Russ McBee

Over the last couple of months, we've seen a $700 billion bailout of the financial sector, the nationalization of AIG, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, pleas for a bailout of the US auto industry, and emergency FDIC guarantees for everything from money market funds to gift cards (hat tip to Suzy Trotta for that one). Randy Neal asked, where does it ...

Ninety years ago today, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the War to End All Wars came to a close. Although its carnage was eclipsed by the global disaster that followed twenty years later, the devastation of the First World War was the worst ever seen up to that point. As I discussed in this post, Dad and I visited ...

Because of a budget shortfall, 375 teachers in the Dallas school system were laid off today, some in the middle of class: Campus by campus, hundreds of Dallas teachers learned their fate Thursday in whatever manner their principals saw fit. Some retained a small measure of dignity; others were forced to clean out their desks in front of stunned ...

Hurricane Ike is fixing to beat the crap out of coastal Texas. For the fourth time in a month, the American Red Cross is having to respond to a hurricane. As a result of Fay, Gustav, and Hanna, the Red Cross has already incurred significant debt; as of five days ago, they'd only raised $5 million toward their $70 million Gustav relief effort ...

Diebold (now called ''Premier,'' since their previous name has become radioactive) has admitted that their electronic voting machines contain a critical flaw which can drop votes: A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to ...

The majority of US corporations are evading (or at least avoiding) paying their fair share of income taxes: Two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005, according to a report released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. While $2.5 trillion ...

David Neiwert, who has written extensively about eliminationist rhetoric from the right wing against liberals, had this to say about Sunday's tragedy in Knoxville: In reality, of course, rhetoric like this has historically played a critical role in some of the ugliest episodes in American history, as well as thousands of little acts of ...

Yesterday, a senseless act of non-random violence struck this city. A man, mad at the world and blaming liberals for his personal ills, targeted the innocent congregants of a progressive church in Knoxville, killing two and wounding seven. Like everyone else in Knoxville, I've spent the last couple of days in a state of shock over this. Described ...

Foreign Policy has a short but fascinating interview with former Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who was the chief architect of the 1995 Dayton Agreement, which ended the war in Bosnia. He discusses the recent arrest of the fugitive Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic, and its parallels with the recent indictment of Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan ...

A couple of days ago, the Pope apologized again, this time in Sydney, for the Catholic Church's global sex abuse scandal: Speaking in Sydney, where he is participating in World Youth Day celebrations, the pontiff called the abuses 'a grave betrayal of trust' that deserved condemnation and called for the victims to receive 'care and ...