America is under assault. From coast to coast, we are being invaded by horrific, body-consuming mutants that are already destroying 65,000 American lives a year. As a Duke University scientist puts it, “This is a living, breathing problem. It’s here. It’s arrived.”
These are not invaders from mars, but from within our own countryside. Ironically, these are mutants of our own creation, leaving America face to face with a spreading plague of drug-resistant germs.
For decades, we have benefited enormously from the healing wonders of antibiotics. These drugs save millions of lives that would otherwise be lost to microbial infections. But more and more of the antibiotics in America’s medical kit are proving to be ineffective against the plethora of germs that endanger us. Why? Too much of a good thing.
Toyota Motor Corp. knew about flaws that could cause unintended acceleration more than 3 1/2 years before it recalled cars and trucks to fix the defects, according to company timelines.
Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, learned that floor mats could entrap accelerator pedals as early as Feb. 7, 2006, and that pedals could stick five months later, according to documents dated March 24 that were submitted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and obtained yesterday.
The timelines show what Toyota has said was a slow response that led to the recall of more than 8 million vehicles worldwide starting last year to repair the two types of acceleration- related defects.
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.
The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.
Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.
Many Americans assumed that the Bush administration’s peril to their freedom ended when George Bush exited the White House on January 20, 2009. Unfortunately, the precedents the administration established continue to threaten Americans’ rights and liberties. This is stark on government secrecy.
Shortly after the 2000 election, Vice President-elect Richard Cheney convened a task force on energy policy. After he assumed office, he refused to disclose the names of the advisors, even though the task-force report was the basis for energy legislation that would profoundly affect the nation’s economy. Critics argued that the involvement of private companies in crafting legislation made the task force a federal advisory committee.
Thanks to a 1972 law, such committees are required to disclose membership and other information. The Clinton administration ran aground on this reef after a federal judge ruled that the secrecy of Hillary Clinton’s health-care task force violated federal law. While the Clinton task force’s secrecy sparked widespread controversy, no such uproar occurred when the Bush team used the same tactic.
Mind reading may no longer be the domain of psychics and fortune tellers – now some computers can do it, too.
Software that uses brain scans to determine what items people are thinking about was among the technological innovations showcased Wednesday by Intel Corp., which drew back the curtain on a number of projects that are still under development.
The software analyzes functional MRI scans to determine what parts of a person’s brain is being activated as he or she thinks. In tests, it guessed with 90 percent accuracy which of two words a person was thinking about, said Intel Labs researcher Dean Pomerleau.
Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle could use his veto power to create a state-funded public option health insurance plan in Wisconsin that would extend coverage to virtually everyone, according to a memo by the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
The memo obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday was requested by the Republican leader of the state Assembly, Rep. Jeff Fitzgerald, R-Horicon, and delivered April 2.
Doyle’s office adamantly denied that the governor planned to do any such thing.
When Jeffrey Smith needed some quick cash to pay a medical bill, he turned to a payday loan store near his home outside Phoenix.
He eventually took out a string of payday loans and fell into a vicious cycle in which he would call out sick from work so he could drive all over town to pay off loans and take out new ones. The experience left him in bankruptcy, lying to his wife and fighting thoughts of suicide.
Stories like Smith’s and a growing backlash against payday lending practices have prompted legislatures around the country to crack down on the businesses.
Credit card reform requires banks by July to get permission before providing “overdraft protection,” which hits customers with fees of $30 or more to cover any debit card transactions that exceed the balance in a checking account. Consumer advocates have long maintained that consumers ought to be allowed to decide whether they want to pay more than $30 for a cup of coffee, no matter the indignity of being declined at the register.
JPMorgan Chase is playing by the new rule already, but it’s not clear the bank is making much of an effort. The online consumer advocacy powerhouse Consumerist posted a screenshot of Chase’s “opt-in” page for overdraft protection and posed this question: “Is Chase’s Overdraft Fee ‘Opt-In’ Purposefully Confusing?” Have a look:
Peter Rubin, staff director for Maryland Democrat Sen. Barbara Mikulski’s subcommittee on health and aging, announced in an email to staffers this week that he will be leaving the Hill for a job on K Street in May.
This will be Rubin’s second spin through the revolving door. In 2000, he left a job with Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) to become a registered lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). He started working for Merck in 2007, then became Mikulski’s subcommittee staff director in 2008, just as health care reform ramped up.
“With the imminent arrival of baby #2, I have decided to take a job at Sanofi-Aventis starting on May 3rd,” said Rubin in an email to staffers that was forwarded to HuffPost. [Note to Hill staffers: Colleague making a similar move? Tell us about it -- email arthur@huffingtonpost.com. Confidentiality guaranteed.]
Raúl Grijalva is sitting quietly with a few of his staffers at one end of the bar, a bottle of Bud and a shot of whiskey in front of him, while his fellow Democratic members of the House of Representatives roar in celebration at the other end. It’s 1 a.m. Less than two hours earlier, after a 14-month battle, Congress approved comprehensive health care reform.
Joe Crowley, ascendant leader of the New Democrat Coalition, stands behind the bar, passing out beers to his colleagues — Bart Stupak, Melissa Bean, Steve Driehaus, John Larson. Crowley owns the place, his six-foot-four frame and Tyrannosaurus head towering over the crush of members, staffers, reporters and regulars.
Grijalva is a regular. So much so that for weeks, a cartoon caricature of him hung on a wall by the front door: a shirtless Grijalva, at the beach, admiring a sandcastle he has built with Lynn Woolsey and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. None of them see the menacing gang of senators marching their way. In the unsubtle tradition of political cartoons, the sandcastle spells out PUBLIC OPTION. The cartoon, fittingly, has been taken down before tonight. “We’re commiserating and celebrating,” says Grijalva, whose mood is leaning heavily toward the former.
Full Story: Power Struggle: Inside The Battle For The Soul Of The Democratic Party.
As friends and families double up, ‘overcrowding’ is up fivefold
Since Richard Brown lost his job to the recession and his Boston home to foreclosure a year ago, he’s been working short-term consulting assignments until he gets back on his feet. In the meantime, he’s been “couch surfing.”
“I’ve lived with my brother, my cousin, my friend and my dad,” he said. “The IRS keeps calling me, asking me: ‘What’s your address?’ And I say, ‘What week is this?’”
Armed with college degree and an MBA, Brown, 49, built a solid resume over three decades as a corporate controller for several Fortune 500 companies, including W.R. Grace and Wal-Mart, before launching his own global consulting business with clients in Europe and Mexico. But when the Panic of 2008 sent clients scrambling, he was unable to keep up with a jump in his mortgage payments and lost his home to foreclosure.
David Schlesinger, the editor in chief of Reuters, declined to run a story by one of his own reporters containing claims that the 2007 killings of two Reuters staffers in Baghdad by U.S. troops may have been war crimes.
Reuters staffers Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were killed by U.S. helicopter gunships in Baghdad in 2007. Video of the attack, which shows the journalists standing next to unidentified armed men on a Baghdad street and records the destruction of a van attempting to retrieve a wounded Chmagh, was published this week by Wikileaks.
The video has launched a debate about the legality of the attack, which also wounded two children (you can read our take here). Yesterday, Reuters’ deputy Brussels bureau chief Luke Baker filed a muscular story repeating allegations from several human rights and international law experts that the killings may have constituted war crimes. But Reuters chief David Schlesinger, a tipster says, spiked the story because “it needed more comment from the Pentagon and U.S. lawyers.” It never ran, but you can read it in full below.
The federal investigators readying their probe into the massive explosion that killed at least 25 West Virginia coal miners this week might take note: The dozens of other active tunnel mines owned by the same energy company have run up thousands of safety violations this year alone, according to a review of federal records by TWI. Hundreds of those citations target the same problems with ventilation and methane buildup that many suspect sparked the West Virginia disaster.
Massey Energy — the Virginia-based coal giant that owns the Upper Big Branch mine, the site of Monday’s tragedy — also controls 41 other underground coal mines currently active in Appalachia. Investigators have cited those projects for 2,074 violations since the start of the year, according to federal documents. The citations run a spectrum, but hundreds charge mine operators with failing to maintain air quality detectors, failing to ensure proper ventilation, allowing combustible material to accumulate, and a host of other infractions related to miner safety.
At the Upper Big Branch — where rescue teams were still searching Wednesday night for four missing miners — investigators had cited 124 similar safety violations this year. More than 50 of them were issued in March alone.
On Wednesday, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, a branch of the Labor Department, sent a team to Upper Big Branch to begin investigating whether the conditions cited in those violations sparked the explosion.
Last Friday, someone going by the name “dermdoc” posted a thread on a message board for Texas A&M students and alumni with this topic: “Laid off my first Obama voting employee today.”
“Our reimbursement rates are spiraling downward, taxes are projected to go up with Obamacare, so I did it,” the person wrote. He later added: “I made this decision because I can.”
“It is kind of interesting watching their face as you explain to them the economic consequences of the policies of the guy they voted for,” wrote dermdoc.
Hotsheet reached out to the person who we believe to have been responsible for the posting, but our requests for comment went unanswered. Late Wednesday afternoon, after Hotsheet’s inquiry, the thread appeared to be removed from the TexAgs.com Web site. (The original link was here.) We took screen shots before the removal; you can view the full first page of comments here.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a planned trip to Washington, where he was scheduled to participate in a nuclear security summit hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama, government officials said.
Intelligence and Atomic Energy Minister Dan Meridor will take Netanyahu’s place in the nuclear summit.
The Federal Reserve owns the biggest mall in Oklahoma, and it’s looking to sell.
The mall is one of the many, many assets the Fed bought to bail out Bear Stearns a few years back. The assets were bundled into a special company called Maiden Lane I.
Also on the bank’s shopping list: A bundle of home mortgages that’s closely related to Toxie, Planet Money’s toxic asset. (Does that make us, like, in-laws with the Fed?)
For the most part, the Fed owns financial stuff like loans and swaps. The assets it bought as part of the Bear bailout included a mortgage on the Crossroads Mall in Oklahoma City. When the owners of the mall defaulted on the mortgage, the Fed foreclosed
When you read an editorial in your local newspaper, your natural assumption is that it expresses the views of that paper’s staff and reflects local concerns. This, however, does not appear to be the case with the many small-town papers owned by Ogden Newspapers, Inc.
On March 31, an editorial headed “ACORN can’t distract public from the truth” appeared in the Fairmont Sentinel, published in Fairmont, MN. It was bylined by Gary Andersen and Lee Smith, the paper’s publisher and editor, and it slammed ACORN as a “front for liberal politicians” that has been involved in “illegal actions.”
That original publication seems legitimate enough. But over the next few days, the same editorial started popping up elsewhere, with no byline and under a variety of headings. On April 3, for example, it appeared in the Minot Daily News of Minot, ND under the heading, “Good riddance to ACORN.”
The families of two Reuters news agency employees killed in a 2007 US helicopter attack in Baghdad on Thursday demanded justice, telling AFP the Americans responsible should stand trial.
Graphic video footage of the shooting, which left several other people dead and wounded two children, was published on the Internet by WikiLeaks, a website that discloses information obtained from whistleblowers.
“The truth came out and the whole world saw. The American pilot should be judged by international justice and we want compensation because the act left orphans,” said Safa Chmagh, whose brother Saeed Chmagh, a Reuters driver, died.
Total financial collapse has been averted. The nation, we are told, is in recovery. Washington has undertaken to manage the real estate and credit bubbles. Normal economic times, indeed prosperity, will return in a few years. Or will it?
Without a self-sustaining cycle of consumer and business spending and income increases, growth is not possible. Capital spending relative to the GDP is at its lowest in 40 years. New home construction is at its lowest proportion of the GDP since 1960. As of mid-year 2009, residential and property values had fallen $ 8 trillion or nearly 20 percent. At that point, American households had lost $12 trillion, or 19 percent, of their wealth. Bank loans to consumers and businesses have fallen sharply. Now U.S. banks and private equity groups face new debt shocks as they dismantle the huge credit boom of the early 2000s. The exposure of banks in commercial real estate loans exceeds $1 trillion and the commercial real estate sector is currently in freefall. Financial firms are far from finished in their ferocious process of deleveraging. The market for structured financial instruments has collapsed.
The worst economic collapse since the 1930s has inflicted lasting damage to the nation’s financial infrastructure. The crisis has crippled the real economy. Its shock and severity has profoundly changed the attitudes of consumers, businesses and the American public in general. They will spend less, cut costs and reduce hiring. Massive real estate and credit crises have led to a massive fiscal crisis. The deficit in 2009, the biggest in 60 years, reached $1.4 trillion – 11.2 percent of the GDP.
According to CNNMoney.com, markets will drop again for much of today. After pushing a strong rally for much of the last two weeks, investors have backed away from their own progress and are now creating a mild slump.
Markets slid during trading yesterday for the second consecutive session. The Dow Jones led the fall with a 0.66 percent (72.47 points) drop, followed closely by the S&P 500 (0.59 percent, 6.99 points). The NASDAQ performed better, but still ended up falling 0.23 percent (5.65 points) at the closing bell.
According to CNNMoney.com, markets will drop again for much of today. After pushing a strong rally for much of the last two weeks, investors have backed away from their own progress and are now creating a mild slump.
One factor that may be pushing markets down today is news that initial jobless claims jumped up last week unexpectedly. Jobless claims rose to a seasonally adjusted 460,000 for the week ended April 3 – roughly 18,000 more than the previous week.
Proposed NAFTA-style free trade agreements with Columbia, South Korea and Panama have stalled in Congress for several years now as lawmakers increasingly oppose the policies that some believe contributed to the near-collapse of the economy.
Despite a slew of Congressional attempts to roll back America’s failed trade policies and restore a sense of fairness in the beleaguered economy, the Obama administration plans to forge ahead with a trio of trade pacts negotiated under the Bush administration.
Proposed NAFTA-style free trade agreements with Columbia, South Korea and Panama have stalled in Congress for several years now as lawmakers increasingly oppose the policies that some believe contributed to the near-collapse of the economy. Critics of free trade had hoped that inaction on the trade pacts signaled their defeat. But, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk told the Dow Jones Newswire that the administration is still determined to push those agreements through Congress.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, speaking at the Dallas Regional Chamber Wednesday, told the audience that America’s fiscal course is unsustainable and would force lawmakers to either raise taxes, slash spending or implement a combination of both.
In a rare foray into politics, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, speaking at the Dallas Regional Chamber Wednesday, told the audience that America’s fiscal course is unsustainable and would force lawmakers to either raise taxes, slash spending or implement a combination of both, according to The New York Times.
“The arithmetic is, unfortunately, quite clear,” Bernanke said, according to The Times. “To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above. These choices are difficult, and it always seems easier to put them off — until the day they cannot be put off any more.”
America’s budget deficit in the 2009 fiscal year reached $1.4 trillion and is expected to top $1.6 trillion in the current fiscal year. The national debt is expected to swell to $13.8 trillion by the end of the year. As millions and millions of Baby Boomers retire and begin collecting Social Security and Medicare benefits, the national debt will only grow.
Racism and xenophobia have been central to the Tea Party movement from the start; while not all of them are racist, they swim in a sea of white racial resentment.
used to be able to watch Glenn Beck and shake my head at his antics. I would listen to Rush Limbaugh and watch Fox News for their entertainment value as theaters of the absurd. I would laugh at the television as Sarah Palin struggled through the easiest of public policy questions. The Tea Party gatherings were comedy gold as one part failed agitprop and one part Village People reunion—fully equipped with protesters dressed in Revolutionary War regalia, carrying misspelled signs, and reciting half-cooked political slogans to a backdrop of bad country music.
The lunatic fringe had taken over the Republican Party. It was high comedy.
Since the passage of the health care bill matters have taken an ugly and horrible turn. Congress members have been spat upon and assaulted by Tea Party protesters. Bricks have been thrown through the windows of representatives who voted for health care reform. Racial and homophobic slurs such as “nigger” and “faggot” have been hurled by Tea Party protesters at members of Congress. A casket was left on the lawn of Representative Russ Carnahan. Right-wing vigilantes targeting Tom Perriello instead accidentally cut the gas main of his brother’s home.
Comcast, AT&T and Verizon are making a play to control the Internet. Tell Obama and the FCC to preserve an open and free Internet.
he Internet has made amazing things possible, like freeing the Jena 6, electing President Obama, even creating ColorOfChange. None of it could have happened without an “open” Internet: one where Internet service providers are not allowed to interfere with what is seen and by whom.
Now, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon — the most powerful broadband providers — are trying to fundamentally change the way the Internet works. They’re seeking to make even bigger profits by acting as gatekeepers over what you can see and do online. If they succeed, the Internet would be more like radio and television: a few major corporations would control which voices are heard most easily, and it would be much harder for grassroots groups, individuals, and small businesses to compete with large corporations and well-funded special interests.
But the larger issue is the notion that a Confederate History Month should be celebrated at all, with or without an overt mention of slavery.
When I first moved to Washington, D.C., I had hardly a stick of furniture, so I boarded a bus to take me to the nearest Ikea, which was in a Virginia mall. Quite unfamiliar with the territory, I watched out the window with curiosity as the bus traveled along the chain-store lined route.
Soon I noticed we were traveling along a road called the Jefferson Davis Highway. I was stunned, and a bit sick to my stomach. How could it be that a highway was named after a man who made war against the United States, all so the citizens of his region could continue to hold human beings in chains? All so slave masters could continue to rape the women they claimed to own. The children of these unions were usually enslaved by their own fathers, often acting as servants to their white half-brothers and -sisters.
That throughout a significant swath of the nation, men who committed treason for the sake of maintaining chattel slavery are lauded as heroes speaks to a terrible illness in the American psyche — one that continues to fester 145 years after the last shot was fired in the War Between the States.
After two months, kids hated the new meals, milk consumption plummeted, and many students dropped out of the school lunch program altogether.
You’ve never seen a school lunch like this one, made with hydroponic vegetables and free-range chicken by a brash British superchef. Not that the elementary schoolchildren care. Most sing-song “Pizza!” when given a choice between the gourmet grub and the reheated factory-made frozen pizza. At the end of the lunch period, a mound of chicken sits untouched, and even more is dumped into the trash after a few wary nibbles.
That much we do know from watching Jamie Oliver’s“Food Revolution” reality TV series now airing on ABC. But we’re not supposed to know that Jamie is substituting high-end foodstuffs that normally grace three-star restaurants for the cheap, institutional fare dished out in public schools like West Virginia’s Central City Elementary School, the setting for the first two episodes.
At the end of one episode, we hear Rhonda McCoy, director of food services for the local county, tell Jamie that he’s over budget and did not meet the fat content and calorie guidelines, but she’s going to let him continue with the “revolution” as long as he addresses these issues. What is not revealed is that the “meal cost at Central City Elementary during television production more than doubled with ABC Productions paying the excess expense,” according to a document obtained by AlterNet from the West Virginia Department of Education.
Yesterday in San Fransisco, federal agents arrested 48 year-old Gregory Giusti for allegedly threatening House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Giusti “allegedly made dozens of calls to Pelosi’s homes in California and Washington, D.C., as well as her husband’s business office. He allegedly recited her home address and warned that she should not support the healthcare overhaul bill that was recently signed into law if she wanted to see her home again.” Yesterday on San Fransisco’s local ABC affiliate, Giusti’s mother blamed Fox News:
ELEANOR GIUSTI: Greg has — frequently gets in with a group of people that have really radical ideas and that are not consistent with myself or the rest of the family and — which gets him into problems. And apparently I would say this must be another one that somehow he’s gotten onto either by — I’d say Fox News or all of those that are really radical, and he — that’s where he comes from.
In their first major public appearance together, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) “lavished praise on each other” in front of a raucous crowd of thousands yesterday in Minneapolis. In her speech, Bachmann called President Obama a “one-term president,” saying “we are going to elect the boldest, strongest, most courageous, rock-ribbed, constitutional conservative president this country has ever seen.” On Fox News host Sean Hannity’s, Palin suggested she might be just that candidate, and that Bachmann could be a “cool” running mate:
HANNITY: Are either one of you considering a run for the presidency in 2012? Just asking. Governor Palin, I’ll start — I’ll start with you. But before I get their answers, how many of would you like to see a Palin-Bachmann ticket?
PALIN: Well that sounds kind of cool. That sounds kind of cool.
HANNITY: Governor Palin, are you thinking about a run again?
PALIN: As I have said, I’m not going to close any doors that perhaps would be open.
Even before President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, right-wing state attorneys general were announcing their intentions to sue the federal government over the constitutionality of health care reform. Virginia’s Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli — who is also an avowed Tea Party loyalist — was the first one out of the gate with a lawsuit, going to Richmond’s federal courthouse to the file papers less than five minutes after Obama signed the legislation. Eighteen other states have also now joined Florida’s similar lawsuit.
These lawsuits are frivolous. Even conservative legal scholars have acknowledged that they have no chance at succeeding and seem to be nothing more than political theater. ThinkProgress has done an analysis of the states suing the federal government and founded that indeed, political motivations do seem to be driving the suit:
– Of the 16 attorneys general in the lawsuits, 11 are either running for re-election or higher office. Four, including Florida’s Bill McCollum, are campaigning to become governor, and seven are up for re-election this year.
Coal baron Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, complained last year that it is “very difficult” to obey “nonsensical” safety rules. On April 5, 2010, 25 miners died in an explosion at his Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, WV, which had racked up thousands of safety violations. Massey is appealing “at least 37 of the 50 citations for serious safety violations” the mine received last year. When asked in a June 2009 interview if he was concerned that Massey was complying with safety regulations, Blankenship derided them as “nonsensical”:
They’re very difficult to comply with. There’s so many of the laws that are, if you will, nonsensical from an engineering or a coal mining viewpoint. A lot of the politicians, they get emotional, as does the public, about the most recent accident, and it’s easy to get laws on the books that are not truly helping the health or safety of coal miners. I think we need to be very pragmatic and very careful when we’re passing laws of that nature to make sure that we create as much safety and as much health as can be created for each of the resources we expend.
Earlier this week, John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira, Center for American Progress senior fellows and co-directors of the Progressive Studies Program, noted that Americans viewed socialism as favorably as they viewed the Tea Party. Now, a new Fox News poll shows that the Tea Party is viewed less favorably than another bugaboo for the Tea Party, the Internal Revenue Service:
Mitt Romney continues to struggle with questions about why he wants to repeal a health care law that is so similar to the health reforms he signed in 2006 as Governor of Massachusetts, particularly since he used to argue that RomneyCare should serve as a template for national reform.
In October of 2009, Romney urged Democrats to use the Massachusetts law as a model to expand coverage. “We have found that we can get everybody insured without breaking the bank and without a public option,” Romney told CNN’s Sanjay Gupta. “Massachusetts is a model for getting everybody insured in a way that doesn’t break the bank, doesn’t put the government in the driver’s seat and allows people to own their own insurance policies and not to have to worry about losing coverage. That’s what Massachusetts did,” he said.
Larry Eugene North, a man accused of placing 36 pipe bombs into mailboxes across east Texas, was indicted yesterday on charges of possessing an illegal firearm or destructive device. In an interview with Talking Points Memo, Brit Featherston, first assistant U. S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, said North had anti-government motives:
“It does appear that there were two motives: one, that he was disenchanted with the federal government, and, two, he was disenchanted with an individual who he perceived that had wronged him,” says Featherston of 52-year-old Larry North, who was arrested today.
The brain trust that calls itself “The Huffington Post” has disgraced itself and shown the “progressive left” is a cowardly fraud by removing a column guest written by Jesse Ventura about 9/11. The official explanation from no less than Arianna Huffington, presumably, is “Editor's Note: The Huffington Post's editorial policy, laid out in our blogger guidelines, prohibits the promotion and promulgation of conspiracy theories–including those about 9/11. As such, we have removed this post.” Maybe no one explained to these worthies that if any one were to write about 9/11, they would be writing about a conspiracy theory, since the government’s own “official account” is only the most outrageous. And, as Jesse’s new book, AMERICAN CONSPIRACIES (2009) elucidates, there have been many more throughout our history.
Conspiracies are as American as apple pie. All they require are two or more individuals acting together to bring about an illegal end. When a couple of guys knock off a 7/11, they are engaged in a conspiracy, even if they are subsequently charged with armed robbery instead. Most America conspiracies are economic, like Enron, WorldCom, and Halliburtion. Bernie Madoff comes to mind, since he can’t possibly have done it alone. Since the “official account” maintains that 19 Islamic fundamentalists hijacked four commercial carriers, outfoxed the most sophisticated air defense system in the world, and perpetrated these atrocities under the control of a guy in a cave in Afghanistan, the “official account” is a conspiracy theory, too.
The civil war in Rwanda and the ethnic massacres were an integral part of US foreign policy, carefully staged in accordance with precise strategic and economic objectives.
From the outset of the Rwandan civil war in 1990, Washington’s hidden agenda consisted in establishing an American sphere of influence in a region historically dominated by France and Belgium. America’s design was to displace France by supporting the Rwandan Patriotic Front and by arming and equipping its military arm, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA)
From the mid-1980s, the Kampala government under President Yoweri Musaveni had become Washington’s African showpiece of “democracy”. Uganda had also become a launchpad for US sponsored guerilla movements into the Sudan, Rwanda and the Congo. Major General Paul Kagame had been head of military intelligence in the Ugandan Armed Forces; he had been trained at the U.S. Army Command and Staff College (CGSC) in Leavenworth, Kansas which focuses on warfighting and military strategy. Kagame returned from Leavenworth to lead the RPA, shortly after the 1990 invasion.
Over the course of the past year, the New York Times has provided ample coverage to a series of potential U.S. Senate candidates from New York–none of whom are actually running for office. Meanwhile, a candidate who is in fact challenging incumbent Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand in the September 2010 primary has been all but erased from the picture.
That progressive activist Jonathan Tasini is running against Gillibrand, who was appointed to the seat in 2009, is known to Times readers who happened to catch a single January 27, 2010, story by N.R. Kleinfeld, headlined “An Underdog Who Isn’t Daunted by a New Try for the Senate”–the only mention to date in the paper of record of Tasini’s candidacy, which was launched in June 2009.
Meanwhile, the Times has treated possible high-profile candidacies as if they were real news. Former Democratic Rep. Harold Ford from Tennessee, for example, contemplated a run, which elicited substantial coverage (1/6/10, 2/15/10, 2/19/10, 2/24/10) before Ford decided against the idea. His formal decision to not run garnered him a news story and an op-ed piece on the same day (3/2/10), with a piece the next day (3/3/10) that re-capped the non-campaign. The Times has devoted at least nine articles to other Democrats who thought about but in the end decided not to run against Gillibrand.
Defense Department officials have told Congress that the already ballooning costs of the F-35 joint strike fighter are likely to soar much higher when new estimates are completed in the summer.
In the Selected Acquisition Report for the F-35, a detailed document sent to Congress on Thursday, the Pentagon said it expects that cost studies now under way will produce estimates dramatically higher than those used in recent months to prepare the 2011 defense budget request.
Based on figures in the document, the average cost of one F-35 — $62 million when the program was launched in 2002 — could rise to $115.5 million, not counting inflation, by the time all 2,457 planes that the U.S. plans to buy are built.
Including inflation, the government now expects each F-35 to cost an average of $133.6 million. But even that figure could swell to more than $150 million when revised estimates are completed in June.
A lot of you have e-mailed me to note that Virginia governor Bob McDonnell has decided to honor those who fought to preserve, and extend, white supremacy. I don’t really have much to say. The GOP is, effectively, the party of willfully unlettered Utopians. It is the party of choice for those who believe global warming is a hoax, that humans roamed the earth with dinosaurs, and that homosexuals should work harder at not being gay.
That the party of unadulterated quackery also believes that Birth Of A Nation is more true to the Civil War than Battle Cry Of Freedom, is to be expected. Ignorance does not respect boundaries. It is, at times, qualified and those who know more, often struggle to say more. But people who believe that the Census is actually a covert attempt to put Americans in concentration camps, are also likely to believe that slavery was incidental to the Civil War.
This is who they are–the proud and ignorant. If you believe that if we still had segregation we wouldn’t “have had all these problems,” this is the movement for you. If you believe that your president is a Muslim sleeper agent, this is the movement for you. If you honor a flag raised explicitly to destroy this country then this is the movement for you. If you flirt with secession, even now, then this movement is for you. If you are a “Real American” with no demonstrable interest in “Real America” then, by God, this movement of alchemists and creationists, of anti-science and hair tonic, is for you.
A major problem with FOX’s general coverage of the news stems from its preconceived narrative filled so saliently far to the political right that its personalities will willfully ignore and manipulate facts to fit the narrative. Part of that philosophy lends itself to couching debates in binaries and ignoring the shades of gray in between, but the substantial criticism of Tea Party protesters has recently forced hosts to reconsider fair reporting — but only when it proves convenient.
One recent example of a FOX host’s inability to look at an issue in a nuanced way came from Sean Hannity. Hannity proved incredulous when discussing President Obama’s push to limit any future use of nuclear weapons by the U.S. as if the idea of moving away from nuclear armaments would suddenly welcome attack. As Bob Beckel pointed out, Hannity’s hero President Reagan worked toward nuclear disarmament, as well, but Hannity still implied President Obama was naive in his move toward that goal “because evil does exist,” a sentiment he kept repeating as his argument. Put another way, Hannity essentially argued that he disliked President Obama’s move away from using nuclear weapons because the president refused to look at the issue with the “good versus evil” binary Hannity and FOX would prefer.
Why both with moral persuasion when you can just threaten to take over government… everywhere?
On March 18, UC Berkeley’s student senate voted 16 to 4 in favor of divesting from companies that profit from the Israeli occupation. A week later, in a move oddly predicted by AIPAC’s Jonathan Kessler at AIPAC’s policy conference, the vote was vetoed by the student senate president. (Students hope the senate will overturn the veto next Wednesday.)
When asked about fighting the Berkeley pro-divest initiative, Kessler said, “we’re going to make sure that pro-Israel students take over the student government and reverse the vote…This is how AIPAC operates in our nation’s capital. This is how AIPAC must operate on our nation’s campuses.” Kessler is at 3:58 in video below. Student elections are happening now at UC Berkeley and you can bet everyone’s looking for the AIPAC-Manchurian candidate, if such a thing exists.
I was just on Democracy Now along with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange discussing the Iraq video they released yesterday, and there’s one vital point I want to emphasize. Shining light on what our government and military do is so critical precisely because it forces people to see what is really being done and prevents myth and propaganda from distorting those realities. That’s why the administration fights so hard to keep torture photos suppressed, why the military fought so hard here to keep this video concealed (and why they did the same with regard to the Afghan massacre), and why whistle-blowers, real journalists, and sites like WikiLeaks are the declared enemy of the government. The discussions many people are having today — about the brutal reality of what the U.S. does when it engages in war, invasions and occupation — is exactly the discussion which they most want to avoid.
According to Theodore Olson, the legal challenge to a California measure banning same-sex marriage he is leading with David Boies clearly has global implications. “What happens in this case won’t just affect the people of California, it will affect the country. And what happens in the United States will affect the rest of the world.”
Olson, who co-chairs Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s appellate practice, made that assertion while talking to reporters shortly after addressing the annual Outlaw networking dinner. Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher has hosted the dinner in its Connecticut Avenue office for the past four years to give members of the Georgetown Law Center student group that focuses on legal issues affecting gays, lesbian, and bisexuals a chance to mingle with Big Law partners.
An interview I did with Max Keiser on Jefferson County. I’m at about 11:00 in on the tape.
Matt appears at about 11:05
Jefferson County:
By MATT TAIBBI
An interview I did with Max Keiser on Jefferson County. I’m at about 11:00 in on the tape.
I normally don’t spend so much time pimping my own stories like this, but this Jefferson County thing is just so atrocious that I want to get it in front of as many eyes as possible. I have to believe the only reason more people aren’t flipping out about this sort of thing is because they just don’t know about it. So please excuse the shameless self-promotion. And please do not write me letters taunting me about the Yankees-Red Sox series, I’m already considering Sepaku.
The proposition that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, in his prior job as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, didn’t do enough to reign in banking giant Citigroup just gained new support.
On Wednesday, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission disclosed that a peer review study by other Federal Reserve banks in 2005 found that the New York Fed “had insufficient resources to conduct supervisory activities” of Citigroup.
Geithner, who led the New York Fed from 2003-2009, did not seek additional resources in the wake of the study, according to testimony yesterday before the commission by Alan Greenspan, who was chairman of the Federal Reserve at the time.
When it comes to health care reform, single-payer advocate Rob Stone, M.D., says, “We’re still for it, and we’re not done yet.”
The need is undeniable. Over 46 million Americans are uninsured, and a recent study reported in the American Journal of Public Health showed that 45,000 die each year because they lack health insurance. Tens of millions are underinsured, able to afford coverage only with policies with gigantic deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses.
Of U.S. health care spending, 31 percent covers administrative costs, or overhead. Medicare, in comparison, spends only 3.1 percent on overhead. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, countries with universal health care spend about 50 percent of what we spend per capita and have superior health outcomes.
The Rules are Written to Protect the Wealthy and the Powerful
By DEAN BAKER
Progressives have wailed against “market fundamentalism” for the last quarter-century. They complain that conservatives want to eliminate the government and leave everything to the market. This is nonsense.
The Right has every bit as much interest in government involvement in the economy as progressives. The difference is that conservatives want the government to intervene in ways that redistribute income upward. The other difference is that the Right is smart enough to hide its interventions, implying that the structures that redistribute income upward are just the natural working of the market. Progressives help the Right’s cause when we accuse them of being “market fundamentalists,” effectively implying that the conservatives’ structuring of the economy is its natural state.
This is not just a question of framing; although the framing is important. Economic outcomes that appear to be the result of the natural workings of the market will always sound more appealing than the machinations of government bureaucrats, especially in the political culture of the United States. If we label the Right’s interventions as nothing more than the free market left to itself, then we place progressive policies at an enormous political disadvantage.
Ninety percent of genetically engineered (GE) seed is made and owned by one US company called Monsanto, and they don’t want us to know when GE is in our food. Many consumers around the world are against GE foods and crops, because genetic engineering has been associated with health risks, loss of biodiversity, increased use of toxic weed killers (herbicides) and other environmental problems.
Monsanto’s battle to force GE foods and crops onto the world Monsanto’s agenda is to turn the world’s agriculture and food production into one big genetic experiment. However, their success has been very limited so far. Only one percent of the world’s farmers are growing GE crops. Furthermore, eighty-five percent of GE crops are concentrated in just three countries: the United States, Argentina and Canada, and so far only four GE crops (cotton, oilseed rape/canola, soya and maize/corn) have been grown on a commercial scale.
In most parts of the world (e.g. in Europe, Russia, Africa and most Latin American and Asian countries) major food companies and retailers are refusing to sell GE foods. There are also many governments who have banned the growing of GE crops or are refusing to import them.
Beginning with the first Walmart store, which opened in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962, this incredible visualization — put together by FlowingData, a data visualization website run by UCLA statistics doctoral student Nathan Yau — traces the expansion of the seemingly omnipresent discount chain across America.
cFortune editor at large Peter Elkind spent almost two years working on his new book, Rough Justice: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, due out from Portfolio April 20. An exclusive excerpt of the book will appear in the next issue of Fortune and on Fortune.com. Elkind recently interviewed Spitzer again about his plans for the future–including a possible return to politics.
Two years after resigning in disgrace, Eliot Spitzer is back in the spotlight: writing columns, giving TV interviews, making speeches. It's a little like his first big political setback, when, upon losing a run for New York attorney general in 1994, he became a talking head on Geraldo and Hannity and Colmes.
This has prompted speculation about a comeback, generating tabloid headlines that he had plans to run for office in 2010. For months Spitzer dismissed such speculation, saying he couldn’t put his battered family through it. But now, even as he protests, he declines to shut the door.
A federal study of hydraulic fracturing set to begin this spring is expected to provide the most expansive look yet at how the natural gas drilling process can affect drinking water supplies, according to interviews with EPA officials and a set of documents outlining the scope of the project. The research will take a substantial step beyond previous studies and focus on how a broad range of ancillary activity – not just the act of injecting fluids under pressure – may affect drinking water quality.
The oil and gas industry strongly opposes this new approach. The agency’s intended research “goes well beyond relationships between hydraulic fracturing and drinking water,” said Lee Fuller, vice president of government affairs for the Independent Petroleum Association of America in comments (PDF) he submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The “lifecycle” approach will allow the agency to take into account hundreds of reports of water contamination in gas drilling fields across the country. Although the agency hasn’t settled on the exact details, researchers could examine both underground and surface water supplies, gas well construction errors, liquid waste disposal issues and chemical storage plans as part of its assessment.
A few weeks ago, for the second time in two months, Senate Republicans objected to an extension of unemployment benefits. While the last dispute was resolved in time to keep benefits from expiring, as of Monday, hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers are seeing their benefits come to an end.
Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) led the GOP obstruction last time (telling the Democrats “tough sh*t” when they asked for unanimous consent to move the extension forward), but this time Sen. Tom “Dr. No” Coburn (R-OK) has stepped up to the plate. And he evidently has no remorse about his actions, as he feels they affect a “relatively small amount of people”:
The easiest thing in the world is to pass this bill unpaid for, but consider the millions of Americans whose financial futures would be damaged, versus the relatively small amount of people who will be affected by this delay. Now you tell me which vote takes the most courage.
Do implanted microchips cause cancer in dogs and cats?
That’s the question owners are asking after highly aggressive tumors developed around the microchip implants of two dogs, killing one and leaving the other terminally ill.
The owners – and pathology and autopsy reports – suggest a link between the chips and formation of fast-growing cancers.
‘I could see it taking his life’
A 5-year-old bullmastiff named Seamus died last month after developing a hemangio-sarcoma – a malignant form of cancer that can kill even humans in three to six months, explains privacy expert, syndicated radio host and best-selling author Dr. Katherine Albrecht.
Albrecht, an outspoken opponent of implantable microchips, has been contacted by pet owners after their animals experienced what they believe to be side effects from the procedure.
According to a pathology report, Seamus’ tumor appeared between his shoulder blades last year, and by September a “large mass” had grown with the potential to spread to his lungs, liver and spleen.
Two Financial Investigations: One Went after The Banksters, The Other Became A Forum For Bluster
A Tale of Then and Now, FDR vs Obama: A Story of Shame, Co-optaton, Partisan Bickering and Industry Lobbying To Undermine Financial Reform
2009, The Intent: Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “What I want to initiate is the equivalent of what happened in the 30′s. They had something that was called the Pecora Commission. This was the commission that was formed when Franklin Roosevelt took office and they investigated what happened with the markets… We need to know. Some people can tell you one piece of it. Others can tell you another piece of it. But really it’s very hard – do you understand it? — for the American people and the rest of us as we try to make policy as we go forward to see the ramifications of any of the changes we’re being asked to make.”
THEN: Robert Kuttner:In 1932 through 1934 the Senate Banking Committee, led by its Chief Counsel Ferdinand Pecora, ferreted out the deeper fraud and corruption that led to the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The Pecora Committee’s findings helped change the political mood, and laid the groundwork for the sweeping financial reforms of Roosevelt‘s New Deal. Roosevelt himself often conferred with Pecora, encouraged him, and depended on Pecora’s work to build the public support for reform. He appointed Pecora to one of the newly created results of his handiwork, the Securities and Exchange Commission, though Pecora was disappointed not to be its chairman.
NOW:NY Times April 6 2010 Financial Crisis Inquiry Wrestles With Setbacks
Key Findings on the Wall Street Bank Bailout Tally
Methodology: In calculating the bailout totals, CMD’s focus has been on direct and indirect support to financial institutions that had a role in causing the financial crisis. We tally programs across five federal agencies (Federal Reserve, Treasury, Federal Housing Administration, Federal Housing Finance Agency, and the FDIC) and include direct support, loans, and guarantees.
Included in our tally is the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) of the U.S. Treasury, which we price at having spent $410 billion. Unlike other bailout tallies, we exclude non-Wall Street bailout programs, including economic stimulus funds, unemployment insurance, student loan aid, the auto bailout, “cash for clunkers” or other efforts to create jobs or assist the citizenry. Also, unlike other bailout tallies, we include the vast efforts at non-Treasury agencies (like the Federal Reserve) for programs to support private banks as well as support for the mortgage and mortgage-backed securities markets through federal housing institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac – which account for 91% ($4.2 trillion) of the disbursed funds.
In May, the leader of Norway’s small Catholic community unexpectedly resigned with little explanation. The Vatican on Wednesday said why: he had sexually abused a boy in the early 1990s.
It was the latest case to emerge in a clerical sex abuse scandal that has been churning through Europe in recent months, putting the Vatican on the defensive and forcing bishops across the continent to confront the issue.
The bishop, Georg Mueller, 58, left his diocese in June, has since undergone therapy and “no longer carries out pastoral activity,” according to a statement by the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman.
U.S. astronomers say a newly discovered asteroid will travel close to Earth Thursday, passing the planet at a distance of about 223,000 miles.
The U.S. space agency said the asteroid — named 2010 GA6 — is approximately 71 feet wide and will fly-by Earth within the moon’s orbit. It was discovered by the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey, a Tucson astronomical survey focused on the discovery and study of near Earth asteroids and comets.
“Fly-bys of near-Earth objects within the moon’s orbit occur every few weeks,” said Don Yeomans of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. He said the asteroid poses no danger to the planet.
U.S. companies would lose their ability to secretly finance political advertising run by organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce under a bill being considered by Democratic lawmakers.
The proposed legislation is a response to a Supreme Court ruling that allows corporations to spend unlimited amounts of their own money on political ads that call for electing or defeating candidates. The Jan. 21 decision triggered concern that companies would funnel unprecedented sums of cash into the Chamber’s system of anonymously funded pro-business campaigns.
President Barack Obama criticized the court opinion in his Jan. 28 State of the Union address, saying it would “open the floodgates for special interests.” The bill, which may be introduced as early as next week, would require nonprofit groups, unions and trade associations including the Chamber to identify who pays for ads designed to sway opinion on candidates for federal office.
Due to a series of posts I once wrote and then collected into a longer piece, entitled Seven Reasons Women Stay in Abusive Relationships, and How to Defeat Each One of Them (which in ten months has been visited some 19,000 times) I get a fair number of emails from women relating the terrible story of their own abusive relationships. (For a particularly difficult example, see this comment I got in just yesterday on my post “From a Christian Woman Whose Marriage to a Non-Christian Failed.”) The letter below came in last week. I’m sad to say it’s typical — especially the part about how this woman’s church “family” responded to her suffering.
Needless to say, I wouldn’t run something like this without first clearing it with its author. The woman who wrote me the following hopes her story might help others
Tax Day is a dreaded deadline for millions, but for nearly half of U.S. households it’s simply somebody else’s problem.
About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That’s according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization.
Most people still are required to file returns by the April 15 deadline. The penalty for skipping it is limited to the amount of taxes owed, but it’s still almost always better to file: That’s the only way to get a refund of all the income taxes withheld by employers.
After almost 1,000 U.S. troops have died and after roughly $300 billion in taxpayer dollars have been spent in Afghanistan, Afghan President Hamid Karzai repayed the U.S. by threatening to join the Taliban and blaming our forces for the fraud he perpetrated in last year’s elections.
And, according to the former deputy United Nations envoy in Afghanistan, he may be on drugs.
The counterinsurgency strategy chosen by the Obama Administration in Afghanistan requires a legitimate local partner. There’s no way around it. It’s a prerequisite for success. This week, it’s become abundantly clear that we not only lack a local partner, but the partner we have is perfectly willing to stab us in the back when it’s politically convenient.
Michael Lewis, the celebrated author of “The Big Short,” claims that about 40 or 50 House Republicans skipped a December hearing by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke to spend three hours with him talking about the financial crisis.
And the lawmakers, who are members of the House Republican book club, were stunningly uninformed about major elements of the crisis, says Lewis, during a recent conversation with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter:
“And their questions were increasingly: ‘Oh my God, Goldman Sachs did what? A.I.G. did what?’ They didn’t understand it … At the end, there was smoke coming out of their ears. I thought they were going to go kill someone at the end of it,.. The minute they started to understand, they were outraged. And I think the more things are explained, the more outraged people will get.”
The FBI arrested a northern California man Wednesday for allegedly making threatening phone calls to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over health care reform, law enforcement officials told The Associated Press.
Charges against the man have yet to be disclosed, but they are expected to be filed in federal court in California.
Several federal officials said the man made dozens of calls to Pelosi’s homes in California and Washington, as well as to her husband’s business office. They said he recited her home address and said if she wanted to see it again, she would not support the health care overhaul bill that since has been enacted.
Kyrgyzstan Protests: Opposition Claims Control, At Least 40 People Killed
Thousands of protesters furious over corruption and spiraling utility bills seized internal security headquarters, a state TV channel and other levers of power in Kyrgyzstan on Wednesday after government forces fatally shot dozens of demonstrators and wounded hundreds.
A revolution in the Central Asian nation was proclaimed by leaders of the opposition, who have called for the closure of a U.S. air base outside the capital that serves as a key transit point for supplies essential to the war in nearby Afghanistan.
The U.S. State Department said transport operations at the Manas base were “functioning normally.”
Group says city must slash spending, downsize or it could end up more than $400M in red
Mayor Dave Bing and the City Council must reduce the size of government and slash the city’s budget deficit to stave off bankruptcy or state receivership, according to a report released Monday.
Without draconian cuts and changes aimed at downsizing government, the city could end up with a “possible” general fund deficit between $446 million and $466 million to its $1.6 billion budget.
“Detroit city government must be restructured,” according to the report from the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a nonprofit that has studied Detroit finances for decades. “The new structure must reflect both the reduced tax base and the limited ability of state government to provide shared revenues.”
This past Sunday, when National Economic Council director Larry Summers was asked if the end of his time in the White House was nigh, Summers told Jake Tapper that he served at the pleasure of the president, he wouldn’t indulge in “hypotheticals” that were based on “personality stories” and that he wasn’t going anywhere, et cetera. On the other hand, Josh Green of The Atlantic is convinced that Summers is leaving, “sooner rather than later, possibly before the mid-term elections, and if not then, soon afterward.”
Green’s take on the matter, he says, is one of the “angles” that emerges from his recent profile of Tim Geithner. Says Green: “I contend that Geithner, not Summers, has emerged as Obama’s key adviser on financial matters, and that Summers isn’t happy about it.”
Of course, high up in the piece are mentions of those very “personality stories” that Summers waved off with Tapper, such as Alexis Simendinger’s Summers-is-an-ego-monster-who-didn’t-get-enough-golf-dates-with-the-president piece for the National Journal, and Jonathan Alter’s forthcoming insider tome “The Promise”. But eventually Green himself speaks his piece:
Wis. prosecutor warns new state sex ed requirements could result in charges against teachers
A Wisconsin prosecutor is warning sex education teachers they could face charges if they follow a new state law that allows them to instruct students about proper contraceptive use.
A letter sent to five school districts by JuneauCounty District Attorney Scott Southworth said the instruction could amount to contributing to the delinquency of a minor if teachers know students are sexually active. He said the districts should drop sex education until the law is repealed.
Southworth also argued that teaching contraceptive use encourages sexual behavior among children, which equates to sexual assault because minors can’t legally have sex in Wisconsin.
“Depending on the specific facts of a case … this encouragement and advocacy could lead to criminal charges,” Southworth, a Republican, wrote to districts in his county.
The nation’s largest and most formidable lobbying group is apparently unsatisfied with being able to spend unlimited amounts of cash to influence elections — they insist they should be able to do so in secret.
Bloomberg News reports that “U.S. companies would lose their ability to secretly finance political advertising run by organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce under a bill being considered by Democratic lawmakers.”
The effort, led by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), would temper the impacts of the monumental Supreme Court ruling this year.
As ThinkProgress and others have documented, for over a year now, Fox News has promoted and celebrated the anti-Obama Tea Party movement. But at a forum for the public affairs TV series, The Kalb Report, last night, Rupert Murdoch, the CEO of Fox’s parent company, said that the network should not be “supporting” the movement:
The mogul was peppered with a host of questions related to his media empire’s political leanings, and in each case fought the perception that he’s made his fortune by catering to the conservative audience. Asked by an official at the progressive watchdog group, Media Matters, whether it was ethical for officials at Fox to promote the Tea Party movement (as has been documented on some occasion) he replied without hesitation.
“No. I don’t think we should be supporting the Tea Party or any other party. But I’d like to investigate what you are saying before condemning anyone.”
Last summer, Sarah Palin famously tried to poison the discourse surrounding health reform by charging that the legislation included bureaucratic “death panels” that would sentence the disabled and the elderly to death. Of course, the accusation was a flat out lie, and news agencies eventually fact-checked and rebuffed Palin’s claim. But that did not stop right-wing partisans and Republicans from using Palin’s absurd death panel claim to try to sow fear in the public and kill the bill.
Now, Newt Gingrich is urging Republicans to campaign on a new, equally absurd myth. Over the last few days, Gingrich has been appearing on television and radio alleging that health reform includes “16,000 IRS agents” as “health police.” Noting that the 16,000 IRS agents claim is “wildly inaccurate,” FactCheck.org explained that the new health law requires the IRS mostly to hand out tax credits, not collect penalties. The bill signed into law (on page 131) specifically prohibits the IRS from using the liens and levies commonly used to collect money owed by delinquent taxpayers, and rules out any criminal penalties for individuals who refuse to pay the tax or those who don’t obtain coverage. PolitiFact, in their own article on the misinformation, reported that the number of new IRS workers would be closer to 8,000, and that the workers would not be “agents,” but rather “clerks, accountants, computer programmers, telephone help line workers and other support staff.” Indeed, FactCheck concludes that the 16,000 claim is “a partisan analysis based on guesswork and false assumptions, and compounded by outright misrepresentation.”
Yesterday, the Obama administration released its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), a congressionally-mandated report that outlines the administration’s nuclear strategy and nuclear arsenal policy. The new strategy, which did not contain any radical changes to previous administration’s policies, took a “middle course” and “keeps first-strike strategy.”
The Wonk Room’s Max Bergmann noted yesterday that the right-wing freak out had already begun before any real details emerged from the new NPR. Now that the details are known, many conservatives are completely misrepresenting them. Led by the Drudge Report, the new talking point is that the U.S. will refuse to retaliate against a chemical or biological attack with a nuclear strike. To wit:
After the worst coal mining disaster in at least 25 years, Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship is facing long-overdue scrutiny for his record of putting coal profits over fundamental safety and health concerns. Blankenship, a right-wing activist millionaire who sits on the boards of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Mining Association, used his company’s ties to the industry-dominated Bush administration to paper over Massey’s egregious environmental and health violations. Massey rewarded Republicans with massive donations after the company avoided paying billions in fines for a 2000 coal slurry disaster in Martin County, three times bigger than the Exxon Valdez. After both mine inspectors and Massey employees got the same message that it was more important to “run coal” than to follow safety rules, a deadly fire broke out in the Aracoma Alma mine in 2006, burning two men alive.
Blankenship was abetted by former employees placed at the highest levels of the federal mine safety system. Massey COO Stanley Suboleski was named a commissioner of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission in 2003 and was nominated in December 2007 to run the Energy Department’s Office of Fossil Energy. Suboleski is now back on the Massey board. After being rejected twice by the Senate, one-time Massey executive Dick Stickler was put in charge of the MSHA in a recess appointment in October 2006. In the 1990s, Stickler oversaw Massey subsidiary Performance Coal, the operator of the deadly Upper Big Branch Mine, after managing Beth Energy mines, which “incurred injury rates double the national average.” Bush named Stickler acting secretary when the recess appointment expired in January 2008.
In an interview on Canadian television, Nate Phelps, the son of Fred Phelps, leader of the “God Hates Fags” Westboro Baptist Church, discusses growing up as one of Phelps’ 13 children. He says Fred Phelps frequently beat his wife and children and would subject them to verbal abuse that went on for hours.
He also says (around 17:18) that his father exhibits the characteristics of a sociopath:
PETER KLEIN: What you’re … I’m not a psychologist — not even, don’t even want to be an armchair psychologist — but if there was a case where you could say someone has a mental illness, seems like this would the case. Even the Baptist minister who ordained your father, [garbled] McAllister, says that at some point, something just changed. Do you think that he’s mentally ill — and sort of the second question is, if he is, does that sort of forgive some of the things he’s done?
A conservative think tank that’s funded by several prominent backers of right-wing causes may bring a lawsuit over health-care reform on behalf of the governor of Arizona.
The Goldwater Institute has offered to bring the suit for free, and Gov. Jan Brewer is considering the offer, a spokeswoman for the institute told TPMmuckraker.
Brewer, a Republican, has been looking for ways to bring the suit, after the state’s attorney general, Democrat Terry Goddard, declined to do so. Fourteen other state attorneys general are suing over the law, which they argue — despite the weight of expert opinion — is unconstitutional.
A former Labor Department chief of staff during the Bush administration entered a guilty plea today to a corruption charge related to the scandals of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Horace Cooper, 44, of Lorton, Va., pleaded guilty to a count charging him with making and using a false certificate or writing. Specifically, the former chief of staff for the Department of Labor (DOL) Employment Standards Administration pleaded guilty to falsely certifying his Fiscal Year 2003 Executive Branch Personnel Public Financial Disclosure Report, the Justice Department says. He is due to be sentenced on July 1.
According to court documents, Cooper was the chief of staff for the DOL's Employment Standards Administration from December 2002 through August 2005. In that position, Cooper was required by federal regulations to complete annual executive branch personnel public financial disclosure reports.
Monsanto does not have the right to dictate the value of my life
-Joel Greeno
While farmers were the star of the show at last Friday's antitrust hearing in Ankeny, Iowa, the debate over the monopolization of farming is one where all of our interests are squarely at stake.
Anyone who eats and has a brain should be downright terrified that just a few giant businesses control the vast majority of food available to us as consumers. Perhaps that explains why more than 15,000 people submitted comments in anticipation of the hearings – four more of which are scheduled this year as a joint effort of the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
To his credit, Attorney General Eric Holder seemed to be trying not to mince words in Iowa – always tough for an attorney – and particularly so for one under the right's atomic microscope. Noting that farming “has been at the core of the American economy ever since there was an American economy,” he went on to say, “[W]e've learned the hard way that . . . long periods of reckless deregulation can foster practices that are anti-competitive and even illegal. . . . We know that a growing number of American farmers find it increasingly difficult to survive by doing what they've done for decades. And we've learned that some of them believe the competitive environment may be, at least in part, to blame.”
Often in our busy daily lives, we miss the significance of a piece of news. Sometimes it’s not until years later that we realize how very important that news event was in shifting the paradigm.
For example: In 1981, President Reagan fired all 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers, and the liberal left didn’t really organize itself to respond forcefully. That breaking of a labor union was the linchpin for much more anti-liberal mischief at the hands of the Reaganite conservatives for the next eight years — and beyond. And the liberal left, as personified by the Democratic Party, remained confused and toothless in its opposition.
But that was then, when the rightwing was in flower. Now we supposedly have a liberal in the White House and the Democrats control both houses of Congress. So surely there aren’t such tipping-point events happening now.
Not so fast. Let’s take a look at a few candidates and see the possible ramifications for the body politic.
The Obama Administration has authorised the targeted killing of an American citizen in what is believed to be an unprecedented move in the War against Terror.
According to US media reports, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been linked to last November’s attack on Fort Hood, Texas, and the failed Christmas day airline bomb plot, has been approved for capture or killing.
Mr Awlaki, who is in hiding in Yemen, is understood to have moved from encouraging attacks on the United States to participating in them directly, The New York Times reports.
The discovery of the new species, which live buried in sediment under the Mediterranean seafloor, is significant in that it marks the first observation of multicellular organisms, or metazoans, that spend their entire lifecycle under permanently anoxic conditions. A few metazoans have been known to tolerate anoxic conditions, but only for limited periods of time.
The team of Italian and Danish researchers, Roberto Danovaro, et al., that discovered the new life forms has identified the creatures as belonging to the animal phylum Loricifera, the most recently described animal phylum. Loriciferans, which have a length of less than one millimeter, typically live in sediment. The three new organisms belong to different genera (Spinoloricus, Rugiloricus, and Pliciloricus), although their species have not yet been named.
Despite belonging to previously known taxonomic groups, the new species possess some radical differences compared with other metazoans. Most significantly, the new species do not have mitochondria, the cellular organelles that use oxygen and sugar to generate the cell’s energy. Instead, the new loriciferans have organelles that resemble hydrogenosomes, which are used by some single-celled eukaryotes to generate energy without oxygen. However, this is the first time that these organelles have been observed in multicellular organisms. Previous research has indicated that hydrogenosomes may have evolved from mitochondria, while other research suggests they evolved independently.
Today’s ruling for Comcast by the DC Circuit Court could be the biggest blow to our nation’s primary communications platform, or it could be the kick in the pants our leaders need to finally protect it. Either way, the future of the Internet, the fight for Net Neutrality, and the expansion of broadband is hanging in the balance.
The court ruled that the Federal Communications Commission lacks the authority under existing legal framework to enforce rules that keep Internet service providers from blocking and controlling Internet traffic. The decision puts the FCC’s Net Neutrality proceeding and the National Broadband Plan in jeopardy.
The court ruled in favor of ISP Comcast, which was caught blocking BitTorrent Internet traffic in 2007 and contested the FCC’s attempts to stop the company. The decision has made it near impossible for the FCC to follow through with plans to create strong Net Neutrality protections that keep the Internet out of the hands of corporations. Additionally, without authority over broadband, the decision means the FCC will be hamstrung when it comes to implementing portions of its just released broadband plan.
OK, presumably their mommas do, and possibly their pet dogs, but that’s it. The general public loathes them and would be delighted to see the whole bunch tarred, feathered and deported to a barren atoll, where their punishment would be living with themselves.
These preening, narcissistic elites turned America’s financial system into a rigged casino game that paid off big-time for them. Then it crashed, wrecking our real economy and making life miserable for millions of people. Yet, there they are, still on their exalted thrones, still playing casino games (now with our bailout funds
“We Are Not ‘Vampire Squid Wrapped Around Humanity’s Face”
Wall Street bank issues eight-page letter to shareholders justifying its conduct before, during and after the financial crisis
Nine months after being labelled “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”, Goldman Sachs has issued a wide-ranging justification of its conduct before, during and after the financial crisis.
The eight-page letter, signed by chief executive Lloyd Blankfein and president Gary Cohn, also contained a detailed defence of the $12.9bn (£8.5bn) payout which Goldman received from AIG after the failed insurance giant was bailed out by the US government.
Mark Thoma, an economics professor at the University of Oregon who has long urged Congress to take aggressive steps to reduce unemployment, announced today on his influential blog that he is giving up.
“I’ve been pushing hard for more help for labor markets for quite awhile,” he wrote, “but it’s probably time for me to give up and accept that we are going to have a slower recovery than we could have had with more aggressive fiscal policy.”
Thoma told HuffPost that what drove him over the edge was a blog post yesterday by Harvard economist Jeff Frankel, declaring the recession over.
Fewer seats and more travelers returning to the skies means you can forget landing a cheap airfare deal this summer.
A survey of the average round-trip purchase price of an airline ticket on Travelocity.com found prices are 13.4% higher than last summer, and slightly higher than 2008. The average fare for all domestic and international flights purchased on the travel site jumped from $415 last summer to $471 this year.
Travelocity.com’s survey of 10 top summer destinations served by the major airlines found average ticket prices ranging from $259 to Orlando to $365 to Seattle.
Migraines are severe, disabling headaches that affect up to 17 percent of women and six percent of men. The disorder has many variants, often making diagnosis difficult. Migraines can be excruciating for patients, incapacitating them for hours or days at a time. They are also frustrating for doctors, who often find that the condition resists their best efforts at treatment.
Fortunately, conventional management of migraines has improved dramatically over the past 10 years. An integrative approach – combining the best of these conventional techniques with evidence-based natural approaches — can make a tremendous difference in reducing frequency and severity of attacks.
What are the symptoms of migraine headaches?
The classic, “textbook” migraine is a one-sided severe, throbbing headache, which can be preceded by some sort of “aura” (visual disturbances), and accompanied by nausea and vomiting, along with sensitivity to light and sound. Headache pain worsens with physical activity and usually interferes with normal functioning. Frequency can vary from several times a month to once a year; intensity varies as well. If left untreated, a migraine can last from a couple of hours to several days.
Beginning at 9 a.m. Wednesday morning, and for the following 24 hours, the Jewish Funds for Justice plans to tweet the heck out of Glenn Beck.
The social justice group plans to unleash a “Twitterstorm” on the Fox News host to protest his recent remarks mocking the faith-based idea of “social justice.” JFSJ has collected more than 1,500 haikus (Haik U Beck, they call it) mocking Beck.
The group plans to start tweeting the verses to Beck's personal Twitter account, one every minute, “to confront Glenn Beck about his bizarre and incongruous opinion that there is no place for social and economic justice in religion.”
Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva declared a state of emergency in Bangkok on Wednesday, handing the army broad powers to restore order after anti-government protesters broke into Parliament, forcing some lawmakers to flee by helicopter.
Other lawmakers scaled the compound’s walls to escape the most chaotic protest in several weeks of demonstrations by a group demanding Abhisit dissolve the government and call elections within 15 days. He has offered to do so by the end of the year.
“The government has tried its best to enforce the law, but violations of the law have increased,” Abhisit said in a televised statement that interrupted regular programming. “Our main goal is to bring the country back to normal and make our law sacred once again.” He did not spell out how the emergency decree will be applied.
The government already had placed Bangkok under the strict Internal Security Act.
The already-volatile race for New York governor got a new jolt of drama this week with the candidacy of Carl Paladino, the Buffalo businessman and Tea Party favorite known for his big mouth and bigger wallet.
And Paladino promises to make headlines as a candidate in the Republican primary by vigorously attacking New York’s entrenched political leadership, forcefully pushing his anti-spending, anti-tax message and not backing down from past controversial stances.
Though he’s little known in the rest of the state, the 63-year-old developer is a legend in Buffalo, where he’s made some powerful enemies and stirred up plenty of scandal.
Just a few days after the Apple iPad’s debut, there’s already “trouble in paradise.”
iPad users have filled Apple forums with complaints regarding everything from Wifi woes to charging headaches and crashing apps. We’ve taken a look at the biggest problems with the iPad users have reported thus far.
Have you been having troubles with your iPad? Let us know!
Get more iPad coverage and reviews on the Huffington Post, including a guide to ’13 Things You Need To Know About The iPad,’ as well as rundown of the ’9 Worst Things About The iPad.’ See our selection of ‘iPad Killers’–alternatives to the iPad–here and our comprehensive review round-up here. We’ve also taken a look at 9 features the iPad has that the iPhone doesn’t–as well as 7 things the iPhone has that the iPad is missing.
As Jon Stewart pointed out last night, McCain has a track record of backtracking – like his stances on DADT and tolerance – for political gain. It’s well documented territory for Stewart. A topic he’s often covered with ease.
Facing perhaps the biggest loss of power in the institution’s nearly 100-year history, the Federal Reserve fought back today with a little-noticed move that seemed to send a message to Congress: we use our oversight authority over banks to help us shape the direction of the economy.
So, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, don’t take it away.
In the wake of the biggest financial crisis and most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression, many in Washington have blamed the Fed. Partly to punish it for past failures and partly to help it concentrate on the biggest financial and economic issues, Dodd took away the Fed’s regulatory authority over banks in the November draft of his bill to reform the financial industry. Last month, he offered a new draft of his bill, this time giving the Fed authority over the nation’s biggest financial firms.
But the Fed is still facing a loss of its oversight powers over nearly 5,000 bank holding companies and nearly 900 banks.
Greenspan Testifies To Financial Crisis Commission, Blames Fannie, Freddie For Subprime Crisis
While being grilled by commission chairman Phil Angelides, Alan Greenspan offered a guess about his batting average as head of the Federal Reserve. In fact, Greenspan seemed to pat himself on the back for only being wrong 30 percent of the time.
Angelides asked whether or or not Greenspan would characterize his handling of the subprime crisis as a mistake — a fair question that got a fairly convoluted answer. Here’s the exchange:
Angelides: Would you put this under the category of ‘Oops,’ we should have done it?
Greenspan: When you’ve been in government for 20 years, as I have been, the issue of retrospective and figuring out what you should have done differently is a really futile activity… My experience has been, in the business I was in I was right 70 percent of the time, but I was wrong 30 percent of the time and there are an awful lot of mistakes in 21 years.
Despite recent turbulence in U.S. relations with Israel, President Obama is “seriously considering” proposing an American peace plan to resolve the Palestinian conflict, according to two top administration officials.
“Everyone knows the basic outlines of a peace deal,” said one of the senior officials, citing the agreement that was nearly reached at Camp David in 2000 and in subsequent negotiations. He said that an American plan, if launched, would build upon past progress on such issues as borders, the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem. The second senior official said that “90 percent of the map would look the same” as what has been agreed in previous bargaining.
The American peace plan would be linked with the issue of confronting Iran, which is Israel’s top priority, explained the second senior official. He described the issues as two halves of a single strategic problem: “We want to get the debate away from settlements and East Jerusalem and take it to a 30,000-feet level that can involve Jordan, Syria and other countries in the region,” as well as the Israelis and Palestinians.
Because of a $45 million budget gap, the New York City Housing Authority may have to revoke rental-assistance vouchers from more than 10,000 low-income tenants, a drastic move that could cause families to lose their apartments.
The federal government gave the housing authority less money for the voucher program, known as Section 8, than the authority expected. But the authority made matters worse by continuing to issue new vouchers until December, eight months after the government warned it to stop doing so because the program was likely to run a deficit.
Michael P. Kelly, the authority’s general manager, said that terminating vouchers would be a last resort. The authority has not decided who might lose their vouchers, but if the deficit is not closed, the cuts could begin this summer.
“This is a dire option for us that we’re hoping we’re not going to have to do,” Mr. Kelly said.
The mayor of Los Angeles, California, called Tuesday for a plan to shut down all city services — except for public safety and revenue-generating positions — twice a week beginning Monday in an effort to solve the city’s budget crisis.
“There are no easy decisions or simple ways to solve this budget crisis,” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said. “But as the CEO of this great city, it is my responsibility to make these difficult, but necessary, decisions to steer the city out of this crisis and onto solid financial ground.”
He said he was asking the city administrative officer to develop a plan to shut down the city for two days a week and calculate the money the city would save from the move.
After being pressed to release its version of the WikiLeaks clip, U.S. CENTCOM says it can’t locate the footage
The U.S. military said Tuesday it can’t find its copy of a video that shows two employees of the Reuters news agency being killed by Army helicopters in 2007, after a leaked version circulated the Internet and renewed questions about the attack.
Capt. Jack Henzlik, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said that forces in Iraq have not been able to locate the video within its files.
“We’re attempting to retrieve the video at this time,” Henzlik said.
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.
" 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
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.
Toyota Motor Corp. knew about flaws that could cause unintended acceleration more than 3 1/2 years before it recalled cars and trucks to fix the defects, according to company timelines.
Mind reading may no longer be the domain of psychics and fortune tellers – now some computers can do it, too.
Credit card reform requires banks by July to get permission before providing “overdraft protection,” which hits customers with fees of $30 or more to cover any debit card transactions that exceed the balance in a checking account. Consumer advocates have long maintained that consumers ought to be allowed to decide whether they want to pay more than $30 for a cup of coffee, no matter the indignity of being declined at the register.
Peter Rubin, staff director for Maryland Democrat Sen. Barbara Mikulski’s subcommittee on health and aging, announced in an email to staffers this week that he will be leaving the Hill for a job on K Street in May.
According to CNNMoney.com, markets will drop again for much of today. After pushing a strong rally for much of the last two weeks, investors have backed away from their own progress and are now creating a mild slump.
Proposed NAFTA-style free trade agreements with Columbia, South Korea and Panama have stalled in Congress for several years now as lawmakers increasingly oppose the policies that some believe contributed to the near-collapse of the economy.
After two months, kids hated the new meals, milk consumption plummeted, and many students dropped out of the school lunch program altogether.
In their first major public appearance together, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) “lavished praise on each other” in front of a raucous crowd of thousands yesterday in Minneapolis. In her speech, Bachmann called President Obama a “one-term president,” saying “we are going to elect the boldest, strongest, most courageous, rock-ribbed, constitutional conservative president this country has ever seen.” On Fox News host Sean Hannity’s, Palin suggested she might be just that candidate, and that Bachmann could be a “cool” running mate:
The Atlantic -
A major problem with FOX’s general coverage of the news stems from its preconceived narrative filled so saliently far to the political right that its personalities will willfully ignore and manipulate facts to fit the narrative. Part of that philosophy lends itself to couching debates in binaries and ignoring the shades of gray in between, but the substantial criticism of Tea Party protesters has recently forced hosts to reconsider fair reporting — but only when it proves convenient.
“The Antidote to Despair is Action”
The Rules are Written to Protect the Wealthy and the Powerful
Fortune editor at large Peter Elkind spent almost two years working on his new book, Rough Justice: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, due out from Portfolio April 20. An exclusive excerpt of the book will appear in the next issue of Fortune and on Fortune.com. Elkind recently interviewed Spitzer again about his plans for the future–including a possible return to politics.
What Lessons for Humans?
Key Findings on the Wall Street Bank Bailout Tally
In May, the leader of Norway’s small Catholic community unexpectedly resigned with little explanation. The Vatican on Wednesday said why: he had sexually abused a boy in the early 1990s.
U.S. companies would lose their ability to secretly finance political advertising run by organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce under a bill being considered by Democratic lawmakers.
Due to a series of posts I once wrote and then collected into a longer piece, entitled Seven Reasons Women Stay in Abusive Relationships, and How to Defeat Each One of Them (which in ten months has been visited some 19,000 times) I get a fair number of emails from women relating the terrible story of their own abusive relationships. (For a particularly difficult example, see this comment I got in just yesterday on my post “From a Christian Woman Whose Marriage to a Non-Christian Failed.”) The letter below came in last week. I’m sad to say it’s typical — especially the part about how this woman’s church “family” responded to her suffering.
The FBI arrested a northern California man Wednesday for allegedly making threatening phone calls to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over health care reform, law enforcement officials told The Associated Press.
Kyrgyzstan Protests: Opposition Claims Control, At Least 40 People Killed
Wis. prosecutor warns new state sex ed requirements could result in charges against teachers
As ThinkProgress and others have documented, for over a year now, Fox News has promoted and celebrated the anti-Obama Tea Party movement. But at a forum for the public affairs TV series, The Kalb Report, last night, Rupert Murdoch, the CEO of Fox’s parent company, said that the network should not be “supporting” the movement:
Last summer, Sarah Palin famously tried to poison the discourse surrounding health reform by charging that the legislation included bureaucratic “death panels” that would sentence the disabled and the elderly to death. Of course, the accusation was a flat out lie, and news agencies eventually fact-checked and rebuffed Palin’s claim. But that did not stop right-wing partisans and Republicans from using Palin’s absurd death panel claim to try to sow fear in the public and kill the bill.
A former Labor Department chief of staff during the Bush administration entered a guilty plea today to a corruption charge related to the scandals of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Often in our busy daily lives, we miss the significance of a piece of news. Sometimes it’s not until years later that we realize how very important that news event was in shifting the paradigm.
We only have 2 days from now to send in those notes!
| Save the Internet -
by Jim Hightower -
“We Are Not ‘Vampire Squid Wrapped Around Humanity’s Face”
Dan Froomkin -
Fewer seats and more travelers returning to the skies means you can forget landing a cheap airfare deal this summer.
How has the iPad fared in the wild?
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. 
