A Tale of Two Bailouts: Wall Street vs. Detroit

The Rachel Maddow Show: Rachel's take on why there appears to be two different standards of bailouts. White collar vs. blue collar, those who take a shower before work and those who take one after:

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Coolest Company In The World

This week, Better Place cut a $1bn dollar deal to bring electric car charging stations to the San Francisco area. Better Place is without question, the most ambitious startup to ever come out of Israel and perhaps the company that has the best chance of restructuring the automobile industry in the next 5 years.Better Place will replace fossil fuel burning cars with electricity consuming cars using a series of battery swapping stations around a given metropolitan area. Nissan is the first company to build the cars. Israel became the first country to commit to building the infrastructure and now Denmark and San Francisco are joining them.

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Refuse to Tolerate Torture - New report details shattered lives of released Guantanamo detainees

Refuse to Tolerate Torture By Linda Rigas November 18, 2008 Excerpts from Scott Horton's Justice After Bush: Prosecuting An Outlaw Administration in Harper's Magazine. This administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself. It transformed the Justice Department into a vehicle for voter suppression, and it also summarily dismissed the U.S. attorneys who attempted to investigate its wrongdoing. It issued wartime contracts to substandard vendors with inside connections, and it also defunded efforts to police their performance. It spied on church groups and political protestors, and it also introduced a sweeping surveillance program that was so clearly illegal that virtually the entire senior echelon of the Justice Department threatened to (but did not in fact) tender their resignations over it. It waged an illegal and disastrous war, and it did so by falsely representing to Congress and to the American public nearly every piece of intelligence it had on Iraq. And through it all, as if to underscore its contempt for any authority but its own, the administration issued more than a hundred carefully crafted "signing statements" that raised pervasive doubt about whether the president would even accede to bills that he himself had signed into law.New report details shattered lives of released Guantanamo detaineesFrom UC Berkeley Human Rights Center and International Human Rights Law Clinic | 12 November 2008 Press conference video from C-SPAN WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Detainees released from U.S. detention in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Afghanistan live shattered lives as a result of U.S. policies in the war on terror, according to a new report by human rights experts at the University of California, Berkeley. (Read full article.)

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Mining: The sun sets on BHP's bid

An audacious attempt by BHP Billiton to get control of Rio Tinto has fallen apart

BHP BILLITON’S boss, Marius Kloppers, wasted no time leaping into action when he took charge a little over a year ago. In November 2007, barely a month into his tenure as chief executive of the Anglo-Australian mining giant, he began making unwanted advances to Rio Tinto, a vast rival, in the form of a proposed all-share bid that was valued at some $140 billion. After a year of politely but firmly reiterating the merits of the huge deal and several months into painstaking antitrust investigations by the European Union, however, his company has sprung another surprise, deciding to drop its bid, now valued at $66 billion.

The giant mining company admits that the crippling credit crisis and a deteriorating world economy mean that now is not the right time to pursue one of the world’s biggest takeovers. So a year of effort and $450m of shareholders’ cash, the cost of dropping the chase of Rio, have yielded nothing. The decision to quit may pain the ambitious Mr Kloppers, but the reasons for doing so had been mounting steadily. ...

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