The President uses the occasion of this Labor Day holiday to announce… $100 billion in proposed tax cuts for the rich…, specifically an extension of a business research and development tax credits that were part of the “stimulus” package (which itself consisted of an awful lot of tax cuts for the rich business.) Also on the table is another $50 billion in infrastructure spending. Thing is, I kind of like Nancy Pelosi; I hate to see her thrown under the bus. But when the bogus way that unemployment was counted by the Clinton Administration in order to make itself look...

The President used the conclusion of slow news month August for the purpose of announcing that major combat operations are complete the combat mission is over, and the 50,000 heavily armed American troops (to be complemented by a cohort of highly paid Blackwater mercenaries and civilian government and contractor personnel) who will remain in Iraq will be in a “non-combat” role. I am told that the total remaining American contingent of around 126,000 personnel to do whatever is they are supposed to do with respect to Iraq’s 25 million people… is around the same size as the British contingent of...

I defer to a piece from Who is IOZ? (in reaction to another in a continuing series of vapid “generational observation pieces” in various media, this one from Slate) to explain the situation in which young people entering (or relatively new to) the current American work force are up against: What they conspicuously fail to do is to cast their eyes toward yonder economy, except to make a vaguely Friedmanian observation that iPads mean you have to go to college or else you will never get hired. Hey, maybe decades of downward pressure on real wages, the destruction of even...

The President has every reason to be pleased with how the military is handling kangaroo courts show trials military commissions under his watch, as exemplified by the “interesting” holdings of military judge Army Colonel Patrick Parrish, who concluded that torture isn’t torture when the American military does it, and fifteen is old enough when it’s Omar Khadr “who was old enough” for whatever torture humane treatment the American military feels like inflicting on its juvenile captives. The heretofore classified opinion has been released during an interregnum in the Khadr trial, the first commission trial in the Obama era… because Khadr’s...

I’m with Greenwald on his take, both in his take that the President deserved effusive praise for his apparent willingness to buck public sentiment in support of an actual (rather than corporate) “American value” in the President’s apparent backing of the now infamous vicinity of the World Trade Center mosque and Islamic cultural center, and then the prompt withdrawal of that effusive praise when the inevitable political sh*t-storm followed, and the President did what I would have expected him to do, and “qualified” his remarks, as Greenwald notes, replacing an act of political courage with a non-sequitur about “the right”...

My country is trying Omar Khadr, a man who was 15 at the time of an alleged war crime, to wit, killing a soldier in combat, although, of course, at the time, Khadr was almost certainly unconscious and full of American shrapnel, which interrogators refused to treat him for while he was interrogated, and later, he was threatened with rape if he didn’t confess, and this is… President Obama’s first military commission trial. A shining example of American, ahem… justice. Trying a juvenile for what isn’t even a crime, and using his tortured confession as “the evidence.” We can’t even...

It’s August, the proverbial home of slow news days and famous for being the month “you don’t launch new products in.” And so… item the first… the swearing in of the nation’s 112th Supreme Court justice, fourth woman, and I believe, youngest person, Elena Kagan I’ve stated my feelings on the subject.. The confirmation hearings have not changed my view… and as an added bonus, there is a strong possibility that Justice Kagan will have to recuse herself on any “national security” cases, effectively reversing Justice Stevens without having to go on record. No point in getting all “partisany;” my...

Unsurprisingly (given how strongly Mayor Bloomberg supports real estate development religious freedom, New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission approved plans for a large Islamic Center (and mosque) on the site of a former Burlington Coat Factory store in lower Manhattan, over two city blocks from the World Trade Center site, In his inimitable style, Brother Roy explains it all for you; Roy Edroso is so thorough, so on, there’s little I can add. So I will add… a little. . When I first heard this story pitched, I, like everyone else, assumed that plans were for a Mosque in Ground...

Yes. yes, a picture is worth… well, you know. So we’ll start with this Financial Times piece that’s pretty verbose in its own right, in which, through the examples of a family in Minnesota and a family in Virginia that are offered as paradigmatic of larger trends in the United States that, in the Cliffnotes version of the piece, amount to a middle class whose present existence is progressively more squeezed causing trepidation particularly viz concerns for retirement and their children’s futures, with a somewhat uniquely for Americans sense of foreboding for the future in general. And thus, we find...

I had been “ambivalent” in my feelings toward Arizona’s rather nasty sounding new law (“SB 1070”) which ostensibly tried to criminalize being Latino undocumented, considering both (1) that the federal government has utterly defaulted in the immigration area both by permitting the border to largely be out of control and to have a “wink wink” policy that purports to make it “illegal” to enter and work in the United States without legal authority to do so, with very real local consequences that has made a great number of people genuinely fearful and desirous of “doing something,” and (2) that Arizona...