The UndieBomber Trial Gets Interesting
I used to have a bit of a party trick last year before I moved out of SE Michigan. At some opportune time, I'd surprise folks by telling them the UndieBomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was in a prison just 20 miles from where we were in Ann…
Obama's Slogan for Trade: "Displaced workers ... Made in America"
When I saw Obama's pivot to creating Korean jobs on Tuesday, I actually thought he had mangled his script.
And I want Congress to pass a set of trade deals -- deals we’ve already negotiated -- that would help displaced workers looking…
The End of the American Empire
I write about our dying empire just about every day in my links posts. But given the debt limit debate and Friday's S&P downgrade, I wanted to look at four pieces that examine where we are more closely (note, all of these are well worth…
Who Will Be the Last 31 Americans to Die in Effort to Kill the Last 31 Al Qaeda Members in Afghanistan?
There are early reports out that the Taliban shot down a NATO helicopter with a rocket propelled grenade. Hamid Karzai has said the casualties include 31 Americans and 7 Afghans. And while President Obama has not put a number on the deaths,…
Trash Talk With Stevie Nicks
Hello mothers, hello others; welcome to The Wheel, brothers. So, we are kind of in the ether, the no mans land, the void and vacuum between the end of basketball and the start of football again.
Yeah, yeah, that little soccer interlude was…
The $100 Billion TeaBagger Tax
Last week, when analysts were contemplating a debt downgrade, they put a price tag on it: $100 billion.
A downgrade of the United States' AAA credit rating is a bigger risk than a default and could over time add up to 0.7 percentage point to…
Links, 8/5/11
Banana Republic of America
The S&P is reportedly about to downgrade America's credit. So the wingnut hostage-taking will end up costing us about $100B. [Update: While we are so badly governed we no doubt deserve to be downgraded,…
John Brennan: Immunizing the Truth
The first time I read Nicholas Schmidle's breathtaking account of Osama bin Laden's killing, I gave up when I got to this passage:
John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, told me that the President’s advisers began an “interrogation…
"Sustainable Growth" Wasn't
There's something that bugged me about this article (indeed, bugs me about most economic analyses of our current crash). Amidst a discussion that fairly lays out some of the problems with the global economy (all the while ignoring that one critical…
Links, 8/4/11
As anticipated, the French have just opened an investigation into whether IMF Chief Christine Lagarde intervened in a settlement Bernard Tapie won with a state-owned bank during her tenure as Finance Minister. At the rate we're going, the developing…
Reliability and the UK's Guidelines on Using Torture
The Guardian has liberated the UK's policy on cooperating with liaison services that torture. ((h/t Rosalind) As the Guardian explains the policy basically sets up a bureaucracy to weigh whether the value of the information outweighs the imperative…
Judge Brinkema Cites Espionage Act to Protect Reporter's Privilege
Charlie Savage tells the headline story from Leonie Brinkema's opinion on whether or not James Risen must testify in Jeffrey Sterling's leak trial.
“A criminal trial subpoena is not a free pass for the government to rifle through a reporter’s…
Buffalo Hangs Its Head In Shame as L'il Luke Laughs at Slaves and Dead Workers
Susie linked to this clip.
And while she's right to point to all the evidence that L'il Luke Russert is an ignorant toad about how many jobs Obama's trade deals will send overseas, I'm more amazed by his arrogant response to being asked…
Links, 8/3/11
Our Dying Economy
The National Employment Law Project has a report showing how this Depression is hollowing out middle class jobs, with 8.4% of all middle wage jobs gone (and that's on top of a process that had already started before…
Tornadoes, Austerity, and Food Stamps
In one of my posts on drones, I noted that we have had more deaths this year in AL (238) and MO (159) because of extreme tornadoes the severity of which is probably at least due partly to climate change than we have from terrorism.
But there's…
The Omnivore Bites Back
Okay, okay, I should have used a pun on "Echelon" for my title here, not "Carnivore." After all, it was that earlier SigInt program that the US and its Anglophone partners used to steal industrial secrets in the 1990s.
The point being that,…
Mark Warner Thinks It's Bold for a $200M Man to Cut Seniors' Pensions
I suggested the other day that Mark Warner's position on the Gang of Six might bode poorly for SuperCongress being anything but a pre-gamed attack on Social Security and Medicare.
Well, it turns out he has already been running around to the…
Links, 8/2/11
Justice and Injustice
Amanda Terkel describes how the state-level budget cuts are putting courts and justice out of the reach of Americans.
Dahlia Lithwick transcribes highlights of the remarkable panel she moderated over the weekend.
The…
Obama's Efforts to Create Korean--Not American--Jobs Gets More Cynical
As I noted this morning, Obama plans to "pivot to jobs" by creating them in Korea. (This video came from his statement today after the deficit ceiling bill got through.)
But his call on Congress to pass trade deals with Korea, Panama,…
Mitt Romney Names Two Torture Lawyers to "Justice Advisory Committee"
The headline news about Mitt Romney's new advisory committee of 63 lawyers is that Robert Bork is co-chairing it.
But even more troubling is that he has named two of the lawyers that okayed torture--Steven Bradbury and Tim Flanigan--to it.
Bradbury,…