Month: February 2008

Did anyone NOT see this coming after another Democratic Congressional Leadership very special “sternly worded letter” to Mukasey (a man that would never have been Attorney General if Chuck Schumer and Diane Feinstein had any sense of dignity) about subpoenas being ignored by Miers and Rove?

Did anyone NOT think that the House Democrats would ultimately waver for a possible cave on telecom immunity after Reid let Rockefeller’s telecom immunity bill pass the Senate, despite the fact that nearly 60% of people are against telecom immunity?

Did anyone NOT think that the RNC would decide to just stop looking for the emails that were erased on purpose, despite the fact that they were ORDERED to be turned over to Congress?

And while we are at it, does anyone think that a republican Congress would have at least pursued inherent contempt against Rove and Miers if they were Democrats? Or that Mukasey would have been confirmed (hint, think Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood and the horrific crime of an undocumented household worker)? Or that impeachment charges against Mukasey would not be pursued for blowing off Congress about waterboarding, illegal wiretapping or ignoring subpoenas?

Is Congress dead?

Back in 2006, the cry was “we can’t do anything because we don’t have a majority”. Then, “we don’t have 60 votes in the Senate” was the cry. And then “we don’t have a veto proof majority” was the cry. And now, there isn’t even an attempt to do anything constructive until 2009 – with the hope and assumption that a Democrat will be in the White House.

Way to do your jobs, Congressional Democratic majorities and leadership.

Does Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid and others in leadership positions realize the following:

• If McCain becomes President, he will ignore Congress much the same way as Bush has.
• If and when the republicans are back in the majority, they will NOT hesitate to use whatever tools they have at their disposal to neuter a Democratic President or a Democratic Congressional minority.
• That they are setting a horrific and dangerous precedent by letting all of these criminal actions slide in the name of “hoping for a bigger majority in the future”.
• That they are aiding and abetting all of this lawbreaking – complicit in the actions of Mukasey, Gonzales and Ashcroft as well as Rove, Bush, Rice, Cheney, Goodling, Rumsfeld and all others who have lied under oath, and
• That they are breaking their oath to uphold the Constitution as well as their promise to those who they are supposed to serve, and

At this point, there are three options. Pursue impeachment, pursue inherent contempt or effectively render Congress as meaningless. If they do not take option one or option two, then they might as well resign and let those who are actually interested in the Constitution do their jobs for them.

This is a disgrace – how anyone in any leadership position can’t see (or thinks it is a good idea to ignore) the consequences of their inactions is beyond me. And if the reasoning is, as my good friend thereisnospoon says, “cynical manipulation” for political gain, then how is that different from the “party before country” that we have seen from the republican party?

To bank on enough people not knowing all that is being done (or being allowed to be done) in the hopes of convincing enough people to put more Democrats in Congress so they can get bigger majorities is the height of disingenuousness. It is self serving and renders any argument of what the Bush administration is or isn’t doing moot.

Congress has the power. It has the power of the purse to stop spending over $200,000 EVERY MINUTE in Iraq. It has the power to pursue inherent contempt (as Kagro X has pointed out so very well). It has the power of oversight, and to impeach.

Leadership has made a calculated decision to not use any of those powers, and to let tens of billions be wasted, hundreds of US troops lives be lost, thousands of US troops lives be forever altered, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people’s lives ruined, to let laws be broken with impunity; all in the name of “if you just give us more power, it won’t be that way anymore”.

To that I say, bullshit.

You have a job. You have been given tools to perform that job. Use them or let someone else who actually cares about this country and the Constitution use them.

But don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining and I should buy an umbrella from you too.

We’re going to court:

Washington, D.C. – Speaker Nancy Pelosi released the following statement today in response to a letter she received late this afternoon from U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey stating that the Administration is refusing to enforce contempt of Congress citations against former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten:

“By ordering the U.S. Attorney to take no action in response to congressional subpoenas, the Bush Administration is continuing to politicize law enforcement, which undermines public confidence in our criminal justice system.

“Anticipating this response from the Administration, the House has already provided authority for the Judiciary Committee to file a civil enforcement action in federal district court and the House shall do so promptly. The American people demand that we uphold the law. As public officials, we take an oath to uphold the Constitution and protect our system of checks and balances and our civil lawsuit seeks to do just that.”

Here’s John Conyers:

From the Judiciary Committee on the DOJ decision:

Conyers Outraged at Justice Department Contempt Decision Vows to Enforce Subpoenas

(Washington, DC)- Today, the House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) reacted to the Justice Department’s decision not to present contempt citations against former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten to a grand jury, despite a statutory obligation to do so:

“Our investigation into the firing of United States Attorneys revealed an Administration and a Justice Department that seemed to put politics first, and today’s decision to shelve the contempt process, in violation of a federal statute, shows that the White House will go to any lengths to keep its role in the US Attorney firings hidden. In the face of such extraordinary actions, we have no choice but to proceed with a lawsuit to enforce the Committee’s subpoenas.”

I wonder if this could go all the way to Inherent Contempt proceedings or whether the clock will just run out.

What do you want to buy?

It is billed as the best pop culture collection ever assembled — ranging from the gun used to kill the assassin of President John F. Kennedy to the Wicked Witch of the West’s hat from “The Wizard of Oz.”

Collected over the past 25 years by South Florida property developer Anthony Pugliese, the collection, which also includes a whip and the holy grail from “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” will be put up for auction next month in Las Vegas…

Also up for grabs is the jacket worn by Beatle John Lennon in the “Imagine” video, the wedding dress worn by pop star Madonna in her “Like a Virgin” video, a “Superman” costume worn by Christopher Reeve, and an Andy Warhol paint brush.

Ettinger said Pugliese was selling his collection, which he had kept in a large vault at his offices, because it “had been his passion, but now has taken a back seat” to a green housing development he was working on.

Other items to be auctioned include a Federal Bureau of Investigation badge that belonged to the bureau’s founder J. Edgar Hoover, a wig worn by Elizabeth Taylor for “Cleopatra,” and the leather jacket worn by actor Brandon Lee when he was accidentally shot and killed while filming “The Crow.”

(“Palestinians can be killed without outrage”)
Israel’s propaganda effort to turn the occupied Palestinians into terrorists is not just a local Israeli phenomenon, but is being actively assisted in America by the US State Department, politicians such as Hillary Clinton (especially through her falsified condemnation of Palestinian textbooks as terrorist manuals), and right wing Zionist organizations like AIPAC, the Zionist Organization of America, and the American Jewish Committee. However, this propaganda effort would not even have begun to take hold without the complicity of America’s mainstream media.

Hamas, which developed to fight Israel’s military occupation during the First Intifada, is now classified by the US as a terrorist organization. It, not Israel, is the terrorist; the occupiers are merely defending themselves. How did this twist of reality come about?

In a word, through one of the most successful propaganda campaigns ever conceived.

The story of Israel’s propaganda effort to transform the Palestinians into terrorists is the theme of the documentary, Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land (Part I and Part II). Seen by over a million Americans, it provides a striking comparison of U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, zeroing in on how structural distortions in U.S. coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This pivotal documentary exposes how the foreign policy interests of American political elites–oil, and a need to have a secure military base in the region, among others–work in combination with Israeli public relations strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from the region is reported.

What Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land depicts is the transformation of a people, the Palestinians, from the victims of a long military occupation while their lands were (and are) being colonized, into perpetrators of heinous crimes in the name of terrorism, largely facilitated by the spate of suicide bombings that occurred during the Second Intifada. (I briefly mention that before a single suicide bomber entered Israel, Israeli forces had killed hundreds of Palestinians, including 86 children below the age of 18. Alison Weir, in her documentary, Off the Charts, documented 27 of them, most of whom were shot in the head, the youngest only a few months old.)

Here are some excerpts:

Robert Jensen, Professor of Journalism, University of Texas-Austin: “In contrast to the international press, in American media, there is a reversal of cause and effect in that the occupation is framed as a response to the suicide bombings. All of the Palestinian actions are attacks and Israel actions retaliation, is meaningful. Retaliation suggests a defensive stance against violence initiated by someone else. It places a responsibility for the violence on the party provoking the retaliation. In other words, Palestinian violence like suicide bombings is seen as cause and the origin of the conflict. Since the September 11 attack on the US, Israel’s PR strategy has been to frame all Palestinian actions, violent or not, as terrorism. To the extent that they can do that they have repackaged the illegal occupation as part of the war on terrorism.”

Rabbi Michael Lerner, Founder & Executive Director, Tikkun Magazine: “When you have a population that is being occupied, when their fundamental human rights are systematically being denied, when they are not allowed to move from city to city and place to place, without a huge amount of harassment, when they are being subject to torture, when people are essentially in desperate conditions, it is not a surprise that they are going to be very, very angry. There is no understand by the public media, or the American media, what creates this circumstance. Israel occupies, people strike at Israel against that occupation. They use means I think are wrong means, namely, the terror, and then Israel imposes punishment on the entire people, which creates a climate which makes it easier to recruit.”

Major Stav Adivi, reserves, Israeli Defense Forces, Israel: “we have to understand that these (suicide bombings) are the effects of the occupation.”

News headlines: “This is Israel’s war on terrorism. F16s hit a Palestinian in the Gaza Strip this morning….The case the Israelis are trying to make: this is no different than what the US is doing in Afganistan (air attacks on the West Bank)…Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared on television tonight, that he was determined to root out what he called `the terrorist infrastructure.'”

So rose the myth of the Palestinian terrorist, who just happens to be fighting a 40-year long military occupation/colonization of their lands, which the UN has called illegal. In the guise of fighting terrorism, Israel’s colonization of occupied Palestinian land now appears to be a defensive move to stop terrorism, rather than the offensive one it is. In fact, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza pretty much remains hidden in the news media. As the documentary shows, U.S. journalists, for reasons ranging from intimidation to a lack of thorough investigation, have become complicit in carrying out Israel’s PR campaign.

(Six year old Palestinian girl killed by shrapnel two days ago)

One effect of this propaganda is that Palestinian lives have now become less valuable.

Ben White, a British journalist specializing in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, speaking about the rocketing of Sderot by Palestinian militants, noted:

Once again, we are learning that when it comes to the conflict in Palestine/Israel, some lives are worth more than others. Earlier today, dozens of Qassam rockets fired from the Gaza Strip fell on Sderot, the Israeli town that has borne the brunt of Palestinian rocket fire over the last few years. This time, an Israeli man, “father-of-four” Roni Yechiah, was killed in a car park by shrapnel. Others have suffered injuries.

Even as I write this, however, there is news that in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military, in separate attacks, has killed a 6 month old baby and three Palestinian children age 10, 12 and 14. No names yet. In the case of the three children, the Israeli army claims that it was aiming at militants, and a spokesperson said it was “strange” that there should be children around the alleged vicinity of rocket launchers. But it is not the first `strange’ occurrence recently in Gaza. On Saturday, three Palestinians in their early 20s, Mohammad Talal al-Za’anin, Ibrahim Ahmad Abu Jarad, and Mohammad Hasan Hussein, were killed as they prepared a picnic in a field near Beit Hanoun. The Israeli missile hit their hut, 1.2km from the border fence, killing and dismembering them instantly. `Strangely’, the Israeli army claimed it had targeted militants firing rockets. Then on Tuesday, Palestinian farmer Hassan Abu Sabatt was tilling his land near Qarara village, when Israeli soldiers shot him dead. Once again, the IDF said it had killed an armed militant – a spokeswoman said he’d been spotted planting a bomb.

(snip)

Of course, Western media outlets either unquestioningly reprint official IDF press releases, or `balance’ the two contradictory accounts.

Let’s be clear. The residents of Sderot are unquestionably living through a nightmare. Indeed, some thought it worthwhile to organize a concert in Los Angeles this week in solidarity with the town. Hollywood stars were in attendance, and according to Yedioth Ahronoth online, the three presidential candidates all sent messages of support.

John McCain, bizarrely, believes that Palestinian violence “is not condemned by world nations”. Hillary Clinton commented on Sderot’s courage and sacrifice, while Barack Obama said that as a father, he “could only imagine the terror that these rockets cause”. The deaths of Mohammad the university student or Hassan the farmer, however, went unnoticed and unlamented. Presumably, if asked bluntly, Obama, McCain and Clinton would all profusely stress that they believe a Palestinian life is equal to that of an Israeli’s. But there will be no A-list concert for Palestinians living under daily terror – indeed, such an event is inconceivable because there is simply no understanding of Israel as a practitioner of terror.

(In remembrance of the Beit Hanoun atrocity, Gaza, 2006)

Turning its back on Israel’s PR campaign, which reframes Israel as the victim rather than the colonial perpetrator of all the death and destruction that has befallen Palestinians and Israelis alike for 60 years, a report commissioned by the United Nations recently put straight the reality.

Palestinian terrorism is the “inevitable consequence” of Israeli occupation and laws that resemble South African apartheid…

The report by John Dugard…, a South African lawyer who campaigned against apartheid in the 1980s, says “common sense dictates that a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror, such as acts committed by al-Qaida, and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation against colonialism, apartheid or military occupation.”

While Palestinian terrorist acts are to be deplored, “they must be understood as being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid or occupation…”

FULL REPORT

So why were the Palestinians shown above killed without outrage? Now you know.

ADDENDUM

Yonatan Mendel who is employed by Walla, Israel’s most popular website, asked a Palestinian spokesman about the rocketing of Sderot:

Interviewing Abu-Qusay, the spokesman of Al-Aqsa Brigades in Gaza, in June 2007, I asked him about the rationale for firing Qassam missiles at the Israeli town of Sderot. ‘The army might respond,’ I said, not realising that I was already biased. ‘But we are responding here,’ Abu-Qusay said. ‘We are not terrorists, we do not want to kill . . . we are resisting Israel’s continual incursions into the West Bank, its attacks, its siege on our waters and its closure on our lands.’ Abu-Qusay’s words were translated into Hebrew, but Israel continued to enter the West Bank every night and Israelis did not find any harm in it. After all it was only a response.

Yonatan Mendel’s diary is also about propaganda: Palestinians terrorize and Israel responds. Written by an insider, it is worth a diary all its own.

Asked whether they consider themselves Democrats or Republicans (or leaned one way or the other) the electorate said Democrat 44%-39% in 2000 and 47%-41% in 2004. Of course, that did not translate into electoral victory in either year. However, the number in 2007 was 50%-35%, and it may be growing. The fifteen-point spread is larger than at any time going back through 1990. So, it’s not all that surprising that the Democrats are enjoying higher voter registration everywhere from Vermont to Rhode Island to Connecticut to North Carolina to Oregon to Nevada.

The question is whether the Democrats can break the red/blue impasse and get a truly realigning election. It’s a little early but there are some indications that Obama can pull it off. Here are some red states where SurveyUSA has Obama beating McCain:

Missouri
New Mexico
Ohio
Virginia
Iowa

Hillary Clinton is also beating McCain in Missouri, New Mexico, and Ohio, but she is losing in blue states like Wisconsin and Oregon where Obama leads easily.

Assuming that Obama can hold Kerry’s blue states and carry those five red states, he has a 308-230 Electoral College advantage. That number grows to 317-221 if you include, for example, Colorado, where Rasmussen finds Obama (but not Hillary) outpacing McCain. Interestingly, Rasmussen currently gives the Democrats a 284-229 Electoral College advantage, with 25 points undecided. Here’s their breakdown.

Safely Democratic: California (55), Connecticut (7), District of Columbia (3), Hawaii (4), Illinois (21), Maine (4), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (12), New York (31), Rhode Island (4), and Vermont (3).

Likely Democratic: Delaware (3), Michigan (17), Minnesota (10), New Jersey (15), Oregon (7), Pennsylvania (21), and Washington (11).

Leans Democratic: Iowa (7), New Hampshire (4), New Mexico (5), Ohio (20), and Wisconsin (10).

Toss-Up: Colorado (9), Missouri (11), and Nevada (5).

Leans Republican: Florida (27), Virginia (13).

Likely Republican: Arkansas (6), North Carolina (15).

Safely Republican: Alabama (9), Alaska (3), Arizona (10), Georgia (15), Idaho (4), Indiana (11), Kansas (6), Kentucky (8), Louisiana (9), Mississippi (6), Montana (3), Nebraska (5), North Dakota (3), Oklahoma (7), South Carolina (8), South Dakota (3), Tennessee (11), Texas (34), Utah (5), West Virginia (5) and Wyoming (3).

Clinton clearly has an advantage in Arkansas, but that seems to be the extent of her cross-over potential. Hillary is losing in the ‘likely Democratic’ state of Oregon and the ‘Leans Democratic’ state of Wisconsin. But Obama is ahead in those states and cuts into McCain’s base in Virginia and wins the ‘toss-up’ states of Colorado and Missouri.

When we look at the ‘safe Republican’ states, in the primaries/caucuses Obama has won or (is favored to win) all of them except Arizona, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Those are four states that will be tough to crack, but who knows? Obama should be competitive in the ‘Likely Republican’ state of North Carolina, where he is polling well ahead of Hillary Clinton.

Overall, Obama is showing much greater cross-over appeal, even though he is locked in a very tough battle for the nomination. What states do you think we can’t win, if any?

Matt Gonzalez over at BeyondChron.org wrote a brilliant exposé on Barack Obama that must be shared.  The hardest part of trying to get Democrats elected to power is vetting them, especially during election years in which people are so desperate for someone who can deliver on a promise of change that they fail to look past the campaign rhetoric to see the truth.  I’ve explained on other blog sites that Barack Obama is a DLCer in progressive’s clothing.  Mr. Gonzalez hammers the point home.
It has been claimed by uncritical supporters that Obama’s record in the U.S. Senate is progressive, but this is far from the truth (a fact easily verified by going to GovTrack.us and doing some homework).  It is undeniable that the senator from Illinois has consistently voted to fund the Iraq war, with the sole exception being that he was shamed by Christopher Dodd of Connecticut into voting against last Summer’s appropriations bill.  Matt Gonzalez writes:

Since taking office in January 2005 he has voted to approve every war appropriation the Republicans have put forward, totaling over $300 billion. He also voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State despite her complicity in the Bush Administration’s various false justifications for going to war in Iraq. Why would he vote to make one of the architects of “Operation Iraqi Liberation” the head of US foreign policy? Curiously, he lacked the courage of 13 of his colleagues who voted against her confirmation.

The senator from Illinois has been less than enthusiastic in advocating for a full withdrawal from Iraq.  Obama has also, as Gonzalez points out, voted to re-authorize the USA PATRIOT Act — one of the more heinous attacks on civil liberties in this decade — in stark contrast to his prior work as a civil rights attorney.  Somewhere along the way, Obama was either corrupted on the issue of civil liberties, or else he has been fooling people on where he actually stands from the beginning.  Either way, his record on the occupation of Iraq and on civil liberties are not consistent with his rhetoric on the campaign trail.

On class action lawsuits, Gonzalez writes:

In 2005, Obama joined Republicans in passing a law dubiously called the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) that would shut down state courts as a venue to hear many class action lawsuits. Long a desired objective of large corporations and President George Bush, Obama in effect voted to deny redress in many of the courts where these kinds of cases have the best chance of surviving corporate legal challenges. Instead, it forces them into the backlogged Republican-judge dominated federal courts.

And on credit interest rates:

Obama has a way of ducking hard votes or explaining away his bad votes by trying to blame poorly-written statutes. Case in point: an amendment he voted on as part of a recent bankruptcy bill before the US Senate would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent. Inexplicably, Obama voted against it, although it would have been the beginning of setting these predatory lending rates under federal control. Even Senator Hillary Clinton supported it.

Are you seeing anything to suggest that Obama is a progressive, yet?  I’m not.  I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth repeating: health care “reform”.  Given Obama’s record of gutting actual health care reform in the Illinois state senate, one can’t help but nod in agreement when Matt Gonzalez explains:

Obama opposed single-payer bill HR676, sponsored by Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers in 2006, although at least 75 members of Congress supported it. Single-payer works by trying to diminish the administrative costs that comprise somewhere around one-third of every health care dollar spent, by eliminating the duplicative nature of these services. The expected $300 billion in annual savings such a system would produce would go directly to cover the uninsured and expand coverage to those who already have insurance, according to Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler, an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program.

Obama’s own plan has been widely criticized for leaving health care industry administrative costs in place and for allowing millions of people to remain uninsured. “Sicko” filmmaker Michael Moore ridiculed it saying, “Obama wants the insurance companies to help us develop a new health care plan-the same companies who have created the mess in the first place.”

And as Gonzalez points out, Obama went to bat for Joe LIEberman for re-election in 2006 against challenger Ned Lamont (whom blog web sites such as Daily Kos supported) and referred to the turncoat as his mentor.  Yeah, real “progressive” of Obama to try to prop up a party traitor who has consistently enabled the Bush-Cheney regime at every opportunity, and who endorses Republican John McCain for president.

I realize Obama supporters don’t like to read the truth about their candidate, and who can blame them?  After eight years of destructive Republican policies, the desperation for some actual change — even if it is only an illusion — is certainly understandable.  But it is because desperation can lead to making serious mistakes in an election year critical to America’s future that it is important for Democrats to know exactly who it is we’re prepared to hand the nomination to.  Barack Obama simply is not a progressive, he’s just another DINO who has somehow managed to fool a lot of people.

Hope is not lost, however.  We can and should focus our efforts to get true Progressives elected to Congress, so that a (we hope) Democratic president may be pushed in the correct direction on issues such as getting out of Iraq and passing true health care reform.  It’s still early in the year, and we still have a chance to be the change we want to see in this country.  It’s not enough to simply get Democrats elected to power; the failures of the last year have proven that.  We must work to get the right Democrats — Progressive ones — seats in the Legislature and in state offices across the country.

Only then can we expect to succeed in pushing Barack Obama, should he win the nomination and become president, to achieve actual change.

In the interests of full disclosure, BeyondChron.org reports that Gonzalez has been chosen as Ralph Nader’s running mate.  Which means the Nader-haters shall dismiss anything and everything he has to say, no matter that it’s true.  But I thought it only fair, in the interest of telling the whole truth, to let you know about this.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

NEW YORK (AP) — Stocks fell sharply Friday after a series of depressing economic and earnings reports and high oil prices stoked concerns about the health of economy. The major stock indexes fell more than 2 percent, with the Dow Jones industrials at times giving up more than 300 points.

Investors were unnerved by disappointing quarterly results from American International Group Inc. and Dell Inc. And an index of regional business activity that Wall Street regards as a good indicator of a broader report set to arrive next week registered its weakest reading in more than six years.

Adding to Wall Street’s list of worries, oil prices continued to stir concern about inflation after topping $103 per barrel for the first time, in electronic trading overnight.

Yeah, oil at $103 a barrel bums me out too. The only people probably unconcerned about it are our good friends at Big Oil, and Mr. “I don’t keep track of the price of gasoline” Bush.

Two things that most Democrats are really tired of are politicians that seek to stoke our fears rather than inspire our service, and politicians that don’t play by the rules. Whether it was color-coded terror warnings or Bush’s Unitary Executive theory, Democrats have recoiled in horror. So that is why it is so telling that the Clintons are pushing both a lawsuit to overturn the caucus rules in Texas and a fear-mongering television commercial. It reminds us of everything we hated about Bush. And the Clintons think this will make us vote for them? They are so out of touch.

.

More to follow …

● Why are Israeli lives worth more than Palestinian lives ◊ by Shergald

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

Here we go again.  The last day of February this year is a Leap Day, the 29th, and all that means is another dismal Friday in the markets.

Yesterday’s affirmation that the economy went to almost a dead stop in Q4 2007 shouldn’t surprise anybody, but the real problem is that excluding the bump in exports from a free-falling dollar giving a boost of 0.9%, the economy would have officially receded by 0.3%.

In other words, we’ve been in a recession for most of the holiday shopping season on, and it’s gotten significantly worse in 2008.

Today’s news has all but sealed the deal on the recession.
Manufacturing, what little we have left in this country, is contracting at a nasty pace…

U.S. Midwest business activity contracted sharply in February in a report showing even the
areas of the country least affected by the boom-bust housing cycle are feeling ripples from the crisis.

The National Association of Purchasing Managers-Chicago said on Friday its index of regional business conditions tumbled to 44.5, its lowest since December 2001, from 51.5 in January. That was well below forecasts centering around 49.7.

The data bolstered the view that the economy is heading for a recession, since manufacturing had been one of the few holdouts in an otherwise grim economic picture.

…and consumer confidence is in the crapper not just here, but in Europe too.

European economic confidence fell more than economists forecast in February on concern soaring food and energy costs will keep inflation at record levels even as the euro’s strength threatens to slow economic growth.

An index of executive and consumer sentiment in the euro area declined to 100.1, the lowest since November 2005, from 101.7 in January, the European Commission in Brussels said today. Separate reports showed energy and food-price inflation accelerated last month and unemployment stayed at a record low.

Foods including wheat, soybeans and corn as well as crude oil rose to records this month. That has pushed up inflation and prevented the European Central Bank from cutting interest rates at a time when economic growth faces the additional threat of the euro’s gains to an all-time high against the dollar.

Meanwhile in Monoline Land, the Great Ambac Bailout has hit…surprise…a slight hitch.

The bailout of troubled bond insurer Ambac has hit a significant snag, after rating agencies demanded more capital from the consortium of banks involved in the bailout effort, CNBC has learned.

Oh, nobody saw THAT one coming.  Nope.

People close to the deal are confident that it will still happen, because the banks and the rating agencies are aware that, if it collapse, there will be a huge decline in the stock market.

The Monoline Nuke is a great motivator.

The snag was hit Wednesday, when raters said they wanted to see more capital injected in the bond insurer if it is to get a triple-A rating, after the consortium of banks had agreed to come up with $2.5 billion in capital.

Too Big To Fail in action, folks.  Everybody wants their cut of the coming government bailout billions, and everyone on Wall Street is now expecting to get them.

When the hyper-inflation bubble explodes and drags the economy down into a massive deflationary spiral, it will take far more than the Monolines with it.  It will almost certainly knock the globe into a deep recession and the US into a Greater Depression.

Much like a chess game where mate is declared in a number of moves before the end, the King and his pieces still thrash about mindlessly, playing through the moves until the inevitable occurs.  The problem is this time, as the King flails about in impotent fury, he’s going to take the rest of us down with him.

And all this goes back to the worst housing depression in generations.

Almost 200,000 newly constructed single-family homes are sitting empty in the U.S., the most since Commerce Department statistics began in 1973. Partially completed developments reduce revenue for cities and towns and hurt businesses, said Nicolas Retsinas, the director of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Rising foreclosures and falling property values may cut tax revenue by more than $6.6 billion for 10 states, including New York, California and Florida, the U.S. Conference of Mayors said in a November report.

“Half-filled developments are an advertisement for a failing housing market,” said Retsinas, a former assistant secretary for housing at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. “It also has a spillover effect on the surrounding community.”

Falling Prices

About 370,000 new homes are for sale because people who initially contracted to buy them backed out, according to estimates in a Feb. 15 report from analysts at New York-based CreditSights Inc. An additional 216,000 homes are under construction, according to Commerce Department data.

In January 1973, the number of finished new homes for sale was 97,000, when the U.S. population was about 212 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In December 2007, 197,000 completed homes were on the market and in January 2008 there were 195,000. The current population is 303.5 million.

Home prices may fall at least 8 percent nationwide and by as much as 26 percent from the third quarter of 2007 before hitting bottom, according to a Feb. 13 report from New York- based Deutsche Bank AG analyst Karen Weaver, the firm’s global head of securitization research.

26 percent?  How many homeowners will that put out onto the streets?

We’re about to find out.