The Hollywood Liberal

Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama resigns
SEOUL — Having squandered a historic electoral mandate in less than a year, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama resigned Wednesday, leaving his Democratic Party of Japan without a leader before a pivotal July election.


Japan – Yukio Hatoyama – Prime minister – Prime Minister of Japan – United States

Obama meets with leaders of new oil spill commission
President Obama vowed a “full and vigorous accounting” of the causes of the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, telling the leaders of a new commission that they should pursue the trail of blame without limits.


Barack Obama – Oil spill – President – Environment – United States

Segregated clubs in Kentucky raise issues for private business, civil rights law
LOUISVILLE — The push to integrate Kentucky’s private social clubs, whose members clung to old notions of Southern white privilege for decades after the end of Jim Crow, began in the early 1990s with a lone, quiet protest: At lunchtime on days when the weather was nice, a black preacher and civil…


Civil and political rights – Kentucky – United States – Rand Paul – Law

Political Ads a Tough Sell for Image-Conscious Corporations

Damage From Spill Can Be Deceiving
Bonnie Berkowitz, Washington Post
 GRAND ISLE, LA. — I guess I expected the oil spill to be laid out like a museum: blackened beach, first floor. Goop-covered marshes upstairs. Smelly blanket of crude in the lobby. All I'd have to do was show up to see it.Instead, when I arrived in Louisiana on Wednesday to report on the cleanup, I found that much of the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico is in the water rather than on it — always moving, rarely showing up where you expect it. 

Where is DC’s Urgency on Unemployment?
Brad DeLong, The Week
U.S. Treasury bond prices leaped again in May. By the third week of the month, the 30-year Treasury bond sold for ten percent more than it had at the start of the month, a mark of the growing excess demand for safe, liquid, high-quality financial assets. As economist John Stuart Mill pointed out in the early 19th Century, excess demand for such assets inevitably means excess supply of something else — “something else,” in this case, being the goods and services provided by workers. We have seen this dynamic at work since early fall, 2007, with growing …

Fiasco on the High Seas
Ari Shavit, Haaretz
Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Moshe Ya'alon are supposed to know history. They are supposed to know there was no greater mistake than that of the British with regard to the illegal immigrant ship Exodus in the summer of 1947. The brutality employed by the British Mandate against a ferry loaded with Jewish refugees turned the regime into an object of revile. It lost what is now called international legitimacy. British rule over the country ended just 10 months after the Exodus fiasco,The Turkish ship Mavi Marmara was no Exodus. It carried not Holocaust survivors but provocateurs,…