All Entries in the "odds & ends" Category

Who’s Writing The Intro To Cheney’s Book — Mephistopheles?

Rep. Grayson (D-FL)

Clinton Foundation Donor List: Includes Foreign Governments, Trump, Coke

Foreign countries including Norway and Oman contributed to former President Bill Clinton’s charity, and donors including Donald Trump, multinational soft drink company Coca-Cola and singer Elton John’s foundation also pitched in as Hillary Rodham Clinton served her first year as secretary of state.

A donor list released on New Year’s Day by the William J. Clinton Foundation shows that in all, Norway has given $10 million to $25 million to the charity since its founding roughly a decade ago. Oman gave $1 million to $5 million over the years. The list gave cumulative donation totals and didn’t say how much each contributor gave last year.

The foundation provided The Associated Press with a donor list Friday morning under the heading “William J. Clinton Foundation Publishes Names of 2009 Contributors on Foundation Website” but later said the disclosure, which included many more foreign governments, covered donors dating back to the charity’s inception, and that it wouldn’t identify who gave in 2009. The foundation changed course Friday afternoon and updated the list to specify 2009 donors.

Full Story Clinton Foundation Donor List: Includes Foreign Governments, Trump, Coke.

FALSE FLAG?:Who Was The Nice Indian Man Who Got Umar on the Plane with NO Passport?

Newport couple witnesses to airliner attack

Wayne Madsen posted this article at his website. The question is, who was the nice Indian man, Umar’s handler? Is this the first piece of witness evidence that we may have a False Flag Op, or has ‘al Qaeda’ recruited rich East Indians too? Another interesting piece of information: An Israeli firm is in charge of security at Schiphol Amsterdam airport. Israelis are supposed to be strict! Time to play detective folks.

Napolitano: Airline Security System ‘Did Not Work’

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano conceded Monday that the aviation security system failed when a young man on a watchlist with a U.S. visa in his pocket and a powerful explosive hidden on his body was allowed to board a fight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

The Obama administration has ordered investigations into the two areas of aviation security – how travelers are placed on watch lists and how passengers are screened – as critics questioned how the 23-year-old Nigerian man charged in the airliner attack was allowed to board the Dec. 25 flight.

A day after saying the system worked, Napolitano backtracked, saying her words had been taken out of context.

Full Story Napolitano: Airline Security System ‘Did Not Work’.

Tighter security on U.S.-bound travel

All passengers must be seated one hour before flights arrive

Extra pat-downs before boarding. No getting up for the last hour of the flight. More bomb-sniffing dogs. Airports worldwide tightened security a day after a passenger tried to light some kind of explosive on a flight into Detroit.

NBC News reports the new steps include:

• Pat downs of passengers at airport security, concentrating on the upper torso and legs;
• Physical inspections of all carry-on bags at the gate;
• Requiring all passengers to be seated for the full hour prior to arrival;
• Banning the use of blankets and pillows one hour prior to arrival.

Full Story Tighter security on U.S.-bound travel – Security- msnbc.com.

Whole Foods CEO to Give up Title of Chairman

Whole Foods CEO to give up chairman title after activist shareholder calls for his replacement

The chief executive of organic supermarket chain Whole Foods Market Inc. is giving up his title of chairman, following years of petitioning by an activist shareholder to separate the two roles.

Co-founder and CEO John Mackey is voluntarily giving up his chairmanship, a position he’s held since the Austin, Texas, company’s inception in 1978, according to a Thursday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mackey will remain on the board.

Whole Foods said lead director John Elstrott will become chairman. His current position will be discontinued.

At Whole Foods’ annual shareholders meeting in March, CtW Investment Group, a shareholder activist group that works with union pension funds, unsuccessfully proposed that the CEO and chairman roles be separated. The grocer said it has been receiving these proposals for three years.

Full Story Whole Foods CEO to Give up Title of Chairman – ABC News.

Day in the Life of Joe Middle-Class Republican

By John Gray Cincinnati, Ohio

Joe gets up at 6:00am to prepare his morning coffee. He fills his pot full of good clean drinking water because some liberal fought for minimum water quality standards. He takes his daily medication with his first swallow of coffee. His medications are safe to take because some liberal fought to insure their safety and work as advertised.

All but $10.00 of his medications are paid for by his employers medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance, now Joe gets it too. He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs this day. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

Joe takes his morning shower reaching for his shampoo; His bottle is properly labeled with every ingredient and the amount of its contents because some liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained. Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some tree hugging liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air. He walks to the subway station for his government subsidized ride to work; it saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees. You see, some liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Joe begins his work day; he has a good job with excellent pay, medicals benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe’s employer pays these standards because Joe’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union. If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed he’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some liberal didn’t think he should loose his home because of his temporary misfortune.

Its noon time, Joe needs to make a Bank Deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some liberal wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the depression.

Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae underwritten Mortgage and his below market federal student loan because some stupid liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his life-time.

Joe is home from work, he plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive to dads; his car is among the safest in the world because some liberal fought for car safety standards. He arrives at his boyhood home. He was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans. The house didn’t have electric until some big government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification. (Those rural Republican’s would still be sitting in the dark)

He is happy to see his dad who is now retired. His dad lives on Social Security and his union pension because some liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to. After his visit with dad he gets back in his car for the ride home.

He turns on a radio talk show, the host’s keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. (He doesn’t tell Joe that his beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day)  Joe agrees, “We don’t need those big government liberals ruining our lives; after all, I’m a self made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have”.

By John Gray Cincinnati, Ohio -  jgray7@cinci.rr.com – Published July – 2004

Howard Dean Is a Genuine Hero: Taking on Corporate ‘Centrists’ Like Lieberman

Dean’s attacks on the Lieberman-gutted health insurance “reform” bill are creating the political space for the final version to be better and more progressive.

I want to take a moment just to recognize what has been recognized before, but needs to be recognized right here and now one more time: Howard Dean is a genuine hero.

In coming out against the Lieberman-gutted health insurance “reform” bill, Dean is leveraging every shred of power he can muster to create the political space for the final bill — whether passed now, or later after going back to the drawing board — to be better and more progressive. He has made a compelling case that the bill “would do more harm than good,” as he says in his Washington Post op-ed today — and in doing that he has made the power struggle between Joe Lieberman’s Palpatinian forces of insurance/drug industry darkness and the progressive movement far more symmetrical.

Before Dean’s move, the fight was asymmetrical, as Chris Hayes noted in my interview with him on my radio show yesterday. Before Dean’s move, Lieberman had the upper hand in that he was the only one who didn’t seem to care whether he alone killed the bill by joining with Republicans for a filibuster. Now, though, Dean has said to progressive members of Congress that they should be OK killing this bill if that’s what taking a stand for a better bill means. And you see some of them potentially starting to follow.

Full Story Howard Dean Is a Genuine Hero: Taking on Corporate ‘Centrists’ Like Lieberman | Politics | AlterNet.

Latino Group Invokes The Bible To Counter A Pastor’s Census Boycott Campaign, Encourage Participation

Earlier this year, the Rev. Miguel Rivera, chairman of the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders, began encouraging a full-out boycott of the U.S. Census on behalf of the Latino and immigrant community in protest of the failure to enact immigration reform. Rivera’s efforts have been widely perceived as damaging to the Latino and immigrant community he claims to be empowering. In response, the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO) has started using the Bible to target religious Latinos with a different message: What would Jesus do?

NALEO is handing out posters that illustrate the arrival of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem. NALEO explains that the Gospel of Luke indicates that the reason Jesus was born in Bethlehem is because Joseph and Mary were fulfilling their civic duty by returning to the town to be counted by the Roman census. A poster printed by NALEO reads: “This is how Jesus was born, Joseph and Mary participated in the Census.” Nick Kimball, spokesman at the Commerce Department (which oversees the Census Bureau), said that the government played no role in creating the posters.

Full Story Think Progress » Latino Group Invokes The Bible To Counter A Pastor’s Census Boycott Campaign, Encourage Participation.

Obama to investment guru Buffett: Hi cuz

U.S. President Barack Obama, who won political support and has sought advice from investment guru Warren Buffett, may now feel even closer to the world’s second richest man.

According to their family trees, the two men who at times shared the stage together during the 2008 presidential campaign are seventh cousins three times removed.

Genealogists at ancestry.com announced on Tuesday that Obama and Buffett are related through a 17th century Frenchman named Mareen Duvall.

According to the online genealogists, Duvall — who immigrated to Maryland from France in the 1650s — is Obama’s 9th great grandfather and Buffett’s 6th great grandfather.

The discovery was made by accident when the same team of genealogists who had researched Obama’s family tree went on to investigate details about Buffett’s relatives.

Full Story Obama to investment guru Buffett: Hi cuz – Yahoo! News.

Tucker Carlson: Was George W. Bush Preparing to Wage War on Space Aliens?

An excerpt from Tucker Carlson’s show:

And speaking of aliens, is President Bush preparing for intergalactic war with our comrades in outer space? Former Canadian defense minister and deputy prime minister, Paul Hellyer, says, “Oh, yes.” He‘ll join us in just a few minutes to explain.

But we start tonight with the new RNC ad that blasts Democrats for having a, quote, “retreat and defeat plan for Iraq.” It also includes recent comments about the war from some prominent Democrats.

The Situation with Tucker Carlson

VIDEO AT LINK

Full Story The Existentialist Cowboy: Tucker Carlson: Was George W. Bush Preparing to Wage War on Space Aliens?.

Taibbi vs. Obama | Mother Jones

Matt Taibbi’s long polemic about Barack Obama’s economic team in the current issue of Rolling Stone has attracted its share of both support and derision in the blogosphere over the past couple of days. Big surprise, eh? Digby rounds up some of the reaction here.

Well, after reading the piece this afternoon you can basically count me among the supporters. Is it over the top? Of course it is. Are there some matters of interpretation that I think Taibbi gets a bit wrong? Sure. For example: the conceit of the piece is that Obama chose to build his economic team around people who were acolytes of Bob Rubin, and this strikes me as misguided. Basically, Obama chose to build his economic team around mainstream Democratic economists with previous government experience, and virtually all of these guys have ties to each other and therefore to Rubin. That’s every bit as bad — maybe worse, in fact — but it changes the problem from one of personal influence to one of systemic influence. There’s a real difference there. What else? Taibbi spends a lot of time on Rubin pal Michael Froman, who led Obama’s search for an economic team during the transition, and this leads him to say that Tim Geithner was “hired to head the U.S. Treasury” by Froman. But that’s kind of silly. At the cabinet level, Obama didn’t need Froman’s advice. He chose Geithner all on his own. Taibbi also commits one of my pet peeves, suggesting that the bailout may eventually cost taxpayers $23 trillion. That’s ridiculous. He also fails to emphasize enough that virtually all of the bailout money was directed by the Fed and virtually all of it predates Obama’s presidency.

Full Story Taibbi vs. Obama | Mother Jones.

Michael Moore on Q TV: Capitalism and Democracy.

The director of ‘Capitalism; A Love Story’ sat down in Studio Q to talk about the film.

Full Story YouTube – Michael Moore on Q TV.

Obamania

Matt Taibbi

There is an important parallel between those who believe all criticism of Obama to be illegitimate and those on the Right who despise him without pause. The latter is every bit as personality-driven as the former: they despise Obama not for any specific policy decisions (often, those are aligned with their ostensible views), but because of personality caricatures they’ve adopted: he’s a narcissistic, vacant, Socialist Muslim and therefore nothing he does is right. That is simply the opposite side of the same coin as those who revere his personality and thus believe that nothing he does merits real criticism.

That’s unsurprising, given that many of the most vehement Obama-haters were the same ones who most loved Bush and now love Palin: this is all about cultural identification and personality admiration and has nothing to do with the factors that ought to be used to judge political leaders.

via Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

I supported Barack Obama. I still do. If I had to vote tomorrow between Obama and Tim Pawlenty, or Sarah Palin, it wouldn’t be a choice that required a whole lot of thought. He’s done some good things. He’s restored some confidence in the United States among foreign leaders. We had something of a revolutionary regime for eight years under George Bush, and Obama has put the United States back into the club of rule-abiding nations, at least to some degree.

But I’m a little mystified by the letters I’m getting from people who suggest that being a supporter of a politician means that you should “give him a break” on this or that shortcoming, and behave more like a fan than a citizen. The above post by the always-intelligent Glenn Greenwald perfectly describes this mindset — he talks about this bizarre phenomenon of Obama fans threatening to “leave the left” because of criticism of Obama trickling up from those ranks. I was particularly struck by his analysis of the now-infamous video of Sarah Palin book-buyers explaining to a snarky interviewer how they support her despite the fact that they can’t really identify any of her positions. Greenwald notes the obvious parallel:

Full Story Obamania – Matt Taibbi – Taibblog – True/Slant.

Official: KGB chief ordered Hitler’s remains destroyed

The remains of Adolf Hitler were burned in 1970 by Soviet KGB agents and thrown into a river in Germany on direct orders from the spy agency’s chief, a top Russian security official said this week.

The head archivist of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) — the successor to the former Soviet Union’s KGB — confirmed for the first time the chain of events that led to the disposal of Hitler’s body, and who ordered the operation, in an exclusive interview with Russia’s Interfax news agency.

Gen. Vasily Khristoforov told Interfax in an interview published Monday that previously secret documents show that KGB chief Yuri Andropov, with prior consent from the Soviet Communist Party leadership, ordered a top secret operation to destroy the remains of Hitler, his wife Eva Braun, Nazi Germany’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels; and Goebbels’ entire family.

Full Story Official: KGB chief ordered Hitler’s remains destroyed – CNN.com.

Dodge Challenger Beats Toyota Prius in Consumer Reports!

Best and worst in new car owner satisfaction

Our readers love sporty cars, hybrids, and ones that are out of the mainstream. That’s the message from our most recent Annual Auto Survey, conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center.

This year, the Dodge Challenger, a throwback, V8-powered muscle car, beat out the longstanding Toyota Prius hybrid as the most satisfying car among our readers. Ninety-two percent of Challenger owners said they would definitely buy another one given the same opportunity. That doesn’t mean hybrids have fallen far from grace, however. The second most satisfying car, with 91 percent of respondents saying they would definitely buy another, was the Ford Fusion Hybrid. More sports cars and hybrids round out the top group: the Chevrolet Corvette, Porsche 911, Toyota Prius, and all-wheel drive Acura TL.

Several other fuel-efficient small cars also earned outstanding satisfaction Ratings from their owners: The Volkswagen Jetta TDI (turbodiesel) sedan placed tenth in our rankings, the TDI wagon 13th, Honda Fit 21st, and the Mini Cooper hatchback 22nd.

Full Story Best and worst in new car owner satisfaction: Car owner, auto shopping.

A Fearful Price

Bob Herbert

I spoke recently with a student at Columbia who was enthusiastic about the escalation of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He argued that a full-blown counterinsurgency effort, which would likely take many years and cost many lives, was the only way to truly win the war.

He was a very bright young man: thoughtful and eager and polite. I asked him if he had any plans to join the military and help make this grand mission a success. He said no.

There was an article in The Times on Monday about a new study showing that the eight years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan were taking an emotional toll on the children of service members and that the difficulties increased the longer parents were deployed.

There is no way that the findings of this study should be a surprise to anyone. It just confirms that the children of those being sent into combat are among that tiny percentage of the population that is unfairly shouldering the entire burden of these wars.

Full Story Op-Ed Columnist – A Fearful Price – NYTimes.com.

Is Ayn Rand Bad for the Market?

Does Ayn Rand Hurt the Libertarian Cause?

Say what you will about Ayn Rand, but one thing is certain: She had no use for common niceties. A grimly precocious, friendless Rand declared her atheism at age 13. “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand’s secular sermon-as-novel, boils with revulsion toward the “looters” and “moochers” who consume public funds. Rand scornfully excommunicated followers who disagreed with her, and in 1964 she told Playboy that those who place friends and family first in life are “immoral” and “emotional parasites.”

Shoddy manners aside, 52 years after the release of “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand seems to be roaring back. Sales are surging—Brian Doherty, author of “Radicals for Capitalism” (2007), recently calculated that in one week in late August, “Atlas” sold “67 percent more copies than it did the same week a year before, and 114 percent more than that same week in 2007.” Two buzzed-about Rand biographies hit the shelves this fall, and an “Atlas” cable miniseries is reportedly in the works. Designer Ralph Lauren recently listed Rand as one of his favorite novelists, and CNBC host Rick Santelli, whose on-air antibailout rant inspired hundreds of “tea party” protests across the nation, admitted the same. “I know this may not sound very humanitarian,” he said, “but at the end of the day I’m an Ayn Rand-er.”

To many, it doesn’t sound humanitarian at all. To be an “Ayn Rand-er” sounds, as the New York Times recently put it, “angry” and “vulgar.” In its review of the new Rand biographies, the New Republic bemoaned the “cacophony of rage and dread” surrounding Rand’s acolytes. Even in Rand’s heyday, many conservatives shrank from what they saw as her toxic blend of atheism, absolutism and ruthless individualism. “William F. Buckley must be spinning in his grave to hear all this chatter about Rand,” says Jennifer Burns, the author of “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right,” “because it was a goal of his to make Rand an untouchable.”

Full Story Does Ayn Rand Hurt the Libertarian Cause? – WSJ.com.

Soldiers On Acid: 1963 British VIDEO Shows Troops Under The Influence Of LSD

This is a must watch. Environmental Graffiti has a post up on the decades of experiments western armies undertook in an attempt to develop chemical warfare to render their enemies incapacitated: In short, armies gave their own soldiers LSD, and other psychedelic drugs, and studied the effects. The Nazis did it first, then Britain, and the U.S. and other countries followed suit.

The video below is from 1963 and shows British soldiers under the influence of LSD. From the narration:

“Fifty minutes after taking the drug, radio communication had become difficult, if not impossible. But the men are still capable of sustained physical effort; however, constructive action was still attempted by those retaining a sense of responsibility despite their physical symptoms. But one hour and ten minutes after taking the drug, with one man climbing a tree to feed the birds, the troop commander gave up, admitting that he could no longer control himself or his men. He himself then relapsed into laughter.”

Video at link

Full Story Soldiers On Acid: 1963 British VIDEO Shows Troops Under The Influence Of LSD.

An Open Letter to President Obama from Michael Moore

By Michael Moore

November 30, 2009

Dear President Obama,

Do you really want to be the new “war president”? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do — destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they’ve always heard is true — that all politicians are alike. I simply can’t believe you’re about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn’t so.

It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That’s the way General Washington insisted it must be. That’s what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. “You’re fired!,” said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen. McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU had to do. Let me be blunt: We love our kids in the armed services, but we f*#&in’ hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD (he has since sought redemption).

So now you feel backed into a corner. 30 years ago this past Thursday (Thanksgiving) the Soviet generals had a cool idea — “Let’s invade Afghanistan!” Well, that turned out to be the final nail in the USSR coffin.

There’s a reason they don’t call Afghanistan the “Garden State” (though they probably should, seeing how the corrupt President Karzai, whom we back, has his brother in the heroin trade raising poppies). Afghanistan’s nickname is the “Graveyard of Empires.” If you don’t believe it, give the British a call. I’d have you call Genghis Khan but I lost his number. I do have Gorbachev’s number though. It’s + 41 22 789 1662. I’m sure he could give you an earful about the historic blunder you’re about to commit.

Full Story An Open Letter to President Obama from Michael Moore        : Information Clearing House -  ICH.

Obama’s War

by Jim Hightower

Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to war we go! Pound the drums loudly, stand with your country proudly!

Wait, wait, wait — hold it right there. Cut the music, slow the rush, and let’s all ponder what Barack Obama, Roberts Gates, Stanley McChrystal and Co. are getting us into … and whether we really want to go there. After all, just because the White House and the Pentagon brass are waving the flag and insisting that a major escalation of America’s military mission in Afghanistan is a “necessity” doesn’t mean it is … or that We the People must accept it.

Remember the wisdom of Mark Twain about war-whooping generals and politicians: “Loyalty to the country, always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.”

How many more dead and mangled American soldiers does the government’s “new” Afghan policy deserve? How many more tens of billions of dollars should we let them siphon from our public treasury to fuel their war policy? How much more of our country’s good name will they squander on what is essentially a civil war?

We’ve been lied to for nearly a decade about “success” in Iraq and Afghanistan — why do the hawks deserve our trust that this time will be different?

Their rationales for escalation are hardly confidence boosters. The goal, we’re told, is to defeat the al-Qaida terrorist network that threatens our national security. Yes, but al-Qaida is not in Afghanistan! Nor is it one network. It has metastasized, with strongholds now in Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, Yemen and Somalia, plus even having enclaves in England and France.

Full Story Obama’s War by Jim Hightower on Creators.com – A Syndicate Of Talent.

National Geographic: Did Brazilian Town With Huge Number Of Twins Result From Nazi Science Experiments? (VIDEO)

Candido Godol, a small town in Brazil, has long astonished the world with its very abnormally high level of birth rates for twins. The rate is nearly a thousand percent higher than the global average: “the 80 households in a one-square-mile area have reportedly some 38 pairs of twins. Blond, blue-eyed twins.”

National Geographic Explorer is digging into this mystery and they have come up with a pretty out there, and horrifying, theory. They investigate claims that mad Nazi scientist Joseph Mengele, who escaped to Brazil, continued his research into using twins as a way to build a perfect Aryan master race. One historian thinks Mengele succeeded, and this town is the proof.

More information from NGE can be found here. (at link)

WATCH:

Full Story National Geographic: Did Brazilian Town With Huge Number Of Twins Result From Nazi Science Experiments? (VIDEO).

OPS: Holy Crap!  The Boys From Brazil was based on a true story?!

‘World’s strongest’ beer with 32% launched

A controversial Scottish brewery has launched what it described as the world’s strongest beer – with a 32% alcohol content.

Tactical Nuclear Penguin has been unveiled by BrewDog of Fraserburgh.

BrewDog was previously branded irresponsible for an 18.2% beer called Tokyo, which it then followed with a low alcohol beer called Nanny State.

Managing director James Watt said a limited supply of Tactical Nuclear Penguin would be sold for £30 each.

Full Story BBC News – ‘World’s strongest’ beer with 32% strength launched.

OPS: This oughta make their ‘football’ games even MORE interesting.

Minnesota Woman Gives Birth To 15-Pound Baby Boy (VIDEO)

A Minnesota woman gave birth to a 15-pound 6-oz. baby boy last Monday, Nov. 23.

Axel Laverne Dolton was born three weeks premature and still wieghed in at more than twice the average birthweight of babies born in Minnesota.

Axel's mother and father, Wendi and Michael Dolton of Rochester, Minn., told the TODAY Show this weekend that they knew their infant would be big, at least 12 pounds, but they weren't expecting the baby to weigh in at 15 lbs.

Wendi Dolton says she too was a big baby, and weighed more than 10 lbs. at birth. She said doctors had to break her shoulders to deliver her.

Axel is the Dolton's third child and their first boy.

In 1955, an Italian woman set a world record when gave birth to a 22lb. 8 oz. baby boy. More recently, a 19 lb. 2 oz. baby was delivered in Indonesia earlier this year.

Full Story Minnesota Woman Gives Birth To 15-Pound Baby Boy (VIDEO).

Barack Obama: Manchurian Candidate Version 2.0

Dave Lindorff

I once wrote an article about former President George W. Bush saying that he was a perfect Manchurian candidate. That is, if his missing year when he was supposed to have been flying fighter jets with the Texas Air National Guard was actually spent in the former Soviet Union being reprogrammed as a covert KGB agent whose job it was to go back to America, win election to the White House, and proceed to destroy the US, he couldn’t have done a better job than he actually did.

Now I wonder whether President Obama might not be a perfect Manchurian Candidate of the Republican Party, or perhaps of some nefarious foreign entity—perhaps the China or the always-enigmatic Al Qaeda. How else to explain policies that have wreaked such destruction on the Democratic Party in Washington and on the nation at large.

Consider for a moment the history of this new president in whom so many invested so much hope and enthusiasm:

Almost immediately upon taking office President Obama announced that he was appointing Timothy Geithner, part of the Bush/Cheney financial team, to head up his Treasury Department. This is the same Timothy Geithner who, as head of the New York Federal Reserve, engineered the initial give-away of $85 billion to AIG, and the subsequent pass-through of tens of billions of dollars to a handful of the nation’s largest banks and investment banks—surely the largest theft of public assets by private billionaires in the history of mankind. Obama went on to name a whole gang of Wall Street crooks to run his economic policy, assuring that the recession would be not an opportunity to restore long neglected and undermined New Deal programs, but rather to crush workers and the middle class while shifting staggering sums to the wealthy.

Full Story Barack Obama: Manchurian Candidate Version 2.0 | This Can’t Be Happening!.

Birkenfeld, Ex-UBS Banker, Seeks Billions as Whistle-Blower

Bradley C. Birkenfeld was sentenced to 40 months in prison for helping rich Americans dodge their taxes. Now he is hoping for a bit more — a few billion dollars more.

Mr. Birkenfeld, a former private banker at the Swiss bank UBS, won the enmity of his peers by violating the omerta of Swiss banking: He divulged the tax evasion secrets of UBS, the world’s largest bank by assets, and its well-heeled American clients. As part of a deal with federal prosecutors, he admitted to, among other things, helping to smuggle diamonds in a tube of toothpaste.

Now, as thousands of wealthy Americans seek amnesty for keeping illicit, offshore bank accounts, Mr. Birkenfeld and his lawyers hope to use a new federal whistle-blower law to claim a multibillion-dollar reward from the American government. If they succeed — and legal experts say the odds are pretty good — it would be the largest reward of its kind.

Full Story Birkenfeld, Ex-UBS Banker, Seeks Billions as Whistle-Blower – NYTimes.com.

Flight Delayed: New Airline Fines For Tarmac Stranding

The government is imposing fines for the first time against airlines for stranding passengers on an airport tarmac, the Transportation Department said Tuesday.

The department said it has levied a precedent-setting $175,000 in fines against three airlines for their roles in the stranding of passengers overnight in a plane at Rochester, Minn., on Aug. 8.

Continental Express Flight 2816 was en route from Houston to Minneapolis carrying 47 passengers when thunderstorms forced it to divert to Rochester, where it landed about 12:30 a.m. The airport was closed and Mesaba Airlines employees – the only airline employees at the airport at the time – refused to open the terminal for the stranded passengers.

Continental Airlines and its regional airline partner ExpressJet, which operated the flight for Continental, were each fined $50,000. ExpressJet spokeswoman Kristy Nicholas said the airline can avoid paying half the fines if it spends the same amount of money on additional training for their employees on how to handle extended tarmac delays.

Full Story Flight Delayed: New Airline Fines For Tarmac Stranding.

Probability 15 JFK witnesses die UNNATURALLY within one year

This is an analysis to compute the probability of at least 15 witnesses dying UNNATURAL deaths within one year of the JFK assassination. The deaths were a combination of homicides, suicides, accidents and undetermined origin.

It's all in the numbers. Take the tinfoil hats off, put your thinking caps on..

Assuming there were 1000 witnesses, the probability that at least 15 would die UNNATURAL deaths in the year following the assassination is:

1 out of 21,230 trillion

This result is the same order of magnitude of a famous prior, though slightly different, study: An actuary engaged by the London Times in 1963 computed the probability that 18 material witnesses would die (of any cause) within 3 years of the assassination as: 1 out of 100,000 trillion.

Full Story Progressive Independent – Viewing message.

Thom and Lamar Waldron on JFK’s Legacy of Secrecy

Thom Hartmann – - Did the mob kill JFK?

YouTube – Thom and Lamar Waldron on JFK’s Legacy of Secrecy – Did the mob kill JFK?.

Reagan Didn’t End the Cold War — Leftist Intellectuals Did

Reagan was inspirational, but to claim he defeated Communism is a disservice to the millions of Eastern Europeans who struggled against great odds for their freedom.

The 20th anniversary of the 1989 Velvet Revolution that overthrew the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia was one of the most impressive civil insurrections in history. It was not the military might of NATO, but the power of nonviolent action by ordinary citizens which brought down the system. The popular uprising against the repressive system that had ruled their country for much of the previous four decades — along with comparable movements, which came to the fore that year in Poland, Hungary and East Germany — marks a great triumph of the human spirit.

These movements were largely led by democratic socialists who mobilized workers, church people, intellectuals, and others to face down the tanks with their bare hands. Yet here in the United States, we are told that it was a result of President Reagan’s militarism and the supposed inherent superiority of capitalism. It is this false narrative that has played such a major role in shifting discourse to the right in subsequent decades and has been used to discredit those struggling for a more just and egalitarian economic system and a more sane and less imperialistic foreign policy.

President Reagan’s verbal support for democracy had little credibility in many of these countries. For example, while he denounced Poland’s martial law regime, he was a strong supporter of the more repressive martial law regime then in power in NATO ally Turkey and scores of other dictatorships. In challenging left-wing governments in the Third World, Reagan gave little credence to nonviolent action and instead backed insurgents with ties to U.S.-backed dictatorships and — in the case of Afghanistan — even Islamic fundamentalists.

Full Story Reagan Didn’t End the Cold War — Leftist Intellectuals Did | World | AlterNet.

Thom and Lamar Waldron on JFK’s Legacy of Secrecy – Did the mob kill JFK?

Thom Hartmann

YouTube – Thom and Lamar Waldron on JFK’s Legacy of Secrecy – Did the mob kill JFK?.

Safest Cars 2010: Ford, Subaru, VW Win Insurance Industry Picks

Ford, Subaru and Volkswagen lead the insurance industry’s annual list of the safest new vehicles, according to a closely watched assessment used by car companies to lure safety-conscious consumers to showrooms.

The Virginia-based Insurance Institute for Highway Safety awarded its “top safety pick” on Wednesday to 19 passenger cars and eight sport utility vehicles for the 2010 model year. The institute substantially reduced the number of awards compared with 2009, because of tougher requirements for roof strength.

Ford Motor Co. and its Volvo unit received the most awards with six, followed by five awards apiece for Japanese automaker Subaru and German automaker Volkswagen AG and its Audi unit.

Full Story Safest Cars 2010: Ford, Subaru, VW Win Insurance Industry Picks.

Drilling for Scotch whiskey on frozen continent

A beverage company has asked a team to drill through Antarctica's ice for a lost cache of some vintage Scotch whiskey that has been on the rocks since a century ago.

The drillers will be trying to reach two crates of McKinlay and Co. whiskey that were shipped to the Antarctic by British polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton as part of his abandoned 1909 expedition.

Whyte & Mackay, the drinks group that now owns McKinlay and Co., has asked for a sample of the 100-year-old scotch for a series of tests that could decide whether to relaunch the now-defunct Scotch.

Workers from New Zealand's Antarctic Heritage Trust will use special drills to reach the crates, frozen in Antarctic ice under the Nimrod Expedition hut near Cape Royds.

via Drilling for Scotch whiskey on frozen continent – Yahoo! News.

The Pledge of Allegiance is un-American

Shouldn’t the government pledge allegiance to the people rather than the other way around?

On Monday, Oct. 5, at an elementary school in Washington County, Ark., Will Phillips, a precocious 10-year-old who had been promoted from third to fifth grade, refused to join his class in standing and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. His parents have gay friends, and Will claimed that the denial of gay marriage means that the U.S. lacks “liberty and justice for all.” After refusing to recite the pledge for several days, the boy was sent to the principal’s office when he told his teacher, “With all due respect, ma’am, you can go jump off a bridge,” a sentiment shared by many 10-year-olds who are not political activists.

Flaps over the Pledge of Allegiance occur with dreary regularity. In 2000 Michael Newdow, an atheist and the parent of a child in California’s public schools, filed a lawsuit claiming that the pledge was unconstitutional because of its inclusion of the phrase “under God.” He won in federal circuit court, but in 2004 the Supreme Court chickened out and, to avoid addressing the issue, tossed out the case on the argument that as a noncustodial parent he did not have standing to sue. Newdow is a party in a subsequent case that is working its way through the courts. Back in 1940, the Supreme Court ruled that Jehovah’s Witnesses could be forced to recite the pledge, and then, in 1943, in the midst of a war against totalitarian states, the court reversed its earlier opinion.

Individuals like Phillips and Newdow who publicly challenge the Pledge of Allegiance can expect to provoke not only harassment by their neighbors but also cyclones of bloviation emanating from elected leaders who, unwilling to fix healthcare or pay for infrastructure, always have time to defend the pledge or the flag. In response to the Newdow case, 150 members of Congress gathered on the steps of the Capitol to recite the pledge, stressing “under God.” To show its understanding of the phrase “liberty and justice for all,” the Republican-controlled House in 2004 passed a law stripping the federal courts of jurisdiction in cases involving the pledge; the bill died in the Senate, proving that the system of checks and balances sometimes succeeds in its intended function of thwarting mob rule.

via The Pledge of Allegiance is un-American – Salon.com.

OPS: New pledge to begin every daily session of either house and every private meeting etc:

“I pledge allegiance to The Constitution of the United States of America, and to the American People for whom it stands…….”

Ralph Nader: “Only the Super Rich Can Save Us” – C-SPAN Video Library

Ralph Nader talked about his novel “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” (Seven Stories Press; September 22, 2009). In his book he speculates on what could happen if America's wealthiest individuals decided to work for the collective good. Mr. Nader, a consumer activist, had previously campaigned to be the president of the United States as the Green Party nominee and as an independent. This event of the 26th Miami Book Fair International took place Sunday, November 15, 2009, 10:00 a.m., in the Chapman Conference Center of Miami Dade College, Wolfson Campus. Included in program ID 289996-1.

50 mins.

via ["Only the Super Rich Can Save Us"] – C-SPAN Video Library.

Obama’s Strongest Supporters Suffering the Most in Recession, While Elites Thrive

By Bob Herbert,

The young, the black and the poor are among those who are being hammered unmercifully in this long and cruel economic downturn that the financial elites are telling us is over.

President Obama’s strongest supporters during the presidential campaign were the young, the black and the poor — and they are among those who are being hammered unmercifully in this long and cruel economic downturn that the financial elites are telling us is over.

If the elites are correct, if the Great Recession really is over, then these core supporters of the president are being left far, far behind — as are blue-collar workers of every ethnic and political persuasion. Nobody wants to talk seriously about class in America, but the elites are smiling and perusing their stock portfolios while the checklist of Americans locked in depressionlike circumstances just grows and grows: construction and manufacturing workers, young men without college degrees (especially young black and Hispanic men), teenagers, and those who were already poor when the recession began.

The economic environment for all of these groups is an absolute and utter disaster.

via Obama’s Strongest Supporters Suffering the Most in Recession, While Elites Thrive | | AlterNet.

America Is One Big Clunker and No Amount of Cash Will Buy Us a New One

By James Howard Kunstler, .

We continue to be childishly delusional about our dark economic and environmental prospects. Unfortunately, reality isn't amenable to lies and spin.

In The Long Emergency (2005, Atlantic Monthly Press), I said that we ought to expect the federal government to become increasingly impotent and ineffectual — that this would be a hallmark of the times. In fact, I said that any enterprise organized at the colossal scale would function poorly in years ahead, whether it was a government, a state university, a national chain retail company, or a giant midwestern farm. It is characteristic of the compressive contraction our society faces that giant hypercomplex systems will wobble and fail. We should expect this.

It’s tragic that the avatar of hopefulness himself, Barack Obama, stepped into his role at exactly the moment when this set of conditions was getting traction. It is sure to get worse, and there are going to be a lot of disappointed people out there who will be suffering terrible losses and real pain in daily life. Societies don’t do well when the public falls into the broad despair that is the opposite of hope. That’s when the long knives and the tribal animosities come out and things get smashed.
Within the context of conventional party politics — the kind that has been baseline “normal” in the USA for a long time — we see this playing out in two factions that are increasingly out-of-touch with reality. The Obama government has made itself hostage to a toxic form of pretense and lying. In order to sustain the wish for “hope” — if not hope itself — the President and his White House advisors along with his cabinet appointments, are pretending that the historical forces of compressive contraction are not underway. They’re flat-out lying about the employment figures issued in the government’s name. They’re willfully ignoring the comprehensive bankruptcy gripping government at all levels. They refuse to bring the law to bear against “the malefactors of great wealth.” They appear to not understand the epochal energy scarcity problem the whole world faces, or its implications for industrial economies. Most of all, they persist in promoting the lie that this economy can return to the prior state of reckless debt accumulation (a.k.a “consumerism”) that has made us so ridiculous and unhealthy.

via America Is One Big Clunker and No Amount of Cash Will Buy Us a New One | Environment | AlterNet.

How to pass healthcare reform

Garrison Keillor

The way to fight Republicans is to make them think you like them. It’ll scare them into passing the thing

There are some things we will never understand. Death, for one. I overheard a woman in the drugstore say, “He went into the hospital yesterday and he was eating his supper and then he fell asleep and then he died. I don’t get it.” She didn’t seem grief-stricken, just uncomprehending. (Why did it have to happen now?) The paranoia that has seized the Republican Party is beyond my understanding. So is the physics of cord entanglement: how two power cords set separately in a briefcase become so complexly intertwined in only a few hours. And why do you find the rudest people in first class? Passengers in steerage accept their misery with stoical grace, while the privileged sit in luxury in a cold rage.

And then there is Washington. I maintain that Congress would do better work if it moved to Buffalo, N.Y., and the Honorables had to experience blizzards and snow shoveling and cold weather, which stimulate intelligence — SAT scores rise as you approach the Canadian border. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution says that Congress could not convene in Buffalo.

The Founding Fathers intended the Senate to be a fount of wisdom flowing, but when you consider Saxby Chambliss and Jim Bunning, John Ensign, Jim DeMint, James Inhofe, who look as if they’ve been banged on the head too many times, and the moon-faced Mitch McConnell, your faith in democracy is challenged severely. Any legislative body in which 41 senators from rural states that together represent 10 percent of the population can filibuster you to death is going to be flat-footed, on the verge of paralysis, no matter what. Any time 10 percent of the people can stop 90 percent, it’s like driving a bus with a brake pedal for each passenger. That’s why Congress has a public approval rating of 25 percent.

Full Story Healthcare Reform – Salon.com.

Is the Fort Hood Shootings George W Bush’s fault?

Thom Hartmann

YouTube – Is the Fort Hood Shootings George W Bush’s fault?.

Reaction to Fort Hood–Stupidity Beyond Belief

Richard C. Cook »

Note: I wrote this article Monday night and feel mine was a normal human response to a horrendous event. Already, however, anomalies with the official story are coming out. How many shooters were there? How could a lone gunman have such a free hand in attacking a huge facility full of combat veterans? Was Hasan “set-up” to take the blame? We may never know. My intuition tells me it was the act of a man who felt trapped within the system.

The United States military is engaged in the conquest of the world. This is not a secret. The strategy has been spelled out repeatedly by official Defense Department policy statements (”full-spectrum dominance”), think-tank studies (PNAC), and official government action by the president and Congress (the biggest war budget in human history).

It’s what led to the Reagan Doctrine which was the practice of picking off one small nation at a time. It’s what led George H.W. Bush to invade Panama and Iraq and the Clinton administration to destroy Yugoslavia. 9/11, whoever did it, followed by the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war, was a convenient springboard for the current phase involving Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Next up: Obama’s impending assault on Iran, whether done with U.S. forces or Israeli proxies. The showdown with Russia and China is clearly on the agenda, subject to intense planning by thousands of uniformed and civilian analysts who earn a lot of taxpayer money.

Ft. Hood, Texas, is a place where men and women in uniform get ready to deploy in order to carry out all these plots and schemes. Some of those deployed are killed and never return. Some come back alive, then kill other people or themselves. Who can blame them for serving? They too need to earn enough for themselves and their families to eat. And jobs now are sparse. It’s what’s assuring the military meets its recruitment quotas.

Full Story Richard C. Cook » Blog Archive » Reaction to Fort Hood–Stupidity Beyond Belief.

Stress Beyond Belief

Bob Herbert, NYTimes OpEd

The authorities will deal with Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who is accused of bringing the nightmare of mass murder into the sanctuary of a military base on American soil. But the rest of us need to look very closely at the stress beyond belief that is being endured by so many other men and women in the armed forces — men and women who are serving gallantly and with dignity, who have not taken out their frustrations on one another, and who deserve better from the broader society.

Simply stated, we cannot continue sending service members into combat for three tours, four tours, five tours and more without paying a horrendous price in terms of the psychological well-being of the troops and their families, and the overall readiness of the armed forces to protect the nation.

The breakdowns are already occurring and will only get worse as the months and years pass and we remain engaged in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. None of this is the military’s fault. There have not been nearly enough people willing to serve in the all-volunteer armed forces to properly staff two wars that have already gone on for the better part of a decade.

I spent some time on the West Coast recently interviewing doctors and researchers studying the enormous problem of troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq with some form of mental health disorder, most commonly depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D. The caseloads are off the charts, and very often the P.T.S.D. or depression (or both) are accompanied by substance abuse, problems with anger management, domestic violence and family breakdown.

Full Story Op-Ed Columnist – Stress Beyond Belief – NYTimes.com.

Do the Teabagger’s get some things right?

Thom Hartmann

YouTube – Do the Teabagger’s get some things right?.

How the Iraq War Destroyed the US Economy

Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Wars reduce the GDP, destroy jobs, reduce productivity, and increase the trade deficit! If wars are ‘bad’ for the economy, then how are they sold so easily? The quick response: they are sold with focus group tested bullshit!

There’s a ‘living’ in killing, we are told! There is a more opulent living in the commission mass murder which requires the construction of tanks, smart bombs, and fighter jets –the MIC, in other words. But that’s all just snake oil for idiots and Republicans!

That wars are good for the economy is just a bald-faced lie cooked up by the defense lobby for whom killing IS a living but only for the shrinking one percent who benefit: the Military/Industrial complex, truly MURDER INC. Fact is war is most often disastrous for the economy.

Full Story The Existentialist Cowboy: How the Iraq War Destroyed the US Economy.

TALIBAN = 9/11?? Afghanistan by Hypnosis

Greg Palast »

On September 11, 2001, my office building, the World Trade Center, was attacked by al Qaeda, a murder cult of Saudi Arabians, funded by Saudi Arabians. And so, in response to the Saudis’ attack, America invaded … Afghanistan. Like, HUH?

And here we go again. New York Times headline last Friday: “Pakistani Army, In Its Campaign In Taliban Stronghold, Finds A Hint Of 9/11.”

Google it and you’ll find the Times report repeated and amplified 5,785 times more.

Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11.

Your eyelids are getting heavy. Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11.

It’s the latest hit from the same crew that brought you Saddam = 9/11 and its twin chant, Saddam = WMD, Dick Cheney’s chimerical tropes which the New York Times’ Judith Miller happily channeled to the paper’s front page.

And they’re at it again.

Full Story Greg Palast » TALIBAN = 9/11??Afghanistan by Hypnosis.

America the Betrayed

Richard C. Cook »

If you want to get an idea of what America once was like, read the poems of Walt Whitman. Whitman was born on Long Island in 1819 and grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. His family was poor, but even though he left school at the age of 11 he gave himself an education by reading and working in the printing shop of a newspaper until he gradually became a published writer. He worked as a teacher and news reporter and owned his own newspaper by the age of 20.

In 1848 Whitman was a delegate to the founding convention of the Free Soil Party. During the Civil War he worked as a nurse in Union military hospitals and held several government jobs, including interviewing Confederate prisoners for pardons. Some of his greatest poems came from his war experiences, including his famous elegy upon the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, “Oh Captain! My Captain!” His great collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, was self-published. He died a national hero in 1892 in Camden, New Jersey, where thousands of people came to pay their respects.

Whitman has always been viewed as a poet of the people, in contrast to the pretentious dandies from academia who have controlled official American culture for much of our history. He wrote of workmen, farmers, sailors, soldiers, lovers, criminals, and prostitutes.

In the text of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, he wrote of himself as, “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.” He had discovered a great secret, one that is known to everyone who is young at heart: that the free individual, always potentially a “kosmos,” stands at a much higher level in the scale of creation than any man-made collective.

Full Story Richard C. Cook » Blog Archive » America the Betrayed.

Democracy and Capitalism Are NOT One and the Same

If Michael Moore had arrived on the film scene as a conservative Republican activist in 1989, he might be heralded by Fox News today as a major American hero, and he might even be able to get a fair review in the so-called “liberal” New York Times.

Unfortunately for him and his message, he started making movies during the late 1980s, when the presidencies of Republicans Ronald Reagan and then George Herbert Walker Bush made them the target of his outsourcing ire. Moore first became famous for his 1989 film “Roger and Me,” a documentary about what happened to his home town of Flint, Michigan, after General Motors closed its automobile factories and moved to Mexico, where workers made much less.

Since then, Moore has been known as a critic of the “neoliberal” view of globalization, according to Wikipedia, although that term goes right over the heads of most of the working people in the US who should be watching his movies and learning something from them. That is the sad state of political dialogue in the good old US of A.

I mean, here’s a regular Joe, who could be comfortable drinking a beer with George W. Bush, who should be fighting side by side with the conservatives who oppose the big government bailout of Wall Street banks.

Full Story t r u t h o u t | Democracy and Capitalism Are NOT One and the Same.

Older Planes, Third World Standards a Lethal Mix

A new study calls for standardizing aircraft maintenance across the globe, but until then, says one co-author, the answer just might be yes.

In the first days after it fell into the Indian Ocean in late June, Yemenia Airways Flight 626 appeared to be a typical example of slack practices by airlines operated from Africa and the Middle East.

The flight started in Paris on a newer plane but switched to a 19-year-old Airbus A310-324 for the second leg of its journey from Sana’a, Yemen, to Moroni in the Comoros Islands, which the pilot approached in high winds. Out of 153 crew members and passengers only one survived, a teenager named Bahia Bakari, who floated until her rescue by clinging to debris. European officials talked of banning Yemenia after the crash, but the cause remains unknown — the flight’s black box hadn’t been recovered — and they backed away from the idea in mid-July.

The real problem exposed by the aftermath of Flight 626 — how to make sure old planes are fit to fly by standardizing worldwide aircraft maintenance — has opened a rift in civil aviation as wide as the wings of a 747.

Full Story Business & Economics Articles | Older Planes, Third World Standards a Lethal Mix | Miller-McCune Online Magazine.

Why Democrats Must Change or Perish

by Len Hart,

The GOP is a disciplined monolith. Even when the GOP screws up and runs an idiot like George W. Bush or John McCain, there is the danger that he will win because, on election day, the GOP will close ranks, hold their noses and vote the party line. Liberal Democrats for whom Clinton or Obama are too conservative will pout and stay home. Worse –conservative Democrats will join the evil minions and vote for a Bush Jr or a John McCain.

The Democratic party, meanwhile, doesn’t have the luxury of settling for a ‘base hit’ in a game in which there are only home runs. For the Democrats, that is! The GOP has the luxury of just putting a man on base! Democrats don’t have the luxury of nominating anything less than a JFK or an FDR.

The left wing world wide is a disorganized amalgam of differing opinions, sitting ducks for a disciplined, Nazi-like top down party like the GOP where issues are not derived from the people but from focus groups, consultants and think tanks who literally manufacture issues based upon how well they ‘test’. What really hurts is that for their talk about ‘the base’, the GOP owes its allegiance to the richest one percent of the US population, a moneyed segment that plays and wins because it writes the rules.

Full Story The Existentialist Cowboy: Why Democrats Must Change or Perish.

Buffett’s big bet: $34B on 2nd-largest railroad

The biggest name in investing is making what he calls an “all-in wager” on the U.S. economy – $34 billion to own a railroad that hauls everything from corn to cars across the country.

The acquisition of Burlington Northern Santa Fe, the nation’s second-largest railroad, would be the biggest ever for Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway investment company.

It’s a natural fit for the Oracle of Omaha, a city with a special place in railroad history. It was the starting point for the westward push of the transcontinental railroad. Today, Omaha is the headquarters of Union Pacific, and BNSF trains rumble through every day.

In a statement, Buffett, whose investing decisions are carefully scrutinized by the world of finance, voiced confidence in the railroad industry.

“Most important of all, however, it’s an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States. I love these bets,” he said Tuesday.

Full Story Business & Technology | Buffett’s big bet: $34B on 2nd-largest railroad | Seattle Times Newspaper.

Is This as Good as It Gets From Obama?

Bill Maher:

Yeah, I’m disappointed, too. I thought we were sweeping into power; I thought change meant Change. I believed all that talk about another First 100 Days, a la Roosevelt. Well, that didn’t happen. The question is, is this as good as it gets from Obama, or is he pacing himself? He may have a four and eight-year plan and they included a first year of just gettin’ to know you and not gonna rock the boat too much. Well, Mission Accomplished on that.

It’s still too early to lose hope in a guy as smart and talented as Barack Obama. But I would counsel him to remember: If you’re going undercover to infiltrate how Washington works, so you become one of them for a while, to gain their confidence, well, it can be just like all those movies where a cop goes deep, deep, DEEP undercover with drug people and — fuck, he’s a drug addict, too!

Logic tells me that really smart guys like Obama and Rahm Emanuel know better what they’re doing than I do. They certainly know things I don’t know. I think we have the same general goals and beliefs. And this is what they do for a living — I wouldn’t even try it. But I will never stop having this doubt: that maybe if they had really charged in there riding the forceful energy of the historic election, and acted like it was an emergency moment — which it was — they could have gotten some big victories right up front, and there really could have been an historic “first hundred days” for this administration and the country. Instead of what happened, which is the Obamas got a dog. It could have worked — the country had given its endorsement to “…and now for something completely different.” There might have been a way to knock the Republicans back on their heels right away, with the argument that “The American people demanded we make these changes, and you are unpatriotic to stand in their way.”

Full Story Bill Maher: Is This as Good as It Gets From Obama?.

The Kennedy Asssassination: New Details about the Transfer of Power

Exactly when did doctors give up their efforts to save Kennedy’s life? And when did Lyndon Johnson learn that JFK was dead? These are the central questions that need to be addressed in understanding the transfer of power on November 22, 1963. The questions may be obvious; the answers are not.

The Warren Commission concluded that Kennedy was shot at 12:30 pm. He was declared dead at 1:00 pm, and Johnson was informed at 1:20 pm. Most authors writing about the assassination, even those who question the conclusions of the Warren Commission, have accepted this timeline.

New documents recently opened to the public call into question key parts of this timeline. The first piece of evidence is a long memorandum prepared by Parkland hospital administrator Jack Price, who was standing outside Trauma Room #1 as President Kennedy was wheeled in on a stretcher. Price gave the memorandum, which outlined his actions over the next few hours, to author William Manchester. Last year, Manchester’s children granted me access to their father’s rich collection of materials housed at Wesleyan University for my new book, The Kennedy Assassination – 24 Hours After.

Full Story Steven M. Gillon: The Kennedy Asssassination: New Details about the Transfer of Power.

Colour-Coded Revolutions and the Origins of World War III

Introduction

Following US geo-strategy in what Brzezinski termed the “global Balkans,” the US government has worked closely with major NGOs to “promote democracy” and “freedom” in former Soviet republics, playing a role behind the scenes in fomenting what are termed “colour revolutions,” which install US and Western-friendly puppet leaders to advance the interests of the West, both economically and strategically.

Part 2 of this essay on “The Origins of World War III” analyzes the colour revolutions as being a key stratagem in imposing the US-led New World Order. The “colour revolution” or “soft” revolution strategy is a covert political tactic of expanding NATO and US influence to the borders of Russia and even China; following in line with one of the primary aims of US strategy in the New World Order: to contain China and Russia and prevent the rise of any challenge to US power in the region.

These revolutions are portrayed in the western media as popular democratic revolutions, in which the people of these respective nations demand democratic accountability and governance from their despotic leaders and archaic political systems. However, the reality is far from what this utopian imagery suggests. Western NGOs and media heavily finance and organize opposition groups and protest movements, and in the midst of an election, create a public perception of vote fraud in order to mobilize the mass protest movements to demand “their” candidate be put into power. It just so happens that “their” candidate is always the Western US-favoured candidate, whose campaign is often heavily financed by Washington; and who proposes US-friendly policies and neoliberal economic conditions. In the end, it is the people who lose out, as their genuine hope for change and accountability is denied by the influence the US wields over their political leaders.

The soft revolutions also have the effect of antagonizing China and Russia, specifically, as it places US protectorates on their borders, and drives many of the former Warsaw Pact nations to seek closer political, economic and military cooperation. This then exacerbates tensions between the west and China and Russia; which ultimately leads the world closer to a potential conflict between the two blocs.

Full Story Colour-Coded Revolutions and the Origins of World War III.

How the GOP is Killing America

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The US is much, much worse off these days than Mexico which often takes the blame for the drug trade and ‘income disparities’. Fact is –income and wealth inequality is much, much worse in the US than in Mexico. At the end of the Bush Sr era, the upper quintile alone had benefited from the Reagan tax cuts. So –where do the GOP ‘yankees’ get off aiming its demagoguery at Mexico?

The piddly amounts of drugs sold across the border are a strawman –peanuts compared to the heist of US wealth pulled off by just one percent of the US population!

The GOP is either nuts or crooked or both! I often wonder what the US might have been if right wing psychopaths had not demagogued every war or every so-called ‘crisis’ and in ways that enriched only their ‘base’! The end result is that just one percent of the entire population owns more than some 95 percent of the rest of us combined!

And if Mexican drugs are sold in the US –what of it? Isn’t that just good ol’ laissez-faire, right wing, GOP ‘free enterprise’. How long would that evil drug trade last if ‘yankees’ were not lined up to buy? And what percentage of the GOP is ‘hooked’ on cocaine? How long would the board traffic last if ‘white shirted’, clean shaven GOP faithful were not lined up to buy?

Full Story The Existentialist Cowboy: How the GOP is Killing America.

Dangerous People Needed

“The Most Dangerous Man in America”

David Swanson

On Thursday night I had the privilege of viewing a premier of a film together with its star. The theater was in the U.S. Capitol, and the film was “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers” ( http://www.mostdangerousman.org ). This is a powerfully and engagingly constructed film about one of the most effective instances of whistle-blowing in our nation’s history.

Ellsberg risked life in prison to expose the lies that had taken this nation into war in Vietnam, lies from Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. And Nixon believed that Ellsberg had incriminating documents on his own lies, which led Henry Kissinger to call Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America.”

Like most whistle-blowers, Ellsberg was not an outside reformer. He had promoted and advanced the war from inside the Pentagon. He had tried to be a force for moderation. But peace activists reached his conscience and persuaded him that he could and must do more. Those close to him supported his decision. Colleagues took similar risks to assist him. Major media outlets risked their futures to publish what Ellsberg gave them and to interview him while he was in hiding from the law. A member of Congress (former senator Mike Gravel, who was present on Thursday) risked his future to read the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record. The Supreme Court ruled against the president of the United States. And Ellsberg became a brilliant spokesman for his cause.

A lot of factors combined to create an incredible impact from the leaking of one 7,000-page pile of documents. This exposure helped end the war in Vietnam, and helped put some spine into our media outlets, our Congress, and our courts’ treatment of the First Amendment.

However, Ellsberg expected more. He expected Americans to change their thinking about wars. He expected us not to fall for obvious lies about wars anymore. He thought that people would digest and synthesize the untold story he exposed. So, in some ways, he was of course disappointed. And, of course, what good he did for the media and Congress quickly wore off.

Full Story Dangerous People Needed.

Neo-Nazi Sam Johnson, Leads Itty-Bitty Minn Protest & Gets Chased Away by Crowd; What a Pathetic Pussy

The mainstreaming of the radical right: Conservatives run and hide from their culpability in spreading hate

Full Story YouTube – Neo-Nazi Fuckhead, Sam Johnson, Leads Itty-Bitty Minn Protest & Gets Chased Away by Crowd; What a Pathetic Pussy.

Unlearning the CIA

The Education of Bob Baer

Unlearning the CIA

By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

When I first met ex-CIA officer Bob Baer in Washington DC, I thought, The guy looks nothing like George Clooney. But Clooney, who won an Academy Award playing Baer in the film Syriana, had in fact captured something about the posture, the pathos, the weariness of a CIA man who spends too many years getting filthy in the field – in the peculiar mire of the Middle East, no less – risking his life and being ignored for it. Clooney in the film cycles among the suits at Langley, the cubicled bureaucracy, looking somewhat like the only sane man in a mental ward.

So it was with Bob Baer in DC – unfamiliar ground, “a city of crazies,” he said. He was heading back home, out west, to the little mountain village of Silverton, and when I met him there a few months later, he took me on the big tour. Silverton is a mining outpost turned tourist stop, but it still resonates with the dissident manners of men who dig silver out of the ground looking for paydirt and don’t like the authorities interfering. The town is accessed by high passes where tractor trailers regularly fall off the cliffs in winter, and it has only one paved road, Main Street, and it has a church with upside-down crosses. Several residents – so Baer assured me – are licensed to own fully-automatic machineguns. “It’s to shoot at the black helicopters,” he laughed but didn’t seem to be joking. The locals tell me the place has a tendency to welcome “people who messed up in some other life and come here to be nobody.” I think Bob Baer came here partly because the CIA claimed he messed up. Maybe he did. Depends on who you talk to in this business, which is as it should be among professional liars.

Because maybe it was the Agency that messed up – this seems to be a CIA habit, the kind of habit that fails to see Al Qaeda on the horizon, that gets the country mired in Iraq, that makes you wonder, as a tax-paying citizen, whether the agency in its current incarnation has a reason for being other than to squander your money. It’s something the citizens in Silverton might grouse about.

Full Story Christopher Ketcham: Unlearning the CIA.

Dog Spends $62 While Owners Sleep (VIDEO)

A chewed remote control, a dog, and $62.50 less in the bank account. For Greg Stroke, this could only mean one thing: his dog had purchased 5,000 Xbox points — worth $62 — while he and his girlfriend were asleep. Stroke saved his credit card information on his remote control to make it easier to buy video games using Microsoft Xbox points — so easy, in fact, that a dog could do it. When the dog chewed the remote, the points were bought. “i just wish they’d make it a little harder to purchase points,” Stroke lamented.

Full Story Dog Spends $62 While Owners Sleep (VIDEO).

An Imperial Strategy for a New World Order: The Origins of World War III

Introduction

In the face of total global economic collapse, the prospects of a massive international war are increasing. Historically, periods of imperial decline and economic crisis are marked by increased international violence and war. The decline of the great European empires was marked by World War I and World War II, with the Great Depression taking place in the intermediary period.

Currently, the world is witnessing the decline of the American empire, itself a product born out of World War II. As the post-war imperial hegemon, America ran the international monetary system and reigned as champion and arbitrator of the global political economy.

To manage the global political economy, the US has created the single largest and most powerful military force in world history. Constant control over the global economy requires constant military presence and action.

Now that both the American empire and global political economy are in decline and collapse, the prospect of a violent end to the American imperial age is drastically increasing.

This essay is broken into three separate parts. The first part covers US-NATO geopolitical strategy since the end of the Cold War, at the beginning of the New World Order, outlining the western imperial strategy that led to the war in Yugoslavia and the “War on Terror.” Part 2 analyzes the nature of “soft revolutions” or “colour revolutions” in US imperial strategy, focusing on establishing hegemony over Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Part 3 analyzes the nature of the imperial strategy to construct a New World Order, focusing on the increasing conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa; and the potential these conflicts have for starting a new world war with China and Russia.

Full Story An Imperial Strategy for a New World Order: The Origins of World War III.

Al-Qaeda Outwitted Bush, Neocons

By Robert Parry

As security worsens in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is clear that al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies outwitted President George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisers by tying down U.S. forces in Iraq for five years while the Islamic militants rebuilt their forces for the war on their “central front.”

The growing U.S. casualty list in Afghanistan and the Taliban advances in nuclear-armed Pakistan also underscore the significance of a late 2005 message from a top al-Qaeda operative, known as Atiyah, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was then leading al-Qaeda’s faction in Iraq.

“Prolonging the war [in Iraq] is in our interest,” Atiyah said in a letter that upbraided Zarqawi for his reckless and hasty actions. Atiyah, who is believed to be a Libyan named Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, emphasized the need for Zarqawi to operate more deliberately in order to build political strength and drag out the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

[The Atiyah letter was discovered by the U.S. military after Zarqawi was killed by an airstrike in June 2006. To view the “prolonging the war” excerpt in a translation published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, click here. To read the entire letter, click here.]

Full Story Consortiumnews.com.

Did Bush Era Mark the End of American Global Dominance?

Video: Oxford professor Timothy Garton Ash discusses the period from 9/11 to the election of President Barack Obama, which he calls the “decade without a name.” Ash argues the period will be viewed as “the last decade in which the United States and the West as a whole was clearly setting the agenda of world politics.”

One of Britain’s most influential and admired commentators presents his latest volume of dispatches from a troubled world. Timothy Garton Ash witnessed the fall of Milosevic in Serbia, visited Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, watched the Orange revolution in Ukraine and talked to militant mullahs in Iran.

He discusses these pivotal moments from the past decade, and shares his critical reflections on the future of Europe, multiculturalism and terrorism.

Against every post-modernist in the world, Timothy Garton Ash maintains that there are facts, and that establishing them is both a political and a moral imperative – and an aesthetic one, too. – The RSA

Timothy Garton Ash is the author of nine books of political writing or “history of the present,” which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last thirty years. He is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and he writes a weekly column in the Guardian which is widely syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Full Story YouTube – Did Bush Era Mark the End of American Global Dominance?.

A New Wrinkle in the JFK Assassination Story

This month will mark the 46th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A recently declassified oral history by Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, President Kennedy’s military aide on the Dallas trip, sheds new light on the critical hours after the shooting. McHugh makes startling claims about Lyndon Johnson’s behavior in the wake of the assassination.

The interview with McHugh, originally conducted for the John F. Kennedy Library in 1978, remained closed for 31 years. It was finally declassified in the spring of 2009. I just happened to be working at the Kennedy Library on the day the interview was opened to the public and have used it for the first time in my new book, The Kennedy Assassination — 24 Hours After.

After being informed at Parkland Hospital that Kennedy was dead, Johnson raced back to Air Force One, where he waited for Mrs. Kennedy and the body of the slain president, and made preparations to take the Oath of Office. Back at the hospital, the Kennedy group loaded the body into a coffin, forced their way past a local justice of the peace, and hurried back to Love Field for the long ride back to Washington.

Full Story Steven M. Gillon: A New Wrinkle in the JFK Assassination Story.

Coyotes kill musician Taylor Mitchell while hiking in Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Canada

Two coyotes attacked a promising young musician as she was hiking alone in a national park in eastern Canada, and authorities said she died Wednesday of her injuries.

The victim was identified as Taylor Mitchell, 19, a singer-songwriter from Toronto who was touring to promote her new album on the East Coast.

She was hiking solo on a trail in Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Nova Scotia on Tuesday when the attack occurred. She was airlifted to a Halifax hospital in critical condition and died Wednesday morning, authorities said.

Coyotes, which also are known as prairie wolves, are found from Central America to the United States and Canada.

via Coyotes kill musician Taylor Mitchell while hiking in Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Canada.

Blue Collar Guy

If everyone in America listened to these informative songs, we could turn this country around.

via Economyincrisis.org – America’s Economic Report – Daily.

Lieberman Twists the Knife

Robert Scheer

Is there a more hypocritical figure in American politics than Joe Lieberman? The Connecticut senator declared Tuesday that he would support a filibuster of any health care reform bill that has a public option—even the version with the “trigger” compromise accepted by Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe—because it might cost money.

“I think that a lot of people may think that the public option is free,” said Lieberman, one of the Senate’s big spenders, in a suddenly frugal mood. “It’s not. It’s going to cost the taxpayers and people that have health insurance now, and if it doesn’t, it’s going to add terribly to our national debt.”

This from a senator who, as much as anyone, helped run up the national debt since 9/11 by pushing to raise the military budget to its highest level since World War II. It is a budget inflated by enormous expenditures on high-tech weaponry irrelevant to combating terror, such as the $2-billion-a-piece submarines—produced in his home state of Connecticut—that he claimed were needed to combat al-Qaida, a landlocked enemy holed up in caves. The same week that he and others in Congress passed a $680-billion defense bill larded with pork of the sort he has always supported, Lieberman is worried about the impact of a very limited public option on the debt.

via Truthdig – Reports – Lieberman Twists the Knife.

Ex-Team Executive Sounds an Alarm on N.F.L. Head Trauma

TAMPA, Fla. — Gay Culverhouse used to be the woman in the men’s locker room. Twenty years later, she’s their friend in the emergency room.

Sitting at a restaurant here Friday, only a few miles from where she once served as president of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, she reconnected with a few company retirees. There was Richard Wood, the fearsome linebacker known as Batman whose searing migraine headaches and tendency to get lost while driving in his own neighborhood leave him scared for his future. Across the table was Scot Brantley, an even harder hitter through the 1980s whose short-term memory is gone. Then there was Brandi Winans, former wife of the former Buccaneers lineman Jeff Winans, who slipped into such inexplicable depression, fogginess and fury several years ago that their marriage splintered.

Culverhouse looked at disability forms, listened to stories, offered counsel and expressed regret. She has done the same via telephone this year for another half-dozen former Buccaneers with increasing cognitive problems in their 40s or 50s. Having followed story after story detailing how N.F.L. retirees are experiencing various forms of dementia at several times the national rate, and listening to the N.F.L. and its doctors cast doubt that football played any role in their problems, she has emerged after 15 years to reconnect with her players and sound an alarm.

Culverhouse has blood cancer and renal failure and has been told she has six months to live. She will testify before the House Judiciary Committee at its hearing on football brain injuries on Wednesday to, as she put it, “tell the truth about what’s going on while I still have the chance.”

via Ex-Team Executive Sounds an Alarm on N.F.L. Head Trauma – NYTimes.com.

Minnesota judge: CIA ‘probably misled’ panel he led on JFK assassination P:S

U.S. District Judge John R. Tunheim says the Central Intelligence Agency “probably misled” a panel he led in the 1990s seeking documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. That’s because the CIA didn’t tell Tunheim that its liaison to a panel that preceded his Assassination Records Review Board had been involved with anti-Castro Cubans in Miami who tangled with Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963.

The New York Times reported Tunheim’s remarks in a front-page story Saturday on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by Minneapolis-born journalist Jefferson Morley, formerly an editor at the Washington Post and past national editorial director for the Center for Independent Media, the Minnesota Independent’s nonprofit parent.

Full Story: Minnesota judge: CIA ‘probably misled’ panel he led on JFK assassination | Twin Cities Daily Planet | Minneapolis – St. Paul.

OPS: Oh gee…. ya really think so?
Let’s remember that Poppy Bush was in teh CIA at the time

7 Stories That Prove You Don’t Need A Car To Get A DUI

People do a lot of stupid crap when drunk, and if we as a society are lucky, they get caught. Here are seven examples of folks dumb enough to get arrested for drunk driving in “vehicles” that were not cars–not even close.

Note: The two incident in the slideshow from outside the U.S. didn’t result in “DUIs” but the drivers of the “vehicles” in each case were punished.

Full Story: 7 Stories That Prove You Don’t Need A Car To Get A DUI.

Failed State Update with Krugman and Roberts

Len Hart

In theory, a near worthless dollar is great for American manufacturers, American jobs. Lower costs for American goods means US exports should rise, reducing our trade deficit and helping pay off the national debt! That’s the theory, the rationale behind Richard Nixon’s decision to take the US off the so-called ‘gold standard’ back in the 70s.

The reality is this: despite the right wing’s subversion of the dollar, despite the deals Nixon and subsequent GOP regimes cut with China, US exports have decreased, US jobs have decreased, the US standard of living has decreased as just one percent of the population has prospered at everyone else’s expense. That has been the case at least since Ronald Reagan’s tax cut of 1982, a tax cut which benefited only this rich base of GOP/right wing supporters. These downward trends have defined US history since the 1970s despite temporary gains made during the Carter and Clinton years. I have previously posted the key ‘stats’ which prove this to have been the case.

Check out the CIA’s World Fact Book which lists the US at the very bottom of the list with the world’s largest negative Current Account Balance. China, which pegs the Yuan to the dollar, is at the top of the list with the world’s largest positive Current Account Balance. If the GOP had been correct, US exports should have risen! The ‘balance of trade deficit’ i.e, the NEGATIVE Current Account Balance would have been reduced! If the GOP had been correct, the US could have paid off huge amounts of national debt run up in incompetent and dishonest GOP regimes. The US might have survived decades of conservative budgets which forced the US to borrow from other countries. But –not surprisingly –things have not worked out as the GOP would have you believe.

Full Story: The Existentialist Cowboy: Failed State Update with Krugman and Roberts.

A teenager questions a Republican’s use of the word freedom.

YouTube – Sigh… Republicans.

AARP’s Tradition of Betrayal

Founded in 1958 for aged 50 and older Americans, AARP call itself “a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization (dedicated to) improv(ing) the quality of their lives,” even though from inception it sold insurance to earn royalties – now to its 40 million members in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands while claiming a mandate to:

– deliver “value to members through information, advocacy and service;”

– work “tirelessly to fulfill its vision: a society in which everyone ages with dignity and purpose, and in which AARP helps people fulfill their goals and dreams;” and

– speak “with one voice – united by a common motto: ‘To serve, not be served.”

Today it’s branches include:

– AARP Foundation focusing on “education….service, (and) legal advocacy efforts;”

– AARP Services, providing “marketplace access to services that people need and want” related to “health and financial products, travel and leisure offerings, and life event services;”

Full Story: SteveLendmanBlog: AARP’s Tradition of Betrayal.

A Corporate Monster v. “The Vermonster”

Jim Hightower

Where are those lawsuit abuse groups when you really need them?

Chance are that you’ve seen ads, letters-to-the-editor, op-ed pieces and other materials put out by outfits with such civic-sounding names on Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse. By whatever name, the message is always the same, usually delivered in a sort of urgent, basso profundo voice saying something like this: “Bloodsucking lawyers are constantly filing frivolous lawsuits against beleaguered corporations. Stop these lawyers and their loser clients — demand that your lawmakers cut them off from the courthouse.”

Hmmmm. Stop consumers from bullying big business — now there’s an improbable populist cause if I ever heard one! Who are these “citizens” who’ve formed such noisy lawsuit abuse groups?

Well, they’re just neighbors, we’re told by the groups. Yeah, assuming you have a neighbor named Philip Morris. In the mid-’90s, this tobacco giant was still fighting off class-action lawsuits from hundreds of thousands of Americans who’d been addicted to, sickened and killed by the corporation’s murderous products. Unable to win in court, Philip Morris and its corporate allies secretly launched a nationwide campaign to rig the rules of judicial access in their favor. Philip Morris itself put up $16 million in 1995 to hire a PR firm to create faux “grassroots” fronts in every state under the banner of Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse.

Full Story: A Corporate Monster v. “The Vermonster” by Jim Hightower on Creators.com – A Syndicate Of Talent.

Is music addictive?

Research entitled “The Rewarding Aspects of Music Listening Are Related to Degree of Emotional Arousal” published on October 16, 2009  has connected the “feeling” people experience listening to music with the dopamine response system in the brain.

The researchers found that the physiological and psychological response to music was very similar to that in cocaine addiction and may be mediated by the same parts of the brain and the same chemistries.

From the time that the first caveman beat a hollow log with two sticks and observed the response of his tribal group, musicians have intuitively known the power that music has to manipulate other people. Beethoven and Lady Ga Ga are equally emotional manipulators. This statement does not imply a direct understanding of the psychology or chemistry on the part of the “artist.” The multiple rearrangement of music prior to performance for small audiences in the past and today is the perfecting ground that produces the needed emotional response that guides the listener to buy that music.

Full Story: Is music addictive?.

Banks are Terrorists $32 Billion Allocated Goldman Sachs Bonuses !

Thom Hartmann video

YouTube – Hartmann: Banks are Terrorists $32 Billion Allocated Goldman Sachs Bonuses !.

The Democrats Don’t Need to Move Right

Post-Bush Stress Disorder – Democrats have too many hang-ups

Johnathon Alter

In “The Godfather,” Sonny talks about going “to the mattresses,” meaning war with rival Mafia families. Now President Obama and the Democrats are holing up together on their Posturepedics as they work out battle plans on health care, banking reform, and Afghanistan. The question is whether they’ll be daring soldiers of the future or content to fight the last war.

That war, when Republicans controlled at least one branch of government, created a mindset where many moderate Democrats now constantly fear giving the other side ammunition. There’s some logic in this. Overreaching is always a danger in politics, and House Democrats in particular are to the left of the country as a whole. Appeasing powerful health-care interests, as the White House did early on, was a smart move. By delaying a climactic battle, Obama built momentum for a bill. The same sequencing was true for banks and the U.S. military in Afghanistan. The bleeding had to stop before their treatment could be properly managed. (Click here to follow Jonathan Alter.)

But Democrats are now at risk of post-Bush stress disorder (PBSD), a trauma that can cripple their efforts to adjust to everyday life in a new era. Their longtime enemy—potent Republicans—is gone, a mere memory of pain. But Republican ways of thinking have infected the minds of too many Democrats. More than a few have fallen into the GOP habit of selling out to corporate interests (the $1.5 million that health-related lobbies contributed to Max Baucus in 2007–08 goes a long way in Montana), pandering to banks, and reflexively assuming that just because the Pentagon recommends escalation in Afghanistan, it must be necessary. These habits will have to be broken if the Democrats are to stay in power.

Full Story: Alter: The Democrats Don’t Need to Move Right | Newsweek Voices – Jonathan Alter | Newsweek.com.

45 Homemade Foods You Can Make Yourself (But Never Thought You Could)

Channel your inner pioneer and never run out of these common items again!

There are many food items that people regularly buy that they could make at home; healthier, cheaper, and tastier.

In days past people did not run to the store every time they needed catsup or baking powder, they made what they needed themselves from basic materials. You can do the same. How many of the following items have you made from scratch?

Full Story: 45 Homemade Foods You Can Make Yourself (But Never Thought You Could) : Planet Green.

Racist undertones of the ‘socialist’ epithet

By most assessments, this summer’s moment of racial anxiety and outcry – namely, the arrest of Henry Louis Gates by Cambridge police in July – came and went faster than it takes to empty a glass of beer.

This was perhaps to be expected. Americans are famously reluctant to talk about race and racism, and the self-congratulatory remarks by Professor Gates, Sergeant James Crowley, and President Obama after the touted “beer summit” only appeared to reinforce this aversion.

Yet, as seen at various town hall meetings and the Tea Party rally in Washington Sept. 12, a deeper sign of racial tension has emerged with the reappearance of a different inflammatory expression: socialism.

In the context of American politics, socialism has seldom been about the economy or state power alone, despite its political-economic roots. Instead, it has been a slur, synonymous with the charge of communism, but with meaning extending beyond this term as well.

Full Story: Racist undertones of the ‘socialist’ epithet – Yahoo! News.

Minn. man suspected of encouraging suicides – Yahoo! News

A nurse who authorities say got his kicks by visiting Internet suicide chat rooms and encouraging depressed people to kill themselves is under investigation in at least two deaths and could face criminal charges that could test the limits of the First Amendment.

Investigators said William Melchert-Dinkel, 47, feigned compassion for those he chatted with, while offering step-by-step instructions on how to take their lives.

“Most importatn is the placement of the noose on the neck … Knot behind the left ear and rope across the carotid is very important for instant unconciousness and death,” he allegedly wrote in one Web chat.

Full Story: Minn. man suspected of encouraging suicides – Yahoo! News.

Thom challenges Randal O’Toole who wants user fee highways?

Video – Thom Hartmann

YouTube – Thom challenges Randal O’Toole who wants user fee highways?.

Texas Man Plans To Camp On GOP Rep’s Lawn If Congress Fails To Extend Unemployment Benefits

If Congress fails to pass an extension of unemployment benefits, Ricky Macoy of Quinlan, Texas plans to take it out on the Republican Party by camping on his congressman’s lawn.

“Ralph Hall is a good man,” said Macoy of his Republican representative, whom he said he has always supported. It’s the larger GOP Macoy has a problem with: “They’re not willing to help. They’re just playing political games.”

Every day 7,000 unemployed workers exhaust their benefits, according to the National Employment Law Project, and 1.3 million will have run out of their benefits by the end of the year. The House of Representatives passed a 13-week extension in September, but Republicans have held similar legislation up in the Senate.

Full Story: Texas Man Plans To Camp On GOP Rep’s Lawn If Congress Fails To Extend Unemployment Benefits.

How to Have Sex Like a Virgin for Only 30 Bucks

By Tana Ganeva,

Who doesn’t want to have sex with virgins?

Purity has its price: it’s $29.90. At least that’s how much it costs to obtain the “artificial virginity hymen,” a plastic baggie filled with mysterious red crap meant to resemble the chaste secretions of a recently deflowered virgin.

“No more worry about losing your virginity,” reads the Web site of Gigimo, the Chinese sex-toy company that distributes the product. (Whew!) “With this product, you can have your first night back anytime.”

To bring back that magic, all you have to do is:

Insert this artificial hymen into your vagina carefully. It will expand a little and make you feel tight. When your lover penetrate, it will ooze out a liquid that look like blood not too much but just the right amount. Add in a few moans and groans, you will pass through undetectable.

On the site’s landing page, a very young-looking woman in a pink nighty, her bare breast partially covered by a digitally imposed pink heart, appears to be really looking forward to having her fake virginity taken.

Full Story: How to Have Sex Like a Virgin for Only 30 Bucks | Sex and Relationships | AlterNet.

The people vs Wall Street

Bear Stearns bankers on trial in first criminal case of the credit crunch

Amidst the economic wreckage, after 7 million job losses and approaching 2 million home foreclosures in the US alone, with businesses and consumers around the world still struggling to get finance after the long credit crunch, Wall Street is finally on trial. A little piece of Wall Street, at least.

In the first major case against bankers at the heart of the financial meltdown, a jury of 12 mainly working-class New Yorkers will decide the fate of the two Bear Stearns managers whose hedge funds imploded in 2007, signalling the start of the crisis. Ralph Cioffi, 53, and Matt Tannin, 48, pocketed millions of dollars in pay during the boom years, but the events of 2007 left their investors nursing losses of $1.6bn (£1bn) and ruined forever the reputation of Bear Stearns, one of the oldest investment banks on Wall Street.

Dressed as if for a funeral, the pair sat impassively in the brightly lit courtroom in downtown Brooklyn yesterday as assistant US attorney Patrick Sinclair recounted what he said was a litany of lies that they told to investors. The two men were desperate to stop investors deserting their funds when the sub-prime mortgage market began to plunge, Mr Sinclair said. Mr Cioffi alone was paid $32m in the two years before the funds collapsed.

Full Story: The people vs Wall Street – Business News, Business – The Independent.

Wells Fargo, Wachovia, and the Vulcan Three

Why did Wells Fargo, a reasonably healthy bank, merge with a debt-laden disaster like Wachovia in the middle of the financial crisis? Ask Vulcan Materials Co.

Last October, in a stunning turn of events at the height of the Wall Street crisis, Wachovia backed out of a deal with Citigroup and agreed to a $15 billion merger with Wells Fargo — the biggest bank merger ever. The Charlotte-based Wachovia had recently collapsed under the weight of its own mortgage portfolio and Citi had come to the rescue, offering a rock bottom $1/share that Wachovia accepted in order to avoid bankruptcy. A few days later, Wells Fargo swooped down with an offer worth seven times as much, and Wachovia gladly accepted.

The Wells Fargo deal confused most observers, infuriated Citigroup, resulted in weeks of intense legal wrangling, and ultimately went through. It was an odd marriage, pairing a Charlotte-based bank that had financed the sun belt’s housing bubble with a San Francisco-based bank that had largely avoided it.

How did the two banks come together? What was the real story behind this deal?

As it turns out, a Birmingham, Alabama-based construction aggregate supply company appears to have played a key role in this merger. Last week, I blogged about this bizarre discovery (part of our Spot.us research project) without offering too much detail. Today I’ll make my case.

Full Story: Eyes on the Ties » a blog by LittleSis » Blog Archive » Wells Fargo, Wachovia, and the Vulcan Three.

Ford adds 4.5M vehicles to defective switch recall

Ford adds 4.5M vehicles to recall of defective cruise control switch that could cause fires

DETROIT (AP) — Ford Motor Co. said Tuesday it will add 4.5 million older-model vehicles to the long list of those recalled because a defective cruise control switch could cause a fire.

The latest voluntary action pushes Ford’s total recall due to faulty switches to 14.3 million registered vehicles over 10 years, capping the company’s largest cumulative recall in history involving a single problem.

The recall covers 1.1 million Ford Windstar minivans that had a small risk of fire due to internal leaking from the switches. Ford said in a letter to federal regulators that it found a small number of reported fires linked to the problem during an internal investigation that began last year, but did not specify how many.

The remaining 3.4 million vehicles are Ford, Lincoln and Mercury models. Ford said there were no reports of fires with those models, most of them trucks and sport utility vehicles, but that they were included in the recall because they use the same switches. All vehicles covered by the recall are from the 1992 to 2003 model years.

Full Story: Ford adds 4.5M vehicles to defective switch recall – Yahoo! Finance.

2010 California Marriage Protection Act PSA

Bonus video this week. The regularly scheduled episode of RNGG will be up next week.

Siv-Art Productions produced this PSA in support of the Marriage Protection Act of 2010, which will ban divorce in the state of California.

Full Story: YouTube – 2010 California Marriage Protection Act PSA (#2).

Halo Cloud Seen Hovering In Moscow Sky (VIDEO)

A mysterious halo-shaped cloud was seen hovering in the sky over the city of Moscow a few days ago. Lest you believe that this confirms your various conspiracy theories, meteorologists have ruled out any supernatural cause:

A spokesman from the city’s weather forecast said: ‘Several fronts have been passing through Moscow recently, there was an intrusion of the Arctic air too, the sun was shining from the west – this is how the effect was produced.’

He added: ‘This is purely an optical effect, although it does look impressive.

WATCH:

Full Story: Halo Cloud Seen Hovering In Moscow Sky (VIDEO).

Ford Recalls 4.5 Million Vehicles Over Defective Cruise Control Switch

DETROIT — Ford Motor Co. said Tuesday it will add 4.5 million older-model vehicles to the long list of those recalled because a defective cruise control switch could cause a fire.

The latest voluntary action pushes Ford’s total recall due to faulty switches to 14.3 million registered vehicles over 10 years, capping the company’s largest cumulative recall in history involving a single problem.

The recall covers 1.1 million Ford Windstar minivans that had a small risk of fire due to internal leaking from the switches. Ford said in a letter to federal regulators that it found a small number of reported fires linked to the problem during an internal investigation that began last year, but did not specify how many.

The remaining 3.4 million vehicles are Ford, Lincoln and Mercury models. Ford said there were no reports of fires with those models, most of them trucks and sport utility vehicles, but that they were included in the recall because they use the same switches. All vehicles covered by the recall are from the 1992 to 2003 model years.

Full Story: Ford Recalls 4.5 Million Vehicles Over Defective Cruise Control Switch.

Madoff In Prison Fight Over Stock Market: Report

For all of his billions in faked profits, convicted Ponzi Schemer Bernie Madoff recently got into a very real fight with a fellow inmate over the stock market, according to The New York Post.

Madoff, of course, is serving a 150-year prison sentence for a massive $68 billion fraud. The altercation, according to The New York Post, was over the state of the market and involved another older inmate, who left the fight “red-faced.” Madoff’s toughness, apparently, impressed a fellow inmate at the Butner, North Carolina facility that was quoted by the Post.

It’s not the first fight involving jailed financiers in recent weeks. Last month, Allen Stanford sustained injuries, including “two black eyes and a broken nose” while fighting with another inmate.

Full Story: Madoff In Prison Fight Over Stock Market: Report.

The Rising Cost of Idiocy

by Len Hart,

The dumbing down of America began with Ronald Reagan who made idiots feel good about being idiots. Reagan proved that not only was intelligence not required to be President, it might even be a handicap.

Reagan proved that any politician ignoring the ‘idiot’ voting block [the GOP] imperils his/her political future. Thus, Sarah Palin, who became an expert on Russia by observing its coast line from across the Bering Strait, is assured a growing constituency: the growing legion of idiots! She is the poster bimbo of idiocy! Its champion!

‘Dumbing down’ implies that the US still has a way to go before bottoming out! But that observation smacks of intelligence and may safely be ignored. The real idiot i.e, a GOP idiot, does not know where the f_ck we are or how we got there! The word ‘idiot’ summons up images of Ronald Reagan and, more recently, George W. Bush. Unlike Bush, Reagan had essential Presidential skills. He could read cue cards. Bush could not read! Reagan taught the GOP that how you say something is much more important than what is said. Bush, by contrast, was challenged even to speak.

Full Story: The Existentialist Cowboy: The Rising Cost of Idiocy.

OPINION: More Spending Is Necessary to Clean Up The Economic Mess

By Scott Lilly

The Labor Department’s September jobs report can only be described as horrific. The media and markets focused on the fact that the 263,000 jobs lost in September exceeded the forecast by nearly 100,000. But there was equally bad, in fact worse, news in the details.

Someone who is laid off for a few weeks may have to postpone a vacation. Someone who is out of work for several months may miss a car payment. But people who are out of work for more than six months are likely to see their life become unhinged. The number of people who were looking for work in September but had been out of a job for more than 27 weeks increased by 450,000 to 5.4 million. A look at the bench mark year of 1983 provides some context to that number.

That year was the standard for measuring the severity of subsequent recessions because, up until now, it was by far the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Full Story: On The Hill: OPINION: More Spending Is Necessary to Clean Up The Economic Mess.

Thomas Greco’s “The End of Money and the Future of Civilization”: A Review by Richard C. Cook

Richard C. Cook

It’s too late for anyone to pretend that the U.S. government, whether under President Barack Obama or anyone else, can divert our nation from long-term economic decline. The U.S. is increasingly in a state of political, economic, and moral paralysis, caught as it were between the “rock” of protracted recession and the “hard place” of terminal government debt.

Even if the stock market can be shored up by more government borrowing for “stimulus” spending, it’s a temporary reprieve, because nothing can bring back the consumer purchasing power that was lost when the banks stopped pumping money into the economy through out-of-control mortgage lending. We simply no longer have the job base for people to earn the income they need to live.

The underlying cause of the crisis is in fact the debt-based monetary system, whereby the U.S. ruling class long ago sold out our nation and its people to the international banking cartel of which the Rockefeller and Morgan interests have been the chief representatives for over a century. It was lending on a previously unheard of scale for overpriced assets to people and businesses unable to repay that created the bubbles that burst in 2008, not only in the housing market but also in such areas as commercial real estate, equities, commodities, and derivatives. It was an explosion that reverberated throughout the world.

Full Story: Richard C. Cook » Blog Archive » Thomas Greco’s “The End of Money and the Future of Civilization”: A Review by Richard C. Cook.

Obama to host Tribal Nations conference

President Barack Obama will host a Tribal Nations Conference discussing issues of importance to Native Americans on November 5, the White House announced Monday.

Representatives from each the country’s 564 federally recognized tribes will be invited to participate, according to the administration.

Full Story: CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive – Obama to host Tribal Nations conference « – Blogs from CNN.com.

Behind Montana Jail Fiasco: How Private Prison Developers Prey On Desperate Towns

With the unraveling of the deal for the shadowy American Private Police Force to take over and populate an empty jail in Hardin, Montana, it’s pretty clear that the small city got played by an ex-con and his (supposed) private security firm.

But an investigation by TPMmuckraker into how Hardin ended up with the 92,000 square foot facility in the first place suggests that, long before “low-level card shark” Michael Hilton ever came to town, Hardin officials had already been taken for a ride by a far more powerful set of players: a well-organized consortium of private companies headquartered around the country, which specializes in pitching speculative and risky prison projects to local governments desperate for jobs.

The projects have generated multi-million dollar profits for the companies involved, but often haven’t created the anticipated payoff for the communities, and have left a string of failed or failing prisons in their wake.

Full Story: Behind Montana Jail Fiasco: How Private Prison Developers Prey On Desperate Towns | TPMMuckraker.

Michael Moore: Second Thoughts

Second Thoughts

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

Friends,

Last night my wife asked me if I thought I was a little too hard on Obama in my letter yesterday congratulating him on his Nobel Prize. “No, I don’t think so,” I replied. I thought it was important to remind him he’s now conducting the two wars he’s inherited. “Yeah,” she said, “but to tell him, ‘Now earn it!’? Give the guy a break — this is a great day for him and for all of us.”

I went back and re-read what I had written. And I listened for far too long yesterday to the right wing hate machine who did what they could to crap all over Barack’s big day. Did I — and others on the left — do the same?

We are weary, weary of war. The trillions that will have gone to these two wars have helped to bankrupt us as a nation — financially and morally. To think of all the good we could have done with all that money! Two months of the War in Iraq would pay for all the wells that need to be dug in the Third World for drinking water! Obama is moving too slow for most of us — but he needs to know we are with him and we stand beside him as he attempts to turn eight years of sheer madness around. Who could do that in nine months? Superman? Thor? Mitch McConnell?

Instead of waiting to see what the president is going to do, we all need to be pro-active and push the agenda that we want to see enacted. What keeps us from forming the same local groups we put together to get out the vote last November? C’mon! We’re the majority now — the majority by a significant margin! We call the shots — and we need to tell this wimpy Congress to get busy and do what we say — or else.

Full Story: Second Thoughts | CommonDreams.org.

Why Obama Should Not Have Received the Peace Prize — Yet

Robert Reich

President Obama’s only real diplomatic accomplishment so far has been to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy from unilateral bullying to multilateral listening and cooperating. That’s important, to be sure, but not nearly enough. The Prize is really more of Booby Prize for Obama’s predecessor. Had the world not suffered eight years of George W. Bush, Obama would not be receiving the Prize. He’s prizeworthy and praiseworthy only by comparison.

I’d rather Obama had won it after Congress agreed to substantial cuts in greenhouse gases comparable to what Europe is proposing, after he brought Palestinians and Israelis together to accept a two-state solution, after he got the United States out of Afghanistan and reduced the nuclear arm’s threat between Pakistan and India, or after he was well on the way to eliminating the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. Any one of these would have been worthy of global praise. Perhaps the Nobel committee can give him half the prize now and withhold the other half until he accomplishes one or more of these crucial missions.

Giving the Peace Prize to the President before any of these goals has been attained only underscores the paradox of Obama at this early stage of his presidency. He has demonstrated mastery in both delivering powerful rhetoric and providing the nation and the world with fresh and important ways of understanding current challenges. But he has not yet delivered. To the contrary, he often seems to hold back from the fight — temporizing, delaying, or compromising so much that the rhetoric and insight he offers seem strangely disconnected from what he actually does. Yet there’s time. He may yet prove to be one of the best presidents this nation has ever had — worthy not only of the Peace Prize but of every global accolade he could possibly summon. Just not yet.

Full Story: Robert Reich’s Blog: Why Obama Should Not Have Received the Peace Prize — Yet.

Congratulations President Obama on the Nobel Peace Prize — Now Please Earn it!

Michael Moore

Dear President Obama,

How outstanding that you’ve been recognized today as a man of peace. Your swift, early pronouncements — you will close Guantanamo, you will bring the troops home from Iraq, you want a nuclear weapon-free world, you admitted to the Iranians that we overthrew their democratically-elected president in 1953, you made that great speech to the Islamic world in Cairo, you’ve eliminated that useless term “The War on Terror,” you’ve put an end to torture — these have all made us and the rest of the world feel a bit more safe considering the disaster of the past eight years. In eight months you have done an about face and taken this country in a much more sane direction.

But…

The irony that you have been awarded this prize on the 2nd day of the ninth year of what is quickly becoming your War in Afghanistan is not lost on anyone. You are truly at a crossroads now. You can listen to the generals and expand the war (only to result in a far-too-predictable defeat) or you can declare Bush’s Wars over, and bring all the troops home. Now. That’s what a true man of peace would do.

There is nothing wrong with you doing what the last guy failed to do — capture the man or men responsible for the mass murder of 3,000 people on 9/11. BUT YOU CANNOT DO THAT WITH TANKS AND TROOPS. You are pursuing a criminal, not an army. You do not use a stick of dynamite to get rid of a mouse.

Full Story: Congratulations President Obama on the Nobel Peace Prize — Now Please Earn it! | MichaelMoore.com.

Yes, You Can Oppose Obama’s Nobel Prize, Be Progressive, Disagree with GOP, and Not Be A Terrorist

David Sirota

A very quick post on the Obama Nobel Prize award after spending the morning in the virtual focus group known as talk radio in a major swing state. Some points we can – or at least should be able to – agree on:

- President Obama’s speeches on nuclear non-proliferation and on the need to do a better job on multilateral diplomacy were very important, as were his efforts to pursue a diplomatic track with Iran.

- Much of the world hated George W. Bush and likes Obama.

- Obama is the president of an administration that may have “inherited” two wars in the heart of the Muslim world, but is also continuing on its own to prosecute those wars. In fact, he’s considering massively escalating one of those wars.

Do these facts mean Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize award? My opinion is no.

I think you need to actually make peace (which requires lots of risks/courage/success) rather than simply talk about making peace (which requires far less risk/courage/success) – I think, for instance, that Chinese dissidents who have risked their lives taking on the most authoritarian government in the world are more deserving.

Full Story: Open Left:: Yes, You Can Oppose Obama’s Nobel Prize, Be Progressive, Disagree with GOP, and Not Be A Terrorist.

Some black players won’t play for Rush Limbaugh if he buys Rams

- Sports Rumors -

Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has some Americans that love him and plenty that hate him. And the fact that he spouts such right-wing opinions doing his day job may hurt Limbaugh’s chances of getting some players if he manages to buy the St. Louis Rams, according to the New York Daily News.

New York Giants defensive end Mathias Kiwanuka(notes) would love to play again under Rams head coach Steve Spagnuolo, who was his defensive coordinator in New York, but Kiwanuka is saying that there is no way he would go play for St. Louis if Limbaugh takes over. New York Jets linebacker Bart Scott(notes) told the paper the same thing yesterday and it seems that it may be a general sentiment for a lot of black NFL players.

“All I know is from the last comment I heard, he said in (President) Obama’s America, white kids are getting beat up on the bus while black kids are chanting ‘right on,’” Kiwanuka told the paper. “He can do whatever he wants; it is a free country. But if it goes through, I can tell you where I am not going to play.”

Full Story: Some black players won’t play for Rush Limbaugh if he buys Rams – Sports Rumors – NFL – Yahoo! Sports.

After Words – After Words: Chris Hedges, “Empire of Illusion,” Interviewed by Ron Suskind – Book TV

After Words: Chris Hedges, “Empire of Illusion,” Interviewed by Ron Suskind

About the Program

Former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges discusses his new book, “Empire of Illusion,” which describes what he considers to be the economic, political and moral collapse of American culture. He is interviewed by Pulitizer Prize-winning writer Ron Suskind.

About the Authors

Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City. A former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, he was part of the team that won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of global terrorism. He also received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Mr. Hedges is author of “Losing Moses on the Freeway” and “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” the latter of which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. He holds a Masters of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School.

Full Story: After Words – After Words: Chris Hedges, “Empire of Illusion,” Interviewed by Ron Suskind – Book TV.

Gore Vidal: Obama ‘incompetent’ but GOP ‘like Hitler Youth’

Storied writer and historian Gore Vidal, in a lengthy interview published Wednesday by The Independent, had more than a few stones to throw at modern Americana.

Calling President Barack Obama “incompetent,” Vidal predicted he will lose his bid for reelection amid the “madhouse” that is present-day politics. As for the political opposition, the iconic intellectual said that Republicans are no longer a party, having morphed into a “mindset,” full of hate “like Hitler youth.”

Speaking with writer Johann Hari, Vidal addressed dozens of key moments in American history, from “unnecessary” foreign entanglements to the coming-soon collapse of U.S. empire in the barren sands of Afghanistan. He called the 2000 election “stolen” by the Bush administration, then added they were “probably” involved in the Sept. 11 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon.

Full Story: Gore Vidal: Obama ‘incompetent’ but GOP ‘like Hitler Youth’ | Raw Story.

Ammiano to Schwarzenegger: “Kiss my gay ass”

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown is lambasting what he calls “highly inappropriate” behavior by San Francisco Democrats Wednesday who greeted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger with a hostile reception during a surprise drop-in at a San Francisco Democratic Party fund-raiser.

But outspoken State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano of San Francisco, who shouted “You lie!” to Schwarzenneger during the event at the Fairmont Hotel — and didn’t deny reports he walked out with a quip of “kiss my gay ass” — said the GOP governor’s “cheap publicity stunt” earned a very appropriate show of political theater, San Francisco-style.

Check out the video here:

Full Story: SFGate: Politics Blog : Ammiano to Schwarzenegger: “Kiss my gay ass”.