Disinformation watch.

The Fairness Doctrine notwithstanding, I wonder if it's possible to sue Fox News for trying to influence public policy with outright lies?

Merry Christmas!

[If you're the Christmas-y sort, at any rate. Otherwise, the usual happy Thursday wishes apply.]

Hey, I get to localize my scorn for the Bush administration around someone new!

A high-ranking Interior Department official tainted nearly every decision made on the protection of endangered species over five years, a new inspector general report finds, concluding she exerted improper political interference on many more rulings than previously thought.

Julie MacDonald, a former deputy assistant secretary overseeing the Fish and Wildlife Service, did pervasive harm to the department's morale and integrity and may have risked the well-being of species with her agenda, Interior Inspector General Earl Devaney said in his report out Monday.

The Interior Department last year reversed seven rulings that denied endangered species increased protection, after an investigation found that MacDonald had applied political pressure in those cases. The new report looked at nearly two dozen other endangered species decisions not examined in the earlier report. It found MacDonald directly interfered with at least 13 decisions and indirectly affected at least two more.

MacDonald, a civil engineer with no formal training in natural sciences, resigned in May 2007. Department employees reported that they used her name as a verb _ encountering political interference from senior managers was called "getting MacDonalded."

Beautiful, isn't it?

Judis.

Of course, this is not just about automobile companies. If you look at the history of the Great Depression, what tipped that event from a global recession to depression was precisely a series of dumb, craven--or in Keynes’ word, “feather-brained”--moves by politicians blinded by ideology or by narrow self-interest. An interest rate hike here, a balanced budget there, a spending reduction or two, and we went from ten to twenty percent unemployment. Don’t imagine for a moment that the failure to bailout the auto companies isn’t one of those feather-brained moves.

Put it this way. What we have learned from the economics of the Great Depression is that in order to end the spiral of unemployment, government has to throw money at companies and consumers. It should be trying to raise wages, not lower them. The Wall Street bailout was a fiasco, but it was probably better than nothing. And the auto bailout was considerably better thought-out. Now there is a good prospect that two of the Big Three will fail, jeopardizing, perhaps, as many as a million jobs. That’s exactly the kind of thing that Americans should not be doing. But don’t tell that to those great patriots Corker, DeMint, or Shelby. They know better.

Grrrrrrrr.

Eight quintillion percent.

That's the estimated inflation rate in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

Incidentally, Mugabe announced yesterday that cholera was no longer a problem in his own little heart of darkness; non-sociopaths instead believe that some six million Zimbabweans are at risk, and that the likely toll will eventually plateau at around 60,000. Meanwhile, of course, nobody's fixing the water and sanitation systems - hell, I'm not even sure they have the expertise to do so anymore, even if they had the resources.

The news just keeps on getting worse.

Square one again.

Apparently the North Koreans have decided they want to open their negotiations with the Obama people from the most hostile defensive huddle they can manage.

A final push by President Bush to complete an agreement to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear weapons program collapsed Thursday, leaving the confrontation with one of the world’s most isolated and intractable nations to the administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

Four days of negotiations in Beijing ended in an impasse after North Korea refused to agree to a system of verifying that it had ended all nuclear activity, which it had pledged to do. Among other things, the North Koreans have objected to allowing soil and air samples to be taken near nuclear facilities and sent overseas for testing.

Make of that what you will - remember, it's still not clear who's in charge in North Korea, following the Dear Leader's health problems earlier in the year.

Dana Perino has suggested that the Bush administration's inclination is to go back to a policy of surly disengagement, but . . . well, happily, that hardly matters anymore.

Our great Congressional moron problem.

I'm trying to wean myself away from being so casually insulting, but we're considerably closer to an out-and-out depression than we were twelve hours ago, and since that's almost entirely the fault of Senate Republicans I'm giving myself a pass on being charitable and civilized.

Short form: the bailout package for Detroit has been abandoned, apparently in no small part because the Republicans simply couldn't bear the notion of letting the U.A.W. defer wage cuts until 2011 rather than 2009. The collapse of Chrysler and GM - expected by some within the month - and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in an already failing economy is apparently a price worth paying if it ensures that the wicked (i.e., organized labor) learns its place.

Sure, I'm also gobsmacked that the Democrats - with the support of the Republican White House, no less - couldn't get this done despite the Republican obstruction, but, honestly, the nihilists are worse than the feckless; there'll be a special, ugly place in the history books for these fools.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman informs me that Germany is single-handedly screwing over the entire E.U. as well. Super.