Archive for May, 2009
Obama presses two-state solution in U.S.-Israel talks
Obama presses two-state solution in U.S.-Israel talks
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday pressed a two-state solution to the Middle East conflict but failed to win a public commitment from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Palestinian statehood.
In their first White House talks, Obama also urged Netanyahu to freeze Jewish settlement building but sought to reassure Israelis wary about his overtures to Iran that he would not wait indefinitely for diplomatic progress toward curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
The two leaders tried to paper over their differences as Obama waded into the thicket of Middle East diplomacy four months after taking office, but the divisions were hard to ignore between Israel and its superpower ally.
via Obama presses two-state solution in U.S.-Israel talks | Reuters.
U.S. workers paying more for healthcare: report | Health | Reuters
U.S. workers paying more for healthcare: report
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Healthcare costs for Americans who get medical coverage through an employer hit a record $16,771 per family this year, and they are having to pay more themselves, a report released on Monday showed.
Employers trying to save money in the current recession have forced workers to take on a greater portion of their healthcare costs, according to Milliman Inc., the consulting firm that prepared the report.
That trend could accelerate the longer the recession lasts, the report stated.
An estimated 170 million Americans get their health insurance through an employer. Healthcare costs, both payroll deductions and out-of-pocket medical expenses, now eat up 14 percent of the average household income of about $50,000 for these people, the study found.
Costs grew by an average of $1,162 per family this year from an average of $15,609 last year, the report said.
via U.S. workers paying more for healthcare: report | Health | Reuters.
Pesticides indicted in bee deaths
Pesticides indicted in bee deaths
Agriculture officials have renewed their scrutiny of the world’s best-selling pest-killer as they try to solve the mysterious collapse of the nation’s hives.
May 18, 2009 | Gene Brandi will always rue the summer of 2007. That’s when the California beekeeper rented half his honeybees, or 1,000 hives, to a watermelon farmer in the San Joaquin Valley at pollination time. The following winter, 50 percent of Brandi’s bees were dead. “They pretty much disappeared,” says Brandi, who’s been keeping bees for 35 years.
Since the advent in 2006 of colony collapse disorder, the mysterious ailment that continues to decimate hives across the country, Brandi has grown accustomed to seeing up to 40 percent of his bees vanish each year, simply leave the hive in search of food and never come back. But this was different. Instead of losing bees from all his colonies, Brandi watched the ones that skipped watermelon duty continue to thrive.
Brandi discovered the watermelon farmer had irrigated his plants with imidacloprid, the world’s best-selling insecticide created by Bayer CropScience Inc., one of the world’s leading producers of pesticides and genetically modified vegetable seeds, with annual sales of $8.6 billion. Blended with water and applied to the soil, imidacloprid creates a moist mixture the bees likely drank from on a hot day.
via Pesticides indicted in bee deaths | Salon.
Australia to build world’s largest solar energy plant
Australia to build world’s largest solar energy plant: PM
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australia plans to build the world’s largest solar power station with an output of 1000 megawatts in a A$1.4 billion (US$1.05 billion) investment, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said on Sunday.
The plant would have three times the generating capacity of the current biggest solar-powered electricity plant, which is in California, Rudd said during a tour of a power station.
Tender details will be announced later in the year, and successful bidders will be named in the first half of 2010. Rudd said the project was aimed at exploiting the country’s ample sunshine, which he called “Australia’s biggest natural resource.”
It was also aimed at helping the country become a leader in renewable, clean energy, he said.
“The government plans to invest with industry in the biggest solar generation plant in the world, three times the size of the world’s current biggest, which is in California,” Rudd said.
via Australia to build world’s largest solar energy plant: PM | Green Business | Reuters.
Recession threatens U.S. progress in child wellbeing | U.S. | Reuters
Recession threatens U.S. progress in child wellbeing
CHICAGO (Reuters) – Hard economic times are hitting the United States’ youngest citizens, threatening to roll back decades worth of gains in health, safety and education, according to a report released on Monday.
It suggests the country’s most severe recession in a generation, which has cost more than 5 million American jobs since it began in late 2007, is having a drastic impact on children.
“Our projections show that virtually all the progress made in family economic well-being since 1975 will be wiped out,” Ken Land of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and colleagues wrote in 2009 Child Well-Being Index and Special Focus Report.
The annual report, sponsored by the Foundation for Child Development, a private child advocacy group, measures economic, health, safety and social factors affecting children and teens.
Based on current estimates, the report projects that the current recession will pare median annual family incomes back to $55,700 by 2010, down from $59,200 in 2007.
via Recession threatens U.S. progress in child wellbeing | U.S. | Reuters.
South Korea tries recharging road to power vehicles | Science | Reuters
South Korea tries recharging road to power vehicles
SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korea’s top technology university has developed a plan to power electric cars through recharging strips embedded in roadways that use a technology to transfer energy found in some electric toothbrushes.
The plan, still in the experimental stage, calls for placing power strips about 20 cm (8 inches) to 90 cm (35 inches) wide and perhaps several hundred meters long built into the top of roads.
Vehicles with sensor-driven magnetic devices on their underside can suck up energy as they travel over the strips without coming into direct contact.
“If we place these strips on about 10 percent of roadways in a city, we could power electric vehicles,” said Cho Dong-ho, the manager of the “online electric vehicle” plan at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
The university has built a prototype at its campus in Daejeon, about 140 km (90 miles) south of Seoul, for electric-powered golf carts and is working on designs that would power cars and buses.
via South Korea tries recharging road to power vehicles | Science | Reuters.
Wash. Post’s Cillizza Uses GOP Poll To Claim That ‘Most’ Americans Say Torture Is ‘Justified’
OPS: Fascist MSM strikes again. The Reich’s propaganda machine in overdrive
Wash. Post’s Cillizza Uses GOP Poll To Claim That ‘Most’ Americans Say Torture Is ‘Justified’
Today in the Washington Post, reporter Chris Cillizza has an article titled “Some Call It Torture. In One Poll, Most Call It Justified.” According to Cillizza, “[A] new poll conducted for Resurgent Republic suggests that the American people — including politically critical independent voters — by and large support the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ [EITs] on suspected al-Qaeda operatives“:
Asked whether such tactics were justified, 53 percent of the overall sample said they were and 34 percent said they were not. [...]
On the question of whether such techniques have yielded information that has made the country safer, 52 percent of all respondents said they had while 39 percent said they had not.
Aside from the fact that Cillizza bases his story on a poll from a firm “made up of Republican strategists,” as he acknowledges, the poll’s questions are conducted in such a way that appear to lead the respondents toward support of torture. In Cillizza’s first example — 53 percent say EITs are justified — the poll’s actual question reads, “Based on what you have read or heard, would you say harsh interrogation of detainees was justified or not justified?” Of course, the poll doesn’t ask if “torture” is justifed. Instead it asks if respondents support “harsh interrogation” — the Bush administration’s preferred language for its torture program. Moreover, the question does not give specific examples of such “harsh interrogation” that would give any determination as to what exactly its respondents are supporting.
‘Party of No’ Chairman on whether health care reform will pass: ‘Noooooo.’
OPS: Miserable Fascist bastards
‘Party of No’ Chairman on whether health care reform will pass: ‘Noooooo.’
This weekend on “Meet the Press,” David Gregory asked RNC Chairman Michael Steele whether health care reform could pass this year. Invoking his party’s preferred reply, Steele responded, “Noooooo”:
GREGORY: Do you think it’s going to happen? Chairman, do you think it’s going to pass this year?
STEELE: No.
GREGORY: You don’t think it will pass?
STEELE: Noooooo. No, no. no.
Reinforcing the fact that Republicans have no health care plan of their own, Steele could only repeatedly insist on “tort reform.” Watch it:
via Think Progress » ‘Party of No’ Chairman on whether health care reform will pass: ‘Noooooo.’.
Newly-Disclosed Memo Shows Bush Was Presented With Legal Alternative To Torture Program
Newly-Disclosed Memo Shows Bush Was Presented With Legal Alternative To Torture Program
zelikowA newly-disclosed 2005 memo, authored by then-State Department counselor Philip Zelikow, then-Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, and then-Deputy Assistant Secretary for Detainee Affairs Matthew Waxman, gave President Bush “clear and unequivocal advice encouraging a detainee interrogation system that followed humane practices that adhered to US and international law.” The memo was authored as the Bush administration was seeking a “fresh approach” handling terror detainee and just weeks after the OLC issued its second round of torture memos.
In the memo, the three Bush administration officials argue that the President should appoint a “special board” to “review general U.S. government detainee policy and operations” and “evaluate issues of effectiveness and intelligence value.”
While that review was taking place, the authors recommended that U.S. forces treat detainees in the so-called war on terror as if they were “civilian detainees under the law of war.” “This is the system generally being used by our forces in Iraq. Adopting this interim approach allows us to handle the detainees on a well understood basis that gives our forces clear, unambiguous guidelines for conduct,” they wrote, adding:
Key Indicators of Election Fraud: Incumbency, the Final National Exit Poll and Voter Turnout
Key Indicators of Election Fraud: Incumbency, the Final National Exit Poll and Voter Turnout
Returning voter turnout implied by the Final National Exit Poll is a key indicator of election fraud.
There is a direct relationship between turnout and the recorded vote deviation from the True vote.
Prior election voter turnout must be less than 100% due to mortality and other factors.
In the four elections since 1988 with Reagan or Bush (3) the incumbent, prior voter turnout was impossible.
The recorded Democratic vote share was far below the calculated True share.
In the two elections with Clinton the incumbent, prior voter turnout was plausible.
The recorded Democratic vote share was very close to the calculated True share.
Republican incumbent:
1988: 106% turnout of 1984 Reagan voters; 5.2% deviation in the Democratic True vote share
1992: 117% turnout of 1988 Bush voters; 8.1% deviation
2004: 112% turnout of 2000 Bush voters; 5.4% deviation
2008: 106% turnout of 2004 Bush voters; 4.4% deviation
Democratic incumbent:
1996: 91% turnout of 1992 Bush voters; 1.9% deviation
2000: 100% turnout of 1996 Bush voters; 0.7% deviation
via Key Indicators of Election Fraud: Incumbency, the Final National Exit Poll and Voter Turnout.
The Bush Administration Homicides –
The Bush Administration Homicides
For five years as a researcher for Human Rights Watch and reporter, John Sifton helped investigate homicides resulting from the Bush administration’s torture policy. His findings include:
• An estimated 100 detainees have died during interrogations, some who were clearly tortured to death.
• The Bush Justice Department failed to investigate and prosecute alleged murders even when the CIA inspector general referred a case.
• Sifton’s request for specific information on cases was rebuffed by the Bush Justice Department, though it was “familiar with the cases.”
• Attorney General Eric Holder must now decide whether to investigate and prosecute homicides, not just cases of torture.
A simple fact is being overlooked in the Bush-era torture scandal: the number of cases in which detainees have been tortured to death. Abuse did not only involve the high-profile cases of smashing detainees into plywood barriers (“walling”), confinement in coffin-like boxes with insects, sleep deprivation, cold, and waterboarding. To date approximately 100 detainees, including CIA-held detainees, have died during U.S. interrogations, and some are known to have been tortured to death.
via The Bush Administration Homicides – The Daily Beast.
No More Mr. Nice Guy
OPS: No Shit. Who could have seen THAT coming?
No More Mr. Nice Guy by Jeffrey Toobin - The New Yorker
Chief Justice Roberts Has Served Interests And Reflected Values Of The GOP – In Every Major Case, He Has Sided With The Prosecution Over The Defendant
The Supreme Court’s stealth hard-liner.
When John G. Roberts, Jr., emerges from behind the red curtains and takes his place in the middle of the Supreme Court bench, he usually wears a pair of reading glasses, which he peers over to see the lawyers arguing before him. It’s an old-fashioned look for the Chief Justice of the United States, who is fifty-four, but, even with the glasses, there’s no mistaking that Roberts is the youngest person on the Court. (John Paul Stevens, the senior Associate Justice, who sits to Roberts’s right, is thirty-five years older.) Roberts’s face is unlined, his shoulders are broad and athletic, and only a few wisps of gray hair mark him as changed in any way from the judge who charmed the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearing, in 2005.
On April 29th, the last day of arguments for the Court’s current term, the Justices heard Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, a critical case about the future of the Voting Rights Act. Congress originally passed the law in 1965, and three years ago overwhelmingly passed its latest reauthorization, rejecting arguments that improvements in race relations had rendered the act unnecessary. Specifically, the bill, signed by President George W. Bush in 2006, kept in place Section 5 of the law, which says that certain jurisdictions, largely in the Old South, have to obtain the approval of the Justice Department before making any changes to their electoral rules, from the location of polling places to the boundaries of congressional districts. A small utility district in Texas challenged that part of the law, making the same argument that members of Congress had just discounted—that this process, known as preclearance, amounted to a form of discrimination against the citizens of the New South.
via Annals of Law: No More Mr. Nice Guy: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker.
Study links cigarette changes to rising lung risk
Study links cigarette changes to rising lung risk 
WASHINGTON – It may be riskier on the lungs to smoke cigarettes today than it was a few decades ago — at least in the U.S., says new research that blames changes in cigarette design for fueling a certain type of lung cancer.
Up to half of the nation’s lung cancer cases may be due to those changes, Dr. David Burns of the University of California, San Diego, told a recent meeting of tobacco researchers.
It’s not the first time that scientists have concluded the 1960s movement for lower-tar cigarettes brought some unexpected consequences. But this study, while preliminary, is among the most in-depth looks. And intriguingly it found the increase in a kind of lung tumor called adenocarcinoma was higher in the U.S. than in Australia even though both countries switched to so-called milder cigarettes at the same time.
“The most likely explanation for it is a change in the cigarette,” Burns said in an interview — and he cited a difference: Cigarettes sold in Australia contain lower levels of nitrosamines, a known carcinogen, than those sold in the U.S.
That’s circumstantial evidence that requires more research, he acknowledged.
via Study links cigarette changes to rising lung risk.
US journo claims Bhutto was killed on Cheney’s orders
OPS:; Turhs out – WSJ and AS repeated phony reports. Here’s the followup to this story: Hersh did not say Cheney ordered Bhutto assassination
US journo claims Bhutto was killed on Cheney’s orders
New York, May 18 (ANI): A special death squad assassinated Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on the orders of former US Vice-President Dick Cheney, an Arab TV channel has reported.
“Cheney was the chief of the Joint Special Operation Command and he cleared the way for the US by exterminating opponents through the unit and the CIA. General Stanley was the in-charge of the unit,” The Nation quoted US columnist Seymour Hersh, as saying.
The US death unit killed Bhutto because she had told Al-Jazeera TV about the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, Hersh said.
The US leadership did not want Osama to be declared dead. It would have raised questions about the US Army’s presence in Afghanistan, he claimed.
According to Hersh, the former Lebanese PM Rafique Al Hariri and the army chief were murdered for not safeguarding US interests and for refusing to set up US military bases in Lebanon.
Ariel Sharon, the then prime minister of Israel, was also a key man in the plot, he said. (ANI)
via US journo claims Bhutto was killed on Cheney’s orders.
Middle Class Healthcare Reform? Bend Over…
Middle Class Healthcare Reform? Bend Over… | CommonDreams.org – by Donna Smith
It’s coming. You and me and every middle class, working person in this nation is about to start handing over more and more of their hard earned cash to the private insurance industry, courtesy of our own elected members of Congress and our very popular President. Fire up those Treasury Department presses. We’re going to be printing and providing money for insurance companies like no bail-out we’ve seen yet this economic crisis cycle.
The healthcare legislation under design and so far under wraps for the American people is slowly being leaked via carefully staged forum and meetings and a few well-timed hearings and grand press announcements. Much of the work is still going on behind closed doors in private meetings attended by those who are deemed appropriate participants and industry friends.
Remember how open these proceedings were to be following all the Clinton plan debacles of the early 90s? Well, today’s stagings are far more sophisticated and planned out. So learning did occur by the industry giants and their political friends over these last 17 years, I will give them that.
And what do we know so far about what middle class Americans can expect from the legislation being privately crafted?
via Middle Class Healthcare Reform? Bend Over… | CommonDreams.org.
Can 350.org Save the World?
Can 350.org Save the World? | CommonDreams.org - by Bill McKibben
Groups gear up to issue an emergency alert that carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere has already passed a tipping point.
Writing From Sydney – All around the world, national governments are trying to hammer out their global warming policies, preparing for the United Nations’ climate-change conclave in Copenhagen at the end of the year. And in too many places, the effort seems to be going nowhere.
Here in Australia, for instance, the government last week decided to postpone any real action for another year, citing the recession. It weakened major elements of its so-called emissions trading scheme, bowing to pressure from the coal industry, which is the country’s biggest exporter, and other major polluters.
via Can 350.org Save the World? | CommonDreams.org.
Distorting Public Opinion on Torture Investigations
Distorting Public Opinion on Torture Investigations | CommonDreams.org
by Glenn Greenwald
Last Friday, CNN hosted a panel debate on torture and investigations with two conservatives and two liberals (Daily Kos’ David Waldman and Center for American Progress’ Erica Williams). Waldman did a genuinely masterful job of arguing the case against torture and for investigations — you can watch the five-minute segment here — but, bizarrely, the representative for CAP joined in with the two conservatives against Waldman to insist that there be no investigations. This is what she said:
The American people right now are actually not interested in this sideshow and this discussion. The American people are interested in looking forward — nobody is concerned anymore with what the Bush administration was doing and did. We decided it was torture. Conservatives may or may not disagree. None of that matters at this point and time.
I wonder how Williams reconciles her claims about what “the American people” are and are not interested in with this:
via Distorting Public Opinion on Torture Investigations | CommonDreams.org.
The Politics of Food
The Politics of Food - VIDEO | CommonDreams.org
From industrial agriculture and human health to the recession’s impact on the way we eat, food and politics are not easily separated. In fact they never have been. As lines at food banks swell and restaurants close their doors what control do we have over the food we eat?
Peter Hoffman, chef and owner of Savoy Restaurant and Back Forty, Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, and Marja Samsom, chef and owner of the Kitchen Club on why eating local matters, the global food system, and the hidden costs of cheap food.
via The Politics of Food | CommonDreams.org.
Images, the Law and War
Images, the Law and War | CommonDreams.org – by Adam Liptak
WASHINGTON – It was a hypothetical question in a Supreme Court argument, and it was posed almost 40 years ago. But it managed to anticipate and in some ways to answer President Obama’s argument for withholding photographs showing the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What if, Justice Potter Stewart asked a lawyer for The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971, a disclosure of sensitive information in wartime “would result in the sentencing to death of 100 young men whose only offense had been that they were 19 years old and had low draft numbers?” The Times’s lawyer, Alexander M. Bickel, tried to duck the question, but the justice pressed him:
“You would say that the Constitution requires that it be published and that these men die?”
Mr. Bickel yielded, to the consternation of allies in the case. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that my inclinations of humanity overcome the somewhat more abstract devotion to the First Amendment.”
via Images, the Law and War | CommonDreams.org.
Class War in America, the Ongoing Assault video
Class War in America, the Ongoing Assault video
Transnationals are “foreign” manufacturers with no particular interest in America except making money here.
The following article originally appeared on OpEdNews.org and may not reflect the views or opinions of EconomyInCrisis.org. Feedback is welcome.
Protectionism. Capitalists were all for it before they were against it. When manufacturing took place in America, when they paid workers enough to buy the products they produced, adding a tariff/tax/fee on to the cost of imported goods made by these same manufacturers’ competitors overseas, was fine. It just made sense. It was good business to prevent your domestic market from being flooded with cheaper goods from overseas, because that would lower domestic manufacturing’s ability to make enough money to stay in business. And this is exactly how the British and the Americans built their global empires.
But when “free trade” was elevated to the god of the marketplace, when American manufacturers had the ability to locate manufacturing overseas in order to take advantage (and I do mean take advantage) of “cheap labor platforms” – that is, to stand on the backs of poor people in other countries who had no choice but to work at a rate far below American workers, who, after all, were Americans and had come to expect a “fair” share of the wealth they created with their labor in the form of wages – well then, all bets were off. And the downsizing of American industry and the outsourcing of American jobs were off to the race to the bottom in order to fatten the bottom line.
via Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.
Made in the USA? The Truth behind the Labels
Made in the USA? The Truth behind the Labels
Many of the products that claim to be made in the U.S. use marketing gimmicks and loopholes to lure in buyers when they actually originated overseas
ConsumerReports.org put together a piece for AOL.com describing the marketing gimmicks and loopholes which allow some companies to claim that their product is “Made in USA” when it really originated overseas.
The most common case occurs when a company assembles certain parts in the U.S. from imported materials. Such is the case with New Balance Athletic Shoes. New Balance proudly claims that it has maintained manufacturing in the U.S., despite its competition – Nike, Adidas, Reebok, etc. – all moving production overseas. What they kindly ignore to tell us is the fact that the components of the shoes are largely imported from overseas before they are put together by American workers.
Many American computers and vehicles are “designed” in the United States, but their components are actually assembled overseas. In the case of Ford and General Motors, the auto giants maintain huge production operations in Canada and Mexico before shipping vehicles back into the U.S. for sale.
via Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.
Disastrous Effects of Free Trade: Part One
Disastrous Effects of Free Trade: Part One
“Free trade” creates winners and losers: the winners are the business leaders, executives and politicians, the losers are the normal people who lose jobs and are forced to borrow money to purchase daily necessities.
The United States has recklessly pursued “free trade” for several decades. The net result has been the loss of more than $7 trillion over the past 40 years. In fact, the United States has not made money from international trade since 1976. In the past 30 years more than $2 trillion of that lost deficit has come back to buy out assets and companies in this country.
One of the reasons we continue to follow this path, in spite of the fact that it is clearly a losing strategy, is that our politicians simply misunderstand the problem. They see that open and unregulated markets are a good way to create a class of millionaires, but they completely overlook the fact that the gap between the rich and poor is increasing. “Free trade” creates winners and losers: the winners are the business leaders, executives and politicians, the losers are the normal people who lose jobs and are forced to borrow money to purchase daily necessities.
In 2005 then Fed chairman Alan Greenspan said that something had to be done about this gap for the sake of maintaining the capitalist structure. Nothing was done, and we are now in the early throws of one of the worst economic crises in history.
via Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.
Scientists now trying to outflank HIV/AIDS virus
Scientists now trying to outflank HIV/AIDS virus
WASHINGTON – Like a general whose direct attacks aren’t working, scientists are now trying to outflank the HIV/AIDS virus.
Unsuccessful at developing vaccines that the cause the body’s natural immune system to battle the virus, researchers are testing inserting a gene into the muscle that can cause it to produce protective antibodies against HIV.
The new method worked in mice and now has proved successful in monkeys, too, they reported Sunday in the online edition of the journal Nature Medicine. The team is led by Dr. Philip R. Johnson of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
That doesn’t mean an AIDS vaccine for people is in the wings, Johnson said. Years of work may lie ahead before a product is ready for human use.
Nevertheless, the report was welcomed by Dr. Beatrice Hahn, an AIDS researcher the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who was not part of Johnson’s team. “It basically shows there is light at the end of the tunnel,” she said in a telephone interview.
“It shows thinking outside the box is a good idea and can yield results, and we need perhaps more of these nonconventional approaches,” she added.
via Scientists now trying to outflank HIV/AIDS virus.
Biden discloses Cheney’s ‘undisclosed location’
Biden discloses Cheney’s ‘undisclosed location’ - The Raw Story »
Oops, Biden did it again. Said too much, that is.
Newsweek contributing Washington editor Eleanor Clift relays a very revealing anecdote over at one of the magazine’s blogs.
Vice President Biden, it seems, in late March told a table of people at the annual Gridiron Club Dinner where Dick Cheney hid out after the 9/11 attacks: a bunker underneath the Naval Observatory in Washington, where vice presidents have lived since 1974. Here’s the story:
via The Raw Story » Biden discloses Cheney’s ‘undisclosed location’.
Ron Paul is ‘Fed up’
Ron Paul is ‘Fed up’ – The Raw Story »
Rep. Paul’s bill to audit Federal Reserve nets 165 co-sponsors
Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) is attracting a lot of attention for his proposal to audit the Federal Reserve bank, the independent financial powerhouse that creates and regulates our money.
In other words, as he wrote in Forbes recently, Paul is ‘Fed up’ with the complete lack of transparency.
The Federal Reserve’s recent and unprecedented actions in the realm of monetary policy have provoked a backlash among the American people. Trillions of dollars worth of loans and guarantees have been provided to Wall Street firms, while Main Street Americans suffocate under harsh taxation, the prospect of higher debt levels and increasing inflation. These events have awakened many Americans to problems with the Fed’s loose monetary policy, the bubbles it has created in the past and the potential hyperinflation it might cause in the future.
One of the fallacies of modern economics is the idea that a central bank is required in order to keep inflation low and promote economic growth. In reality, it is the central bank’s monetary policy that causes inflation and depresses economic growth. Inflation is an increase in the supply of money, which in our day and age is directly caused or initiated by central banks. All other things being equal, inflation results in a rise in prices. A so-called “mild” rate of inflation of 3% per year leads to a 56% rise in prices over a 15-year period. Even a “low” rate of inflation of 2% per year leads to a 35% rise over that same period. How is that conducive to long-term growth?
A common misconception is that the Fed is completely independent of political pressures. While the Fed has far too much authority to make agreements with foreign governments and central banks, or create temporary liquidity facilities, the governors and–more important–the chairman, are appointed by the president.
“In essence, the bill requires an audit of the Fed’s activity which shall be made available to Congress,” wrote Glenn Greenwald a couple weeks ago. “What possible arguments exist against this bill? Who opposes an audit of the Fed’s activities and why?”
As if to answer Greenwald’s question, days later Forbes published an opinion contrary to Paul’s, wrapped in a seemingly reasonable argument. Consider this, by Thomas F. Cooley:
via The Raw Story » Ron Paul is ‘Fed up’.
That Didn’t Take Long: Insurance Industry Breaks Promise to President Obama
That Didn’t Take Long: Insurance Industry Breaks Promise to President Obama
Why we can’t trust the insurance industry with health care reform.
Just four days after standing next to President Obama and declaring their commitment to control health care costs to the tune of $2 trillion over 10 years, the insurance industry, drug and medical device makers, and hospital groups are backing off their promise:
Hospitals and insurance companies said Thursday that President Obama had substantially overstated their promise earlier this week to reduce the growth of health spending.
Mr. Obama invited health industry leaders to the White House on Monday to trumpet their cost-control commitments. But three days later, confusion swirled in Washington as the companies’ trade associations raced to tamp down angst among members around the country.
…
Health care leaders who attended the meeting have a different interpretation. They say they agreed to slow health spending in a more gradual way and did not pledge specific year-by-year cuts.
Teen Sex Panic: Media Still Freaking Out About “Sexting”
Teen Sex Panic: Media Still Freaking Out About “Sexting”
By Christopher White, National Sexuality Resource Center.
Rather than focusing on how harmful and dangerous sexting is, we should be talking to young people about healthy sexual behaviors.
The sensationalizing, melodramatic, “scare-the-crap-out-of-you”, hype machine that passes for mass media these days is once again doing its best to ensure that parents are ready to break out the chastity belts, pass out whistles for “stranger danger” encounters, install nanny software on their home computers to block adult content, and this time, take away their cell phones to ensure that they are safe from the big, bad, sexually predatory world out there. Yes, I’m talking about the attention the “recent phenomenon” labeled “sexting” has gotten in the mainstream media in the last few weeks. According to the news reports I found via a simple Google search, sexting is a very dangerous activity that could damage your future and ruin your life – although there wasn’t really much of an explanation of how this could happen. Instead of getting caught up in yet another panic, let’s take a rational look at this “new” behavior as well as some of the real concerns that a more responsible press might address.
First, sexting is not new. Cell phones are no longer new; texting is no longer new; and even sending photos via a cell phone is no longer a new technology. And before there were cell phones, there was the internet and a similar panic about teens emailing nude photos or posting nude photos online. There was even a Veronica Mars episode about it as well as numerous Law and Order: SVU episodes (I heard that SVU has already had an episode about sexting, but I haven’t seen it yet). Before there was this “new” technology, teenagers engaging in this “new” behavior wrote each other explicit notes, gave one another nude Polaroids, and spent hours talking “dirty” to each other on the phone – and I seem to recall that all of these, including secretly recorded phone calls, were passed around my high school.
via Teen Sex Panic: Media Still Freaking Out About “Sexting” | Sex and Relationships | AlterNet.
Will Obama End the War on Drugs?
Will Obama End the War on Drugs? – By Arianna Huffington,
Is Obama really committed to a fundamental shift in America’s approach to drug policy or is this about serving up a kinder, gentler drug war?
When it comes to addressing America’s disastrous war on drugs, the Obama administration appears to be moving in the right direction — albeit very, very cautiously.
On the rhetorical front, all the president’s men are saying the right things.
In his first interview since being confirmed, Obama’s new drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, said that we need to stop looking at our drug problem as a war. “Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs” or a ‘war on product,’” he told the Wall Street Journal, “people see war as a war on them. We’re not at war with people in this country.”
He also said that it was time to focus more on treatment and less on incarceration.
via Will Obama End the War on Drugs? | DrugReporter | AlterNet.
Cheney’s Chief Assassin Is Now Obama’s Commander in Afghanistan
Cheney’s Chief Assassin Is Now Obama’s Commander in Afghanistan – By James Petras,
Obama’s appointment of General Stanley McChrystal reflects a grave new military escalation of his Afghanistan war.
“The Deltas are psychos…You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force…”, a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980s. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan.
McChrystal’s rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.
The point of the ‘Special Operations’ teams (SOT) is that they do not distinguish between civilian and military oppositions, between activists and their sympathizers and the armed resistance. The SOT specialize in establishing death squads and recruiting and training paramilitary forces to terrorize communities, neighborhoods and social movements opposing US client regimes. The SOT’s ‘counter-terrorism’ is terrorism in reverse, focusing on socio-political groups between US proxies and the armed resistance. McChrystal’s SOT targeted local and national insurgent leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan through commando raids and air strikes. During the last 5 years of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld period the SOT were deeply implicated in the torture of political prisoners and suspects.
via Cheney’s Chief Assassin Is Now Obama’s Commander in Afghanistan | | AlterNet.
Auto Bailout Blues: Spin, Lies and Layoffs
Auto Bailout Blues: Spin, Lies and Layoffs - The Nation
The madness of the approach adopted by the Johnson and Nixon administrations to war in Vietnam was summed up by the American major who said after the destruction of the Vietnamese village of Ben Tre: “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.”
The madness of the approach adopted by the Bush and Obama administrations to the renewal of the American auto industry has been summed up by the Treasury Department’s latest statement on the “restructurings” of the Chrysler and General Motors automotive companies — which are shaping up as plans for factory closings, mass layoffs and the shuttering of hundreds of car dealerships in communities across the country: “The Administration’s commitment to this industry has given both companies a new lease on life.”
It may be true that the tens of billions in federal tax dollars that are being pumped into Chrysler and General Motors will save the names of these companies. But the auto-industry “restructuring” is not saving auto plants that have been targeted for closing, tens of thousands of auto workers who face layoffs, auto dealers who are being “consolidated” out of business and perhaps 100,000 service and repair employees who are soon to be jobless.
via Auto Bailout Blues: Spin, Lies and Layoffs.
House Democrats Gut Climate Bill in ‘Compromise’
House Democrats Gut Climate Bill in ‘Compromise’ - The BRAD BLOG :
And the Repubs haven’t even gotten their own claws into it yet…
With Democrats like these, who needs Republicans?…
Even as House Democrats are celebrating their deal with conservative-leaning colleagues on climate change legislation, the real winners under the compromise have been the coal, electric and auto industries, who are largely the source of the nation’s carbon emissions to begin with.
Details of the compromise are still emerging, but already the chief sponsors of the measure — Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) — have been forced to lower carbon-reduction targets, cut renewable fuel standards and dole out billions of dollars in benefits to the nation’s largest polluting industries. Many environmentalists say the compromise comes at the too-high cost of undermining the bill’s very purpose, which is to slash emissions dramatically enough to prevent a warming planet from heating further. Some are asking Democrats either to bolster the environmental protections or to scrap the proposal altogether.
…
the concessions from Waxman and Markey to this point have been made to satisfy Democrats representing regions heavy with coal, oil and automaker interests.
Details on some of those “compromises” follow, along with a reminder that it’ll get even worse once the Republicans get to water down the legislation further still…
via The BRAD BLOG : House Democrats Gut Climate Bill in ‘Compromise’.
Michael Steele uses former Gov. Christie Todd Whitman as proof Republicans are a ‘Big Tent’ party. She quit the GOP in 2003
Michael Steele uses former Gov. Christie Todd Whitman as proof Republicans are a ‘Big Tent’ party. She quit the GOP in 2003 | Crooks and Liars
David Gregory asked Michael Steele for an example of the GOP being as inclusive a party as the Democrats since Kaine is pro-life. Steele uses Christie Todd Whitman as his example to show America how “Big Tent” they really are.
Gregory: Is the Republican Party open to pro-abortion right candidates in the way that Gov. Kaine has survived in the Democratic Party?
Steele: We’ve had wonderful pro-choice candidates. Gov. Christie Todd Whitman for example was a very successful republican Governor…
She was so happy with the GOP that she quit the Republicans in 2003 after she was picked to lead the EPA in 2001 by Bush and then refused to do their bidding.
Wikipedia: Whitman was appointed by President George W. Bush as Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, taking office on January 31, 2001.
She refused to go along with Bush and Cheney over their pollution quest and resigned from the EPA:
On June 27, 2003, after having several public conflicts with the Bush administration, Whitman resigned from her position to spend more time with her family.[31][32]
What did Thomas Jefferson say about religious freedom?
What did Thomas Jefferson say about religious freedom?
In 1786, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which is available online at the University of Virginia. Below is what Thomas Jefferson wrote:
Well aware
- that Almighty God hath created the mind free;
- that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do;
- that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time;
- that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical;
more…….
via Miami Interfaith Spirituality Examiner: What did Thomas Jefferson say about religious freedom?.
As Charlie’s Angels star lies dying, she begs for camera to keep rolling
As Charlie’s Angels star lies dying, she begs for camera to keep rolling || The Observer
An unflinching documentary of Farrah Fawcett’s long struggle with a terminal illness, filmed byher best friend, has been tipped for an Emmy
Farrah Fawcett, the 70s television star and sex symbol, wants to live her life on camera until the very end. That is why the actress has allowed her best friend, Alana Stewart, to film even the rawest moments of her battle with terminal cancer – including one when she writhed in agony, clutching a rosary, in a hospital bed.
“She was projectile vomiting and she looks up at me and says, ‘Why aren’t you filming this? This is what cancer is’,” a tearful Stewart recounts in the harrowing film, Farrah’s Story, which aired in the early hours of yesterday morning.
Now commentators in America are saying the heartrending documentary – effectively Fawcett’s curtain call – could result in an Emmy for the actress, named as an executive producer. It is an industry honour that has eluded her so far.
Fawcett, who soared to fame as the blonde bombshell private eye in the original Charlie’s Angels TV series, appears close to death in the final scenes of the film, so ill and sedated that she doesn’t recognise her own son.
via As Charlie’s Angels star lies dying, she begs for camera to keep rolling | Film | The Observer.
1988-2008 True Vote Math: Three stolen elections and not one Democratic peep
1988-2008 True Vote Math:
Three stolen elections and not one Democratic peep
It’s all here. For each election from 1988, an analytical data warehouse of recorded state votes, exit polls and True Vote calculations. The recorded popular vote vs. the True Vote. The recorded electoral vote vs. the True Vote. Deviations of the state and national exit polls and the True Vote from the recorded vote.
The True Vote is based on a feasible prior election returning voter mix and the National Exit Poll Vote shares.The rationale for calculating the returning voter mix is based on two facts which are ignored by the media.
Fact 1:
There must be fewer returning voters from the prior election voting in the current election.
About 5% die and another 2-10% don’t bother to vote depending on the level of interest. This should be obvious, but the fact is that the Final National Exit Poll, which is ALWAYS forced to match the recorded vote, has consistently adjusted the voter mix to include millions more returning Bush voters from the prior election than were alive to vote in the current.
Fact 2:
Millions of votes are never counted in every election. The Census provides very accurate estimates of total votes cast.
There were 10 million net uncounted votes in 1988 and 1992, 5 million in 2000 and 3 million in 2004. Approximately 70-80% of are Democratic. In every election, the Republican margin is 1-5 million higher just because of net uncounted votes.
But it’s even worse than that. “Net uncounted” means net of “stuffed” ballots. For example if there are 5 million uncounted votes and 1 million stuffed ballots, there are 4 million net uncounted. That means the Democrats lose 70-80% of 5 million uncounted votes, not 4 million.
But it’s even worse than that. What about the 1 million stuffed ballots? Were they Democratic or Republican? No further questions.
Fact 3:
Millions of voters (the vast majority Democratic) are disenfranchised and never get to the polls. These would-be Democrats are not included in the analysis.
The Bottom Line:
Our so-called democracy is a monumental myth and has been one for a very long time. The Democrats would win EVERY fair election, so the obvious question is: why haven’t they made election fraud an issue? Why do they keep silent when it has been killing them in every election? Landslides were denied in 2006 and 2008. Elections were stolen in 2000 and 2004 and possibly in 1988. It’s a Bush tradition, after all.
Democratic politicians didn’t raise a peep about elections stolen from true patriots Max Cleland and Tammy Duckworth who gave two or three limbs in service. They don’t fight like the Republicans do (see Norm Coleman) for their candidates. In fact, they told Duckworth to concede early – even when the fraud was apparent. Maybe the Democrats want the GOP to win to keep the Democratic wing of the Party in its place. What other explanation could there be? It’s just a Gentleman’s Agreement in DLC land.
via True Vote Math.
The U.S. to Raise Military Aid to Israel
The U.S. to Raise Military Aid to Israel
Despite expectations that the Obama administration will pressure Israel to accept a two-state solution and implement practical measures, the U.S. administration has sent signals that aid to Israel will, in fact, be raised. At the same time, the budget also imposes harsh conditions on the Palestinian Authority in order to receive aid.
According to the Israeli daily, Haaretz, the budget proposed to Congress for 2010 includes $2.775 billion in aid to Israel, compared to $2.5 billon budgeted for 2009. This is more than a 10% increase in total U.S. aid to Israel.
The budget also includes an increase in the assistance to the production of weapons systems, such as the missile Hetz-3.
The U.S. Congress proposed to raise the amount of aid to Israel for the development of the Hetz-3 missile—the Arrow “Interceptor” in English—from $30 million to $37.5 million. Israel considers continuous support in the development of this anti-missile missile a victory for the Israeli security establishment.
Hetz-3 is a theater missile defense (TMD) system first built by Israel and the United States. It was specifically designed to intercept and destroy ballistic missiles on a national level.
via The Alternative Information Center – The U.S. to Raise Military Aid to Israel.
Global Recession – The 21st century’s bleak harvest
The 21st century’s bleak harvest - Al Jazeera English
Rising food prices increased the aid dependency of developing countries
As the world staggers from one economic crisis to another, it seems easy to forget the global food crisis that occupied centre stage in 2008.
World prices for essential grains more than doubled between 2006 and 2008.
Rice, the staple food of most of Asia, doubled in price in just seven months. And, despite their commitments to trade liberalisation, a few significant grain-exporting developing countries rushed to protect domestic grain stocks by banning exports.
The poor, who typically spend between 50 and 70 per cent of their meagre incomes on food, were most affected by the crisis.
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, the food crisis raised the number of undernourished people from 923 million to more than one billion by this year.
In late 2007 and 2008, the crisis caused food riots in at least 15 countries across the world, from Brazil to Bangladesh, and international media and forums spoke of little else.
Then, as suddenly as it struck, declining prices relegated the food crisis to collective global amnesia.
Causes not addressed
However, while prices for grains and foods have declined in 2009, they are still higher than pre-crisis levels and the fundamental causes of their volatility have not disappeared.
via Al Jazeera English – Global Recession – The 21st century’s bleak harvest.
The Gospel of Consumption
The Gospel of Consumption | Orion Magazine
And the better future we left behind
PRIVATE CARS WERE RELATIVELY SCARCE in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within the home, electricity remained largely a luxury item for the wealthy.
Just ten years later things looked very different. Cars dominated the streets and most urban homes had electric lights, electric flat irons, and vacuum cleaners. In upper-middle-class houses, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, curling irons, percolators, heating pads, and popcorn poppers were becoming commonplace. And although the first commercial radio station didn’t begin broadcasting until 1920, the American public, with an adult population of about 122 million people, bought 4,438,000 radios in the year 1929 alone.
But despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them.
via The Gospel of Consumption | Orion Magazine.
The Perfect, the Good, the Planet
The Perfect, the Good, the Planet – - NYTimes.com
Paul Krugman
In a way, it was easy to take stands during the Bush years: the Bushies and their allies in Congress were so determined to move the nation in the wrong direction that one could, with a clear conscience, oppose all the administration’s initiatives.
Now, however, a somewhat uneasy coalition of progressives and centrists rules Washington, and staking out a position has become much trickier. Policy tends to move things in a desirable direction, yet to fall short of what you’d hoped to see. And the question becomes how many compromises, how much watering down, one is willing to accept.
There will be a lot of soul-searching later this year for advocates of health care reform. (For me the make-or-break issue is whether the legislation includes a public plan.) But right now it’s the environmental community that has to decide how much it’s willing to bend.
If we’re going to get real action on climate change any time soon, it will be via some version of legislation proposed by Representatives Henry Waxman and Edward Markey. Their bill would limit greenhouse gases by requiring polluters to receive or buy emission permits, with the number of available permits — the “cap” in “cap and trade” — gradually falling over time.
via Op-Ed Columnist – The Perfect, the Good, the Planet – NYTimes.com.
Researchers studying effects of meditation on traumatized war veterans
Researchers studying effects of meditation on traumatized war veterans
Many of our brave men and women returning home from active military duty have been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and researchers are investigating whether an eight-week meditation program might be able to help. One 34-year-old combat veteran described feeling threatened by crowds, heavy traffic, and sudden loud noises. He was starting to lock himself in his home and drink to numb the fear.
Then he found a veterans hospital offering a meditation technique called mindfulness-based stress reduction.
The technique includes yoga exercises and deep breathing techniques. People learn to focus on the present without judgment, simply being with whatever thoughts, pain, or fear they might be experiencing in the moment. With disciplined practice, people can free themselves from their own unwanted thought patterns and more effectively cope with chronic physical or emotional pain.
The 34-year-old veteran, whose name was withheld due to fears of future employers knowing about his PTSD, reported significant improvement:
It’s like the thoughts lost their hook. Before, they were just ripping me. With mindfulness, it opens up the blinders, and you realize (those thoughts) are not the totality of your existence forever.
Knowing ‘What’s Good for the Country’
Knowing ‘What’s Good for the Country’ – By Robert Parry
When President Barack Obama reversed himself on releasing photos of U.S. soldiers abusing detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq, he offered the usual “patriotic” excuse, that the images might fuel anti-Americanism and cost the lives of U.S. soldiers.
That argument has a powerful emotional appeal – especially when juxtaposed against the abstract counterargument regarding “the public’s right to know” – but the truth is much more complex than Obama and other advocates for this secrecy acknowledge.
Indeed, one could argue that the sanitizing of war by both U.S. politicians and the press over the last couple of decades – supposedly for “the good of the country” – has contributed to the deaths of many more U.S. soldiers and foreign civilians than any disclosure might have.
For instance, during the first Gulf War in 1991, grim photos of charred victims of U.S. aerial bombardments appeared in Europe and elsewhere but not in the United States. The U.S. news media chose to withhold the most gruesome images out of a concern that the pictures might dampen the happy national celebration as war again began to seem like fun.
via Consortiumnews.com.
Rumsfeld kept rescue choppers from Katrina
Rumsfeld kept rescue choppers from Katrina – Turf War
The GQ article about SecDef Rumsfeld is now up. Frank Rich referenced it in today’s column.
There you’ll find the atrocious cover pages of the top secret notes Rumsfeld sent to the WH – with biblical quotations above battlefield images.
But you’ll also find this:
- a final story of Rumsfeld’s intransigence begins on Wednesday, August 31, 2005. Two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans—and the same day that Bush viewed the damage on a flyover from his Crawford, Texas, retreat back to Washington—a White House advance team toured the devastation in an Air Force helicopter. Noticing that their chopper was outfitted with a search-and-rescue lift, one of the advance men said to the pilot, “We’re not taking you away from grabbing people off of rooftops, are we?”
“No, sir,” said the pilot. He explained that he was from Florida’s Hurlburt Field Air Force base—roughly 200 miles from New Orleans—which contained an entire fleet of search-and-rescue helicopters. “I’m just here because you’re here,” the pilot added. “My whole unit’s sitting back at Hurlburt, wondering why we’re not being used.”
* SteinL’s diary :: ::
*
Choppers with rescue air lift equipment were standing hours away, in the hundreds, and had not been deployed!
And why hadn’t the choppers been sent?
Because Rumsfeld was engaged in a turf war, and it would take days before he finally sent in both troops and released the materiel.
The US military had hundreds of rescue choppers, many with airlift equipment, within practical range. As BOHICA points out below, there were people in the military who were shaking with rage at not being allowed to assist.
The article explains:
via Daily Kos: Rumsfeld kept rescue choppers from Katrina – Turf War.
Some on left souring on Obama –
Some on left souring on Obama
When President Barack Obama speaks to the Notre Dame commencement Sunday afternoon, television cameras will search the sea of graduates, looking for turned backs and defaced mortar boards that abortion opponents will likely use to register their disagreement with the president.
But the attention to protests from conservatives who don’t support Obama – and almost certainly never would – could obscure the far more significant political threat he now faces.
Barely four months into his presidency, Obama is confronting growing dissatisfaction among members of his liberal base, who feel spurned by a series of his early decisions on issues ranging from guns to torture to immigration to gay rights.
The list got longer last week as Obama reversed his earlier decision to release photos of detainees abused in U.S. military custody and announced plans to try some terror suspects before military commissions – though on the campaign trail he railed against earlier versions of the tribunals.
A few, like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, have even hurled the left’s ultimate epithet – suggesting that Obama’s turning into George W. Bush.
via Some on left souring on Obama – Josh Gerstein – POLITICO.com.
Consumer prices fall 0.7% year-over-year
Consumer price drop is biggest since ’55
Government says 0.7% annual decline is the largest in nearly 54 years. Monthly prices unchanged.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — A key index of prices paid by consumers fell at the sharpest rate since August 1955 due to historically low energy prices, the government said Friday.
The Labor Department said the Consumer Price Index declined 0.7% on an annual basis in April, only the second year-over-year decline in nearly 54 years following March’s 0.4% drop.
On a monthly basis, consumer prices were unchanged, in line with the consensus estimate of economists surveyed by Briefing.com.
The overall index was affected by a sharp decline in energy prices, which fell 2.4% in April, and are down 25.2% on an annual basis.
via Consumer prices fall 0.7% year-over-year – May. 15, 2009.
Elderly need more ‘sun vitamin’
Elderly need more ‘sun vitamin’ - BBC NEWS
Spending more time in the sun could help older people cut their risk of heart disease and diabetes say experts.
Sun exposure helps the skin make vitamin D – a vitamin older people are generally deficient in due to their lifestyles and ageing processes.
A team at Warwick University has shown a deficiency increases the risk of metabolic syndrome, which is linked to diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Their study of more than 3,000 people is published in Diabetes Care.
The researchers say older people would benefit from more sunshine, although it is still important to be sensible in the sun as UV damage is linked with skin cancer.
Among the 50 to 70-year-olds living in China that the scientists studied, 94% had a vitamin D (25-hydroxyvitamin D) deficiency or insufficiency and 42% also had metabolic syndrome.
via BBC NEWS | Health | Elderly need more ‘sun vitamin’.
Under Rumsfeld, Pentagon published Bible verses on top-secret intel reports.
Under Rumsfeld, Pentagon published Bible verses on top-secret intel reports.
In a lengthy article on Donald Rumsfeld’s rocky tenure as Defense Secretary, GQ published never-before-seen cover sheets from top-secret intelligence briefings produced by Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. Starting in the days surrounding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the cover sheets featured inspirational Bible verses printed over military images, “and were delivered by Rumsfeld himself to the White House” to the president, “who referred to America’s war on terror as a ‘crusade,’” GQ writes. Below are some examples of the Bible quotes (view the images here):
“Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” [The quote appears over an image of a tank at sunrise]
“Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and your plans will succeed.” [The quote appears over an image of a soldier in Baghdad]
“It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.” [The quote appears over an image of Saddam Hussein]
“Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter, The nation that keeps faith.” [The quote appears over an image of tanks entering an Iraqi city]
via Think Progress » Under Rumsfeld, Pentagon published Bible verses on top-secret intel reports..
Sen. Webb Sides With Right-Wing Claims On Truth Commission And Gitmo
Sen. Webb Sides With Right-Wing Claims On Truth Commission And Gitmo
When President Obama announced on his second day in office that he would close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) said on MSNBC that Obama had “given a reasonable timeline here.” He praised Obama for “helping us reassert ourselves around the world as a moral beacon, in terms of how people are being handled.”
However, on ABC’s “This Week” today, Webb reversed course and appeared to condemn the Obama administration for “creating artificial timelines” to close Guantanamo, where he said detainees should stay. He also objected to a truth commission on torture. On the most important national security issues, Webb sided with the right wing:
ON TRUTH COMMISSION
STEPHANOPOULOS: That’s the irony here , Senator Webb, as Speaker Gingrich says, investigate. He wants a separate House investigation. Speaker Pelosi says, fine, let’s have a truth commission, the one that Senator Kyl doesn’t want. Where do you stand on this?
WEBB: I just don’t think it’s that big a deal. [...]
STEPHANOPOULOS: So, no truth commission?
WEBB: I think this will resolve itself without something like that.
via Think Progress » Sen. Webb Sides With Right-Wing Claims On Truth Commission And Gitmo.
The Charleston Gazette – West Virginia News and Sports – News – Obama’s EPA clears 42 of 48 new mountaintop removal mining permits
Obama’s EPA clears 42 of 48 new mountaintop removal mining permits
The Obama administration has cleared more than three-dozen new mountaintop removal permits for issuance by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, drawing quick criticism from environmental groups who had hoped the new president would halt the controversial practice.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The Obama administration has cleared more than three-dozen new mountaintop removal permits for issuance by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, drawing quick criticism from environmental groups who had hoped the new president would halt the controversial practice.
In a surprise announcement Friday, Rep. Nick J. Rahall said 42 of the 48 permits already examined by the U.S. Environmental Protection had been approved by EPA for issuance by the corps.
“It is unfortunate that, when EPA once again began reviewing proposed coal mining permits earlier this year, alarmists claimed that a moratorium on permit issuance was being proposed,” Rahall said in a telephone news conference. “That was not that case then, and it is not the case now.”
Obama to warn Israel’s PM, Benjamin Netanyahu: ‘No more blank cheques’
OPS: We’ll see. Don’t hold your breath
Obama to warn Israel’s PM, Benjamin Netanyahu: ‘No more blank cheques’ - Telegraph
Barack Obama is to deliver a blunt warning to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that the era of the blank US cheque is over.
The President will use a meeting with Mr Netanyahu in Washington on Monday to tell him that from now on Israel must earn its privileged relationship with America.
Mr Obama will make clear that he will not allow his foreign policy objectives to be dictated by the Jewish state’s interests, and that its leaders must resume working for peace with the Palestinians.
via Obama to warn Israel’s PM, Benjamin Netanyahu: ‘No more blank cheques’ – Telegraph.
Conservatives Express Hope That Their Attacks On Pelosi Will Quiet Calls For Truth Commission
OPS: interesting framing here since a ‘truth commission” is all about cover-up and no accountability. We need an independent prosecutor, investigations and prosecution not another cover-up commission.
Conservatives Express Hope That Their Attacks On Pelosi Will Quiet Calls For Truth Commission
For weeks, conservatives have been launching hypocritical and disingenuous attacks on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) regarding her level of knowledge of the Bush administration’s torture program.
Fox News conservatives are revealing one of the underlying motives for these attacks — to diminish calls for a truth commission on torture. While interviewing Newt Gingrich, and later, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Fox host Neil Cavuto wondered whether “both parties will cease and desist” from investigations:
Is it a potential Mexican standoff? And by that, I mean, Senator, that Democrats feel they have the goods on the prior administration to drag out hearings on what they knew about Iraq and when. Now Republicans have the goods, presumably, on Nancy Pelosi about what she knew about interrogation and when. So to avoid mutual self-destruction, both parties cease and desist.
Last night on Fox, Dick Cheney’s official biographer Stephen Hayes said, “Democrats who have been so enthusiastic about truth commissions have to be stopping and saying, OK, wait a second.” Mort Kondracke chimed in with some advice for the President: “I think Obama really has to get this stuff stopped.” Watch a compilation:
In A Speech About Making The GOP More Relevant, Steele Calls Same-Sex Spouses A Burden On Businesses
In A Speech About Making The GOP More Relevant, Steele Calls Same-Sex Spouses A Burden On Businesses
steeleelephant This morning, RNC chairman Michael Steele delivered a speech to the delegates of the Georgia Republican convention. Steele made opening the GOP to more voices a theme of his remarks, declaring that Republicans need to “be relevant” and “engage.” However, in that same address, Steele spoke out against same-sex marriage, saying that such spouses become a huge burden on small businesses:
In a breakfast speech to delegates of the Georgia Republican convention, Steele put himself in the shoes of a small business owner having to pay for health care and life insurance for a same-sex couple.
“Now all of a sudden I’ve got someone who wasn’t a spouse before, that I had no responsibility for, who is now getting claimed as a spouse that I now have financial responsibility for,” Steele said. “So how do I pay for that? Who pays for that? You just cost me money.”
McCain Delivers Hypocritical Attacks Against Obama On Gun Regulation
McCain Delivers Hypocritical Attacks Against Obama On Gun Regulation
This weekend, the National Rifle Association is holding its annual convention in Phoenix. The Arizona Daily Star reports that if you didn’t know any better, you would have thought it was a Republican campaign rally.
One of the speakers, RNC Chairman Michael Steele, claimed President Obama’s position in support of reinstating the assault weapons ban is “threatening to deny Americans their second amendment right.” But Steele previously held the same views on assault weapons as Obama.
Steele wasn’t the only conservative proffering hypocritical attacks. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) told the NRA gathering that he will oppose any “separate agenda” to rein in gun-owners’ rights. Unsurprisingly, McCain didn’t discuss his 2001 position on eliminating the so-called gunshow loophole:
via Think Progress » McCain Delivers Hypocritical Attacks Against Obama On Gun Regulation.
The NYT sums up Obama’s civil liberties record in one paragraph
The NYT sums up Obama’s civil liberties record in one paragraph – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com
Among progressives, Democrats, liberals, Obama supporters and the like, there seems to be some debate about the extent to which Obama deserves criticisms for what he has done thus far in the realm of civil liberties, restoration of Constitutional principles, and reversing the severe imbalance between “security” and liberties — major planks of his two-year-long campaign and among the most frequent weapons used to criticize the Bush presidency. On that topic, here is the first paragraph of this New York Times article this morning by David Sanger, summing everything up:
President Obama’s decisions this week to retain important elements of the Bush-era system for trying terrorism suspects and to block the release of pictures showing abuse of American-held prisoners abroad are the most graphic examples yet of how he has backtracked, in substantial if often nuanced ways, from the approach to national security that he preached as a candidate, and even from his first days in the Oval Office.
Here’s how the NYT describes the article on its front page:
via The NYT sums up Obama’s civil liberties record in one paragraph – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.
For the WaPo, It’s Not Really a Debt if You Borrowed From the Elderly
For the WaPo, It’s Not Really a Debt if You Borrowed From the Elderly – FAIR.org
The Washington Post editorial (5/14/09) on the Social Security and Medicare trustees’ report didn’t break much new ground, other than perhaps a uptick in the sarcasm quotient. (“Oh, please” is their retort to critics who point out the paper’s demonstrable hostility to the Social Security program.)
But this line jumped out at me as noteworthy:
Furthermore, the size of the Social Security surpluses has shrunk, posing a problem for the government since it relies on these funds to help plug its deficits. Over the next seven years, the cumulative surpluses will be $157 billion instead of the previously estimated $454 billion, forcing the cash-strapped feds to borrow even more than they had expected.
This is wrong in an important way: The Social Security surpluses are money that the program is lending to the U.S. government; when the government accepts this money, it is borrowing it, with a legal obligation to pay it back–just as if it had borrowed money from private sources. So whether or not the Social Security surpluses have shrunk doesn’t change the amount of money the government is borrowing–it just changes who the government will owe the money to.
via FAIR Blog » Blog Archive » For the WaPo, It’s Not Really a Debt if You Borrowed From the Elderly.
Your Credit Card Company Is Building A Psychological Profile Of You
Your Credit Card Company Is Building A Psychological Profile Of You
The next time you apply for a credit card, your credit report and income will be only a part of the criteria used to determine your creditworthiness. For that matter, as long as you have the card, what you use it for will be noted and added to a growing set of data that makes up your psychological profile, which will then be referred to every time the bank deals with your or reevaluates your risk as a customer.
The New York Times Magazine takes a look at this new method of determining credit risk, pioneered by Canadian Tire executive J.P. Martin about 6 years ago.
Martin’s measurements were so precise that he could tell you the “riskiest” drinking establishment in Canada – Sharx Pool Bar in Montreal, where 47 percent of the patrons who used their Canadian Tire card missed four payments over 12 months. He could also tell you the “safest” products – premium birdseed and a device called a “snow roof rake” that homeowners use to remove high-up snowdrifts so they don’t fall on pedestrians.
It’s not just that what you buy reflects your socioeconomic level and current financial status, however; what Martin did was take the raw data and tease out personality traits that explained the the purchases while predicting future behavior.
Why did birdseed and snow-rake buyers pay off their debts? The answer, research indicated, was that those consumers felt a sense of responsibility toward the world, manifested in their spending on birds they didn’t own and pedestrians they might not know. Why were felt-pad buyers so upstanding? Because they wanted to protect their belongings, be they hardwood floors or credit scores. Why did chrome-skull owners skip out on their debts? “The person who buys a skull for their car, they are like people who go to a bar named Sharx,” Martin told me. “Would you give them a loan?”
via Credit Cards: Your Credit Card Company Is Building A Psychological Profile Of You.
Even with Obama in charge, anti-war Democrats powerless
Even with Obama in charge, anti-war Democrats powerless
WASHINGTON — The anti-war crowd had waited years for this moment, when it could finally use its political muscle to end or at least sharply curtail American involvement in a war that seems endless.
Instead, Congress’ most vocal anti-war activists were badly outnumbered this week when they tried to define an exit strategy for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.
“We need a plan while we are there and a strategy for leaving,” said Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md., who last year defeated an eight-term incumbent Democrat who backed the Iraq war. “We don’t have it.”
They weren’t even allowed a vote on a plan. It was a setback because for years, anti-war lawmakers lacked the votes they needed to impose restrictions on former President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. Now, the president is a Democrat, and the Democrats have a 79-seat majority in the House of Representatives and 59 Senate seats, including two independents, which gives them their biggest margins since the early 1990s.
via Even with Obama in charge, anti-war Democrats powerless | McClatchy.
Baptism, Bees, and Salvation
Baptism, Bees, and Salvation | CommonDreams.org
by Christopher Brauchli
I’ll convert YOU!
Into a stew.
A nice little, white little, missionary stew!
– T.S. Eliot, Sweeney Agonistes
They’re still at it. I’m referring to the Cornerstone Baptist Church in Colorado Springs. They’ve probably learned that it really works. How else to explain its practices. We examined its practices in 1993 and 16 years later it’s still going strong. It’s called involuntary baptism.
In 1993 the Cornerstone Baptist church advertised a kids’ carnival that featured, among other things, a water fight, free balloons, squirt guns and candy. The carnival was obviously directing its advertising at children since most adults are not attracted to an event just because it has water fights, balloons and squirt guns. Unadvertised, but nonetheless a big part of the festivities, was a spontaneous (as far as the kids were concerned) baptism. Reports suggest that the pastor encouraged the carnival attendees to become baptized by telling them that without the baptism they could be killed by bee stings. If he was right, those accepting the invitation were permanently inoculated against that particular peril. Right or wrong, most children would probably find that appealing since any inoculation one can obtain without being given a shot seems like a very good kind of inoculation indeed.
via Baptism, Bees, and Salvation | CommonDreams.org.
THE CIA LIE TO CONGRESS? IT’S HAPPENED BEFORE.
THE CIA LIE TO CONGRESS? IT’S HAPPENED BEFORE. - The American Prospect
Over the years, the right has managed to make criticism of military operations from the left a mark of disloyalty, a perspective the press has only been happy to reproduce. That same immunity to criticism has now been extended to the CIA, which we can see in the reaction to Nancy Pelosi’s suggestion that she was mislead by the CIA in their briefings on interrogation practices.
In fact, the CIA has lied to members of Congress a number of times, detailed in Tim Weiner’s history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes. Here are just a few prominent instances:
*
In the 1950s, Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, after being told by Senator Joseph McCarthy that tha CIA was “neither sacrosanct nor immune from investigation,” began waging a “down and dirty covert operation on McCarthy” which included attempting to bug his office and feeding his staff with disinformation “in order to discredit him.”
*
Former CIA Director Richard Helms was convicted in 1977 of lying to Congress about the United States’ role in overthrowing the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Allende was succeeded by brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet.
*
In 1982, Congress passed a law prohibiting the administration from ousting the leftist regime in Nicaragua. The CIA kept trying to overthrow the Sandanistas. CIA Director Bill Casey testified frequently before oversight committees Congress about the agency’s covert action plans, during which he was often misleading. “Casey was guilty of Contempt of Congress from the day he was sworn in,” Robert Gates, former head of the CIA and current Secretary of Defense, told Weiner. When the Iran Contra Scandal began to break, Casey lied to Congress, denying that they had traded arms for hostages with Iran.
*
On September 17, 2001, George Tenet told Congress that Iraq had provided al Qaeda with training in combat, bomb-making, and weapons of mass destruction. That information was based on a single source, the interrogation Ibn al-Shakh al Libi, who later recanted and whom we now know was tortured for that information. Tenet of course, hasn’t recanted.
via TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect.
Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush
Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush – - NYTimes.com
Frank Rich
TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.
That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.
There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.
via Op-Ed Columnist – Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush – NYTimes.com.
Giving Some Love to the Inquisition
Giving Some Love to the Inquisition
By Robert Parry
At a Senate hearing this past week, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, rallied to the defense of ex-President George W. Bush’s torture techniques by implicitly endorsing the Spanish Inquisition’s brutal treatment of Jews, Muslims, Protestants and other alleged heretics from the 15th to 17th centuries.
“One of the reasons these techniques have been used for about 500 years is that they work,” Graham said on May 13 in the latest Republican justification of Bush’s authorization of tactics such as forced nudity, sleep deprivation, painful stress positions and the near-drowning of waterboarding.
In a normal world, one might have expected national outrage over a prominent U.S. senator speaking favorably of the Spanish Inquisition, which pioneered innovations in torture that encompass many of the techniques – including the water torture now known as waterboarding – that Bush used against “war on terror” detainees at the start of the 21st Century.
via Consortiumnews.com.
How War Caused the Crash
How War Caused the Crash
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
US government crimes against the people of the US amount to organized high treason! Millions are now out of work amid declining prospects. US troops still occupy Iraq, a war of aggression that the US has not begun to pay for. Unfortunately, neither people nor media have made the connection. Even worse, the US has yet to either win or pay for any war waged since World War II. Since World War II, Republican regimes have run up the highest debts and deficits in US history. What John Maynard Keynes stated the US has proven: war transfers wealth upward! Wealth flowing upward equals economic depression.
Democrats have meanwhile become GOP-lite. Nevertheless, it was GOP regimes that compounded the problem by cutting taxes but only for the rich. That means that it is only a tiny elite of some one percent of the population that benefited or shared the booty! You got stuck with the bill.
The GOP cut taxes first for the upper quintile and, later under Bush Jr, it was only the upper one percent who benefited. This is how the rich elites have literally forced the people of the US to finance and wage wars of naked aggression from which only the rich and privileged benefit. Examples include Viet Nam, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Iraq I and now Iraq II. None were won! None were ever paid for!
GOP regimes compounded the problem by cutting taxes first for the upper quintile and, later under Bush Jr, it was only the upper one percent who benefited. The rich elites wage wars of naked aggression from which only they benefit. It is the poorer classes who pick up the tab.
Debt was simply rolled over –but so were you! The rich were given a tax cut and everyone else got the bill and the accruing interest! As Gen. Smedley Butler put it: “War is a racket!” You were rolled over, screwed and ridiculed by the leaders of the ‘right wing’! You are not expected to be smart enough to understand when you have been fucked over!
I’ve written about how various extra-governmental and irresponsible, non-elected entities orchestrate and conduct the ongoing auction of the US government. I’ve written about how the US government is clearly more responsible and responsive to foreign nations than it is to American citizens, a situation may be high treason by any recognized definition. If you have not yet gotten ‘it’ — just one percent of the nation’s population benefit from the whoring out of America. Like Hitler’s ‘Third Reich’, the whole thing has been a scam.
In times past, traitors were hanged or beheaded. Today they are allowed to barricade themselves behind several multiple rings of secured walls in exclusive ‘neighborhoods’ and bank their booty offshore untaxed. One might conclude that these elites are fortified and actually prepared for revolution.
Millions are now out of work amid declining prospects. US troops still occupy Iraq, a war of aggression that the US has not begun to pay for. Unfortunately, neither the people or the media have made the connection. In fact, the US has probably yet to pay for any war waged since World War II. It is not coincidental that neither has the US actually won a war since WWII. It’s not about winning. It’s about getting rich and richer.
At the Nuremberg trials following WWII, the US stood for a principle that no nation had the right to wage aggressive war against another. The US, it is said, prosecuted from ‘the top down’. The criminals were the architects of genocide, the brass who gave the order, the architects of atrocities and mass murder. Today, we repudiate those principles if we declare ourselves above them. You cannot have it both ways. If it is the US position that international laws apply only to Nazis or Muslims, then the laws apply to no one. The US position is idiocy on its face and a recipe for international anarchy and lawlessness. There are no exceptions for the US
via The Existentialist Cowboy: How War Caused the Crash.
The Case for Kenosha
The Case for Kenosha By John Nichols – The Nation
Down the hall from the marble plaque celebrating the commitment of a Midwestern union local to the freedom struggle of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., past the collages made by the children and grandchildren of proud blue-collar families highlighting more than a century of carmaking in their community, next to the posters celebrating the election of Barack Obama, a woman wearing a Yes We Did! T-shirt hands white postcards to the hundreds of shellshocked workers who pour into the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 72 hall on the north side of Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Less than a week earlier, on April 29, the same workers had gathered at the same hall to cast 89 percent of their votes for a package of pay and benefits cuts that they were promised would “keep manufacturing jobs here in the United States.” Within hours of the vote, Chrysler was forced into bankruptcy proceedings that were portrayed by Obama as a painful but necessary step to give the company “a new lease on life.” Then, in bankruptcy documents describing “the new Chrysler,” came the news: the company, which had already accepted more than $4 billion in federal loans and which was maneuvering to collect $6 billion more, is preparing to use this largesse to jettison the Kenosha plant and seven others while ramping up production in Mexico.
via The Case for Kenosha.
The Cure for Layoffs: Fire the Boss
The Cure for Layoffs: Fire the Boss
By Avi Lewis & Naomi Klein
In 2004 we made a documentary called The Take about Argentina’s movement of worker-run businesses. In the wake of the country’s dramatic economic collapse in 2001, thousands of workers walked into their shuttered factories and put them back into production as worker cooperatives. Abandoned by bosses and politicians, they regained unpaid wages and severance while reclaiming their jobs.
As we toured Europe and North America with the film, every Q&A ended up with the question, That’s all very well in Argentina, but could that ever happen here?
Well, with the world economy now looking remarkably like Argentina’s in 2001 (for many of the same reasons), there is a new wave of direct action among workers in rich countries. Co-ops are once again emerging as a practical alternative to more layoffs. Workers in the United States and Europe are beginning to ask the same questions as their Latin American counterparts: Why do we have to get fired? Why can’t we fire the boss? Why is the bank allowed to drive our company under while getting billions of dollars of our money?
via The Cure for Layoffs: Fire the Boss.
Food Companies Try, but Can’t Guarantee Safety
Food Companies Try, but Can’t Guarantee Safety - NYTimes.com
The frozen pot pies that sickened an estimated 15,000 people with salmonella in 2007 left federal inspectors mystified. At first they suspected the turkey. Then they considered the peas, carrots and potatoes.
The pie maker, ConAgra Foods, began spot-checking the vegetables for pathogens, but could not find the culprit. It also tried cooking the vegetables at high temperatures, a strategy the industry calls a “kill step,” to wipe out any lingering microbes. But the vegetables turned to mush in the process.
So ConAgra — which sold more than 100 million pot pies last year under its popular Banquet label — decided to make the consumer responsible for the kill step. The “food safety” instructions and four-step diagram on the 69-cent pies offer this guidance: “Internal temperature needs to reach 165° F as measured by a food thermometer in several spots.”
Increasingly, the corporations that supply Americans with processed foods are unable to guarantee the safety of their ingredients. In this case, ConAgra could not pinpoint which of the more than 25 ingredients in its pies was carrying salmonella. Other companies do not even know who is supplying their ingredients, let alone if those suppliers are screening the items for microbes and other potential dangers, interviews and documents show.
via Food Companies Try, but Can’t Guarantee Safety – NYTimes.com.
Official story of 9/11 “almost entirely untrue”
“There Was An Agreement NOT To Tell The Truth”
Official story of 9/11 “almost entirely untrue”
Now, before you get your panties in a bunch, this is about a new book, titled “The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11″.
And before you get all outraged (The FAQ! The FAQ!), here is the author of the book, John Farmer:
John Farmer served as Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, where his areas of responsibility included assessing the national response to the terrorist attacks and evaluating the current state of national preparedness for terrorist attacks and natural disasters, he also served as attorney general of New Jersey (1999-2002), as chief counsel to Governor Whitman, and as a federal prosecutor. He recently served as a subject matter/rule of law expert on security to the special envoy for Middle East regional security. He is currently a partner of a New Jersey law form and an adjunct professor of national security law at Rutgers University Law School. His editorials and articles have appeared in “The New York Times” and elsewhere
And my diary title are the words of Farmer’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin.
* Inky99′s diary :: ::
I wrote a couple of nights ago, here — ’9/11 Commission Report — Info Obtained Through Torture” — as to how much of what was published in the 9/11 Commission report was obtained through torture, and is therefore completely without credibility.
Scandalous enough, right?
Well, it gets worse.
The above described James Farmer has just come out with his new book. It was released April 14. I have not read it (I just heard about it maybe ten minutes ago) and it is difficult to find any reviews of it by any mainstream book reviewers (gee, what a surprise!).
But according to the publisher, it’s quite a bombshell:
Description:
As of the 9/11 Commission’s one of the primary authors report, John Farmer is proud of his and his colleagues’ work. Yet he came away from the experience convinced that there was a further story to be told, one he was uniquely qualified to write.Now that story can be told. Tape recordings, transcripts, and contemporaneous records that had been classified have since been declassified, and the inspector general’s investigations of government conduct have been completed. Drawing on his knowledge of those sources, as well as his years as an attorney in public and private practice, Farmer reconstructs the truth of what happened on that fateful day and the disastrous circumstances that allowed it: the institutionalized disconnect between what those on the ground knew and what those in power did. He reveals — terrifyingly and illuminatingly — the key moments in the years, months, weeks, and days that preceded the attacks, then descends almost in real time through the attacks themselves, revealing them as they have never before been seen.
Ultimately Farmer builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version not only is almost entirely untrue but serves to create a false impression of order and security. The ground truth that Farmer captures tells a very different story — a story that is doomed to be repeated unless the systemic failures he reveals are confronted and remedied.
So let me just repeat that to let it sink in …. The official story is “almost entirely untrue.” So what IS true? Hell if I know.
And check this out:
Farmer himself states that “at some level of the government, at some point in time … there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened.”
via Daily Kos: Official story of 9/11 “almost entirely untrue”.
Jon Stewart Nails it again. Obama is going back on his word
May 14, 2009: Moral Kombat
Barack Obama blocks the release of detainee photos, and refuses to intervene in the dismissal of a gay lieutenant.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=227351&title=moral-kombat
VIDEO: ‘You can’t authorise murder’: Dick Cheney headed a secret assassination wing that targeted America’s enemies
VIDEO: ‘You can’t authorise murder’: Dick Cheney headed a secret assassination wing that targeted America’s enemies
Interview with Seymour Hersh
Dubai: Pulitzer prize-winning American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh recently said that former US vice-president Dick Cheney headed a secret assassination wing that targeted America’s enemies abroad.
Video: Seymour Hersh interview (best viewed with Internet Explorer – cannot be viewed with FireFox)
Gulf News catches up with him on his trip to Dubai for the Arab Media Forum to ask about those revelations as well as issues concerning Barack Obama, Lebanon, Israel, Syria and Egypt.
GULF NEWS: You have spoken about an assassination unit that reported to Cheney called the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). There have been allegations that this unit was responsible for former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination.
SEYMOUR HERSH: I can’t verify [that]. What I said was, and what I have written more than once, is that there’s a special unit that does high-value targeting of men that we believe are known to be involved in anti-American activities, or are believed to be planning such activities.
In Cheney’s view this isn’t murder, but carrying out the “war on terror”. And in the view of me and my friends, including people in government, this is crazy. The vice president is committing a crime. You can’t authorise the murder of people. And it’s not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s in a lot of other countries, in the Middle East and in South Asia and North Africa and even central America.
In the early days, many of the names were cleared through Cheney’s office. One of his aides, John Hanna, went on TV and acknowledged that the programme exists, and said killing these people is not murder but an act of war that is justified legally.
The former head of JSOC has just been named the new commander in charge of the war in Afghanistan, which is very interesting to me.
About Hariri, what I’ve always maintained – I was in the position of seeing and interviewing President Bashar Al Assad on the day Hariri was killed in February 2005 – it seemed clear to me that he knew nothing about it. But I never wrote anything about it, even the fact that I was there, because I had no empirical or factual basis for knowing whether he was involved or not, and I never did. And I decided to wait for the investigations and they have come up with no concrete evidence that Syria did it. Despite the fact that one of the earlier investigators speculated that he did, he didn’t know.
The Financial Storm
The Financial Storm
Reviewing Ellen Brown’s “Web of Debt:” Part III
by Stephen Lendman
This is the fourth in a series of articles on Ellen Brown’s superb 2007 book titled “Web of Debt,” now updated in a December 2008 third edition. It tells “the shocking truth about our money system, (how it) trapped us in debt, and how we can break free.” This article focuses on America’s “web of debt” entrapment.
The Debt Spider Captures America – American Workers Consigned to Debt Serfdom
America has been trapped for over two centuries, with today’s debt level way exceeding developing nations. Like bankrupt people staying “afloat by making the minimum payment(s) on (their) credit card(s), the government (avoids) bankruptcy by paying just the interest on its monster debt” – now double in size since Brown’s first edition and onerous enough for Controller of the Currency David Walker to warn earlier of its unaffordability by this year. If America can’t service the amount, it’s officially bankrupt and the economy will collapse. If it happens, IMF austerity will follow and turn America into Guatemala. Other vulnerable economies as well – permanent debt bondage and worker serfdom.
Catherine Austin Fitts was a former high-level Wall Street and government insider. She points to a “financial coup d’etat” conspiracy between the two to hollow out America, centralize power and knowledge, shift wealth to the top, destroy communities and local infrastructure, create new wealth by rebuilding them, and leave human wreckage in its wake.
She also calls today’s crisis “a criminal leveraged buyout of America (meaning) buying (the) country for cheap with its own money and then jacking up the rents and fees to steal the rest.” She calls it the “American Tapeworm” model:
It’s “to simply finance the federal deficit through warfare, currency exports, Treasury and federal credit borrowing and cutbacks in domestic ‘discretionary’ spending…This will then place local municipalities and local leadership in a highly vulnerable position – one that will allow them to be persuaded with bogus but high-minded sounding arguments to further cut resources. Then to ‘preserve bond ratings and the rights of creditors,’ our leaders can be persuaded to sell our water, national resources and infrastructure assets at significant discounts of their true value to global investors” – masquerading as a plan to “save America by recapitalizing it on a sound financial footing.”
via The Financial Storm.
Global Systemic Crisis: “Financial Surrealism at the Heart of Stock Market Trends”
Global Systemic Crisis: “Financial Surrealism at the Heart of Stock Market Trends”
When the world steps out of a 60 year old referential framework
The financial surrealism which has been at the heart of stock market trends, financial indicators and political commentaries in the past two months, is in fact the swan song of the referential framework within which the world has lived since 1945.
Just as in January 2007, the 11th edition of the GEAB described that the turn of the year 2006/07 was wrapped in a « statistical fog » typical of an entry into recession and designed to raise doubts among passengers that the Titanic was really sinking (1), our team today believes that the end of Spring 2009is characterized by the world’s final stepping out of the referential framework used for sixty years by global economic, financial and political players in making their decisions, in particular of its “simplified” version massively used since the fall of the communist bloc in 1989 (when the referential framework became exclusively US-centric). In practical terms, this means that the indicators that everyone is accustomed to use for investment decisions, profitability, location, partnership, etc … have become obsolete and that it is now necessary to find new relevant indicators to avoid making disastrous decisions.
This process of obsolescence has increased dramatically over the past few months under pressure from two trends:
. first, the desperate attempts to rescue the global financial system, particularly the American and British systems, have de facto “broken navigational instruments” as a result of all the manipulation exerted by financial institutions themselves and by concerned governments and central banks. Among those panic-stricken and panic-striking indicators, stock markets are a perfect case as we shall see in further detail in this issue of the GEAB. Meanwhile, the two charts below brilliantly illustrate how these desperate efforts failed to prevent the world’s bank ranking from experiencing a major seism (it is mostly in 2007 that the end of the American-British domination in this ranking was triggered).
. secondly, astronomical amounts of liquidity injected in one year into the global financial system, particularly in the U.S. financial system, led all financial and political players to a total loss of touch with reality. Indeed, at this stage, they all seem to suffer from a syndrome of diver’s nitrogen narcosis – impairing those affected and leading them to dive deeper instead of surfacing. Financial nitrogen narcosis has the same effects than its aquatic counterpart.
Destroyed or perverted sensors, loss of orientation among political and financial leaders, these are the two key factors that accelerate the international system’s stepping out of the referential framework of the past few decades.
via Global Systemic Crisis: “Financial Surrealism at the Heart of Stock Market Trends”.
Time For Renewable Energy
Time For Renewable Energy | CommonDreams.org
by Ralph Nader
After years of opposing or ridiculing renewable energy, the giant oil companies are using a new approach. A recent ExxonMobil advertising campaign puts it this way:
“Oil, gas, coal, biofuels, nuclear, wind, solar….to fuel the future we need them all.”
Not an unexpected maneuver from a fossil fuel company that has owned Washington and received subsidies and tax breaks for decades. What is unfortunate is that this is the exact kind of energy pitch coming out of the Obama Administration and most Congressional Democrats. Indeed it is right out of candidate Obama’s 2008 campaign rhetoric last year.
Then Senator Obama gave every energy source its due although he spent an inordinate amount of time pushing the mirage of “clean coal” and keeping nuclear energy on the table.
The problem is that all energy sources are not created equal for purposes of efficiency, and the well being of consumers, workers, the environment and posterity. Regardless of their BTU production, different kinds of energy produce different levels of harms and benefits, short and long term.
via Time For Renewable Energy | CommonDreams.org.
McChrystal was Cheney’s Chief Assassin
McChrystal was Cheney’s Chief Assassin | CommonDreams.org
Seymour Hersh says that Dick Cheney headed a secret assassination wing and the head of the wing has just been named as the new commander in Afghanistan.
In an interview with GulfNews on May 12, 2009 Pulitzer prize-winning American investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, said that there is a special unit called the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that does high-value targeting of men that are known to be involved in anti-American activities, or are believed to be planning such activities.
According to Hersh, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) was headed by former US vice president Dick Cheney and the former head of JSOC, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal who has just been named the new commander in charge of the war in Afghanistan.
McChrystal, a West Pointer who became a Green Beret not long after graduation, following a stint as a platoon leader in the 82nd Airborne Division, is currently director of Staff at the Pentagon, the executive to Joint staff to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
via McChrystal was Cheney’s Chief Assassin | CommonDreams.org.
Coal, Electric Industries Big Winners in Climate Bill Deal
OPS: Of course. Their boy is in the White House 
Coal, Electric Industries Big Winners in Climate Bill Deal
Regional Interests Watering Down Bill Aimed at Curbing Global Climate Change Effects - The Washington Independent »
Even as House Democrats are celebrating their deal with conservative-leaning colleagues on climate change legislation, the real winners under the compromise have been the coal, electric and auto industries, who are largely the source of the nation’s carbon emissions to begin with.
Details of the compromise are still emerging, but already the chief sponsors of the measure — Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) — have been forced to lower carbon-reduction targets, cut renewable fuel standards and dole out billions of dollars in benefits to the nation’s largest polluting industries. Many environmentalists say the compromise comes at the too-high cost of undermining the bill’s very purpose, which is to slash emissions dramatically enough to prevent a warming planet from heating further. Some are asking Democrats either to bolster the environmental protections or to scrap the proposal altogether.
via The Washington Independent » Coal, Electric Industries Big Winners in Climate Bill Deal.
Obama Turns Back on New Deal
Obama Turns Back on New Deal | The Progressive
Soon after getting into the White House, Barack Obama said
bemusedly that some of his opponents were still fighting the New Deal.
But now it looks like Obama himself may chip away at one of the cornerstones of the New Deal: and that is Social Security.
After announcing that the recession has shrunk the payroll taxes that fund Social Security, Obama’s pathetic Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner signaled that cuts in the program may be in the offing.
“The President explicitly rejects the notion that Social Security is untouchable politically,” Geithner said.
Obama’s OMB director, Peter Orzag, came out with a paper several years ago calling for reductions in benefits for all recipients who are currently 55 or under. The cuts would be from 2 percent to 9 percent.
Obama himself uses the derisive term “entitlement” for this benefit, as if the elderly and the disabled are acting like entitled little brats to expect to have any government help.
Another outrageous thing about this targeting of Social Security is that it’s so unnecessary.
via Obama Turns Back on New Deal | The Progressive.
The Only Road Out of Crisis
The Only Road Out of Crisis – - In These Times
By Joseph M. Schwartz
Yes, it is socialism, but nationalize the banks already.
Since taking office, President Barack Obama and his economic team have confronted a daunting financial crisis with a string of solutions that have been hard to sell to a wary public.
Obama’s first problem is that his administration’s bank rescue has failed to break with the discredited Bush administration plan—throwing taxpayer funds at insolvent banks to put off their inevitable nationalization by the Federal Deposit Insurance Company (FDIC).
On March 23, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner proposed the latest rescue for big banks, whose “legacy assets” of housing-based financial derivatives have tanked in value. Geithner’s Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP) tries to revive the market for these toxic assets by having the government insure their value.
Some major financial institutions, such as Bank of America and Citigroup, are what Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls “zombie banks.” They live as private entities only because of the endless infusion of government funds that swamp their private stock market equity value.
via The Only Road Out of Crisis — In These Times.
Socialist Sanders Taps Anger to Influence Bailouts
OPS: America’s Senator – Bernie Sanders
Socialist Sanders Taps Anger to Influence Bailouts
May 15 (Bloomberg) — The future of American capitalism is being shaped in part by Congress’s only avowed socialist.
First-term Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who spent 16 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, is taking advantage of rising populist anger at the government’s bailouts of financial companies to push legislation that would reveal the identity of all Federal Reserve borrowers and restrict recipients of emergency Fed loans from hiring foreign workers.
“This is his moment,” said Vincent Reinhart, a former Fed monetary-affairs chief who is now resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “The American people want to extract retribution. They want to punish somebody. Who better a vehicle to design that punishment than somebody who’s been thinking about it his entire career?”
As the Fed tries to stabilize the banking system and end the recession with unprecedented credit programs that may put taxpayer funds at risk, it is running into someone who’s long been a “thorn in the side” of the central bank, said Tom Gallagher, head of policy research at International Strategy & Investment Group Inc. in Washington and a former congressional aide.
Sanders’s foreign-worker measure initially scared investors away from a $1 trillion Fed-Treasury program to jumpstart lending. And Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke told Sanders in a February letter that naming borrowers would be “counterproductive” and result in “severe adverse consequences” for the economy.
Average Taxpayer
When asked in an interview if he’s hampering the Obama administration’s efforts, Sanders, 67, said he’s just standing up for the average taxpayer.
“What Wall Street needs to do is to apologize to the American people for their recklessness and make amends and not continue to threaten our economy,” he said.
via Bloomberg Printer-Friendly Page.
Torture as a means to justify war
Torture as a means to justify war
via YouTube – Torture as a means to justify war.
The Educational Crisis
The Educational Crisis
In the past our K-12 policies created students who were capable of building the economic juggernaut that we became. Then the U.S. got sidetracked with other things and allowed 25 countries to surpass us in education.
The United States economy is falling apart for many reasons. We import more than we export, we have deregulated financial markets to the point of complete disarray, we have allowed our manufacturing sector to fall apart, and we have consolidated our wealth with the elites and left everyone else behind.
The collapse of this economy has many levels and nuances, some causes were preventable some were not. But one thing that was absolutely preventable is the decline of our educational system. Thomas Friedman’s Tuesday op-ed column in The New York Times has brought this issue back to the forefront.
This country was lulled into a false sense of security and superiority while the credit and housing bubbles grew, but we have since realized just how bad our situation really is.
via Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.
GM Dealerships Closing: SEE THE LIST
GM Dealerships Closing: SEE THE LIST
The list of the 1,100 dealerships that GM is closing has begun to trickle in. Early this morning, GM dealerships across the country anxiously waited for FedEx packages to arrive, which indicated which franchises will be shut down. GM announced that it will close nearly one quarter of its U.S. dealerships.
GM, however, isn’t publicly disclosing the list of dealerships that will be shuttered. The Huffington Post is compiling the closed dealerships as we find them. Here is the list so far:
via GM Dealerships Closing: SEE THE LIST.
Bair: Some Bank CEOs Will Be Fired
OPS: OK – It’s about time. But what will their tax supported parachutes consist of?
Bair: Some Bank CEOs Will Be Fired
Who will be the next CEO to get the ax? In an interview with Bloomberg television to be aired this weekend, FDIC chairman Sheila Bair says that some bank heads will lose their jobs in the coming months, as the government continues its efforts to stabilize the banking industry.
From Bair’s interview with Bloomberg:
Management needs to be evaluated,” Bair said today on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” to be broadcast this weekend. “Have they been doing a good job? Are there people who can do a better job?
Speculation about which bank heads will be replaced comes on the heels of last week’s stress test results.
via Bair: Some Bank CEOs Will Be Fired.
Obama’s Top 10 stocks
Obama’s top 10 stocks
According to the latest disclosure from the White House, President Obama is a fan of index-fund investing. See the stocks in his main holding.
The Vectrix VX-1 maxi scooter, which weighs much more than a typical bike at 515 pounds, is anything but a kid’s toy. It requires a motorcycle license to drive.
It’s also electric, with a 180-pound battery that lets the rider forget about pumping gas. The Vectrix just needs an electrical outlet to get its fuel.
Steven Shapiro bought a scooter last year, when gas prices were surpassing $4 a gallon.
“I felt like I had an opportunity to sort of make a statement, just at the local level,” Shapiro said.
That statement came with a price, though. His Vectrix VX-1 was $8,000.
“The cost of new technology is always higher than old technology,” explains Mike Boyle, Vectrix’s CEO. “You may win [people's] minds and hearts through the understanding of what an electric vehicle can bring to them. You then have to win their pocketbooks as well.”
The Obama administration is helping do just that. Earlier this year, President Obama’s stimulus plan proposed tax credits for those who buy plug-in electric vehicles. Depending on the size of the battery, the credit can reach up to $7,500.
via Obama’s Top 10 stocks – May. 15, 2009.
Electric vehicles offer rides in the green lane
Electric vehicles offer rides in the green lane
The Vectrix VX-1 maxi scooter, which weighs much more than a typical bike at 515 pounds, is anything but a kid’s toy. It requires a motorcycle license to drive.
It’s also electric, with a 180-pound battery that lets the rider forget about pumping gas. The Vectrix just needs an electrical outlet to get its fuel.
Steven Shapiro bought a scooter last year, when gas prices were surpassing $4 a gallon.
“I felt like I had an opportunity to sort of make a statement, just at the local level,” Shapiro said.
That statement came with a price, though. His Vectrix VX-1 was $8,000.
“The cost of new technology is always higher than old technology,” explains Mike Boyle, Vectrix’s CEO. “You may win [people's] minds and hearts through the understanding of what an electric vehicle can bring to them. You then have to win their pocketbooks as well.”
The Obama administration is helping do just that. Earlier this year, President Obama’s stimulus plan proposed tax credits for those who buy plug-in electric vehicles. Depending on the size of the battery, the credit can reach up to $7,500.
via Electric vehicles offer rides in the green lane – CNN.com.
Countdown’s WTF Moment: Texas Secession (VIDEO)
Countdown’s WTF Moment: Texas Secession (VIDEO)
In tonight’s installment of Countdown’s “WTF Moment,” Olbermann takes a realistic look at what would happen if Texas actually followed through on Governor Rick Perry’s threat to secede if the federal government doesn’t leave Texas alone. Well, between skyrocketing taxes, loss of military protection, sports teams crumbling, massive debt burdens, and the coming political crisis in 2020 (when the projected population of Texas will be 45 percent Hispanic and 38 percent Anglo, and the Hispanics win a ballot initiative to have the new republic join Mexico), the picture doesn’t look good.
via Countdown’s WTF Moment: Texas Secession (VIDEO).
Britain’s Expense Scandal Widens
Britain’s Expense Scandal Widens
LONDON — Britain has seen its share of sex and sleaze scandals over the years, but few have tarnished all three of the country’s main political parties in a single stroke.
Leaked lawmaker expenses for chandeliers, pornography, moat upkeep on country estates and other claims have enraged voters _ many of whom have lost jobs and homes during Britain’s deepening recession.
Talk show lines buzzed Friday with irate callers. Web sites flashed reader comments comparing politicians to greedy bankers. And commuters clenched newspapers with such headlines as: “Parliament’s Darkest Day” and “House of Ill Repute.” Many politicians were being heckled during events that had been scheduled long before the leak.
“It’s not just one or two rotten apples, it’s the whole lot,” said Randy Wallace, 41, an unemployed London electrician. “Our Parliament used to be the envy of the world. Now, it’s a laughing stock.”
via Britain’s Expense Scandal Widens.
Elizabeth Warren Interviewed By Bill Maher On Credit Card Legislation, Usury (VIDEO)
Elizabeth Warren Interviewed By Bill Maher On Credit Card Legislation, Usury (VIDEO)
TARP watchdog Elizabeth Warren sat down for an interview with Bill Maher on last night’s episode of “Real Time.” One of the topics she and Maher discussed was the current credit card legislation and how usury has regained a place within our society. Warren stated that this is the reason we needed a credit card bill of rights, to prevent companies from arbitrarily raising interest rates and burying people in a mountain of debt. Maher took another angle, saying it proved that we really just don’t treat each other very well.
via Elizabeth Warren Interviewed By Bill Maher On Credit Card Legislation, Usury (VIDEO).
Swine flu set to spread: WHO
Swine flu set to spread: WHO
Swine flu will spread further across the world, experts at the World Health Organisation warned Friday, as the number of confirmed cases surged by more than a thousand in 24 hours.
In Geneva, acting WHO Assistant Director-General Keiji Fukuda told reporters that studies by experts indicated a “significant number of people” had been infected but remained undetected or unconfirmed by laboratory tests.
“Their work also suggests that the virus is transmissible enough that we will expect to see continued community level outbreaks and regional spread,” he told a WHO meeting in Geneva on pandemic preparedness.
The latest WHO data showed 7,520 people in 34 countries were confirmed to have caught the influenza A(H1N1) virus, 1,000 more than a day ago.
via The Raw Story | Swine flu set to spread: WHO.
When Google Goes Down, So Does 5 Percent Of The Internet?
When Google Goes Down, So Does 5 Percent Of The Internet?
We knew a Google outage had worldwide Internet impact, but do we know just how much? Here’s an unsettling number to chew on over the weekend: the Google outage Thursday that brought down Google’s search platform and many of its Web-based applications meant that 5 percent of Internet traffic went with it.
That’s the statistic offered by Arbor Networks’ Craig Labovitz, who in a Thursday blog post and Web traffic graph noted that between 10:15 a.m. and 12:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Thursday, average traffic across 10 tier-one and tier-two Internet service providers declined 5 percent.
“If you happen to be Google and your content constitutes up to five percent of all Internet traffic, people notice,” Labovitz wrote. “Network engineers around the world frantically e-mail traceroutes to mailing lists. IRC channels fill with speculation. And end users Twitter (a lot).”
It wasn’t just Google itself being affected, either.
The Web performance research firm Gomez told Business Week that the Google outage also slowed response times for Web sites in 238 of the 560 global regions Gomez covers — a result of the disrupted Google Analytics service and the millions of Web pages that use Google Analytics to track content.
ACLU: Obama’s revival of tribunals strikes blow to rule of law
ACLU: Obama’s revival of tribunals strikes blow to rule of law - Raw Story »
Human rights groups reacted with anger and disappointment Friday to President Barack Obama’s revival of special military trials of terror suspects, saying the system was flawed beyond repair.
In announcing the return of the military commission system devised by former president George W. Bush, Obama also proposed reforms that he said would restore them “as a legitimate forum for prosecution, while bringing them in line with the rule of law.”
But human rights organizations almost in unison called it a bad idea, insisting that even with changes the special military tribunals would provide substandard justice and meet with delays and legal challenges.
“The military commissions system is flawed beyond repair,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “By resurrecting this failed Bush administration idea, President Obama is backtracking dangerously on his reform agenda.”
The American Civil Liberties Union called it “a striking blow to due process and the rule of law.”
via Raw Story » ACLU: Obama’s revival of tribunals strikes blow to rule of law.
Kristol: ‘Dick Cheney, Most Valuable Republican.’
OPS: The hardest of the hard-core huddle up and circle the wagons
Kristol: ‘Dick Cheney, Most Valuable Republican.’ - Think Progress »
While many Republicans are trying to ditch the legacy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, one pundit is still clinging to the previous administration. In a column today titled “Don’t Wince. Fight!,” Bill Kristol offers a full-throated defense of Cheney, writing that Republicans cringing at the re-emergence of the former vice president have a “juvenile understanding of political dynamics.” Kristol then prescribes that to regain power, the GOP needs to embrace Bush’s policies and listen to Cheney:
kristl23The real question any Republican strategist should ask himself is this: What will Republican chances be in 2012 if voters don’t remember the Bush administration–however problematic in other areas–as successful in defending the country after 9/11? To give this issue away would be to accept a post-Herbert-Hoover-like-fate for today’s GOP. That’s why Republicans should listen carefully when Cheney gives a speech this week in which he’ll lay out the case for the surveillance, detention, and interrogation policies of the Bush administration in the war against terror.
via Think Progress » Kristol: ‘Dick Cheney, Most Valuable Republican.’.
“Omnivore’s Dilemma” : “Don’t Buy Any Food You’ve Ever Seen Advertised”
Democracy NOW: Video – Audio – Transcript – MP3 Download
“The real food is not being advertised. And that’s really all you need to know.”
“Omnivore’s Dilemma” Author Michael Pollan’s New Advice on Buying Food: “Don’t Buy Any Food You’ve Ever Seen Advertised”
Michael Pollan is one of the nation’s leading writers and thinkers in this country on the issue of food. He is author of several books about food, including The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and his latest, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. In light of what he calls the processed food industry’s co-option of “sustainability” and its vast spending on marketing, Pollan advises to be wary of any food that’s advertised.
The Case of the Missing H-Bomb
OPS: Does anyone really believe that they have never found it? Question is – what the hell are they doing with it?
When We Almost Nuked Savannah
The Case of the Missing H-Bomb -By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
60 years have passed since a damaged jet dropped a hydrogen bomb near Savanah, Ga. — and the Pentagon still can’t find it.
Things go missing. It’s to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. Last October, the Pentagon’s inspector general reported that the military’s accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL.
Those anomalies are bad enough. But what’s truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons, a hydrogen bomb. The thermonuclear weapon, designed to incinerate Moscow, has been sitting somewhere off the coast of Savannah, Georgia for the past 40 years. The Air Force has gone to greater lengths to conceal the mishap than to locate the bomb and secure it.
On the night of February 5, 1958 a B-47 Stratojet bomber carrying a hydrogen bomb on a night training flight off the Georgia coast collided with an F-86 Saberjet fighter at 36,000 feet. The collision destroyed the fighter and severely damaged a wing of the bomber, leaving one of its engines partially dislodged. The bomber’s pilot, Maj. Howard Richardson, was instructed to jettison the H-bomb before attempting a landing. Richardson dropped the bomb into the shallow waters of Wassaw Slough, near the mouth of the Savannah River, a few miles from the city of Tybee Island, where he believed the bomb would be swiftly recovered.
via Jeffrey St. Clair: The Case of the Missing H-Bomb.
Lax Little Islands – Let’s invade the Caymans!
Lax Little Islands
Obama and Congress must get tougher on offshore tax cheats — prosecute them as criminals and require full payment.
By David Cay Johnston
The Cayman Islands are well known to those seeking sun, sand and sea–and for their hospitality to US corporations seeking to escape taxes, launder money and use other discreet financial services. The islands’ tax dodgers help multinational corporations move jobs offshore; they also give aid and comfort to terrorists, drug dealers and divorcing spouses trying to hide money. Honest taxpayers have to make up for the revenues lost through this offshore cheating in three ways: we pay more in taxes, we get fewer government services and we incur rising government debt. Interest on that debt, which doubled under the Bush administration, now equals all the individual income taxes paid from New Year’s to around June 10. And that cost means less government investment in research, education and the infrastructure on which commerce depends. Untaxed money hiding in the Caymans and other tax havens means the rest of us pay a higher price for less civilization.
In short, the Caymans, and other tax havens, are parasites that weaken the United States and other developed nations.
President Obama proposed on May 4 to crack down on offshore tax cheating; that proposal does not go nearly far enough. Instead of settling for a dime on the dollar, as Obama’s plan would do, let’s get serious about offshore tax cheating, both legalized and criminal. Let’s do what we did to halt the imagined threats of communists in Grenada, depose a drug-dealing president in Panama and find those imaginary weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Let’s invade the Caymans!
via Lax Little Islands.
The Politics of Excusing Torture In The Name of National Security
The Politics of Excusing Torture In The Name of National Security
By JOHN W. DEAN
Allow me to share some analysis about the way things work in Washington. President Obama’s flip-flop on his agreement to turn over photographs of detainees being tortured by American soldiers is a message with broad and clear implications. Those who believe that the Obama Administration should expose and prosecute persons who committed war crimes should understand that it is not going to happen the way they would like, or as quickly, because Obama is having internal battles as well. His pullback is not occurring because he fears that Republicans will attack him (he knows they will); rather it is occurring because he needs the national security community behind him, and they fear they will be further embarrassed and humiliated if more information is revealed.
According to The Washington Post, President Obama told White House lawyers he does not “feel comfortable” releasing the photos because of the reaction they could cause against U.S. troops, and because “he believes that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court,” in responding to the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. [Emphasis added.]
Even before looking closely at Obama’s change of mind, I understood immediately what had taken place, as soon as I heard the report on the radio. President Obama was, in fact, speaking for the national security bureaucracy in announcing his change of mind. I knew it would happen at some point. Although his first instinct had been to release the pictures, as he had released the new Justice Department torture memos, it was clear he had been turned around, and I was certain it was the work of the national security bureaucracy.
My hunch was confirmed by the AP report, which explained, “American commanders in the war zones expressed deep concern about fresh damage the photos might do, especially as the U.S. tries to wind down the Iraq war and step up operations against the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan.” How do the commanders know this to be the case? How do they know that it is the not the case that, to the contrary, more people around the world might admire us for openly correcting past mistakes? In fact, you can be certain “the commanders” do not truly know that the photos will harm America’s image, but they do know how to protect the national security bureaucracy, after having risen to its top ranks. This is exactly what is going on here, and the explanation was pure bureaucratic excuse-making.
via The Politics of Excusing Torture In The Name of National Security.
Don’t Believe The Hype! Potent Pot, So What?
Government claims that today’s pot is more potent, and thus more dangerous to health, than ever before must be taken with a grain of salt.
Federal officials have made similarly dire assertions before. In a 2004 Reuters News Wire story, government officials alleged, “Pot is no longer the gentle weed of the 1960s and may pose a greater threat than cocaine or even heroin.” (Anti-drug officials failed to explain why, if previous decades’ pot was so “gentle” and innocuous, police still arrested you for it.)
In 2007, Reuters again highlighted the alleged record rise in cannabis potency, proclaiming, “U.S. marijuana grows stronger than before: report.” Quoted in the news story was ex-Drug Czar John Walters, who warned, “This report underscores that we are no longer talking about the drug of the 1960s and 1970s — this is Pot 2.0.”
Predictably, in 2008 the mainstream news media ran with yet another set of ‘news’ stories alleging that the pot plant’s strength had reached all-time highs. According to a June 12, 2008 Associated Press story:
via Marijuana Law Reform – NORML.
Our Appetite for Animals Is Taking Us Toward Apolcalypse
Our Appetite for Animals Is Taking Us Toward Apolcalypse
Cutting your meat-eating habits is one of the most impactful ways you can prevent drastic changes to our climate.
I’ve been catching up on my magazine reading and I came across a fascinating piece in a recent issue of New Scientist, which is usually a few steps ahead of the non-scientific press. It is a serious journal – not given to hyperbole – for scientists, although it does try to match scientific rigor with accessibility for interested lay people. The cover title of this usually staid magazine’s March issue?
Earth 2099: Population crashes, Mass migration, Vast new deserts, Cities abandoned.
Well okay then.
The story says that if the Earth is warmed by a mere 4 degrees Celsius, by the year 2099 the planet will become unrecognizable. We will have warm, acidic seas that will probably not sustain fish; many of the areas where food is grown and populations flourish will no longer be able to provide for either because of vast flooding or desertification; storms will be fiercer and much more devastating; and the only places that will have enough water and resources to sustain humans will be in the high latitude areas of the planet (stress mine–because I’m shocked).
A nightmare scenario based on worst possible circumstances? Sadly, no. In fact a warming of 4 degrees Celsius is a conservative prediction according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If we don’t make serious changes, and soon, warming could be markedly greater.
via Our Appetite for Animals Is Taking Us Toward Apolcalypse | Environment | AlterNet.
Changing Obama’s Mindset
Changing Obama’s Mindset | The Progressive
Obama once said, ‘It’s not enough to get out of Iraq; we have to get out of the mindset that led us into Iraq.’ What happened to that Obama?
By Howard Zinn,
We are citizens, and Obama is a politician. You might not like that word. But the fact is he’s a politician. He’s other things, too—he’s a very sensitive and intelligent and thoughtful and promising person. But he’s a politician.
If you’re a citizen, you have to know the difference between them and you—the difference between what they have to do and what you have to do. And there are things they don’t have to do, if you make it clear to them they don’t have to do it.
From the beginning, I liked Obama. But the first time it suddenly struck me that he was a politician was early on, when Joe Lieberman was running for the Democratic nomination for his Senate seat in 2006.
Lieberman—who, as you know, was and is a war lover—was running for the Democratic nomination, and his opponent was a man named Ned Lamont, who was the peace candidate. And Obama went to Connecticut to support Lieberman against Lamont.
It took me aback. I say that to indicate that, yes, Obama was and is a politician. So we must not be swept away into an unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of what Obama does.
via Changing Obama’s Mindset | The Progressive.
Not Even Chuck Norris Can Save the GOP
OPS: HE doesn’t HAVE to save the GOP. The Dems have already insured that. The Rats have left the GOP ship and migrated to the Left side of the aisle – AND MADE IT THEIR OWN. E.G. Blue Dogs and DLC
Not Even Chuck Norris Can Save the GOP | The American Prospect
Celebrities and everymans are the pundits of choice for the GOP. Is it any wonder Republicans are directionless?
Before the 2004 election, no small number of progressives were heard to say to their friends, “If George W. Bush gets re-elected, I’m moving to Canada.” With but a few isolated exceptions, they weren’t serious — just expressing their exasperation that a majority of their fellow citizens could sign up for another four years of what was already a disastrous presidency. Conservatives saw the sentiment as yet more evidence of liberals’ shaky loyalty to the Land of the Free.
Just a few months into Barack Obama’s presidency, it’s the conservatives who are talking about leaving. And not just in private conversations or on little-read blogs; a number of Republican state legislators have introduced “sovereignty resolutions” in an apparent attempt to re-enact the events leading up to the Civil War (Ed Kilgore explains here). And the state that seems to have the itchiest finger on the secession trigger is Texas, where Gov. Rick Perry has been hinting that the Lone Star State might have to go its own way (incredibly, when one poll asked whether the state should secede, Texas Republicans were evenly split). But if Perry is going to make his state an independent nation, he’ll have to compete for leadership with a unique political figure: Chuck Norris.
In a recent column titled “I May Run for President of Texas,” Norris writes that he might have no choice: “That need may be a reality sooner than we think. If not I, someone someday may again be running for president of the Lone Star State, if the state of the union continues to turn into the enemy of the state. … I’m not saying that other states won’t muster the gumption to stand and secede, but Texas has the history to prove it.”
via Not Even Chuck Norris Can Save the GOP | The American Prospect.
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Republicans Don't Care about Voter Fraud....owa Republicans are trying to dismiss claims that the vote count in Tuesday's Iowa Caucus was wrong. An Iowa voter told a local TV station yesterday that he noticed a 20-vote discrepancy in the count - and that Rick Santorum was the real winner of the Caucuses. Republican Party officials, though, are sticking to their first count - showing Mitt Romney as the winner by 8-votes - and there will be no recount.The Republican Party has launched a war on voters around the nation this year with strict new laws that will disenfranchise over 5 million Americans. They claim these laws are necessary to combat so-called voter fraud. Yet in Iowa - where there are no such laws - and where a very, very close and questionable election was just held - Republicans don't seem to care at all about getting it right.Clearly - the war on voters isn't about making sure the people's voices are represented accurately - it's about making sure poor people, young people, and minorities who tend to vote for Democrats - can't vote at all.-Thom(Who do you think won? Tell us here.) -
LEGALIZE Democracy
" We the corporations" On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. __________
MOVE to AMEND
a project of the CAMPAIGN TO LEGALIZE Democracy
Help end Corporate personhood
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The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. 
