Your blogger is pooped

Blogging will be scant today. I need to recover from and digest an intensive weekend retreat focusing on what people can do within the real life context of our divided and anxious country to reduce militarism and our rulers' enthusiasms for wars without end.


A highlight was Hany Khalil's report on his recent visit to Egypt to visit family and see firsthand where the Egyptian revolution for democracy was trending. As soon as we can get it, his multimedia presentation will be posted in full at WarTimes/Tiempo de Guerras.

One of the topics of the retreat was why the once seemingly bright prospects of the Obama administration seem to have dissolved for many people, leaving cynicism, demobilization and even despair. On this topic, the morning's New York Times brings some insights within an interview reporter Joe Nocera conducted with the outgoing head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila Bair. Here's a tidbit to tease the piece; go read the whole thing.

“I think the president’s heart is in the right place,” Bair told me. “I absolutely do. But the dichotomy between who he selected to run his economic team and what he personally would like them to be doing — I think those are two very different things.” What particularly galls her is that Treasury under both Paulson and Geithner has been willing to take all sorts of criticism to help the banks. But it has been utterly unwilling to take any political heat to help homeowners.