Monday, October 24, 2011

Obama's Anti-War Promises Kept?

Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com: "Second, the Obama administration has been working for months to persuade, pressure and cajole Iraq to allow U.S. troops to remain in that country beyond the deadline. The reason they’re being withdrawn isn’t because Obama insisted on this, but because he tried — but failed — to get out of this obligation. Again, listen to the White House itself:"

The Status of Forces Agreement between the United States and Iraq expires at the end of the year. Officials had been discussing the possibility of maintaining several thousand U.S. troops to train Iraqi security forces, and the Iraqis wanted troops to stay but would not give them immunity, a key demand of the administration. . . .

“The Iraqis wanted additional troops to stay,” an administration official said. “We said here are the conditions, including immunities. But the Iraqis because of a variety of reasons wanted the troops and didn’t want to give immunity.”

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

The Increasingly Radicalized Paul Krugman

Lately I have become more and more impressed with the extent that Krugman has become not just a mainstream liberal, but more of a voice for a genuine left. And then he come out with this, Economics and Politics by Paul Krugman - The Conscience of a Liberal - NYTimes.com:

This isn’t the only case where news organizations consistently report as truth something that didn’t happen, while failing to report what did. Another one that comes to mind is the California electricity crisis of 2001-2002. As some readers may recall, that crisis was caused by market manipulation — and that’s not a hypothesis, Enron traders were caught on tape telling plants to shut down to create artificial shortages. Yet “news analyses” published after the whole thing was revealed would often tell readers that excessive environmental regulation and Nimbyism caused the crisis, with nary a mention of the deliberate creation of shortages.
And as you’ll notice, in both cases the imaginary history just happened to be one more comfortable to status quo interests.
I don’t want to go all Chomsky here, but this sort of thing really can radicalize you.
'via Blog this'

Friday, October 14, 2011

The Regulation Impedes Job Growth Story Has No Evidence

The Regulation Impedes Job Growth Story Has No Evidence
From the Conclusion:

In short, the "regulation is impeding job growth" story has no evidence to support it. This story is a pure invention of the right wing. Presidential candidates who repeat it should be ridiculed by the media – just as if they were talking about space aliens.