A Nonprofit, Reader-Supported News Organization
Last Saturday, the Washington Post ran an article on Jay Bybee, a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and former assistant attorney general in the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel. In his role as the Justice Department’s issuer of legal opinions, Bybee was responsible for the various “torture memoranda” and signed perhaps […]
On Newsweek’s website, Michael Hirsh writes under the headline “The old system refuses to change. Is Obama getting the message?” He describes a late-March meeting between six Democratic senators, President Obama and his economic advisers—a meeting that has gone essentially unreported: …while they supported Obama, they were worried. The financial reform policies the president was […]
Apparently, I am not alone in being troubled by current large-media practices in reference to leaked material and unnamed sources. You can see what I had to say previously here and here, when I focused on the New York Times. Now comes Slate’s Today’s Papers column to note some similar problems at the Washington Post […]
The New York Times published a glowing profile yesterday of Steven Rattner, Obama’s lead adviser on the car-industry rescue. It’s so laudatory, in fact, that the reader is left wondering why someone of Rattner’s elite stature and stunning qualifications would accept a job that is clearly so beneath him—save perhaps his exceedingly noble commitment to […]
In an era when the public is demanding accountability, how accountable is the intelligence sphere? Employing hundreds of thousands and spending hundreds of billions each year, it essentially answers to no one. Even the people’s representatives tasked with riding herd, the congressional intelligence committees, have nearly always been kept in the dark, sworn to silence, […]
The Wall Street Journal has disclosed that Lloyd Blankfein was present at the meetings with Tim Geithner and Hank Paulson when the decision was made to bail out AIG, which had sold credit default swaps to Goldman Sachs on which AIG was unable to make good. Goldman’s stock had plummeted to 35, wiping out vast […]
They are really coming. Official investigations of the George W. Bush administration are on the way. Karl Rove and Harriet Miers have just agreed to limited testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, which is looking into the seemingly politically-motivated firings of seven U.S. Attorneys. Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and Patrick Leahy, his senate counterpart, […]
The panic over government getting directly involved in running companies that can’t survive without federal support may be misguided. New York Times business reporter Louis Uchitelle makes this point, noting that As General Motors and Chrysler struggle to remain solvent, the railroad bailout of a generation ago could offer a template to the Obama administration […]
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has resisted calls from Congress that he release the names of the banks that were recipients of the bailout money the Fed gave to AIG to prevent it from collapsing. AIG insured its counterparties against losses from mortgage backed derivatives. The Fed poured $85 billion into AIG, which paid out $37.3 […]
Research support for this story was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. Published in conjunction with The Nation. IN THE CLINTONS’ PURSUIT OF POWER, there is no such thing as a strange bedfellow. One recently exposed inamorato was Norman Hsu, the mysterious businessman from Hong Kong who brought in $850,000 to Hillary […]
Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a ‘real shocker.’ But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades […]
Jack Quinn served as Vice President Gore’s Chief of Staff, and later as Counsel to President Clinton. Now he is a partner in a political consulting and lobbying firm with a close friend of Tom DeLay, and together, they have represented clients who want to drill in fragile areas of Alaska, put the screws to […]