Frank Rich in his column about the GOP meltdown in upstate NY's congressional race:

The same Republicans who once deplored Democrats for refusing to let an anti-abortion dissident, Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, speak at the 1992 Clinton convention now routinely banish any dissenters in their own camp.

Joe Klein, trying to dismiss Glenn Greenwald. And (hat tip to Athenae at First Draft), the most perfect comment ever on a Klein column. Take a bow, juniusredivivus.

In news you may not have heard yet: Some big banks and some not-so-big banks are repaying their bailout money, and the US Treasury is actually seeing a profit.

“The taxpayers want their money back and they want the government out of our banking system,” Representative Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican and a member of the Congressional Oversight Panel examining the relief program, said in an interview.

Profits were hardly high on the list of government priorities last October, when a financial panic was in full swing and the Treasury Department started spending roughly $240 billion to buy preferred shares from hundreds of banks that were facing huge potential losses from troubled mortgages. Bank stocks began teetering after Lehman Brothers collapsed and the government rescued A.I.G., and fear gripped the financial industry around the world.
...
But critics at the time warned that taxpayers might not see any profits, and that it could take years for the banks to repay the loans.

As Congress debated the bailout bill last September that would authorize the Treasury Department to spend up to $700 billion to stem the financial crisis, Representative Mac Thornberry, Republican of Texas, said: “Seven hundred billion dollars of taxpayer money should not be used as a hopeful experiment.”

So far, that experiment is more than paying off. The government has taken profits of about $1.4 billion on its investment in Goldman Sachs, $1.3 billion on Morgan Stanley and $414 million on American Express. The five other banks that repaid the government — Northern Trust, Bank of New York Mellon, State Street, U.S. Bancorp and BB&T — each brought in $100 million to $334 million in profit.

The figure does not include the roughly $35 million the government has earned from 14 smaller banks that have paid back their loans. The government bought shares in these and many other financial companies last fall, when sinking confidence among investors pushed down many bank stocks to just a few dollars a share. As the banks strengthened and became profitable, the government authorized them to pay back the preferred stock, which had been paying quarterly dividends since October.

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Hmm. So it appears that Texas' House Republicans,

Nice Polite Republicans being the on-air home of Cokie Roberts and David Brooks, I've started sleeping through Morning Edition. But this week something strange has happened. Partial transcripts of a couple of NPR interviews by Steve Inskeep as proof:

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If you haven't seen this yet, brilliant parody of the WaPo's Clinton beer video (h/t Shakesville):

Melissa McEwan asks a really good question about the cesspool that is the Post:

I'd love to hear the Washington Post explain how they feel confident their reporters are giving balanced coverage to female public figures when they're willing to unabashedly use sexist slurs in public.

*BOOP*

No transcript.

Bobby Jindal repeated the Reagan line word for word, and now it's nihilism? I seriously do not understand the Conservative mindset.

First we had   Read more…

Suddenly, the Village is concerned with corruption and ethics:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration and the new Congress are quickly handing over to Republicans the same “culture of corruption” issue that Democrats used so effectively against the GOP before coming to power.
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Freshman Sen. Roland Burris, D-Ill., is only the latest embarrassment.

Senate Democrats accepted Burris because they believed what he told them: He was clean. Burris now admits he tried to raise money for Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who authorities say sought to sell President Barack Obama’s former Senate seat.

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Obama apologist Clarence Page let's us know in his December 21, 2008 column that progressives need to get over Obama's pick of Rick Warren as his invocation leader. Now, a few gems, and please count the number of times he uses "pragmatic":

Although some gay activists and other left-progressives might try to dismiss Warren as a hard-line troglodyte, he actually is a pragmatic moderate compared with right-wing evangelical activists like Pat Robertson or the late Rev. Jerry Falwell.

Obviously very few of you have ever read a automobile magazine, a motorcycle magazine, or have ever heard of AFX, Moose Racing, Dennis Kirk, Arctiva, Arvin, Altimate, HJC – seriously. Am I the only one that has seen chicks with guns or car porn. Guess what? Governor Palin, the beauty queen, fits the bill and she is using it; the sexy girl who isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty routine, to draw public opinion. Get over it. It’s not mean (though BIO I appreciate the very diplomatic way you addressed you concerns) it’s the truth.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Unfuckingbelievable.

(via the Make Them Accountable e-mail newsletter)

Here is the second part of my review of Manfred Steger's The Rise of the Global Imaginary (part 1 here). In the last part of the book, Steger focuses on the sometimes conflicting ideologies derived from the global imaginaries.

Starting from the collapse of the USSR, Steger argues (correctly, I think) that the first winning ideology in the decontestation game was market globalism, the ideology that managed to decontest "globalization" in the limited sense of deregulated markets on a global scale.

To explore the tenets of market globalism, Steger reviews the writings of one of its main proponents and popularizers: Thomas Friedman. Needless to say, this is painful to read as is anything related to Thomas Friedman (hence no links), however he is indeed a central figure in the promotion of market globalism. He is also a good representative of the way this ideology was promoted by the political, economic and corporate elites in the 1990s (or the transnational capitalist class as Leslie Sklair calls this group, Friedman belongs to the ideological sub-group of the TCC).

The Sunday New York Times Magazine will have a big feature entitled Is Obama the End of Black Politics

Filled with reporter Matt Bai's Obamessiahanism, the piece is unreadable for all intents and purposes. But it is notable for one big reason -- Bai renders black female politicians invisible in his discussion of black politics.

Of the 15 African Americans whose names get a "link" from the Times, there is only one woman -- Michelle Obama. In addition to the "linked", there are other black political figures quoted or mentioned -- none of whom are women.

that is Maureen Dowd's mind, we find that contrary to what the Public Editor of her own goddamned newspaper very publicly said about her own goddamned columns not two months ago:

"Obama also allowed Hillary supporters to insert an absurd statement into the platform suggesting that media sexism spurred her loss and that “demeaning portrayals of women ... dampen the dreams of our daughters.” This, even though postmortems, including the new raft of campaign memos leaked by Clintonistas to The Atlantic — another move that undercuts Obama — finger Hillary’s horrendous management skills.".

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

I know Robert Fisk is controversial. But he lives and breathes the Middle East and has intimate knowledge of it. In his latest column for the Independent, he reports on the restraint that Al Jazeera has shown considering the amount of atrocities on tape it receives:

""We've trained ourselves not to go to the maximum in our feelings when we see terrible things like this," Ayman Gaballah, Al Jazeera's deputy chief editor, says bleakly. And I can see why. There are other tapes, other outrages too terrible to show. George Bush wanted to bomb the station's headquarters in Doha but staff have shown great sensitivity with what they show the world from Iraq. There is no proof that any of Al Jazeera's reporters was ever tipped off about anti-American attacks before they happened – in Iraq, I investigated these claims in 2003 and 2004 – but plenty of proof that some things are too awful to see.   Read more…

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post. A copy of this was mailed as a letter to the editor Thursday morning.

The honeymoon is over:

And [rightwingers] also accused the media of being in the tank for Obama, which is a standard "liberal media" charge, but which, at least in some cases, was an observable fact (although I think it had less to do with Obama and more with Clinton) and which now makes them all uncomfortable and susceptible to overreaction the other way. There is a reason why the Republicans laid so low during that period.

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vastleft*:

Many people believe the press failed to do its job in the run up to the Iraq war. Has Beltway reporting changed as a result?

Gwen Ifill:

I am not sure what you mean by "Beltway reporting."

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

Via Context Crawler, comes this article from the Washington Post, by Shankar Vedantam on happiness surveys. We take it for granted, and it is supported by surveys, that people tend to be happier when their economic situation is more secure and overall better. That is fairly uncontroversial. And right now, the economy stinks, gas prices are through the roof, so, the mood is on the gloomy side. Straightforward as well. If the economy were better, people would be happier. What is the paradox then?  Read more…

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

Two good pieces on Al Qaeda landed in my Newsreader this week and they both point in the same direction, albeit in different terms. The first one is from Tony Karon who questions the current relevance of Al Qaeda as the big post-9/11 bogeyman. For Karon, Al Qaeda is irrelevant and always was. In this respect, Al Qaeda is comparable to Trotsky... Huh? How does the comparison apply?

"Al-Qaeda is irrelevant, and yet U.S. hegemony in the Middle East is facing an unprecedented challenge from Islamist-nationalist groups. To understand the link between al-Qaeda’s weakness and the greatly expanded strength of groups such as Hamas, Hizballah, the Muslim Brotherhood and, of course, Iran, over the past seven years, it’s worth turning to the 20th century precedent: Leon Trotsky and his followers vs. the larger, nationally-focused parties of the left in the mid 20th century.

Trotsky rejected pragmatism and compromise by nationally-based leftist movements and insisted, instead, that they subordinate their specific national interests and objectives to the fantasy of “world revolution.” And as a result, long before his murder by Stalin, he found himself holed up in Mexico City, manically firing off communiques denouncing all compromise, and being largely ignored by the more substantial parties of the left world-wide. He had become an irrelevant chatterbox, caught up in a frenzy of his own rhetoric while world events simply passed him by. The same can be said of Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri — it is not al-Qaeda, but the likes of Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, and the Muslim Brotherhood that represent the future of the nationalist-Islamist challenge to Western power in the Middle East."

What makes Al Qaeda seemingly powerful are two factors: the one mentioned by Karon, that is, the fact that the United States treats Al Qaeda as this omnipresent threat of global proportion and reacts to every action as if it were the beginnings of a terrorist apocalypse. The second one, which I think is relevant here and contributes to the first, is that fact that Al Qaeda, being a non-state group, articulates itself opportunistically to nation-based movements (Algeria, Philippines, Indonesia, or Iraq).  Read more…

As it happens, (and in light of today's endorsement) Naomi Klein has a column in the Guardian regarding Obama's economic policies. And she's not impressed, to say the least:

MoveOn recently allowed members to sign a virtual get well, be well card to be delivered to Senator Kennedy that contained the message that the entire liberal/progressive community was with him in his battle against the recently diagnosed cancer he will fighting.

Today he is in surgery doing just that.

The MoveOn card allowed members to add a personal word of their own, and I decided mine would be a simple one line quote - the last line of the speech the Senator had given to the deeply divided Democratic Convention in 1980. To make sure I remembered correctly, I consulted the speech.

Reading the speech again, one of many times I've turned back to it, it's relevance to the divisive primary we are currently living through fairly shouted at me.

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog

My blog bookmark listing is getting thinner every day. That goes along with the shrinking respect I had for some bloggers in the past. Boy has this primary been a reality check. Here is someone who used to be one of my favorite bloggers, Hilzoy, subbing for Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly :  Read more…