ground zero in the foreclosure meltdown. The department’s secretary, Alphonso Jackson, resigned in March amid still-unresolved investigations over whether he enriched himself and friends with government contracts...

¶ 9:11 AM 0 comments links to this post

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama said Wednesday that overhauling Social Security and Medicare would be “a central part” of his administration’s efforts to contain federal spending...

¶ 7:29 AM 0 comments links to this post

President-elect Barack Obama has banned corporations and big donors from funding his Jan. 20 inauguration. But 90% of donations received so far have been raised by well-heeled fund-raisers, including Wall Street executives whose companies have received billions of dollars in federal bailout money.

A total of 207 fund-raisers have collected $24.8 million of the $27.3 million in contributions disclosed by Mr. Obama through Thursday, according to an analysis by nonpartisan campaign finance group Public Citizen commissioned by The Wall Street Journal.

Wall Street employees, as a group, have been the biggest single source of these private donations, according to the analysis. Much of their donations—$5.7 million total—has been channeled through financial-services executives who each have bundled together donations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars...

¶ 10:58 PM 0 comments links to this post

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan ran into crossfire from his own party in Congress on Thursday, suggesting that quick passage of spending programs and tax cuts could require more time and negotiation than Democrats once hoped.

Senate Democrats complained that major components of his plan were not bold enough and urged more focus on creating jobs and rebuilding the nation’s energy infrastructure rather than cutting taxes.

Just hours earlier, Mr. Obama called for speedy passage of the stimulus measure, warning that the recession “could linger for years” if Congress did not pass his plan within weeks.

Further complicating the picture, Democratic senators said Thursday that they would try to attach legislation to the package that would allow bankruptcy courts to modify home loans, a move Republicans have opposed...

...To close a gap of more than $2 trillion — possibly a lot more, if the budget office projections turn out to be too optimistic — Mr. Obama offers a $775 billion plan. And that’s not enough.

Now, fiscal stimulus can sometimes have a “multiplier” effect: In addition to the direct effects of, say, investment in infrastructure on demand, there can be a further indirect effect as higher incomes lead to higher consumer spending. Standard estimates suggest that a dollar of public spending raises G.D.P. by around $1.50.

But only about 60 percent of the Obama plan consists of public spending. The rest consists of tax cuts — and many economists are skeptical about how much these tax cuts, especially the tax breaks for business, will actually do to boost spending. (A number of Senate Democrats apparently share these doubts.) Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center summed it up in the title of a recent blog posting: “lots of buck, not much bang.”

The bottom line is that the Obama plan is unlikely to close more than half of the looming output gap, and could easily end up doing less than a third of the job...

¶ 6:34 AM 0 comments links to this post

If you want a glimpse of the fundamental moral obscenity that underlies our bold new era of hope and change, look no further than Barack Obama's promise this week to "overhaul" Social Security and Medicare. This effort to cut back on support for the sick, the old, the weak, the unfortunate and the abandoned will be a "central part" of the new administration's economic program, a linchpin of its struggle to curb federal spending, Obama declared.

He pointed to a looming federal deficit of $1.2 trillion this year, with more to follow, as urgent reasons to deal with "entitlement spending." Given the hundreds of billions of dollars that the Bush Regime has already given away in its no-strings bailout of selected corporate cronies, and the hundreds of billions that Obama plans to spend on "economic stimulus" (a large portion of which is going to "tax breaks" that will give, at most, a few hundred dollars to people losing their jobs and homes and medical insurance), it is imperative to get government spending under control, said the president-elect. The New York Times described Obama's remarks as an effort to offer "some soothing words to Republicans and the financial markets" – two groups who certainly need special comforting in these trying times.

The Times goes on to tell us helpfully that there is a threat that these "entitlement programs" might "grow so large as to be unsustainable in the long run." This is of course the same argument that George W. Bush made after the 2004 election, when he sought to sell off Social Security to those same "financial markets" that Obama is now trying so assiduously to soothe. No doubt, we will soon see the old scare stories that filled the media then trotted out once again, this time in "progressive" garb. But the truth remains the same: the programs are essentially sound and can be maintained with only relatively small adjustments for many decades, as far as one can reasonably project into the future.

Yet it is here, on "entitlements," that Obama wants to make a "tough stand" on government spending. It will be a "central part" of his entire economic program. Getting "entitlements" under control will be one of the first major campaigns of his administration, he says, promising plans in February, just days after he moves into the White House.

At the same time, he promises to expand – to expand – the multitrillion-dollar war machine that has literally bled the nation dry. He wants to expand a military-industrial-security complex that already devours more money and resources than every other military force on earth combined. He wants more troops, more weapons, an ever-increasing "global strike capability," an escalation of the endless, pointless "War on Terror" in Afghanistan and Pakistan (for starters). He has never said a single word about "curbing government spending" on this vast conglomerate of death and destruction. He has not said a single word about rolling back even a few of American military outposts that in their several hundreds now cover the entire globe. At every point, it seems, government spending on the war machine – including the tens of billions of dollars spent in secret each year on the various tentacles of the "national security" apparatus – will be increased under the Obama administration.

No "cutbacks" here then. No concerns that spending in this area might "grow so large as to be unsustainable in the long run." Spending on death and domination is sacrosanct, the true "third rail of American politics," and Obama is not going to touch it – except to augment it...

The president-elect has made his fundamental priorities clear – for anyone who wants to see them. The war machine and the financial markets will continue to be gorged and comforted in their wonted manner. Programs to help ordinary citizens, programs to enhance the quality of life for individuals and the well-being of society, will be the first – perhaps the only – areas to feel the budget axe. Whatever you may think of the efficacy of such programs, this ordering of priorities -- war and profits over people -- bespeaks the same depraved sensibility that has prevailed for generations in Washington. It is the same old rancid swill in a stylish new container

...Throughout America's history, there have been some years that simply rolled into the next without much notice or fanfare, and then there are the years that come along once in a generation, the kind that mark a clean break from a troubled past and set a new course for our nation. This is one of those years.

We start 2009 in the midst of a crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetime, a crisis that has only deepened over the last few weeks. Nearly 2 million jobs have been now lost, and on Friday we're likely to learn that we lost more jobs last year than at any time since World War II. Just in the past year, another 2.8 million Americans who want and need full-time work have had to settle for part-time jobs. Manufacturing has hit a 28-year low. Many businesses cannot borrow or make payroll. Many families cannot pay their bills or their mortgage. Many workers are watching their life savings disappear. And many, many Americans are both anxious and uncertain of what the future will hold.

Now, I don't believe it's too late to change course, but it will be if we don't take dramatic action as soon as possible. If nothing is done, this recession could linger for years. The unemployment rate could reach double digits. Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity, which translates into more than $12,000 in lost income for a family of four. We could lose a generation of potential and promise, as more young Americans are forced to forgo dreams of college or the chance to train for the jobs of the future. And our nation could lose the competitive edge that has served as a foundation for our strength and our standing in the world.

In short, a bad situation could become dramatically worse...

...this plan begins with -- this plan must begin today, a plan I am confident will save or create at least 3 million jobs over the next few years. It is not just another public-works program; it's a plan that recognizes both the paradox and the promise of this moment -- the fact that there are millions of Americans trying to find work even as, all around the country, there's so much work to be done. And that's why we'll invest in priorities like energy and education; health care and a new infrastructure that are necessary to keep us strong and competitive in the 21st century. That's why the overwhelming majority of the jobs created will be in the private sector...

...To improve the quality of our health care while lowering its cost, we will make the immediate investments necessary to ensure that within five years all of America's medical records are computerized...

...To get people spending again, 95 percent of working families will receive a thousand-dollar tax cut, the first stage of a middle-class tax cut that I promised during the campaign and will include in our next budget...

...the time has come to build a 21st-century economy in which hard work and responsibility are once again rewarded. That's why I'm asking Congress to work with me and my team day and night, on weekends if necessary, to get the plan passed in the next few weeks. That's why I'm calling on all Americans -- Democrats and Republicans and independents -- to kut -- to put good ideas ahead of the old ideological battles, a sense of common purpose above the same narrow partisanship, and insist that the first question each of us asks isn't "What's good for me?" but "What's good for the country my children will inherit?"

¶ 8:54 PM 0 comments links to this post

Cheney: It’s Just An ‘Urban Legend’ That I ‘Exceeded My Authority’ As Vice President

...Here are just some examples of Cheney abusing his vice presidential powers:

– Argued he was not part of the executive branch but instead a “barnacle” hanging between the legislative and executive branch.

– Cheney’s office failed to provide data on its classification and declassification activities as required by Executive Order 12958. “Cheney’s office provided the information in 2001 and 2002, then stopped.”

– Top Cheney aide David Addington “typed a substitute signature line” for Alberto Gonzales on a memo re-authorizing Bush’s illegal wiretapping program.

– “The Cheney team had…technological supremacy over the National Security Council staff. That is to say, they could read their e-mails,” said former Colin Powell aide Lawrence Wilkerson.

– Documents prepared for the then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice were “routed outside the formal process” to Cheney.

– A Cheney lawyer told the Secret Service in September 2006 “to eliminate data on who visited Cheney at his official residence.”

In addition to his well-documented disregard for the rule of law, Cheney admitted last year that he doesn’t care what the public thinks...

¶ 6:51 AM 0 comments links to this post

WASHINGTON – Pointing with concern to "red ink as far as the eye can see," President-elect Barack Obama pledged Wednesday to tackle out-of-control Social Security and Medicare spending and named a special watchdog to clamp down on other federal programs — even as he campaigned anew to spend the largest pile of taxpayer money in history to revive the sinking economy...

¶ 9:32 PM 0 comments links to this post

Liskula Cohen, 36, has filed a suit in Manhattan Supreme Court in New York seeking an order that would allow her to sue for defamation the anonymous contributor to a blog calling itself "Skanks in NYC".

According to her court papers, the bloggers have "posted entries, including photographs, captions to the photographs and commentary solely about Liskula Cohen that describe her as a 'skank' and a 'ho'".

A blogger titled "Anonymous" said in one entry: "She's a psychotic, lying, whoring...skank". The blogger added that Cohen "may have been hot 10 years ago" but that "desperation seeps from her soul, if she even has one".

Cohen, a Canadian who has appeared on the front cover of Australian Vogue and worked for Versace and Armani, said her depiction as a "promiscuous woman who is filthy, disgusting, foul and a whore" had damaged her "reputation and desirability for endorsing products".

They were also hurtful and "flatly untrue", she said in her affidavit...

¶ 6:36 AM 1 comments links to this post

...So apparently Obama plans to appoint CNN’s Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General. I don’t have a problem with Gupta’s qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way...

...This is the thing that always worries me about Obama - he seems very much a part of that subgroup of people in his age group who fell hook, line, and sinker for the "libertarian" excuses to oppose liberalism, because he doesn't know any better. And unlike a lot of other people in that group, he hasn't learned anything from the last eight years. I have a friend who seems convinced that Obama is the Real Deal because he spoke to him back during his Senate race and learned that Obama really doesn't like Bush - but, really, despising Bush is a pretty low threshold. Not many people ever really liked Bush, anyway. What's important is understanding why the policies are bad, and listening to Obama talk about Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, I get the feeling he doesn't really know what was wrong with Iraq, either. Same with healthcare.

¶ 9:59 PM 0 comments links to this post

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The recent carnage in Gaza has left little doubt that within the tortured dynamic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, both the chicken and the egg have completely and utterly lost their minds.

Regardless of who's to blame for the origins of the conflict, shame on both Hamas and Israel for their recent violations of international law that have led to a humanitarian inferno in Gaza and southern Israel.

Hamas is to be blamed for its sophomoric provocation of its neighbor's military wrath by firing missiles into southern Israel. Israel also should be condemned for its disproportionately inhumane onslaught in Gaza, which has currently left 555 people dead and 2,750 injured, according to Palestinian medical sources cited by CNN. The United Nations estimates that at least 25 percent of Palestinians killed have been civilians.

Simply put, both sides have committed acts tantamount to "war crimes," and both continue to violate international law repeatedly in this nightmare.

Under international law, the Geneva Conventions prohibit armed reprisals that intentionally inflict "collective punishment" against civilian populations as well as the targeting of nonmilitary targets.

Both Israel (with its military onslaught in Gaza) and Hamas (with its primitive rocket-firing into southern Israel) violate Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Conventions, which states: "No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited..."

¶ 9:28 PM 0 comments links to this post

WASHINGTON — Leon E. Panetta, a former congressman and White House chief of staff, has been selected by President-elect Barack Obama to head the Central Intelligence Agency. The choice, disclosed Monday by Democratic officials, immediately revealed divisions in the party as two senior lawmakers questioned why Mr. Obama would nominate a candidate with limited experience in intelligence matters.

The job was the last unfilled major post for Mr. Obama, who has criticized the agency for using interrogation methods he characterized as torture. Democratic officials said Mr. Obama had selected Mr. Panetta for his managerial skills, his bipartisan standing, and the foreign policy and budget experience he gained under President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Panetta has himself been a sharp critic of the agency’s interrogation practices. Some Democrats expressed strong support for the choice, with Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, describing him as “one of the finest public servants I have ever served with and dealt with since he left the White House.”

... Among the lawmakers who expressed skepticism about the choice was Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and the new chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Ms. Feinstein, who would oversee any confirmation hearing for Mr. Panetta, issued a statement that signaled clear disapproval and said she had not been notified about the choice.

“My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time,” she said.

A second top Democrat, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the departing chairman of the Intelligence Committee, shares Ms. Feinstein’s concerns, Democratic Congressional aides said.

Ms. Feinstein’s Republican counterpart on the Intelligence Committee, Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, said he would be “looking hard at Panetta’s intelligence expertise and qualifications...”

...URS Corp., a San Francisco planning and engineering firm partially owned by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein's husband, landed an Army contract Monday worth up to $600 million.

The award to help with troop mobilization, weapons systems training and anti-terrorism efforts is the latest in a string of plum defense jobs snared by URS. In February, the firm won an army engineering and logistics contract that could bring in $3.1 billion during the next eight years.

Government contracting has come under increasing scrutiny by Congress and citizen groups, with critics decrying the political connections of firms winning lucrative jobs. Richard Blum, Feinstein's husband, serves on the company's board of directors and controls about 24 percent of the firm's stock...

¶ 6:32 AM 0 comments links to this post

...Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what?

To that end consider the strange story of Harry Markopolos. Mr. Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldn’t be anything other than a fraud. Mr. Madoff’s investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not merely improbable but mathematically impossible. And so, Mr. Markopolos reasoned, Bernard Madoff must be doing something other than what he said he was doing.

In his devastatingly persuasive 17-page letter to the S.E.C., Mr. Markopolos saw two possible scenarios. In the “Unlikely” scenario: Mr. Madoff, who acted as a broker as well as an investor, was “front-running” his brokerage customers. A customer might submit an order to Madoff Securities to buy shares in I.B.M. at a certain price, for example, and Madoff Securities instantly would buy I.B.M. shares for its own portfolio ahead of the customer order. If I.B.M.’s shares rose, Mr. Madoff kept them; if they fell he fobbed them off onto the poor customer.

In the “Highly Likely” scenario, wrote Mr. Markopolos, “Madoff Securities is the world’s largest Ponzi Scheme.” Which, as we now know, it was.

Harry Markopolos sent his report to the S.E.C. on Nov. 7, 2005 — more than three years before Mr. Madoff was finally exposed — but he had been trying to explain the fraud to them since 1999. He had no direct financial interest in exposing Mr. Madoff — he wasn’t an unhappy investor or a disgruntled employee. There was no way to short shares in Madoff Securities, and so Mr. Markopolos could not have made money directly from Mr. Madoff’s failure. To judge from his letter, Harry Markopolos anticipated mainly downsides for himself: he declined to put his name on it for fear of what might happen to him and his family if anyone found out he had written it. And yet the S.E.C.’s cursory investigation of Mr. Madoff pronounced him free of fraud.

What’s interesting about the Madoff scandal, in retrospect, is how little interest anyone inside the financial system had in exposing it. It wasn’t just Harry Markopolos who smelled a rat. As Mr. Markopolos explained in his letter, Goldman Sachs was refusing to do business with Mr. Madoff; many others doubted Mr. Madoff’s profits or assumed he was front-running his customers and steered clear of him. Between the lines, Mr. Markopolos hinted that even some of Mr. Madoff’s investors may have suspected that they were the beneficiaries of a scam. After all, it wasn’t all that hard to see that the profits were too good to be true. Some of Mr. Madoff’s investors may have reasoned that the worst that could happen to them, if the authorities put a stop to the front-running, was that a good thing would come to an end.

The Madoff scandal echoes a deeper absence inside our financial system, which has been undermined not merely by bad behavior but by the lack of checks and balances to discourage it. “Greed” doesn’t cut it as a satisfying explanation for the current financial crisis. Greed was necessary but insufficient; in any case, we are as likely to eliminate greed from our national character as we are lust and envy. The fixable problem isn’t the greed of the few but the misaligned interests of the many.

A lot has been said and written, for instance, about the corrupting effects on Wall Street of gigantic bonuses. What happened inside the major Wall Street firms, though, was more deeply unsettling than greedy people lusting for big checks: leaders of public corporations, especially financial corporations, are as good as required to lead for the short term.

Richard Fuld, the former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, E. Stanley O’Neal, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch, and Charles O. Prince III, Citigroup’s chief executive, may have paid themselves humongous sums of money at the end of each year, as a result of the bond market bonanza. But if any one of them had set himself up as a whistleblower — had stood up and said “this business is irresponsible and we are not going to participate in it” — he would probably have been fired. Not immediately, perhaps. But a few quarters of earnings that lagged behind those of every other Wall Street firm would invite outrage from subordinates, who would flee for other, less responsible firms, and from shareholders, who would call for his resignation. Eventually he’d be replaced by someone willing to make money from the credit bubble.

OUR financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today’s financial markets is immense. Obviously the greater the market pressure to excel in the short term, the greater the need for pressure from outside the market to consider the longer term. But that’s the problem: there is no longer any serious pressure from outside the market. The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest...

¶ 9:55 PM 0 comments links to this post

We used to tax the hell out these guys and we were the land of opportunity, a rich and prosperous nation full of innovators and entrepreneurial spirit and actually making things that people wanted to buy. Let's do that again!

¶ 9:28 PM 0 comments links to this post

WASHINGTON -- President-elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are crafting a plan to offer about $300 billion of tax cuts to individuals and businesses, a move aimed at attracting Republican support for an economic-stimulus package and prodding companies to create jobs.

The size of the proposed tax cuts -- which would account for about 40% of a stimulus package that could reach $775 billion over two years -- is greater than many on both sides of the aisle in Congress had anticipated. It may make it easier to win over Republicans who have stressed that any initiative should rely more heavily on tax cuts rather than spending.

The Obama tax-cut proposals, if enacted, could pack more punch in two years than either of President George W. Bush's tax cuts did in their first two years. Mr. Bush's 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut of 2001, considered the largest in history, contained $174 billion of cuts during its first two full years, according to Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation. The second-largest tax cut -- the 10-year, $350 billion package engineered by Mr. Bush in 2003 -- contained $231 billion in 2004 and 2005...

¶ 6:42 AM 1 comments links to this post

# 1. Obama, Democrats Eye $300 Billion Tax Cut
# 2. Why We Keep Falling for Financial Scams
# 3. 2009 Could Be Better Than You Think

¶ 6:38 AM 0 comments links to this post

...The American International Group, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Electric and the municipal bond guarantors Ambac Financial and MBIA all had triple-A ratings. (G.E. still does!) Large investment banks like Lehman and Merrill Lynch all had solid investment grade ratings. It’s almost as if the higher the rating of a financial institution, the more likely it was to contribute to financial catastrophe. But of course all these big financial companies fueled the creation of the credit products that in turn fueled the revenues of Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s.

These oligopolies, which are actually sanctioned by the S.E.C., didn’t merely do their jobs badly. They didn’t simply miss a few calls here and there. In pursuit of their own short-term earnings, they did exactly the opposite of what they were meant to do: rather than expose financial risk they systematically disguised it.

¶ 5:47 PM 0 comments links to this post

...Sources say the Senate majority leader pushed against Jackson and Davis — both democratic congressmen from Illinois — and against Jones — the Illinois Senate president who is the political godfather of President-elect Barack Obama — because he did not believe the three men were electable. He feared losing the seat to a Republican in a future election.

Blagojevich spokesman Lucio Guerrero confirmed that Reid (D-Nev.) and U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) — the new chief of the Senate Democratic political operation — each called Blagojevich’s campaign office separately Dec. 3. Sources believe that at least portions of the phone conversations are on tape.

Before their contacts, Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel called Blagojevich to tell him to expect to hear from Senate leadership because they were pushing against Jackson and others, according to statements the governor made to others...

...This is certainly a stunningly rich development from about every perspective imaginable. Harry Reid has threatened to use the Capitol Police to forcefully haul Roland Burris off the Senate floor should he try to enter because he feels Burris is tainted by Blagojevich's shady machinations of the open Senate seat. Only it turns out that Reid is the one smack in the middle of Blago's machinations, not Burris. And it would appear he is on Pat Fitzgerald's wiretaps doing so...

... Reid has been steadfastly determined to block the appointment of three black elected politicians - Emil Jones, Danny Davis and Jesse Jackson, Jr. because they are supposedly "not electable"; in favor of a white woman, Tammy Duckworth who has, you know, been previously found unelectable by the voters of Illinois. Or another white woman, Lisa Madigan, who managed to get elected mostly on the coattails of her powerful Chicago machine daddy. Lovely; what a picture that paints.

Oh, and now that nice gentlemanly 71 year old Roland Burris, another black man, who has previously been elected to statewide office in Illinois, can't be permitted in the hallowed Senate doors either. George Wallace must be laughing his butt off at Reid's bad optics and unseemly folly...

Harry Reid will be the featured guest on Meet the Press Sunday morning. Jane Hamsher has already raised the curious difference between how Reid and the Democratic leadership has treated Roland Burris and how they handled and accepted Joe Lieberman, Harriet Miers, Karl Rove, Ted Stevens and Larry Craig, or for that matter the evisceration of Habeas Corpus, the Fourth Amendment and the Geneva and UN Conventions against torture. No moral leadership whatsoever was shown on any of those; anybody think it will occur to self aggrandized inquisitor David Gregory to examine Harry Reid over the discrepancy?

¶ 7:55 AM 0 comments links to this post

...The latest CNN poll finds that only one-third of his fellow citizens want him to play a post-presidency role in public life...

...You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is. It stretches from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship. The discrepancy between the grandeur of the failure and the stature of the man is a puzzlement. We are still trying to compute it.

¶ 7:06 AM 0 comments links to this post

2008: Worst UFO Media Year Ever!
By Billy Cox


(actually a similar encounter over Phoenix, 1997 above)

...2008 was shaping up as a garden-variety yawner. Until the drama over Stephenville, Tex., shook down. And as a result of the MSM’s evaporation in the aftermath of this still-unresolved national security fiasco, De Void has proclaimed 2008 as The Media’s Worst UFO Year Ever.

To be sure, there was an initial stampede to the Stephenville region shortly after Empire-Tribune reporter Angelia Joiner’s accounting of the Jan. 8 UFO incident made the wires. TV crews came from as far away as Japan to get the story, and why not? There were plenty of loquacious witnesses to the lit-up, bigger-than-an-aircraft-carrier flying machine that glided silently over the little cow town and reversed its course. Eyewitnesses included cops and a pilot. Better yet, several reported military jet fighters scrambling after it.

An Air Force Base at nearby Fort Worth denied it had planes in the air that night, which was good enough for Newsweek. The emaciated weekly magazine didn’t waste any precious print on the story, but it did run a “Web Exclusive” by a “lecturer in English at Yale University” who attributed the suppertime sighting to sleep deprivation.

But then, not quite two weeks after the incident, as the hoopla subsided, Carswell Field made the surprise announcement that yes, it did indeed have warplanes in the air on the 8th. Not one or two, but 10. Ten F-16s. “Routine training missions.” Its press release said nothing about the UFO. Which raised another question – why bother with issuing a press release at all? Why not just let the event die a natural death? The official statement went against the USAF's own interests. It meant the eyewitnesses were credible.

Carswell’s reversal generated another brief wire-service cycle, but it had nothing to fear from the media.

In May, Dateline NBC promoted a UFO ratings-month special called “Ten Close Encounters Caught on Tape.” Host Hoda Kotb was more into rhymes (“Tonight, an extraterrestrial creature feature!”) and lame cliches (“The experts can argue until they’re as green as the little men whose existence they debate”) as she reviewed UFO cases from as far back as half a century ago. This lady had network resources to work with. And she said nothing about Stephenville. Zilcho.

The reason for Carswell’s embarrassing press release became clear in July when the Mutual UFO Network uncorked an online bombshell – a 77-page evaluation of radar records from 4 to 8 p.m. near Stephenville [.pdf, here].

In response to MUFON’s Freedom of Information Act request, the FAA produced a 139-meg CD tracking 2.8 million radar hits during that time span along the UFO flight corridor on a southeast beeline toward Crawford, site of President Bush’s “Western White House.” The timeline tapered off at 8 o’clock sharp, the end of MUFON’s request window – with the UFO just 10 miles from Bush’s ranch, and six miles from its restricted air space.

Although the F-16s ventured into unauthorized civilian air space and pulled to within a mile of the object, which carried no transponder and flew at speeds between 49 mph and 2,100 mph, they were nowhere near the craft when it reached Crawford. Neither Carswell nor any other Defense Department entity released radar data, but the former turned over its flight logs for that evening, all of which had been redacted.

“Four days after our FOIAs hit the FAA, they (the military) knew we’d show they had planes all over the place that night,” study investigator Glen Schulze told De Void. “They didn’t have much choice. Fort Worth radar data shows the F-16s from takeoff the landing at Carswell Air Force Base.”

This was an incredible story. Especially the non-responses from various military bureaucracies. There was a brief allusion to the MUFON report on Larry “non sequitur” King. But no wire service coverage. Not even The Wall Street Journal. During the first public presentation of the data in San Jose, Calif., in July, the San Francisco Chronicle showed up, but its reporter didn’t have a clue.

“A chart full of purple dots and black arrows that may or may not indicate aliens flew over President Bush’s Texas ranch in January,” wrote Steve Rubenstein. “The dots and arrows on the chart are as plain as day.”

Schulze, a resident of Littleton, Col., couldn’t even draw ink from the hometown media. But he pointed out that the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News managed to cover Denver rez Jeff Peckman’s press conference, which advocated spending municipal funds on an extraterrestrial liaison committeee.

During the September sweeps, ABC Prime Time aired a rehash of Peter Jennings’ “Seeing Is Believing” report from 2005. There was a brief mention of Stephenville, but reporter David Muir didn’t bother to question military authorities about the FAA records. Which appear to have documented a serious breach of national security. Just for the record, when contacted by De Void, Carswell PIO Maj. Karl Lewis says his employer has no comment on what he describes as MUFON “speculation.”

Finally, in November, during the last ratings period of 2008, CNN’s Miles O’Brien filed a week-long UFO series (pre-empted by the terror attacks in Mumbai) without mentioning the Stephenville case once. Internet cassandras charge O’Brien was terminated immediately thereafter because he dared to venture into The Great Taboo. CNN said it canned O’Brien and its entire science staff as a cost-cutting measure, and there’s no reason to doubt that. No sinister government agency could've possibly been threatened by O’Brien’s UFO reporting.



Stephenville was the only UFO story that mattered in 2008, because it was one of those rare instances where federal records supported eyewitness accounts. It showcased a military response to a threat against the home of the United States president. And the Air Force got away with its lack of accountability (again) because the press wasn’t interested.

Which raises another question: If the MSM’s stunning financial collapse hits critical mass this year, will anyone notice?

...Huyghe favorably compares the MUFON report with the depth of last year’s National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena analysis of a UFO incident over Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport in November 2006. NARCAP’s team of scientists concluded the UFO that reportedly ripped a discernible hole through the clouds above a United Airlines gate posed a “definite potential threat to flight operations.”

Initial coverage of that event by The Chicago Tribune triggered an avalanche of international press after it broke on New Year’s Day 2007. Ditto for the initial reports on the Stephenville UFO. But when follow-up research that touts boring stuff like “science” and “data” gets released, the MSM just doesn’t have the chops for it.

But again, this really isn’t about UFOs.

“We’ve not been given a full accounting of national security aerial threats since 9/11,” Huyghe says. “We’ve got a few reports of Cessna overflights into restricted airspace, but that’s about it.

“You’ve got a Homeland Security Department that considers itself above the law; they don’t have to answer to anybody, and the media doesn’t really care. This story’s got no legs at all. It’s not going anywhere.”

Still, the MSM’s corroded attention span doesn’t alter what happened. So the rest of us are left to imagine: a large unidentified aircraft, without a transponder, drawing to within 10 miles of President Bush’s home in Crawford, Texas, in the new age of terror. With military jets in the area. It’s hard not to speculate.

“You have to wonder,” says Huyghe. “Why no direct confrontation?”

But that’s another riff.

Viborg, 1975

¶ 8:46 PM 0 comments links to this post

(CBS) Over the years, booming oil prices helped turn Dubai into a land of opportunity and playground for the ultra rich.

But that was then and this is now. And as CBS News correspondent Sheila MacVicar reports, even Dubai is feeling the pinch of the worldwide economic crisis.

The gulf city state's property prices went up as fast and as high as the towering buildings. But reality has suddenly intruded.

One investor said it was as if someone had thrown a switch, as the global credit crunch slammed a city that was, in effect, the world's biggest construction site

It took just 20 years for Dubai to go from a desert outpost with a handful of office towers to a world metropolis, where one fifth of the world's cranes operate, and property became a very hot commodity, with some people playing real estate the way others play poker...

Banks aren't lending. Projects are shelved. And the normally secretive government has had to acknowledge it has one of the highest levels of per-capita debt in the world -- and not enough oil to pay for it.

"The worst is still yet to come in the sense of people losing properties" Khadri says. "That will happen."

Of course, Dubai will come back eventually, many say, perhaps without the speculators and the insane price increases. So while the fizz might be gone, they insist, the water still sparkles...

...Concerns that the week-old renewal of fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza could disrupt supplies in the Middle East helped keep prices from falling further earlier this week...

¶ 12:31 PM 0 comments links to this post

This is a few days old and, frankly, a bit obvious but for the record I think I should link to and quote from Human Rights Watch’s most recent statement on Gaza:

Israel and Hamas both must respect the prohibition under the laws of war against deliberate and indiscriminate attacks on civilians, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch expressed grave concern about Israeli bombings in Gaza that caused civilian deaths and Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli civilian areas in violation of international law.

Rocket attacks on Israeli towns by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups that do not discriminate between civilians and military targets violate the laws of war, while a rising number of the hundreds of Israeli bombings in Gaza since December 27, 2008, appear to be unlawful attacks causing civilian casualties. Additionally, Israel’s severe limitations on the movement of non-military goods and people into and out of Gaza, including fuel and medical supplies, constitutes collective punishment, also in violation of the laws of war.

Neither the Israeli government nor Hamas is the first outfit to flaunt the laws of war and they obviously won’t be the last. But I think it’s still important to call these things out, and I think it’s a real problem that the fraught nature of these issues seems to have persuaded a lot of bloggers to basically say nothing about the fighting. At a minimum, duly noting that there are human rights abuses being committed by both sides and that human rights abuses are bad isn’t so hard.

¶ 8:33 PM 0 comments links to this post

...the kind of person who considers his mild discomfort the equivalent of torture, crippling injury, or death for other people...

¶ 9:24 PM 0 comments links to this post

Here’s a parlor game, played best by the people who are in it: Which private-equity firm’s going bust first? Carlyle? Fortress? K.K.R.? Cerberus? Apollo? Could it even be mighty Blackstone, with its vast real-estate holdings? Which of these one-word-branded enterprises (the word should emphasize strength, opacity, and preferably be culled from mythology—though no one in private equity, rest assured, reads his Bulfinch’s) that make up what’s been called the world’s “shadow banking system” will collapse and, in the domino pattern of this financial crisis, take the other firms with it?

There’s an urgency to this question because no big firm has actually gone bust—yet. All of the behemoth investment groups that sit on top of trillions of dollars of the largest capital accumulation outside the public markets remain suspended over the global economy like awfully big shoes waiting to drop. The wait increases both the suspense and the bitchiness of the game: somehow every private-equity guy (private-equity guys have been among the most unpopular figures of the great bubble) feels he’s been more prudent and responsible than all the others. Given the credit crunch, no private-equity deals are getting done now—chances are that what you’re doing with your idle hours as a P.E. man is trying to figure out who deserves to crash and burn before you...

...Carlyle Capital Corporation, the arm of the Carlyle Group that invests in mortgage-backed securities, had defaulted last spring on more than $16 billion...

When I was 11, my father, a businessman who, in his day, took a dubious risk or two, gave me a key lesson in finance and life which I knew was meaningful without understanding it. “You’re not bankrupt,” he said, “until people know you’re bankrupt.”

By which he meant, I’ve come to understand, that money is a complicated reality. It’s a master illusionist’s game. The artifice is everything. Transparency is the enemy of making it really big—which is one reason the word “private” got joined to “equity.”

This may have something to do with the message I got when I called up Stephen Schwarzman, the head of the Blackstone Group, and the most successful of all private- equity players. At the top of the market, in June 2007, when Blackstone went public (a top-of-the-market irony was to have firms specializing in taking companies private doing it with public money), he was, briefly, the richest man in New York, stepping over Michael Bloomberg, but now may be down to his last billion.

“Mr. Schwarzman’s office,” said the receptionist, “is no longer taking calls.”

“Ever?”

“Not for the foreseeable future, I’ve been told.”

This might seem to be a sort of going to ground, or holing up in a single room, as you are surrounded by creditors and police, the gun in your hand. Blackstone, which with Fortress Investment Group went public a year and a half ago, is now at a fraction of its former value—whereas K.K.R. has altogether failed in its efforts to go public.

And those other kinds of funds, hedge funds—which make short-term investments in securities rather than, like private-equity funds, long-term investments in companies—are, everywhere, shutting their doors. Investors in those funds are, sensibly, demanding their money back—or what’s left of it.

And yet, even though you might not be able to get through to Mr. Schwarzman, the greater point is that he is still in his office. His thousand or so employees around the world are still there, too. Indeed, few people in private equity—in the middle of the greatest financial crisis of the era, even as everybody in private equity awaits the collapse of everyone else in private equity—have actually lost their jobs. Even with no business to be done, it’s business as usual. This is an extraordinary demonstration of denial, or of a dreamworld, or of an alternative reality—or of my father’s dictum. Nobody knows if the world’s great P.E. firms are out of business—the guys who run these firms may not even know...

¶ 7:44 PM 0 comments links to this post

...Some inside the development program have complained that it is run with a my-way-or-the-highway attitude that stifles dissent and innovation. Jeffrey Finckenor, an engineer who left NASA this year, sent a goodbye letter to colleagues that expressed his frustrations with the program. “At the highest levels of the agency, there seems to be a belief that you can mandate reality,” he wrote, “followed by a refusal to accept any information that runs counter to that mandate.” The letter was posted to the independent NASA Watch Web site...

...in April, Richard Gilbrech, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration systems at the time, testified before the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics that “we can’t justify, based on laws of physics, the performance” claimed by the plan’s proponents...

Pressure has grown to keep the shuttles flying. In July, former Senator John Glenn of Ohio said in testimony before the House Science and Technology Committee that he favored flying the shuttles until the Constellation craft were ready to fly. “I never thought I would see the day when the world’s richest, most powerful, most accomplished spacefaring nation would have to buy tickets from Russia to get up to our station,” said Mr. Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.

Continuing shuttle flights has also been proposed by the New Democracy Project, a group with strong ties to John D. Podesta, a co-chairman of the Obama transition team.

To Mr. Griffin, though, such proposals threaten to scuttle the new space program by hijacking billions of dollars that could go to Constellation development. He also argues that the shuttle’s considerable risks make it unsafe to continue flying it. In an interview in November, Mr. Griffin defended the program he has put in place.

“U.S. civil space policy, in terms of its goals, was headed in the wrong direction after the Nixon administration,” he said. Today, with the nation talking about going back to the Moon, exploring near-Earth asteroids and even going to Mars, “that’s the right path for us to be investing in,” he said...

¶ 8:41 AM 0 comments links to this post