Japan opened one of its execution chambers to the media for the first time on Friday, after the country's Justice Minister, Keiko Chiba, attended the hangings of two inmates in July and called for more debate on capital punishment. A series of false convictions have surfaced in recent months, including one of a 63-year-old man who had served 17 years of a life sentence for the murder of a 4-year-old girl. He was released after prosecutors admitted that his confession was a fabrication made under duress and DNA tests showed he was innocent.

Japan does not execute many prisoners compared to the United States. Since 1993, the country has carried out 43 executions. Seven were executed in 2009. By comparison, Texas executed its 16th prisoner of the year last week in Huntsville. The execution was the 224th in the administration of Governor Rick Perry. Texas has far and away the most active death chamber in America, accounting for more than 37 percent of the nation's post-Furman executions. Virginia ranks second.

Japan, however, has guarded its execution practices in secrecy for decades. Currently, there are 107 inmates on death row in Japanese prisons. Execution is by hanging. While the law says an execution must take place within six months after the sentence is finalized by the court system, in practice it usually takes several years. Among 30 executions that took place in the 10 years from 1997, the average period was 7 years and 11 months. Death row inmates are kept in solitary confinement in 7 detention centres throughout the country. Some inmates have been in solitary confinement for over 20 years. 

Death row inmates are notified on the morning of their execution day that they will be executed, usually about an hour before the execution. The UN Committee against Torture has criticised Japan for "the psychological strain" on inmates and their families over the uncertainty of the execution timing.

Keiko Chiba, the Justice Minister, is an opponent of the death penalty. She is taking this action now to foster a debate in Japan on capital punishment. She lost her seat in Japan's Upper House in July's elections and will thus be soon losing her post. 

There are 58 countries that still retain capital punishment, while 104 countries have abolished it and 35 have stopped executions in practice. Of the Group of Eight industrialized nations, only the United States and Japan use capital punishment. The 18 countries known to have conducted executions in 2009 were: Bangladesh, Botswana, China, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Libya, Malaysia, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, the United States, Vietnam and Yemen. 

More on this story at the New York Times.

Politico reports in detail today what I have already touched on in brief weeks ago. Rep. Darrel Issa and the Republicans are planning a wave of committee investigations targeting the White House and Democratic allies if they win back the majority and regain the power of subpoena. 

Peter Daou states the obvious:

Republicans play hardball. Brazen hardball. Unscrupulous hardball. Yes, it’s couched in well-crafted soundbites about fighting “big government” and “judicial activism” and promoting “fiscal responsibility.” But in essence, it’s about no-prisoners political warfare. And when there’s a Democrat in the White House, it means total destruction of that presidency.

Nothing else will satisfy the GOP's lust for power than the wanton destruction of Obama's Presidency. From day one, this has been their game plan, obstruct, rant and rave, delay, obstruct some more, rant and rave, delay, repeat as necessary as to make the nation look ungovernable and the Administration as pathetic and dangerous if not criminal. Throw enough mud, maybe some will stick. And if nothing's there, invent something.

Starring in the role of chief inquisitor is California's Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Issa, we are told, would like Obama's cooperation. But it’s not essential.

"How acrimonious things get really depend on how willing the administration is in accepting our findings [and] responding to our questions," says Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for Rep. Issa who refers to his boss as "questioner-in-chief."

If this sounds like a re-run to you, it is. Issa will be reprising the role once played by Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana during the Clinton years. Also starring in a supporting role is Texas Rep. Lamar Smith.

There's more...

Last night I ventured into Laura Ingraham’s No Spin Zone. Confined to the house by inclement weather, I chose to contribute indirectly to Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal’s News Corp. dividends and directly to Bill O’Reilly’s Olympian ego. In the race to the bottom that is cable news, Laura Ingraham’s monotonous Reaganite pabulum trumps msnbc, which is unwatchable, as well as that other thing which barely warrants mentioning.

I witnessed a truly interesting exchange between the aforementioned Ms. Ingraham and Rep. Eric Cantor—who gets to be majority leader after the bloodbath of November. The broad issue was ObamaCare but the main focus was what Ingraham perceived to be Eric Cantor’s squishiness on Republican plans to “repeal and replace” the unpopular reform law.

LAURA INGRAHAM, GUEST HOST: …You've now got to correct the record because Politico is reporting that Eric Cantor, if he's the House majority leader come -- come November, that you're going to push for a more modest approach to Obamacare, meaning defund it, not repeal it. Did Politico get it wrong?

REP. ERIC CANTOR: Laura, I'll tell you one thing: As you and I have known each other for several years and as many of my constituents are, I'm a big fan of yours. So I got several calls from constituents over the last day or so saying, "What's Laura Ingraham talking about that Eric Cantor is not for a repeal of Obamacare?" Of course I'm for a repeal of Obamacare.

As you know, Laura, I'm the Republican whip in the House, and the duty of the Republican whip was to marshal as many votes as we could against Obamacare to make sure it didn't become law. And in the end, we didn't have one Republican vote that voted for it. Unfortunately, the bill passed. So we are faced with a situation where, hopefully, this November, a conservative majority will regain position in the House. And we're going to do everything we can to repeal the bill, to delay the bill, to defund the bill, to do all of the above. I mean, these things go hand in hand, Laura.

Whenever I wade into the land of Rupert Murdoch and Glenn Beck, I’m always careful to have plenty of aspirin and a barf bag on deck. The latter very nearly came into use after watching Mr. Cantor kiss the ring of hot reactionary blonde Laura Ingraham like the dickless establishmentarian he is. But however nauseating the display may have been, there are important insights to be gleaned here.

Rather than reaping a fortuitous repeat of 1994, conservatives are exactly where progressives were in ’06. In many respects ObamaCare is to them what the war in Iraq was to us. The mainstream public’s rather late aversion to the intractable chaos and bloodshed of the Iraq adventure vindicated grassroots progressives. It was a swift reversal of fortune that came right on time after the nightmarish re-election of President Bush. Unsatisfied with handing Democrats a decent majority in the House and a slim one in the Senate, the American people marched ahead and put a charismatic “change agent” in the White House two years thereafter. And yet the war(s) go on.

There's more...

Just 18 months into the Obama Presidency, the verdict of the academy is already beginning to take shape. This summer has seen an array of assessments specifically on Barack Obama and his Administration and more generally on the triumph of corporate politics in the Age of Obama.

Apart from the Jonathan Alter book The Promise: President Obama, Year One, which was published in May and the forthcoming Paul Street book The Empire's New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power which will be released next month, the assessments have been in op-eds or essays in scholarly journals and leftist publications. And again apart from the Alter book, the assessments have been more critical than glowing. The Street book, from what I've heard, promises to be an evisceration of the Obama Presidency. Not surprising given that Paul Street is one of the nation's leading radical historians along with Mike Davis. 

The Alter work, of which I have only read excerpts, while praising the young President isn't exactly a tribute either. According to Michiko Kakutani's review in the New York Times, "Alter gives this White House a mixed grade so far on achieving its policy goals, working with a highly politicized Congress and communicating with the public." Tim Rutten's review in the Los Angeles Times finds Alter "sympathetic to the President's goals" while casting "a cold eye on his most vociferous political antagonists" and yet "independent enough to criticize the administration's — and the chief executive's — shortcomings." Alter, of course, has known the President nearly two decades or put another way the pair have been acquainted nearly half their lives. If your friends aren't willing to raise their voices on your behalf, who will? 

While the right is populated by sycophantic obstreperous propagandists who inhabit the rive droit of the Potomac think tanks that are wholly servile to the interests of the American corporate-led oligarchy and seemingly allergic to facts, the left, to begin with, lacks that vast corporate-funded infrastructure. Even if they did possess it, the left is hardly going to countenance such a wholesale capitulation to longstanding Democratic goals that the Obama Administration has set aside.

While the vitriol may emanate from the right, some of harshest rebukes have come from the left. The President can brush off being called a socialist but the appellation of a Bush third term clearly stings. Newt Gingrich, a career politician with presidential ambitions, can call him "the most radical president in American history" and "potentially, the most dangerous" urging the GOP faithful and indeed all "patriotic Americans" to resist the President's "secular, socialist machine" and Obama says not a word. But Glenn Greenwald and Dylan Ratigan, two journalists, discuss the President's targeting of American citizens with extrajudicial executions on a television programme and that unleashes the volcanic wrath of Robert Gibbs. 

The litany of progressive complaints slip off the tongue effortlessly. Single payer didn't have a prayer much less a hearing. The public option wasn't an option. Lip service to LGTB goals but not much real movement even when the opportunity arises to make a definitive stand. Leaving Iraq is defined as garrisoning 50,000 troops indefinitely. With each new boot on the ground in Afghanistan, the Taliban only has spread like a wild fire across the country returning to the north after a nine year absence even as General Petraeus assures us that we are turning the tide. Guantánamo, still open and now hosting the trial of a child soldier. The Patriot Act extended without tighter privacy protection for US citizens. The Employee Free Choice Act all but forgotten. Comprehensive immigration reform indefinitely delayed even as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency expects to deport about 400,000 people this fiscal year, nearly 10 percent above the Bush administration's 2008 total and 25 percent more than were deported in 2007. Comprehensive climate and energy legislation stalled with public support melting away faster than Greenland glacier. The financial sector reform law still doesn't solve the Too Big to Fail problem thus all but guaranteeing another bailout when our high rolling casinos overextend themselves as they inevitably will. The initial trepidation over the appointment of 18 unrepresentative, inordinately wealthy individuals to the recently formed National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is now giving away to outright despair at the thought that the President as he finds his fiscal religion might be willing to balance the budget on the backs of the poor and the elderly.

While one wants to be supportive of the Administration, it is increasingly difficult to do so when one senses that things are seriously amiss. Even the Center for American Progress' John Podesta, the former Clinton Chief of Staff who headed the Obama Transition that filled the key posts in the Administration, has said that the White House had lost the narrative by the end of this first year in office.

He's not the only one. When Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, a center-left publication, asked leading liberal progressives thinkers to assess President Obama's performance this past April, a recurrent theme among the nine contributors was a fear that the Administration had lost control of the all important economic debate. Robert Reich, President Clinton's Labor secretary, lamented that Obama's failure to provide "a larger narrative" to explain the causes of the crash and his response to it had left the public "susceptible to [conservative] arguments that its problems were founded in 'Big Government.'

Here's how Ronald Brownstein of the National Journal summarized the debate among many of the nation's leading progressive voices:

The fear among the Democracy contributors is that against this disciplined assault the White House is suffering from what could be called a "narrative gap." By which they mean that the White House has inadvertently allowed Republicans to shift public discontent from business to government by not working more doggedly to link President George W. Bush's anti-regulation, tax-cutting policies not only to the 2008 meltdown but also to the economy's meager performance over his entire tenure. (During Bush's two terms, the economy created only one-fourth as many jobs as it did under Clinton; poverty rose sharply; and the median family income declined, after rising 14 percent under Clinton.)

Among those who haven't taken their quills to penning paeans to the virtues of Barack the Great Disappointment are Frank Rich, Michael Tomansky, Eric Alterman, Joe Klein, Brad Carson, David Swanson, Danielle Allen, Michael Walzer and Barbara Ehrenreich. All have published essays - devastating critiques of varying degrees - on Obama the man and Obama the President over this the summer of our discontent. Even if they express some sympathy for his plight given the condition of the country he inherited, these voices point more to the bad and the ugly than to the good the Administration has accomplished. Progressive economists like Robert Reich, Dean Baker, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman continue to bemoan the President's economic policies often wondering if the President and his economic team gets the magnitude of our malaise. Others befuddled by the President's lackadaisical approach to the severity of the crisis include Simon Johnson, Felix Salmon, Nouriel Roubini and Martin Wolf.

There's more...

Since 1960, no one has won the White House without carrying two of these three states: Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Combined they account for 68 Electoral College votes (ECVs), or a quarter of the ECVs required to win the White House.

Today, Public Policy Polling has a poll out looking at the approval ratings of the President in these three critical swing states.

-In Florida Obama's approval is 39% with 55% of voters disapproving of him. 88% of Republicans disapprove while just 73% of Democrats approve and independents go against him by a 52/36 margin. Only 78% of people who voted for him in 2008 like the job he's doing while 93% who voted against him disapprove.

-In Pennsylvania Obama's approval is 40% with 55% of voters disapproving of him. 85% of Republicans disapprove while just 68% of Democrats approve and independents go against him by a 63/32 margin. Only 78% of people who voted for him in 2008 like the job he's doing while 93% who voted against him disapprove, identical numbers to Florida on that count.

-In Ohio Obama's approval is 42% with 54% of voters disapproving of him. 94% of Republicans disapprove while only 79% of Democrats approve and independents go against him by a 58/33 margin. Only 76% of people who voted for him in 2008 approve while 91% who voted against him disapprove.

The numbers are brutal and the takeaways are clear. Those who disliked Obama in 2008 really disliked him now. Among Democrats, approval of the President is increasingly tepid with only four in five Democrats in Florida and Pennsylvania approving of the President's performance. In Ohio, just three of four Democrats expressing approval. The number should be closer to nine in ten.

It is among independents, however, where the data is most worrisome.  In Pennsylvania, independents disapprove of the President's performance by a 2-to1 margin. In Florida, where approval for Obama remains strongest, independents still break by 16 points against the President. In Ohio, the break is 25 points.

However, there's another aspect here that merits pointing out. With the President still earning approval from at least three in four Democrats, there really isn't much of an opening for anyone to mount a primary challenge. Come 2012, we'll sink or swim with Obama.

Bill Carr is assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, serving as the Deputy Under Secretary in charge of Military Personnel Policy since August 2002. Here, he answers a caller's question on the military draft which he opposes reinstating.

If you want to end American military adventurism, you reinstate the draft. Keep the all volunteer army and our Empire will keep going and going until it bankrupts us.

Germany, by the way, still has a military draft and is currently debating whether to end it. We, on the other hand, should be having a debate over one and over the military in general but for whatever reason we'd much rather cut Social Security and Medicare. If Social Security is a milk cow with 310 million teats, then the US military is one bloated sacred bull goring the fiscal condition of the country.

The GOP on carbon:

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R—Minnesota):

Carbon dioxide is natural. It occurs in Earth. It is a part of the regular lifecycle of Earth. In fact, life on planet Earth can’t even exist without carbon dioxide. So necessary is it to human life, to animal life, to plant life, to the oceans, to the vegetation that’s on the Earth, to the, to the fowl that — that flies in the air, we need to have carbon dioxide as part of the fundamental lifecycle of Earth.

Rep. Joe Barton (R—Texas):

Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about.

Rep. John Shimkus (R—Illinois):

The Earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood…. There is a theological debate that this is a carbon-starved planet, not too much carbon…. It’s plant food … So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere?

This is your future government based on the infallibility of the delusional rants of cave dwelling mystics that believed in winged messengers from above and who wrote on papyrus:

Here's where the line is drawn and the scales tip. Everyone pretty much believes now that Republicans are going to win back the House. In the Senate, a flip is also possible, but less likely it seems. There are two issues that, if Obama does not draw his own line with Republicans, that he will lose the Party over.

First, the Bush tax-cuts. The notion that this is going to be something where Democrats can keep them in place for those under $250K, and end it for those above, is a false lie for anyone to pretend such a possibility exists. The Republicans will not let that happen-- its all of them, or nothing.

The question is, with a Republican House sure to pass them, will there be 40 Senate Democrats to filibuster the passage of the complete tax package, say, in the spring of 2011?  Do the math. Looking at it the other way, are there 13 or so Democrats who the Republicans can count on for cloture?  So, that (the complete Bush Tax Cuts) lands on Obama's desk. Lets ponder whether he would veto it or not.

Second, the Afghanistan quagmire. All it takes is to watch this video to realize the disingenuity that Obama has performed (Senator Obama vs. President Obama on Afghanistan); a reckless abandoment of the promise of his entire candidacy. There are knaves who would like to pretend that Obama played a straight hand on Afghanistan with Democrats in the leadup to the 2008 election. We are currently amidst Obama's own Friedman Unit-- one that expires in July 2011.

General Petraeus has played the President like a fiddle with the surge to over 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. The Generals now openly speak of there being no such deadline, and being in Afghanistan until 2020. VP Biden has cowardly backtracked on the deadline he said was set in stone.

That Obama will give us enduring war in Afghanistan beyond July 2011 seems a given. Will it come on the heels of his buckling to the Republican passage of the permanent Bush Tax cut package for millionaires? 

And when I say lose the Party, I mean explicitly that he will face a Democratic primary in 2012, and hopefully, denied the nomination.

Some of you still might see this as far-fetched. But watch and see how losing 50 seats, setting the Democrats back below 200 in the House, has a way of changing the perception.

But that alone is probably not enough-- its strike one. The betrayal by Obama over the Bush Tax Cuts (if he doesn't let the entire package expire-- all or nothing will be the only choice) will be the second shoe. Then, the unlikelihood of his getting us out of these damned military occupations, and his being played like a puppet of the Pentagon's desire to build a military empire in Afghanistan, will be the final straw.

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics and co-founder of Economy.com, sits down for a conversation with attendees of the Monitor Breakfast about the state of the economy, including the recent plunge in U.S. housing sales and rise in unemployment. While he is optimistic about the economy's long-term chances to rebound, the national unemployment rate will likely continue to rise through the November 2010 elections. "If it's 10 percent come Election Day, I'm not sure I'd be surprised," says Zandi. "It's going to be in that kind of ballpark."

Up in Alaska, Senator Lisa Murkowski trails Joe Miller, a Fairbanks lawyer who received endorsements from Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck's 9-12 Project and the Tea Party Express. With 429 of 438 precincts reporting, Miller has 45,909 votes while Murkowski has 43,949 votes. According to the Alaska Division of Elections, more than 16,000 absentee ballots were requested and fewer than half (7,600) had been returned as of Monday night. The full results won't be known for at least a week and it is possible that Murkowski may yet overtake Miller. The Anchorage Daily News has more:

Miller credited the support of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for his lead.

"I'm absolutely certain that was pivotal," he said.

Murkowski on Tuesday night took a shot at Palin, saying that when Palin resigned as governor last summer she said she would use her new national role to help out Alaska.

"I think she's out for her own self-interest. I don't think she's out for Alaska's interest," Murkowski said as she waited at her campaign headquarters for results to come in.

Her campaign spokesman, Steve Wackowski, was holding out hope that she would benefit from support in rural and coastal areas of the state that hadn't yet reported.

"We knew the race was going to be tight. The rural areas have yet to come in and we know Sen. Murkowski is going to be very strong in the rural areas."

Most of the remaining precincts are in rural areas, where paper ballots are counted by hand.

The final results of the race won't be known for over a week. The Alaska Division of Elections said over 16,000 absentee ballots were requested and as of Monday night 7,600 had been returned. The first count of absentees will be next Tuesday and there will be two subsequent counts as the absentee votes trickle in on Sept. 3 and on Sept. 8.

Polls prior to vote had Murkowski winning comfortably by double digits. The last poll I saw was from RT Nielson poll, a poll commissioned by the Tea Party Express backing Miller, put Murkowski at 46.91 percent and Miller at 35.39 percent. Clearly, the polls were off.

Here's what we know about Miller. He is a 43-year-old father of eight and deeply religious. Born in the mid-west ( I've heard both Kansas and Illinois), he graduated from West Point in 1989 and served in the first Gulf War. He went on to earn a law degree from Yale in 1995 and moved to Alaska to take a law firm job. In Alaska, he earned a Master's in Economics from the University of Alaska. He soon became a U.S. magistrate judge before stepping down in 2004 to make an unsuccessful run for state representative. He is currently an attorney in private practice in Fairbanks. He is a friend of Todd Palin which is how he got the endorsement of Sarah Palin.

Salon has some more color:

His positions on the issues -- though we don't know many specifics -- would put him in line with diehard conservatives in the Senate like Jim DeMint of South Carolina. He says not only that he would repeal what he calls "ObamaCare," but that the health care overhaul law is not consititutional. Ditto for cap and trade legislation: he opposes it, and argues it is unconstitutional. Miller has said he would cut funding to the U.N. and the IMF and other foreign aid, but maintained in a letter to seniors he would not cut Social Security.

Miller also holds that unemployment insurance is unconstitutional. A strict constitutionalist, Miller says he believes the Federal Department of Education and the Department of Energy should be abolished and that, over the long term, the government should stop offering Social Security and Medicare. He believes that the TARP and the healthcare reform are not just wrong but unconstitutional. 

On other issues, Miller has placed himself in line with other Tea Party candidates running for Senate seats this year -- including Nevada's Sharron Angle and Colorado's Ken Buck -- by saying that he is opposed to allowing women to obtain abortions, even in cases of rape and incest. In a recent interview with the Fairbank Daily News-Miner, he said that he is "unequivocally pro-life," except "when the mother's life is in danger." He supports the Arizona immigration stance and does not believe the millions of immigrants already here illegally should be granted amnesty.

The winner of the Murkowski-Miller race will face Democrat Scott McAdams, the former mayor of Sitka, in the November general election. If Murkowski does lose, there's a chance that she can run on a third party ticket or perhaps run a write-in candidacy. She cannot, however, run as independent a la Joe Lieberman. The filing deadline for independent candidates ended in June.

"President Obama should ask for - and accept - the resignations of the remaining members of his economic team, starting with Secretary Geithner and Larry Summers, the head of the National Economic Council," said Minority Leader John Boehner in a morning speech to business leaders at the City Club of Cleveland. And with that masterful stroke of political rhetoric, long called for by many observers on the left including this one, John Boehner has set the terms of the debate for the Fall election. Granted, the Fall election was always bound to be a referendum on the President's economic policies but now Boehner has floated an idea that many outside the GOP's base can latch onto.

Beyond that demand for personnel changes in the White House Economic Team, Boehner's speech offered the standard Republican boilerplate of failed ideas: lower taxes, fewer regulations, free trade agreements, and unspecified spending cuts but presumably to social safety net entitlement programmes. While the speech is disingenuous -  he quotes John F. Kennedy "an economy constrained by high tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance the budget, just as it will never create enough jobs." but neglects to mention the top marginal rate in 1961 was 91 percent a far cry from today's 35 percent - the speech, politically speaking, is Boehner's finest hour. It's the pitch for a man who thinks himself the Speaker-in-waiting.

Mind you, the Democrats have somewhat pre-empted Boehner by making him a campaign issue and the White House is firing back. Bill Burton, the White House deputy press secretary, said he had reviewed Boehner's speech and found "what was most surprising was his full-throated defense of the indefensible." Burton rejected Boehner's call for Obama to dismiss Geithner and Summers, saying the "irony of this is that Boehner would fire the people who made the tough decisions, who did the hard work to get the economy going again." And the problem with the Administration, they think the economy is on the right track when we are headed for long period of Japanese-style malaise.  

The other must read piece of news today is in the Wall Street Journal where Jon Hilsenrath covers the on-going debate at the Federal Reserve over how to kick start the economy.

After steering the economy away from another Great Depression, Mr. Bernanke confronts a painfully slow rebound.

Unemployment is still high and inflation is uncomfortably low. Fed officials, who spent much of the early part of this year planning for an exit from easy-money policies, have been forced to think about doing more to jolt the economy to life.

Fed officials emphasize they have common objectives despite being deeply divided over what to do next: They seek to avoid either deflation, a broad decline in prices and wages, or an upsurge of inflation. And they share a strong desire to get the economy growing fast enough to sustain a recovery without unusual government support.

The Fed already has cut the short-term interest rates it targets to near zero, vowed to keep them there for an extended period and purchased trillions of dollars in securities, with money the central bank creates, to push down long-term interest rates.

The most contentious issue now is whether to print more money and buy even more long-term securities, which would expand the Fed's portfolio further. An earlier bond-buying program ended in March.

A decision hinges largely on whether the Fed sees inflation falling much further or if economic growth fails to revive. The Fed and most private forecasters still expect faster growth in 2011, and few economists are predicting outright deflation.

Among the other issues: Should the Fed act quickly, or should it wait for firmer evidence that the economy is truly faltering? And if it does decide to act, should it take small, cautious steps or large, dramatic ones?

Deflation is a concern of mine but what troubles me most isn't the Fed's wrangling though it sheds clarity over the situation but rather that Administration appears lackadaisical in tackling unemployment. From day one, it should have been priority one but the views of Christina Romer were dismissed by Summer, Geithner and Emanuel, the troika that runs the White House economic policy. Rightly or wrongly, the troika is perceived as putting the interests of Wall Street ahead of Main Street and perceptions do matter. Still, it is hard to discern a sustained effort by the Administration on the nation's unemployment problem. By letting unemployment fester, it has gives credence to the GOP thus giving them an opening.

There's more...

Here's Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders taking two questions from constituents. The first is Senator Sanders' thoughts on the achievements and disappointments of President Obama's tenure and the second is on Senator Sanders' views on the recently passed Wall Street reform law.

Florida Primary Preview
Polling last week showed Kendrick Meek overtaking Jeff Greene in the Democratic Senate primary and Bill McCollum overtaking Rick Scott in the GOP guberanatorial primary. However, a new Quinnipiac University poll released Monday shows Attorney General Bill McCollum's lead narrowing to 39-35 percent against Rick Scott, a healthcare billionaire. In the Democratic primary for US Senate, Rep. Kendrick Meek appears to have a steady 39-29 percent lead over investment billionaire Jeff Greene, according to the poll of likely primary voters. The Miami Herald has more on these races.

Earlier this year, the New York Times wondered if Marco Rubio might be the first Senator from the Tea Party but now the nation's paper of record finds the right wing Tea Party darling veering off-script. Of course, Rubio has already pivoted towards the general election where he will face Governor Charlie Crist now running as a centrist independent and the winner of the Meek/Greene primary. The Florida Senate race is certainly the nation's most intriguing one.

I'm pretty adamant on this but I think Marco Rubio is the most dangerous candidate running in any race this cycle - one that must be defeated at all costs. That's quite a statement given the likes of Sharron Angle, Rand Paul, Pat Toomey and Ken Buck. Why do I think that Rubio must be defeated? Well statements like this one where he is perceived as the next Ronald Reagan.

And frankly, I concur. He's the next Reagan, polished enough to hide his real agenda and articulate enough to sound sane at least say compared to Sarah Palin. Rubio has his feet in several conservative camps. First and foremost, he is Jeb Bush's designated heir giving him an in with the Bush wing and more importantly their money and organizing prowess. Second, he's close to the neocon presidential pardoned felon Elliot Abrams, who like Jeb Bush is a signatory in the Project for the Next American Century. Third, he's got Jim DeMint's backing and the support the red-meat conservative wing of the GOP. While he's a not a social conservative along the likes of Mike Huckabee, he's a good-looking somewhat charismatic Hispanic with the picture perfect family who seemingly lives his values. He's Florida's answer to Wisconsin's Paul Ryan. One of these two will be on GOP ticket before long. Giving Marco Rubio a Senate seat is giving him a launching pad to a presidential bid. I'd just assume beating him here and now. 

The Woes of Chet Culver
Stateline interviewed Iowa Governor who is fighting for his political life trailing Terry Branstad by 16 points in the latest poll. While Culver has Iowa sitting pretty with a balanced budget, cash reserves, low debt, and unemployment below the national average, it's not translating into votes. Here's part of the reason why, an unmotivated base.

Relations between Culver and labor hit a low in 2008, when the governor vetoed a bill that would have expanded collective bargaining rights for public employees. The move so infuriated labor unions that one union lobbyist, when asked what Culver’s biggest misstep as governor has been, asked, “Have you talked to anyone around here?”

Culver has governed as a political centrist in other ways. To balance the budget last year, he and lawmakers relied on an across-the-board spending cut of 10 percent that slashed hundreds of millions of dollars from key areas such as public education and health and human services. While deep budget-slashing has won New Jersey Governor Chris Christie plaudits from national Republicans, it is not typically the way to draw Democrats to the polls in droves, says Mack Shelley, a political science professor at Iowa State University.

Vermont's Democratic Gubernatorial Primary
Susan Bartlett, Matt Dunne, Deb Markowitz, Doug Racine and Peter Shumlin are down to the wire battling for votes ahead of Tuesday's primary in the Green Mountain State. After months of campaigning, no candidate has emerged as the clear favorite. The Burlington Free Press has more on what promises to be a cliffhanger election.

There's more...

Here are some of the other news stories making the rounds today.

Judge Royce C. Lamberth, a US District Court judge, granted a preliminary injunction Monday to stop federal funding of embryonic stem cell research that he said destroys embryos, ruling it went against the will of Congress. Lamberth's ruling said all embryonic stem cell research involves destroying embryos, which violates the Dickey-Wicker Amendment included in federal spending bills. The ruling overturns the guidelines issued by President Obama early in his Administration to allow federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.The full story from CNN.

General David Petraeus, the top commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said the Afghan Taliban's momentum has been reversed in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, as well as near Kabul. The Christian Science Monitor has the details.

One in four Californians lack health insurance according to a study released Monday by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. According to the latest estimates, the state's uninsured population rose by over 31 percent over the past two years. The number of uninsured has reached 24.3%, or about 8.4 million, up from 6.4 million in 2007. In Los Angeles County, 28.9% of residents were uninsured for all or part of last year, the largest number of uninsured residents of any county in the state. The Los Angeles Times has more on this story.

My former colleague at Goldman Sachs, Wallace Turbeville writes about how an SEC/CFTC roundtable exposes how little is being done about the next financial time bomb in a post entitled Derivatives Clearing: At the End of the Beginning over at New Deal 2.0. The post tackles the issue of clearinghouses that were set up the recently passed 880 page Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Law and that are dominated by ten or so large financial institutions. As Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism writes "we were skeptical of derivatives reform efforts as inadequate to deal with the product that needed to be reined in, credit default swaps, and subject to evisceration depending on how various details were sorted out" noting that "if the types of contracts that wind up being covered are reasonably broad, the new derivatives clearinghouse is merely another too big to fail entity." Turbeville suggests that new derivatives clearinghouses "are, or soon will be, Too Big to Fail." This, of course, points to the problem of doing incremental, if not half-assed, reform. No credit will be rewarded for moving the ball forward and all blame will come due when the inevitable failure occurs. 

Former House Majority Leader and de facto leader of the Tea Party Movement Dick Armey (R-Texas) on Sunday said lawmakers who have not signed onto Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to balance the budget lacked “courage” and could be targeted by the conservative tea party movement as a result. “All Paul Ryan is saying is let Social Security be voluntary, let Medicare be voluntary,” Armey said. “The fact that he only has 13 co-sponsors is a big reason why our folks are agitated against the Republicans as well as the Democrats — the difference between being a co-sponsor of Ryan or not is a thing called courage.” Or political suicide. More from the Congressional Quarterly.

Until three weeks ago, my biggest regret was an epic failure to hop aboard that Barack Obama bandwagon back in February 2007, or even January ’08. Whether you supported him, or whether you’re creepily infatuated with him, is irrelevant. Undeniably, there’s a lot to like about our 44th president—namely his charmed past smokin’ ganja in the island paradise of Hawaii, and his awesome off-the-rack Burberry suits. In the interest of fairness, however, he’s also a egomaniacal naïf with a long and unfortunate history imbibing the insane doctrine of black liberation theology. Not that I care about any of that. While I have learned to shroud my contempt for the president in serious policy talk, the cynical truth is that I was simply convinced the man couldn’t win.

But that’s all been eclipsed by my inexcusable failure to purchase Newsweek for all of $1 (and the assumption of some small liabilities) this past Aug. 2. (Fuck!) My first order of business would have been to haughtily saunter into my newly-acquired Manhattan headquarters or our Washington bureau—like my idol Charlie Kane—and immediately cashier Howard Fineman. My goodness, imagine the shivers down the spines of that entire clique of lazy, capricious but very serious establishment reporters it would have triggered.

Alas, I struck out. Consequently, Howard Fineman is still safely ensconced in his Newsweek sinecure and free to trot out sycophantic nonsense like his most recent piece: “The Resurgence of Bill Clinton.”

Le sigh:

If you’re President Obama, here is a galling fact: most Democrats would rather have Bill Clinton campaign for them this fall than, um, you.

“Part of it is that Bill Clinton is, at this point, a sympathetic story and has always been a likeable guy,” says Eric Schultz of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. “But his appeal right now has to do with the fact that voters associate him with a time of prosperity. You can’t say that about either George W. Bush or, unfortunately, Barack Obama.”

… As a Democratic campaign operative who spoke on background says, “Somebody’s got to get out and make the case nationally for a Democratic Congress. And who is that going to be? Not Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid. If you’ve got Clinton, you’ve got to use him.”

Grassroots folk need to very clear about what’s happening here. Recently, we spoke repeatedly about the budding rehabilitation of Mr. Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, and that’s basically the story here. In the lame, cyclical brains of reporters like Howard Fineman, Obama’s breathtaking failure necessarily vindicates his two immediate predecessors.

As Obama’s fate (one-term miserable failure) becomes unavoidably clear, we can surely anticipate the begrudging talk of how Shrub possessed a certain certitude and ruthlessness tragically absent in Mr. Obama. Likewise, Bill Clinton will be canonized as the last great Democratic president. (Black people—the president’s biggest boosters—are pretty fickle, too. Once he reaches those Nixonian levels of unpopularity, we might even see the first black president and carrier of the Dream morph back into that awkward, blackish fellow that once got his ass and his pride handed to him by Bobby Rush on the South Side of Chicago.)

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Its a bit dark to even tread this ground, as the landscape is difficult to paint rosy, even if one wanted a hopeful outlook, there's not much to go off.

Even with contests where it looks like the Democrats are very close, the number of undecideds is at 10% or greater. Its been more likely than not that those undecideds have broken to the Republicans in recent statewide elections.

But you might notice, in the past couple of weeks, the Republicans and their national megaphone are way off message with the GZM flap. Not that its an issue on which Democrats gain (far from it), but a day not talking about the economy is a day where Democrats are not defending the worst part of the record.

A look across the pundits.

The Fix merely ranks contests, and has never shown an inclination to go out on a limb and predict outcomes. It's eye candy to the prognosticator, but, reading between the tea leaves of the Chris Cillizza rankings seems to suggest a 50-47-3 makeup, with those 3 Independents caucusing with the Dems. The Democrats losing 6 seats sounds about conventional wisdom.

The thing that ticks me off about Charlie Cook is that, while he was late to the show in finding out the Democratic Wave elections of '06 and '08, he was quick to label '10 a Republican Wave election. No quicker than I was though, after seeing the '09 results, so I shouldn't mind too much. Cook is more straight-up toss-up city right now. The Democrats start with just 49 secure seats. In fact, the CT contest (rightly so) is on the bubble of making it 48. Its scary to think that in all of the previous 5 election cycles, the Senate contests tipped nearly all one-way or the other with the toss-ups. If it went that way (49), the Dem caucus would be left upon relying on Lieberman for the majority. Or, in the case of just 48, hoping that Crist wins.

Chances are, even in the extreme, the Democrats win at least one of the toss-ups. If I had to bet it'd be out on the west coast. I don't think the Republicans can sweep WA, CA, NV at this moment in time. I wouldn't be shocked at Dems losing 2 out of 3 of those though.

Over on The Rothenberg Report, Stuart and Nathan Gonzales show 5 Democratic seats going Republican. They project Republicans are likely to gain 5-8 seats. Right in the CW sweet spot.

Nate Silver says he's got a new model coming out. Right now the 538 rankings, based on their majority indicator, show 7 takeaways by the Republicans, and 1 takeaway by the Independent Crist from the Republicans. It yields a 49-48-3 makeup. Right on the bubble are IL and WA for the Republicans to takeaway.

Jim Geraghty counts 12 Democratic seats where Republicans are trying to take it away, even 13, with the mention of Oregon. Even the NRSC ("Republicans are now on offense in at least 12 Democrat-held Senate seats") are not that optimistic.

Mike Lux, whom has the stomach to gleefully endorse Alexi Giannoulias, doesn't really put forward a prediction.

Take it all together, and the biggest consensus is that Democrats will lose seats. Its only a question of how many. A depressing reality given how rosy things looked a mere 20 months ago, but here we are.

At thing point, I'll skip the possibility of Republicans taking control, and just apply Matt Stoller's Theorem to figure out the most annoying scenario. I'll go with that being the likelihood that Democrats will be relying upon Independents to make a majority. And if its Crist and Lieberman, then what we will likely see is a defacto Crist-Lieberman-McCain council of power in the Senate come 2011. They would decide that one of their own (maybe even pull in a few others in their gang?) is to be the majority leader. I don't even know if that's possible, but it sounds miserable.

Germany's Der Spiegel has a short informative, if disturbing, article that looks at the widening gap between rich and poor in the United States that threatens to erode the 70 years of gains made by the American middle classes that will leave the country looking more a second tier developing country in terms of wealth distribution than an advanced economy. Here are some of the alarming statistics from the article.

Four out of 10 Americans who consider themselves part of this [middle] class believe that they will be unable to maintain their social status.

In its current annual report, the US Department of Agriculture notes that "food insecurity" is on the rise, and that 50 million Americans couldn't afford to buy enough food to stay healthy at some point last year. One in eight American adults and one in four children now survive on government food stamps. These are unbelievable numbers for the world's richest nation.

The boom in stocks and real estate, the country's wild borrowing spree and its excessive consumer spending have long masked the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans derived almost no benefit from 30 years of economic growth. In 1978, the average per capita income for men in the United States was $45,879 (about €35,570). The same figure for 2007, adjusted for inflation, was $45,113 (€35,051).

Statistically, less affluent Americans stand a 4 percent chance of becoming part of the upper middle class -- a number that is lower than in almost every other industrialized nation. (among OECD countries, only in México and Turkey does someone born poor stand less of chance of escaping poverty than in the United States)

While 90 percent of Americans have seen only modest gains in their incomes since 1973, incomes have almost tripled for people at the upper end of the scale. In 1979, one third of the profits the country produced went to the richest 1 percent of American society. Today it's almost 60 percent. In 1950, the average corporate CEO earned 30 times as much as an ordinary worker. Today it's 300 times as much. And today 1 percent of Americans own 37 percent of the total national wealth.

Because they lacked savings, Americans began borrowing money to cover all of their other expenses, including education, healthcare and consumption. American consumer debt now totals about $13.5 trillion.

Many people threaten to suffocate under the burden of their debt. Some 61 percent of Americans have no financial reserves and are living from paycheck to paycheck.

All rather grim. The Der Spiegel article doesn't go into the causes of this decline but it should be clear that this massive redistribution wealth, a trickle up and then some, is a result of policies enacted by successive Republican Administrations beginning with the Reagan tax cuts. The Reagan Administration drastically altered the wealth distribution patterns by introducing tax legislation that favored the top one percent.

If the redistribution upwards since 1981 had not taken place, if the average American family in the bottom 90 percent were today getting the same share of the nation's income as the average bottom 90 percent family received in 1973 when income distribution was much more egalitarian, this average family would now be taking home in income over $10,000 more per year. Now how many of you can use an extra ten grand?

Still to put our wealth gap into perspective, top one percent controls more assets than the bottom 90 percent. Who makes up that bottom 90 percent? Well, it is all of the poor, all of the middle class and half of the upper middle class.

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McConnell: What are you talking about, paid for? This is existing tax policy. It’s been in place for ten years. 

[yada, yada, yada . . .]

Gregory: For a final time, I’ll go back to my question which is, the extension of the tax cuts would cost $3.2 trillion. That’s borrowed money, that adds to the deficit. Do you have a plan to pay for that extension?

McConnell: You’re talking about current tax policy. Why did it all of a sudden become something that we, quote, ‘pay for’?

Earlier this month, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said that the push by Congressional Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts without offsetting the costs elsewhere could end up being "disastrous" for the economy. "I'm very much in favor of tax cuts but not with borrowed money and the problem that we have gotten into in recent years is spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money," he said. "And at the end of the day that proves disastrous. My view is I don't think we can play subtle policy here."

They've already been "disastrous" turning the Clintonian budget surplus into a budget deficit. Over the past decade those tax cuts added $3.8 trillion to the national debt. President Obama's proposals are simple: in 2011 the top two income tax rates — now 33 percent and 35 percent — would revert to the levels before the Bush Administration, 36 percent and 39.6 percent, respectively. But the four lower rates would remain 10 percent, 15 percent, 25 percent and 28 percent. 

Paul Krugman tells us what's at stake.

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to following the Obama proposal, would cost the federal government $680 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. For the sake of comparison, it took months of hard negotiations to get Congressional approval for a mere $26 billion in desperately needed aid to state and local governments.

And where would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that’s the least of it: the policy center’s estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income; he’s going to get the majority of that group’s tax break. And the average tax break for those lucky few — the poorest members of the group have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year — would be $3 million over the course of the next decade.

It's a simple question, Mitch, how will you pay for the Bush tax cuts?

Last month, Marg Baker, a Tea Party-backed candidate for the Florida State House, suggested that illegal immigrants be rounded up and placed in internment camps. She floated her idea at a local meeting in Tampa of the 9-12 Project, the Glenn Beck-founded group.

After the video of remarks surfaced earlier this month, Justin Elliott of Salon caught up with Ms. Baker where she expanded on her idea.

"We can ship them out to the middle of the country and put up high walls and leave them there," said Marg Baker, the middle-aged real estate broker vying for the Republican nomination in the state's 48th district, north of Tampa.

Baker was filmed advocating the camps idea at a local meeting of the 9-12 Project, Glenn Beck's activist group, earlier this month. She told Salon today that she was upset at the way some had misinterpreted her comments. "They're trying to think I want to erect some sort of prison camps like over in Germany" -- which she is not, Baker said.

Asked if what she had in mind was more like the Japanese internment camps of the World War II era, Baker said, "something like that. But unfortunately in the Japanese camps they detained American citizens. The only ones I want to detain are the ones who are illegal."

She added, "You've gotta have places for them to eat and sleep and breathe fresh air. It can be a tent city ... You don't want to make them too comfortable or they'll want to come back."

While illegal immigrants are held in detention centers, they are generally processed quickly and then deported. It may surprise Ms. Baker to learn that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency expects to deport about 400,000 people this fiscal year, nearly 10 percent above the Bush Administration's 2008 total and 25 percent more than were deported in 2007.

Perhaps that number remains a drop in the bucket but the deportation of all illegal aliens is a non-starter. The economic impact would be severe. A 2007 study put the economic contribution of illegal aliens at $1.7 trillion. Add in that illegal aliens perform tasks at 20 percent below market rates, the inflationary impact would be immediate. Few Americans are willing to work for or able to survive on wages of $8.00 an hour. The Washington Post in a June 4, 2007 editorial article titled "Immigrants Equal Growth... Reform Isn't Just Humane. It's Self-Interest," offered the following position:

Amid the blizzard of data concerning immigrants' effects on wages, welfare and municipal budgets, the essential point is this: The latest wave of immigrants - legal and illegal, skilled and unskilled - has stimulated enormous economic activity and wealth generation in this country, and it is implausible that the American economy would fare as well without them...

Since most immigrants come when they are young and working... they tend not to collect Social Security or Medicare for many years - even while paying into the systems with payroll taxes, in many cases with phony Social Security numbers (meaning they will contribute but not collect). In fact, illegal immigrants do not get federal welfare benefits of any kind. At the same time they often pay income tax (through paycheck withholdings) and sales tax, thereby helping directly or indirectly to underwrite transportation, health care, education and other services.

But beyond the economic impact, we can't hold people against their will. There's the matter of due process and then there's the matter of how you round up an estimated 8 to 12 million illegal aliens. The suggestion is ludricous but such are many of the suggestions emanating from the Tea Party wing of the GOP.

Now comes word that a Tea Party backed Republican candidate for Governor in New York Carl Paladino said he would transform some prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, where they would work in state-sponsored jobs, get employment training and take lessons in "personal hygiene."

There's more...

A tremendously hot August that flirted with record highs is almost history, and with it the tendentious hope some had for a Summer of Recovery. Au revoir. Boasts that emanated from the White House of an imminent reversal of America’s dismal economic predicament (and Democratic political fortunes) were so predictably wide of the mark that the reluctant acknowledgment of such is almost uncontroversial. One must understand that when a president is this out of his depth, what other recourse is there besides breaking out the Blue Goose to disseminate false hope?

A woeful chasm in this country persists and it sets the Best and the Brightest of our venerable institutions diametrically apart from the economic reality on the ground. This Recovery Summer that decidedly wasn’t brings to mind the “green shoots” we heard a bit about in the spring of 2009. Or perhaps more notoriously, reminds us of how wrong the establishment was in its belated discovery of economic recession 2½ years ago. If their epic wrongness continues unabated, words like “expert” may literally have to undergo semantic change. “A person who commands considerable status despite lack of foresight, special knowledge or self-awareness,” is what Webster’s Fourth may read at the turn of the next century.

Optimistic talk of liberal policy wonks—who else is there left to defend this administration?—is given the lie to by NPR a day ago.

Articles like these make pearl-clutchers out of us all:

[I]n light of the financial crisis and Fannie and Freddie's near-collapse, policy leaders are also rethinking the government's role — and many Americans are starting to question whether homeownership is the only path to the American Dream.

Fannie and Freddie function by buying, bundling and then stamping a government guarantee on mortgages. Then they sell them to investors. It keeps the banks happy because it keeps capital flowing, and it keeps consumers happy because it makes low, fixed-rate mortgages possible.

In a related occurrence, Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the Financial Services Committee, finally lent his lisp to an astonishing truism: “Not everybody can or should be a homeowner,” the congressman informs us, summoning the authority of a public official oblivious to how tragically late he is.

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