Clippings for the last day of summer

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Moguls Steal Home While Companies Strike Out
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship write for Truthout: "From our offices in Manhattan, we look out on the tall, gleaming skyscrapers that are cathedrals of wealth and power - the Olympus ruled by the gods of finance, the temples of the mighty, the holy of holies, whose priests guard the sacred texts of salvation - the ones containing the secrets of subprime lending and derivatives as mysterious and elusive as the Grail itself."

States Accuse Pentagon Of Threats, Retaliation
Lyndsey Layton writes for The Washington Post: "Environmental officials from several states that have tried to force the Pentagon to clean up polluted military sites say the Defense Department has retaliated by reducing or withholding federal oversight dollars due them. A group representing state environmental officials says California, Colorado, Alabama, Ohio and about a dozen other states have been pressured by the Pentagon to back off the oversight of cleanup at polluted military sites. 'In the worst-case scenarios, the Department of Defense is intimidating a state environmental agency into not pursing enforcement,' said Steve Brown, executive director of the Environmental Council of States."

Making America Stupid
Thomas Friedman puts a real bite on the "lipstick-on-a-pig" line in a New york Times commentary: "Imagine for a minute that attending the Republican convention in St. Paul, sitting in a skybox overlooking the convention floor, were observers from Russia, Iran and Venezuela. And imagine for a minute what these observers would have been doing when Rudy Giuliani led the delegates in a chant of 'drill, baby, drill!'”

The Media's Counter Productive Focus on Negative Campaigning
Jamison Foser writes for Media Matters: "It's getting awfully hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on the television without seeing a news report about the presidential campaign turning negative. It often seems the media consider the tone of the campaign more important than the collapsing economy, the war, our continued failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, and the Bush administration's apparent disdain for the Constitution -- combined."

Palin's Husband Refuses to Testify In Alaska Probe
Reuters reports: "The husband of Gov. Sarah Palin will ignore a subpoena from Alaska lawmakers investigating whether the Republican vice presidential nominee's firing of a state commissioner constituted an abuse of power, officials from her campaign said on Thursday. Todd Palin was among 13 people, including several Palin administration staffers, subpoenaed by a legislative committee to testify in private or at a hearing scheduled for Friday. The governor's husband, however, refuses to answer questions to a panel that he believes is politically motivated, according to campaign officials for Republican presidential candidate John McCain and Palin."

A Spaniard in the Works
Oliver Burkeman writes for The Guardian UK: "Does John McCain know that Zapatero is the Spanish prime minister, and that Spain is in Europe? You'll have to decide for yourself whether the painful interview above, which John McCain gave yesterday to a Spanish journalist in Florida, really does seem to indicate that he didn't know that Jose Luis Zapatero is the prime minister of Spain, and that he perhaps even thinks Spain might be in Latin America."

Return of the Geeks: Bush's Continued Assault on Scientific Integrity
Chris Mooney writes for Mother Jones: "If the Bush administration had consciously plotted to leave office with one last jab at American scientists, it could hardly have done better than the North Atlantic right whale incident. This fish tale has everything: attacks on science, appeasement of special interests, delays in government action - even a cameo by Moby Dick Cheney."

Wall Street and Washington: How the Rules of the Game Have Changed
Steve Fraser writes for TomDispatch.com: "What is Washington to do as the financial system collapses? Clearly, stark differences in approach as well as in public policy have already emerged. Bail-out Bear Stearns and pump up the brokerage and investment business with new lines of credit. Nationalize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the backs of the taxpayer -- but let Lehman drown. Tell the financial community to save itself, after which Bank of America salutes and buys Merrill Lynch. Then, the Fed gets cold feet and decides it can't let an institution the size of the insurance giant AIG go under as well. Washington is left staring into the abyss. The old rules no longer apply. And that's the point. At moments of crisis since the mid-1980s, the relationship between Washington and Wall Street has changed fundamentally, at least when compared to anything that would have been recognizable in the previous century. As a result, the road ahead is dark and unknown."

Second Stimulus Needed to Create Jobs and Revive Our Economy
Michael Ettlinger and David Madland, The Center for American Progress: "With 605,000 jobs lost so far this year and an unemployment rate topping 6 percent, the U.S. economy-and especially its labor market-needs another shot in the arm. The economic stimulus package passed in February gave the economy a helpful prod and staved off an economic contraction over the summer. The Treasury Department and Federal Reserve are intervening in financial markets on a massive scale to hold off a complete collapse wrought by their own and other agencies' incompetent supervision of Wall Street business practices. But other stimulus measures are needed as well."

U. S. Court Is Now Guiding Fewer Nations
Adam Liptak reports in The New York Times: "Judges around the world have long looked to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for guidance, citing and often following them in hundreds of their own rulings since the Second World War. But now American legal influence is waning. Even as a debate continues in the court over whether its decisions should ever cite foreign law, a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices."

Barack Obama: Fire Them All
Responding to John McCain's call for the firing of the chairman of the Security Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox, Obama called for voters to "fire the whole Trickle-Down, On-Your-Own, Look-the-Other-Way crowd in Washington who has led us down this disastrous path. Don't just get rid of one guy, get rid of this administration, get rid of this philosophy, get rid of the do nothing approach and put somebody in there who is going to fight for you."