Maybe we could learn a few things.

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I still believe her:

In her Senate testimony, Hill said that Thomas would make sexual comments to her at work, including references to scenes in hard-core pornographic films. Thomas angrily denied the allegations, memorably saying they amounted to a “high-tech lynching.”

But Lillian McEwen, a former Senate Judiciary Committee lawyer who said she dated Clarence Thomas from 1979 through the mid-1980s, told The Washington Post in an interview that Hill’s long-ago description of Thomas’s behavior resonated with her.

“The Clarence I know was certainly capable not only of doing the things that Anita Hill said he did, but it would be totally consistent with the way he lived his personal life then,” said McEwen, who is writing her own memoir but has never before publicly discussed her relationship with Clarence Thomas.

McEwen also told the Post she was not surprised that Virginia Thomas would leave Hill a message, even after all these years.
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You’ve noticed, I’m sure, the continuing corporate media refrain: Those irresponsible people ran up their debt and got mortgages they couldn’t afford!

This, of course, is bullshit. We have lots of evidence that mortgage brokers not only lied for people on their mortgage applications, they actually forced qualified minority buyers out of conventional mortgages and into riskier subprime mortgages — on purpose.

Why? Because the bankers made more money by betting against the same mortgage bonds they sold to suckers, and at a certain point in the Ponzi scheme, they simply needed more bad mortgages to maintain the profits.

It’s not that hard to understand — that is, once you ascribe the worst possible motives to the financial services players.

Yet still we have these hacks (either stupid, venal or stupefyingly naive — you decide) who try to turn this whole mess into a morality play by blaming the victims of the con — but not the investors, mind you! The people who got tricked and trapped into the mortgages that would inevitably go bad were the cold-blooded people who tried to milk the system!

Although I don’t believe there’s a hell, it would be pretty to think so.

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No right-wing conspiracy here!

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Because odds are, you won’t get squat:

With no end in sight to the nation’s high unemployment, the government program to help the jobless is heading for a crash.

And with Democrats and Republicans now divided over what used to be routine extensions of unemployment insurance benefits, there’s little prospect anytime soon for the sort of costly and complex rescue that’s necessary, according to one of the program’s champions.

“I am worried,” said Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), who got some temporary unemployment fixes in the $787 billion economic stimulus bill. “It is going to take a degree of bipartisanship … that we haven’t seen.”

The sour economy, with unemployment stuck above 9 percent for a year and a half, has been the backdrop for this fall’s midterm elections, but long-term fixes for the unemployment insurance system have hardly been a hot campaign issue.

Democratic and Republican leaders alike say that helping the unemployed is a top priority. But critics say neither side has done enough to avert the looming insolvency of the outmoded unemployment system, which reaches less than half of the jobless and yet is shuddering under $40 billion in debt.

States, which have already raised employment taxes, will be forced to cut benefits even further next year without the kind of overhaul of unemployment insurance that has always seemed to slip off the congressional agenda, according to McDermott, who’s tried for years to modernize a program that has changed little since it was created in 1935.

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You’ll probably want to make sure you’ve had some caffeine before you read this one.

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The more I read about these British budget cuts, the madder I get. They put a 12-month cap on… long-term disability? So we’re unofficially renaming them “short-term” disability — and when the money runs out, I suppose they can simply curl up and die?

And they’re raising the rents in public housing to market rates? I hope they have enough cardboard boxes.

Politicians seems to be under the impression that everyone is sitting on hidden resources, which will magically come to light when people are backed into a corner. What will actually happen is, people will die on the streets. Oh well!

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Professor Juan Cole:

The amazing thing about what is being done to the Palestinians in the Palestinian West Bank by Israeli illegal aliens is that it is happening in full view of the world, reported on by wire services, and yet remains invisible to Western publics.

The world reacts in horror when the Taliban in Afghanistan torch girls’ schools. But Israeli squatters just set fire to the store room of a Palestinian girls’ school, and the whole school would have gone up in flames if that warehouse had not been near a water main. The Israeli illegals left behind graffiti saying ‘regards from the hills.’

Early in October, Israeli squatters set fire to a Palestinian mosque in Bethlehem.

For instance, there is the seasonal vandalism against olive trees in Palestinian orchards, which reached a fever pitch this year. The Israeli authorities prosecute few of these offenses and almost never hand down a punishment to an Israeli squatter. The 10 million olive trees in the West Bank and Gaza, occupying some 45 percent of the farmland, are the matrix of Palestinian existence.

An attack on olive trees is a form of economic warfare of the first water. (There are some counter-attacks by Palestinians on the orchards of Israeli illegal immigrants, but they are minor in number compared to the onslaught on theirs).

Or consider the ways in which the Israeli squatters unleash their sewage on Palestinian vineyards. A potent symbol for the way the stateless, rights-less Palestinians are continually shat upon by the Israelis.

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The latest neocon idea from the UK, in which you pay a lot of taxes to the government so that they can cut services in order to prop up the bankers — and you get to do the work your taxes used to pay for! Win-win! [via]

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Is apparently dumb enough to believe her husband’s version of reality. I read somewhere that she and some of her friends are pushing Clarence Thomas to run for president (and why not? After all, voters are easily confused and all black people look alike) and she probably figured this would get that silly little PR problem out of the way!

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