Bill Ackman Was Right: MBIA, Ambac on `Ratings Cliff'

By Christine Richard

June 18 (Bloomberg) -- Bill Ackman was right: the world's largest bond insurers aren't worthy of a AAA credit rating and may be headed for the bottom of the scale.

Ackman, the 42-year-old hedge fund manager who says he stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars betting against MBIA Inc. and Ambac Financial Group Inc. if they go bankrupt, will tell investors at a conference in New York today that losses posted by bond insurers may threaten to breach the capital limits allowed by regulators, making them insolvent.

Beck inflated estimated ANWR oil production by nearly 7,000 percent

Summary: Glenn Beck falsely claimed that "drilling in ANWR alone would yield 100 million barrels a day." In fact, according to Energy Department researchers, if the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is opened for drilling for oil in 2008, the estimated peak production would yield, at most, 1.45 million barrels a day in 2028.

General who probed Abu Ghraib says Bush officials committed war crimes

By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account.

The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

Karl Rove's Trojan Horse among the SMU Mustangs

To obtain the George W. Bush presidential library, Southern Methodist University has been required to accept an autonomous partisan institute on campus. Karl Rove is in the middle of the planning of and fund-raising for this Trojan horse project. The institute will give Rove the resources he needs to try to re-write the narrative of the Bush presidency, as well promoting his larger vision -- the domination of the right-wing of the Republican Party in American politics. In July the United Methodist Church, which owns SMU "lock stock and barrel," has one last chance to stop Rove.

Bear Stearns ex-managers charged

Two former managers at investment bank Bear Stearns have been charged with fraud related to two hedge funds which collapsed in June last year.

Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, who managed the funds, were arrested in New York and later granted bail.

Thomas Frank: Lord, Make Me Conservative, But Not Yet

June 18, 2008; Page A13

The Republican Party is in tatters, but conservatism shares no portion of the blame. Or so former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay wrote in a cheering column a few weeks ago.

The movement's ideals of "reform" and "justice" did not fail, intoned this towering figure of virtue; conservatism just never got a proper shot in the first place. "To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton," Mr. DeLay wrote, "conservatism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."

Army Overseer Tells of Ouster Over KBR Stir

By JAMES RISEN

Published: June 17, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops.

The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.

Economists: Health Cost Crisis Coming

Experts Say Congress Must Change Spending on Health Care

By Mike Lillis 06/17/2008

In what is fast becoming a repetitive exercise, some of Washington's top economists warned lawmakers Tuesday that health-care spending threatens to devour the nation's economy unless Congress steps in with sweeping reforms.

The message is hardly news on Capitol Hill, where some policy-makers have sounded a similar alarm for years. But forecasting a fiscal doomsday is easier than convincing a divided Congress to prevent it. Indeed, despite the urgency of the health spending warnings, lawmakers agree that no major reforms are coming this election year.

Roadmap to Torture

Testimony Reveals How Torture Resistance Training, 'SERE,' Became Pentagon's 'Enhanced' Interrogations

By Spencer Ackerman 06/18/2008

In August 2004, a Defense Dept. panel convened to investigate detainee abuse after the Abu Ghraib scandal issued its much-anticipated report. Interrogation techniques designed for use at Guantanamo Bay, which President George W. Bush had decreed outside the scope of the Geneva Conventions, had "migrated" to Iraq, which Bush recognized was under Geneva, concluded panel chairman James Schlesinger, a former defense secretary. Schlesinger's panel, however, did not explain which officials ordered the abusive techniques to transfer across continents -- or how and why they became Pentagon policy in the first place.

The Real Cause of the Mortgage Crisis: Conservative Opposition to Sensible Financial Standards

THE POLITICS

Home prices are falling and foreclosures rising across the country. With one in six mortgaged homes now worth less than the loan balance, our entire economy is at risk. Few Americans are aware that the housing bubble was the natural result of reckless Bush administration policies. Let’s place blame where it’s due and outline a series of progressive solutions to the problem.

THE ISSUE

One of every 11 mortgage holders in America faces major loan problems. During the first quarter of 2008, nearly 9 percent of all mortgage holders were delinquent or in foreclosure, the highest rate since recordkeeping began in 1979 [The New York Times [23]]. Foreclosure filings more than doubled from 2007 to 2008 [RealtyTrac [24]].

The Taliban Are Back. What Now?

The long road to fixing Afghanistan winds through Pakistan.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, June 17, 2008, at 6:26 PM ET

What is going on in Afghanistan?

In the past week, Taliban fighters staged a prison raid and freed at least 1,000 of their brethren. Soon after, they mounted offensives on seven villages and are moving in on the southern stronghold of Kandahar. One of the fiercest Taliban leaders, Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, a major U.S. ally during the days of resistance to Soviet occupiers, is bringing in foreign jihadists from all over the region to help his cause.

Mr. Bush v. the Bill of Rights

In the waning months of his tenure, President Bush and his allies are once again trying to scare Congress into expanding the president’s powers to spy on Americans without a court order.

This week, the White House and Democratic and Republican leaders on Capitol Hill hope to announce a “compromise” on a domestic spying bill. If they do, it will be presented as an indispensable tool for protecting the nation’s security that still safeguards our civil liberties. The White House will paint opponents as weak-kneed liberals who do not understand and cannot stand up to the threat of terrorism.

Can the U.S. Thrive as Other Powers Rise?

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet
Posted on June 18, 2008, Printed on June 18, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/88453/

Looking beyond U.S. borders, this is a rare moment. Not one of the world's powers is an enemy. The threats to our security do not come from rival nation states. With some threats like climate change -- as Walt Kelly put it via Pogo -- the enemy is us. Even the greatest external violent threats have roots not in powerful nations, but in instability, in states at risk of failure. Our ability to solve all major global problems is compromised or blocked by tribal conflicts, the failure of national institutions, and the resulting breakdown of authority and accountability.

A new book, The Next American Century: How the U.S. Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise by Nina Hachigian and Mona Sutphen, argues that it's good for us that other pivotal nations grow wealthier and stronger. We need them on our side so that together we can solve global problems of peace, climate, health, and justice.

Comfortable retirement a fading dream for many

(06-15) 17:35 PDT -- Ruth Britton enjoys her part-time work as a college instructor. But, at 69, there are plenty of other things the Greenbrae resident would like to do - volunteer, write, take classes, travel.

The problem is, with the cost of living rising and the value of her investments falling, Britton can't do without the money she gets from teaching. She's already put off retirement several years. Now, she says she may have to stay on the job four or five years more.

Tomgram: John Feffer, Are We All North Koreans Now?

It's been a curious experience, each evening recently, turning on the NBC or ABC nightly news, with historic levels of flooding in Iowa as the lead story. ("Uncharted territory," National Weather Service meteorologist Brian Pierce called these floods.) After all, there are those stunning images of Cedar Rapids, a small city now simply in the water. The National Weather Service has already termed what's happened to the city an "historic hydrologic event," with the Cedar River topping its banks at, or above, half-millennium highs. (That's an every 500 year "event"!)

But here's the special strangeness of this TV moment: Network news loves weather disasters, and yet, as with historic droughts in the Southeast or Southwest, as with the hordes of tornadoes coursing through the center of the country, as with so many other extreme weather phenomena of recent times, including flooding in Southern China and the Burmese cyclone, when it comes to the Midwestern floods, night after night no TV talking head seems ever to mention the possibility that climate change/global warming might somehow be involved. (Nor, by the way, are our major newspapers any better on the subject.) As an omission, it's kinda staggering, really, for an event already being labeled "a Midwestern Katrina."

Glenn Greenwald: John Yoo's ongoing falsehoods in service of limitless government power

One of the most reliable methods for knowing that a position is unsustainable is that its advocates must employ outright falsehoods in order to support it. In a Wall St. Journal Op-Ed today, John Yoo defends the right of the Bush administration to imprison people at Guantanamo indefinitely with no judicial review and condemns last week's Supreme Court habeas corpus ruling as "judicial imperialism of the highest order." To do so, Yoo asserts what have become the now-standard though still-blatant falsehoods on this issue.

Myth-makers caught short in oil speculation

By R M Cutler

BRUSSELS - As in military science there is the danger of "fighting the last war", so in economic science there is the danger of puncturing the last bubble. This is especially hazardous when what one has is not, in fact, a bubble. Then, the myths of such a bubble are what need puncturing. So it is today with oil prices, which this week hit a record US$139.89 a barrel.

Is demand actually decreasing in India and China? No, demand is still rising; it is the rate of increase of demand that is declining, and also not by much. Or, perhaps, is oil a hedge against dollar weakness? "The dollar," said Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty at the Group of Eight (G-8)meeting of his colleagues last weekend in Osaka, "is a market currency." And "one does not interfere with a market currency".

Scarcity in an Age of Plenty

As food and fuel prices continue to increase the world must look to new patterns of consumption and production

by Joseph Stiglitz

Around the world, protests against soaring food and fuel prices are mounting. The poor — and even the middle classes — are seeing their incomes squeezed as the global economy enters a slowdown. Politicians want to respond to their constituents’ legitimate concerns, but do not know what to do.

In the United States, both Hillary Clinton and John McCain took the easy way out, and supported a suspension of the gasoline tax, at least for the summer. Only Barack Obama stood his ground and rejected the proposal, which would have merely increased demand for gasoline — and thereby offset the effect of the tax cut.

Izzy Stone, Patron Saint of Bloggers

by Jeff Cohen

It was nineteen years ago this week that I.F. (Izzy) Stone died. The legendary blogger was 81.

Confused? You say he died years before web blogs were invented?

Well, yeah, but when I think of today’s blunt, fact-based online hell-raisers, my mind quickly flashes on Izzy Stone. You may think of Josh Marshall or Glenn Greenwald or Arianna Huffington. I think of Izzy.

Before there was an Internet, Izzy Stone was doing the work we associate with today’s best bloggers. Like them, he was obsessed with citing original documents and texts. But before search engines, Izzy had to consume ten newspapers per day — and physically visit government archives and press offices, and personally pore over thousands of words in the Congressional Record. That’s how he repeatedly scooped the gullible, faux-objective MSM of his day in exposing government deceit, like that propelling the Vietnam War.

Matt Taibbi: Full Metal McCain

Evening, June 3rd, in a muggy, dragonfly-beswarmed place called the Pontchartrain Center, just outside New Orleans. Half a continent away, amid yet another legacy-smashing fusillade of unsolicited invective from Bill Clinton, the excruciating Obama-Hillary mess is finally wrapping up, in a pair of anticlimactic primaries somewhere over the darkened plains of Montana and South Dakota. But here in the Big Easy, John McCain has chosen this moment to mount his first general-election attack against the Great Satanic Liberal Enemy — who, as luck would have it, turns out to be a Negro intellectual from Harvard who's never served in the military. And this is supposed to be a bad year for Republicans?