Reading Time: < 1 minute Russ was recently on Laura Flanders’s GRITtv to discuss Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination, the Tiller murder, Obama’s Middle East speech, and the upcoming Reagan centennial. Here’s Russ on the public controversies surrounding Sotomayor: I think most of these [accusations against Sotomayor] are what I would call misdirection. It’s an attempt to focus the public’s eye away Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes Those of us in journalism pretty much know the extent to which our field is being decimated by the simultaneous unraveling of the economy and of the journalistic business model. Still, Barbara Ehrenreich’s commencement address at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism is well worth reading. The dean gave me some very strict instructions about Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes USA Today published a thorough investigation of the donations lobbyists pour into the favorite non-profits of Congressmen to gain influence and buy face time at charity events. Only since 2007, when congressional ethics rules were changed, has such beneficence had to be reported. The article shows that the reform didn’t come soon enough, since the Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes Remember how Citigroup’s reported $1.6 billion first-quarter profits sparked a rally in financial stocks? Martin Weiss of Weiss Research Inc. thinks Citigroup really suffered a $2.5 billion loss: Citigroup’s $1.6 billion in first-quarter profit would vanish if accounting were more stringent, says Martin Weiss of Weiss Research Inc. in Jupiter, Florida. “The big banks’ profits Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes The Los Angeles Times reports today that the majority of people in Florence, Colorado, do not mind terrorist suspects being moved from Guantánamo to the nearby federal “supermax” prison: The Senate last week overwhelmingly rejected providing funds to close the U.S. military prison in Cuba, saying that no community in America would want terrorism suspects Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes Should the numbers of enemy fighters killed by American forces be published? That’s the topic of the moment at the Wall Street Journal, as summarized by Slate: The WSJ fronts a look at how the U.S. command in Afghanistan has been releasing numbers of every enemy fighter killed in combat. It marks the first time Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes How exactly did the Federal Reserve gain the emergency authority to loan more than $1 trillion of taxpayer money to the banks secretly and without oversight? The Washington Post explains today in a long investigative piece by Binyamin Appelbaum and Neil Irwin. As it turns out, Sen. Chris Dodd slipped the necessary language into an Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes Sonia Sotomayor is not the only recent Obama appointment. She may be the most significant pick, but she is hardly the most intriguing. To wit, I direct your attention to a short Associated Press item, which appeared in papers including the New York Times, about some of President Obama’s recent ambassadorial appointments: President Obama has Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes Recently, I raised some questions about the impact of imprisonment at Guantánamo and how it affected those who were released. For example, I wrote: As for those who returned to jihad, one would like to know whether they were more motivated to do so as a result of their treatment at Guantánamo, or less. In Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes We’ve heard a lot rumbling from the banks in the past several weeks about how committed they are to repaying the TARP money they have received at the soonest opportunity. The motive of such talk is clear: Paying back TARP money would clearly be seen as a sign of strength,” Douglas Elliott, fellow at Brookings Read More