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 . '/' . substr('9780399162633',-6,3) . '/' . '9780399162633' . '.jpg'; ?>)
By Tom Watson and Martin Hickman
$26.95
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Flickr / Diana Parkhouse (CC-BY)
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U.S. mortgage rates on 30-year fixed loans have fallen to a record low after the Federal Reserve last week announced its plan to reduce borrowing costs by replacing short-term debt with more long-term debt. (more)
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Flickr / U.S. Army (CC-BY)
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Not a single American service member died in Iraq in August, a first since the U.S. invasion of the country in 2003. (more)
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Wikimedia Commons
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Some records are made to be broken, from the 100-meter dash to Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. But who would covet breaking the nine-year, 50-day Soviet record for its military campaign in Afghanistan? And the winner is … the USA.
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AP / Henny Ray Abrams
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Even in the face of an extended recession, devastating double-digit unemployment and a barrage of political charges that President Barack Obama’s health care reform will decimate the economy, the U.S. stock market finished the week at a 19-month high.
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Flickr/tashmahal
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Twitter users, you’ve been warned: Your thoughts while showering are about to be saved for posterity. The Library of Congress announced Thursday that the venerable institution of record was acquiring the whole public Twitter archive, so watch what you overshare from now on.
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AP / Eric Draper
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By Mark Heisler — This just in: With all forgiven, Mark McGwire makes Hall of Fame. Who knows, it may even happen in his lifetime.
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wfxl.com
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Economic news and pessimistic views: U.S. unemployment increased slightly to 9.8 percent and, moreover, this figure shows the crisis is far from over, experts say. Joblessness is at a 26-year high.
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theinsanityreport.com
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Just as the Labor Day weekend arrives comes word that the U.S. economy shed another 216,000 jobs last month, pushing the unemployment rate up to a 26-year high of 9.7 percent.
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wfxl.com
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As if to prevent surplus national exuberance over the electoral defeat of John McCain on Tuesday, the Labor Department announced that the country’s unemployment rate has hit a 14-year high of 6.5 percent, with 240,000 jobs lost in October as joblessness continues to increase in the face of economic turmoil.
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Flickr / Joe Crimmings Photography
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The Obama campaign announced early Sunday morning that it had raised $150 million in September, more than doubling the previous single-month record of $66 million, set by Obama in August.
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Flickr / sfadden
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The housing market is continuing its descent into Slumpsville, judging by the way things have gone over the first quarter of 2008, and indicators don’t look good for the immediate future, either. American homeowners have been forced into foreclosure in record numbers this year and late payments have soared to a new high.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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The price of a barrel of crude oil has doubled over the last year, reaching a record $135 on Thursday. With dwindling supplies and a weak dollar, analysts expect the price to go up for some time.
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publishing2.com
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A Los Angeles judge on Tuesday ordered two Internet spammers to pay a record-breaking $230 million in fines after they sent more than 700,000 unsolicited advertisements to MySpace users. The amount is almost half what Rupert Murdoch spent to buy the social networking site in 2005.
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sfgate.com
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After spending 7 1/2 months in jail, longer than anyone else in a modern journalism rights case, blogger Josh Wolf reached a deal with prosecutors and was set free Tuesday. Wolf turned over unedited video of WTO protesters and, in exchange, was excused from identifying the individuals shown in the footage. He said he proposed the same deal in November but was turned down.
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hillaryclinton.com
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Hillary Clinton has easily set a fundraising record, pulling in $26 million between January and March. The Clinton campaign would not publicly say how much of the money it plans to save for the general election. A number of pundits have predicted this will be the most expensive election in American history.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has declared this winter the warmest on record for the Northern Hemisphere. So far, 2007 appears likely to rank as the warmest overall year. Annual temperatures have broken the record in 10 of the last dozen years.
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bradblog.com
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Margie Burns, reporting for the Brad Blog, says the White House may be up to some old, unsavory tactics, deleting unfavorable material from its website in potential violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978. At issue are briefing references to Jeff Gannon, the faux journalist whose non-questions helped deflect criticism during press briefings.
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Opium production in Afghanistan is at the highest level ever recorded and shows an increase of 50 percent from last year. The increase in opium cultivation is a result of the resurgence of Taliban rebels. The head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said in a statement: ?The southern part of Afghanistan was displaying the ominous hallmarks of incipient collapse, with large-scale drug cultivation and trafficking, insurgency and terrorism, crime and corruption.?
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The NSA asked AT&T to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, allege lawyers filing a lawsuit on behalf of telephone company customers.
This is huge because, according to a lawyer on the case, “The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11…. This undermines that assertion.’‘
Posted on Jul 2, 2006
READ MORE 
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Dwayne Powell
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The president’s former counter-terrorism chief says the White House wants “the public to believe that it had not already occurred to every terrorist on the planet that his telephone was probably monitored and his international bank transfers subject to scrutiny.”
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The newspaper originally reported that AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon have been providing phone call data to the NSA. But now USA Today says it can’t confirm that either BellSouth or Verizon provided the data. (AT&T definitely appears to have done so.)
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Stephen Colbert said the N.Y. Times could learn a thing or two about secrecy from Superman, who continued to be “a pretend journalist”—“like Brit Hume.”
Posted on Jun 29, 2006
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Officials from the Dept. of Homeland Security and the FBI are paying private data brokers to gather personal phone record information—circumventing the need to obtain warrants for such data.
It’s ironic that some federal agents are availing themselves of this potentially illegal service; other federal agents (from the FCC) are already investigating the practice. See “Feds Probe Sale of Private Phone Records”
And earlier: All Your Phone Call Records Are for Sale, Cheap
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The attorney general, in defending the NSA’s collection of millions of U.S. phone records, claims it is constitutional—but conveniently ignores the fact that it appears to be illegal.
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Via Business Week, we learn that an entire niche industry has sprung up to provide the government with commercially purchased telecommunications records that the government isn’t allowed to purchase itself. (TPM Muckraker has a good sum-up.)
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We learn from the Wall Street Journal that banks, Internet service providers and other companies are being besieged by law enforcement authorities who want to pore over their corporate data in hunting for clues in criminal cases.
Just another example of how the government is going through personal records.
Posted on May 20, 2006
READ MORE
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gregpalast.com
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When the government can’t legally dig up your medical records, call histories and voter registration information, it turns to the data mining company ChoicePoint—which has sucked up over $1 billion in federal contracts.
Do. Not. Miss. this article on how the frightening industry of data mining works.
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From AMERICAblog
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You won’t believe the envelope that the phone company has apparently been sending out. If it’s not a hoax, the irony is so thick that not even an NSA eavesdropper could penetrate it.
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“The Daily Show” host tees off on the recent report of the NSA’s phone call database. “It turns out that there was one specific type of domestic call the government was keeping tabs on. All of them.”
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The phone company says that, despite the claims made in the USA Today story, it never provided phone records to the NSA.
Posted on May 15, 2006
READ MORE
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The Washington Post loaded a poll so it would appear that most Americans support the NSA’s phone record collection program. Blogger Jane Hamsher did the original analysis on this sloppy poll, and Buzzflash sums it up.
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The telecom giant faces two suits—one for $20 billion, another for $5 billion—for handing over customers’ phone records to the NSA.
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From thezreview.co.uk
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President Bush will deliver a rare (for him) television address, a Monday night talk on immigration reform.
Is it too cynical to ask whether he’s wagging the dog to distract attention from the NSA phone record issue?
Is it possible to be too cynical about Bush’s motives?
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Before the USA Today story, The Nation magazine had loads of details on the NSA-telecom spying program: a lawsuit against AT&T; links between telecom officials and the White House; and a history of how these insidious relationships developed.
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The Sept. 11 attacks “did not give the president the limitless power he now claims to intrude on the private communications of the American people,” the N.Y. Times says in an editorial about the NSA spying story.
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From ThinkProgress
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The president claims that the program activities “strictly target Al Qaeda and their known affiliates,” despite USA Today’s claim that the NSA has pored over the records of tens of millions of Americans.
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hardnewsnow.com
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“We’re not mining or trolling though the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans,’’ Bush says, without directly addressing the NSA program reported in USA Today.
Meanwhile, GOP Sen. Arlen Specter demands that phone company executives testify before Congress about the data they provided to the NSA.
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From wcsh6.com
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Many Republican and Democratic lawmakers are furious over the alleged NSA phone record collection program.
GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham: “The idea of collecting millions or thousands of phone numbers, how does that fit into following the enemy?”
Democratic Sen. Pat Leahy: “It is our government, it’s not one party’s government.”
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The 31% mark is the lowest of his presidency.
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Who will pay this piper? Four years of terrible trade deficits—and this year is the historical worst. | story
Posted on Feb 11, 2006
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With the announcement coming from a source like NASA, we expect Bush to get so upset that he’ll forget to work out. | story
Posted on Jan 24, 2006
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Does Anything Change in Los Angeles With Election of New Mayor?
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