david dayen

After a big buildup, the hacker group Anonymous released its first batch of whistleblower emails regarding Bank of America. The result was ... confusion. Maybe they're real, maybe not. (We assume they are.) Maybe they're a letdown. Maybe not. Here's what we know and what we don't know so far.

Let's start with what we don't know: read more »

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President Barack Obama and Congressional Republicans are ready to mortgage the American economy to billionaires in exchange for a few months of unemployment benefits. This deal is easily the gravest economic outrage of the Obama presidency to date, and signals that other political assaults on the economy are ahead. read more »

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After much hype and buildup, the AmericaSpeaks "national town meeting" on cutting the deficit was held on Saturday. I watched the proceedings via webcast for much of the morning, knowing that Digby was liveblogging it and David Dayen was on the scene here in Southern California, so that I could take part in a radio interview before heading out to experience the event in person. What I found in sunny Pasadena was a cross between a corporate "team-building" and "motivational" exercise and one of Stanley Milgram's sinister "obedience to authority" experiments.

The good news for America seems to be that, as Roger Hickey points out, the experiment went horribly wrong ... for its organizers. The bad news is that they'll probably try to spin it the way they wanted to anyway. read more »

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