In an interview with ABC New's Diane Sawyer that aired Monday night, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad walked back his promise to help three American hikers—including Mother Jones contributor Shane Bauer—detained in Iran.

Bauer and his companions, Josh Fattal and Sarah Shourd, accidentally wandered into Iran while hiking in Northern Iraq on July 31, their traveling companion, Shon Meckfessel, explained in a statement in early August. But in the interview with Sawyer, Ahmadinejad suggested that he didn't believe that story. "How do you know they have accidentally crossed into Iran? How do you know they were looking for waterfalls and forests?" Ahmadinejad asked Sawyer in response to her questions about the hikers. He also refused to say he would release the three Americans. You can watch the full interview here.

Bauer and his companions have been charged with espionage and face trial. Want to learn more? Their families have a website where you can follow the story and help out.

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Flickr/wallyg (Creative Commons).Has the backlash to the Goldman Sachs backlash officially begun? Jessica Pressler over at New York's excellent Daily Intel says "it's become so fashionable to hate Goldman Sachs that it's actually unfashionable." Singled out for criticism is this Bloomberg piece on the firm. The article centers on the claim that Goldman benefited from 9/11 because "Building a new headquarters cater-cornered to where the World Trade Center once stood qualified the firm to sell $1 billion of tax-free Liberty Bonds and get about $49 million of job-grant funds, tax exemptions and energy discounts." Pressler calls BS: 

First of all, why not just headline the story "Goldman Sachs Benefited From 9/11," Bloomberg, because that is clearly the audience you're trying to reach? We guess you can't, since that would be grotesquely untrue. Second, what exactly are you telling us here? That Goldman Sachs took advantage of tax breaks to get a discount on a new headquarters? That they ran a cost-benefit analysis and came away thinking, hey, that's a pretty good deal for us? YOU DON'T SAY.

Of course they did! That's what they do. Also breaking: They sometimes package bunches of crap and make it look attractive so that they can sell it for more money. You know who else does that? The makers of CEREAL. The guy who runs American Apparel. Oh, and pretty much everyone else because that is what business is. In this case, Goldman Sachs's new tower helped keep a lot of jobs in lower Manhattan, despite the ice-skating snafu, so we can't say we're all that bothered. Honestly, news cycle, bring us some real evidence that Goldman had something to do with the intelligence saying there were WMDs in Iraq, or get the hell out of our office.

The reason that most consumer goods companies are very careful about product safety isn't just that it's good business. It's also that there's usually a regulator—the Consumer Product Safety Commission or what-have-you—that's in charge of bringing the hammer down on them if they sell us unsafe products. (Even the notoriously lax FDA is better than nothing.) Financial products don't have that kind of dedicated safety agency, which is why Elizabeth Warren suggested a Financial Product Safety Commission. It's also why that new agency is part of the proposed regulatory reforms the House passed earlier this year.

This all goes back to an idea that I'm going to keep harping on. It's ridiculous to expect all individuals—or companies—to act responsibly in the absence of laws and regulations restricting their behavior and imposing penalties for noncompliance. While everyone's outrage is focused on Goldman Sachs, the other banks will have more freedom to do fishy stuff and improve their competitive position. That's why liberals believe that if you're going to fix big problems like the ones that led to the financial crisis, you have to make those difficult changes to laws and incentives—not just rail against a single corporation.

Want more on all this? Check out the January/February issue of Mother Jones.

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Today is the day that aging Tea Partiers across the country are supposed to burn their AARP cards to protest the group’s support for health care reform. At least, that's what one right-wing blogger is encouraging them to do. Last week, self-described "Tea Party Patriot" Sam Mela announced the "1st Tea Party Winter Fest for Health Care Freedom & AARP Card Burning":

The Tea Party Movement is initiating a nation-wide AARP Card Burning, on the first day of winter, December 21, 2009. This is in response to AARP’s duplicitous stance in support of Congress’ attempted thievery of ample health care away from the American people. This response is being called for due to the fact that Congress has turned a deaf ear to the will of the American people, one of the most vulnerable groups of our society, our American Seniors….

Don’t forget your lighters, AARP cards and any other AARP printed material/mailings; home made cards a/or signs…you could even dress up like Santa, or his elves, Scrooge, Tiny Tim, whatever your favorite Christmas character…don’t forget your cameras & video recorders! If YOU don’t send this message NOW, the die will be cast!

It seems unlikely that more than a few stragglers will turn out in Santa suits today to torch their membership cards (and a good thing, too, since as one of my the readers of my Unsilent Generation blog pointed out, the cards are plastic, so they won't burn so much as "melt and make a big stink"). When a West Virginia Tea Party organizer called for a day of AARP card burnings earlier this month, the only reports were of a half-dozen protesters huddled around a fire in Charleston. But this hasn’t stopped Republican politicians from picking up the battle cry. John McCain recently urged AARP members to trash their cards both in Arizona speeches and on the Senate floor. (To his credit, McCain told them to cut the cards in half and send them back to AARP, rather than burn them.) 

None of this represents much of a threat to AARP. Although the group has lost tens of thousands of members over the health care reform issue, that’s a tiny fraction of its 45 million total. President Obama and Democratic senators have been making much of AARP’s support for the reform legislation, leading Sam Mela, in a post yesterday, to lament the fact that "in terms of Public Relations and Public Perception, the AARP has been able to steamroll over the Tea Party movement, without encountering even token resistance, although it would have been a simple matter for the Tea Partiers to neutralize them at any time."

[Read more]

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