Our Dying Economy
Update: Reid just named his three picks for SuperCongress: Patty Murray, Max Baucus, and John Kerry. IMO, Kerry is actually a worse choice than Baucus (yeah, that’s me saying that), since Kerry was in favor of the 4T bargain but Baucus voted against the Catfood Commission recommendations. And frankly, we’re probably better off without Durbin, who was bad on these issues.
All those Republicans (and the President) calling on sucking up to the “job creators” to convince them to maybe, one day, create jobs, have Adam Smith’s version of capitalism all wrong.
Jared Bernstein makes an argument that every single Democrat should be making: our problem is not in Medicare, per se. It’s in health care costs (and Bush’s war and tax cuts). As Bernstein says, “An honest analysis of fiscal sustainability would point toward a larger, not smaller, role for publicly provided health coverage.”
A single mother of two from St. Louis rented a plane so she could fly by Wall Street with a banner reading, “Thanks For The Downgrade. You Should All Be Fired.”
H&R Block just agreed to modify $115 million worth of home mortgages in which it discriminated against black and Latino borrowers (presumably meaning it pushed people of color into subprime loans when they qualified for prime). This follows a similar, national settlement from Wells Fargo.
Justice and Injustice
Apparently, you can set out in your F250 after a party, saying, “let’s go fuck with some niggers,” find the first black man you see, beat him repeatedly, run him over with your full-size pickup and kill him, and not be charged with a hate crime. Or, if you weren’t driving the truck, charged with anything more than assault. (What I want to know is why no one at the motel stopped this before James Craig Anderson got killed.)
Back in 1994, Multiple Choice Mitt believed abortion should be safe and legal. Justin Elliott explains why: because when Mitt was 16, Mitt’s sister’s husband’s sister, Ann Keenan, died from an infection caused by an illegal abortion. She was 21 when she died in 1963. (h/t Susie)
The IRS was going to investigate whether a bunch of rich Republicans were evading gift tax laws by donating to 501(c)(4)s. But Republicans like Orrin Hatch and Dave Camp said “boo.” So the IRS backed off its investigation.”Boo!”
Our Dying Empire
The Council for Foreign Relations’ home journal confirms what we’ve heard elsewhere–al Qaeda is weaker than we’ve been led to believe. As it describes, al Qaeda didn’t even have the resources to wire Najibullah Zazi any money to buy hydrogen peroxide.
Carol Rosenberg and the Miami Herald have put together a list of everyone left at Gitmo.