McCain Chooses Self-Described “Hockey Mom” as VP

Posted on August 30, 2008 by Jeff Q

The McCain campaign has been relentlessly attacking Obama on not having “experience”, because, you know, he only first became a state Senator in ’97, and then McCain taps Sarah Palin, who would be the least experienced vice president in U.S. history, having only been a governor of the crowned-king of backwater states for 20 months. Only 2 months ago she said she said she couldn’t answer whether she would accept a VP nomination because she didn’t know what the Vice President did, and now she’s going to be 1 heart attack away from the most powerful office in the world. Oh yeah, and she’s also being investigated by the ethics committee on charges that she tried to get a state trooper fired for divorcing her sister. But hey, she’s perfect for Republicans, since she can pick up all the Hillary PUMAs (Party Loyalty My Assers) who wanted a woman in the White House.

http://www.wptv.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=d7ed3b72-8de4-481e-9a9c-68a2a3a12090

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/08/29/palin-corruption-investigation/

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/08/29/sarah-palin-july-2008-i-dont-even-know-what-the-vice-president-does/

http://www.thrfeed.com/2008/08/commander-in-ch.html

Also, a new report from a non-partisan military think tank says the military actions rarely solves terrorism.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9351/index1.html

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Also, since it’s the anniversary or Katrina and I’m going to be running away from Gustav later this evening (but really because I was talking about this with my friend Im), I’m reposting this quote from Mary Landrieu it in a Slate article about how Bush spent more time on his own damage control than Hurricane Katrina:

“So George and I went up in the helicopter and for three hours his jaw was dropping. Then I said, ‘George, before we finish I have to show you one positive thing because I can’t send you back to Washington to produce a story that shows nothing but devastation and disaster.’ So I told the pilot to tack right so I can show George the 17th Street Canal and the work that was going on there. I swear as my name is Mary Landrieu I thought that what I saw with the president was still there — people working, trucks, sandbags, everything. Then I looked down and saw one little crane. It was like someone took a knife and stabbed me through my heart. I lost it.” There, in the cabin of the helicopter, as they flew above the breached canal below them, Landrieu sat devastated.

“I could not believe that the president of the United States, staged by Karl Rove himself, had come down to the city of New Orleans and basically put up a stage prop. It was like you had gone to a studio in California and filmed a movie. They put the props up and the minute we were gone they took them down. All the dump trucks were gone. All the Coast Guard people were gone. It was an empty spot with one little crane. It was the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life. At that moment I knew what was going on and I’ve been a changed woman ever since. It truly changed my life.”

http://www.salon.com/books/excerpt/2008/06/06/rove_katrina/index2.html

Even the head of FEMA who Bush installed, Michael Brown, has admitted that there was no plan and that he was told by White House officials after the disaster to lie to put a more positive spin on the Federal response:

BROWN: The lie was that we were working as a team and that everything was working smoothly. And how we could go out, and I beat myself up almost daily for allowing this to have happened, to sit there and go on television and talk about how things are working well, when you know they are not behind the scenes, is just wrong.

O’DONNELL: So let me get this clear. Someone in the White House was telling you to lie?

BROWN: Well, yes. They give you the talking points. Whenever you go out to do any interviews they always have the talking points. Here’s what the message for today is and here’s how we are going to spin everything. That’s just the way Washington, D.C. works and that’s just wrong.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14570837/

Bush Warned Before Katrina Hit

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11627394/

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And let me also repost the stuff I’ve said about the “liberal media”:

It’s a simple fact that there are a lot more conservative talk shows than liberal talk shows on basic cable and the radio, due mostly thanks to the huge tilt from Fox News. As far as I know, Countdown With Keith Olberman is the only openly liberal television news show on cable, discounting comedy shows (I don’t have reception right now, so this may not be up to date).

Here’s a comparison I did of Fox News vs. CNN/CNN Headline News pundits:

http://bahumuth.bitfreedom.com/liberalconservative-news-pundit-comparison

“Look at the op-ed pages. Compare the number of conservative columnists with liberal columnists. Listen to talk radio. Count the number of nationally syndicated liberal talk-show hosts. Watch the cable TV talk shows. Count the number of liberal and conservative pundits. Conservatives far outnumber liberals.”

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/02/21/column.billpress/

“Unlike BBC’s network of reporters and bureaus, CNN International makes extensive use of affiliated reporters that are local to, and often directly affected by, the events they are reporting. The effect is a more immediate, less detached style of on-the-ground coverage. This has done little to stem criticism, largely from Middle Eastern nations, that CNN International reports news from a pro-American perspective. This is a marked contrast to domestic criticisms that often portray CNN as having a “liberal” or “anti-American” bias.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN

“Examining the ‘Liberal Media’ Claim”

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2447

“How the Liberal Media Myth is Created”

http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/003973.php

http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/003980.php

“Fox’s vitality comes as a consequence of another significant change in the media landscape. Political polarization is increasingly reflected in the public’s news viewing habits. Since 2000, the Fox News Channel’s gains have been greatest among political conservatives and Republicans. More than half of regular Fox viewers describe themselves as politically conservative (52%), up from 40% four years ago. At the same time, CNN, Fox’s principal rival, has a more Democrat-leaning audience than in the past.
The public’s evaluations of media credibility also are more divided along ideological and partisan lines. Republicans have become more distrustful of virtually all major media outlets over the past four years, while Democratic evaluations of the news media have been mostly unchanged. As a result, only about half as many Republicans as Democrats rate a variety of well-known news outlets as credible a list that includes ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, NPR, PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time and U.S. News and World Report.”

http://people-press.org/report/215/news-audiences-increasingly-politicized

“A new study shows that patrons of Rupert Murdoch’s brand of journalism are most likely to be misinformed about key facts of the Iraq war.”

http://www.alternet.org/story/16892/

“Survey: Daily Show/Colbert Viewers Most Knowledgable, Fox News Viewers Rank Lowest”

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/16/daily-show-fox-knowledge/

Fox News Airs Altered Photos of Journalists

http://mediamatters.org/items/200807020002?f=h_top

“In covering the Iraq war last year, 73 percent of the stories on Fox News included the opinions of the anchors and journalists reporting them, a new study says.

By contrast, 29 percent of the war reports on MSNBC and 2 percent of those on CNN included the journalists’ own views.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32631-2005Mar13.html

“In January 2006, Ken Jautz, president of CNN Headline News, hired conservative talk radio host Glenn Beck, giving him a primetime show which premiered May 8, 2006. Jautz stated that Beck was “cordial,” and that his radio show was “conversational, not confrontational.” However, Media Matters for America and FAIR have reported that Beck had a history of controversial statements made on his radio show, including calling Jimmy Carter a “waste of skin”, calling the people who stayed in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina “scumbags”, hoping for the deaths of Dennis Kucinich and Michael Moore, [28] and telling a caller who claimed to have tortured foreign prisoners for the U.S. military, “I appreciate your service”.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN_controversies

This website also provides some examples of liberal bias as well, but in my opinion, they are minor and unimportant (as are some of the “conservative bias” ones listed). For example, CNN didn’t report on Saddam Hussein’s atrocities while journalists were stationed in Iraq for the sake of their safety. Another time there was a technical glitch that caused an X to flash over Cheney’s face. I don’t consider those to be instances of liberal bias, but people I know do. As a side note, if you think someone at CNN is retarded enough to believe flashing an X over someone’s face will change their political views, you should look into the number of times Fox News has identified a Republican going through a scandal as a Democrat. But seriously, anyone who employs Glenn Beck can hardly be oozing with Leftiness.

Here are some examples of misinformation put out by CNN favoring conservative stances:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200807240001?f=s_search

http://mediamatters.org/items/200807310011?f=s_search

http://mediamatters.org/items/200807310010?f=s_search

http://mediamatters.org/items/200807310009?f=s_search

http://mediamatters.org/items/200807290005?f=s_search

http://mediamatters.org/items/200807270002?f=s_search

http://mediamatters.org/items/200807270001?f=s_search

http://mediamatters.org/items/200807180013?f=s_search

http://mediamatters.org/items/200807180006?f=s_search

http://mediamatters.org/items/200807170006?f=s_search

Using Polar Bears as a Back Door

Posted on August 13, 2008 by Jeff Q

An article at CNN reads:

“Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said late Monday the changes were needed to ensure that the Endangered Species Act would not be used as a “back door” to regulate the gases blamed for global warming. In May, the polar bear became the first species declared as threatened because of climate change. Warming temperatures are expected to melt the sea ice the bear depends on for survival.”

Yes, we wouldn’t want the sudden disappearance of polar bears making people notice that there’s no more ice at the north pole:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/08/11/bush.endangered.species.ap/index.html

There is also a lot of talk lately about a forged letter the Administration had done to link Saddam to 9/11:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93319762

http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/spytalk/2008/08/suskind-to-release-cia-intervi.html

Also, the Health Dept. is drafting a rule to classify using any contraceptives as abortion:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=agclip2V0QNk&refer=home

And Christopher Hitchens finally got the last laugh on his arch-rival in debate, George Gallaway:

http://www.slate.com/id/2170981/

Wright Comes Out

Posted on April 30, 2008 by Jeff Q

I noticed the mainstream media was shocked — SHOCKED — to learn that Wright was going on a book tour to try and defend himself after 4 weeks of being completely lambasted by them. Chris Matthews took special offense to Wright saying that the media was attacking not Obama but the “black church.” Of course it’s not really an attack on black churches. It’s the media using the shock value of what goes on in a lot of black churches in order to get ratings and pawn it off as a campaign issue. Obama supporters are interviewed to get the message out that he needs to just shut up and go away, because, as is continuously repeated, the story was suppossedly JUST NOW starting to “die off” (har har har). It almost makes me think the media doesn’t want people to find out that there is more substance to Wright’s message than his crazy conspiracy theory about AIDS. Personally, I don’t care what he says; at least now the lazy media will have to pick off new statements to take out of context instead of re-looping the same two phrases (“God damn America” and “chickens coming home to roost”) over and over again. Of course, this isn’t an attack on the “black church.”

Here’s the FULL quote from Wright about “chickens coming home to roost”:

“I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday did anybody else see or hear him? He was on FOX News, this is a white man, and he was upsetting the FOX News commentators to no end, he pointed out, a white man, an ambassador, he pointed out that what Malcolm X said when he was silenced by Elijah Mohammad was in fact true, he said Americas chickens, are coming home to roost.”

“We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, Arikara, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism.

“We took Africans away from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism.

“We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel.

“We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenage and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard working fathers.

“We bombed Qaddafi’s home, and killed his child. Blessed are they who bash your children’s head against the rock.

“We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy, killed hundreds of hard working people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day not knowing that they’d never get back home.

“We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye.

“Kids playing in the playground. Mothers picking up children after school. Civilians, not soldiers, people just trying to make it day by day.

“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff that we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

“Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y’all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people we have wounded don’t have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that.”

—————–

Compare this to the comments recently made by Rush Limbaugh:

“Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats,” Limbaugh said during Wednesday’s radio broadcast. He then went on to say that’s the best thing that could happen to the country.

Limbaugh cited Al Sharpton, saying the Barack Obama supporter threatened to superdelegates that “there’s going to be trouble” if the presidency is taken from Obama.

Several callers called in to the radio show to denounce Limbaugh’s comments, when he later stated, “I am not inspiring or inciting riots, I am dreaming of riots in Denver.”

Limbaugh said with massive riots in Denver, which he called “Operation Chaos,” the people on the far left would look bad.

“There won’t be riots at our convention,” Limbaugh said of the Republican National Convention. “We don’t riot. We don’t burn our cars. We don’t burn down our houses. We don’t kill our children. We don’t do half the things the American left does.”

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Limbaugh and Hagee are a lot alike. Both are fat, racist bigots who call for (or “dream of”) violence in order to achieve their political ends (although for Hagee, that end is the Apocalypse). Both believe that God blesses the rich and the poor only have themselves to blame (the opposite of the gospel message). And both make a lot more money off their messages and affect real world politics than their scary, black “hate-filled” counterparts.

I’ve also heard people like Buchanan say there’s no comparison between Wright and Hagee because Obama knew Wright for 20 years and McCain doesn’t know Hagee personally. But why is that better? Obama didn’t *want* Wright to become an issue yet until recently refused to disown him even though it would cost him votes. McCain *sought out* Hagee, despite the fact he had previously condemned people like him, and *asked* for his support in order to get more votes from anti-Catholic, anti-Islamic Evangelicals.

O’Reilly calls for Catholic Church to sanction priest for defending Wright

Posted on April 20, 2008 by Jeff Q

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5909

I think this is something like the 3rd week the “liberal media” has been bashing Obama over Rev. Wright’s “God Damn America” sound bytes. This isn’t surprising for those who have noticed how the mainstream media has consistantly jumped to the side of the underdog. First they loved up to Obama because he was the “new guy”, then they jumped over to Hillary when he started to win, and have continued to switch partners as the polls swing back and forth so as to drag the Democratic primary out as long as humanly possible. It’s not like they didn’t have this stuff on Wright from the very beginning.

Yes, Rev. Wright and Louis Farrakhan are both crazy. But they really aren’t as racist and hate-filled as everyone would have you believe. Obviously the part about government infecting the population with AIDS and Syphallis is nothing but a crazy conspiracy theory, but it’s hardly unthinkable. North Carolina secretly sterilized 65,000 people between 1929 and 1974. His statements on “God Damn America” were issued against the violence that America spreads, whch is something Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out as well, saying that America was the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and that “America was founded on genocide, and a nation that is founded on genocide is destructive.”

Farrakhan has blamed the Jews of Hollywood for making movies that depict black people as “less than human.” He’s said every American Jew is also a dual citizen of Israel, and in some cases, like that of Liberman, this is true. He’s called Hezbollah “freedom fighters”, which of course is nonsense, but it is true that they are a product of Israel’s injustice towards the Palestinian people. He’s said that rich Jewish bankers helped finance Hitler, which is partially true; many Jewish bankers did help finance both sides during the World Wars. And he’s said that for having such a small number of people, the Jews have a large influence over American and European politics, which is true.

A lot of it is skeevy, but really pretty low on the radar in terms of being “out-and-out” anti-semitic. Both of them deny being anti-white or anti-semitic, but then so did Mel Gibson. Like Apocalypto, there are hateful insinuations cloaked in historical interpretations, but I feel like I’ve heard so much worse, which brings me to Rev. John Hagee.

Hagee said that American and Israel need to ally up to bomb Iran to fulfill “God’s Plan”, which pretty much makes him admittedly anti-arab and anti-islamic. He considers Harry Potter to be contemporary witchcraft. Hurricane Katrina was an act of God meant to punish New Orleans for “a level of sin that’s offensive to God,” namely homosexuality, but also Bush’s pressuring Israel to give up some of its illegal settlements in the “tit for tat” exchange. He even erroneously said that the hurricane hit on the same day as a Gay Pride Parade, which in fact was scheduled a week later (plus the primarily gay neighborhoods such as the French Qurater were spared). He’s blamed Hitler’s anti-semitism on Catholicism without any consideration to the anti-semitic Protestant culture of Martin Luther (something very common; my sister’s history teacher Coach Ourso from Mandeville High teaches the same). He’s also written a book called Beginning of the End about how giving the Golan Heights to the Palestinians is “signing a deal with the Anti-Christ” that will bring about the Apocalypse. On a Praise-A-Thon broadcast in 1993, he said that “poverty is caused by sin and disobeying the Word of God.”

Unlike Farrakhan and Wright, Hagee is one of the highest-paid television evangelists in the world, making over a million dollars in 2001 alone. Hagee has claimed that McCain has sought out his vote, and after his endorsement, McCain said more than once that he was “very proud to have Pastor Hagee’s support.” This, however, is not the story the media is interested in, because it doesn’t fit into the Hillary vs. Obama fight that they have been trying to frame for months now.

Lou Dubose writes in the Huffing Post:

“John McCain needed an evangelical to embrace and send a message to the Christian right that he will do their bidding, even if he’s not quite one of them. He settled on San Antonio End-Timer John Hagee.

Hagee’s bizarre theology would be harmless enough (perhaps) if confined to his multimillion-dollar temple. But John Hagee has a constituency that extends beyond his congregation. He used that constituency to build a foreign-policy advocacy organization–Christians United for Israel (CUFI)–that is now pressing for a pre-emptive war with Iran. CUFI brought 4,500 End Times activists to Washington for its July 2006 inaugural event, followed by a day of lobbying on the Hill.

Hagee was straightforward in announcing his agenda: “The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West,” he said.

John McCain has been pressed to renounce Hagee. He cannot. Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, whose unsolicited “endorsement” created a problem for Sen. Barack Obama, can preach religious hate. But he works on the fringe of American religion and politics and is an unlikely guest at anyone’s White House. The influence of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright–Obama’s longtime pastor who is cut from a different cloth than Farrakhan–doesn’t extend beyond the African-American community in Chicago.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, is deeply invested in John Hagee and his followers.”

Bailing Out the Super Rich

Posted on April 13, 2008 by Jeff Q

My brother asked me the other day why I bother arguing with my dad about politics. “It’s not like you’re ever change anyone’s mind.”, he told me. I tried to convince him that I couldn’t speak for my dad but I wasn’t married to my ideas. I like to argue, but with every argument, you have to go in accepting the possibility of changing your mind. But he’s got a point about discussing politics in general. The majority of people, left or right, are incapable of critical thought and only repeat bland cliches they heard from someone else. Conceding defeat on even one topic is tantamount to rooting against your own football team. It seems like political discussion has replaced theology in the practice of mindlessly rattling off articles of faith that have no actual connection to the real world.

For example, Hillary Clinton just lately got caught in a huge lie with with surprisingly little effect on public opinion. I used to think you’d have to be insane to think you could get away with having an affair while in public office, but that’s downright reasonable compared to thinking you can get away with lying about getting shot at. Before Clinton even became the nominee, I laughed off Rush’s accusation about Hillary being a nominee, thinking no party could be so stupid as to allow the Clinton Drama become center-stage in American politics again. Now Rush is asking Republicans to fraudulently vote in Democratic primaries for her (suppossedly to maintain “chaos” but more likely because he is sick of 8 years playing defense). I understand Clinton lost a few points in the poll, but if that “gaff” can’t pry her out of the race, what on earth can?

But the real reason I bring all this up is the economy. That seems to be the one issue that Republicans always use for everything (probably because no one believes in the social issues of the 50’s anymore). Democrats tax and spend. Democrats are socialists. They want to “redistribute the wealth” and waste resources on “nation building.” Never mind that the last Democratic administration gutted welfare, passed NAFTA, and created the first surplus, “leftists” like Clinton and Gore are still said to want a “command economy.” Never mind that people who work for their money pay more taxes than those who make money off their money, or that the top 1% is receiving the largest share of national income since the first year of the Great Depression. According to them, money is only “redistributed” downward.

But by bailing out Bear Sterns, Bush has proven that he believes more in socialism than Clinton ever did, corporate socialism. Now, before I get accussed to “hating corporations,” I should point out that you can’t blame companies for asking for money any more than you can blame hobos. Companies are run by a board of directors who are obligated by their job description to make the most amount of money for their stock holders. So of course it’s no surprise they want to “capitalize” going up and “socialize” going down. But the problem is, they are the ones who caused this mess. Its deregulation that allowed Enron to destroy the job market in Texas and now its allowed banks to scam all these people out of money they didn’t have, and once again, the super rich that owns 90% of the wealth of this country got pissed at the middle class writing checks they couldn’t cash and are now refusing to invest the money that runs our economy. According to conservative and libertarian philosophy, we shouldn’t be bailing anyone out, but the problem with that is volatility. As unethical as it is to reward rich fatcats for failure (something Bush learned in his oil business days), it does stop the cascading effects from hitting the rest of the economy, which is why deregulation doesn’t help anyone.

I hope by acknowledging the banking system as our corporate masters and not wanting the economy to go into choas, no one reads me saying we should bail out Bear Sterns as a betrayal of my own principals. I don’t like playing Monopoly, but when the players break the bank, it’s better to start dishing out paper money. What upsets me more is that there is no new regulation standards that accompany them, because that is the only thing that is going to stop them from doing it again. Now that we’ve shown that we reward risk-taking by paying them whatever they lose at the slots, the banks will now be emboldened to gamble away the taxpayer’s money knowing we’ll bail them out again the next time it happens. I’d much rather see something like Stupidity Insurance for banks, but unfortuantely, this is the game we’re playing now thanks to the Conservative/Libertarian dream of a perfect self-regulating market system.

Then there’s gas prices. Bush complained that it was Clinton’s fault gas was at $1.64 and promised if he was president he would “jaw bone” OPEC. That’s a pretty funny description considering the “tough talk” amounted to saying: “If it’s possible, your majesty, consider what high prices are doing to one of your largest customers.” Actually, the mullahs are right on this one. It isn’t their fault. Supply and demand have little to do with what’s driving up oil. It’s speculation. Bush starts talking about attacking Iran, but doing that would cause oil to go up to $6, so speculators price oil up to $3 to hedge a bet even Bush isn’t stupid enough to call. This could be supplimented by opening up 1% of the strategic reserve, not only bringing prices down but making a profit for the government at the same time, but that’s not going to happen because oil companies like it this high.

So my big question is: what excuse do Republicans have? They have had over 7 years in power with both the Senate and the House on their side for the majority of that time. It seems to me, you have to come to 1 of 2 conclusions: either the presidency and the Senate have little or no effect on the economy, in which case the #1 Republican issue has been nothing but empty words all along, or Republican policy was in fact the cause of it and Right-wing Libertarians have traded away all their social issues for the economy we now have. I’m proud to call myself a Liberal but have never considered myself a Democrat. Still, if I did, I would be embarrassed if the Democrats were in power right now and would refuse to vote for them in the next election. Republicans, however, seem completely unaffected in their own convictions by the financial downturn.

This brings me to my point: is there any good reason to try and compare the effectiveness of economic philosophy with the current economy, or is it there always going to be some excuse that divorces philosophy from real life? Is economic theory really just another form of religion, something that’s pointless to talk about because no one is ever going to change their mind on something their parents told them when they were kids?

http://abcnews.go.com/US/Politics/Story?id=4141964&page=1

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0308/9246.html

http://www.pensitoreview.com/2008/03/08/in-2000-gop-trashed-dems-over-gas-prices/

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/politics/15772329/detail.html

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/29/business/income.4.php

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=736148

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/opinion/31krugman.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/17/opinion/17krugman.html