Well, the actual UK Telegraph story, about a Chinese official expressing “concern” about likely U.S. inflationary measures (i.e. “monetizing debt,” a/k/a gearing up those printing presses) seems mundane enough. China is the holder of the largest international U.S. dollar reserves (some $2 trillion) and is concerned both the ongoing viability of its investment, and of its own export-based economy amidst the new economic reality. No, the part of the article that amused me is the quoting of CPC official Cheng Siwei (now “head of the green energy drive” and “former vice-hairman of the Standing Committee”… whatever they are… it’s not...

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has permitted a lawsuit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft to proceed, said lawsuit brought by an Muslim-American citizen of this country who contended that his detention on purported “material witness” grounds violated his civil rights; needless to say, the plaintiff, was never charged with a crime, and never asked to testify in anyone else’s criminal proceeding, though he was detained, and claims that it resulted in loss of employment and loss of his marriage. The Ninth Circuit, widely regarded as the nation’s most liberal federal appeals court, has often been...

We’ll start with this, where Paul Krugman tells us succinctly that we’re probably not going to get a decent health care reform plan at all, and if we do, it will be less good than Richard Nixon offered Democrats thirty-five years ago. Why? It’s the corporate cash, stupid: Democrats are possibly more beholden to it than Republicans (Republicans being a more natural ally of business interests). With an army of lobbyists ready to blast Congress, and a war-chest of billions in corporate cash ready to blast the airwaves and man the barricades with outrageous misinformation (and a public primed to...

We’ll start with this wonderful piece of misinformation from WaPo, which should know better than to publish crap like it, in this case, insisting that “torture works” because “KSM was so forthcoming” after waterboarding. If that’s the case, than kindly explain why it was necessary to waterboard him 183 times? Sounds like something other than “torture works”… unless it “works” to get some official’s rocks off, maybe. The ever-vigilant Glenn Greenwald enumerates the plethora of things wrong with the WaPo piece (hint: everything, including being at odds with WaPo’s own less “shilling for Dick Cheney” reporting, by actual journalists rather...

Go read Andy’s interview with Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell. Read it now.

Just a couple of quickies. First, this wonderful satiric (or is it?) explanation of health insurance by analogizing it to “hunger insurance” by Dmitri Orlov of Club Orlov. Dmitri tells us about the likely coming collapse in ways we can at least laugh about, and hopefully, prepare ourselves and our families. And Thomas Nephew tells us… that on health care, we gettin’ out-organized. Simple answer, while many of the thugs disrupting the loathsome “town halls” are indeed, paid for their activities, many are not… there is a passion on “the other side” that the incoherent complexity and mixed messages (such...

Senator Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy passed away at 77, finally succumbing to brain cancer. Sen. Kennedy outived Bob Novak by about a week, his sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver by about two weeks, and of course, his assassinated brothers, the late President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, by some decades. Also somewhat ironically, I see that the late Mary Jo Kopechne died in the Chappaquiddick incident 40 years ago this summer. (Besides Chappaquiddick, 1969 was a somewhat busy summer, what with the moon landing, Woodstock, the Vietnam War still raging and the coming ascendancy of the New York...

Via the now indispensable Bill of Rights Defense Committee, we give you these snippets from… torture news. We’ll start with this item from ABC News noting that in the sort of released (though heavily redacted) CIA inspector general report, the redacted portions show details of at least three deaths in CIA custody, as well as note that a number of detainees in CIA custody “can’t be accounted for”… wtf? And it accounts some of the waterboarding of KSM that came close to killing him (prior to the opportunity to stage his show trial). Also re the CIA IG redacted report,...

The situation in Iraq has apparently improved dramatically via the expedient of the American press by and large refusing to report news from it. Not so the situation in Afghanistan: the American press, alas, is quite interested in it. Not that you want to roll out a new product in August or anything, but it seems that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen said to CNN: I think it is serious and it is deteriorating, and I’ve said that over the past couple of years, that the Taliban insurgency has gotten better, more sophisticated, in their...

Although most political journalism in my adult life has been, to put it politely, execrable, one thing I do like is the use of the term “Gang of __” to describe groups of legislators, usually a “bipartisan” agglomeration of senators, to stand in the way of some major piece of legislation or at least legislative action, such as “the gang of 14” who aligned to prevent filibusters of extremist judges… and now, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich discusses “the gang of six” that will keep us from getting meaningful health care reform. Although these six senators represent six per cent...