Newt Gingrich made a name for himself as the right-wing ideologue who led the 1994 "Republican Revolution."

What a difference the wholesale collapse of international capitalism makes.

Forget 9/11--everything changed on 9/14/08, when Lehman Brothers hit the skids. Millions lost their jobs. Millions more lost their jobs. And the government refused to help them.

The government's masters, the bankers, wouldn't let them. They wanted all that taxpayer money for themselves.

Dear Friends,

You already may have heard that I'd be coming back in January with a new series on the public television station nearest you. But you may not have heard exactly why. It's not just that I lack retirement skills, as my wife and co-editor, Judith, keeps reminding me. Or that the squeaky rocking chair on the front porch got on my nerves. I'm coming back because in tumultuous times like these I relish the company of people who try to make sense of the tumult. These are the people I'll bring to our new broadcast, Moyers & Company.

— from TomDispatch

Here’s the ad for this moment in Washington (as I imagine it): Militarized superpower adrift and anxious in alien world. Needs advice. Will pay. Pls respond qkly. PO Box 1776-2012, Washington, DC.

Here’s the way it actually went down in Washington last week: a triumphant performance by a commander-in-chief who wants you to know that he’s at the top of his game.

When it came to rolling out a new 10-year plan for the future of the U.S. military, the leaks to the media began early and the message was clear. One man is in charge of your future safety and security. His name is Barack Obama. And -- not to worry -- he has things in hand.

With U.S. media obsessing on the fight here at home among conservatives vying to become president, most of them missed some big news about France, which already has a conservative president. This week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he would take the lead – even go it alone within Europe, if need be – in introducing and pushing a Financial Transaction Tax in his country.

That’s right – the conservative president of France wants to tax the financial traders and speculators.

Referring to the tax as a “moral issue” and blaming deregulation and speculation for the global economic meltdown, Sarkozy has said that traders must “repay for the damage they have caused.”

— from Truthdig

There is a full-blown debate going on in, of all places, the Republican Party about the failings of the governing, corporate-sponsored kleptocracy. Not so on the Democratic side. Spared a primary battle, the incumbent president need not defend his economic record, which is basically a redo of the save-Wall-Street-first stance initiated by his Republican predecessor.

That bipartisan establishment consensus, in which the enormous power of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve was harnessed to bail out the financial industry swindlers while ignoring the plight of their victims, has been challenged only on the Republican side, where the libertarian Ron Paul has tapped into the enormous populist rage among voters.

Sonoma County’s Occupy movement in Northern California opened 2012 by two well-attended events—one outside in the streets and another inside. Around 140 people attended a county-wide Town Hall on Occupy at Sebastopol’s United Methodist church on Jan. 9. Over 400 people marched on and peacefully shut down two Wells Fargo Bank branches in Santa Rosa on Jan. 6.

Town Hall participants self-organized into various small groups to discuss “Reporting Out and Plugging In.” They included veteran activists from Occupy Sebastopol, Occupy Santa Rosa, Occupy Petaluma, and from the small towns of Sonoma, Healdsburg, and Guerneville, as well as newcomers to the movement.

President Obama is hosting a forum on "insourcing" today. We need to bring jobs back to America, and restore our "industrial commons." One way to help move this along is for states to require "Buy American" in their procurement rules. This is legal and here's the big thing -- it saves states money.

In December Steelworkers President Leo Gerard wrote a strong post, Antidote For Stupidity Of Shipping Tax-Dollar-Financed Jobs Overseas, writing,

Amid prolonged, painfully high unemployment, ABC News Anchor Diane Sawyer for the past year tirelessly advocated a simple solution – buy American-made products. She clearly explained the reasoning: every American dollar spent on an American-made product helps create an American job.

As conservatives prepare for an urgent meeting this weekend to discuss their options in the 2012 campaign, they face an epic crisis of identity and electability that creates rising odds for the reelection of President Obama.

Throughout the 2012 campaign, there has not been one credible conservative candidate for the presidency.

Conservatives now face a choice between a front-runner of no lasting convictions -- who has lost campaigns for two out of three major offices he has previously run for and who champions a predatory capitalism that applauds layoffs when jobs are the primary issue -— against a divided group of second-tier candidates that may be the weakest field in the history of presidential politics.

Just saying her name sounds like a joke: Baroness Bertha Felicitas Sophie Freifrau von Suttner, Gräfin, née Countess Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau. And when she began talking about ending war in mid-nineteenth century Austria it wasn't her name that was treated as a joke. Yet by the turn of the century, her idea seemed to be one whose time had come.

Bertha von Suttner's novel "Ground Arms," or "Lay Down Your Arms," was widely described as the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of war abolition. It was doing and would accomplish for war what Harriet Beecher Stowe's book had for slavery. I can't encourage you strongly enough to take a quick break from the inanities of presidential debates and football announcers and buy the book, borrow the book, or read it free online.

WASHINGTON, Jan 11, 2012 (IPS) - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's charge Tuesday that Iran had intended to keep the Fordow site secret until it was revealed by Western intelligence revived a claim the Barack Obama administration made in September 2009.

Clinton said Iran "only declared the Qom facility to the IAEA after it was discovered by the international community following three years of covert construction." She also charged that there is no "plausible reason" for Iran to enrich to a 20-percent level at the Fordow plant, implying that the only explanation is an intent to make nuclear weapons.

If you have cable or satellite TV you are captive behind a virtual iron curtain. That's right. You're a prisoner in an electronic gulag. You can leave, but only if you move to another electronic gulag. There is no escape. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

With all the fussing and moaning from Tea Party types about the American government going all socialist on us, it's amazing how the same people can go home, turn on their cable TV box and not notice the cable-commie shackles snapping closed around them.

I have Comcast. Poor me. But the other cable and satellite providers are cut of the same commie cloth. While they tout their companies on Wall Street as models of capitalist profitability, they are, in fact, as authoritarian and anti-freedom as any latter day Stalinist.

For a movement that started with one strategy and a couple of slogans, Occupy has preformed brilliantly. Having based itself on the examples of Egypt and Wisconsin, the Occupy Movement has raised the political consciousness of millions and created a large layer of new activists. But the uninterrupted string of successes of Egypt and Tunisia haven’t materialized for Occupy. We're in a lull period. Next steps are being considered and some tactics are being re-thought.

This is where revolutionary theory comes into play: a set of ideas that help guide action. Sometimes theory is learned unconsciously, where it resembles a set of non-ideological "assumptions" about movement building and politics. Occupy's theory began mostly with assumptions, many of them true.

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Despite a crashing economy and angry liberals, Barack Obama runs unchallenged in the 2012 Democratic Party primaries.

The Obama White House continues to push for a settlement that would let bankers avoid being punished - or even investigated - for a wave of mortgage-related crimes that includes perjury, tax evasion, and several types of fraud.[1]

Despite the President's new-found populism - rhetorically, anyway - officials in his Administration continue to push an unfair deal designed to conceal the financial Crime of the Century.

The Financial Times reported on new details of the proposed settlement, whose stated purpose is to punish banks and reduce the amount of money owed by underwater homeowners. But it's increasingly clear that the deal wouldn't help homeowners very much and wouldn't punish bankers at all.

— from TomDispatch

Last week, the president made a rare appearance at the Pentagon to unveil a new strategic plan for U.S. military policy (and so spending) over the next decade. Let’s leave the specifics to a future TomDispatch post and focus instead on a historical footnote: Obama was evidently the first president to offer remarks from a podium in the Pentagon press room. He made the point himself -- “I understand this is the first time a president has done this. It’s a pretty nice room. (Laughter)” -- and it was duly noted in the media. Yet no one thought to make anything of it, even though it tells us so much about our American world.

Well, the New Hampshire primary results are in, and I just know that you have to be counting the days until our exciting Michigan Republican primary, which is coming Feb. 28.

Yessiree, if you were too busy standing in line at the soup kitchen, our fiscally prudent Republican Legislature last year happily voted to spend $10 million to hold this presidential primary, which is expected to help anoint favorite son Mitt Romney.

True, others might have wasted that money by instead trying to, say, keep part of our broken promise to our kids by funding the now-canceled Michigan Promise Scholarships.

I wouldn't want to be Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, the 28-year-old former US Marine just recently sentenced to death by a court in Iran after being convicted of being an American spy.

Hekmati, who was born in Arizona to Iranian exile parents, and who grew up in Michigan, is being defended by President Obama, whose White House spokesman Tommy Vietor, declared, "Allegations that Mr. Hekmati either worked for, or was sent to Iran by the CIA are false." The White House, not content with that denial, went on to trash the Iranian government and legal system, with Vietor adding, "The Iranian regime has a history of falsely accusing people of being spies, of eliciting forced confessions, and of holding innocent Americans for political reasons."

New York Times political reporter Katharine Q. Seelye, who famously misquoted Al Gore during Campaign 2000, has now bent over backward to shield Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum from a real quote in which he disparaged "black people."

Santorum has been running from his quote since he was caught on video discussing food stamps with a group of white voters in Sioux City, Iowa, on Jan. 1 and telling them "I do not want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."

The comment won Santorum a round of applause from his white audience - and may have helped him rally right-wing Iowans as he surged to a virtual tie with front-runner Mitt Romney in the Iowa caucuses two days later. But the former Pennsylvania senator began coming under criticism for his racially charged remark, which was replayed on MSNBC, CNN and other news networks.

President Obama will host a forum on insourcing jobs Wednesday. The forum will feature leaders of several companies who have already shifted jobs back home and are encouraging others to do the same. According to the White House,

On Wednesday, January 11, 2012, President Obama and Vice President Biden will host an "Insourcing American Jobs" forum at the White House focused on the increasing trend of companies choosing to "insource" jobs and invest in growing in the United States.

They’ve barely begun counting the votes and it already looks inevitable. Mitt Romney, the Republican Republicans love to hate, is going to be the Republican nominee for President.

How did it come to this? Mitt Romney generates less excitement in the GOP base than charity. He’s as authentic as John Boehner’s tan, and about as sexy. Bob Dole could give this guy charisma lessons.

Romney’s big pitch is that he’s the most electable Republican in the race. This says a couple of things about him, neither flattering.

The Presidency is supposed to be a means. A means to make changes in the way the nation works and what it stands for. A place where one can turn one’s core beliefs into history.

Scientists figured out years ago that there was nowhere near enough matter in our Local Group of galaxies to create enough gravity to keep them from flying apart. Our Local Group consists of our own Milky Way Galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, and several dwarf galaxies. They reached the same conclusion regarding all of the galaxy clusters in the observable universe.

Realizing that something must be holding them together, they deduced the existence of a form of invisible matter and called it dark matter. There must be a lot of it because, to account for the stability within galaxy clusters, approximately 73% of the universe must be dark matter. Think of it as a kind of matrix or web within which galaxies form and develop.

You've got to give him credit. Newt Gingrich doesn't just read Gideon's bible when he stays at the Marriott, he also reads poetry.

Like the line in a poem by legendary Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, the former House speaker heeds the admonition not to "go gently into that night, but rage against the dying of the light," and raging he is. Newt Gingrich is raging so much that by the time this whole affair is over, the state will instead be named: Newt Hampshire.

While the latest polls out of New Hampshire show frontrunner Romney down by four percentage points, Newt is nowhere near second place. He's in a tie with Rick Perry for fourth place. Ron Paul is polling second to Mitt Romney while Romney is holding on to a double digit lead.

Do T-shirt pirates make $ on teams, concerts and bookstores?

In order to frame the topic of the exploitation of sports fans let’s outline an impossible hypothetical situation: Would citizens of California agree to use their tax dollars to subsidize the building of a new stadium in Perth, in Western Australia, for the West Coast Eagles? NFW! No way, Jose!

Would tax payers in San Diego and Los Angeles agree to let the state subsidize a new football stadium in San Jose? Not bloody well likely, eh?

I’ve been thinking about commentaries. Actually I’ve been thinking about Metternich, New Hampshire, the media, newspapers, opinions, the primaries, what is said, and more importantly what is not said. Everybody has an opinion. In truth, everybody has multiple opinions which may or may not be in conflict with what they already claim to believe. Opinions change over time, or as the 19th Century Austrian foreign minister Metternich once said: “The public holds the opinion of the last person to which they spoke...” If the person you listened to holds little credibility in your estimation, your opposing opinion may be reinforced. In either case, the person last speaking has considerable impact on their listeners, one way or the other. Whoever has the last word impacts us more than we might TH*NK. Speak often, but speak last to have the greatest of impact…

"I feel stupid," someone said the other day. "I consider myself well-informed, but I have no idea what the term 'austerity economics' really means."

Actually it's not that complicated, and most of the lesson plan can be found in today's headlines.

We'll explain austerity to you in six steps, and we promise it it won't take more than 900 words. Since adults read an average of 250-300 words per minute - and we know all of you are above average - our little course shouldn't take more than three minutes.