Preval rejects calls for fair elections; How will Washington and the international community respond? | Relief and Reconstruction Watch
The AP reported late last night that President Preval had rejected many of the recommendations outlined in Senator Lugar's report for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which we wrote about yesterday. While Preval did formally set a [...]

The Right Prescription for an Ailing Economy | Dean Baker
the story of economic weakness being the result of a broken banking system is a complete fabrication. This is a good story if your intention is to get more money to the banks. It is not a good story if your goal is getting the economy [...]

Ireland’s Economy Is Still Being Managed by People Too Incompetent to See a Massive Housing Bubble | Beat the Press
It might have been worth pointing this out in an NYT piece telling readers how Ireland's deficit reduction has devastated the country and still left it with large deficits. It also might have been worth talking [...]

John J. Mearsheimer — Sinking Ship
Israel’s botched raid against the Gaza-bound humanitarian flotilla on May 31 is the latest sign that Israel is on a disastrous course that it seems incapable of reversing. The attack also highlights the extent to which Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States. This situation is likely [...]

FT.com | Spanish banks rage at end of ECB offer
Spanish banks have been lobbying the European Central Bank to act to ease the systemic fallout from the expiry of a €442bn ($543bn) funding programme this week, accusing the ECB of "absurd" behaviour in not renewing the scheme.
On Thursday, the clock runs out on the ECB [...]

Cuts won’t reduce the deficit - investment will | Left Foot Forward
Michael Burke on the contradiction of Thatchers legacy - how public spending actually rose during her time despite savage cuts and how this time around those who claim her legacy are going to make the same mistake, except to an even further extreme.
So, overall [...]

Why I use ‘middle class’ as an insult | Cath Elliot
For the vast majority of people, well those who haven’t read Marx anyway, class is increasingly defined by how much material wealth a person has, and by that definition I’m decidedly middle class. My husband and I have a mortgage for instance; we also [...]

A War Gone Badly Wrong « LRB blog
Tariq Ali on the sacking of McChrystal and the unwinnable war. McChrystal’s kamikaze interview had the desired effect. He was sacked and replaced by his boss General Petraeus. But behind the drama in Washington is a war gone badly wrong and no amount of sweet talk can hide [...]

David Rieff | The Fall of an Intellectual
David Rieff, son of Susan Sontag, provides a funny and thorough filleting of Paul Berman's The Flight of the Intellectuals:
"IN HITCH-22, Christopher Hitchens sums up the sectarian mind-set as one in which “if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite [...]