Catfish Wallow

04-08-09

The Geithner-Summers Plan is Even Worse Than We Thought (huffingtonpost) "Insiders can easily game the system created by Geithner and Summers to cost up to a trillion dollars or more to the taxpayers."
Bernanke has embarked on the most radical and ruinous financial rescue plan in history (onlinejournal) ". . . the Fed has already lent or committed $12.8 trillion trying to stabilize the financial system after the bursting of Wall Street’s speculative mega-bubble. Now Bernanke wants to dig an even bigger hole, by creating programs that will provide up to $2 trillion of credit to financial institutions that purchase toxic assets from banks or securities backed by consumer loans."

Restore the Rule of Law And Legal Accountability -- What Are a Few Broken Promises Among Friends? -- What is the difference between a bad person doing bad things and a good person doing bad things? Obama is more interested in programs than principles. He is frittering away the rights we have as citizens.

Glenn Greenwald: Keith Olbermann's scathing criticism of Obama's secrecy/immunity claims (salon) -- Watch these videos.
Glenn Greenwald: Obama, the ICRC Report and Ongoing Suppression (salon) "Obama has repeatedly done the exact opposite of what he vowed he would do: rather than 'seek full accountability for past offenses,' he has been working feverishly to block such accountability, by embracing the same radical Bush/Cheney views and rhetoric regarding presidential secrecy powers that caused so much controversy and anger for the last several years."
The CIA Torture Cover Up (thedailybeast) ". . . a number of CIA officials implicated in the torture program not only remain at the highest levels of the agency, but are also advising Panetta. Panetta’s attempt to suppress the issue is making Bush’s policy into the Obama administration’s dirty laundry."
Goodbye, Bill of Rights (antiwar) "History also teaches us that once a right is suspended, in all likelihood it is gone forever."

Do U.S. drones kill Pakistani extremists or recruit them? (mcclatchydc) ". . . concerns are growing among U.S. intelligence and military officials that the strikes are bolstering the Islamic insurgency by prompting Islamist radicals to disperse into the country's heartland."
New Dept. of War Budget, Not Quite a Fundamental Shift (ips) "They're calling it a fundamental shift and that's both true and false," said Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. "It's true because their budget proposes the most ambitious set of cuts to well-entrenched weapons systems since the early 1990s." "It's false, though, because this budget perpetuates the upward trajectory of defense spending, it's higher than any of the Bush budgets that preceded it, and it increases funding for some programs that I think are a mistake," Pemberton continued.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009