From The Regressive Antidote
By David Michael Green

The Republican party in America faces two grave problems today.

One is Barack Obama, probably the most skilled and era-appropriate politician in a generation or more. And that, after he’s already through all of one whole month in office.

The other problem threatening the very life of the Republican Party today is the Republican Party.

It’s been some time since America had much of a real two-party system. Ralph Nader was right about that in 2000. By 2001, he was beginning to be wrong. Today, it may be the case that he is growing wronger all the time.

It’s a little hard to say, because the two great, tectonic, political questions of the moment remain unanswered, only slowly coming into focus, perhaps in part because they are moving targets, actually evolving over time toward some new equilibrium. Those questions are, Who will the Democrats (and especially Obama) be?; and, Who will the Republicans be?

My sense is that Obama is fundamentally every bit the centrist he apparently whispered that he was as a sweet nothing into Benjamin Netanyahu’s ear, on his visit to Israel last year, but that events may pull him to the left. My sense is that the Republican Party has been wholly and completely captured by the lunatic fringe, but that events are jerking its sleeve toward the center.

Read more Two-Party

From Tom Dispatch
By Chip Ward

Now that we’ve decided to “green” the economy, why not green homeland security, too? I’m not talking about interrogators questioning suspects under the glow of compact fluorescent light bulbs, or cops wearing recycled Kevlar recharging their Tasers via solar panels. What I mean is: Shouldn’t we finally start rethinking the very notion of homeland security on a sinking planet?

Now that Dennis Blair, the new Director of National Intelligence, claims that global insecurity is more of a danger to us than terrorism, isn’t it time to release the idea of “security” from its top-down, business-as-usual, terrorism-oriented shackles? Isn’t it, in fact, time for the Obama administration to begin building security we can believe in; that is, a bottom-up movement that will start us down the road to the kind of resilient American communities that could effectively recover from the disasters — manmade or natural (if there’s still a difference) — that will surely characterize this emerging age of financial and climate chaos? In the long run, if we don’t start pursuing security that actually focuses on the foremost challenges of our moment, that emphasizes recovery rather than what passes for “defense,” that builds communities rather than just more SWAT teams, we’re in trouble.

Today, “homeland security” and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), that unwieldy amalgam of 13 agencies created by the Bush administration in 2002, continue to express the potent, all-encompassing fears and assumptions of our last president’s Global War on Terror. Foreign enemies may indeed be plotting to attack us, but, believe it or not (and increasing numbers of people, watching their homes, money, and jobs melt away are coming to believe it), that’s probably neither the worst, nor the most dangerous thing in store for us.

Read more Homegrown Security

From The Observer
By Joe Conason

At the brink of global ruin, many Americans suddenly seem willing to consider sensible ideas that were always deemed unthinkable, and to reject foolish notions that were once deemed brilliant. Soon we may be mature enough to observe how other developed countries solved problems that have baffled us for generations.

Nationalizing major banks, temporarily at least, is a radical notion that today looks far more prudent than handing over hundreds of billions of additional dollars to the clowns and crooks who wrecked the financial system. Privatizing Social Security, or turning over another trillion dollars to the Wall Street geniuses whose reckless greed drove us into penury, no longer appears so alluring. Even a few repentant right-wingers — notably including Alan Greenspan, the former “maestro” of money — now gaze dolefully into the mirror and wonder where they went so wrong. (Here’s a hint: the trouble began during those lonely evenings spent perusing the addled works of Ayn Rand.)

So as President Obama convened his “fiscal responsibility summit” and prepared to deliver his first budget, and delivered his first address to Congress, the voices of free-market fundamentalism were muted in Washington, if not on cable television. The anticipated onslaught against Social Security from those claiming to represent future generations did not materialize at the Obama summit – and neither did the presidential capitulation that liberals had feared.

Instead, the White House wonks and the President himself have insisted on discussing the actual threat to America’s future solvency – namely, the swelling price of health care for the retiring generation of baby boomers and its effect on Medicare and Medicaid. “Comprehensive health care reform is the best way to strengthen Medicare for years to come,” said the President in his first address to Congress, when he also promised a “down payment” on the principle of universal coverage.

Read more Health Care

From The NY Times
By Paul Krugman

Elections have consequences. President Obama’s new budget represents a huge break, not just with the policies of the past eight years, but with policy trends over the past 30 years. If he can get anything like the plan he announced on Thursday through Congress, he will set America on a fundamentally new course.

The budget will, among other things, come as a huge relief to Democrats who were starting to feel a bit of postpartisan depression. The stimulus bill that Congress passed may have been too weak and too focused on tax cuts. The administration’s refusal to get tough on the banks may be deeply disappointing. But fears that Mr. Obama would sacrifice progressive priorities in his budget plans, and satisfy himself with fiddling around the edges of the tax system, have now been banished.

For this budget allocates $634 billion over the next decade for health reform. That’s not enough to pay for universal coverage, but it’s an impressive start. And Mr. Obama plans to pay for health reform, not just with higher taxes on the affluent, but by putting a halt to the creeping privatization of Medicare, eliminating overpayments to insurance companies.

On another front, it’s also heartening to see that the budget projects $645 billion in revenues from the sale of emission allowances. After years of denial and delay by its predecessor, the Obama administration is signaling that it’s ready to take on climate change.

Read more Change

From uExpress
By Ted Rall

On July 14, 1789 an angry mob invaded Paris’ Bastille prison, igniting a chain of events that became the French Revolution. The insurgents may have been provoked by a prisoner, the notorious Marquis de Sade. “They are killing the prisoners here!” he shouted to the crowd two weeks earlier, on July 2nd. The authorities moved him to another prison before the 14th.

The storming of the Bastille was pretty much a BS event. There were only seven prisoners for the revolutionaries to liberate, several of whom were living lives of considerable ease in fully furnished cells with servants. Yet the Bastille remains a symbol of monarchist oppression smashed by righteous people seeking freedom and equality. Sometimes empty symbolism means a lot.

Not so much here or now. Revolution doesn’t seem imminent in Obamaland, where polls show people pro-Bama despite losing their jobs, and a government bailout for everyone and everything except the people and institutions who actually need help. But revolution’s second cousin–symbolic scapegoating–is all around, like love in the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song minus the beret toss.

“In 1980, according to a Forbes magazine study, executive compensation was 40 times the average worker’s pay; by 2007, that had soared to more than 400 times,” CBS News reported on February 25th. Now that the companies those ridiculously compensated executives were charged with running are tanking, CEO pay is coming under attack by pundits and politicians.

Read more Fun and Sport

From Salon
By Andrew O’Hehir

When François-Claudius Ravachol went to the guillotine in Paris on July 11, 1892, he gave one of the great performances in the history of “la Veuve” (”the widow”), as that ingenious beheading machine was often called. Ever since the French Revolution more than a century earlier, Dr. Guillotine’s invention had provided kings, murderers and revolutionaries with the opportunity to make a dramatic exit, and huge throngs of Parisians turned out to watch them take their last steps and utter their final words.

Dignified to the end, Marie Antoinette reportedly apologized for stepping on the executioner’s foot: “Monsieur, I ask your pardon. I did not do it on purpose.” Her husband, Louis XVI, also faced the end bravely, although his attempt to give a long-winded speech forgiving his enemies and calling for God’s mercy was, quite literally, cut short. Robespierre, the revolution’s greatest orator, went to his death with his jaw shattered from a gunshot wound, and could say nothing.

Ravachol, an implacable enemy of the French state and any other form of government ever devised or imagined, outdid them all. Condemned to death for three murders — one he admitted and two he probably didn’t commit — Ravachol was a true believer in anarchist revolution, an advocate of ruthless acts of violence that would point toward the inevitable destruction of bourgeois society.

Read more Middle Class

From TruthDig
By David Sirota

Only months after the 2008 primaries, most Americans probably don’t remember Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul. But that doesn’t mean the conservative populism they championed during their campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination is as fleeting as their dark-horse candidacies.

Since rank-and-file House Republicans began criticizing October’s Wall Street bailout, a growing faction of the GOP has been channeling the country’s rage at Corporate America with us-versus-them rhetoric and appeals to economic patriotism. And they are getting help from a Democratic Party whose actions often imply subservience to Big Money.

Recall that the majority of House Democrats voted to ratify the bank bailout, and the majority of House Republicans opposed it. Recall, too, that Democratic Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is pushing to throw more no-strings-attached cash at Wall Street, while Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., makes headlines with calls to nationalize the banks.

Conversely, when Republicans tried to prevent bailout and stimulus money from subsidizing job outsourcing, Democrats blocked their amendments and President Obama criticized such “Buy America” laws.

Now, Newt Gingrich is trying to capitalize on the contrast, insisting that the GOP can recast itself as the party of the little guy. Summing up his thoughts during an analysis of recent Democratic legislation, he said: “If in fact it’s terrific for Citibank and GM, but bad for small business, then it’s an elite bill—it’s not a populist bill.”

Read more Robin-Hood

From AlterNet
By Sara Robinson

Yes, it’s true. The conservatives — that’s right, the very same folks who just dragged us along on an eight-year drunken binge during which they borrowed-and-spent us into the deepest financial catastrophe in nearly a century — are now standing there, faces full of moral rectitude, fingers pointing and shaking in our faces, righteously lecturing the rest of us on the topic of “fiscal responsibility.”

I didn’t think it was possible. I mean, they were mean enough drunk — but hung over, in the clear light of morning, it turns out they’re even worse.

I know. The choice is hard. Laugh? Cry? Scream? All three at once? It would almost be funny, if it weren’t such clear evidence of a complete break with objective reality — and their ideas of what that “fiscal responsibility” means weren’t so dangerous to the future of the country.

The next episode in this surreal moral drama is set to take place next Monday, when President Obama will convene a “fiscal responsibility summit” at the White House to discuss the right’s bright new idea for getting us out of this hole: let’s just dismantle Social Security and Medicare.

As usual, this proposal is encrusted with a thick layer of diversions, misconceptions, factual errors and out-and-out lies. Here are some of the most pungent ones, along with the facts you need to fire back.

Read more Danger

From TruthOut
By Dean Baker

Housing aid should be focused on nonbubble markets.

The data in the December Case-Shiller 20-City index indicate that the rate of housing price decline is continuing to accelerate. The data show that house prices in the 20 cities fell at a rate of 2.0 percent in the month of December and were falling at a 21.3 percent annual rate in the last quarter of 2008.

It is important to remember that these data reflect sale prices in the three month period from October to December. Since there is typically a 6-8 week period between contracts and closing, these data reflect contracts in a period centered on October. This means that the data is already somewhat dated when it is released. If the recent rate of price decline has persisted, prices are already 8 percent lower on average than the data indicate.

For the fourth consecutive month, prices declined in all twenty cities in the index. While prices continue to decline rapidly in former bubble markets, there were also sharp drops in some markets that had been less affected by the bubble. For example, prices in Minneapolis fell 4.1 percent in December and have fallen at a 31.5 percent annual rate over the last quarter. Prices in Atlanta fell 2.0 percent in December and have fallen at a 21.5 percent rate over the quarter.

However, most of the bubble markets continue to deflate rapidly. Prices in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Miami fell by 4.5 percent, 3.2 percent, and 2.7 percent, respectively, in December. The respective annual rate of price declines in these cities over the last quarter is 35.9 percent, 32.6 percent, 28.2 percent.

Read more Housing Decline

From True Blue Liberal
By Stephen Lendman

The more they do, the worse it gets, and world headlines confirm it. Recent ones include:

– The New York Times, February 17: “After Manhattan’s Office Boom, a Hard Fall;”

– Washington Post, February 17: “Obama signs $787 billion stimulus bill; Dow Jones industrial average drops nearly 300 points;”

Dow theorist, Richard Russell, called it “one of the damnedest closes I’ve ever seen,” within one point of the November 20 low, and added: “I thought President Obama outlawed torture in the US. Wall Street is not listening.”

The next day both the Dow and Transportation averages hit new bear market lows. For Dow theorists like Russell and others, it’s confirmation of lower ones to come.

– The Financial Times (FT):

February 17: “California dream turns into nightmare” given the housing collapse, slumping economy, and return of “widespread poverty;” Read the rest of this entry »