NEW YORK TIMES: Describing the government’s financial bailout plan as “extensive, powerful and transformative,” Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said on Tuesday that the injection of $250 billion into the nation’s banks was needed to restore confidence and avoid a collapse of the financial system. Speaking shortly after President Bush used similar terms to describe the proposal, Mr. Paulson said the Treasury would make $250 billion available to banks to help recapitalize those banks and to get them lending again, among themselves and to businesses and consumers. “The needs of our economy require that our financial institutions not take […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR His starring role as George W. Bush in the new Oliver Stone film W. is the latest in a series of high-profile jobs for Josh Brolin — including the Oscar-winner No Country for Old Men. He was also seen recently in American Gangster and In The Valley of Elah. ALSO, Curtis Sittenfeld‘s new novel American Wife is about a kind, bookish, young woman who marries a wealthy charismatic young man who eventually becomes president. It’s based on the life of Laura Bush. One reviewer calls it “a compassionate, illuminating, and beautifully rendered portrait.” PREVIOUSLY: A Comedy Of Terrors
MESSAGE TO INQUIRER EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR: Even A Broken Watch Is Right Twice A Day
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with three more execrable characters. Yet, let the McCain campaign raise the issue, and the mainstream media begin fulminating about dirty campaigning tinged with racism and McCarthyite guilt by association. But associations are important. They provide a significant insight into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a potential president as new, unknown, opaque and self-contained as Obama. With the economy overshadowing everything, it may be too late politically […]
FILE UNDER X: UFOs Over Springsteen Rally
Filmed by somebody in the crowd at last Saturday’s Bruce Springsteen Rally For Change concert in the Ben Franklin Parkway. Our in-house paranormal analysts have reviewed this footage and concluded it can only be one of two things: NSA surveillance satellites monitoring large public political gatherings that might be a threat to NSA surveillance satellites monitoring large public political gatherings. Either that or it’s McCain, Snoopy and the Red Baron.
OBAMA: Time For A Moratorium On Foreclosures
SENATOR BARACK OBAMA: For those Americans in danger of losing their homes, today I’m also proposing a three-month moratorium on foreclosures. If you are a bank or lender that is getting money from the rescue plan that passed Congress, and your customers are making a good-faith effort to make their mortgage payments and re-negotiate their mortgages, you will not be able to foreclose on their home for three months. We need to give people the breathing room they need to get back on their feet. It also means promoting a new ethic of responsibility. Part of the reason this crisis […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Case For Change
THE NEW YORKER: Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals? The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the […]
BIRTHDAY BLUES: Lenny Bruce Died For Your Sins
[Illustration by NEWTASTY] WIKIPEDIA: Lenny Bruce (October 13, 1925 – August 3, 1966), born Leonard Alfred Schneider, was an American stand-up comedian, writer, social critic and satirist of the 1950s and 1960s. His 1964 conviction in an obscenity trial led to the first posthumous pardon in New York history.On October 4, 1961 Bruce was arrested for obscenity[9] at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco; he had used the word cocksucker and riffed that “‘to’ is a preposition, ‘come’ is a verb” and that the sexual context of “come” is so common that it bears no weight, and that if someone […]
MCCAIN: I Heart Cheney & Rumsfeld
It is all about judgment. SALON: Republicans are already starting to gird themselves for a Nov. 4 debacle. A front-page story in Sunday’s New York Times featured GOP leaders lamenting the disarray in the McCain campaign. More ominous for McCain are the results of a secret-ballot survey by National Journal magazine of roughly 100 prominent Republican campaign consultants. Freed from the demands of on-the-record spin, 80 percent of these operatives admitted that it was highly likely that Obama would win the White House. The other 20 percent — the cockeyed optimists of the GOP camp — predicted that the election […]
IMPERIAL HUBRIS: Rome Did Not Fall In A Day
NEW YORK TIMES: At the turn of the 20th century, toward the end of a brutal and surprisingly difficult victory in the Second Boer War, the people of Britain began to contemplate the possibility that theirs was a nation in decline. They worried that London’s big financial sector was draining resources from the industrial economy and wondered whether Britain’s schools were inadequate. In 1905, a new book — a fictional history, set in the year 2005 — appeared under the title, “The Decline and Fall of the British Empire.” The crisis of confidence led to a sharp political reaction. In […]
HOCKEY BOMB: Palin Roundly Booed By Flyers Fans
FORBES: Palin Gets Booed in Philly! This is sure to be the headline splashed across television and newspapers Sunday morning, the day after the Republican Vice Presidential candidate and hockey mom from Alaska drops the puck at the ceremonial face-off for the Philadelphia Flyers’ home opener on Saturday night at the soon-to-need-a-name-change Wachovia Center. What will be missing from the news: the jeers were deserved. As every sports fan knows, no one is safe in front of Philadelphia fans—they have never needed a reason to boo anyone in their ballpark, stadium or arena. As usual though, the boring chorus of […]
OBAMA: ‘Our Destiny Is Not Written For Us, But By Us’
[Photos by TIFFANY YOON] STARS AND STRIPES: Rally For Change, Progress Plaza, Philadelphia, 8 AM REMARKS OF SENATOR BARACK OBAMA: We meet at a moment of great uncertainty for America. In recent weeks, we’ve seen a growing financial crisis that’s threatening not only banks and businesses, but your economic security as well. It’s getting harder to get a loan for that new car or that small business or that college you’ve dreamed of attending. And in recent days, millions of Americans have lost more of their investments and hard-earned retirement savings as the stock market has plunged. I know these […]
HOT DOCUMENT: Letter From Obama
Jonathan — I’m coming to Philadelphia tomorrow, Saturday, October 11th. I’ll be visiting four different neighborhoods and talking to folks about what we can do together to change this country. See the details below and RSVP for the event in your neighborhood. Hope to see you there, Barack P.S. — Here’s the invitation for the event: This Saturday, October 11th, please join Barack Obama for rallies in Philadelphia, where he will talk about his vision for creating the kind of change we need. Change We Need Rallies with Barack Obama Saturday, October 11th Progress Plaza 1501 N. Broad Street Mayfair […]
GAYDAR: Sarah, You CANNOT ‘Pray Away The Gay’
BY AARON STELLA GAYDAR EDITOR Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, an organization fighting right wing lies and the “ex-gay” fraud, recently urged Sarah Palin to “come out” about her church’s beliefs about ex-gay ministries. Palin’s church supported an ex-gay conference that was held in Anchorage on September 10th, 2008. According to TWO, Palin agrees that homosexuality can be cured through prayer—so every god-fearing Christian needs to join the crusade. What Palin’s church and other religious sects affiliated with ex-gay ministries withhold from the public is how few homosexuals have been “cured” and how many have run […]