THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Officials in a small Michigan town featured in a new video about Guantanamo by Liz Cheney’s national security group want her to know that they’re not falling for her “fearmongering” — and tell us they want Gitmo detainees in their town.

Cheney’s group, Keep America Safe, has released a short documentary starring several residents of little Standish, Michigan, slamming the Obama administration over a proposal to transfer some Guantanamo detainees to the town’s maximum security facility, one of several facilities being discussed.

The vid, which is below, ominously warns that unnamed “politicians” want Gitmo detainees placed in their “small farm town,” without saying who the politicians are or whether they’re Federal or local. A resident says those politicans “aren’t listening to us little people in Standish.”

But Standish’s City Manager tells us that local leaders and residents want the facility, and dismissed Cheney’s efforts as “fearmongering.”

# posted by montag : 7:10 PM  0 comments

Bill Moyers is leaving weekly television.

The New York Times' Elizabeth Jensen reports that the PBS newscaster is retiring from his Friday night program, "Bill Moyers Journal," on April 30, 2010...

..."I am 75 years old," Moyers told Jensen. "I feel it's time."

# posted by montag : 7:04 PM  0 comments

On one side of the cavernous room sat Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who's warned that the international community is losing patience with Karzai.

On the other side was Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Afghan warlord who's become a symbol of cronyism and government corruption. Dostum was stripped of his top military post after he was accused of war crimes and investigated for enacting vigilante justice on the streets of Kabul.

Although foreign leaders have demanded that Karzai sideline Dostum and other discredited political allies, the Afghan president is also under pressure to reward those, such as Dostum, who helped him win re-election.

# posted by montag : 1:28 PM  0 comments

For the A.I.G. rescue was part of a pattern: Throughout the financial crisis key officials — most notably Timothy Geithner, who was president of the New York Fed in 2008 and is now Treasury secretary — have shied away from doing anything that might rattle Wall Street. And the bitter paradox is that this play-it-safe approach has ended up undermining prospects for economic recovery. For the job of fixing the broken economy is far from done — yet finishing the job has become nearly impossible now that the public has lost faith in the government’s efforts, viewing them as little more than handouts to the people who got us into this mess.

# posted by montag : 12:59 PM  0 comments

Influential US lawmakers on Thursday called for levying a new income tax to pay for the war in Afghanistan, warning its costs pose a mortal threat to efforts like a sweeping health care overhaul.

"Regardless of whether one favors the war or not, if it is to be fought, it ought to be paid for," the lawmakers, all prominent Democratic allies of Obama, said in a joint statement on the "Share The Sacrifice Act of 2010."

The proposal came with US President Barack Obama set to announce within weeks his decision on whether to send more US troops to fight the war, now in its ninth year.

The group included House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey; Representative John Murtha, who chair that panel's defense subcommittee; and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank.

# posted by montag : 12:32 PM  1 comments

During a relatively unnoticed speech in early November, former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said he found it "deplorable" and "shameful" that his fellow Republicans were attacking the president for even the most trivial or well-intentioned matters...

...The underlying point, Huckabee concluded, was that knee-jerk criticism to the president was counter-productive to civil debate. "I hated it when people did that to George Bush," he said. "They couldn't even laugh at the man's jokes they found something wrong with everything and if we do that to Barack Obama, then shame on us, shame on us. No wonder our country is so divided when that happens."

# posted by montag : 7:05 PM  0 comments

Whether they’re attending ‘tea party’ rallies featuring Holocaust imagery, comparing health insurance reform to terrorism, or staying silent about plans to burn public officials in effigy, the tenor from House Republicans grows more alarming by the day.

It’s long past time for the House Republican Leadership to speak out against this disturbing pattern of increasingly extreme rhetoric from their ranks and engage in the constructive search for solutions that America’s many challenges demand.

# posted by montag : 4:44 PM  0 comments

Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a Houston lawyer and Democratic candidate for attorney general, says that a 22-word clause in a 2005 constitutional amendment designed to ban gay marriages erroneously endangers the legal status of all marriages in the state.

The amendment, approved by the state legislature and overwhelmingly ratified by voters, declares that "marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman." But the troublemaking phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares:

"This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage."

# posted by montag : 2:08 PM  0 comments

Police in Michigan are investigating after an irate reader of the Port Huron Times-Herald reportedly called in a threat to the newspaper after it criticized a local House representative's participation in the anti-health reform Tea Party protest two weeks ago.

"A 60-year-old Port Huron woman threatened to take a gun to the newspaper and 'do what they did at Fort Hood,' according to police," the Times-Herald reported on Tuesday.

# posted by montag : 12:49 PM  0 comments

The navigator was listening to his iPod during a critical evolution.

Watchstanders were known to sleep on the job.

Stereo speakers were rigged for music in the radio room.

An informal atmosphere — along with crew complacency, a “weak” command and inferior submariner skills — are named as contributors to the March 20 collision between the attack submarine Hartford and the amphibious transport dock New Orleans in the Strait of Hormuz.

# posted by montag : 12:37 PM  0 comments

With his prospect of winning the 23rd Congressional District race now almost zero, Conservative Party candidate Douglas L. Hoffman suggested Wednesday in a letter that “ACORN, the unions and the Democratic Party” “tampered” with results to deny him victory.

Mr. Hoffman provided no evidence to support his claims, but asked fellow conservatives to send donations his way to “ensure every vote is counted.”

Jerry O. Eaton, Jefferson County Republican elections commissioner, called Mr. Hoffman's assertion “absolutely false.”

“No one has touched those ballots or has access to those ballots except board of elections staff - and in a bipartisan manner,” he said.

# posted by montag : 12:09 PM  0 comments

The international security company formerly called Blackwater Worldwide is facing large government fines for unlicensed arms shipments to Iraq, as a key Congressional committee is asking for a separate investigation into whether the company bribed Iraqi officials.

In talks likely to result in millions of dollars in penalties, executives from the company, now known as Xe Services, are negotiating with government regulators over years of violations of export laws. According to government officials and former company employees, many of the violations involve arms shipments to Iraq, to outfit company security guards operating inside the country.

In addition, former company officials say that other penalties could result from violations of licensing requirements for the transfer of other forms of military technology and training expertise to foreign countries.

# posted by montag : 10:58 PM  0 comments

Rep. Louie Gohmert appeared on Fox News earlier today to discuss the House bill he's proposed that aims to prevent Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other detainees from being tried in New York City.

Gohmert first claimed that "millions of New Yorkers who will be put at risk" by such a trial, where "you've got weak links all along the way. From the jailers, the bailiffs, the clerks, the jurors, the judge, everybody in the courtroom, their families. You've got subways, tunnels, bridges, all subject to terrorism."

Gohmert continued: "Unless they're trying to create a new jobs bill by allowing terrorism back in New York, then this is insane." He added, "and even that would be insane."

# posted by montag : 4:39 PM  0 comments

Suicides in the Army are expected to reach a new high this year, with 140 suspected cases among active-duty soldiers so far, Army officials said Tuesday.

This will be the fifth year in a row that grim statistic rose despite an aggressive military campaign to tackle the mental health stigma in the Army. This year's number already matches that for all of 2008. There were 115 suicides in 2007 and 102 in 2006.

These new statistics come as the military is investigating what may have driven Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, who allegedly shot 55 people Nov. 5 at Fort Hood, Texas. The military has charged Hasan, who was set to deploy to Afghanistan, with 13 counts of premeditated murder.

Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the Army's vice chief of staff, said that the military wasn't seeing any trends that explained the rise. Forty suicides occurred in the first two months of the year. About a third were by soldiers who'd never deployed to war zones, and 40 percent of those who committed suicide had seen mental health specialists.

"We are almost certainly going to end the year higher than last year," Chiarelli said. "This is horrible, and I do not want to downplay the significance of these numbers in any way."

# posted by montag : 1:56 PM  0 comments

Children’s toys carrying the Barbie and Disney logos have turned up with high levels of lead in them, according to a California- based advocacy group—a finding that may give consumers pause as they shop for the holiday season.

The Center for Environmental Health tested about 250 children’s products bought at major retailers and found lead levels that exceeded federal limits in seven of them. Lead can cause irreversible brain damage.

# posted by montag : 12:10 PM  0 comments

The nation’s doors are open to Mr. Obiang, the forest and agriculture minister of Equatorial Guinea and the son of its president, even though federal law enforcement officials believe that “most if not all” of his wealth comes from corruption related to the extensive oil and gas reserves discovered more than a decade and a half ago off the coast of his tiny West African country, according to internal Justice Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement documents.

And they are open despite a federal law and a presidential proclamation that prohibit corrupt foreign officials and their families from receiving American visas. The measures require only credible evidence of corruption, not a conviction of it.

Susan Pittman, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement in the State Department, said she was prohibited from discussing specific visa decisions. But other former and current State Department officials said Equatorial Guinea’s close ties to the American oil industry were the reason for the lax enforcement of the law. Production of the country’s nearly 400,000 barrels of oil a day is dominated by American companies like ExxonMobil, Hess and Marathon.

“Of course it’s because of oil,” said John Bennett, the United States ambassador to Equatorial Guinea from 1991 to 1994, adding that Washington has turned a blind eye to the Obiangs’ corruption and repression because of its dependence on the country for natural resources. He noted that officials of Zimbabwe are barred from the United States.

# posted by montag : 5:36 PM  0 comments

“It’s the terrorist-type thing that gets me,” said Donald L. Pauley, 64, who said he felt queasy at the notion of such prisoners being kept here, 150 miles west of Chicago, a place where everyone acknowledges that signs describing the population as 600 are overestimates by now.

Not even talk of added security measures, of a second fence around the prison, of increased law enforcement along the Mississippi River, which is less than a mile away, was enough to assure him, Mr. Pauley said.

But, in one example of the split that is playing out all over this village, even within houses, Mr. Pauley’s wife, Merrie Jo, said she was firmly behind the idea of turning over the Thomson Correctional Facility, a barely used state prison, to federal authorities, in part for those from Guantánamo.

“We need the jobs,” Ms. Pauley, who was the village president here for 27 years, said as she and Mr. Pauley dined at the Sunrise Restaurant, one of the few restaurants still open in an area where unemployment was 10.5 percent in September. “This place has been changing, and we’ve been going in the wrong direction.”

The notion that a terrorism suspect could slip away into Thomson without notice was unimaginable to Ms. Pauley, who added, “If a stranger comes around here, everyone knows within 20 minutes, believe me.”

# posted by montag : 5:24 PM  0 comments

This came to mind as I was reading about yet another closure of the problem-plagued San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which is more than 70 years old. In 20 years, will today’s toddlers be traveling on bridges and roads that are in even worse shape than today’s? Will they endure mammoth traffic jams that start earlier and end later? Will their water supplies be clean and safe? Will the promise of clean energy visionaries be realized, or will we still be fouling the environment with carbon filth to the benefit of traditional energy conglomerates and foreign regimes that in many cases wish us anything but good?

The answers to these and many other related questions will depend to a great extent on decisions we make now (even in the midst of very tough economic times) about the American infrastructure. We’re trundling along in the infrastructure equivalent of a jalopy, with bridges rotting and falling down, while other nations, our competitors in the global economy, are building efficient, high-speed, high-performance infrastructure platforms to power their 21st-century economies.

We used to be so much smarter about this stuff.

# posted by montag : 5:18 PM  0 comments

"This demonstrates conclusively that we are going back to a pre-9/11 mentality," she said.

# posted by montag : 4:35 PM  0 comments

Residents of the C Street Christian fellowship house will no longer benefit from a loophole that had allowed the house's owners to avoid paying property taxes.

Previously, the house -- despite being home to numerous lawmakers -- had been tax exempt, because it was classified as a church. That arrangement had allowed the building's owner, the secretive international Christian organization The Family, to charge significantly below market rents to its residents. In recent year, Senators John Ensign (R-NV), Tom Coburn (R-OK), Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Jim DeMint (R-SC), and Reps. Zach Wamp (R-TN), Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Mike Doyle (D-PA) have all reportedly called C Street home.

Natalie Wilson, a spokeswoman for the Office of Tax and Revenue for Washington D.C., told TPMmuckraker that her office inspected the house this summer. "It was determined that portions of it were being rented out for private residential purposes," she said. As a result, the tax exempt status was partially revoked. Sixty-six percent of the value of the property is now subject to taxation.

# posted by montag : 4:22 PM  0 comments

"The moral imperative for our time is clear. Anyone whose guide in public policy is conscience, anyone who argues that faith and religious traditions should direct our actions, such a person must stand for universal health care in America," Fish concluded. "It happens we are all also citizens of Connecticut. That fact leads us to ask you Senator Lieberman, what is it that you stand for?"

# posted by montag : 5:08 PM  0 comments

The Bureau of Prisons is not looking at the empty jail in Hardin, Montana -- which was recently at the center of the American Police Force con -- as a potential site for Guantanamo inmates, contrary to an AP report today, a spokesperson for the bureau tells TPMmuckraker.

"We do not have any information that a facility in Montana is being considered for a BOP facility," spokesman Edmund Ross told us. "We're looking at the Thomson facility in Illinois."

# posted by montag : 4:33 PM  0 comments

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) says his "Veterans 2nd Amendment Protection Act" will protect veterans' gun rights. But the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence calls it a "dangerous" proposal that could allow "over 100,000 mentally incapacitated or incompetent persons" to buy guns—people who would previously have been barred from doing so by the Veterans Administration (VA).

With debate over Fort Hood still raging on cable news, one might think that Burr might try to quietly shelve the measure, whose co-sponsors include Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.). Instead, Burr fired back at the Brady Campaign in an interview with Fox News, accusing its president, Paul Helmke, of using the tragedy to "exploit the senseless murder of American soldiers in the quest to secure personal triumph."

Responding to Burr Thursday in an open letter, Helmke wrote, "it is hardly 'exploitative' to have an honest debate" about the proposal, which would cancel out key provisions of the Gun Control Act of 1968 and override standards used by the VA for nearly four decades.

# posted by montag : 1:40 PM  0 comments

The number of Americans who lack dependable access to adequate food shot up last year to 49 million, the largest number since the government has been keeping track, according to a government report released Monday that shows particularly steep increases in food scarcity among families with children.

In 2008, the report found, nearly 17 million children -- more than one in five across the United States -- were living in households in which food at times ran short, up from slightly more than 12 million children the year before. And the number of children who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.

Among people of of all ages, nearly 15 percent last year did not consistently have adequate food, compared with about 11 percent in 2007, the greatest deterioration in access to food during a single year in the history of the report...

...Last year, people in 4.8 million households used private food pantries, compared to 3.9 million in 2007, while people in about 625,000 households resorted to soup kitchens, nearly 90,000 more than the year before.

# posted by montag : 1:02 PM  0 comments

During the best of the times, Miguel Salcedo’s son, an illegal immigrant in San Diego, would be sending home hundreds of dollars a month to support his struggling family in Mexico. But at times like these, with the American economy out of whack and his son out of work, Mr. Salcedo finds himself doing what he never imagined he would have to do: wiring pesos north.

Unemployment has hit migrant communities in the United States so hard that a startling new phenomenon has been detected: instead of receiving remittances from relatives in the richest country on earth, some down-and-out Mexican families are scraping together what they can to support their unemployed loved ones in the United States.

“We send something whenever we have a little extra, at least enough so he can eat,” said Mr. Salcedo, who is from a small village here in the rural state of Oaxaca and works odd jobs to support his wife, his two younger sons and, now, his jobless eldest boy in California.

# posted by montag : 12:42 PM  0 comments

China is the great exception. Despite huge trade surpluses and the desire of many investors to buy into this fast-growing economy — forces that should have strengthened the renminbi, China’s currency — Chinese authorities have kept that currency persistently weak. They’ve done this mainly by trading renminbi for dollars, which they have accumulated in vast quantities.

And in recent months China has carried out what amounts to a beggar-thy-neighbor devaluation, keeping the yuan-dollar exchange rate fixed even as the dollar has fallen sharply against other major currencies. This has given Chinese exporters a growing competitive advantage over their rivals, especially producers in other developing countries.

What makes China’s currency policy especially problematic is the depressed state of the world economy. Cheap money and fiscal stimulus seem to have averted a second Great Depression. But policy makers haven’t been able to generate enough spending, public or private, to make progress against mass unemployment. And China’s weak-currency policy exacerbates the problem, in effect siphoning much-needed demand away from the rest of the world into the pockets of artificially competitive Chinese exporters.

# posted by montag : 12:38 PM  0 comments

Carrie Prejean, Porn Star? Vivid Has the Sex Tapes and Wants to Distribute Them.
If only the biggest mistake (or eight) of your life was worth "millions of dollars." Porn distributor Vivid Entertainment is making a play to distribute the former Miss California's sex tapes—which it allegedly has in its possession, already.

# posted by montag : 12:29 PM  0 comments

Since starting its slide in 2000, the world-wide production of gold has finally hit "terminal decline," according to reports citing Barrick Gold, the largest gold miner in the world.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph during a London gold conference, Barrick President Aaron Regent said that one could argue that Earth has reached "peak gold," as new supplies of the ore are increasingly difficult to find.

# posted by montag : 12:11 PM  0 comments

Even as drug makers promise to support Washington’s health care overhaul by shaving $8 billion a year off the nation’s drug costs after the legislation takes effect, the industry has been raising its prices at the fastest rate in years.

In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992.

The drug trend is distinctly at odds with the direction of the Consumer Price Index, which has fallen by 1.3 percent in the last year.

Drug makers say they have valid business reasons for the price increases.

A Harvard health economist, Joseph P. Newhouse, said he found a similar pattern of unusual price increases after Congress added drug benefits to Medicare a few years ago, giving tens of millions of older Americans federally subsidized drug insurance. Just as the program was taking effect in 2006, the drug industry raised prices by the widest margin in a half-dozen years.

# posted by montag : 11:05 PM  0 comments

Gamboa, who entered the U.S. in 1992 and overstayed a visitor's visa, says he may decide early next year to give up and return home.

Under the supervision of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Gamboa began working as an informant with local law-enforcement agencies in the mid-1990s.

His work on major national and international drug investigations helped to win more than 90 federal convictions and led to seizure of money, weapons, vehicles and drugs, including more than 282 pounds of cocaine.

He parted ways with ICE near the end of a major drug investigation in May, when he said he was threatened with deportation after telling an agent he was broke and wanted to take a regular paying job on top of his informant work.

ICE soon arrested and detained Gamboa and moved ahead with plans to deport him. But under mounting pressure from other agencies, it released him after six weeks.

Now, Gamboa's status is not unlike that of millions of illegal immigrants nationwide — unable to find legitimate work or to travel — and with no obviously viable way to make it right. "I'm out and everybody's turned their backs," he said.

"It's really frustrating that after all these years they close the door and say, 'Forget about him.' "

# posted by montag : 10:13 PM  0 comments

The only way [Republicans] will read the Health Care Bill is to rest it on the back of the hooker they're boning down at C Street House!

# posted by montag : 6:18 PM  0 comments

In Bird's book and in a more recent one--Lessons in Disaster by Gordon Goldstein, who helped McGeorge Bundy to prepare a book reconsidering the war--another factor moves into the foreground. Bundy's death prevented completion of that book, but Goldstein makes use of Bundy's notes in his own book. Seeking to understand the origins of the war, Bundy was impressed with the salience of domestic politics. In 1949 the Communist Party had come to power in China, and ever since, Republicans and other right-wingers had been accusing Democrats of "losing" China. The belief that the United States could have prevented the communist victory was a fantasy; yet the charge became one of the principal themes of Senator Joe McCarthy's attacks on Democrats, which sent currents of fear far beyond the government and into society at large, intimidating and paralyzing a generation. The dread of being accused of lacking patriotic toughness--and above all of being accused of losing a military venture--cast a long shadow. Even Kennedy, who according to Goldstein showed remarkable independence in refusing the nearly unanimous advice from his advisers to send large numbers of combat troops to Vietnam, expressed his fear of being called a "communist appeaser." As he said to his aide Kenny O'Donnell in early 1963, "If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I'm re-elected." That re-election, of course, never came.

Johnson was more deeply frightened by the right. Urged by Senator Mike Mansfield to withdraw from Vietnam, he answered that he didn't want another "China in Vietnam." Bundy fueled Johnson's fears. In a 1964 memo he wrote that "the political damage to Truman and Acheson from the fall of China arose because most Americans came to believe that we could and should have done more than we did to prevent it. This is exactly what would happen now if we should seem to be the first to quit in Saigon." In another memo, Bundy outlined a moderated version of the domino theory and went on to argue that neutrality would be viewed by "all anti-communist Vietnamese" as a "betrayal," thus angering a domestic constituency powerful enough "to lose us an election."

In short, in strictly political terms, the Vietnam dilemma has been handed down to Obama virtually intact. Now as then, the issue politically is whether the United States is able to fail in a war without coming unhinged. Does the American body politic have a reverse gear? Does it know how to cut losses? Is it capable of learning from experience? Or must it plunge unchecked over every cliff it approaches? And at the heart of these questions is another: must liberals and moderates always bow down before the crazy right when it comes to war and peace? Must presidents behave like Johnson, of whom his attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, later said, "It would not have made any difference what anybody advised him--he would have done what he did [in Vietnam].... It was fear of the right wing." What is the source of this raw power, this right-wing veto over presidents, Congresses and public opinion? The person who can answer these questions will have discovered one of the keys to a half-century of American history--and the forces that, even now, bear down on Obama as he considers what to do in Afghanistan.

# posted by montag : 5:37 PM  0 comments

In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that was no accident.

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.

E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans.

The lobbyists, employed by Genentech and by two Washington law firms, were remarkably successful in getting the statements printed in the Congressional Record under the names of different members of Congress.

Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House members picked up some of its talking points — 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats, an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists.

# posted by montag : 4:43 PM  0 comments

I’d be a little more forgiving of the nonsense if all the people screaming about the deficit were sincere. And some are. But many, if not most, are perfectly happy to incur huge unfunded liabilities for the wars they want to fight, and/or to eliminate inheritance taxes for the heirs of multimillionaires. It’s only deficits incurred to help working Americans that get them all moralistic.

# posted by montag : 1:51 PM  0 comments

The CIA has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Pakistan's intelligence service since the Sept. 11 attacks, accounting for as much as one-third of the foreign spy agency's annual budget, current and former U.S. officials say.

The Inter-Services Intelligence agency also has collected tens of millions of dollars through a classified CIA program that pays for the capture or killing of wanted militants, a clandestine counterpart to the rewards publicly offered by the State Department, officials said.

The payments have triggered intense debate within the U.S. government, officials said, because of long-standing suspicions that the ISI continues to help Taliban extremists who undermine U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and provide sanctuary to Al Qaeda members in Pakistan.

But U.S. officials have continued the funding because the ISI's assistance is considered crucial: Almost every major terrorist plot this decade has originated in Pakistan's tribal belt, where ISI informant networks are a primary source of intelligence.

# posted by montag : 1:18 PM  0 comments

President Obama’s strongest supporters during the presidential campaign were the young, the black and the poor — and they are among those who are being hammered unmercifully in this long and cruel economic downturn that the financial elites are telling us is over.

If the elites are correct, if the Great Recession really is over, then these core supporters of the president are being left far, far behind — as are blue-collar workers of every ethnic and political persuasion. Nobody wants to talk seriously about class in America, but the elites are smiling and perusing their stock portfolios while the checklist of Americans locked in depressionlike circumstances just grows and grows: construction and manufacturing workers, young men without college degrees (especially young black and Hispanic men), teenagers, and those who were already poor when the recession began.

The economic environment for all of these groups is an absolute and utter disaster.

# posted by montag : 1:14 PM  0 comments

Even if fewer troops are sent, or their mission is modified, the rough formula used by the White House, of about $1 million per soldier per year, appears almost constant.

So even if President Obama opts for a lower troop commitment, Afghanistan’s new costs could wash out the projected $26 billion expected to be saved in 2010 from withdrawing troops from Iraq. And the overall military budget could rise to as much as $734 billion, or 10 percent more than the peak of $667 billion under the Bush administration.

# posted by montag : 1:07 PM  0 comments

Bank of America Corp's search for a new chief executive has been hurt by federal pay limits that played a major role in the senior vice chairman of PNC Financial Services Group Inc spurning feelers from the company, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday...

...Bank of America has argued the added regulation, like the pay czar's compensation limits, hurts its ability to compete with other financial firms.

Those limits are expected to be in place for any successor to Kenneth Lewis, who is scheduled to retire at year end and gave up his 2009 salary and bonus at Feinberg's request...

...Bank of America's next chief faces a bevy of operational, regulatory and political challenges.

# posted by montag : 12:26 PM  0 comments