America can sleep safer tonight. A deadly menace has been thwarted. A wicked conspiracy, foiled. A vicious foe with a deadly agenda has been apprehended. His tools of terror have been seized. His hatred of all we hold dear, our most Cherished Ideals, has come to nothing. Hooray, AMERICA! … what? No, not him. HIM. [...]

If Mark Halperin wrote for TMZ this is exactly the post that he would write:
“Two Years Later: Sarah Palin Has Come A Long Way From The Slaughtered Turkey Video…”

Sometimes it’s comedic to try carrying on a dialogue with the talking heads. This morning I was listening with fascination as WaPo economics fiction writer insisted that the consumer is responsible for the debacle in our economy, and if we don’t go shopping, unemployment will go up.

The International Monetary Fund fell into wide spread disrepute following its bungled management of the international financial crisis of 1997-1998. Economist Joseph Stiglitz in his book Globalization and its Discontents laid them out on the dissecting table. They have generally been seen as the enforcement agent of the global neoliberal regime imposing programs of control and fiscal austerity on struggling developing nations. As the agent of the industrial nations of the global north imposing their economic will on the global south, the whole thing had a definite flavor of neo-colonialism.

If your staff’s communications omit mention of the bank you supposedly want “saved” how can you be charged with trying to save the bank?

In Mark Harris’ classic baseball novel, Bang The Drum Slowly, players and coaches for the mythical New York Mammoths (modeled after the New York Yankees) fill the dead hours spent in hotels while on road trips by adjourning to the hotel lobby where they make a show of playing a card game called “Tegwar”. Tegwar (The Exciting Game Without Any Rules) is a con game whose express purpose is to extract as much money as possible from the passing starstruck fans who want to join in yet don’t want to appear like rubes by admitting that they don’t know what the hell is going on in the game. Befuddled by nonsensical winning hands like Red Rooster, Banjo, Coney Island Tatey or Butchered Hog, but caught up in the glow of hanging out with real live major league ballplayers, the fans are easy pickings and, unsurprisingly, the ballplayers always win.

John Bellinger has been publicly suggesting the Obama Administration had exceeded the terms of the AUMF for some time. So it is unsurprising that he took the opportunity of a Republican House, the incoming Armed Services Chair’s explicit support for a new AUMF, and the Ghailani verdict to more fully develop his argument in an op-ed. It’s a well-crafted op-ed, such as in the way it avoids explicitly saying the government has been breaking the law in its pursuit of terrorism, when he pretends the only people we’ve been targeting in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are al Qaeda leaders.

The Portuguese government isn’t as deeply committed to keeping the banking system afloat as the Irish government, but the banks are experiencing significant liquidity problems as a result of the contracting economy and the increasing pressure from international bond markets. So once again we have the government of an EU member state willing to adopt draconian austerity measures on a more or less voluntary basis and it isn’t making the problems go away.

The only way the British Defence Advisory notice to UK media makes sense,in my opinion, is if Britain’s partners are making similar efforts to request prior restraint from the other major news outlets that have the Wikileaks dump.

Thirty two years ago today at 10:55 AM, openly gay city supervisor Harvey Milk was shot and killed in his office at City Hall in San Francisco. The message of hope that he preached, however, continues on, and his strategy of building coalitions and rejecting life in the Veal Pen is one progressives need to remember and repeat — that’s how you give hope.

Thanks, Harvey.