A few interesting links for December 12th through December 13th:
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Bush’s Final F.U. : Rolling Stone – “But if George Bush has his way, the country will be ruled by his slash-and-burn ideology for a long time to come.
In its final days, the administration is rushing to implement a sweeping array of “midnight regulations” — de facto laws issued by the executive branch — designed to lock in Bush’s legacy. Under the last- minute rules, which can be extremely difficult to overturn, loaded firearms would be allowed in national parks, uranium mining would be permitted near the Grand Canyon and many injured consumers would no longer be able to sue negligent manufacturers in state courts. Other rules would gut the Endangered Species Act, open millions of acres of wild lands to mining, restrict access to birth control and put local cops to work spying for the federal government.”
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Bloomberg.com: Fed Refuses to Disclose Recipients of $2 Trillion – The Federal Reserve refused a request by Bloomberg News to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.
The Fed responded Dec. 8, saying it’s allowed to withhold internal memos as well as information about trade secrets and commercial information. The institution confirmed that a records search found 231 pages of documents pertaining to some of the requests.
Congress is demanding more transparency from the Fed and Treasury on bailout, most recently during Dec. 10 hearings by the House Financial Services committee when Representative David Scott, a Georgia Democrat, said Americans had “been bamboozled.”Damn! That’s brazen!
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Lee Bey: The Urban Observer: When Life Came to Chicago – On my list of things to do is explore the Life Magazine archive just like Lee Bey has done. There’s a lot of good stuff newly available.
“This photo and the ones below come courtesy of Life magazine. The digitized archives of the once world-famous photo magazine are now only a Google away. See the archive here. And there’s more to come. The Google people are going to add 10 million photos over the next few months.Naturally I was drawn to the Chicago stuff.”
