Conservatives in this country have latched on to this attack that the Obama administration is pushing us toward socialism, often tinged with enough paranoia to qualify them for their own custom-fit tinfoil hats.

Most often the attacks contain no facts. So here are some facts for them. The U.S. Government has nationalized $82.3 billion in corporate and business assets. Big number, huh? But it makes up only .21 percent of all corporate and business assets in this country, which add up to $39.2 trillion.

For those afraid of the U.S. turning into the next North Korea, the government would have to keep up this nationalization push for the next 100+ years to get there.

In other words, chill. Your paranoia is showing.

I guess that Rush and his buddies are too stupid to read. They are taking a single sentence of a speech by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor out of context and branding her a racist. Maybe they should read the entire passage:

… Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage. …

How hard would it be to take Limbaugh quotes out of context in this same way and portray him as, well, an Obama loving liberal?

Idiots.

As newspaper publishers get more desperate, they keep going back to this thing about charging for content.

Now Dean Singleton jumps all in. But he trots out this stupid justification:

First, we continue to do an injustice to our print subscribers and create perceptions that our content has no value by putting all of our print content online for free. Not only does this erode our print circulation, it devalues the core of our business - the great local journalism we (and only we) produce on a daily basis.

Hey Dean, I've got news for you. You have never charged readers for your journalism at any one of your papers. Not once. In fact, you PAY your readers to take your news. Sure, they buy subscriptions and pay for papers on the newsstand. But that money isn't enough to pay the costs of printing and delivering them.

If Dean really thinks his journalism is worth charging his readers, why isn't he raising his subscription prices? Yea, let's see him do that.

Jeff Jarvis also rips Dean a new one.

Do you remember the story about how the big bad government forced Wells Fargo to take TARP funds they didn't want? Take a look at who is second on the list of the most troubled banks. Perhaps the Wells Fargo execs were more worried about their own compensation packages than their bank's health when they were making those noises about TARP.

Sorry, but this is just too good to pass up. The fact that a member of Congress could be so historically illiterate is astounding:

As a matter of fact, the recession that FDR had to deal with wasn't as bad as the recession Coolidge had to deal with in the early 20s. Yet, the prescription that Coolidge put on that -- from history -- is lower taxes, lower regulatory burden, and we saw the "Roaring 20s," where we saw markets and growth in the economy like we'd never seen before in the history of the country. FDR applied just the opposite formula. The Hoot-Smalley Act [sic], which was a tremendous burden on tariff restrictions. And then, of course, trade barriers, and the regulatory burden and tax barriers. That's what we saw happen under FDR that took a recession and blew it into a full-scale depression. The American people suffered for almost ten years under that kind of thinking.

Where do we start? We can start with the fact that the recession Coolidge dealt with wasn't even close to what FDR faced. The stock market didn't crash during the Coolidge administration, the GDP did not collapse, the banking system was still intact and he didn't inherit a 25 percent unemployment rate. The depression started in 1929, and didn't start turning around until 1933, the year FDR became president. If you want, go look up the GDP numbers yourself.

And that "Hoot-Smalley Act"? The Smoot-Hawley Act was signed into the law by Republican Herbert Hoover, and is named after Sen. Reed Smoot and Rep. Willis Hawley, both Republicans.

Somewhere in Minnesota, a village is missing its idiot.

It's been 41 years since one of the greatest agents of change was gunned down by someone afraid of that change. I think back to those days when I was a child and realize I was born into a different world than the generation before. I was six days old when Dr. King told America about his dream for a better nation. Only when patriots like him step up will this nation attain the lofty goals set forth by our founding fathers. I, too, have a dream.

Headlines like this make it impossible not to respond.

Bad start? Let's review for a minute. Obama got almost exactly the stimulus bill he first proposed, and the polls show Americans approve of the job he's doing by almost 70 percent.

The GOP congress critters on the other hand have approval rates at half that. Oh, they whine, Obama wasn't bipartisan enough! Really? Obama gave the GOP their tax cuts, which made up 37 percent of the final bill. What did the Republicans bend on? Nothing, nada, zip. They had no intention of negotiating in good faith. And now they are trying to spin this as a defeat for Obama, and the suckers at CNN are buying their BS.

After eight years of GOP games, the American people aren't buying it anymore.

This account of a lead interrogator in Iraq on why torture doesn't work is really eye=opening:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

With the many challenges facing the newspaper business, many different ideas on how to save the industry have been trotted out.

One that I had pretty much dismissed immediately was the non-profit model. Maybe it's the capitalist in me, but I thought the quest for profits to be a great catalyst for innovation, and a required element of any attempt to revolutionize the newspaper business.

But the more I think about it, the more I'm beginning to see the genius of the non-profit news model, at least as it pertains to local media.

To understand this change, you have to understand the huge problems facing local news. I read a recent piece by Vin Crosbie that lays out how the industry got behind the supply and demand curve, to a point where the value of what we produce just isn't enough to pay the bills. I would add to that the supply and demand difficulties on the advertising side as well, which has dropped online advertising rates to levels that make it increasingly hard to make sustainable revenues for online-only enterprises.

Local newspapers have been viewed by the community as performing a public service, informing them of the news they need to know. But as newspapers cut back on staff and newshole, this perception is changing. Readers are becoming increasingly aware that our motives are private profit, not public service. They can see all those years when we pulled in 20 and 30 percent profit margins that flowed out of the communities and into corporate coffers, usually to buy more newspapers. But now during the tough times, there is no reserve left to maintain the level of public service the readers expect.

And then we hit them with our efforts at "community journalism," trying to get our readers to write the stories and shoot the photos that we don't do anymore. I'm not knocking the concept of getting readers to participate in the journalism. But when you cut back on the public service you used to offer and ask readers to take up the slack, the "public service" perception starts breaking down. Why should the readers help subsidize a for-profit business that was too short-sighted to deal with this crisis?

I think this is where non-profit Internet news start-ups have an opening. As non-profits, they can successfully gain the advantage with the public in terms of providing a public service. They can call out for volunteers and donations without the for-profit hypocracy hanging over their heads. And while you can't become the next Rupert Murdock becoming a non-profit publisher, but you can earn a decent paycheck. And in this economy, that's doing OK.

I'm not too optimistic about the success of newspapers companies to survive much longer. If they economy turns around next year, they may live to print another day. But if the downturn goes into 2010 and longer, they are toast. McClatchy stock was at $75 three years ago. The last I saw, it was at $1.50. Gannett was at $90, and is now at $8. Pretty soon, someone is going to realize that they can make more money liquidating these companies than keeping them going.

If newspapers start going under, those who are set up as non-profit news organizations in their communities could see a huge benefit.

In the midst of writing this post, I came across this article from the New York Times about non-profit news outlets like Minnpost.com and voiceofsandiego.com. Here is a good quote from Buzz Woolley, president of voiceofsandiego.com:

“Information is now a public service as much as it’s a commodity,” he said. “It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It’s one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn’t doing it very well.”

(cross-posted to Sustainable News Project)

Markos asks a very good question.