Essays:

• Neil Irwin & Binyamin Appelbaum, Late Change in Course Hobbled Rollout of Geithner's Bank Plan, The Washington Post, 17 February 2009.


• Dan Froomkin, Obama: I Won't Play Washington Games, The Washington Post, 17 February 2009.


• Jefferson Smith, Why conservatives are always WRONG, no date (after 2004).


• inside the meltdown, Frontline, PBS, 17 February 2009.
  
  "Investigating how the economy went so bad so fast and what Bernanke and Paulson didn't see, couldn't stop and weren't able to fix."


• Glenn Greenwald, Charlie Savage on Obama's embrace of Bush/Cheney "terrorism policies", Salon.com, 17 February 2009.
  
  Savage is the author of Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy: Little, Brown and Company / Hachette Book Group, September 2007 (publisher, Amazon.com).


• Mark Faber, Synchronized Boom, Synchronized Bust: Bad U.S. monetary policy had global consequences, WSJ.com, 18 February 2009.
  
  via: Barry Ritholtz, Synchronized Boom, Synchronized Bust, The Big Picture, 18 February 2009.


• Chris Floyd, Operation Uptick: Obama Launches Afghan Surge, Empire Burlesque, 18 February 2009.


• Lawrence C. Strauss, How the Credit-Loss Cycle Got Supersized: An Interview with Robert Albertson: The financial crisis could drag on another two or three years, says this Wall Street veteran, Barrons.com, 17 February 2009.


• Jane Mayer, The Hard Cases: Will Obama institute a new kind of preventive detention for terrorist suspects?, The New Yorker, 23 February 2009.
  
  via: Scott Horton, The Enemy Combatant Canard, No Comment, 18 February 2009.
  "Thomas Jefferson and James Madison shared one definition of the term “tyrant” – a ruler who deprived a person of his freedom without operation of law and without accountability before a court. Which perhaps explains why American historians are consistently ranking George W. Bush at the very bottom of the list of all American presidents; the man, ultimately, is guilty of tyranny."
  
  and via: Terry Gross, Jane Mayer Details Obama's 'Hard Cases', Fresh Air, WHYY Philadelphia, 18 February 2009.
  
  Mayer is the author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals: Doubleday, July 2008 (publisher, Amazon.com).


• William Astore, An American Foreign Legion: Is the U.S. Military Now an Imperial Police Force?, TomDispatch.com, 15 February 2009.
  
  Article summary at Asia Times: "The United States military is close to being a foreign legion. Foreign as in being constantly deployed overseas on imperial errands; foreign as in being ever-more reliant on private military contractors; foreign as in being increasingly segregated from the elites that profit most from its actions, yet serve the least in its ranks. And increasingly foreign to Americans."


• William Pfaff, America’s Confused Cause in Central Asia, TruthDig.com, 18 February 2009.


• Amy Goodman, How Two Former PA Judges Got Millions in Kickbacks to Send Juveniles to Private Prisons, AlterNet.org, 17 February 2009.
  
  Amy Goodman, Penn. Judges Get Kickbacks for Placing Youths in Privately Owned Jails, Democracy Now!, 17 February 2009.


• Chris Floyd, Field of Nightmares: Fixing the Economy to Death, Empire Burlesque, 19 February 2009 2009.
  
  Arthur Silber, The Vampire, Struck by Sunlight, Once Upon a Time ..., 15 September 2008.
  
  Arthur Silber, It's Called the Ruling Class Because It Rules, Once Upon a Time ..., 27 October 2007.


• Stirling Newberry, We’re In a Depression, Not a Recession: Here’s Why, Fire Dog Lake, 19 February 2009.
  
  "Once a Bushite, always a Bushite. Having been the architect of the economic policy that lead directly to the housing bubble, and been a member of the policy making apparatus at the Federal Reserve while a flood of accomodative money ballooned the world's economic system, Bernanke will go to his grave not admitting that he is the worst economic policy maker of the last generation. Republicans and stupidity are like baseball sluggers and steroids. They are all on it, they all deny it, and newspapers fawn all over them for it until it is obviously too late."


• John M. Broder, E.P.A. Expected to Regulate Carbon Dioxide, The New York Times, 18 February 2009.
  
  Frequently Asked Questions, from Climate Change (2007) The Physical Science Basis, a report accepted by Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC.


• Susan Solomon, et al., Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions, PNAS, 28 January 2009, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0812721106.
  
  David Archer, Irreversible Does Not Mean Unstoppable, RealClimate.org, 01 February 2009.


• Elana Schor, Dems: Keeping Wall Street Profits High is 'Collateral Benefit', TalkingPointsMemo.com, 19 February 2009.


• Glenn Greenwald, Binyam Mohamed, war crimes investigations, and American exceptionalism, Salon.com, 19 February 2009.
  
  I have observed that the American ruling class believes that "might makes right." The Bush administration war crimes - and the U.S. Congress and Judiciary turning a blind eye - are one of the clearest expressions of that principle. See, for example, the James Baker interview in Lewis Lapham's film The American Ruling Class. "Nickel and Dimed" from The American Ruling Class. Who Owns America? from The American Ruling Class.
  
  Will Bunch, Reagan, Bush and How Presidents Got To Be Above the Law, The Huffington Post, 18 February 2009.
  
  Bunch is the author of Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future: Free Press / Simon & Schuster, February 2009 (publisher, Amazon.com).
  
  Mark Benjamin, "You can't sweep unlawful activities under the table": Abu Ghraib investigator Antonio Taguba talks to Salon about why he backs a commission to examine Bush torture policies, Salon.com, 20 February 2009.


• Kate Jennings, American Revolution: The Fall of Wall Street and the Rise of Barack Obama, Quarterly Essay, Issue 32, 2008.
  
  The author is an Australian-born Manhattan-resident, writing for an Australian audience, surveys recent U.S. economic and political events through the election of November 2008. The author has worked as a speech-writer at a large New York bank and so has an insider's perspective on the collapse of U.S. financial companies, but doesn't add much if one has been reading the various professional economists and financiers noted in this blog.
  Jennings is the author of Moral Hazard: A Novel: Fourth Estate, May 2002 (publisher, Google Book Search, Amazon.com). Jennings biography at HarperCollins.


• Robert G. Kaiser, interview, Bill Moyers' Journal, 20 February 2009.
  Kaiser is the author of So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government: Knopf, January 2009 (publisher, Amazon.com). Wikipedia article on Kaiser.
  
  See also: Parker Palmer, interview, Bill Moyers' Journal, 20 February 2009.
  Palmer is the author of Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation: Jossey-Bass, September 1999 (publisher, Amazon.com). Wikipedia article on Palmer.


• Matthew Richardson & Nouriel Roubini, There's Virtue In Geithner's Vague Bank Plan: At least he doesn't want to guarantee more bad debt, WSJ.com, 18 February 2009.


• Barry Ritholtz, Federal Reserve Off Balance Sheet Lending, The Big Picture, 20 February 2009.
  
  Barry Ritholtz, Favoring Nationalization Are . . ., The Big Picture, 20 February 2009.