So here we are at the tail end of the disastrous Bush era - 201 days and 14 hours left at this writing - and can start doing damage assessments. Take the economy. Our currency has lost half its value, our government debt has roughly doubled, we have lost millions of manufacturing jobs and replaced them with lower-paying jobs in the service sector, our infrastructure is crumbling, and most importantly, due to a burst asset bubble created by lax regulation in the housing industry that in turn produced a credit bubble, our economy is going to either stay stagnant or contract outright. As The New York Times points out today, this state of affairs is likely to persist until the Fall of 2009. In short, we are fucked.

You'll be hearing apologies for this from conservatives with all the frequency you heard them from Soviet-era apparatchiks, of course. One virtue of being an ideologue is that you're never wrong, no matter how crushing the weight of facts that might indicate otherwise.

So, as some parts of the country are in recession and others lurch into outright depression - Michigan, Ohio and Indiana along with most of the rust belt, for example - it's time to take a sobering look at what the medium-term future may hold for the City of New York.

Do you recall John McCain’s war-loving-lyrical response to the challenge of getting along with Iran? (See also this Moveon Youtube.)

Well, a more pressing question might be whether George Bush & his allies in Israel will pull an “October surprise” on our election process. Imagine if you will, some “Gulf of Tonkin” incident, some “Weapons of Mass Distraction” science fiction, some “supporters of cross-border terrorism” lies. Would the Republican Party benefit from such an attack? Would McBush-Cain strategists think so? Certainly McCain’s only hole-card is his claim to being tough on terrorists.

July 1, Update Having so consistently lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, would you think the liar-in-chief or his servants would be truthful about Iran? Tuesday's Washington Post reports the CIA ignored facts and analyses which showed Iran long ago suspended its nuclear weapons program

A former CIA operative who says he tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs now contends that CIA officials also ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb. The onetime undercover agent, who has been barred by the CIA from using his real name, filed a motion in federal court late Friday asking the government to declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency views at the time.

Laura Rozen at Mother Jones collects snippets of expert observers' views which are really worth reading. Their take-away? Most of them think military action against Iran is unlikely. But –

Seymour Hersh has another blockbuster in The New Yorker. Cross-border terrorist George W. Bush has sent US forces to fight Iran. Hersh’s must-read essay which appears in this coming week’s issue points out that the clandestine US actions against Iran “are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.”

If someone had asserted a week ago at this writing - early AM Monday - that within a week, Eliot Spitzer's career and Bear Stearns would both spectacularly implode, the most likely response would have been derision.

And yet here we are, with Bear being essentially nationalized - the Fed is taking over that firm's assets as collateral for a thirty billion dollar loan guarantee - and Eliot Spitzer officially handing over the reins to his lieutenant governor at noon today.

The Sheriff of Wall Street went down at the same time as Wall Street itself. How ironic. Per the New York Times, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers may be next down the rabbit hole.

At the bottom of that hole sits the same culprit in both cases: the Bush administration. Any serious look at the investigation into Eliot Spitzer has to come to the conclusion that the Bush Department of Justice was aiming for a hit. And that's what they got, signed, sealed and delivered courtesy of Alberto Gonzales. Any why Spitzer? Because he was the lone politician to take on the business practices that first came to pass in the Bush era, when Wall Street knew its practices wouldn't be scrutinized too closely, Enron and Sarbanes-Oxley be damned.

Greg Palast takes a closer look:

Why is it, do you think, that some tyrants love show trials? Why not, as death squads did in Argentina and Chile kidnap, torture and murder at midnight? Why detain & torture people, coerce confessions, rig kangaroo courts (my apologies again to the kangaroos who, after all are innocent unlike our Decider-in-Chief) and bar lawyers from representing them effectively?

As you may well know by now, Mr. Bush as decided to follow up on the show trial and hanging of Saddam Hussein (who may well have been guilty of something, but we’ll never know) by trying” six people in Guantanamo before military commissions and executing them. Their crime? A la little Rudy one-note, claimed involvement in the September 11 attacks.

In order to make acceptable the “evidence” extracted by Mr. Bush by torture (Did he watch the torture tapes?) a public relations campaign has launched to show that water boarding is just fine. Mr. Injustice Antonin Scalia loves torture , he tells us, rewriting the Federal Rules of Evidence with scenes Fox’s 24. (Do you think Mr. Justice S plans to recuse himself from deciding these issues? Me neither.)

The White House whitewash of water boarding, here and here is buttressed by a bizarre argument: after we tortured them, we interrogated them nicely, indeed treated them to Starbucks Coffee and they still confessed.

Do you have to be a Nobel-prize winning economist like Joseph Stiglitz to understand that a fast, effective way to spend our way out of the Bush-GOP-invented economic swamp is to put cash into the hands of the poor? Food stamp increases and extension of unemployment insurance benefits could be done quickly by Congress and would be spent right away by the lower-income people they’d reach.

Yet, of course, the Bush-Pelosi plan doesn’t include them. It could be a worse plan, of course but its mechanism, tax refunds, will take five months (best case) and it directs the pump-priming cash to people who might well bank it instead of spending it. Indeed two-thirds of the money in the Bush-Pelosi plan goes to higher income while only a third goes to poorer people. ( Andrew Leonard at Salon tracks the saddest-funniest food story: Republicans saving the poor from fatness by blocking boost in food stamps. Who knew?) Many, many (too many?) updates (5 sets) are at the end of the post. Also Take Action! Urge a progressive stimulus package! Link at the end. .

This has led progressives like economist-columnist Paul Krugman to pan the Bush-Pelosi deal:

When the 18 and 1/2-minutes of Nixon-tape turned up missing, it was the beginning of the end for his presidency. Will the destroyed tapes of CIA torture end Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney’s Gestapo-like torture careers? (Check Washington Post story here )Perhaps not unlike Sgt. Shultz of Hogan’s Heroes, Mr. Bush "knows nothing, remembers nothing" His mouthpiece press spokespinner: "He has no recollection of being made aware of the tapes or their destruction before yesterday." So far as I’ve read Scott Horton’s take at Harpers is the most focused. But if you want a full scream-by-scream review try Dan Froomkin’s chronology with hot-links from the Washington post. Update: The White House now claims it tried to stop the CIA from destroying evidence; before they claimed destroying the videos was just peachy. I could give you a dozen hot-links but Scott Horton has already collected them with a Sgt. Shultz reference to spare.

UPDATE: Progressive Democrats of America, Brooklyn For Peace & others plan a protest at Sen. Schumer's Park Slope home Tuesday night. They write:

Senator Schumer's support of Mukasey for U.S. Attorney General is outrageous and we must respond.

New York Progressive Democrats of America joins with Brooklyn For Peace and other Neighborhood Peace organizations to protest Senator Charles Schumer's decision to support the nomination of Michael Mukasey for U.S. Attorney General.

PROTEST VIGIL - TUESDAY, NOV 6th, 6:00 pm
at Senator Schumer's residence: 9 Prospect Park West (corner of President Street in Park Slope)Brooklyn, NY

Protest Schumer's support of Michael Mukasey - who will support Bush's continued use of torture.
Protest Schumer's increasing support of military action against Iran and Bush's attempt to launch a new war.
Protest Schumer's continuing support of funding for the war against Iraq.

As Senate Judiciary power broker, Senator Schumer green-lighted the nomination of Michael Mukasey as Mr. Bush’s replacement AG to hit for Gonzo. The bad news of course is that Judge M cannot figure out whether waterboarding is torture. This put our senior senator in a spot. He now favors the Mukaseky. He may be a key to defeating it. What a sad situation.

NYC’s Housing Authority (NYCHA)has sold off property because, perhaps in part, it is being pushed over a fiscal brink by the combined defunding efforts of decades of GOP office holders at the city, state and federal level. (For a very cursory – but perhaps too long – overview of some of NYCHA’s financial and operating woes, click here ).

Those of you of a certain age who remember the War in Vietnam, may recall a puzzling Military concept:“we burned the village in order to save it.” Similarly, public housing operators across the US have from time-to-time destroyed huge public housing projects in order to save them. Forty years ago, for example, I spent a moderate amount of time in the Pruit-Igoe projects of St. Louis Mo.—a 33 building forest of medium-rise buildings so badly-built, so badly maintained so crime-ridden that they were torn down altogether in 1972. Since then, the dynamite & bull-dozer solution to public housing failures (and even some successes) has been applied in other locales (famously Cabrini-Green in Chicago and recently, in Staten Island). In general, NYCHA housing – even at its worst moments of disrepair and dangerousness – never equaled the disgrace of Pruitt-Igoe.

The right-wing idea is that the solution to the financial crisis in public housing

No! I don't mean NYCHA is not broke but ...New York City’s Housing Authority (NYCHA) has been and is being mugged and robbed by Federal, State and City Republicans. NYCHA operates more than 2600 buildings with more than 180,000 apartments and many more than 400,000 residents. (It does a lot more, but for purposes of this post and the next, I focus only on its role as housing operator) As a result of planned policies federal, state and local subsidies for NYCHA have declined dramatically over the Bush, Pataki, Giuliani and Bloomberg years. As a result, cash for routine maintenance is drained away, fees and rents have increased and surprisingly, NYC continues, vampire-like, to suck hundreds of millions of dollars a year from NYCHA. (See the figures after the jump)

NYCHA’s GOP government-induced financial crisis was the subject of a fascinating forum a few days ago at the New School's Center for NYC Affairs. There Daily News columnist and editorial board member and former NYCHA resident Errol Lewis convened a panel of experts and officials and an audience of alarmed tenants and activists. The tales they told, the problems they debated and recent developments point to a NYCHA crisis which could, if not addressed, severely damage the largest single bloc of affordable housing in NYC – some of it imposed by Mayor Bloomberg right this minute.(Check out the forum here)

Have you followed the most recent round of disclosures, lawyerly denials concerning President Bush mission to torture whomever he wishes? The story, that a secret Injustice Department memo authorized CIA torture, first appeared in The NY Times Thursday. Shock, dismay and outrage from Congressional Democrats followed as the night the day which were of course followed by Mr. Bush’s lawyerly, misleading statements that we don’t “torture.” Editorial condemnations here and here. Congressional Quarterly's report of persistent Congressional pique is here . Scott Horton writing at the Harper's Blog has this blistering torture essay which should not be missed.