Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

Even as Sarah Palin’s public voice grows louder, she has become increasingly secretive, walling herself off from old friends and associates, and attempting to enforce silence from those around her. Following the former Alaska governor’s road show, the author delves into the surreal new world Palin now inhabits—a place of fear, anger, and illusion, which has swallowed up the engaging, small-town hockey mom and her family—and the sadness she has left in her wake.

Related: “Sarah Palin’s Shopping Spree: Yes, There’s More…,” by Michael Joseph Gross.

By Michael Joseph Gross

PALIN’S PALADINS
Erratic behavior and a pattern of lying matter little: “Such falsehoods never damage Palin’s credibility with her admirers, because information and ideology are incidental to this relationship.”

Backstage in the arena, a little girl in Mary Janes pushes her brother in a baby carriage, stopping a few yards shy of a heavy, 100-foot-long black curtain. The curtain splits the arena in two, shielding the children from an audience of 4,000 people clapping their hands in time to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The music accompanies a video “Salute to Military Heroes” that plays above the stage where, in a few moments, the children’s mother will appear.

When the girl, Piper Palin, turns around, she sees her parents thronged by admirers, and the crowd rolling toward her and the baby, her brother Trig, born with Down syndrome in 2008. Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, bend down and give a moment to the children; a woman, perhaps a nanny, whisks the boy away; and Todd hands Sarah her speech and walks her to the stage. He pokes the air with one finger. She mimes the gesture, whips around, strides on four-inch heels to stage center, and turns it on.

And how. Palin and the crowd might as well be one. She’s glad to be here with the people of Independence, Missouri, “where so many of you proudly cling to your guns and your religion”—the first laughline in a 40-minute stump speech that alludes to many of the perceived insults she and her audience have suffered together, and that transforms their resentments into badges of honor. Palin waves her scribbled-on palm to the crowd, proclaiming that she’s using “the poor man’s teleprompter.” Of the Obama administration, she says, “They talk down to us. Especially here in the heartland. Oh, man. They think that, if we were just smart enough, we’d be able to understand their policies. And I so want to tell ’em, and I do tell ’em, Oh, we’re plenty smart, oh yeah—we know what’s goin’ on. And we don’t like what’s goin’ on. And we’re not gonna let them tell us to sit down and shut up.”

The crowd’s ample applause at these lines swells to something vastly bigger when Palin vows defiantly that “come November, we’re taking our country back!” The phrase plays on the name of this event, “Winning America Back,” which has been billed as a Tea Party rally organized by a grassroots Missouri political-action committee that no one had heard of until a few months ago, when the event was announced.

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By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet

Those of us who need prescription eyewear need prescription eyewear. Are you wearing yours to read this? Imagine if you weren’t. Imagine life without your glasses for a year, a week, an hour. Yet many health insurance plans, especially for the unemployed or self-employed, don’t cover them.

Mine doesn’t.

Last year, I went shopping for no-line progressive bifocals in small oval metal frames. Name brands mean nothing to me. Price does. My high astigmatism and need for bifocals disqualify me from those buy-one-get-one-free deals, which almost always involve only single-vision specs.

In store after store, megachains and optical boutiques alike, small oval metal frames fitted with lenses matching my prescription started at $300. One popular shop quoted me $582 for the lenses alone.

I bought a pair of no-line progressive bifocals in small oval metal frames for $44 online. I’m wearing them right now.

Perhaps because prescription glasses are where medicine meets fashion, they’re among the world’s most overpriced merchandise. Imperfect eyesight isn’t your fault: You can’t make yourself nearsighted by eating too much fudge. Yet if your health plan excludes vision care, you’ve spent years at the mercy of a $64 billion industry characterized by 500-percent markups.

This has begun to change over the last few years. A knowledge-is-power, power-to-the-people, Web-driven DIY wave is rocking the optical industry’s very foundations. Dozens of companies now sell prescription glasses online, frames and lenses included, for as little as $7.95.

It works like this: Google “cheap glasses” to find a frame you like at a price you like at a site you like. (Among the most popular are 39DollarGlasses, ZenniOptical — where I bought mine — and Goggles4U.) Use the virtual fitting mechanism to “try it on.” Type in your prescription (obtained from an actual eye doctor), pupillary distance (aka PD, derived by measuring the space between your pupils with a ruler), address and payment information. Send.

It’s a virtual myopian/hyperopian/presbyopian Tea Party, led largely by Minnesota software engineer Ira Mitchell, who launched his revolutionary GlassyEyes blog (its motto is “Saving the World from Overpriced Glasses!”) in 2006. Packed with forums, product reviews, discount deals, and tips for buying specs online, it’s the vision-impaired version of Yelp.

“There is no appreciable functional or material difference” between prescription eyewear bought online and bought in brick-and-mortar stores, Mitchell tells me, but in stores “the cost to the consumer is anywhere from four to ten times more. It turns out that they’re making ridiculous margins on the frames, the lenses and the coatings.”

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by Juan Cole

Here is the speech that I wish President Obama would give about the Iraq War, but which neither he nor any other president ever will.

Fellow Americans, and Iraqis who are watching this speech, I have come here this evening not to declare a victory or to mourn a defeat on the battlefield, but to apologize from the bottom of my heart for a series of illegal actions and grossly incompetent policies pursued by the government of the United States of America, in defiance of domestic US law, international treaty obligations, and both American and Iraqi public opinion.

The United Nations was established in 1945 in the wake of a series of aggressive wars of conquest and the response to them, in which over 60 million people perished. Its purpose was to forbid such unjustified attacks, and its charter specified that in future wars could only be launched on two grounds. One is clear self-defense, when a country has been attacked. The other is with the authorization of the United Nations Security Council.

It was because the French, British and Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956 contravened these provisions of the United Nations Charter that President Dwight D. Eisenhower condemned that war and forced the belligerents to withdraw. When Israel looked as though it might try to hang on to its ill-gotten spoils, the Sinai Peninsula, President Eisenhower went on television on February 21, 1957 and addressed the nation. These words have largely been suppressed and forgotten in the United States of today, but they should ring through the decades and centuries:

“If the United Nations once admits that international dispute can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the very foundation of the organization, and our best hope of establishing a real world order. That would be a disaster for us all . . .

[Referring to Israeli demands that certain conditions be met before it relinquished the Sinai, the president said that he] “would be untrue to the standards of the high office to which you have chosen me if I were to lend the influence of the United States to the proposition that a nation which invades another should be permitted to exact conditions for withdrawal . . .”

“If it [the United Nations Security Council] does nothing, if it accepts the ignoring of its repeated resolutions calling for the withdrawal of the invading forces, then it will have admitted failure. That failure would be a blow to the authority and influence of the United Nations in the world and to the hopes which humanity has placed in the United Nations as the means of achieving peace with justice.”

In March of 2003, it was the United States government itself that contravened the charter of the United Nations, aggressively invading a country that had not attacked it and against the will of the UN Security Council. The war was preceded by a summit in the Azores of the US, Britain, Spain and Portugal, for all the world as though it were the sixteenth century and a confusion between empire and piracy still prevailed.

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By Ron Brynaert

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington might not really be composed of superheroes but many agree that — through the years — CREW has done a kickass job exposing corruption by both Democrats and Republicans, despite often being derided as partisan.

“Top aides to President George W. Bush seemed unconcerned amid multiple warnings as early as 2002 that the White House risked losing millions of e-mails that federal law required them to preserve, according to an extensive review of records set for release Monday,” Ed O’Keefe reported for The Washington Post Sunday night.

The review, conducted by the nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, follows a settlement reached last December between President Obama’s administration, CREW and the National Security Archive, a George Washington University research institute. The groups sued the Bush White House in 2007, alleging it violated federal law by not preserving millions of e-mails sent between 2003 and 2005.

The settlement resulted in the restoration of 94 days worth of e-mail and the release of documents detailing when the Bush White House learned of the missing e-mails and how it responded. The restored e-mails are part of the National Archives and Records Administration’s historic record of the Bush administration, but presidential historians and others seeking information in the coming decades about the major decisions of Bush’s presidency likely will be starved of key details, including messages sent between White House officials and drafts of final policy decisions, according to CREW.

“The net effect of this is we’ve probably lost some truly valuable records that would have provided insight” into the administration’s decision-making process on several policy issues, said CREW Chief Counsel Anne L. Weismann, who led the review.

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Why the 44th president is no FDR—and the economy is still in the doldrums.

by Michael Hirsh

Barack Obama was “incredulous” at what he was hearing, said one of his top economic advisers. The president had spent his first year in office overseeing the biggest government bailout of the financial industry in American history. Together with Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, he had kept Wall Street afloat on a trillion-dollar tide of taxpayer money. But the banks were barely lending, and the economy was still mired in high unemployment. And now, in December 2009, the holiday news had started to filter out of the canyons of lower Manhattan: Wall Street’s year-end bonuses would actually be larger in 2009 than they had been in 2007, the year prior to the catastrophe. “Wait, let me get this straight,” Obama said at a White House meeting that December. “These guys are reserving record bonuses because they’re profitable, and they’re profitable only because we rescued them.” It was as if nothing had changed. Even after a Depression-size crash, the banks were not altering their behavior. The president was being perceived, more and more, as a man on the wrong side of an incendiary issue.

And so, prodded forward by Vice President Joe Biden—the product of a working-class upbringing in Scranton, Pa.—the president began to consider getting tougher on Wall Street. “We kept revisiting it,” said the economic adviser (who recounted details of the meetings only on condition of anonymity). One big proposal the White House hadn’t adopted was Paul Volcker’s idea of barring commercial banks from indulging in heavy risk taking and “proprietary” trading. In Volcker’s view, America’s major banks, which enjoy federal guarantees on their deposits, had to stop putting taxpayer money at risk by acting like hedge funds. This had become a grand passion for Volcker, a living legend renowned for crushing inflation 30 years before as Fed chairman. He had long been skeptical of financial deregulation. Beyond the ATM, Volcker asked, what new banking products had really added to economic growth? Exhibit one for this argument was derivatives, trillions of dollars in “side bets” placed by Wall Street traders. “I wish somebody would give me some shred of neutral evidence about the relationship between financial innovation recently and the growth of the economy,” he barked at one conference.

Yet for most of that first year, Obama and his economic team had largely ignored Volcker, a sometime adviser. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and chief economic adviser Larry Summers still questioned whether Volcker’s proposals were feasible. Now Obama was pressing them—very gingerly—to reconsider. “I’m not convinced Volcker’s not right about this,” Obama said at one meeting in the Roosevelt Room. Biden, a longtime fan of Volcker’s, bluntly piped up: “I’m quite convinced Volcker is right about this!”

Obama’s cautious, late embrace of Volcker was all too typical. He had arrived in office perceived by some as the second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yet Obama hadn’t acted much like FDR in the ensuing months. Instead he had faithfully channeled Summers and Geithner and their conservative approach to stimulus and reform. Early on, Obama’s two key economic officials had argued down Christina Romer, the new chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, when she suggested a massive $1.2 trillion stimulus to make up for the collapse of private demand. They opted for slightly less than $800 billion. “We believe that this is a properly sized approach to move the economy forward,” said Summers, who didn’t want to expand the federal deficit or worry the bond market. With the recession still darkening their outlook, Summers and Geithner also didn’t want to tamper too much with what they still saw as the economy’s engine room: Wall Street. Partly on their advice, the president “explicitly decided not to break up all big financial institutions,” said another top economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee.

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by Russell Mokhiber

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Fox News’ Park51 fear mongering shows that Rupert Murdoch’s channel has dropped even the pretext of professionalism

By Gene Lyons

“These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith, and it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that.”
– President George W. Bush, at the Islamic Center of Washington, Sept. 17, 2001

They’ve finally made it official. Although you’re not likely to see it reported on Fox News, media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., parent company of Fox, the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, etc., recently donated a cool $1 million (that’s $1,000,000) to the Republican Governors Association. While corporate donations to political parties are common, media conglomerates are normally careful to give to both parties for appearance’ sake.

Not Murdoch, however. Any questions?

Conflicts of interest don’t come much more obvious. Appearances be damned; Fox News is a partisan propaganda outlet. Actually, as Media Matters columnist Eric Boehlert has recently suggested, the GOP isn’t so much running Fox News as Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and a host of other talk-radio ranters are stampeding the party.

Back in the bad old days of the Soviet Union, Russians had a cynical proverb describing their country’s party-line press. Playing on the names of the two main newspapers Pravda (“Truth”) and Izvestia (“News”), the joke was that there was no Truth in the News, and no News in the Truth.

We’re not there yet, but not for lack of trying. Rushing to fill the power void on the right after the Democrats’ 2008 takeover of Congress and the White House, Fox News and its allies have grown ever bolder and more irresponsible since President Obama’s inauguration, dropping all but the thinnest pretext of professionalism and often enabled by the “mainstream” media’s institutional cowardice.

This has rarely been more apparent than during the recent controversy over the so-called ground zero mosque. Seizing on public ignorance about the project, its location and the motives of those proposing it, Fox News’ propagandists, its politician employees and their talk-radio allies have generated a perfect storm of bigotry and ethnic hatred.

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By Bill Boyarsky

Fox News and its boss, Roger Ailes, along with Karl Rove and unlimited corporate campaign contributions, pose an enormous threat to President Barack Obama and Democratic candidates this fall.

Although they may not be working in tandem, they pursue common goals: Republicans winning control of Congress in 2010, defeating Obama two years later and restoring conservative business-first Republican policies.

To understand Fox’s importance, think of it as a political campaign rather than a news operation.

Fox’s political role is to stir up the Republican base, which bears a demographic resemblance to the news channel’s audience—older, more conservative, whiter than the audiences of its competitors.

With a single-minded intensity, Fox frames the world through stories that will stir this base—Obama’s religion, taxes, the Obama health care law, the Iran nuclear reactor, immigrants, the economy and, over and over again, the proposed community center and mosque near the World Trade Center site. These issues are presented in news stories, commentaries and talking-head discussion shows and by star personalities such as Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck with their torrent of anti-Obama propaganda.

Leading this de facto campaign is the news channel’s president, Ailes, a veteran Republican political communicator. It’s like a daily tea party rally, hour after hour of right-wing Republicanism, only the audience is at home, in front of television screens, steaming about Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats.

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The Huffingotn Post |  Elyse Siegel

In an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union over the weekend, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean took a shot at the Obama administration for what he saw as its inability to maneuver in a polarized political climate.

“I think the people around the president have really misjudged what goes on elsewhere in the country other than Washington, D.C.,” explained Dean. “I don’t think this is true of the president, but I do think his people, his political people ought to go out and spend some time outside Washington once in a while.”

Despite the criticism, Dean, who also served as Governor of Vermont, suggested that he remains optimistic that Democrats will retain control of both congressional chambers following the midterm elections this November.

“I’d bet money on the Senate for sure,” said Dean. “The House is much tougher, I think at the end of the day, we are going to win in the House, and we are going to have a majority. It’ll probably be reduced … perhaps as small as a five or ten seat majority. We simply have better candidates.”

Dean went on to underscore what he sees as the bottom line, as well as the stakes for Democrats, when it comes to this year’s midterm match-ups.

“We’ve got to win this election,” explained the strong progressive voice. “After the election is over we can go back to having our policy fights, but this is about winning. You can’t get anything done unless you have a Democratic president, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House.”

WATCH:

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Pamela Geller jokes on a video blog about being dressed ‘in my burka’ while warning of Islamic ‘world domination’.

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Pamela Geller, the once-obscure right-wing blogger known for peddling hateful, wildly over-the-top rhetoric (she once claimed that Barack Obama was the bastard stepchild of Malcom X) and for pulling stunts like taping a harangue against Muslims while clad in a bikini, has parlayed the anti-mosque hysteria sweeping across America into mainstream media attention just in time to promote her new book, The Post-American Presidency.

Geller and co-author Robert Spencer have been relentlessly promoting the “nontroversy” over the Park 51 project. According to a profile in the Guardian, the pair have “been at the forefront of drumming up opposition to the center, two blocks from Ground Zero, through an array” of organizations like the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and Stop Islamisation of America (SIOA). The groups “have become increasingly influential as conservative politicians exploit anti-Muslim sentiment before November’s congressional and state elections.”

The groups’ ideology is reminiscent of the reckless demagoguery of Joe McCarthy. According to the Guardian, AFDI “says it is fighting ‘specific Islamic supremacist initiatives in American cities’ and hunting down ‘infiltrators of our federal agencies’.” SIOA, which bills itself as a human rights organization “is tied to a similar group, Stop Islamisation of Europe, which goes by the motto: ‘Racism is the lowest form of human stupidity, but Islamophobia is the height of common sense.’”

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg calls Geller a “lunatic racist,” and laments the “very depressing” fact that despite being “a marginal nutbag… it seems as if she’s setting the national agenda now on matters related to Islam and religious freedom.” Spencer previously penned several books advancing dark conspiracy theories about Islam, including Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs. He’s also the proprietor of Jihad Watch, a wingnut Web site that helped raise thousands of dollars to pay for a controversial ad campaign smearing the Park 51 project on New York City buses.

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And you thought your commute was bad.

A 62-mile-long traffic jam on a highway leading to Beijing has now entered its ninth day, with no relief in sight, according to Chinese state media.

The gridlock on the National Expressway 110, also referred to as the Beijing-Tibet expressway, began on August 14 due to a spike in truck traffic heading toward the capital, AFP reported. The problem was exacerbated by a construction project on the roadway that began five days later, a spokesman for the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau told the Global Times. Small accidents and broken-down cars have also been a factor since the congestion started.

While state media reports noted that Beijing drivers are accustomed to such delays, having suffered through similarly epic gridlock in July, they may have to be especially patient in this instance as the construction project is not scheduled to end until mid-September.

Residents in the area have reportedly sought to capitalize on the captive drivers by setting up food and drink stands along the roadway. However a number of the drivers complained about exorbitant prices.

“Instant noodles are sold at four times the original price while I wait in the congestion,” one trucker said, describing the inflated prices caused him to suffer “double blows.”

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By Terry Ann Knopf, Columbia Journalism Review

Whenever they say ‘it’s not about the money,’ it is about the money.”

– Fred W. Friendly

It was a balmy Saturday––a perfect night for champagne toasts. Some 450 people from the local television industry gathered in the Grand Ballroom at the Boston Marriott Copley Place, many of the men in tuxedos, the women in strapless gowns. The occasion was a dinner ceremony on May 10, 2008, to announce the local Emmy-award winners. Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray was on hand, as were bigwigs from the Boston/New England chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

The evening’s highlight was to be the presentation of the prestigious Governors’ Award to Bill O’Reilly, the host of Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor. The award, voted on each year by a local board of NATAS governors, recognizes achievements in the television industry and is typically given to individuals with roots in the New England area. According to Timothy Egan, then the president of the academy’s local chapter, “Bill O’Reilly was selected because he hosted the top-rated talk show on cable seven years running. He worked at TV stations in Hartford and two in Boston. He wrote for The Boston Phoenix. And he holds master’s degrees from Boston University one from [Harvard’s] Kennedy School of Government. He is someone who understands New England’s journalism industry and honed his skills here.”

To some participants, though, O’Reilly was an odd choice. For all his success as a media superstar—cable TV host, newspaper columnist, and best-selling author—O’Reilly has long been dogged by critics turned off less by his conservative politics than his inflammatory rhetoric and bullying tactics.

Barry Nolan was one. Then the host of the CN8 cable program Backstage with Barry Nolan, produced at the time by Comcast out of Brookline, Massachusetts and carried on its cable outlets from Maine to Virginia, Nolan was particularly taken aback. A month before the event, he fired off a couple of e-mails to the academy’s governing board, urging the members to reconsider their decision. Next, he went public. “I am appalled, just appalled,” he told the Boston Herald’s gossip column, Inside Track, calling O’Reilly “a mental case” who “inflates and constantly mangles the truth.”

Interestingly, Nolan had some support within Comcast and within the twenty-plus-member local Emmy board. At least two board members, Roger Lyons, national trustee and former president of the local NATAS chapter, and Ken Botelho, an engineering executive with Comcast as well as a board member, had second thoughts after considering Nolan’s e-mails. O’Reilly is “a well-known TV personality and has a large following,” Lyons wrote in an e-mail to his fellow board members. “But his indiscretions, inaccuracies, and prejudices disqualify him for such a lofty honor.” Minutes later, Ken Botelho, a board member and, equally important, Comcast’s vice president of engineering and network operations, e-mailed Lyons back. “Very well said, and I agree,” he wrote. … “If we do not reverse course there will be a backlash from others in the industry seriously questioning the integrity of this award…it will be a ticking time bomb if we set this in motion. The groundswell is already beginning.” But the vote stood.

Rumors spread that Nolan might try to disrupt the ceremony or even bring to the event, as his guest, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, O’Reilly’s liberal nemesis. (Nolan admits sending an e-mail and a letter to Olbermann, but says he never got a reply.) Five days before the awards, Eileen Dolente, Nolan’s supervisor, traveled from Comcast’s Philadelphia headquarters to Boston and warned Nolan not to make a scene.

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The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.

by Jane Mayer

On May 17th, a black-tie audience at the Metropolitan Opera House applauded as a tall, jovial-looking billionaire took the stage. It was the seventieth annual spring gala of American Ballet Theatre, and David H. Koch was being celebrated for his generosity as a member of the board of trustees; he had recently donated $2.5 million toward the company’s upcoming season, and had given many millions before that. Koch received an award while flanked by two of the gala’s co-chairs, Blaine Trump, in a peach-colored gown, and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, in emerald green. Kennedy’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had been a patron of the ballet and, coincidentally, the previous owner of a Fifth Avenue apartment that Koch had bought, in 1995, and then sold, eleven years later, for thirty-two million dollars, having found it too small.

The gala marked the social ascent of Koch, who, at the age of seventy, has become one of the city’s most prominent philanthropists. In 2008, he donated a hundred million dollars to modernize Lincoln Center’s New York State Theatre building, which now bears his name. He has given twenty million to the American Museum of Natural History, whose dinosaur wing is named for him. This spring, after noticing the decrepit state of the fountains outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Koch pledged at least ten million dollars for their renovation. He is a trustee of the museum, perhaps the most coveted social prize in the city, and serves on the board of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where, after he donated more than forty million dollars, an endowed chair and a research center were named for him.

One dignitary was conspicuously absent from the gala: the event’s third honorary co-chair, Michelle Obama. Her office said that a scheduling conflict had prevented her from attending. Yet had the First Lady shared the stage with Koch it might have created an awkward tableau. In Washington, Koch is best known as part of a family that has repeatedly funded stealth attacks on the federal government, and on the Obama Administration in particular.

With his brother Charles, who is seventy-four, David Koch owns virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars. The company has grown spectacularly since their father, Fred, died, in 1967, and the brothers took charge. The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch—who, years ago, bought out two other brothers—among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

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By PAUL KRUGMAN

As I look at what passes for responsible economic policy these days, there’s an analogy that keeps passing through my mind. I know it’s over the top, but here it is anyway: the policy elite — central bankers, finance ministers, politicians who pose as defenders of fiscal virtue — are acting like the priests of some ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods.

Hey, I told you it was over the top. But bear with me for a minute.

Late last year the conventional wisdom on economic policy took a hard right turn. Even though the world’s major economies had barely begun to recover, even though unemployment remained disastrously high across much of America and Europe, creating jobs was no longer on the agenda. Instead, we were told, governments had to turn all their attention to reducing budget deficits.

Skeptics pointed out that slashing spending in a depressed economy does little to improve long-run budget prospects, and may actually make them worse by depressing economic growth. But the apostles of austerity — sometimes referred to as “austerians” — brushed aside all attempts to do the math. Never mind the numbers, they declared: immediate spending cuts were needed to ward off the “bond vigilantes,” investors who would pull the plug on spendthrift governments, driving up their borrowing costs and precipitating a crisis. Look at Greece, they said.

The skeptics countered that Greece is a special case, trapped by its use of the euro, which condemns it to years of deflation and stagnation whatever it does. The interest rates paid by major nations with their own currencies — not just the United States, but also Britain and Japan — showed no sign that the bond vigilantes were about to attack, or even that they existed.

Just you wait, said the austerians: the bond vigilantes may be invisible, but they must be feared all the same.

This was a strange argument even a few months ago, when the U.S. government could borrow for 10 years at less than 4 percent interest. We were being told that it was necessary to give up on job creation, to inflict suffering on millions of workers, in order to satisfy demands that investors were not, in fact, actually making, but which austerians claimed they would make in the future.

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By Peter Dreier and Christopher R. Martin, AlterNet

Andrew Breitbart has a job to do and he does it well. Breitbart’s job is to lie and distort the truth in order to advance a right-wing agenda, embarrass liberals, and undermine the Obama administration.

Breitbart is not a journalist, researcher, or pundit. He is a propagandist. He operates several websites (BigGovernment, BigJournalism, and BigHollywood), where he and other right-wing bloggers spew their political pornography. The articles that appear on these websites are contemporary versions of what historian Richard Hofstadter called, in a famous 1964 essay, the “paranoid style” of American politics practiced by extreme conservatives.

Breitbart is part of the “paranoid style” conservative echo chamber that includes Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levin, and thousands of lesser-known activists who use a combination of talk radio, Fox News, dozens of conservative publications, and the new media (emails, blogs, youtube, facebook) to mobilize support for their right-wing crusade. Breitbart was a featured speaker at the Tea Party conference in Nashville in February and is a frequent guest on Fox News and right-wing TV and radio talk shows. His websites are propaganda vehicles for building a political movement. Unlike Fox News, he doesn’t even pretend to be “fair and balanced.” What much of America learned last week is that Andrew Breitbart is unfair and unbalanced.

What’s distressing is not that Breitbart does his job, but that the mainstream media and mainstream politicians, including the Obama Administration, take him seriously. The recent dust-up over the firing of federal Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod, fueled by a doctored video on Breitbart’s website, is only the latest example of this.

Since he began his website operation, Breitbart has sought to inject himself and his blogger network into the political debate. Sometimes he succeeds in getting wider attention, outside the right-wing silo, for the manufactured scandals he tries to provoke.

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By Ellen Brown, YES! Magazine

Over 62 million mortgages are now held in the name of MERS, an electronic recording system devised by and for the convenience of the mortgage industry. A California bankruptcy court, following landmark cases in other jurisdictions, recently held that this electronic shortcut makes it impossible for banks to establish their ownership of property titles–and therefore to foreclose on mortgaged properties. The logical result could be 62 million homes that are foreclosure-proof.

Mortgages bundled into securities were a favorite investment of speculators at the height of the financial bubble leading up to the crash of 2008. The securities changed hands frequently, and the companies profiting from mortgage payments were often not the same parties that negotiated the loans. At the heart of this disconnect was the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, or MERS, a company that serves as the mortgagee of record for lenders, allowing properties to change hands without the necessity of recording each transfer.

MERS was convenient for the mortgage industry, but courts are now questioning the impact of all of this financial juggling when it comes to mortgage ownership. To foreclose on real property, the plaintiff must be able to establish the chain of title entitling it to relief. But MERS has acknowledged, and recent cases have held, that MERS is a mere “nominee”–an entity appointed by the true owner simply for the purpose of holding property in order to facilitate transactions. Recent court opinions stress that this defect is not just a procedural but is a substantive failure, one that is fatal to the plaintiff’s legal ability to foreclose.

That means hordes of victims of predatory lending could end up owning their homes free and clear — while the financial industry could end up skewered on its own sword.

California Precedent

The latest of these court decisions came down in California on May 20, 2010, in a bankruptcy case called In re Walker, Case no. 10-21656-E-11. The court held that MERS could not foreclose because it was a mere nominee; and that as a result, plaintiff Citibank could not collect on its claim. The judge opined:

Since no evidence of MERS’ ownership of the underlying note has been offered, and other courts have concluded that MERS does not own the underlying notes, this court is convinced that MERS had no interest it could transfer to Citibank. Since MERS did not own the underlying note, it could not transfer the beneficial interest of the Deed of Trust to another.Any attempt to transfer the beneficial interest of a trust deed without ownership of the underlying note is void under California law.

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John Robbins
Author of The New Good Life, Diet For A New America, and many other bestsellers

Monsanto has been in the news this week, with a U.S. District Court Judge ruling that the USDA has to at least go through the motions of regulating the company’s genetically engineered sugar beets. Monsanto, you may know, is not likely to win any contests for the most popular company. In fact, it has been called the most hated corporation in the world, which is saying something, given the competition from the likes of BP, Halliburton and Goldman Sachs.

This has gotten me thinking about, of all things, ice cream, and of how Monsanto’s clammy paws can be found in some of the most widely selling ice cream brands in the country. These brands could break free from Monsanto’s clutches. So far they haven’t, but maybe this is about to change.

Ben & Jerry’s gets all their milk from dairies that have pledged not to inject their cows with genetically engineered bovine growth hormone (rBGH). Why, then, can’t Haagen Dazs, Breyers and Baskin-Robbins do the same?

Starbucks now guarantees that all their milk, cream and other dairy products are rBGH-free. So do Yoplait and Dannon yogurts, Tillamook cheese, Chipotle restaurants, and many others. But ice cream giants Haagen Dazs, Breyers and Baskin-Robbins continue to use milk from cows injected with rBGH, a hormone that’s been banned in Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Australia and all 27 nations of the European Union. As if to add insult to injury, Haagen Dazs and Breyers have the audacity to tell us, right on the label, that their ice cream is ” All Natural.”

We have Monsanto to thank for rBGH. Monsanto developed the artificial hormone and marketed it aggressively for years, before selling it in 2008 to Elanco, a division of the Eli Lilly drug company. Of course, Monsanto (and now Elanco) wants us to think the hormone is in every way completely satisfactory and safe. Monsanto’s party line has consistently been that there is “no significant difference” in the milk derived from cows who have been dosed with the hormone compared to those who haven’t.

Pardon me for not swallowing Monsanto’s hooey, but if that’s so, why have so many countries outlawed rBGH? Are these countries all run by ignorant Luddites who oppose technology and progress? Or might there actually be compelling reasons?

There are, indeed. One of them is that injecting the genetically engineered hormone into cows increases the levels of a substance called IGF-1 in their milk. Monsanto’s own studies found that the amount of IGF-1 in milk more than doubled when cows were injected with rBGH. Studies by independent researchers show gains as much as six-fold. (Scientific citations in support of the statements in this article can be found here.)

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By: David Dayen

Two FCC Commissioners and one US Senator slammed the Google-Verizon joint policy agreement an

d strongly endorsed the principle of net neutrality last night at a hearing before hundreds of citizens in Minneapolis, giving the Chairman of the federal agency Julius Genachowski all of the support he would need to regulate broadband Internet, if he so chose.

Democratic Commissioners Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn both endorsed the reclassification of broadband as a communications service, under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. Copps said simply, “It’s calling an apple an apple.” If Genachowski agreed, he would thus have enough votes to pass the change in policy. Genachowski and the FCC released a plan in May to reclassify, but has yet to move on it, taking meetings with industry stakeholders and generally foot-dragging in an effort to reach consensus.

In the interim, Internet giant Google and telecom giant Verizon announced a joint policy agreement that made a distinction between wireline and wireless Internet, and also allowed for undefined “managed services” to discriminate between online content. Both Copps and Clyburn sharply criticized the statement. The deal “would eliminate any openness provisions over wireless, which is where all Internet applications are going,” said Copps, the longtime Commissioner. Clyburn, the daughter of House Majority Whip James Clyburn, agreed. “Any proposal that treats wire-line and wireless Internet differently would be impossible for me to support,” she said, citing the increasing tendency for minority Web users to access the Internet on phones or wireless devices.

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Fired USDA Official Describes Her Ordeal, Blames Fox News

Marcus Baram
Marcus@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting

Despite being fired by the Obama administration, condemned by the media and targeted with abusive phone calls, Shirley Sherrod still believes in America and the promise of a multiracial society living in harmony.

In an interview with Huffington Post, the former Agriculture Department official described her shock at landing in the middle of a media firestorm when her misconstrued remarks from an edited video clip led millions of Americans to believe that she had once discriminated against a white farmer. She also gave her thoughts on the new job offered her by USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, her phone call with President Obama, her refusal to appear on Fox News or to speak to Andrew Breitbart and her doubts that whites are the victims of black racism.

“I’m still looking at it — I’ve asked some questions about it and I have a few more questions,” Sherrod said about Vilsack’s offer to promote her to the position of deputy director of the office of advocacy and outreach at the USDA, adding that she will meet with Vilsack and USDA officials on August 24. “It’s [a job] dealing with discrimination in the agency, working with minority groups and so forth. I’m a little concerned that the agency has really not dealt with that issue in the way that it should have through the years.”

Sherrod says that she has not been contacted by the White House since talking to President Obama on July 22. In that seven-minute conversation, she explained, “I said that there are people like me who have had experiences — different from the ones he had — which had a big impact on my life… I just wanted to share some of that with him. He told me that he covered a lot of what I was saying in his book [she explains that he didn't specify which of his two books he was referring to]. I guess I have to read it.”

And she continues to assert that USDA Deputy Under Secretary Cheryl Cook told her that the White House asked for Sherrod’s firing, despite the denials of Vilsack. “I know that she said that, she said the White House. I can only go on what she said to me.”

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