"The private sector helped create and spread a toxic stew of derivatives. Yet Geithner's strategy to “fix” the financial system is to ask its riskiest, most opaque players—the companies that shirked the most in taxes and were led by the execs who made the most money during the build-up years—to buy the system's junky assets in order “to cleanse it.” And this will come after $350 billion of capital injections and trillions of dollars of Federal Reserve loans haven't fixed the problem.

"This is how Christina Romer, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, described the plan on Sunday night: 'What we're talking about now are private firms that are kind of doing us a favor, right? Coming into this market to help us buy these toxic assets off banks' balance sheets.' She added, 'They are firms that are being the good guys here—coming into a market that hasn't existed to try and help us get toxic assets off banks' balance sheets.'

"Which good guys? The financial firms that had their profits taxed at 25 percent rather than at 35 percent, like the rest of us, and made oodles of money in 2006 and 2007 before their bad bets greased the way to an economic collapse? Or the ones that bet housing-related securities would fail, in a self-fulfilling manner?" 

Naomi Wolf at Alternet writes that Bush's secret memos are treasonous in an interview with Michael Ratner, a constitutional scholar. 

"In early March, more shocking details emerged about George W. Bush legal counsel John Yoo's memos outlining the destruction of the republic.

"The memos lay the legal groundwork for the president to send the military to wage war against U.S. citizens; take them from their homes to Navy brigs without trial and keep them forever; close down the First Amendment; and invade whatever country he chooses without regard to any treaty or objection by Congress.

"The memos are a confession. The memos could not be clearer: This was the legal groundwork of an attempted coup. I expected massive front page headlines from the revelation that these memos exited. Almost nothing. I was shocked.

"As a non-lawyer, was I completely off base in my reading of what this meant, I wondered? Was I hallucinating?

"Astonished, I sought a reality check -- and a formal legal read -- from one of the nation's top constitutional scholars (and most steadfast patriots), Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been at the forefront of defending the detainees and our own liberties.

"NW: "....Surely, when we have evidence Bush prepared the way to allow the military to imprison or shoot civilians in the various states and created law to put his own troops over the authority of the governors and the national guard of the various states, and when the military were sent to terrorize protesters in St. Paul, [Minn.], Bush was levying war in this sense against the united states?

"Hasn't Bush actually levied war against Minnesota? And if our leaders and military are sworn to protect and defend the Constitution, and there is clear evidence now that Bush and his cabal intended to do away with it, are they not our enemies and giving aid and comfort to our enemies? Again, "enemy" does not seem to me to be defined in the Constitution as another sovereign state.

"The authority given by these memos that could be used to raid every congressional office, raid and search every home, detain tens of thousands, would certainly fit a definition of treason.

"This would be the president making war against the institutions of the United States."

Neve Gordon at The Guardian writes about Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's far right foreign minister.

"What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of Eurasia will provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush towards a new, polycentric world order, also known as the New Great Game.

"Our good ol' friend the nonsensical "Global War on Terror," which the Pentagon has slyly rebranded "the Long War," sports a far more important, if half-hidden, twin -- a global energy war. I like to think of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is the pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet. Put another way, if its crucial embattled frontier these days is the Caspian Basin, the whole of Eurasia is its chessboard. Think of it, geographically, as Pipelineistan.

"Last year, oil cost a king's ransom. This year, it's relatively cheap. But don't be fooled. Price isn't the point here. Like it or not, energy is still what everyone who's anyone wants to get their hands on. So consider this dispatch just the first installment in a long, long tale of some of the moves that have been, or will be, made in the maddeningly complex New Great Game, which goes on unceasingly, no matter what else muscles into the headlines this week.

"Forget the mainstream media's obsession with al-Qaeda, Osama "dead or alive" bin Laden, the Taliban -- neo, light or classic -- or that "war on terror," whatever name it goes by. These are diversions compared to the high-stakes, hardcore geopolitical game that follows what flows along the pipelines of the planet. 

"In his 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski -- realpolitik practitioner extraordinaire and former national security advisor to Jimmy Carter, the president who launched the U.S. on its modern energy wars -- laid out in some detail just how to hang on to American "global primacy." 

"Later, his master plan would be duly copied by that lethal bunch of Dr. No's congregated at Bill Kristol's Project for a New American Century (PNAC, in case you'd forgotten the acronym since its website and its followers went down).

"For Dr. Zbig, who, like me, gets his fix from Eurasia -- from, that is, thinking big -- it all boils down to fostering the emergence of just the right set of "strategically compatible partners" for Washington in places where energy flows are strongest. This, as he so politely put it back then, should be done to shape "a more cooperative trans-Eurasian security system."

"By now, Dr. Zbig -- among whose fans is evidently President Barack Obama -- must have noticed that the Eurasian train which was to deliver the energy goods has been slightly derailed. The Asian part of Eurasia, it seems, begs to differ.

"Global financial crisis or not, oil and natural gas are the long-term keys to an inexorable transfer of economic power from the West to Asia. Those who control Pipelineistan -- and despite all the dreaming and planning that's gone on there, it's unlikely to be Washington -- will have the upper hand in whatever's to come, and there's not a terrorist in the world, or even a long war, that can change that."