Now that the House has left for summer recess, with the Senate leaving in a week, it’s a perfect time to look back and see what may have gone wrong in the Democrats’ plan to pass a major health care reform package before this week had passed. Most people tend to focus on the policy [...]

At the center of President Obama’s overhaul strategy for Wall Street are the “stress tests” which will be applied to all financial institutions. But how accurate will the test results be? That will depend on whether the treasury takes off-balance-sheet assets into account, experts say.
This is Danielle Ivory, reporting from the American News Project and [...]

After months of hand-wringing, bailouts and backlash, new GM CEO Fritz Henderson says bankruptcy is still a very real possibility:
The company, he said, has until June 1 to accomplish changes sought by the government, or it will be in bankruptcy. The 60-day deadline should be enough time, but if it becomes evident that the changes [...]

In this economy, would you pay $149.99 for a Bernie Madoff action figure?
Would your answer be influenced if you knew it was a limited edition action figure?
Herobuilders.com is no stranger to controversy, brazenly giving G.I. Joe collectors the meanest enemies possible to wage war on — Saddam, Osama, Hugo Chavez.  Without bad guys, who are [...]

At his new Culture11 digs, John Schwenkler points to a Washington Post article about the impending February 10 National Bankruptcy Day, about which I have written prolifically in recent days.
One of the few saving graces with respect to this legislation, which will devastate small, medium and domestic businesses in numerous industries, has been a recent [...]

Hello Donklephants! I’m Mark, and I regularly blog at (and run) the site Publius Endures.
Ostensibly I self-identify as a libertarian, although I’m not terribly dogmatic and tend not to write much on the more common libertarian themes, focusing instead on taking a sober look at the relationships between interest groups (which I [...]

If Ford declines the taxpayer money, Ford deserves the support of American car buyers. If GM and Chrysler take taxpayer money, they do not deserve the support of American car buyers. Polls show that a majority of Americans oppose taxpayer dollars being used to support the Detroit 3 bailout. Perhaps the right idea is to boycott any company that takes taxpayer funds against the wishes of the majority of American taxpayers.

Hi, this is Danielle Ivory from ANP. My colleague, Lagan Sebert, and I have recently been covering the economic crisis and found ourselves thoroughly intrigued by the bank mergers happening all over the country. We looked into it, connected the dots, and this is what we discovered..
With newfound bailout money in their wallets, [...]

In a stunning display of self absorption, executives at financial giant AIG spent $440,000 on a posh California retreat just days after accepting an $85 billion bailout loan from the federal government.
While the extravagant retreat did not include employees from the troubled financial services division, how on earth could these men and women partake [...]

For years, publishing houses that put out “conservative non-fiction” have used a very tried and true method for pumping up the popularity of their authors’ screeds. They sell a bunch of their books in bulk at cut rate prices to book clubs so titles will show up on The New York Times best seller list. [...]

More twisted logic from the administration that keeps me in stitches nearly every single day.
From IHT:
WASHINGTON: The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.
The Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans [...]

I’ve never been a Don Imus devotee. In fact, I can’t recall the last time I listened to any portion of his show. I’ve never met the man and I know next to nothing about his character or his motivations other than what I’ve garnered during this rancor over his racially charged remarks.
So what [...]

It’s not as simple as that, but the math is pretty stark. GlaxoSmithKline, which spent decades and more than $400 million developing a meningitis vaccine, expects to sell it only in Africa, and at a price that will never cover the cost of development.
As the story notes, this is not an entirely selfless act. Some [...]

You can read my take on Walmart, class and the Democrats over at NeoMugwump.

Many of our commenters on this post (at AmbivaBlog) took issue with the spirited defense of New Deal-rooted American social democracy expressed by Jack Whelan at After the Future. In my opinion Jack is hands down one of the best thinkers and writers on the Web; I’m particularly blown away by his “post-secular” take [...]

“We’re shocked. This is not the outcome we expected.”
So said Ken Lay after his conviction on fraud and conspiracy charges relating to the collapse of Enron. Shocked? Really?
My theory is that he really doesn’t believe he did anything wrong because he never intended anyone to get hurt.
If someone breaks into my house and takes everything [...]

Well here’s an interesting development. Wired Magazine has published the full text of some of the documents that Mark Klein has provided against AT&T. The court had placed a gag order on the Electronic Frontier Foundation to prevent the information from being released to the public, ostensibly because it contained proprietary technical information, [...]

Prometheus: The Science Policy Weblog is an excellent site.
Here they delve into the Peak Oil question. According to their sniffers, the peak moment is coming, and soon, and that’s the consensus of people in the oil biz.
But, since this is a policy-based site, they’re interested in how Big Oil will “frame the issue to [...]

Conservative writer Rod Dreher is starting to get noticed for his new book entitled Crunchy Cons. The book focuses on traditional Republican types who are interested in environmental conservation, supporters of smart growth ideals and wary of if not openly hostile towards multi-national corporations. The group is also quite family-centric and traditionally religious.
In many ways, [...]

Still in denial. Rather sad.