Clippings for 13 November 2008

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Goodbye and Good Riddance
Paul Waldman writes for The American Prospect: "After eight years of President Bush, we almost don't know how to function without him - almost. But before we move on, we should pause to remember just what we're leaving behind. Goodbye, we can say at last, to the most powerful man in the world being such a ridiculous buffoon, incapable of stringing together two coherent sentences. Goodbye to cringing with dread every time our president steps onto the world stage, sure he'll say or do something to embarrass us all. Goodbye to being represented by a man who embodies everything our enemies want the people of the world to believe about America - that we are ignorant, cruel, and only care about foreign countries when we decide to stomp on them."

A Closer Look at Obama's Energy Plan
Mark Clayton writes for The Christian Science Monitor: "If President-elect Barack Obama enacts the energy plan he laid out during his campaign, American taxpayers will each get a $500 rebate check - funded by a windfall profits taxes on big oil companies. But that's just for starters. Besides taxing oil giants more, Senator Obama's detailed 30-point energy agenda calls for big changes to address carbon emissions, fuel efficiency for vehicles, and domestic and renewable power and efficiency."

Cold War Hawks Nesting With Obama
Robert Scheer writes for Truthdig: "So, Vladimir Putin was right: It was Georgia that started the war with Russia, and once again it was President Bush who got caught in a lie. As The New York Times reported last week, 'Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the long-standing Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.'"

Obama's Toughest Challenge: America's Energy Crunch Comes Home
Michael T. Klare writes for TomDispatch: "Of all the challenges facing President Barack Obama next January, none is likely to prove as daunting, or important to the future of this nation, as that of energy. After all, energy policy -- so totally mishandled by the outgoing Bush-Cheney administration -- figures in each of the other major challenges facing the new president, including the economy, the environment, foreign policy, and our Middle Eastern wars. Most of all, it will prove a monumental challenge because the United States faces an energy crisis of unprecedented magnitude that is getting worse by the day."

Guantanamo Closure Called Obama Priority
Peter Finn reports for The Washington Post: "The Obama administration will launch a review of the classified files of the approximately 250 detainees at Guantanamo Bay immediately after taking office, as part of an intensive effort to close the U.S. prison in Cuba, according to people who advised the campaign on detainee issues. Announcing the closure of the controversial detention facility would be among the most potent signals the incoming administration could send of its sharp break with the Bush era, according to the advisers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak for the president-elect."

The New Liberalism: How the Economic Crisis Can Help Obama Redefine the Democrats
George Packer reports in The New Yorker: "Barack Obama's decisive defeat of John McCain is the most important victory of a Democratic candidate since 1932. It brings to a close another conservative era, one that rose amid the ashes of the New Deal coalition in the late sixties, consolidated its power with the election of Ronald Reagan, in 1980. Obama will enter the White House at a moment of economic crisis worse than anything the nation has seen since the Great Depression; the old assumptions of free-market fundamentalism have, like a charlatan's incantations, failed to work, and the need for some 'new machinery' is painfully obvious. But what philosophy of government will characterize it?"

America the Illiterate
Chris Hedges writes for Truthdig.com: "We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities. "

College Loan Slavery: Student Debt Is Getting Way Out of Hand
Nan Mooney writes for AlterNet: "Raya Golden thought she was handling college in a responsible way. She didn't apply until she felt ready to dedicate herself to her studies. She spread her schooling across five years so she could work part-time throughout. She checked that her school, the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, had a high post-graduate employment rate. But there were two things she hadn't counted on. The first was the $75,000 in nonsubsidized federal student loans she'd have to take out for tuition and those living expenses her part-time jobs selling hotdogs and making lattes couldn't cover. The second was that she'd graduate into a workforce teetering on the edge of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression."

The Midnight Deregulation Express
Matthew Blake writes for The Washington Independent: "It's something of a tradition - administrations using their final weeks in power to ram through a slew of federal regulations. With the election grabbing the headlines, outgoing federal bureaucrats quietly propose and finalize rules that can affect the health and safety of millions."

In Final Days, Bush Pushes for Iraq's Oil
Maya Schenwar writes for Truthout: "As the Bush administration rumbles to an end, it is pushing with increasing urgency for a commitment to a long-term US presence in Iraq. Though the military aspect of this 'commitment' has garnered substantial publicity, the administration is equally invested in the economic aspect: securing US control over Iraqi oil before Bush leaves office, according to experts in the field."

Probe Sought of Bush Handling of Alaska Oil-Spill Case
Renee Schoof reports for McClatchy Newspapers: "An environmental watchdog group asked the Department of Justice's inspector general on Monday to investigate whether the department had prematurely halted a criminal prosecution of BP for a 2006 oil spill in Alaska. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility filed the complaint on behalf of Scott West, who as the special agent in charge for the Environmental Protection Agency participated in the federal and state investigation of the spill."

Prescription Drugs Kill Three Times as Many Americans as Illegal Drugs
David Gutierrez, Natural News: "A report by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission has concluded that prescription drugs have outstripped illegal drugs as a cause of death. An analysis of 168,900 autopsies conducted in Florida in 2007 found that three times as many people were killed by legal drugs as by cocaine, heroin and all methamphetamines put together. According to state law enforcement officials, this is a sign of a burgeoning prescription drug abuse problem."

Is Our Internet Future in Danger?
Galen Gruman and Tome KAneshige write for InfoWorld: "The digital Disneyland of the future -- where we freely work and play online -- may be at risk. Why? Because, some argue, broadband carriers can't support it. The Internet's "free ride" culture has led to more people downloading gigabytes of data at practically no cost. "

Obama Media Policy: Broadband and Breaking up Telecom/Cable/Broadcast Monopolies
Matt Stoller blogs for Open Left: "I've been blogging about media policy for a few years, so I have pretty good sources on net neutrality, the FCC and media policy. Whenever I have a really tough question, I'm usually referred to Harold Feld, a brilliant lawyer at the Media Access Project who blogs about communications policy and politics at his incomparably great site, Wetmachine. His work and knowledge has been essentially to the media reform movement that has successfully placed openness and the protection of the internet in an important position in the Obama administration's priority list."

What do "White Spaces" Mean for Public Media?
Jessica Clark writes for the Center for Social Media: "The FCC decision on white spaces could mean more than just broadband access for millions of Americans. It could hold the key to more evenly distributed access to the public airwaves. And the public won't just be consuming media on open networks, they'll be producing it, too. "