It wasn’t terrorism By Rick Perlstein

It’s E. coli conservatism.

An explosion wracked the area around Manhattan’s Grand Central Station yesterday, spewing asbestos, claiming one life, sending the city into a panic. The culprit? A pipe built in 1924.

We’ve warned here again and again about the decrepitude of our underground infrastructure, about what happens when a nation consecrates itself to no higher domestic goal than the cutting of taxes. New York had a Republican mayor, in fact, who now spends his days boasting that he cut taxes 23 times. Cut spending, too, he’s proud to say….

NEW YORK TIMES BURIES AN “OUTRIGHT FRAUD”
BUSH PEACE PLAN IN MIDDLE EAST WILL FAIL
MEMORIES OF MOVEMENT DAYS

Wow—here’s an admission by none other than President Bush’s Federal Reserve Chairman. It appeared in the Guardian in England yesterday.. Read this and I will then tell how the NY Times handled the same story:

Fed chief condemns ‘outright fraud’ of easy mortgages for the poor
· Bernanke pledges to rein in sub-prime market abuse
· Dollar drops to 26-year low against the pound

Larry Elliott, economics editor

Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, last night warned that the downturn in the US housing market would get worse before it got better as he pledged action by the central bank to rein in abuses in the sub-prime mortgage market.

Deploring what he described as “the outright fraud” involved in selling some home loans to those on low incomes, Mr Bernanke sent the dollar into a fresh slide when he stressed that the housing market would remain a drag on growth.

The Fed chairman’s half-yearly health check on the economy stressed that growth would remain weak in the rest of 2007 before gathering steam in 2008.”

Ok that is what readers in England were being exposed to. And our press?

The headline on the business page of the NY TIMES on the same day was this: “FED TRIMS ITS FORECAST FOR GROWTH.”

The word fraud pops up in the third paragraph from the BOTTOM of the piece on the jump page on B-4, the EIGHTEENTH PARAGRAPH down in the story. This just confirms my sense that if you want the real story you have to read these stories from the bottom up, not the top down.

FAIR meanwhile passes this little corrective along about our obsession with the climb in the Dow:

FAIR ON PHONIED UP ECO NEWS

The dow hit 2000 yesterday. Many are wondering whether to buy or sell, but beware the numbers game:

This column, on how the media-hyped “record high” Dow Jones number isn’t really a record at all, is an implicit indictment of virtually every recent news report on the stock market. Pointing out that if you take the basic step of adjusting for inflation, stocks are worth far less than their 2000 high, Leonhardt writes that “if we are going to talk about a stock market record, we should be doing the same for a whole lot of other things: Loaves of Bread Surge to New Highs.”

US ATTACK ON RUSSIA? PARANOIA OR POLICY:
Retired Generals Predict US War Against Russia, Third World War

\
From: The Telegraph (Britain) July 17, 2007
Retired generals predict US-Russia war

[A] group of influential retired generals yesterday said the United States was preparing to invade Russia within a decade.

Interviewed by Komsomolskaya Pravda, Russia’s biggest circulation newspaper, the four senior generals - who now direct influential military think tanks - said the
United States had hatched a secret plan to seize the country’s vast energy resources by force.

BUSH IN THE MIDDLE EAST

From Tomdispatch this morning, Tony Karon, “Yes, Bush Is Naked, What of It? — On the Middle East Catwalk with the Bush Administration”

He then "handicaps" the competition for the most craven and cynical player of all those who are clustering around the "naked emperor" -- the Israelis, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, the various Arab regimes allied with Washington, and the Europeans. ("Unlike the Arab allies smiling painfully as they quietly agitate for President Bush to put on some clothes, the Europeans, bizarrely enough, have stripped down to the buff and joined Bush on the catwalk.")

Written with verve, Karon's piece nonetheless reaches a grim conclusion in the sort of analysis of the Israeli/Palestinian situation that is in painfully short supply here. Karon finishes this way:

"Sadly, the end of an independent European role will have tragic consequences for the Israelis and the Palestinians, as well as for the rest of us. After all, as the Europeans have surely noted, under President Bush and his top officials the U.S. has made itself part of the problem, not part of any prospective solution in the Middle East. That really is one great tragedy of the Bush administration, which essentially outsourced its policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Ariel Sharon. Sharon's ideas are now so deeply embedded in the mainstream of both parties on Capitol Hill that Congress is even more anti-Palestinian than the administration. As the presidential candidates of both parties fall over one another to take ever harder-line stances on the Palestinians, Iran, and any other subject of concern to Israel, it's an odds-on bet that the naked imperial fashion show will continue, no matter who replaces Bush on the imperial throne."

FROM A JUDGE APPOINTED BY PRESIDENT BUSH

Valerie Plame’s Lawsuit Dismissed

ARRIGATO COMRADES:

I recently came back from South Africa where a Communist Party exists and challenges the government with which it is aligned. TIME reports that there is also a CP in JAPAN.
Notice their use of the word “dissecting.”

Cute as Hello Kitty, 19-year-old Michiko Suzuki looks
like any of the thousands of teens haunting the street fashion stores of Tokyo’s youthful Harajuku district.

But when the Wako University student takes time off from study sessions dissecting Marx to hit the street, it’s usually in order to distribute political literature. To her classmates, the party may be something to which you bring the karaoke machine, but
Suzuki knows it’s really the revolutionary vanguard of class struggle. That’s because Suzuki is a teenage communist.

Bolshevism runs in her family: The daughter and granddaughter of party members, she joined the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) as soon as she turned 18. “I think it’s cool to see [fellow members] struggling unyieldingly,” says Suzuki, smiling shyly. “I really love that last word.”

The idea of a communist party soldiering on in the world’s second-largest economy more than 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union may invite comparisons
to Japanese soldiers who remained hidden on isolated Pacific islands because nobody told them World War II had ended. But the JCP is far from extinct: It claims
some 400,000 members, and earned 7.3% of the vote in the most recent legislative elections, in 2005 - that’s 4.36 million voters.

“The JCP is probably the most successful non-ruling communist party in Asia, if not the world,” says Lam Peng-er, a research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute.