Robert Reich has posted the article Why We Must Raise Taxes on the Rich on his blog and on Truthout.org

He closes with the following:

All the President has to do is connect the dots – the explosion of income and wealth among America’s super-rich, the dramatic drop in their tax rates, the consequential devastating budget squeezes in Washington and in state capitals, and the slashing of vital public services for the middle class and the poor.

This shouldn’t be difficult. Most Americans are on the receiving end. By now they know trickle-down economics is a lie. And they sense the dice are loaded in favor of the multi-millionaires and billionaires, and their corporations, now paying a relative pittance in taxes.

The President has the bully pulpit. But will he use it?

My comment on Truthout.org would have been (if only their website weren’t still suffering from the effects of the vandals):

I can forgive Obama for all his failures except one.  I cannot forgive him for failing to even make the case for the policies we need.

His silence in the face of the relentless attack from the right makes it harder for all progressives to make the case.

As a very early supporter of Obama, I have had the pleasure of quickly refusing to fund his re-election campaign.  He won’t get anything, not even a vote from me, if he doesn’t quickly repair the one unforgivable mistake mentioned above.

Perhaps this is the only avenue left to make any political progress in this country.

From the article on the Think Progress web site:

In Washington, D.C. today an estimated 2,000 protesters marched on Koch Industries’ Washington D.C. offices and attempted to give Charles and David Koch an invitation to come out and speak with the protesters.

and the following:

Last Thursday, tea party activists rallied on Capitol Hill to pressure Republican lawmakers to cut government spending. Crowd estimates ranged from “dozens” to “fewer than 200,” yet the event attracted dozens of reporters and significant media interest, producing hundreds of stories in local and national press. At today’s rally, which was ten times bigger than the tea party one, ThinkProgress spotted three reporters — none from mainstream publications.

This is the kind of behavior of the mainstream press that has me reading the news on the internet for an hour or so before I pick up my copy of The Boston Globe from the box in front of my house.  The printed newspaper is mostly good for the funny pages.

James Kwak published a brief comment on The Baseline Scenario Blog about the fallacy of blaming the mortgage meltdown on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or the Community Reinvestment Act.

Kwak  talks about a frequently referenced article by Edward Pinto and an analysis of that article by David Min.

As for Fannie and Freddie, Kwak says:

… Min shows ( p. 8 ) that prime loans to <660 borrowers had a delinquency rate of 10 percent, compared to 7 percent for conforming loans and 28 percent for subprime loans, implying that calling them the moral equivalent of subprime is a bit of a stretch.  Min also shows that most of the Fannie/Freddie loans that Pinto classifies as subprime or high-risk didn’t meet the Fannie/Freddie affordable housing goals anyway — so to the extent that Fannie/Freddie were investing in riskier mortgages, it was because of the profit motive, not because of the affordable housing mandate imposed by the government.

As for the Community Reinvestment Act, Kwak says:

… only banks are subject to the CRA (not nonbank mortgages originators) and most risky loans were made in middle-income areas where the CRA is essentially irrelevant.

A commenter on The Baseline Scenario Blog has posted a link to David Min’s article Faulty Conclusions Based on Shoddy Foundations.

Based on work done by his AEI colleague Edward Pinto, Peter Wallison, minority member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, concludes federal affordable housing policies were the driving cause behind the financial crisis, causing a decline in underwriting standards that triggered the U.S. housing bubble. Unfortunately, Pinto’s research findings relied upon so heavily by Wallison and others are false.

Apparently I am not the only one to notice how self-defeating the Democrats are.

When I learned of some of the details of the upcoming The New York Times‘ paywall, I thought of a way around it.

I did not envision that the paywall implementation would be so unprofessionally done that it would be as easy to circumvent as described in the article That was quick: Four lines of code is all it takes for The New York Times’ paywall to come tumbling down.

The method I imagined is spelled out in one of the comments (not a comment authored by me) about the above story posted on the Nieman Journalism Lab site where this story is posted.

In my previous post Monetizing Internet Content, I have explained why the effort of The New York Times is doomed to failure. My post explains how the modern technology changes the calculation on what a person is willing to pay for a subscription.  It then suggests a method of micro-payments that is the solution that will work in this new environment.

I have offered my suggested solution  to Google and to The Boston Globe. As far as I know, nobody has paid the slightest attention to my obvious answer to how to monetize internet content.  If you are attending MIT, Harvard, Stanford, or Berkeley and want to become the next drop-out billionaire, read up on my suggestion, have your classmates implement it, then drop out of school,  and run with it.

I have found that some complaints about the new Firefox 4.0 User Interface are easily fixable by the user.  After making my own set of complaints known and seeing hundreds of others make the similar complaints, I saw a note that one person found out how to fix them.  Of course there was no hint as to how.  Well here is the missing info.

The first complaint is that the back and forth button are far separated from the refresh button in the URL window and the home button far to the right.  I had tried grabbing the button and pulling, to no avail.

You have to  right click on the menu bar, and then select customize.  That’s not hard to figure out, but then what?  I found that you have to drag the home page button off the menu bar into the customize window.  The you can drag the home button from the customize window to where you want it in the menu bar.

I also did not like the placement of the tabs.  Unselecting the “tabs on top” option puts the tabs back where they should be.  Previously I erroneously thought that unselecting this option would doing something weird that I would not want.

The above interview is part of the article CIA Psychologist’s Notes Reveal True Purpose Behind Bush’s Torture Program

Here is the email that I received to introduce this article:

It’s been nine years since the Bush administration implemented its highly-classified torture program, where government interrogators subjected “war on terror” detainees held at CIA prisons and at Guantanamo to brutal techniques in an effort, the public was told, to thwart pending terrorist attacks against the United States and its interests abroad.

While President Obama and Congressional lawmakers “look forward” and have failed to hold accountable those individuals who violated international and domestic human rights laws, new revelations continue to surface showing the extent of the previous administration’s war crimes and the lies upon which they were based.

Indeed, as Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye report in this in-depth investigative report, the handwritten notes, obtained exclusively by Truthout, that were drafted by Dr. John Bruce Jessen, the psychologist who was under contract to the CIA and credited as being one of the architects of the so-called “enhanced interrogation” program, show that torture was used to “exploit” detainees and to get them to “collaborate” with government authorities.

The documents stand as the first pieces of hard evidence to surface that further explain the psychological aspects of Bush’s torture program and the rationale for subjecting detainees to so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Jessen’s notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a decorated veteran who previously held high-ranking positions within the Department of Defense, and is speaking publicly for the first time. Kearns, who worked closely with Jessen in developing a survival training program for military personnel that the torture program was based upon, said Jessen’s “duplicitous act is appalling to me and shall haunt me for the rest of my life.”

Supplementing this groundbreaking report is an exclusive, on-camera interview with Captain Kearns conducted by Jason Leopold. Truthout is also providing our readers with copies of Jessen’s notes that can be downloaded from the article page.

I do not hold up CNN as a paragon of journalistic virtue, so make of this what you will.
Below is the video and a few paragraphs from the report CNN Correspondent Goes Ballistic Over Fox News Libya/Human Shield Report.

CNN correspondent Nic Robertson has a bone or two to pick with Fox News, which reported today that he and other journalists were used by the Libyan Ministry of Information as human shields, in a successful bid to block a coming, second attack on a compound in Tripoli, supposedly controlled by Qaddafi.

“[T]his allegation is outrageous and it’s absolutely hypocritical. When you come to somewhere like Libya, you expect lies and deceit from a dictatorship here,” Robertson told Wolf Blitzer. “You don’t expect it from the other journalists.”

In his article America ‘Trapped’ by False Narratives, Robert Parry reminds us how the media is aiding and abetting the disastrous path we are following in Libya.

Regarding Libya, the major U.S. news media already is repeating many of the journalistic errors made in the early phases of previous conflicts against regimes led by U.S.-designated villains.

For instance, NBC spent much of Monday touting a story from “intelligence sources” about a supposed intercept of a Libyan government communiqué ordering bodies from the morgue to be scattered near sites of U.S. aerial bombings. When reporters found no evidence that this tactic was actually being used, NBC correspondents gave themselves credit for heading it off.

No attention was given to the other possibility – that U.S. propaganda experts or the Libyan opposition had planted the intercept story as a tactic to whip up more animosity toward the Libyan government and to deflect criticism of the U.S. bombings if they did kill large numbers of civilians.

Despite the lack of evidence that Muammar Gaddafi has targeted and slaughtered Libyan civilians or had any intention to do so, we use this as an excuse for yet another military intervention.  If it worked to rescue George W. Bush’s failing administration, perhaps Barack Obama figures it can rescue his.  I am so tired of getting exactly what I voted against.  If I were a believer in evil conspiracies, I might think some power has threatened Obama so frighteningly that he has agreed to go along with policies that he abhors.

Watch Democratic Representative Anthony Weiner praise the Republicans for averting the world’s most terrible crisis with their vote to defund NPR.