05-19-13 Left Jab Hour 1

05-19-13 Left Jab Hour 2

05-17-13 Edge of Sports

05-12-13 Left Jab Hour 1

05-12-13 Left Jab Hour 2

By Robert Parry

You have to hand it to the Republicans and their right-wing media: they are persistent in pushing their conspiracy theories no matter how improbable or insignificant, just as they are relentless in covering up GOPwrongdoing even when that behavior strikes at the heart of democratic institutions or costs countless lives.

So, we have the contrast between the nine high-profile hearings about last September’s Benghazi attack and Republican determination to cover up Watergate, Iran-Contra, Iraq-gate, Contra-cocaine trafficking, and the two October Surprise cases (sabotaging President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in 1968 and subverting President Jimmy Carter’s Iran-hostage negotiations in 1980).

In those cases and others, Republicans not only suppressed evidence but mounted counteroffensives against brave whistleblowers, diligent government investigators and conscientious journalists. The GOP and its right-wing media took pleasure in punishing anyone who dug up troublesome truths, even a conservative Republican such as Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh.

The Republicans also showed little or no interest in delving into the facts surrounding terrorist incidents on George W. Bush’s watch, including his failure to protect the nation from the 9/11 attacks, or examining his war crimes, such as his deceptive case for invading Iraq and his approval of torture against “war on terror” detainees.

Granted, part of the blame for those short-circuited investigations must fall on the Democrats and the mainstream news media for lacking the courage and integrity to pursue investigations in the face of Republican obstructionism.

With only a few exceptions, Democrats have shied away from confrontations with Republicans, sometimes fretting that a full accounting might not be “good for the country.” Mainstream news executives, too, have shown a lack of stomach for going toe to toe with angry Republicans and their ferocious propagandists.

Thus, there has been a systematic crumbling of investigative will when the subject of a scandal is a Republican. But near-opposite rules apply when the subject is a Democrat. No matter how flimsy the evidence, Republicans and the Right demonstrate a boundless determination to build a mountain of scandal out of a molehill of suspicions.

The cumulative impact of this investigative imbalance has been that the narrative of modern American history has been wildly distorted.

Read more here.

There are more than 2 million unemployed Americans who might have jobs today if not for austerity.

That’s the conclusion of a new study by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney at the Brookings Institution. In the 46 months since the Great Recession ended, state, local and federal governments have cut about 500,000 jobs. In contrast, in every other U.S. recession since 1970, the government hired approximately 1.7 million people, on average. That means the U.S. is an estimated 2.2 million jobs in the hole.

Given the size of the U.S. labor force, an extra 2.2 million jobs would mean the U.S. unemployment rate would be about 6.1 percent, instead of 7.5 percent. That would be below the 6.5 percent rate the Federal Reserve is targeting with its extraordinary bond-buying program known as quantitative easing. Worried about Fed-fueled financial bubbles? Thank austerity. In fact, the Fed recently called out tight fiscal policy in explaining why it’s keeping the economy’s gas pedal floored.

That 2.2 million jobs would also get the U.S. job market back to its peak level of employment, set in January 2008, in the early months of the recession. Right now, we’re about 2.6 million jobs shy of that peak, making this the slowest job-market recovery since World War II. The government has not helped at all — in fact, it has pulled in the other direction, firing people when it should be hiring.

That 2.2 million jobs would also help close another wide disconnect: Employers aren’t firing people any more, but they’re only barely hiring, leaving the economy about 4 million jobs short of where it should be, given current levels of unemployment benefits. More than half of that gap could be attributed to stingy government, if Brookings is right.

Though the austerity movement has taken a serious blow with the discovery of errors in its favorite research report, many austerity fanatics still doubt the U.S. has taken all of the bitter medicine it should. But the fact is that the government has slashed its payrolls after the worst recession since World War II and cut spending at the fastest rate since the end of the Vietnam war.

And this is all before most of the effects of the across-the-board budget cuts of the federal government’s sequestration, which might cost the economy another 750,000 jobs, the Brookings study notes.

Austerity is real, and it is choking the life out of the U.S. economy.

The Heritage Foundation’s Jason Richwine, who co-authored the think tank’s study claiming immigration reform will cost trillions of dollars, contributed two articles to a “nationalist” website about Hispanic incarceration rates, Yahoo News reported Thursday.

Richwine came under fire after the Washington Post reported Wednesday that his Harvard dissertation argued Hispanics have lower IQs than Caucasians and that the United States should screen immigrants based on their IQ scores.

According to Yahoo News, Richwine wrote two articles on “crime rates among Hispanics in the United States” for the site AlternativeRight.com, a website run by Richard Spencer, “a self-described ‘nationalist’ who writes frequently about race and against ‘the abstract notion of human equality.’”

AlternativeRight.com describes itself as “dedicated to heretical perspectives on society and culture—popular, high, and otherwise—particularly those informed by radical, traditionalist, and nationalist outlooks”…

The website has published several controversial pieces about nationalism and race since Spencer founded it 3 years ago. Spencer is now the chairman of the Montana-based National Policy Institute, an organization that describes itself as a think tank for “White Americans.”

Richwine’s articles for AlternativeRight.com, “Model Minority,” published on March 3, 2010, and “More on Hispanics and Crime,” published the next day, push back on an American Conservative essaythat argued that some conservatives have over-hyped the crime rate among Hispanics. (Richwine’s article was cross-posted on the website of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. where Richwine was previously a fellow.)

05-10-13 Edge of Sports

05-05-13 Left Jab Hour 1

05-05-13 Left Jab Hour 2