Poor Mojo's Newswire

The central premise of Feith's book, which he repeated over and over to Jon Stewart, is that although there were errors in some of the administration's claims about the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein, the people making those statements were not being intentionally dishonest and did not set out to mislead the American public.... Stewart pointed out in response that painting a rosy picture of how quick and easy the war would be while downplaying the risks was itself a form of dishonesty. "You said something that I thought was interesting," he noted to Feith. "'The common refrain that the postwar has been a disaster is only true if you had completely unrealistic expectations.' Where would we have gotten those expectations?" "If you knew the perils but the conversation that you had with the public painted a rosier picture, how is that not deception?" Stewart asked. Feith attempted to counter this by suggesting that because "the recent history has been very unhappy in a lot of ways ... people look back and I think they misremember a lot," but he finally resorted to claiming once more that "there were statements ... that in looking back you wish you would have made differently ... I don't think any of them were deception. I think they were errors."

Rochelle Parker needed money for Christmas gifts and medicine, so she went online and found a Web site promising easy money. After a few key punches she was zapped a $300 loan, but one that charged an astonishing 842 percent annual interest. The recently retired fingerprint technician for the Chicago Police Department had several other online loans that drained her financially and forced her to move in with her daughter. But getting another loan was so easy on the Internet. People like Parker are falling through one of the newest trapdoors in the cash-strapped economy—online payday loans. Such loans typically were the province of payday loan storefronts that cater mostly to the working poor and low-middle-income workers, short on cash until payday. Now online loans are spreading to the middle class as a result of rising gasoline and food prices, tightening credit, the subprime mortgage fallout and the ease of home computer access to the Web.

Around the world, governments are trying every play in their books to stave off food riots — sending troops to hand out food in slums, ordering sweeping wage increases, banning grain exports and suspending futures trading. The United States is promising millions in emergency food aid. But many experts call these Band-Aid solutions, saying what's needed is a radical rethink of how the world gets its food. However, they're deeply divided about which way to go. Some would in effect reverse the fundamentals by investing massively in small farmers, instead of letting them sink in a free-trade world. That would be very different from what the U.S. has long been evangelizing — take uncompetitive food producers off the land and put them in new jobs with paychecks that would buy them cheap food, efficiently farmed.... The pain inflicted on Mexican farmers by NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, was supposed to be offset by cheap grains for consumers, said Jeff Faux of the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute. "But when the U.S. Congress realized the potential of ethanol, corn was diverted there and Mexico was left high and dry," Faux said. "The corn turned out to be not that cheap." The campesino federation estimates 200,000 Mexicans a year have fled the countryside for the city or the United States since NAFTA was launched in 1994.