In their groundbreaking new book, The Bankers’ New Clothes, Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, two of the world’s most prominent and respected academics in finance and economics, expose the lies propagated by those who fight so dramatically to preserve the broken status quo. Argument by argument, scare tactic by scare tactic, they take on the bankers’ arguments and shred them, one by one, exposing them as nothing more than self-serving justifications for preserving a system that serves only the banks, not the general public. And most importantly, they do so in plain English with real world examples that are familiar to anyone who has ever had a bank account, a credit card, or a mortgage. They make the complex simple, and in so doing, reveal that as taxpayers we have been on the wrong side of a decades-long con that has enriched a handful of bankers while the rest of us suffer for their excesses.

When I wrote about MSNBC’s documentary on Iraq war lies this week, I linked to an earlier blog post of mine that drew heavily on a House Judiciary Committee report on the same topic, as well as to Lawrence Wilkerson’s recent debate with Norman Solomon on Democracy Now! When Brad Friedman reposted my Hubris review, he suggested I ask Wilkerson for a response. I did and here it is.

As our government was making a fraudulent case to attack Iraq in 2002-2003, the MSNBC television network was doing everything it could to help, including booting Phil Donahue and Jeff Cohen off the air. The Donahue Show was deemed likely to be insufficiently war-boosting and was thus removed 10 years ago next week, and 10 days after the largest antiwar (or anything else) demonstrations in the history of the world, as a preemptive strike against the voices of honest peaceful people.

Bush v. Gore is ancient history. The results of the 2000 Presidential election in Florida are no longer considered to be an issue by the mainstream press; anyone who brings it up instantly dismissed as a kook, a conspiracy theorist, a somewhat stale joke.

And the inevitable rewriting of history has continued over the years. “Bush won, get over it” is probably the most common response to those who bring up the issue of hanging chads and the recount in Florida. In one critical case, the historical record has actually been erased – and that, in itself, tells us something interesting about the Florida recount.

It seems only fitting that I have been asked to introduce Bill Press and host this salon on his book The Obama Hate Machine, an indispensable expose of the “largely personal, political, and mean-spirited” assault on America’s first black president. The host of the nationally syndicated radio program The Bill Press Show, a syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services, and an accredited member of the White House Press corps, Press has seen the hate machine close up and personal.

Fatster rounds up stories from everywhere about a species still struggling to find itself, but always struggling to be free of tyranny, ignorance, lies, oppression, fear, poverty, disease, greed, thieves, bullies and thugs.

Scott Walker on Monday claimed he saved Wisconsin taxpayers $1 billion, mainly through his union busting Act 10. But a careful look at this claim reveals Walker both exaggerated or invented the savings while balancing his budget on the backs of the poor, adding teachers and public servants to the unemployed, imposing a de facto tax on public employees, claiming credit for declining property values, and increasing fees while he claimed to be cutting taxes.

Sigmund Freud once mentioned the defense offered by a man who was accused by his neighbor of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition. In the first place, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second place it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and in the third place, he had never borrowed it at all.

That man’s name?

Dick Cheney.

Rarely do lies simply go out in the world and stand on their own. To have staying power, they require a complex network of ancillary lies and human enablers (sometimes knowing, sometime unwitting) who create a web of falsehood. These tangled webs can drain families’ bank accounts, get people killed, cause great institutions to fall, even help crash an economy.

Well, what do we have here? A deceptively-edited video purporting to show liberals saying the kinds of terrible things that conservatives insist we say when we think no one’s watching? Gee, I wonder where that might have come from…