Bushit

Roraima - Brasil que a gente nao conhece sendo muito explorado

2011-05-30T11:25:00.000-07:00

Segue abaixo o relato de uma pessoa conhecida e séria, que passou recentemente em um concurso público federal e foi trabalhar em Roraima. Trata- se de um Brasil que a gente não conhece.

As duas semanas em Manaus foram interessantes para conhecer um Brasil um pouco diferente, mas chegando em Boa Vista (RR) não pude resistir a fazer um relato das coisas que tenho visto e escutado por aqui.

Conversei com algumas pessoas nesses três dias, desde engenheiros até pessoas com um mínimo de instrução.

Para começar, o mais difícil de encontrar por aqui é roraimense. Pra falar a verdade, acho que a proporção de um roraimense para cada 10 pessoas é bem razoável, tem gaúcho, carioca, cearense, amazonense, piauiense, maranhense e por aí vai. Portanto, falta uma identidade com a terra.

Aqui não existem muitos meios de sobrevivência, ou a pessoa é funcionária pública, (e aqui quase todo mundo é, pois em Boa Vista se concentram todos os órgãos federais e estaduais de Roraima, além da prefeitura é claro) ou a pessoa trabalha no comércio local ou recebe ajuda de Programas do governo.

Não existe indústria de qualquer tipo. Pouco mais de 70% do território roraimense é demarcado como reserva indígena, portanto restam apenas 30%, descontando- se os rios e as terras improdutivas que são muitas, para se cultivar a terra ou para a localização das próprias cidades.

Na única rodovia que existe em direção ao Brasil (liga Boa Vista a Manaus, cerca de 800 km ) existe um trecho de aproximadamente 200 km reserva indígena (Waimiri Atroari) por onde você só passa entre 6:00 da manhã e 6:00 da tarde, nas outras 12 horas a rodovia é fechada pelos índios (com autorização da FUNAI e dos americanos) para que os mesmos não sejam incomodados.

Detalhe: Você não passa se for brasileiro, o acesso é livre aos americanos, europeus e japoneses. Desses 70% de território indígena, diria que em 90% dele ninguém entra sem uma grande burocracia e autorização da FUNAI.

Outro detalhe: americanos entram à hora que quiserem. Se você não tem uma autorização da FUNAI mas tem dos americanos então você pode entrar. A maioria dos índios fala a língua nativa além do inglês ou francês, mas a maioria não sabe falar português. Dizem que é comum na entrada de algumas reservas encontrarem-se hasteadas bandeiras americanas ou inglesas. É comum se encontrar por aqui americano tipo nerd com cara de quem não quer nada, que veio caçar borboleta e joaninha e catalogá-las, mas no final das contas, pasme, se você quiser montar um empresa para exportar plantas e frutas típicas como cupuaçu, açaí, camu-camu etc., medicinais ou componentes naturais para fabricação de remédios, pode se preparar para pagar 'royalties' para empresas japonesas e americanas que já patentearam a maioria dos produtos típicos da Amazônia...

Por três vezes repeti a seguinte frase após ouvir tais relatos: Os americanos vão acabar tomando a Amazônia. E em todas elas ouvi a mesma resposta em palavras diferentes. Vou reproduzir a resposta de uma senhora simples que vendia suco e água na rodovia próximo de Mucajaí:

'Irão não minha filha, tu não sabe, mas tudo aqui já é deles, eles comandam tudo, você não entra em lugar nenhum porque eles não deixam. Quando acabar essa guerra aí eles virão pra cá, e vão fazer o que fizeram no Iraque quando determinaram uma faixa para os curdos onde iraquiano não entra, aqui vai ser a mesma coisa'.

A dona é bem informada não? O pior é que segundo a ONU o conceito de nação é um conceito de soberania e as áreas demarcadas têm o nome de nação indígena. O que pode levar os americanos a alegarem que estarão libertando os povos indígenas. Fiquei sabendo que os americanos já estão construindo uma grande base militar na Colômbia, bem próximo da fronteira com o Brasil numa parceria com o governo colombiano com o pseudo
objetivo de combater o narcotráfico. Por falar em narcotráfico, aqui é rota de distribuição, pois essa mãe chamada Brasil mantém suas fronteiras abertas e aqui tem estrada para as Guianas e Venezuela. Nenhuma bagagem de estrangeiro é fiscalizada, principalmente se for americano, europeu ou japonês, (isso pode causar um incidente diplomático). Dizem que tem muito colombiano traficante virando venezuelano, pois na Venezuela é muito fácil comprar a cidadania venezuelana por cerca de 200 dólares.

Pergunto inocentemente às pessoas: porque os americanos querem tanto proteger os índios ? A resposta é absolutamente a mesma, porque as terras indígenas além das riquezas animal e vegetal, da abundância de água, são extremamente ricas em ouro - encontram-se pepitas que chegam a ser pesadas em quilos), diamante, outras pedras preciosas, minério e nas reservas norte de Roraima e Amazonas, ricas em PETRÓLEO.

Parece que as pessoas contam essas coisas como que num grito de socorro a alguém que é do sul, como se eu pudesse dizer isso ao presidente ou a alguma autoridade do sul que vá fazer alguma coisa.

É, pessoal... saio daqui com a quase certeza de que em breve o Brasil irá diminuir de tamanho.

Será que podemos fazer alguma coisa???

Acho que sim.

Repasse esse e-mail para que um maior número de brasileiros fique sabendo desses absurdos.

Mara Silvia Alexandre Costa

Depto de Biologia Cel. Mol. Bioag.Patog. FMRP - USP

Opinião pessoal:

Gostaria que você que recebeu este e-mail, o repasse para o maior número possível de pessoas. Do meu ponto de vista seria interessante que o país inteiro ficasse sabendo desta situação através dos telejornais antes que isso venha a acontecer.

Afinal foi num momento de fraqueza dos Estados Unidos que os europeus lançaram o Euro, assim poderá se aproveitar esta situação de fraqueza norte-americana (perdas na guerra do Iraque) para revelar isto ao mundo a fim de antecipar a próxima guerra.

Conto com sua participação, no envio deste e-mail.

Celso Luiz Borges de Oliveira

Doutorando em Água e Solo FEAGRI/UNICAMP

Obama-GOP tax Deal

2010-12-08T16:35:00.000-08:00

President Obama is right about one thing -- Republicans in Congress are holding the middle class hostage.

We have a $13.8 trillion national debt, a collapsing middle class and the most unequal distribution of wealth of any major country. With all this in mind, Republicans in Congress say they will block tax cuts to the middle class and block unemployment benefits to more than two million families unless the President gives huge tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires.

Their behavior is morally bankrupt. It is reprehensible.

But instead of challenging the Republicans for their absurd demands and their outrageous tactics, the President gave them virtually everything they wanted.

I cannot and will not support this deal. I will do everything I can to uphold the promise made to the American people to end the Bush tax cuts for the rich.

Join me and my friends at Democracy for America today and sign our pledge calling on Congress to reject this deal.

One of the most underreported parts of this deal is a cut to the Social Security payroll tax. In just one year, over $120 billion of revenue will be cut from Social Security under the President's compromise plan, weakening the program and virtually guaranteeing benefit cuts in the future.

Make no mistake about it. Social Security has not added one dime to the national debt and this cut will only embolden Republican attempts to privatize the program and increase the age of retirement. Social Security is a vital safety net for all Americans and a cornerstone of our commitment to protect the middle class.

We are not alone in standing against this compromise. Republicans are holding the middle class hostage and the American people know it. I come from a small state and yesterday my office received more than 1,000 calls on this issue, with over 90% of them in opposition to this deal.

Last night, thousands of DFA members joined me on DFA Live where we had a lively discussion on this issue. One thing was clear to me during that call -- DFA members nationwide want Democrats to stop this deal and fight for the middle class, working people, senior citizens and the unemployed while making sure that millionaires and billionaires are not given massive tax breaks.

Make sure Congress gets the message -- Join the fight now and sign the petition opposing this so-called "compromise."

Thank you,

-Bernie

AE911Truth Gets Implicit Respect on Fox News' Geraldo at Large

2010-11-18T10:13:00.000-08:00

AE911Truth Gets Implicit Respect
on Fox News’ Geraldo at Large

“BuildingWhat?” Campaign to Sponsor New Opinion Poll

AE911Truth engineer Tony Szamboti lays out the long-suppressed facts about the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7 to Geraldo Rivera’s Fox News audience

Dear AE911Truth Supporters,

Please see this account by NYCCAN’s Ted Walter of a very exciting breakthrough, and a new project:

Dear Friends,

This past Saturday, Bob McIlvaine and Tony Szamboti of AE911Truth appeared on Geraldo At Large to discuss the BuildingWhat? campaign for a new investigation into the destruction of Building 7. We invite you to watch the interview and afterwards take three important steps to help this campaign grow:

Give us feedback on the poll we plan to commission to survey New Yorkers on their support for a new Building 7 investigation. You will see the questions for the poll below the Geraldo video.
Donate what you can to help us fund the poll. Any funds raised above $15,000 will be used for the next ad buy. Already we are over $7,500!
Send the Geraldo interview link to everyone you know so that it continues to go viral. The link is http://buildingwhat.org/buildingwhat-appears-on-geraldo-at-large-on-fox-news/.
Your generosity and determination have made this campaign possible, and so we thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Sincerely,

The “BuildingWhat?” Team

Rove In 2004: Influence Of ‘Billionaires Who Write The Checks Give Me Some Concern’

2010-10-22T20:51:00.001-07:00

Rove In 2004: Influence Of ‘Billionaires Who Write The Checks Give Me Some Concern’
Last night on NBC’s Nightly News, Michael Isikoff reported that a network of special interest money led by Karl Rove is “expecting to raise $250 million to flood the airwaves in these last few weeks of the election.” Rove has been able to raise all of this money from millionaires and billionaires by promising them anonymity.

In 2004, Rove benefited from a similar avalanche of outside money in his quest to help secure President Bush’s re-election. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were funded in part by Texas homebuilder Bob Perry, who is now funding Rove’s new group. The Swift Boat group, which operated as a 527, received over $20 million in donations to air television ads that smeared the war record of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA).

After the 2004 election concluded, Rove was asked how he felt about the impact of outside groups spending millions of dollars to shape the outcome of elections. Echoing a line offered by many Democrats today, Rove said the potential for a few wealthy contributors to tip the electoral balance was a concern and could potentially undermine democracy:

Rove said the 527s — named for the section of the tax code they are formed under — potentially undermine democracy by allowing a few wealthy individuals to spend tens of millions of dollars under less stringent disclosure requirements than before campaign laws were overhauled more than two years ago. These groups, first exploited by Democrats and later joined by Republicans, existed because of a huge loophole in the new law.

Democratic donors, led by at least $27 million from billionaire George Soros, funded such anti-Bush groups as America Coming Together and the Media Fund. Republican leaders originally thought these groups would be prohibited by the Federal Election Commission but when they were not, GOP activists joined the 527 parade late in the campaign. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which ran ads attacking Kerry’s Vietnam War service and anti-war activities, were the most notable of these groups on Bush’s side.

Rove condemned them all.

“I am a firm believer in strong (political) parties, and things that weaken the parties and place the outcome of elections in the hands of billionaires who can write checks and political consultants who can get themselves hired by billionaires who write the checks, give me some concern,” Rove said.

Of course, these days Rove isn’t as big a believer in strong political parties, as he works to build a “shadow RNC.” He also isn’t as concerned about the subversion of democracy at the hands of a few wealthy donors. Instead, when President Obama makes the argument that Rove did in 2004, the Rove of 2010 slams him for having an “enemies list” and engaging in a “desperate political ploy.”

UPDATE In a Fox News interview with Bill O'Reilly on Nov. 1, 2004, here's what President Bush said:
O'REILLY: OK. Do you think the swift boat vets' charges against Kerry are unfair?
BUSH: I think that these ads -- first of all, I said clearly, all these ads, these 527s, with billionaires funding campaigns, ought to be gone.
UPDATE In an interview with CNN on Aug. 31, 2004, Rove said:
ROVE: Look, I'm against all the 527 ads and activities. I don't think they're fair. I don't think it's appropriate. They're misusing the law. They all ought to stop.

The outlaw Karl Rove is doing it again !!!

2010-10-19T10:38:00.000-07:00

Karl Rove is trying to steal elections again for the Republicans.

Our TV's, radios, and mailboxes are being inundated with lies and smears against Democrats.

Who's paying for all those attacks? Rightwing billionaires like the Koch brothers, rightwing corporations like FOX News, even foreign corporations dedicated to stealing our jobs.

Who's "the architect" of this effort? Karl Rove.

Karl Rove stole the White House for George Bush in 2000 by getting 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court to throw out 175,000 votes and appoint Bush. He stole Congress for Republicans in 2002 by forcing a divisive vote for invading Iraq based on his WMD lies. He stole the White House for Bush again in 2004 through phony terror alerts and the Swift Boat smears against war hero John Kerry.

And now he's at it again. He turned FOX News into a 24x7x365 Republican political machine, and even appears on FOX to smear President Obama personally. He set up a criminal secret slush fund to take millions from billionaires and corporations and spend it all smearing Democrats. (We are urging Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law.) He vigorously defends other corporate slush funds like the Chamber of Commerce.

But we can beat Karl Rove in November, just as we did in 2006 and 2008. Here's what we must do, starting immediately:

Vote straight Democratic
Tell everyone we know to vote straight Democratic
Even tell strangers to vote straight Democratic
Here are all the resources you need:
http://www.democrats.com/2010-gotv

In many states, early voting has begun so you don't have to wait for Election Day. After you vote, you can zap political ads, throw out political mail, and spend your free time telling friends and strangers to vote straight Democratic. This will be good for America, good for your mental health, and good for your soul.

Share your thoughts in our new blog:
http://www.democrats.com/dont-let-karl-rove-steal-another-election

Thanks for all you do!

Bob Fertik

PS: I wish the Obama Admin had the cajones to prosecute Karl Rove !!!

Jerry Brown for California Governor 2010

2010-08-22T10:25:00.000-07:00

1 2 3 4

PRESS RELEASES

Birthers, Meg Whitman Unite to Attack Brown

Brown For Governor Campaign

16 August 2010

Oakland - The Small Business Action Committee (SBAC) - an organization run by paid Whitman endorser Joel Fox and right-wing "birther" James Lacy - today launched yet another round of false attacks against Jerry Brown. (More...) (more...)

CALIFORNIANS FIRST

The Real
Jerry Brown Story

Under Jerry Brown Californians saw their tax burden reduced by more than $16 Billion. He indexed the personal income tax, eliminated the business inventory tax and offered energy tax credits, as well as other tax-saving measures. (more...)

SPOTLIGHT

Jerry Brown: Former governor has the know-how to get things done

I have lived in California all my life, as did my parents. And like them, I have devoted a large part of my life to public service. I care deeply about California. I know its history and its governing structure. (more...)

myjerrybrown.org

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Hope you come out to Oakland's Art & Soul festival this weekend. Great music, food, and art. http://bit.ly/a6NaLy —1 day 18 hours ago
I added my own thoughts about Mario Obledo to the campaign blog. Read my post here: http://bit.ly/bcuWif —1 day 19 hours ago

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THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ - WEAPONS SEARCH - THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ - WEAPONS SEARCH - Iraqis Removed Arms Material, U.S. Aide Says - NYTimes.com

2010-06-06T10:50:00.000-07:00

THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ: WEAPONS SEARCH

THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ: WEAPONS SEARCH; Iraqis Removed Arms Material, U.S. Aide Says

By DOUGLAS JEHL

Published: October 29, 2003

WASHINGTON, Oct. 28— The director of a top American spy agency said Tuesday that he believed that material from Iraq's illicit weapons program had been transported into Syria and perhaps other countries as part of an effort by the Iraqis to disperse and destroy evidence immediately before the recent war.

The official, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material ''unquestionably'' had been moved out of Iraq.

''I think people below the Saddam Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and disperse,'' General Clapper, who leads the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, said at a breakfast with reporters.

He said he was providing a personal assessment. But he said ''the obvious conclusion one draws'' was that there ''may have been people leaving the scene, fleeing Iraq, and unquestionably, I am sure, material.'' A spokesman for General Clapper's agency, David Burpee, said he could not provide further evidence to support the general's statement.

But other American intelligence officials said General Clapper's theory was among those being pursued in Iraq by David Kay, a former United Nations weapons inspector who is leading the American effort to uncover the weapons cited by the Bush administration as the major reason for going to war against Iraq.

General Clapper's comments came as the Central Intelligence Agency prepared to defend its prewar assertions that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and that it sought to reconstitute its nuclear program. The director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, has written a letter to the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence saying the agency will be ready to provide an assessment by late November.

In the letter, the contents of which were described by several intelligence officials on Tuesday, Mr. Tenet proposed that a team headed by John McLaughlin, the deputy director of central intelligence, provide a briefing for the committee after Nov. 20, when the agency's internal review is expected to be completed.

General Clapper's agency is responsible for interpreting satellite photographs and other imagery. He declined to answer a question about whether he believed that illicit Iraqi weapons material might have been smuggled into any other country.

We Need to Watch Obama over Social Security

2010-05-25T10:12:00.000-07:00

We have to watch Obama over Social Security:

He has created a commission to study potential savings in the budget, which are mainly "conservademos" (Bill Clinton types), which want to cut the social security benefits.

We need to keep watching this and put pressure on congress to instead of cut/reduce social security to increse social security benefits (by making the social security tax progressive (eliminating the $100k limit).

Contact your member of congress about this issue.

GULF OIL LEAK ESTIMATE

2010-05-16T21:48:00.000-07:00

Legalize it !!!

2010-03-30T17:28:00.000-07:00

Legalize the herb, Obama !!

Cali needs the revenue from it, and also the decriminalization of cannabis will save tons of money with the costly private prison system.

Besides tabacco and alcohol which are much worse than marijuana are legal.

The medical uses of marijuana are enormous. So it is a wining situation for Cali.

Vote for the Legalization in November ballot.

Celebrating (Mourning) a Culture of Lies

2010-03-28T21:34:00.000-07:00

Published on Sunday, March 28, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Celebrating (Mourning) a Culture of Lies

by Robert Freeman

Tomorrow, March 29th, marks the thirty-seventh anniversary of America's withdrawal from Vietnam. You won't hear it celebrated in any mainstream media, though it should be. Or more precisely, it should be mourned. Vietnam is the first war America ever lost.

It should be remembered so that we might learn the lessons of that loss. They are many, they are profound, and they could inform so many of our policy decisions today: that withdrawal from immoral wars doesn't mean the end of civilization as we know it; that even America's seemingly limitless resources are, in fact, limited; that masses of engaged, moral individuals can constrain the reckless, destructive folly of renegade elites.

Perhaps the most important lesson of Vietnam is that policies based on lies will ultimately fail, for in an open society it is the consent of the governed that is required to sustain major policy initiatives. A government can either earn that consent, or it must forfeit the essence of its democracy. If lying becomes its essential modus operandi, a nation ceases to be a democracy. Rather, it becomes a criminal conspiracy of self-interested insiders donning the trappings of democracy in order to gull the credulous.

If Vietnam was anything, it was a fetid cesspool of a policy of lies. The intelligence agencies lied about the threat to our country from a nation of pre-industrial age rice farmers who just wanted to be left alone. The Pentagon was steeped in lies, from field level body counts to the success of strategic bombing to the basic question of whether the war could even be won. The State Department lied about the prolonged, illegal bombings of Laos and Cambodia.

Multiple presidents lied about their plans to end the War because none wanted to be the first American president to ever lose a war. Congress lied about our ability to finance both a major foreign war and a Great Society, all without raising taxes. The people lied about the War's essential goodness, all the while shunting off its fighting to a Black and Latino underclass. Once middle class white boys began coming home in body bags, the War ended quickly.

It was this vast and entangled web of lies that, once unmasked in the humiliation of defeat, caused shame among the nation's people and revulsion from the rest of the world. And rightly so. For it is one of the most basic of moral precepts, one of the first lessons that all people of all cultures teach their children, that if you have to lie about something it is wrong. This is so elemental an admonition it is enshrined in one of the sacramental narratives of America's founding: George Washington and the cherry tree. "I cannot tell a lie."

The overt tragedies of Vietnam are that the U.S., the greatest military power in the history of the world, lost its first war to a rag-tag bunch of peasants who believed in the simple truth that it was not their fate to submit to foreign domination; that 58,000 Americans and 3 million Asians were killed; that our application of 21 million gallons of Agent Orange left the country the greatest man-made environmental catastrophe in the history of the world; that it wrecked the U.S. economy; that it gravely damaged America's moral standing in the world; and that it grievously undermined Americans' faith in their own government and, indeed, in themselves.

But all of those tragedies are compounded again and again in the fact that we didn't learn the most important lesson of the War: that when democratic nations found major policies on lies, either those policies will fail when the lies are disclosed, or the nation will forfeit its essential nature and accept its status as a phony, a nation of liars, led by a cabal of con men playing dress-up for the TV.

We are saturated today with lies in number and magnitude easily equal to the lies of Vietnam. In fact, it is difficult to find a major policy arena in the U.S where the essential policy is not based on lies.

The stratospheric debt we've run up over the past thirty years was all premised on the seductive lie that there would not be a day of reckoning when it would have to be paid back. That lie gave rise to enfeebling personal gluttony and debilitating cultural decadence. Of course, the debt is patently unsustainable and when the bills come due we will either debauch the currency as they did in Weimar Germany (giving rise to Hitler) or we will surrender title to much of our nation's wealth in favor of the foreigners who have funded our childish, improvident binge.

The invasion of Iraq is now a case study in the use of lies to goad a nation into an illegal and immoral war. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein was never involved in 9/11. He had nothing to do with al Qaeda. None of that mattered, and it still doesn't matter seven years later, today. The elites wanted their war because it made them richer by raising the price of oil, increasing the national debt, and inducing an orgy of weapons-buying. So they lied the country into it. They're still lying but we have become anaesthetized to it, inured to the degradation it signals for all of us, and so we accept it, mumbling servile rationalizations in a futile attempt to assuage our consciences and balm our battered dignity.

The recent financial bubble and collapse was similarly drenched in lies, from start to finish, top to bottom, inside and out. Legions of busboys, gardeners, and bartenders lied about their incomes to buy homes they could never hope to be able to afford. Phalanxes of appraisers, realtors, and mortgage brokers collaborated in the lies to consummate the contracts and clinch the commissions. Armies of Gucci-clad investment bankers bundled the garbage and called it gold, selling Collateralized Debt Obligations to hordes of greedy buyers around the world who lied to themselves that prices never went down. Bond rating agencies lied to everybody that the turds were treasures, again, to land the lush fees that larded their lavish lifestyles.

When the bubble burst, politicians, bankers on Wall Street and at the Federal Reserve, and cabinet members at Treasury lied that the only way to save the country was to transfer trillions of dollars of money from small taxpayers to the richest people in the world, no strings attached. They lied that this was to save the economy rather than replace the vaporized capital of the reckless bankers who gambled it away pursuing more and ever more sociopathically obscene profits.

The recent health care "reform" bill was sold as a policy to help the American people. In fact, its purpose is to earn the Democratic party a sustained funding stream from the insurance industry by forcing tens of millions of American citizens to buy the industry's intentionally defective products. This is the same reason the majority Democratic party WILL not enact meaningful financial reform, WILL not reduce greenhouse emissions, and WILL not constrain the expansion of illegal wars: all three policies earn them sustained funding streams from wealthy corporate interests: banks; oil and coal companies; and weapons makers. This is the essential political enterprise of our time: playing the greater whore to corporate money so that it will re-install you in the demonstrable certainty that you will continue to sell your country and its people down the river, all the while mouthing unctuous lies about serving the public.

We have lied to ourselves as a nation about our innate righteousness and our Providentially anointed superiority. Yet much of our wealth has been stolen from people in the developing world, laundered through our international rogue's gallery of complicit and obeisant thugs: the Shah of Iran, Marcos of the Philippines, Pinochet of Chile, Diem in Vietnam, the Duvaliers in Haiti, Sukarno in Indonesia, Zia in Pakistan, Rhee and Park in Korea, Saddam in Iraq, Duarte in El Salvador, the Sauds in Arabia. These are just a few of the headliners in a cast of thousands whose role in the geo-political food chain has been to enslave their people and ship out their national treasures to the U.S. in exchange for a piece of the action discreetly banked in Switzerland.

We carry on today the cataclysmic lie that we can continue our predation on the environment without paying the consequences. We can destroy vast ecosystems like rainforests, coral reefs, and oceans, boil the atmosphere in carbon, melt the polar ice caps, punch continental-sized holes in the ozone layer, wipe out dozens of species a day, and our magical economic system, a product of out innately superior civilization, will just keep producing more and more and more so that we needn't ever have to imagine living within limits, regulating our appetites, or constraining our irrepressible glandular impulses.

We could go on and on and on. A media whose purpose is not to inform and empower but to occlude and pacify; a puerile civic sphere where hate, venom, and tantrums get far more air time than do thought, dialogue, and compromise; a pervasive and astonishingly vapid entertainment culture in which more people believe in the Immaculate Conception than believe in evolution; educational "reform," much like health care "reform," whose real purpose is to destroy public education so that the half trillion dollars a year we spend on it can be turned over to private corporations running franchised charter schools; an encroaching police state that tells us that in order to be safe we must give up our civil liberties. Need we go on?

The compulsion to lie about public policy has become inescapable because so many of our nation's policies, while advancing the interests of a small, plutocratic elite, are so hostile to the fundamental interests of the American people. But what kind of country is it that can only be managed through pervasive lying? What kind of people is it that can only stomach its own policies by dressing them up in flattering fantasies? Why is it that we have to lie so often to ourselves about ourselves in order to live with ourselves?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian who led underground resistance to the Nazis in World War II, wrote once, "In a time of pervasive lying, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." Isn't it true? This is why the truth tellers in the run-up to Iraq were so viciously mocked and ruthlessly scorned. Bonhoeffer went on to write of the German people, "We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds: we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of one another and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and made us cynical. Are we still of any use?"

"Are we still of any use?"

That is the question, isn't it. That is the question on which hangs today not only the fate of our nation but the salvation of our souls. If we are to be of any use to any body, it is time we begin decrying the lying. It is time to put aside the flattering but childish illusions of existential goodness and eternal innocence and recognize and begin to atone for the venality and naked selfishness of much of what we do and what we've become.

It is time to grow out of our materialistic fetishes and begin cultivating the personal and civic maturity we like to fancy we possess, but which we don't. It is time to grow up and accept the burdens of mature citizenship, among the most important of which are a capacity and a willingness to tell the truth, letting go the comforting but corrosive lies in the confidence that courage mustered now will yield not only greater self respect today but a more sane, a more decent, and a safer society in the future.

It is important that we commemorate Vietnam, both to mourn the objective horror of what it was, but also to redeem our capacity to tell the truth, to ourselves, about ourselves. Only in that way can we begin to reclaim the country and the people we want to imagine ourselves to be.

Robert Freeman writes on economics, history and education. His earlier piece, "Is Iraq Another Vietnam?" was also published on CommonDreams. He can reached atrobertfreeman10@yahoo.com.

Bush wipes handshake off on Clinton's shirt !!!

2010-03-24T21:53:00.000-07:00

2010-03-24T21:49:00.000-07:00

2010-03-22T16:20:00.000-07:00

It is time to Oust Glenn Beck

2010-03-22T16:05:00.000-07:00

Christian Social Justice Group Joins Campaign to Oust Glenn Beck

Last month, I wrote an article about the growing campaign to foist Glenn Bleck off the air. Back then Beck’s show had already run in the UK with no ads — which normally pay for content air time — for six days. Four weeks later, and the show has run adless in Britain for over a month, in large part thanks to the organizing efforts of StopBeck.com’s UK outfit.

The campaign continues to grow in different ways. ColorofChange.org which has been leading the domestic effort to oust Beck, recently announced their newest partner, a Christian social justice group.

Sojourners, a progressive Christian organization, recently launched a petition page addressed to Glenn Beck. The letter begins, “I’m a Christian who believes in the biblical call to social justice.”

This all comes on the heels of Beck’s latest bout of fear-mongering, when he told viewers to be wary of churches that preach social and economic justice, despite the fact that these are key pillars of Jesus’ teachings.

View the craziness here:

Yes, that’s right: in his latest failure to correctly draw causal connections, he compares social justice-preaching churches with Communists and Nazis.

The Sojourners’ petition urges supporters to send Beck a letter that reads: “I stand in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets and the teachings of Jesus that demonstrate God’s will for justice in every aspect of our individual, social, and economic lives.”

Lots of Herb #1 song

2010-03-16T10:48:00.000-07:00

Check out the # 1 song: Lots of Herbs, music by Nando of Nowsound.

web site: www.reggae-vibes.com (see Hot & fresh top 15)

Date : -+ March 14 -2010- +-

Artist - Song - Riddim/Label

1	5	Junior Kelly - Lots Of Herb Jah Children / Nowtime Sound
2	1	Dakeye - Just Like A Man Fallen / Citizen K Productions
3	3	Alborosie and The Tamlins - Garrison Ghetto / No Doubt Records
4	2	Gregory Isaacs and Blackout - Inner City Lady Inner City Lady / Necessary Mayhem Prod.
5	4	Richie Spice - Dont Call Mi No Dog Ital Jockey / Sankofa Records

6	14	Elephant Man - Gal Yuh Have Yuh Own Duck / Penthouse
7	15	Kiprich - Bonafide Dream / House A Stars Prod.
8	8	Buju Banton - Hard Times Shoulder Move / Lenky
9	9	Konshens and Mr Vegas - Help Me Praise Jehovia Praise Jehovia / White
10	13	Mr Vegas - Let Them Talk D.N.A. / TJ Records

11	6	Bascom X - Crime Rate Maestro / Weedy G
12	12	Delly and Mitch - Want To Know Jet Blue / Gargamel
13	NEW	Morgan Heritage - Here To Stay Eternity / Techniques Records
14	NEW	Mr Chumps - Hunting Native / Zee Squad Records
15	NEW	Leftside and Llo

Lots of Herb # 1 song

2010-03-16T10:36:00.000-07:00

Song: Lots of Herb

Singer: Junior Kelly

Author: Music by Nando of Nowsound.

Time for a U.S. Revolution - Fifteen Reasons

2010-03-07T18:40:00.001-08:00

Published on Sunday, March 7, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Time for a U.S. Revolution – Fifteen Reasons

by Bill Quigley

It is time for a revolution. Government does not work for regular people. It appears to work quite well for big corporations, banks, insurance companies, military contractors, lobbyists, and for the rich and powerful. But it does not work for people.

The 1776 Declaration of Independence stated that when a long train of abuses by those in power evidence a design to reduce the rights of people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the peoples right, in fact their duty to engage in a revolution.

Martin Luther King, Jr., said forty three years ago next month that it was time for a radical revolution of values in the United States. He preached “a true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.” It is clearer than ever that now is the time for radical change.

Look at what our current system has brought us and ask if it is time for a revolution?

Over 2.8 million people lost their homes in 2009 to foreclosure or bank repossessions – nearly 8000 each day – higher numbers than the last two years when millions of others also lost their homes.

At the same time, the government bailed out Bank of America, Citigroup, AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the auto industry and enacted the troubled asset (TARP) program with $1.7 trillion of our money.

Wall Street then awarded itself over $20 billion in bonuses in 2009 alone, an average bonus on top of pay of $123,000.

At the same time, over 17 million people are jobless right now. Millions more are working part-time when they want and need to be working full-time.

Yet the current system allows one single U.S. Senator to stop unemployment and Medicare benefits being paid to millions.

There are now 35 registered lobbyists in Washington DC for every single member of the Senate and House of Representatives, at last count 13,739 in 2009. There are eight lobbyists for every member of Congress working on the health care fiasco alone.

At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that corporations now have a constitutional right to interfere with elections by pouring money into races.

The Department of Justice gave a get out of jail free card to its own lawyers who authorized illegal torture.

At the same time another department of government, the Pentagon, is prosecuting Navy SEALS for punching an Iraqi suspect.

The US is not only involved in senseless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the U.S. now maintains 700 military bases world-wide and another 6000 in the US and our territories. Young men and women join the military to protect the U.S. and to get college tuition and healthcare coverage and killed and maimed in elective wars and being the world’s police. Wonder whose assets they are protecting and serving?

In fact, the U.S. spends $700 billion directly on military per year, half the military spending of the entire world – much more than Europe, China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, and Venezuela - combined.

The government and private companies have dramatically increased surveillance of people through cameras on public streets and private places, airport searches, phone intercepts, access to personal computers, and compilation of records from credit card purchases, computer views of sites, and travel.

The number of people in jails and prisons in the U.S. has risen sevenfold since 1970 to over 2.3 million. The US puts a higher percentage of our people in jail than any other country in the world.

The tea party people are mad at the Republicans, who they accuse of selling them out to big businesses.

Democrats are working their way past depression to anger because their party, despite majorities in the House and Senate, has not made significant advances for immigrants, or women, or unions, or African Americans, or environmentalists, or gays and lesbians, or civil libertarians, or people dedicated to health care, or human rights, or jobs or housing or economic justice. Democrats also think their party is selling out to big business.

Forty three years ago next month, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached in Riverside Church in New York City that “a time comes when silence is betrayal.” He went on to condemn the Vietnam War and the system which created it and the other injustices clearly apparent. “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing oriented” society to a “person oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

It is time.

Bill is legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. Quigley77@gmail.com

Pres. Obama: Replace Rahm with Michael Moore!!

2010-03-06T09:51:00.000-08:00

31Comments Print

March 5th, 2010 10:12 PM

President Obama: Replace Rahm with Me ...an open letter from Michael Moore

Dear President Obama,

I understand you may be looking to replace Rahm Emanuel as your chief of staff.

I would like to humbly offer myself, yours truly, as his replacement.

I will come to D.C. and clean up the mess that's been created around you. I will work for $1 a year. I will help the Dems on Capitol Hill find their spines and I will teach them how to nonviolently beat the Republicans to a pulp.

And I will help you get done what the American people sent you there to do. I don't need much, just a cot in the White House basement will do.

Now, don't get too giddy with excitement over my offer, because you and I are going to be up at 5 in the morning, 7 days a week and I am going to get you pumped up for battle every single day (see photo). Each morning you and I will do 100 jumping jacks and you will repeat after me:

"THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ELECTED ME, NOT THE REPUBLICANS, TO RUN THE COUNTRY! I AM IN CHARGE! I WILL ORDER ALL OBSTRUCTIONISTS OUTTA MY WAY! IF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE DON'T LIKE WHAT I'M DOING THEY CAN THROW MY ASS OUT IN 2012. IN THE MEANTIME, I CALL THE SHOTS ON THEIR BEHALF! NOW, CONGRESS, DROP AND GIVE ME 50!!"

Then we will put on our jogging sweats and run up to Capitol Hill. We will take names, kick butts, and then take some more names. If we have to give a few noogies or half-nelson's, then so be it. In our pockets we will have a piece of paper to show the pansy Dems just how much they won by in 2008 -- and the poll results that show the majority of Americans oppose the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and want the bankers punished. Like drill sergeants, we will get right up in their faces and ask them, "WHAT PART OF THE PUBLIC MANDATE DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND, SOLDIER?!! DROP AND GIVE ME 50!"

I know this is the job Rahm Emanuel was supposed to be doing.

Now, don't get me wrong. I have always admired Rahm Emanuel (if you don't count his getting NAFTA pushed through Congress in the '90s which destroyed towns like Flint, Michigan. I know, picky-picky.). He is what we needed for a long time -- a no-apologies, take-no-prisoners fighting machine. Someone who is not afraid to get his hands dirty and pound the right wing into submission. Far from being the foul-mouthed bully he has been portrayed as, Rahm is the one who BEAT UP the bullies to protect us from them.

That's certainly what he did in 2006. After six long, miserable years of the middle-class getting slaughtered and the poor being flushed down the toilet, Rahm Emanuel took on the job of returning Congress to the Democrats. No one believed it could be done.

But he did it. Big time. He put the fear of God into the party of Rush and Newt. They had never been so scared. More importantly, though, he instilled a sense of hope in the Democrats that they could actually score the mother of all hat tricks in 2008 -- and with you, an African American no less, in the pole position!

It worked. The Darkness ended. The vast majority of nation wept with joy on the night of the election (those who weren't weeping went out and bought a record number of guns and ammo). Unlike the last president, you didn't "win" by 537 votes in Florida (although Gore won the popular vote by a half-million), you beat McCain nationally by 9,522,083 votes! The House Democrats got a walloping 79-vote margin. The Senate Dems would caucus with a supermajority of 60 votes unheard of in over 30 years. The wars would now end. America would have universal health care. Wall Street and the banks would, at the very least, be reined in. Hardworking citizens would not be thrown out of their homes. It was supposed to be the dawning of a new age.

But the Republicans were not going to go quietly into the night. You see, instead of having just one Rahm Emanuel, they are ALL Rahm Emanuels. That's why they usually win. Unlike most Democrats, they are relentless and unstoppable. When they believe in something (which is usually themselves and the K Street job they hope to be rewarded with someday), they'll fight for it till the death. They are loyal to a fault to each other (they were never able to denounce Bush, even though they knew he was destroying the party). They dig their heels in deep no matter what. If you exiled them to a lone chunk of melting polar ice cap, they would keep insisting that it was just a normal "January thaw," even as the frigid Arctic waters rose above their God-fearing necks ("See what I mean -- this water is COLD! What 'global *warming*'?! Adam and Eve rode dinos...aagghh!!... gulp gulp gulp").

We thought we were all done with this craziness, but we were mistaken. Like a beast that you just can't cage, the Republicans convinced not only the media, but YOU and your fellow Dems, that 59 votes was a *minority*! Precious time was lost trying to reach a "consensus" and trying to be "bipartisan."

Well, you and the Democrats have been in charge now for over a year and not one banking regulation has been reinstated. We don't have universal health care. The war in Afghanistan has escalated. And tens of thousands of Americans continue to lose their jobs and be thrown out of their homes. For most of us, it's just simply no longer good enough that Bush is gone. Woo hoo. Bush is gone. Yippee. That hasn't created one new friggin' job.

You're such a good guy, Mr. President. You came to Washington with your hand extended to the Republicans and they just chopped it off. You wanted to be respectful and they decided that they were going to say "no" to everything you suggested. Yet, you kept on saying you still believed in bipartisanship.

Well, if you really want bipartisanship, just go ahead and let the Republicans win in November. Then you'll get all the bipartisanship you want.

Let me be clear about one thing: The Democrats on Election Day 2010 are going to get an ass-whoopin' of biblical proportions if things don't change right now. And after the new Republican majority takes over, they, along with a few conservative Democrats in Congress, will get to bipartisanly impeach you for being a socialist and a citizen of Kenya. How nice to see both sides of the aisle working together again!

And the brief window we had to fix this country will be gone.

Gone.

Gone, baby, gone.

I don't know what your team has been up to, but they haven't served you well. And Rahm, poor Rahm, has turned into a fighter -- not of Republicans, but of the left. He called those of us who want universal health care "f***ing retarded." Look, I don't know if Rahm is the problem or if it's Gibbs or Axelrod or any of the other great people we owe a debt of thanks to for getting you elected. All I know is that whatever is fueling your White House it's now running on fumes. Time to shake things up! Time to bring me in to get you pumped up every morning! Go Barack! Yay Obama! Fight, Team, Fight!

I'm packed and ready to come to D.C. tomorrow. If it helps, you won't really be losing Rahm entirely because I'll be bringing his brother with me -- my agent, Ari Emanuel. Man, you should see HIM negotiate a deal! Have you ever wanted to see Mitch McConnell walking around Capitol Hill carrying his own head in his hands after it's just been handed to him by the infamous Ari? Oh, baby, it won't be pretty -- but boy will it be sweet!

What say you, Barack? Me and you against the world! Yes we can! It'll be fun -- and we may just get something done. Whaddaya got to lose? Hope?

Retardedly yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

P.S. Just to give you an idea of the new style I'll be bringing with me, when a cornhole like Sen. Ben Nelson tries to hold you up next time, this is what I will tell him in order to get his vote: "You've got exactly 30 seconds to rescind your demand or I will personally make sure that Nebraska doesn't get one more federal dollar for the rest of Obama's term. And then I will let everyone in your state know that you wear Sooner panties, backwards. NOW DROP AND GIVE ME 50!"

President Obama: Replace Rahm with Me ...an open letter from Michael Moore | MichaelMoore.com

2010-03-06T09:49:00.000-08:00

President Obama: Replace Rahm with Me ...an open letter from Michael Moore | MichaelMoore.com

2010-03-02T21:00:00.000-08:00

OBAMA legalize marijuana, stop DEA raides on medical marijuana clubs !!!!

Stop giving money to prisons. Stop marijuana criminalization !

The Missing Voices at the Healthcare Summit | MichaelMoore.com

2010-02-25T22:42:00.000-08:00

The Missing Voices at the Healthcare Summit | MichaelMoore.com

The despicable mofo nazi John Yoo

2010-02-22T19:31:00.000-08:00

Padilla Sues DoJ Official for Authorizing Torture

By Paul Kiel - January 4, 2008, 2:50PM

Here's an approach I haven't seen before. From The Chicago Tribune:

In the latest legal contest over the treatment of detained terrorist suspects, attorneys for Jose Padilla filed a suit in a California federal district court this morning against John Yoo, the former deputy assistant Attorney General whose legal opinions formed the basis for Padilla's detention and the interrogation techniques used against him that the attorneys call torture....
The suit filed this morning in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, turns the spotlight of blame on Yoo, the author of a series of legal memoranda known collectively as the "Torture Memos." Drafted in 2002, when Yoo was a deputy assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department, they provided the legal justification for the interrogation techniques used on suspected Al Qaeda operatives that many, from former generals to presidential candidates, have since decried as torture.
"John Yoo is the first person in American history to provide the legal authorization for the instiution of torture in the U.S.," said Jonathan Freiman, an attorney representing Padilla in the suit. "He [Yoo] was an absolutely essential part of what will be viewed by history as a group of rogue officials acting under cover of law to undermine fundamental rights.it never would have happened without the legal green light. That made it possible."

We need to put Dick Cheney to jail !!!

2010-02-18T10:22:00.000-08:00

Dick Cheney is a war criminal. He belongs in prison.

“I was a big supporter of waterboarding,” Cheney crowed Sunday, on ABC’s “This Week,” adding, “I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques … ”

So, what do we do with this information? The former Number Two Honcho in the United States of America has bragged, in public, that the torture buck stopped, or at least paused long enough to be fondled, on his desk.

Here’s what we do with that information: We throw Dick Cheney in prison.

To go on about our collective business, merely to shake our heads and hope it was a one-off (or, more accurately, a several-hundred-off), to call no one to account, does more than set a dangerous precedent: it establishes the shameful, awful, but clearly undeniable fact that we live in a country that tortures.

That’s present tense: We live in a country that tortures. Maybe not right this minute, maybe not tomorrow or a week from Wednesday, but, that’s what we do. The Obama administration claims to have put a stop to it, and they probably have. Well, good for them, and good for us, as far as it goes, which is not very. Until we as a nation, we as a people, make our rejection of this barbarity manifest through the proper workings of our court system, we’re engaging in what used to be called — and should be called again, for my money — just so much chin music: Yeah, we tortured, and a lot of us feel pretty steamed about it, but we’re not going to do it ever, ever again...

Major conference about 911 truth (AE911Truth)

2010-02-17T21:19:00.000-08:00

News from AE911Truth

Feb 19, 2010
Updates: Major Press Conference: Feb 19
— Editor

1,000+ Architects & Engineers
demand a new 9/11 WTC investigation!

• Host an AE911Truth Press Conference in your cityon Feb 19

• Luncheon price-hike delayed to Feb. 16 - last chance!

• A/E conference (2-6pm) now open to all petition signers

• David Ray Griffin and Steven Jones attendance confirmed

• Submit the AE911Truth Petition to your congressional reps

• LIVE webcast via webinar at AE911Truth.org - watch in real time!

As of January 2010, over 1,000 architects and engineers have signed our petition demanding a truly independent investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11. This petition, along with AE911Truth literature and DVDs, will be presented to every Member of Congress on the same day by the 14,000 active supporters of AE911Truth.

To underscore the importance of this milestone achievement, AE911Truth is launching a massive publicity campaign world-wide and holding a majorPress Conference in San Francisco, California on February 19, 2010 followed by an informative Keynote Luncheon to include David Ray Griffin and Steven Jones. We will also host a strategy and team development conference featuring our Architect and Engineer petition signers - many of whom will be flying in to San Francisco to join us. All petition signers are now welcome and encouraged to attend this very important mini-conference.

This will be a day of events that you won't want to miss!

• DATE:February 19, 2010
• TIME: 11am – 6pm
• PLACE:Marines' Memorial Club & Hotel,
609 Sutter St.
San Francisco, CA

PROGRAM:

11:00 am - Press Conference
Richard Gage, AIA, accompanied by other distinguished speakers and prominent petition signers, will announce this milestone event with a brief dynamic presentation of the evidence which has convinced over 1,000 architects and engineers to support the demand for a real investigation. The presentation will be followed by Q&A. Press kits will be distributed.

• Open to the Public - Free

12:00 pm - Keynote Luncheon
Join us for an exclusive luncheon in honor of the thousand petition signers and supporters who have contributed to the success of AE911Truth. To mark the occasion, distinguished members of the 9/11 Truth movement, including David Ray Griffin, PhD. and Steven Jones, PhD., will make important relevant presentations. We will also present an overview of the major accomplishments achieved in 2009 along with the ambitious goals we have set for 2010.

• Open to all AE911Truth petition signers, volunteers, and qualified members of the press
• Reservations required (RSVP below) Note: We must have your choice of Salmon or Beef by Monday Feb 15th please RSVP now to 1000@AE911Truth.org
• Cost per person: $50 if paying by Feb. 16, $75 if after Feb. 16

2 – 6 pm – A/E Conference
This conference will give us the opportunity to strategize with and empower our architect and engineer petition signers. Our goal: to develop more AE911Truth speakers and otherwise actively disseminate our message to fellow A/E professionals. We will focus on several methods of structuring and delivering the message effectively. And hear your ideas about how to make AE911Truth even more impactful.

• Open to all petition signers & special guests
• Reservations required (RSVP below)
• Cost per person: $20 if registered by Feb. 16, $30 if registered after Feb. 16

REGISTRATION:
• AE911Truth online ticketing service:http://www.1000aes.eventbrite.com
• Phone: (510) 292-4710
• Email: 1000[at]AE911Truth.org

DONATIONS & SPONSORSHIP:

Please also consider a sponsorship to help defray our costs of organizing this historic event:

a. Sponsor a Volunteer – honoring their hard work and dedication - enabling them to attend the Luncheon.
b. Sponsor a Speaker with a major donation that will enable us to bring esteemed 9/11 Truth figures David Ray Griffin, Steven Jones, and other special guests to our milestone event.
c. Sponsor the Publicity Effort with a generous donation to enable us to reach the broadest audiences possible locally, nationally and worldwide via PR Newswire, etc.

Actions you can take - for coordinated exposure and publicity:

1) Download and print the AE911Truth petition. Mail & fax it to your local congressional rep with a personalized message along with the letter of introduction to AE911Truth. (This letter can also be used for numerous other 9/11 awareness raising purposes!)

2)Hold the AE911Truth press conference in your local City on Feb 19. We will help you with this.

3)Volunteer now to contact the media in your area (or across the country) to distribute:
• Radio Interview Request
(Email it to every radio, TV and newspaper in your community starting now to propose on-air interviews with Mr. Gage and encourage them to cover this timely story)
• SF Bay Area Media Alert
(Issue now to advise media to cover the event when it happens on the 19th)
• Press Release
(To be issued only on the morning of Press Conference. Will not be available for download until midnight Feb 18)
Please contact Abby Martin at 1000@AE911Truth.org to help.

5) Download and print the press conference flyer for your use in raising awareness.

Finally, please join the family of monthly sustaining donors to ensure our success in 2010.
Thank you again for all of your efforts in the past and for being there for us at this crucial moment.

I hope to see you in San Francisco!

Richard Gage, AIA
and the dedicated volunteers at AE911Truth

Feb 16, 2010
The Media Response to the Growing Influence of the 9/11 Truth Movement
— Elizabeth Woodworth

Part II: Part II: A Survey of Attitude Change in 2009-2010

Originally published February 15, 2010 by Global Research, available here.

Abstract

In the past year, in response to emerging independent science on the 9/11 attacks, nine corporate, seven public, and two independent media outlets aired analytic programs investigating the official account.

Increasingly, the issue is treated as a scientific controversy worthy of debate, rather than as a "conspiracy theory" ignoring science and common sense.

This essay presents these media analyses in the form of 18 case studies.

Eight countries – Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Russia – have allowed their publicly-owned broadcasting stations to air the full spectrum of evidence challenging the truth of the official account of 9/11.

This more open approach taken in the international media – I could also have included the Japanese media – might be a sign that worldwide public and corporate media organizations are positioning themselves, and preparing their audiences, for a possible revelation of the truth of the claim that forces within the US government were complicit in the attacks – a revelation that would call into question the publicly given rationale for the military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

The evidence now being explored in the international media may pave the way for the US media to take an in-depth look at the implications of what is now known about 9/11, and to re-examine the country's foreign and domestic policies in the light of this knowledge.

I. Introduction

Until 2009, doubts about the official 9/11 story were briefly entertained by the mainstream media on each anniversary of the event, allowing the independent research community only a fleeting moment once a year to publicly voice its findings.

Feb 10, 2010
Major Milestone Reached at AE911Truth:
— Editor

1,000 Architects & Engineers demand new 9/11 WTC investigation!

Press Conference Scheduled February 19th

As of January 2010, over 1,000 architects and engineers have signed our petition demanding a real investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11. This petition, along with AE911Truth literature and DVDs, will also be presented to every Member of Congress.

To underscore the importance of this milestone achievement, AE911Truth is launching a massive publicity campaign nationwide and holding a Press Conference in San Francisco, California on February 19, 2010 followed by an exclusiveKeynote Luncheon to include David Ray Griffin, Steven Jones and others. We will also host an exclusive A/E Conference in honor of our AE911Truth petition signers– many of whom will be flying in to San Francisco to join us. Mark your calendars now! This will be a day of events that you won't want to miss!

• DATE: February 19, 2010
• TIME: 11am – 6pm
• PLACE: Marines' Memorial Club & Hotel,
609 Sutter St.
San Francisco, CA

When is high tide for the 9/11 Truth movement? When do architects and engineers, as well as physicists, journalists, actors, artists, students, policemen, firemen, pilots, doctors, veterans, professors, scientists, lawyers, politicians, peace activists, clergy, members of the armed forces, and every other manner of citizen imaginable, join with the survivors, the First Responders, and the family members of the victims of 9/11 to commemorate the terrorist attacks? On the eleventh of the month, every single month: That's when we say, "Let's roll."

The concept was originated by TruthAction, and the idea was to publicly, consistently, and exponentially raise awareness about 9/11, showing support for the family members of 9/11 victims, as well as the sick and dying First Responders – to let them know, in a bold and visible way, that they haven't been forgotten. After all, it was primarily the 9/11 family members who pressured the Bush administration (which tried very hard to block any investigation of 9/11 at all) to form the 9/11 Commission. The 9/11 Commission turned out to be a cruel farce, and now the family members are fighting once more – this time for the real investigation they should have gotten. Should they – who have lost so much – have to do this work alone? We think not.

Jan 26, 2010
Sunstein and Beck Fire Shots Across Our Bow
— Gregg Roberts

Officials, journalists, activists say 9/11 truth activists pose a violent threat; call for secret government disruption of our work – or worse

Note: This article addresses issues that arguably lie outside AE911Truth's mission. We consider such a departure to be justified in this case, because the paper by Sunstein and Vermeule specifically mentioned as the targets of its advocated "infiltration," the 16% of Americans who responded to a Scripps-Howard Poll in 2006 that it was either very likely or somewhat likely that "the collapse of the twin towers in New York was aided by explosives secretly planted in the two buildings" (Conspiracy Theories, p. 2).

You know you're getting somewhere on an issue of paramount public importance when your opponents stop making fun of you and start describing you as a threat to the established order, and supporting interference with or the elimination of your First Amendment rights, and even accuse you of being a terrorist.

Background 1: Weitzman's Defamation

One of the first shots in the threat campaign was fired just over two years ago by Mark Weitzman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (to which we responded).

Testifying in November 2007 before a House subcommittee of the Homeland Security committee,Weitzman portrayed AE911Truth in what could be construed as part of a jihadist campaign in support of "violent radicalization," " homegrown terrorism," and "ideologically based violence." The words Weitzman intoned as our homepage appeared in his presentation – "Soon, soon, soon, the attack on Manhattan" – have never appeared on our website. Alas, anyone testifying before Congress has absolute immunity against being sued for defamation. All of this is a sour irony, given Weitzman's work as an "anti-defamation" activist.

COINTELPRO Revisited – by Harvard Law Professors

In early 2008, Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule published a preliminary draft of a Harvard Law / University of Chicago Law working paper entitled "Conspiracy Theories". The paper has become "the talk of the town" in the 9/11 Truth community. The references at the end of this article are only a small sample of what's available through Internet search engines.

Jan 25, 2010
AE911Truth presents at The Commonwealth Club of California
— Richard Shinn

"We only propose to find truth, and turn it loose in the world." - Edward F. Adams
(Founder of The Commonwealth Club)

For videos on AE911Truth's presentation at the Commonwealth Club please scroll to the bottom
Read the entire Info Item...

Jan 25, 2010
The Shout Heard ’Round the World on Feb 19!
— Editor

1,000 Architects & Engineers Call for a Real 9/11 Investigation
Press Conference and Dinner February 19, 2010
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Jan 23, 2010
Live Debate: Architect Richard Gage, AIA, vs. Explosives Expert Ron Craig, Round Two
— Graham Pardun

"We've got to follow the truth, no matter where it leads us." – Richard Syrett

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Dick Cheney guilty of ordering torture !!!

2010-02-15T21:24:00.000-08:00

February 15th, 2010 8:42 PM

'This Week' Transcript: Former Vice President Dick Cheney

ABC

…

KARL: If you have somebody in custody like Abdulmutallab, after just trying to blow up an airliner, and you think he has information on another attack, I mean, do you think that those enhanced interrogation techniques should have been -- should have been used? I mean, would you -- do you think that he should have been, for instance, subject to everything, including waterboarding?

CHENEY: Well, I think the -- the professionals need to make that judgment. We've got people in -- we had in our administration -- I'm sure they're still there -- many of them were career personnel -- who are expects in this subject. And they are the ones that you ought to turn somebody like Abdulmutallab over to, let them be the judge of whether or not he's prepared to cooperate and how they can best achieve his cooperation.

KARL: But you believe they should have had the option of everything up to and including waterboarding?

CHENEY: I think you ought to have all of those capabilities on the table. Now, President Obama has taken them off the table. He announced when he came in last year that they would never use anything other than the U.S. Army manual, which doesn't include those techniques. I think that's a mistake.

…

CHENEY: You want my opinion, my view of what ought to happen, I think we have to treat it as a -- as a war. This is a strategic threat to the United States. I think that's why we were successful for seven-and-a-half years in avoiding a further major attack against the United States.

And I do get very nervous and very upset when that's the dominant approach, as it was sometimes in the Bush administration or certainly would appear to be at times in the new Obama administration.

KARL: Did you more often win or lose those battles, especially as you got to the second term?

CHENEY: Well, I suppose it depends on which battle you're talking about. I won some; I lost some. I can't...

(CROSSTALK)

KARL: ... waterboarding, clearly, what was your...

CHENEY: I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques that...

KARL: And you opposed the administration's actions of doing away with waterboarding?

CHENEY: Yes.

Tags:

Dick Cheney guilty of ordering torture !!!

2010-02-15T21:12:00.000-08:00

February 15th, 2010 8:42 PM

'This Week' Transcript: Former Vice President Dick Cheney

ABC

…

KARL: But you believe they should have had the option of everything up to and including waterboarding?

…

And I do get very nervous and very upset when that's the dominant approach, as it was sometimes in the Bush administration or certainly would appear to be at times in the new Obama administration.

KARL: Did you more often win or lose those battles, especially as you got to the second term?

CHENEY: Well, I suppose it depends on which battle you're talking about. I won some; I lost some. I can't...

(CROSSTALK)

KARL: ... waterboarding, clearly, what was your...

CHENEY: I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques that...

KARL: And you opposed the administration's actions of doing away with waterboarding?

CHENEY: Yes.

Dollars for Death, Pennies for Life

2010-02-15T10:15:00.000-08:00

Published on Monday, February 15, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Dollars for Death, Pennies for Life

by Norman Solomon

When the U.S. military began a major offensive in southern Afghanistan over the weekend, the killing of children and other civilians was predictable. Lofty rhetoric aside, such deaths come with the territory of war and occupation.

A month ago, President Obama pledged $100 million in U.S. government aid to earthquake-devastated Haiti. Compare that to the $100 billion price tag to keep 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan for a year.

While commanders in Afghanistan were launching what the New York Times called "the largest offensive military operation since the American-led coalition invaded the country in 2001," the situation in Haiti was clearly dire.

With more than a million Haitians still homeless, vast numbers -- the latest estimates are around 75 percent -- don't have tents or tarps. The rainy season is fast approaching, with serious dangers of typhoid and dysentery.

No shortage of bombs in Afghanistan; a lethal shortage of tents in Haiti. Such priorities -- actual, not rhetorical -- are routine.

Last summer, I saw hundreds of children and other civilians at the Helmand Refugee Camp District 5, a miserable makeshift encampment in Kabul. The U.S. government had ample resources for bombing their neighborhoods in the Helmand Valley -- but was doing nothing to help the desperate refugees to survive after they fled to Afghanistan's capital city.

Such priorities have parallels at home. The military hawks and deficit hawks are now swooping along Pennsylvania Avenue in tight formation. There's plenty of money in the U.S. Treasury for war in Afghanistan. But domestic spending to meet human needs -- job creation, for instance -- is another matter.

Joblessness is now crushing many low-income Americans. Among those with annual household incomes of less than $12,500, the unemployment rate during the fourth quarter of last year "was a staggering 30.8 percent," Bob Herbert noted in a February 9 column. "That's more than five points higher than the overall jobless rate at the height of the Depression."

Herbert added: "The next lowest group, with incomes of $12,500 to $20,000, had an unemployment rate of 19.1 percent. These are the kinds of jobless rates that push families already struggling on meager incomes into destitution."

The current situation is akin to the one that Martin Luther King Jr. confronted in 1967 when he challenged Congress for showing "hostility to the poor" -- appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity" but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."

Such priorities are taking lives every day, near and far.

Early this month, the National Council of Churches sent out an article by theologians George Hunsinger and Michael Kinnamon, who wrote: "What the Haitians obviously need most is massive humanitarian relief. They need food, water, medical supplies. They need shelter and physical reconstruction. . . . Over half of Haiti's population are children, 15 years old or younger. Many were already hungry and homeless before the earthquake hit."

But the warfare state, with vast budgets for military purposes, has scant funds for sustaining life.

These priorities kill.

It is time to get rid of Blue Cross and other health care insurance companies

2010-02-11T20:59:00.000-08:00

Other insurers raising health care rates too

Victoria Colliver, Chronicle Staff Writer

Thursday, February 11, 2010

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Anthem Blue Cross customers may be hopping mad about their rate hikes, but members of other health insurers say they're also getting hit with sky-high increases.

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John McClave of San Francisco opened his mail this week to learn Health Net had jacked up his monthly premium from $345 to $462 on March 1 - a nearly 34 percent increase. This was on top of an 18 percent increase he received last year.

"I do intend to shop around, but with others raising their rates at the same time I am not too optimistic," said McClave, 57, a freelance marketing and communications consultant.

Anthem Blue Cross, headquartered in Woodland Hills (Los Angeles County), has come under fire this week after it told thousands of individual policyholders their premiums would increase on March 1 by as much as 39 percent and, in some cases, more. Consumers say other carriers, including Health Net and Aetna, are also raising rates.

Officials target hikes

The Anthem rate hikes have become a talking point for the Obama administration, with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius demanding the insurer justify the hikes. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce and its Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations are also looking into the issue.

California legislators and regulators have announced probes, with Assemblyman Dave Jones, D-Sacramento, scheduling a hearing Feb. 23 to examine not only Anthem's proposed increases, but also those imposed by other health insurance companies.

On Wednesday, Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, said he plans to introduce legislation to require health insurers to disclose their reasons for raising rates and for denying coverage to applicants.

Leno, who supports a single-payer health system in the state, said he doesn't buy Anthem's excuse that higher medical costs and a shrinking membership pool made the increases necessary.

Anthem declined to comment Wednesday.

Attention welcomed

Consumers said they appreciate the additional scrutiny and hope it will produce change.

When Health Net increased Britton Jackson's coverage by 49 percent last year, the 40-year-old San Francisco real estate agent said she felt isolated in her frustration. "I think people are paying so much more attention to it now and realizing they're not alone," she said.

Small businesses are also getting walloped. Carmel-Monterey Travel in Monterey switched last year from Anthem to Aetna to save money - only to be hit this week with news of a 40 percent rate hike for the eight-member group.

Health Net declined to discuss the company's rates, and Aetna officials did not return a call for comment.

Some Anthem consumers reported even higher rate increases than the 39 percent cited. Anthem, which is owned by Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc. and is the state's largest for-profit insurer, has declined to say how many policyholders are affected or how high the company raised rates.

Bay Area resident Mary Deen said Anthem Blue Cross raised her rates from $134 a month last year to $263 a month - a 96 percent increase. Deen, who is self-employed, tried to get answers from the company but was given the generic excuse of higher medical costs. "It doesn't seem fair my increase is so high and I've never filed a claim," she said.

Therapists' rates cut

California physical, occupational and speech therapists are also taking issue with Anthem. The therapists said the insurer cut their reimbursement rates by 30 to 50 percent on Feb. 1.

Chris Chorak, a physical therapist and owner of Presidio Sport & Medicine in San Francisco, said she refused to agree to the new rates, even though about 30 percent of her patients are covered by Anthem. She said she couldn't afford to stay open under the new pricing structure.

Anthem officials said the company had to adjust its physical therapy reimbursement rates to "standardize the pricing structure and to help contain escalating health care costs."

E-mail Victoria Colliver at vcolliver@sfchronicle.com.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/11/MNRS1BVIVR.DTL##ixzz0fIKd8IlS

'Peace Prize" President Submits Largest War Budget Ever

2010-02-01T12:07:00.000-08:00

Published on Monday, February 1, 2010 by Reuters

'Peace Prize' President Submits Largest War Budget Ever

Obama Seeks Record $708 Billion in Defense Budget

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama on Monday asked Congress to approve a record $708 billion in defense spending for fiscal year 2011, including a 3.4 percent increase in the Pentagon's base budget and $159 billion to fund U.S. military missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The White House budget request also included $33 billion in additional funding for fiscal 2010 to pay for increasing military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and drawing down U.S. forces in Iraq. That comes on top of $129.6 billion already provided for the current fiscal year, which ends September 30.

The Pentagon's base budget request of $549 billion is up $18 billion from $531 billion in fiscal 2010, and will pay for continued reforms of defense acquisitions, development of a ballistic missile defense system and care of wounded soldiers.

The budget also calls for cancellation of several major weapons programs, including Boeing Co's C-17 transport plane, saving $2.5 billion, and a second engine for the Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter jet, saving $465 million in fiscal 2011 and more than $1 billion longer-term. The White House tried to kill both programs last year, but lawmakers revived them during the budget process.

The second engine is being developed by General Electric Co and Britain's Rolls-Royce as an alternate to the main engine built by Pratt & Whitney, a unit of United Technologies Corp.

The proposed budget also kills plans for development of a new Navy cruiser, scraps plans to replace the Navy's EP-3 intelligence aircraft and halts work on a missile early-warning satellite, opting instead to upgrade the Space Based Infrared System satellite already being developed by Lockheed.

The budget proposal also calls for a delay in replacing two new Navy command and control shops until after 2015, a move the White House said would save $3.8 billion across the Pentagon's five-year defense plan. The Navy had planned to buy one command ship in 2012, and a second one in 2014.

Procurement of a new amphibious vehicle being built by General Dynamics Corp for the Marine Corps would be delayed by one year, saving $50 million in fiscal 2011 and cutting risk by allowing more time for testing.

The Pentagon also said it would further reduce its use of high-risk contracts in areas that related to time, material and labor hours by 17 percent through the end of 2011.

The budget underscored the administration's commitment to a "robust defense against emerging missile threats," saying it would pay for use of increasingly capable sea- and land-based missile interceptors and a range of sensors in Europe.

The Pentagon's budget continues to fund new weapons already under development, including the F-35 fighter, a new ballistic missile submarine, a new family of ground vehicles and the P-8 surveillance aircraft built by Boeing.

It will also pay for more unmanned planes, helicopters, electronic warfare capabilities and cybersecurity measures.

Overall, the budget includes $112.8 billion for weapons procurement, up from $104.8 billion in fiscal 2010, and $76 billion for research and development, down from $80 billion.

Reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn

Ben Bernanke should not be nominated for a second term !!!

2010-01-28T19:38:00.000-08:00

Embattled Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke won confirmation for a second term

Thursday, but only by the closest vote ever for the crucial post and after withering criticism from

lawmakers for bailing out Wall Street while other Americans suffered in recession.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=86069&tstart=0#ixzz0dy8zMGRP

I have to blame the Dems, specially Obama for keeping this bastard (Ben Bernanke) in his post. Obama also has kept some bush crooked federalattorneys. He should fire them. It is normal for a new president to nominate new attorneys. Specially those judges that together with the corrupt karl rove, which sent to jail the democrat governor of Alabama Don Siegelman.

See the following article:

These are nervous days in Montgomery. Federal prosecutors, investigating corruption in Alabama's two-year college system, have subpoenaed legislators by the dozen — in some cases delivering papers just outside the statehouse itself. Sue Schmitz, a state representative, was arrested in the bathroom of her home while she was taking an early morning shower. As prosecutors have fostered a climate of fear, numerous legislators have hired lawyers, and some have swept their offices for listening devices. "It's had an effect on the atmosphere," says Pat Lindsey, a state senator, offering what sounds like an understatement. "There's some bitterness there toward the U.S. attorney's office and the Department of Justice."

The tension is even greater because the recent investigation comes in the aftermath of a separate case involving Don Siegelman, the former Democratic governor sent to federal prison last year on corruption charges. Siegelman was released in March by a federal court, pending his appeal. As with the community-college investigation, Democrats have accused Republicans of prosecuting Siegelman as a partisan vendetta, and the case has drawn attention from the national media and Congress. Lawyers for Alabama's legislators have taken to referring to Siegelman's plight as evidence that their own clients are being railroaded for political reasons. "If I were accused of something right now and I were a Democrat, " says William Stewart, a University of Alabama political scientist, "I would say they're after me, just like they were after Siegelman. It's become very standard."

Alabama is far from the only place where indicted public officials accuse prosecutors of targeting them for political purposes, either to destroy an opponent from the other party or simply to advance their own careers. But such accusations have taken on greater currency following the dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys who were insufficiently loyal to an effort in Washington to politicize public corruption cases. That scandal led last August to the resignation of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, along with most of the other top officials at the Justice Department. "It gives traction to the claims of partisan political motivation made by indicted officials," says former prosecutor Geoff Moulton, now a law professor at Widener University, "even in cases where there's absolutely no merit to those claims."

There's no disputing that the feds are going after a lot of state and local officeholders these days. Since 2002, both the number of public corruption cases and the number of FBI agents devoted to such cases has increased by more than 50 percent. But is it because there's been a sudden spike of mischief in office? Or is it more an epidemic of prosecutorial zeal and ambition? Those are not easy questions to answer. But they're increasingly important to ask.

What's clear is that we are dealing with a national phenomenon. In the past three years, the FBI's long-running undercover operation in Tennessee (code named "Tennessee Waltz") has led to the conviction of a dozen officials, including several state senators and a state representative, the most recent of them in April. In New Jersey, U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie has prosecuted more than 125 state and local officials, without a single acquittal. In North Carolina, U.S. Attorney George Holding successfully prosecuted House Speaker Jim Black in a corruption scandal, followed this spring by the conviction and expulsion of one of Black's top lieutenants — the first expulsion of a legislator in that state since 1880. And in Alaska, a major bribery scandal involving an oil services company has already led to seven convictions, including that of former state House Speaker Pete Kott.

Corruption cases always have been, and always will be, part of the public-sector landscape. A prosecutor seeking to press such cases can usually find plenty of work — and prosecutors have shown they can obtain an indictment from a grand jury without presenting anything close to an airtight case. Given the vast discretion prosecutors maintain in picking their targets, they are subject to regular complaints that they are interfering with the political process and the normal operations of government. Democrats still single out Ken Starr, the special prosecutor who published an X-rated account of President Clinton's love life, in their pantheon of villains. For their part, many Republicans have excoriated Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago and special counsel in the Valerie Plame investigation, for his successful prosecution of former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Public corruption cases may not be the most certain way for a prosecutor to advance his career — they create plenty of enemies even when, or especially when, they're successful — but they do guarantee bigger headlines than conducting drug seizures or even sending a series of murderers to death row. That sort of motivation was starkly on display in 2004, when e-mails leaked from the office of Thomas DiBiagio, then the U.S. attorney in Maryland. He demanded that his staff bring no fewer than three "front-page" corruption indictments by Election Day. Given the current climate, it's become the first line of a vigorous defense for public officials to suggest they are the latest victims of politically-motivated investigations.

On the other hand, there are safeguards. To carry off a partisan prosecutorial vendetta really does require something of a conspiracy, with a U.S. attorney having to bring on board his or her own career staff, FBI agents and other investigators, the media, a judge and a jury. It's such a tough trick to pull off that even David Iglesias, a U.S. attorney who was told to speed up prosecutions of Democrats and ultimately was fired by Gonzales, is skeptical about the existence of organized partisan scalp-hunting. Iglesias, who just published a book about his experience, concedes there was an "attempt to politicize the Justice Department both in Washington and out in the field," but argues that it failed. In his biggest case, which led to the conviction of two New Mexico state treasurers, Iglesias says that "our referral wasn't from the Republican Party, it was from a state employee caught copying U.S. currency on an office photocopier."

There is always a risk that prosecutors will want to score points by aiming at the ripe target of elected leadership. Yet in the vast majority of cases, government officials who are formally charged with crimes end up either entering into a plea bargain or being convicted. Even critics of the system concede that it remains a necessary corrective to the temptations of exploiting public office. And when politicians do get caught, they normally have themselves, much more than the prosecutors, to blame. "People in public office, particularly legislators, ought to know they are in somebody's gun sights," says Alan Rosenthal, an expert on legislatures at Rutgers University. "If it's not an opponent or a newspaper, it's the prosecuting attorney."

Obama, it's time to close Guantanamo!!!

2010-01-22T10:32:00.000-08:00

On Eve of Missed Guantánamo Deadline President Announces He Will Hold 50 Without Trial
CCR Condemns Unconstitutional Indefinite Detention Scheme

NEW YORK - January 22 - In response to the announcement that President Obama has decided he will detain 50 of the approximately 200 remaining men at Guantánamo without trial indefinitely, the Center for Constitutional Rights issued the following statement:

"Today was supposed to be the deadline by which President Obama would close Guantánamo. Now it will be the anniversary of the president's decision to abandon our most fundamental constitutional principles. Our nation was built on the idea that no president or king should have the power to imprison people solely at will, that a system of checks and balances on executive authority is the bedrock of a free democracy, and that it is up to the courts to determine whether individuals have engaged in acts that justify depriving them of their liberty.

"Guantánamo remains open, and remains a symbol of lawlessness and abuse. Now the President has committed to holding approximately 50 men without any trial not as a result of anything the men have done in the past but because of a fear of what the men may due in the future and because they have been deemed too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release. This is too much power to put into the hands of one person. It is an assault on the rule of law, our principles and our system of justice.

"The true danger is from the damage this will do to our reputation in the world and the way we are viewed by those who are undecided about our country, those we must most urgently convince that we are not their enemy and that we truly value the ideals we claim to represent."

CCR has led the legal battle over Guantanamo for the last eight years - sending the first ever habeas attorney to the base and sending the first attorney to meet with a former CIA "ghost detainee" there. CCR has been responsible for organizing and coordinating more than 500 pro bono lawyers across the country in order to represent the men at Guantanamo, ensuring that nearly all have the option of legal representation. In addition, CCR has been working to resettle the approximately 50 men who remain at Guantánamo because they cannot return to their country of origin for fear of persecution and torture.
###
The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.

US healthcare sham

2010-01-21T18:42:00.001-08:00

US healthcare sham
by Serge Halimi
A Republican Congress and President Bill Clinton abolished a welfare programme in 1996 under the (largely fallacious) pretext that it bred fraud, waste and abuse. Thirteen years on, the reforms that Barack Obama is proposing will not fundamentally change the United States’ abysmal healthcare system because those who profit from it have been able to buy protection from the lawmakers. The welfare programme ditched in 1996 absorbed about 1% of the US budget; today’s well-ensconced private insurance companies swallow most of the 17% of the budget set aside for healthcare.

Paradoxically, the US president is one of the most spirited prosecutors of the system he has chosen to retain. Day after day he recounts how “we are held hostage by health insurance companies that deny coverage, or drop coverage, or charge fees that people can’t afford for care they desperately need… We have a healthcare system that too often works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people” (1).

Obama’s project initially set out with two important objectives. It proposed compulsory health cover for the 46 million Americans outside the system while funding the poorest amongst them. It also suggested the creation of a public insurance system with less prohibitive tariffs than private companies (2), which commit huge resources to finding legal loopholes (“pre-existing conditions”) allowing them not to pay out when their insured clients fall ill.

What is it that so alarms the right? Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, claims that “any government plan will benefit from taxpayer subsidies and be able to operate at a financial loss, competing unfairly in the marketplace until private plans are driven out of business” (3). Other more telling tales of distress might have concerned him, particularly in Louisiana, one of the poorest US states.

American politics is so poisoned by money flowing from industrial and financial lobbies that the only proposals ensured a smooth ride through Congress are those that cut taxes. Banks, insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry have almost nothing to fear. Max Baucus, the Democrat chairman of the Senate finance committee, whose approval is needed for reforms to be adopted, is also the lawmaker who receives the most money from private hospitals, insurance companies and doctors. However, his largest donors are hardly worried about the problems of Montana, the small rural state he represents, since 90% of their contributions come from elsewhere in the country, in a perfectly legal and accountable way. Will anyone be surprised to hear that Baucus opposes a complete overhaul of the current medical system?

A year after the crash of neoliberalism, the (small-scale) panic that gripped the ruling classes has vanished. The political system remains locked in their favour. From time to time, a more corrupt or unlucky operator goes to jail; the mantra – morals, ethics, regulation, G20 – is chanted; then it all starts again. Questioned recently about the huge bonuses awarded to traders at BNP-Paribas, Christine Lagarde, France’s economy minister and a former Chicago business lawyer, had only this to say: “If we say no more bonuses, the best trader teams will simply move elsewhere.”

Cradled in a political system that protects them (and which they in turn protect) and profiting from the public’s widespread cynicism and all-round despair, traders and medical insurance companies can only pursue their parasitic ways. “Abuse” is not some aberration in their practice, it’s their essence. So a “reform” they could agree to will not do: what we need is their disappearance.

Hackable Diebold Machines to Decide US Senate Race in MA !!!

2010-01-20T09:41:00.000-08:00

• COAKLEY BREAKS WORLD CONCESSION RECORD!

Democracy bravely averted; Sen. Kerry applauds...

• Rocket Science Rather Than Democracy on Election Day

[UPDATED] Ballots reported as pre-marked in "at least three" jurisdictions for Brown; Election experts file public records requests; Why didn't they just hand count?...

• More on E-Vote Vulnerabilities in MA Senate Race

Election integrity groups issue 'Orange Alert'; Details given on how to'protect election'; Brad's media interviews...

Hackable Diebold Machines to Decide U.S. Senate Race in MA

Brad at rightwing outlet on disturbing e-vote vulnerabilities, dubious company running Special Election for Kennedy's seat...

*'Green News Report' 1/19/09*
*w/ Brad & Desi*

TODAY: Climate & energy legislation may also hinge on MA Senate race; James Inhofe is #1! PLUS: The long aftermath as Haiti's 'second wave' of disaster unfolds ...

Previous GNRs: 1/14/09 - 1/12/10 - Archives...

Finally 'Uncensored': Mysterious Death of Bush/Rove IT Guru Connell Hits Mag

An EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW of Maxim's feature hitting stands this week on the still-unexplained circumstances surrounding the plane crash of the man at the center of the 2004 Ohio election fraud scandal...

Ernest Canning:
'Zionism' & the 3rd Rail of U.S. Politics

Frank Schaeffer:
Our Very Own
Pact With Satan

NEW STUDY: CA Prop 8 'Marriage Equality Ban' Results 'Probably Corrupted'

'Election Verificiation Exit Poll' shows tallies off by 7.5% to 17.7% in L.A. precincts. Report authors call for investigation...

Palin, Fox, 'Jesus on Acid' and the End of the World

Frank Schaeffer on the unconnected dots of Alaska's superstar and rightwing evangelical/fundamentalist victimhood for politics and profit. And he oughta know...

• Brad @ Guardian: 'Rogue Palin at Fox'

Progressive Group to Woolsey:
Pull Support for 'War Hawk' Harman

Previously: Betrayal?: 'Progressive' Dem Backs 'Blue Dog'

Justice Returns to
DoJ Civil Rights Unit

Following a little help from The BRAD BLOG, voting rights returns...

'Terrorism' in the
Eye of the Beholder

Ernest Canning on our view from 9/11, their's from Fallujah...

The Case Against Geithner !!!

2010-01-17T21:00:00.000-08:00

January 12th, 2010 10:57 AM

The Case Against Geithner
By Dylan Ratigan

As we sit here today, Wall Street continues to exploit a policy of government-sponsored giveaways and secrecy to pay themselves billions.

Record-setting bonuses due to banks like Goldman Sachs as early next week.

Yet instead of acting as our cop, Secretary Tim Geithner has become central to what may be a cover-up of the greatest theft in U.S. history.
Here is the evidence.
COUNT 1: The AIG Emails:
Recently-released emails show Geithner's New York Federal Reserve Bank directing AIG to keep details of the 100-cents-on-the-dollar bailout secret in 2008 -- A reversal of the traditional role of government, which is to force companies to become more transparent, not less.

A Treasury Spokeswoman says: "Secretary Geithner played no role in these decisions and indeed, by November 24, he was recused from working on issues involving specific companies, including AIG."

Friday, the White House also defended the Treasury Secretary:
Gibbs: These decisions did not rise to his level at the fed.
CNN's Ed Henry: How do you know that he wasn't involved? He was the leader of the New York Fed.
Gibbs: Right, but he wasn't on the emails that have been talked about and wasn't party to the decision that was being made.
He wasn't party to a decision to hide $62 billion dollar payouts to firms that became insolvent during his 5-year watch at the New York Fed?
Congressman Darrell Issa speculates that maybe Geithner wasn't on the emails in question because his people felt so strongly they already knew their boss's intentions, they didn't feel the need to bother him with the details.
COUNT 2: He wasn't even a regulator!
In Geithner's own words during confirmation hearings in March:
"First of all, I've never been a regulator...I'm not a regulator."
According to the New York fed bank's website, that was your job!! And I quote from the Fed's website: "As part of our core mission, we supervise and regulate financial institutions in the Second District."
That district of course is the epicenter for bailed out banks and billion dollar bonuses.
Count 3: "The Christmas Eve Taxpayer Massacre."
As you were wrapping those last presents, Geithner's Treasury Department lifted the 400-billion dollar cap on taxpayer responsibility for potential losses for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The new cap? Unlimited taxpayer funds! Interesting timing... Christmas eve, Tim?
Still no word on recovering the hundreds of millions paid to the CEOs who created this mess.
COUNT 4: He's too cozy with certain banks.

Remember those call logs when he first started... 80 contacts with Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and CitiGroup CEOs in just 7 months!
But Bank of America's CEO only got three calls. Apparently Bank of America is not one of Geithner's favorites, especially when you consider that there are still many unanswered questions about Tim Geithner's role in threatening to fire Bank of America management if they didn't go through with a deal to buy Merrill lynch.
COUNT 5: TARP Special Investigator Neil Barofsky's report says Geithner's New York Fed overpaid the big banks through AIG by billions of dollars.
Geithner says it had to be done. Maybe so, maybe not, but this takes us to our final point.
Since then, the Treasury Secretary has yet to really prove whose side he's on -- the Wall Street big wigs or the American taxpayer? Here's the litmus test: Mr. Geithner, show us the past ten years of AIG emails or step down so that we can get somebody who will. A crime has been committed against the American taxpayer and right now you are standing at the door of the crime scene refusing to let anyone in.
Show us you're not involved Mr. Geithner, prove the White House correct in defending you. All we are asking for is the transparency promised by the President you serve.

Activists Ask for Peace Dividend !!!

2010-01-17T19:28:00.000-08:00

WE should do this in every state !!!:

Published on Friday, January 15, 2010 by the Kennebec Journal (Maine)

Activists Ask for Peace Dividend

by Susan M. Cover

AUGUSTA -- A coalition of activists gathered Thursday in the State House Hall of Flags to call for an end to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a way to help pay for needed state programs.

In the future, Brennan (seen speaking here) said he'd like Maine to be known less for building warships and more for providing a high-quality education. ( photo Roger Leisner The Maine Paparazzi Radio Free Maine)The groups say Maine taxpayers have already spent $2.5 billion on the wars. Their estimate is that Maine makes an annual contribution of $320 million toward those conflicts.

This week, hundreds of citizens have come to the State House to protest proposed cuts in the state budget to help fill a $438 million gap. Many of the cuts are to human services and education.

"We are calling for cuts in war spending as a way to help Maine state government deal with this crisis," said Lisa Savage, representing a group called Code Pink.

Savage, a teacher in central Maine, said she used a personal day to come to the State House for the rally and to protest proposed cuts to education funding.

She said the Bring Our War Money Home coalition has launched a three-month campaign to spread their message across the state. The coalition includes Maine Veterans for Peace, Pax Christi Maine, Peace Action Maine and Waterville Area Bridges for Peace & Justice.

Former Sen. Michael Brennan of Portland said he and a dozen other legislators called for an end to the wars more than three years ago.

"I'm sorry to say we were right in our prognosis three and a half years ago," he said. "The state of Maine and this country is in a more dire situation than it was."

Brennan said cuts to education funding, both K-12 and higher education, have continued to chip away at the quality of schools.

"In the 1970s, this country led the world in the number of people that graduated from high school," he said. "Now we're not even in the top 10."

In the future, Brennan said he'd like Maine to be known less for building warships and more for providing a high-quality education.

"My dream is that we will soon become the state known for building universities, building schools, and educating our young people," he said. "And we become No. 1 in the world in that, not in building ships and destroyers."

Stop Obama from sending $30Bi more to Afghan/Iraq wars !!!

2010-01-15T10:00:00.000-08:00

Watch The Video

Have you heard? On top of a record $708 billion request for Defense Department funds for next year, President Obama wants another $33 billion for the unpopular Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It's outrageous.

Please take a moment to call your Member of Congress and tell them:

"I oppose spending billions more on the Afghanistan War without a clear path to a 2011 drawdown and a 2012 exit. President Obama said we'd begin bringing troops home in July 2011. I want you to demand a concrete plan to make that a reality."

Call (202) 224-3121 to be transferred to your member of Congress.

After you call, tell us about it on our Facebook page.

We are suffering through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and spending those funds on war will further damage our economy. It's outrageous to waste so much of our national wealth on war. Please call today.

Yours,
Robert Greenwald
Derrick Crowe
and the Brave New Foundation team

Why Obama Must Take On Wall Street

2010-01-14T21:04:00.000-08:00

Why Obama Must Take On Wall Street

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 13, 2010

It has been more than a year since all hell broke loose on Wall Street and, remarkably, almost nothing has been done to prevent all hell from breaking loose again.

In fact, close your eyes and you could be back in the wilds of 2007. Bankers are still making wild bets, still devising new derivatives, still piling on debt. The big banks have access to money almost as cheaply as in 2007, courtesy of the Fed, so bank profits are up and bonuses as generous as at the height of the boom.

The only difference is that now the Street’s biggest banks know they are “too big to fail” and will be bailed out by taxpayers if they get into trouble – which means they have every incentive to make even riskier bets. And, of course, American taxpayers are out some $120bn, while millions have lost their homes, jobs and savings.

All could be forgiven if the House and Senate committees with responsibility for coming up with new regulations were about to come down hard on the Street and if the Obama administration were pushing them to. But nothing of the sort is happening. Yes, the White House has indicated interest in charging banks for the cost of the bailout, but this is not real reform; it’s just making up for some of the direct costs of cleaning up the mess.

Last week, Senator Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate banking committee, announced he would not seek re-election next November, recasting himself as a lame duck who will do whatever the banks want. Mr Dodd’s decision “makes it more likely that regulatory reform will be enacted”, says Edward Yingling, chief executive of the American Bankers Association, because it “frees him from political dynamics that would have made it more difficult for him to compromise”. Translated: Dodd’s committee will report out a bill – Democrats would be embarrassed not to – but it will be weak because voters can no longer penalise Mr Dodd for rolling over for the Street.

The bill that has already emerged from the House is hardly encouraging. Dubbed the “Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act”, it effectively guarantees future Wall Street bail-outs. The bill authorises Fed banks to provide up to $4,000bn in emergency funding the next time the Street crashes. That is more than twice what the Fed pumped into financial markets last year. The bill also enables the government, in a banking crisis, to back financial firms’ debts – a wonderful insurance policy if you are a bondholder. To be sure, the bill authorises the Fed and Treasury to spend these funds only when “there is at least a 99 per cent likelihood that all funds and interest will be paid back,” but predictions about pending economic disasters can be conveniently flexible, especially when it comes to bailing out the Street.

If this were not enough, the House bill creates regulatory loopholes big enough for bankers to drive their Ferraris through. Consider derivatives. Last year, as taxpayers threw money at the Street, congressional leaders promised to put derivative trading on public exchanges. The prices of derivatives could be disclosed and margin requirements imposed, making it more likely that traders would make good on their bets. Yet the House bill exempts nearly half the $600,000bn of outstanding derivatives trades.

The bill also allows – but, notably, does not require – regulators to “prohibit any incentive-based payment arrangement”. This makes fat bonuses the norm unless a regulator has reason to prevent them. And as we witnessed last year, bank regulators tend not to disturb the status quo. The House bill does not even make an attempt to unravel the conflict of interest that led credit ratings agencies to turn a blind eye to the risks the Street was taking on.

To its credit, the House bill does create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency to protect borrowers from predatory lending. Banking regulators have authority to protect consumers but failed to do so, so consolidating these powers in a new agency makes some sense. But Senate Republicans are dead-set against it, and Mr Dodd’s new willingness to compromise may well doom it in that chamber.

What is truly remarkable is what Congress and the administration have shown no interest in doing. Large numbers of Americans have lost their homes to bank foreclosures or are in danger of doing so. Yet American bankruptcy law does not allow homeowners to declare bankruptcy and have their mortgages reorganised. If it did, homeowners would have more bargaining power to renegotiate with banks. But neither Congress nor the administration has pushed to change the bankruptcy laws. Wall Street opposes such change and was instrumental in narrowing the scope of personal bankruptcy in the first place.

Nor have lawmakers shown any enthusiasm for resurrecting the wall that used to exist between commercial and investment banking. The Glass-Steagall Act, passed in the wake of the Great Crash of 1929, separated the two after it became obvious that commercial deposits needed to be insured by government and kept distinct from the betting parlour of investment banking. But Wall Street forced Congress to take down the wall in 1999, enabling financial supermarkets such as Citigroup to use its deposits to make all sorts of bets. Even Obama adviser and former Fed chief Paul Volcker has argued that the two functions should be separated again.

Nor is anyone talking seriously about using antitrust laws to break up the biggest banks – the traditional tonic for any capitalist entity that is “too big to fail”. Five giant Wall Street banks now dominate US finance. If it was in the public’s interest to break up giant oil companies and railroads a century ago, and the mammoth telephone company AT&T, it is not unreasonable to break up the almost infinitely extensive tangles of Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. No one has offered a clear reason why giant banks are important to the US economy. Logic and experience suggests the reverse.

What happened to all the tough talk from Congress and the White House early last year? Why is the financial reform agenda so small, and so late?

Part of the answer is that the American public has moved on. A major tenet of US politics is that if politicians wait long enough, public attention wanders. With the financial crisis appearing to be over, the public is more concerned about jobs. Another 85,000 jobs were lost in December, bringing total losses since the recession began in December 2007 to over 7m. One out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed.

Yet if the president and Congress wanted to, they could help Americans understand the link between widespread job losses and the irresponsibility on Wall Street that plunged America into the Great Recession. They could make tough financial reform part of the answer to sustain-able jobs growth over the long term.

True, financial regulation does not make a powerful bumper sticker. Few Americans know what the denizens of Wall Street do all day. Even fewer know or care about collateralised debt obligations or credit default swaps. To the extent Americans have been paying attention to the details of any public policy, it has been the healthcare reform bill. But that only begs the question of why financial reform has not been higher on the agenda of the president and Democratic leaders.

A larger explanation, I am afraid, is the grip Wall Street has over the American political process. The Street is where the money is and money buys campaign commercials on television. Wall Street firms and executives have been uniquely generous to both parties, emerging as one of the largest benefactors of the Democrats. Between November 2008 and November 2009, Wall Street doled out $42m to lawmakers, mostly to members of the House and Senate banking committees and House and Senate leaders. In the first three quarters of 2009, the industry spent $344m on lobbying – making the Street one of the major powerhouses in the nation’s capital.

Money is powerful. Talk is cheap. Mr Obama recently called the top bankers “fat cats”, and the bankers insisted they were shocked – shocked! – to learn how intransigent their lobbyists had been in opposing financial reform. The bankers even claimed a “disconnect” between their intentions and their lobbyists’ actions. This was all for the cameras, of course.

But the widening gulf between Wall Street and Main Street – a big bail-out for the former, unemployment checks for the latter; high profits and giant bonuses for the former, job and wage losses for the latter; buoyant expectations of the former, deep anxiety and cynicism by the latter; ever fancier estates for denizens of the former, mortgage foreclosures for the rest – is dangerous. Americans went ballistic early last summer when AIG executives got big bonuses after taxpayers had bailed them out. They will not be happy when Wall Street hands out billions in bonuses very soon. Angry populism lurks just beneath the surface of two-party politics in America. Just listen to Sarah Palin or her counterparts on American talk radio and yell television. Over the long term, the political stakes in reforming Wall Street are as high as the economic.

Pat Robertson the billionaire thief, evilman, evangelist, crazy nuts !!!

2010-01-14T10:10:00.000-08:00

We should look at Pat Robertson tax free status and ask the IRS to investigate this nuthouse phony evil man and send him to jail and take all his possession and give to the needed.

So I recommend to people to start looking at Pat Robertson tax free status (because of his "christian evangelical" cause).

Pat Robertson, you are the evil in person!!

2010-01-13T20:33:00.000-08:00

Look at what the imbecile, ignorant, stupid, evil, thief, millionaire Pat Robertson has said about the earthquake in Haiti:

(CNN) -- Pat Robertson, the evangelical Christian who once suggested God was punishing

Americans with Hurricane Katrina, says a "pact to the devil" brought on the devastating

earthquake in Haiti.

Pat Robertson and the whole Fox News cast, which by the way are all (can only be)

republi-cons.

That explains a lot about the behavior of these bastards that unfortunately populates the main

stream media in our country. No wonder the US is in such a state of failure: big deficit, huge

trade deficit, four wars (Iraq, Afghan, Yemen and Gaza) which are bankrupting the country,

worse healthcare

system of the industrialized world, uncontrolled

bank/investment system, worse economic system (supply-side economics) milton

friedman's/university of Chicago school) and founder of the "reagonomics", and the infamous

trickle down economics that is responsible for the big hole that the US is in, bad free trade

agreements, 18 % unemployment, abuses military power to invade other countries with

oil/mineral resources, etc.

Tom Friedman, the billionaire idiot !!!

2010-01-13T10:38:00.000-08:00

Billionaire Scion Tom Friedman

I've documented repeatedly how New York Times columnist Tom Friedman parrots the propaganda of Big Money, using his column to legitimize some of the worst, most working-class-persecuting policies this country has seen in the last century - all while bragging on television that he doesn't even bother read the details of the policies he advocates for. I have always believed Friedman's perspective comes from the bubble he lives in - that is, I have always believed he feels totally at ease shilling for Big Money and attacking workers because from the comfortable confines of the Washington suburbs he lives in and the elite cocktail parties he attends, what Friedman says seems mainstream to him. But I never had any idea how dead on I was about the specific circumstances of Friedman's bubble - and how it potentially explains a lot more than I ever thought.

As the July edition of the Washingtonian Magazine notes, Friedman lives in "a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7½-acre parcel just blocks from I-495 and Bethesda Country Club." He "married into one of the 100 richest families in the country" - the Bucksbaums, whose real-estate Empire is valued at $2.7 billion.

Let's be clear - I'm a capitalist, so I have no problem with people doing well or living well, even Tom Friedman. That said, this does potentially explain an ENORMOUS amount about Friedman's perspective. Far from the objective, regular-guy interpreter of globalization that the D.C. media portrays him to be, Friedman is a member of the elite of the economic elite on the planet Earth. In fact, he's married into such a giant fortune, it's probably more relevant to refer to him as Billionaire Scion Tom Friedman than columnist Tom Friedman, both because that's more descriptive of what he represents, and more important for readers of his work to know so that they know a bit about where he's coming from.

Mind you, I don't think everyone needs to publish their net worth. But Friedman's not everyone. He's not just "doing pretty well" and is not just any old columnist. He's not just a millionaire or a multimillionaire - he's member of one of the wealthiest families in the world, and is one of the most influential media voices on the planet, who writes specifically about economic/class issues. If politicians are forced to disclose every last asset they own, you'd think at the very least, the New York Times - in the interest of basic disclosure - should have a tagline under Friedman's economic columns that says "Tom Friedman is an heir to a multi-billion-dollar business empire."

Again, there's positively nothing wrong with people being rich in general, or Tom Friedman being a billionaire scion in specific. The problem is that so few of his readers know this, even as he aggressively uses his platform to justify policies that almost exclusively benefit his super-wealthy brethren - all under the guise of supposed objectivity.

Then again, the fact that we know so little about who is actually making opinion in this country isn't surprising. Even looking at this kind of information as it relates to the most important opinionmaker in the world is looked down upon by Washington insiders/elites/politicians. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson from "A Few Good Men," deep down in places they don't talk about at parties, they want billionaires like Friedman dictating the debate because they need someone creating public rationales for policies that enrich Big Money interests, sell out America and guarantee the next fat campaign contribution.

Some, of course, might ask: Why should we care about Friedman's billionaire status, but not the status of very rich people like, say, Ted Kennedy? Two points on that: First, most people already know that Kennedy comes from a very wealthy family, so there is no lack of knowledge by the public about potential conflicts of class interest. The same can't be said for Friedman, who is constantly billed as just an average Joe speaking his mind.

But far more important, the superwealth of a political actor (ie. a politician, columnist, etc.) is really only relevant when that actor is using their power to push their own class's economic interests, because then and only then does it really bring up questions of conflicts of interest, bias and corruption. Ted Kennedy is widely known as one of the most outspoken advocates for the poor and for economic progressive causes in general - causes that defy the interests of his personal economic class. Thus, his wealth really isn't important in conflict-of-interest, objectivity or personal corruption terms as it relates to his actions in the political arena. (Same thing goes, I might add, for wealthy folks who donate to liberal causes. In the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt critics, they are "traitors to their class." They are altruistically/patriotically donating against their own personal economic class interests and for the broader good - and therefore there is no relevant conflict of interest or pay-to-play corruption going on. That stands in sharp contrast to right-wing billionaires who fund conservative institutions that purport to be steered only by principled ideology, but which inevitably spend much of their time trumpeting the very specific policies that personally benefit their big donors.)

Friedman, unlike Kennedy, uses his position to push the very specific economic policies (such as "free" trade) that the superwealthy in this country are pushing and exclusively benefit from. That's why his billionaire scion status is so important for the public to know - because it raises objectivity questions. If, for instance, Richard Mellon Scaife wrote articles in newspapers demanding the repeal of the estate tax - don't you think it would be important for readers to be warned that Scaife was a multimillionaire whose family (and the few families like his) would almost exclusively benefit from the policies he was writing about? Of course. That's called full disclosure and transparency, the very things critical to an objective free press and democracy - the very thing Friedman says is so important for other countries when he writes about foreign policy.

So the next time you read a piece by Tom Friedman telling us how wonderful job outsourcing is or how great it is to pass Big Money's latest trade deal that include no labor, wage, human rights or environmental provisions - just remember: Tom Friedman, scion of a billionaire business empire, is just doing right by his own economic class.

Mike Malloy's show

2010-01-12T14:42:00.000-08:00

Check MIKE MALLOY SHOW:

The Mike Malloy Show is now live on Green 960 in San Francisco. Mon-Fri 6pm-9pm.

MIKE'S DAILY BLOG

Rachel Maddow tonight!

January 12th, 2010
Rachel Maddow will be our guest following her program tonight, so be sure to tune in at 10:30 PM ET as Mike and Rachel discuss the ongoing DC madness.

Sarah Palin struts onto the set at Fox “News” and joins their army of overly-botox’d bubble heads who stare blankly at the camera and read whatever Murdoch’s minions scrawl on the telescreen. Tonight it’s Bill O’Reilly’s turn. He won the coin toss and get’s the first shot at Sarah while she “takes on America’s top issues” while simultaneously removing Bill-O’s hand from her thigh. Somebody pass me a loofah.

A prop 8 update, and more on the show tonight!

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KATHY'S DIARY

Fox and Facts

January 12th, 2010
President Obama doesn’t have enough to worry about with the tumultuous debate on the final version of his health care reform proposal, continuing economic uncertainties, rising unemployment, and bank failures; two wars he’s inherited and the ongoing threat of terror attacks. Now he’s being criticized for not holding enough press conferences.

“Obama Going on Six Months Without a Press Conference” reads the headline on . . . . you guessed it, Fox “News.” The “article” continues to blast the President for being out of touch with the public. This from a “news” organization that just a few weeks ago criticized him for being overexposed. The article states, “Obama has given dozens of one-on-one interviews for television, radio and print, and Towson University political science professor Martha Joynt Kumar said presidents tend to favor media exchanges that best suit their particular goals,” adding that “some in the White House press corps are getting antsy for him to hold a news conference with reporters, something he hasn’t done since July 22, almost six months ago.”

Fox “News” and other, similar, Neocon media outlets continue their selective amnesia about Presidential administrations. First, one of the former Bush spokesmodels - Dana Perino – stated that there was no terrorist attack during the eight years Bush was in office, magically forgetting the tragedy of 9-11-2001. Naturally, that ridiculous statement went unchallenged as she was appearing on Fox “News” with Sean Hannity at the time. As they accuse Obama of avoiding the press (itself a flip-flop from Fox’s previous admonishment that he was always seeking the cameras) they seem to forget that their own Favorite Son, George Dubya, failed to hold a presser for his first nine months in office, and then entered an extended press blackout from July of 2008 to January of 2009, a (gasp!) six month period during which he avoided even a single reporter’s question. Darn those pesky facts that keep interfering with their “news” reporting.

By the numbers, Bush only exposed publicly himself to the press three times in 2004 and four times in 2008 . . . . hmmmmmm, both of those election years. Perhaps he was busy devising amusing new nicknames for the reporters, or trying to remember which ones were vision impaired so he didn’t repeat his 2006 mistake of asking legally blind reporter Peter Wallsten of the Los Angeles Times why he didn’t remove his “shades.”

But, Fox “News” has become infamous for its many double standards, be it politicians and their private parts (Bill Clinton affair = impeachable offense, Henry Hyde affair = youthful indiscretion), criminal activity (witness the innocent victims of circumstance Tom Delay and Irving “Scooter” Libby), response to terror threats (Bush’s delayed response to the shoe bomber vs. Obama’s prompt response to the Detroit incident), or natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Don’t even talk about the number of troops that have died under Dubya compared to Clinton. The amnesiacs at Fox never, ever touch that topic. Nor do they discuss how the Bush Crime Family sucked up the Clinton budget surpluses into a massive, personal war chest and spent billions of our taxpayer dollars on fomenting terror, death, and destruction across the oily, Muslim Mideast. That will never be a headline on The O’Reilly Factor.

Sarah Palin, with her murky understanding of the world outside Wasilla, will fit right in with the other factually-challenged misfits at Fox “News.” And they won’t even have to fix her face like they did before dragging Greta over from CNN. How long before Sarah Barracuda and Glen Beck are dueling it out on white-board challenges to see who can wax crazier about death panels, Obama’s terrorist pals, God-inspired crusades in various Muslim majority countries, ACORN, and bogus birth certificates?

They deserve each other.

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Afghan war kills three children a day: report

2010-01-10T21:07:00.000-08:00

LATEST NEWS

January 7th, 2010 4:06 PM

Afghan war kills three children a day: report

Looks like there's a fourth one hiding back there who can wait until tomorrow.

1 of 7

By Lynne O'Donnell / AFP

KABUL — Children are the biggest victims of the war in Afghanistan, with more than 1,050 people under 18 years old killed last year alone, according to an Afghan human rights watchdog.
Taliban-linked militants caused around 64 percent of all violent child deaths last year, the Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM) said in a report.

Children were also press-ganged, sexually exploited, deprived of health and education, and illegally detained by all sides in a war that is dragging into its ninth year since the US-led invasion toppled the Taliban regime.
"At least three children were killed in war-related incidents every day in 2009 and many others suffered in diverse but mostly unreported ways," ARM director Ajmal Samadi said.

Children died in suicide attacks and roadside bombings -- at the crux of the Taliban's arsenal against US, NATO and Afghan troops fighting the increasingly virulent insurgency as it spreads across the impoverished country.

The Taliban "reportedly caused more harm and intentionally abused more children for illegal purposes than pro-government Afghan and international forces," the report said.
"Through a horrible anti-education policy of heinous attacks, intimidation and terror the insurgents deprived hundreds of thousands of children, boys and girls, from education mostly in the insecure south and east of the country."
On the other hand, the Western-backed government has failed to introduce or implement laws to protect children against the abuses of war or "bring alleged criminals and abusers to justice," Samadi said.
ARM called on the Afghan authorities to set up an official child protection body and liaise with the warring parties on child rights.

The report by ARM, an independent rights monitoring group set up in Kabul in 2008, comes after the United Nations said civilian deaths in Afghanistan rose 10.8 percent in the first 10 months of 2009, most caused by the Taliban.
The United Nations put civilian deaths at 2,038 for that period, up from 1,838 for the same period of 2008, with the vast majority killed by insurgents.
It said 468 deaths were caused by pro-government forces, including NATO and US-led forces, and 166 by "other actors."
ARM released the report as a suspected roadside bomb attack killed four children and wounded more than a dozen in volatile eastern Nangahar province.

Reports that foreign forces killed eight students in Kunar province on December 26 caused widespread outrage, including US flag-burning demonstrations in two cities, though reports of what happened varied widely.
A government investigation found the teenagers were unarmed and killed in cold blood, while Western military sources said the group were armed, opened fire at foreign and Afghan forces, and were killed in self-defence.
Civilian deaths at the hands of foreign forces fuel distrust between the Afghan population, the government and US and NATO troops, even though most are caused by insurgent tactics such as homemade bombs.

The Taliban regularly exploit deaths caused by foreign and Afghan forces, and Western military intelligence officials say the militants have gained the upper hand in a sophisticated propaganda war.
Militant leaders, based largely in Pakistan, rarely claim responsibility for operations that kill large numbers of civilians but routinely exaggerate losses among foreign forces.

The United States and NATO are boosting their troop numbers in Afghanistan to 150,000 over the course of 2010, as part of a new strategy determined to clear and secure insurgent strongholds.
US General Stanley McChrystal, commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan, has ordered civilian casualties be kept to a minimum, yet as more troops pour in, a higher death rate is inevitable, experts say.

The US as a Failed State !!!

2010-01-08T23:10:00.000-08:00

The Super Rich are Laughing

The US as Failed State

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

The US has every characteristic of a failed state.

The US government’s current operating budget is dependent on foreign financing and money creation.

Too politically weak to be able to advance its interests through diplomacy, the US relies on terrorism and military aggression.

Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest of rich organized interest groups at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. For example, war at all cost, which enriches the armaments industry, the officer corps and the financial firms that handle the war’s financing, takes precedence over the needs of American citizens. There is no money to provide the uninsured with health care, but Pentagon officials have told the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in the House that every gallon of gasoline delivered to US troops in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $400.

“It is a number that we were not aware of and it is worrisome,” said Rep. John Murtha, chairman of the subcommittee.

According to reports, the US Marines in Afghanistan use 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At $400 per gallon, that comes to a $320,000,000 daily fuel bill for the Marines alone. Only a country totally out of control would squander resources in this way.

While the US government squanders $400 per gallon of gasoline in order to kill women and children in Afghanistan, many millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes and are experiencing the kind of misery that is the daily life of poor third world peoples. Americans are living in their cars and in public parks. America’s cities, towns, and states are suffering from the costs of economic dislocations and the reduction in tax revenues from the economy’s decline. Yet, Obama has sent more troops to Afghanistan, a country half way around the world that is not a threat to America.

It costs $750,000 per year for each soldier we have in Afghanistan. The soldiers, who are at risk of life and limb, are paid a pittance, but all of the privatized services to the military are rolling in excess profits. One of the great frauds perpetuated on the American people was the privatization of services that the US military traditionally performed for itself. “Our” elected leaders could not resist any opportunity to create at taxpayers’ expense private wealth that could be recycled to politicians in campaign contributions.

Republicans and Democrats on the take from the private insurance companies maintain that the US cannot afford to provide Americans with health care and that cuts must be made even in Social Security and Medicare. So how can the US afford bankrupting wars, much less totally pointless wars that serve no American interest?

The enormous scale of foreign borrowing and money creation necessary to finance Washington’s wars are sending the dollar to historic lows. The dollar has even experienced large declines relative to currencies of third world countries such as Botswana and Brazil. The decline in the dollar’s value reduces the purchasing power of Americans’ already declining incomes.

Despite the lowest level of housing starts in 64 years, the US housing market is flooded with unsold homes, and financial institutions have a huge and rising inventory of foreclosed homes not yet on the market.

Industrial production has collapsed to the level of 1999, wiping out a decade of growth in industrial output.

The enormous bank reserves created by the Federal Reserve are not finding their way into the economy. Instead, the banks are hoarding the reserves as insurance against the fraudulent derivatives that they purchased from the gangster Wall Street investment banks.

The regulatory agencies have been corrupted by private interests. Frontline reports that Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers blocked Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating derivatives. President Obama rewarded Larry Summers for his idiocy by appointing him Director of the National Economic Council. What this means is that profits for Wall Street will continue to be leeched from the diminishing blood supply of the American economy.

An unmistakable sign of third world despotism is a police force that sees the pubic as the enemy. Thanks to the federal government, our local police forces are now militarized and imbued with hostile attitudes toward the public. SWAT teams have proliferated, and even small towns now have police forces with the firepower of US Special Forces. Summons are increasingly delivered by SWAT teams that tyrannize citizens with broken down doors, a $400 or $500 repair born by the tyrannized resident. Recently a mayor and his family were the recipients of incompetence by the town’s local SWAT team, which mistakenly wrecked the mayor’s home, terrorized his family, and killed the family’s two friendly Labrador dogs.

If a town’s mayor can be treated in this way, what do you think is the fate of the poor white or black? Or the idealistic student who protests his government’s inhumanity?

In any failed state, the greatest threat to the population comes from the government and the police. That is certainly the situation today in the USA. Americans have no greater enemy than their own government. Washington is controlled by interest groups that enrich themselves at the expense of the American people.

The one percent that comprise the superrich are laughing as they say, “let them eat cake.”

Giuliani is a fucking idiot!

2010-01-08T22:59:00.001-08:00

Giuliani: It's not Terror if it's not Islamic [Updated]
by DanK Is Back

Fri Jan 08, 2010 at 05:00:48 PM PST

In an amazing feat of acrobatics, Rudy Giulani went on CNN today to try to talk his way out of his claim the other day that "no domestic terrorism" had happened under Bush's watch. It was an attempt to backpedal while keeping foot firmly in mouth.

What he meant to say, he said, was that there had been no domestic terrorism under Bush's watch since 9/11.

What about the anthrax letters a month later, Wolf Blitzer asked him?

He ... said the anthrax attacks of 2001 don't count, because they never proven to be done in the name of "Islamic terrorism."

DanK Is Back's diary :: ::
In other words, it only counts as terror if it's "Islamic terror."

Every time I think these Republicans have gone as low as they can get, they find a new level to sink to. If I were Giuliani, I would not go any time soon to the offices of those senators and congressmen who got those letters, or anywhere near the families of those who died from handling them.

Maybe Giuliani was setting up to excuse abortion clinic bombings and doctor shootings; since those are done by "Christian" fundamentalists, they can't be acts of terror by his definition.

Then there's the Beltway Sniper, who "terrorized" the DC area for 23 days in October 2002 - Bush's term - before he was caught? As the Washington Examiner put it in its headline:

Beltway sniper fights execution as region remembers terror

The DC region, it seems, has a different definition of terror, not to mention a better memory, than Giuliani.

Giuliani also said that his reference to "domestic terrorism" on Obama's watch was meant to be the Fort Hood shootings. That was designed a dodge to avoid comparing the shoe bomber (Bush) to the underwear bomber (Obama). But in saying that, he in effect denied that the underwear bomber was a domestic terrorist, since he only gave Obama a score of 1 terrorist.

Giuliani still hasn't learned a lesson from Politics 101: When you're in a hole, stop digging.

I'll leave the last word on the subject to WH Press secretary Gibbs:

"There were a number of things that didn’t quite seem to jive with the better part of reality," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said at Friday’s briefing. "I think he mentioned there not being any domestic terror attacks in the previous administration... It’s interesting that the mayor of New York had forgotten that." ABC News blogs

Update [2010-1-8 20:17:5 by DanK Is Back]: I rushed this a bit because I wanted to go watch Countdown. Lawrence O'Donnell was on subbing for Keith, and he led with this as the lead story. Since I do not have any bugs planted in MSNBC's office, I can only plead GMTA.

O'Donnell listed a number of other attacks that took place on Bush's watch that can only be called "Islamic terrorism" such as the attack on El Al's Los Angeles airport counter in 2002.

In some ways, I prefer O'Donnell to Olberman because he is calmer, cooler, sounds more rational. This time he was clearly, visibly, angry over Giuliani's lies - and he called them that in so many words. Very effective.

Tags: Rudy Giuliani, Terror, Islamic Terror, 9/11, Fort Hood, Anthrax (all tags) :: Previous Tag Versions

ass-holes Joe Liberman and Ben Nelson

2010-01-08T21:48:00.000-08:00

My rant against big media political "blogs" by way of "Black Tuesday" coverage

by: Chris Bowers
Thu Jan 07, 2010 at 14:00

Uh-oh for D.C. political writers: it looks like the Democratic retirements on Tuesday were actually a net positive for the Democratic Party's electoral chances. Colorado, too:
Now that Colorado Governor Bill Ritter has said he will step down rather than run for reelection, Democrats may be more competitive in this year's gubernatorial race. Ritter trailed former GOP Congressman Scott McInnis by eight points a month ago.
New Rasmussen Reports polling of likely Colorado voters shows that two of McInnis' potential Democratic opponents are a bit closer than that.

Three Democrats running for statewide re-election retied on Tuesday (a fourth Democratic retirement came from a Lt. Governor in Michigan seeking a promotion). The retirements in Colorado and Connecticut were helpful to Democratic causes, while the Democratic retirement in North Dakota was not. On balance, that makes so-called "Black Tuesday," almost universally defined as a negative for Democrats among D.C. political writers, a net positive for Democrats.
So much for there being "Black Tuesday" at all. As such, let's revisit some conventional wisdom that appeared on MSNBC's First Read yesterday:

Here is some more genius from MSNBC:
Of course, be wary when the first set of blind quotes you read from party strategists after a retirement is "[Fill in the blank's] decision may turn out to be a blessing." As we wrote above, that's probably true regarding Dodd.
And then, at the end of the same paragraph:

The fact is that retirements, party switches, etc. hurt a party -- period.
Yeah, retirements always hurt a party. PERIOD!!!!! Except that, at the start of this same paragraph, the author wrote that Dodd's retirement helped Dems. Awesome.

To put it in completely ungenerous terms, the claim that retirements are always bad for an incumbent party is just plain stupid. There are lots of cases where an incumbent retiring either is, or would be, good for the incumbent's party. Claiming otherwise is simply to cling to entirely qualitative, entirely fact-less, conventional wisdom rather than looking at the actual numbers.
Corruption cases are one obvious, glaring example that proves retirements can sometimes be good for an incumbent party. Take, for example, the Louisiana 2nd congressional district. There is no possible way Democrats would have lost that campaign in 2008 if the incumbent, William Jefferson, had retired. Further, take the California 50th congressional district as an example. There is no possible way Republicans would have held that seat in 2006 if Duke Cunningham had remained the Republican nominee, even if he had escaped jail time.
If an incumbent is unpopular, and his or her district is leans in favor of his or her party, then his or her retirement absolutely helps that party's electoral chances. PERIOD. This is why, as Kos pointed out yesterday, Democratic chances in Nevada and Arkansas would be improved with Harry Reid and Blanche Lincoln stepped aside, respectively. Reid and Lincoln are personally unpopular in Nevada and Arkansas, and a "generic Democrat" has a relatively better chance of winning either state. As such, their retirements would help Democratic electoral chances.
The same goes for Jim Bunning's retirement in Kentucky, which moved an almost certain Democratic pickup into toss-up / lean Republican territory. There is no hard and fast rule about whether an incumbent retirement, in and of itself, helps or hurts the incumbent's party. The effect of incumbent retirements needs to be examined on a case by case basis, using actual, scientific, empirical evidence (aka, polls).
Using such evidence, and engaging in such detailed examination, is not a strength of political writing from well-financed, established, national news organizations. And I'm not going to hide my agenda here: poor political writing from those organizations is what really angers me in this case. After spending years dismissing us, these well-financed, established, national news organizations are now stealing market share from smaller, independent, political websites by paying people lots of money to write "blogs" of their own. It pisses me off that they are able to do this even though those "blogs" are largely replicating the same, crappy conventional-wisdom and non-fact-based political writing that led to the rise of independent (in the institutional, rather than partisan sense of the word) political websites in the first place. They are beating us because they are able to pay people a lot more money, and because they are attached to well-established brand names, not because they have actually improved their writing all that much. This is exceptionally frustrating.
With the rare exceptions of people like Greg Sargent, Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias, who established themselves as independent bloggers before they became big media bloggers, most big media "bloggers" couldn't get even one million page views a year if they started independent political websites of their own. They certainly couldn't get the eight million page views of even a mid-range independent political website like Open Left. They would be nobodies without their institutions. Instead, they are well paid "bloggers" who help define the conventional wisdom. And yeah, as someone who has spent the last six years trying to make a living as an independent political writer, that really does piss me off. Effectively, with their move to "blogs," these news organizations are just yet more crappy superstores pushing small businesses to the side, to the benefit of absolutely no one except the superstore investors.

Discuss :: (13 Comments)
People don't like hostage-takers: Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman now most unpopular Senators of all
by: Chris Bowers
Thu Jan 07, 2010 at 13:00
It is both small comfort, and an important lesson, for public option advocates that Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson have become the most unpopular and electorally imperiled members of the entire Senate. This has happened largely because of their hostage-taking actions on the healthcare bill.
Joe Lieberman:

Joe Lieberman's actions on the health care bill antagonized constituents both for and against it, and in the wake of that he finds his approval rating at just 25% with 67% of voters in the state disapproving of him.(...)
It's clear that his actions on the Senate health care bill have made a large contribution to his falling popularity. 68% of voters say they disagree with how he handled the issue to just 19% giving him support. Among people who support the health care bill 84% say they disapprove of Lieberman's actions but even among those opposed to the initiative 52% say they disagree with how Lieberman handled himself.

This isn't the first poll showing that Lieberman took a big hit over his backstab on the public option. Two weeks ago, CNN polling showed the exact same results, much to the mystification of D.C. political writers.
Lieberman's actions appealed to no one. Now, he is toast, even among Republicans. A warm body will defeat him in 2012.
Ben Nelson:

If Governor Dave Heineman challenges Nelson for the Senate job, a new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows the Republican would get 61% of the vote while Nelson would get just 30%. Nelson was reelected to a second Senate term in 2006 with 64% of the vote.
Nelson's health care vote is clearly dragging his numbers down. Just 17% of Nebraska voters approve of the deal their senator made on Medicaid in exchange for his vote in support of the plan.

Nelson, like Lieberman, did not make himself more popular among those who oppose the health care bill, or the public option, with his actions. Both supporters and opponents of both the health care bill and the public option were largely disgusted with what they viewed as personal power aggrandizement.
Their actions earned both Nelson and Lieberman featured appearances on Sunday D.C. talk shows, but it also made voters of all sorts loathe them. It would appear that people don't like members of Congress who take enormous pieces of legislation hostage for personal reasons. Nelson and Lieberman are now the most unpopular Senators in their home states in the entire country, far more unpopular than even Harry Reid, Chris Dodd or Blanche Lincoln.
All of this makes it quite amusing that ongoing hostage-taker, Bart Stupak, is strongly considering a run for Governor of Michigan. What a fool. It seems that he really believes that the only people who hate his hostage-taking actions are from New York City. The Nelson and Lieberman polling quoted above shows that very few people, whether in your home state or nationally, and whether among people who agree with your positions or not, like it when members of Congress take hostages in this manner.
Man, I hope Stupak does run for Governor. It would be an easy way to get him out of elected office altogether. It would also be nice to see another health care hostage-taker go down in flames, mystified about why people don't like him anymore.
Finally, I think this is a lesson for public option advocates, and our high-profile hostage-taking strategy called The Progressive Block. It seems clear to me now that a strategy like that only works if you build up public support for it (which we most definitely did not do among the Democratic primary electorate), or if the fight is far more low-profile (such as IMF funding in the Afghanistan supplemental). High-profile hostage taking just doesn't work from the left (or, as polling shows, from the right or the center, either) Voters of all sorts, including those on the left, just don't like it, and they will punish you given the opportunity. It is indeed small comfort that the mendacious hostage-takers who stopped us are now wildly unpopular both at home and around the country, but it is also a warning that we would have been in the same position if we had become the hostage takers ourselves.

After Helping Gordon Gekko Evade the SEC, Will Geithner Finally Now Be Fired?

2010-01-08T21:45:00.000-08:00

After Helping Gordon Gekko Evade the SEC, Will Geithner Finally Now Be Fired?

by: David Sirota

Thu Jan 07, 2010 at 16:29

NOTE: I was going to post this tomorrow, but since the scandal is moving at light speed, I wanted to posted it right now as a follow on to Chris's rightfully enraged post, because the history of what's going on really explains how significant this story is. - D

Way back in May of 2009, I and others here at OpenLeft said President Obama needed to fire Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner because he was either lying or incompetent when it came to AIG. Per the norm, we were lambasted as part of the supposed fringe for saying this, just as we were lambasted for saying that the no-strings-attached bailout was a blatant giveaway to Wall Street. Now, while I'm not going to say "I told you so," I will note it's become more acceptable to say Geithner must be fired - especially after a new report that Geithner's New York Fed instructed AIG to refuse to disclose to SEC regulators some of the worst financial shenanigans surrounding the AIG bailout.

As I'll show using characters from the movie Wall Street, this kind of thing makes Gordon Gekko and Bud Fox's shenanigans look petty.

Bush stole the social-security fund!!

2010-01-04T17:27:00.000-08:00

Here's another source of the Neo-Con's war chest--the Social Security fund.

Bush stole billions from the fund to pay for his wars, tax cuts for the elite, and gift to Big Pharma, and then he went around explaining how Social Security was going broke and needed to be privatized, i.e., handed over to his buddies, the Wall Street crooks.

As a SS recipient myself, it drives me nuts when people explain to me how the system is going broke, all because the "boomers" are reaching retirement age and there aren't enough funds to go around. Apparently the Republican talking points have become the common wisdom among the unformed, i.e., most of the American public.

Obamacare is a bad healthcare bill !!!

2009-12-30T22:40:00.000-08:00

Olbermann to Axelrod: You're a Useless Sell-Out and Shill

Axelrod to Olbermann: You're a Lunatic

Everyone Else: Hey, No Fighting! You're Both Right!

Olbermann: I will go to jail before I participate in a mandated-insurance scheme that enriches the corporate fat-cats in the insurance companies.

Axelrod: Anyone on the left wanting to kill this bill is insane.

Incidentally, after Gibbs called Howard Dean pretty much crazy yesterday, a White House hack (forget who-- Rahm?) walked that back and offered a more respectful objection; but I see the respectful objection thing was abandoned again by Captain Wonderful, and we're back to the "lunatic" argument.

(Argument being used in the loosest possible sense.)

Hmm... those who started saying, early, "the left just might kill this bill," well, you may be about to collect on your pool wager, depending on what day you selected.

I gotta tell ya, I did not see this coming. I thought the left was so hopelessly in love with Captain Wonderful they just wanted him to get a "Win," and didn't care what it looked like.

I see now that that was pretty much just Chris Matthews. And David Brooks, I'd imagine.

Posted by: Ace at 04:07 PM

Another one of "war president" Obama's wars !!!!

2009-12-27T21:13:00.000-08:00

Published on Monday, December 21, 2009 by Salon.com

Cruise Missile Attacks in Yemen

by Glenn Greenwald

Given what a prominent role "Terrorism" plays in our political discourse, it's striking how little attention is paid to American actions which have the most significant impact on that problem. In addition to our occupation of Iraq, war escalation in Afghanistan, and secret bombings in Pakistan, President Obama late last week ordered cruise missile attacks on two locations in Yemen, which "U.S. officials" say were "suspected Al Qaeda hideouts." The main target of the attacks, Al Qaeda member Qasim al Rim, was not among those killed, but: "a local Yemeni official said on Sunday that 49 civilians, among them 23 children and 17 women, were killed in air strikes against Al-Qaeda, which he said were carried out 'indiscriminately'." Media reports across the Muslim world -- though, not of course, within the U.S. -- are highlighting the dead civilians from the U.S. strike (one account from an official Iranian outlet began: "U.S. Nobel Peace Prize laureate President Barack Obama has signed the order for a recent military strike on Yemen in which scores of civilians, including children, have been killed, a report says").

Protesters shout slogans as they march on a street in the southern Yemeni town of Radfan December 19, 2009 to denounce Thursday's government military operation which the authorities said killed about 30 al Qaeda militants. Yemen's opposition accused the raids killed dozens of civilians, including whole families. (REUTERS/Stringer)For many people, the mere assertion by anonymous U.S. Government officials that these attacks targeted "suspected al-Qaeda sites" will be sufficient to deem them justified. All credible reports confirm that there is indeed a not insignificant Al Qaeda presence in Southern Yemen, so that claim, at least, seems at least grounded in reality. Yet arguments about justification to the side for the moment, here we have yet another violent attack by the U.S. which -- even under the best-case scenario -- has killed more Muslim civilians than it did "Al Qaeda fighters," and failed to kill the main target of the attack. When it comes to undermining Al Qaeda -- both in Yemen and generally -- isn't it painfully obvious that the images of dead Muslim women and children which we constantly create -- and which we again just created in Yemen -- will fuel that movement better than anything else we can do?

Consider what else is happening around the Muslim world that is quite consistent with all of that yet receiving virtually no attention in the West (though receiving plenty of attention there). Pakistani lawyers -- many of the same ones who protested the tyrannical practices of General Musharraf -- held a large protest in Islamabad this weekend objecting to the presence of "notorious" Blackwater agents in their country. Palestinians are consumed with a recent incident in which West Bank settlers torched one of their mosques, burning holy books and leaving threatening messages; that was preceded by the Israeli Justice Minister proclaiming that "step by step, Torah law will become the binding law in the State of Israel." And perhaps most significantly of all, while reports have focused on alleged tension between the Obama administration and Israel over the latter's uncooperative conduct, this is what is actually happening:

Behind the scenes, strategic security relations between the two countries are flourishing. Israeli officials have been singing the praises of President Obama for his willingness to address their defense concerns and for actions taken by his administration to bolster Israel's qualitative military edge -- an edge eroded, according to Israel, during the final year of the George W. Bush presidency.

Among the new initiatives taken by the administration, the Forward has learned, are adjustments in a massive arms deal the Bush administration made with Arab Gulf states in response to Israeli concerns. There have also been upgrades in U.S.-Israeli military cooperation on missile defense. And a deal is expected next year that will see one of the United States' most advanced fighter jets go to Israel with some of America's most sensitive new technology.

Amid the cacophony of U.S.-Israel clashes on the diplomatic front, public attention given to this intensified strategic cooperation has been scant. But in a rare public comment in October, Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren praised the Obama administration's response to complaints about lost ground during the close of the Bush years as "warm and immediate."

"We came to the Obama administration and said, ‘Listen, we have a problem here,'" Oren, told a gathering of the National Jewish Democratic Council. "The administration's reaction was immediate: we are going to address this issue, we are going to make sure that we maintain your QME [qualitative military edge]."

All of this is being done pursuant to this:

America's commitment to maintaining Israel's qualitative military edge was codified directly into U.S. law via 2008 legislation backed by AIPAC. This legislation requires the president to report to Congress periodically on actions taken by the administration to ensure Israel's advantage.

I have to confess that I didn't realize that a law was enacted last year making it a legal requirement for America to maintain "Israel's qualitative military edge," and -- even more amazingly -- that the President of the U.S. is required to report regularly to the U.S. Congress on the steps he's taking to ensure Israel's superiority. That's a rather extraordinary law, and the administration seems to be fulfilling its requirements faithfully.

Whatever else is true, and even if one believes it's justified to lob cruise missiles into more countries where we claim "suspected Al Qaeda sites" are located, one thing seems clear: all of the causes widely recognized as having led to 9/11 -- excessive American interference in the Muslim world, our alliance with their most oppressive leaders, our responsibility for Israel's military conflicts with its Muslim neighbors, and our own military attacks on Muslims -- seem stronger than ever. As we take more actions of this sort, we will create more Terrorists, which will in turn cause us to take more actions of this sort in a never-ending, self-perpetuating cycle. The U.S. military, and the intelligence community, and its partners in the private contractor world will certainly remain busy, empowered, and well-funded in the extreme.

A Patient's View of the Senate Christmas Healthcare Gift

2009-12-26T22:07:00.000-08:00

December 24th, 2009 9:10 AM
A Patient’s View of the Senate Christmas Healthcare Gift
By Donna Smith
So, all the great fanfare and all the king’s horses. The great and almighty U.S. Senate has spoken. I will have to buy private health insurance – forever, amen. The defective product that has left me wanting for real healthcare for all of my adult life is now a step closer to being the law of the land.
A lump of Christmas coal all polished up with sparkling rhetoric.
Here’s what the Chicago Tribune said this week, and I agree:
On Sunday, the Chicago Tribune published an exhaustive front-page analysis by Northwestern University's Medill News Service and the Center for Responsive Politics of how it was done. The main culprit: "a revolving door between Capitol Hill staffers and lobbying jobs for companies with a stake in health care legislation."

The study found that 13 former congressmen and 166 congressional staffers were actively engaged in lobbying their former colleagues on the bill. The companies they were working for -- some 338 of them -- spent $635 million on lobbying. It was money extremely well spent -- delivering a bill that, by forcing people to buy a shoddy product in a market with no real competition, enshrines into law the public subsidy of private profit.

As we approach the end of Obama's first year in office, this public subsidizing of private profit is becoming something of a habit. It is, after all, exactly what the White House did with the banks. Just as he did with insurance companies, Obama talked tough to the bankers in public, but, when push came to shove, he ended up shoving public money onto their privately held balance sheets.
This is not just bad policy, it's bad politics.
Now, back to my own thoughts as a patient:
I went broke while carrying health insurance, a disability insurance policy and a small healthcare savings account. And if I get sick under this mess of a plan, it will happen to me again. Little has changed except that millions more of my fellow citizens will join my ranks.
How does it happen to insured people under this plan? Easy. Step-by-torturous-step. Slowly. Like water-torture.
1. Buy health insurance at work or on the new exchange;
2. Avoid using insurance due to co-pays, deductibles and out-of-pocket maximum exposures – not to mention lost work time and the worry about losing one’s job in a tough economy;
3. If symptoms are noticed, treat by internet medical site suggestions and over-the-counter drugs until no other option but going to a doctor are available;
4. Attempt to make appointment with doctor but first find one who accepts both new patients and your insurance;
5. Go to doctor and pay co-pay up front before ever speaking to anyone about medical problem;
6. Sit in outer waiting room for as long as required, missing work and worrying;
7. Sit in exam room waiting for doctor for as long as required;
8. See doctor for five or six minutes, if lucky, during which time you will either be prescribed some expensive drug to fix a problem the doctor isn’t sure you have, referred to another doctor who may have a month or two wait for appointments, be directed to get some tests done you aren’t sure your insurance will allow or pay for, and do it all sitting in your underwear or less;
9. Leave medical office owing more than what you thought your insurance and co-pay advertised (and never get an explanation for how that is possible) and never sure if this experience was much different than being to a used car lot where the sales folks have assessed your financing mechanism before showing you anything at all and then only show you what fits the financing not what you need or want;
10. In the alternative, if you collapse or wait until symptoms get so severe that going for an office appointment is impossible, go to an emergency room – repeat steps five through eight – and either be admitted to the hospital if your insurance is adequate and you have any available sick-time from work (if not, beg for drugs and to be released) or go to number nine.
11. Need a dentist? Too bad. Have dental insurance? Still too bad. You might get a cleaning and some x-rays, but getting the care you may or may not need will be again totally related to your ability to pay whatever portion of the dental work is not covered (and amazingly, every penny of what dental insurance will cover will be eaten up by whatever problem you may or may not have) – in the alternative, avoid dentists or just pull teeth as they go bad;
12. When the bills roll in, try to pay some after trying to find out how you can possible owe hundreds if not thousands more than the insurance policy you have indicates is possible;
13. When the collectors call to collect all of the balances due, try to negotiate payments but endure threats of lawsuit, garnishment and worse as the collectors report back to the doctors you saw for a few moments in number eight;
14. Try to get your meds – if too costly, go without;
15. Try to get well – if you cannot, go back to work;
16. Try to act like this is all wonderful and you are grateful to have any insurance at all;
17. Get sued by a collection agency for a doctor bill or hospital bill you cannot cover;
18. Sell your house and use whatever proceeds you have to try to pay some of the debts;
19. Collectors for the doctors and hospitals are not happy if you don’t pay it all in full and up-front most of the time;
20. Feel stress, fear, anguish – but don’t gripe and don’t show it at work – buck it up, chump;
21. Sell keepsakes and anything valuable to try to stay afloat;
22. Stress, more stress. Fear to answer the phone. Friends and family fall away as they don’t want you to ask to borrow money;
23. Keep working – sick or not, keep working or you’ll lose that damn insurance if you cannot pay the premium – or you’ll be back out on the exchange trying to buy another policy that is cheaper and even worse;
24. Watch your elected officials claim victory and history as they work to make sure your kids and grandkids must suffer the same fate if they need healthcare in America;
25. Have a Merry Christmas, so says your U.S. Senate.
Don’t think this can happen to you because it hasn’t yet? Count your blessings this Christmas.
I'd really like the gift of healthcare. Medicare for all, single-payer healthcare would remove so much of this awful process. That would be a gift.
Tags:
Health Care Reform,Medicare,Single Payer,Universal Health Care

healthcare bill is giveaway to insurance industry

2009-12-23T22:57:00.000-08:00

Michael Moore says Democrats’ healthcare bill is giveaway to insurance industry

By Raw Story
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 -- 9:17 am
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In a speech broadcast on Canadian television Tuesday, Michael Moore savaged the Democrats' healthcare bill, calling it a gift to the health insurance industry, which he argues will make $70 billion more as a result of mandated health insurance.

"The health insurance companies are going to make an extra $70 billion dollars as a result of Americans being forced to buy their health insurance," Moore quipped. "What company wouldn't love this bill?"

Moore argues that the health insurance industry isn't really upset about healthcare reform. His assertions -- which mirror those of some on the left -- highlight the challenge that Democrats in Congress face on healthcare reform. On the left, critics say that the bill doesn't go far enough in ensuring universal care; on the right, critics say the proposal will lead to a government takeover of healthcare.

"So all of the wailing that they're doing about this bill -- believe me, the health insurance companies are not that upset about it," Moore said. "In fact, they helped write this bill."

"It's not universal health care," he continued. "Thirteen million people will still not have health insurance in the United States.

Story continues below...

"And the drug companies signed a deal with Obama to keep them out of it, because they agreed to reduce their prices by $8 billion in the first year of the healthcare bill," he asserted.

But he noted that because these companies allegedly raised prices in the last year by $10 billion, they still come out $2 billion ahead.

"When you create a society that essentially is in that state, it's very easy to run an ad on the nightly news about what a third world country Canada is, and about how people are dying on the sidewalk here because they can't get in to see the doctor," he added. "You actually believe that stuff. Because of the education you've been given, because education is such a low priority. Our schools are in such disarray. And our media doesn't do anything to help educate people in the way they need to be educated."

"It's not that you need to become more like America," Moore said. "America needs to become more like you. We need to become more Canadian-like."

"A hospital will hire a foreclosure company to go after someone's home and have them thrown out on the curb because they haven't paid the hospital bill," he added. "Something is seriously wrong with this."

This video is from The Canadian Press, broadcast Nov. 17, 2009.

Merry Christmas! Ed Hanway, Cigna CEO, is getting a $73,200,000 golden parachute

2009-12-23T20:55:00.000-08:00

December 23rd, 2009 2:30 PM

Merry Christmas! Ed Hanway, Cigna CEO, is getting a $73,200,000 golden parachute

By Jason Rosenbaum / Firedoglake

Ed Hanway, CEO of Cigna, one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies, will step down at the end of this year, in just over a week. When he does, he’ll get $73,200,000 as compensation for a job well done.

What makes Hanway worth $73.2 million? Well, for one example, he’s presided as Cigna denied a liver transplant to 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan, causing her death and widespread outrage. Wendell Potter, Cigna’s former spokesperson turned whistle-blower, was at the company during the Sarkisyan scandal, and he explains its effect on him personally, as well as how the company thinks about denying care:

In our system today, there is literally no repercussions for insurance companies when they deny care, jack up rates, or do all the other things they do to screw over their customers. Ed Hanway did all those things as much as he could, and for that, he’s being rewarded.

Out there in America, people are losing their jobs. They’re losing their homes. They’re skimping on holiday gifts to put food on the table. And they’re still going bankrupt due to skyrocketing medical costs.
Meanwhile, insurance company stocks are "on fire" in reaction to the Senate bill, which, though it has some regulations, leaves people at the mercy of private insurance because it lacks a public health insurance option.
People out there are suffering, insurance companies are winning, and Ed Hanway is walking away with $73.2 million.
We’ve managed to track down Hanway’s personal email address. This isn’t a spam box or an unattended address, this is

Hanway’s actual corporate email. It’s H.Edward.Hanway@CIGNA.com.

Send him an email. Tell him what you think of his golden parachute. While you’re at it, why don’t you tell Hanway what you’d like for Christmas, and what you’d buy with his money. You can leave a message on Cigna’s Facebook page as well, if you want.

Obama:Another Fucking War President

2009-12-22T10:54:00.001-08:00

December 21st, 2009 2:46 AM
Obama Ordered U.S. Military Strike on Yemen Terrorists
Cruise Missiles Launched Thursday Hit Two Suspected al Qaeda Sites; Major Escalation of US Efforts Against Terrorists

Protesters shout slogans as they march on a street in the southern Yemeni town of Radfan December 19, 2009 to denounce Thursday's military operation.
By Brian Ross, Richard Esposito, Matthew Cole, Luis Martinez and Kirit Radia / ABC News
On orders from President Barack Obama, the U.S. military launched cruise missiles early Thursday against two suspected al-Qaeda sites in Yemen, administration officials told ABC News in a report broadcast on ABC World News with Charles Gibson.
One of the targeted sites was a suspected al Qaeda training camp north of the capitol, Sanaa, and the second target was a location where officials said "an imminent attack against a U.S. asset was being planned."
The Yemen attacks by the U.S. military represent a major escalation of the Obama administration's campaign against al Qaeda.
In his speech about added troops for Afghanistan earlier this month, President Obama made a brief reference to Yemen, saying, "Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold -- whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere -- they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships."
Until tonight, American officials had hedged about any U.S. role in the strikes against Yemen and news reports from Yemen attributed the attacks to the Yemen Air Force.
President Obama placed a call after the strikes to "congratulate" the President of Yemen, Ali Abdallah Salih, on his efforts against al Qaeda, according to White House officials.
A Yemeni official at the country's embassy in Washington insisted to ABC News Friday that the Thursday attacks were "planned and executed" by the Yemen government and police.
Along with the two U.S. cruise missile attacks, Yemen security forces carried out raids in three separate locations. As many as 120 people were killed in the three raids, according to reports from Yemen, and opposition leaders said many of the dead were innocent civilians.
American officials said the missile strikes were intended to disrupt a growing threat from the al Qaeda branch in Yemen, which claims to coordinate terror attacks against neighboring Saudi Arabia.
The al Qaeda presence in Yemen has been steadily growing in the last two years. "Al Qaeda generally has been pushed into these ungoverned areas, whether it is the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area [or Yemen]," said Richard Barrett, coordinator of the U.N.'s Taliban al-Qaeda Sancitions Monitoring Committee. "I think many of the key people have moved to Yemen."
The U.S. embassy was attacked by suspected al Qaeda gunmen last year.
And the presumed leader of al Qaeda in Yemen, Qaaim al-Raymi, has frequently appeared on internet videos, offering an alternative to the training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
"If they can go to Yemen just as easily or easier and get training there and come out again," said Barrett, "all your efforts in Pakistan and Afghanistan are a waste of time."
Qaaim al-Raymi was considered a prime target of the attack Thursday but was reported to have escaped the attack. However, U.S. officials believe one of his top deputies may have been killed.
Tags:
Afghanistan,Al Qaeda,Ali Abdallah Salih,Barack Obama,Pakistan,Qaaim al-Raymi,Somalia,Taliban,White House,Yemen
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bio4Posted December 22nd, 2009 4:31 AM
I wonder how long we will have to wait before Venezuela is added to the list to give number 5. The new bases to be built in Columbia are purportedly for continuing "the war against drugs" but an Air force document stated that the US military presence was necessary to combat the "constant threat from anti-US governments in the region". These governments include those in Venezuela and Bolivia and possibly Ecuador.

And then there is Iran (no 6?). Reply
bsodPosted December 22nd, 2009 1:00 AM
the word terrorist is kinna vague and abused to push agenda's in some cases, I wish even headlines we're more specific like, "military strike on al-Qaeda " so we know that they arent talking about a teenager who saw the wrong webpage on accident Reply
powertothepeoplePosted December 22nd, 2009 12:12 AM
I just hope that danno75 takes the rest of the evening to kill off that pint of ice cream. The Warmongers and Fearmongers are still going strong. Book em danno. Reply
rokonPosted December 21st, 2009 7:03 PM
The people of America should wake up now. Obama, Bush, Dick Cheny, they are all ELECTED by you REMEMBER? and by now you might have understood that they all serve the same godfathers.

REFORM the present political system . DEMOCRACY is not about choosing between the chosen. Reply
enkoARTPosted December 22nd, 2009 1:28 AM
Agree, well said . Reply
AsilPosted December 21st, 2009 5:35 PM
As many as 120 people in Yemen were killed and many of the dead were innocent civilians… and Obama placed a call to “Congratulate” the efforts to Predent of Yemen?

What a Noble Peace Prize winner! Is this his way of earning it? Reply
danno75Posted December 21st, 2009 4:35 PM
What is it going to take to make us realize that the U.S. has become exactly what we are supposed to be fighting against in this "War on Terror". We are headed for the first all out war fought on American soil since the Civil War, and I hate to say it, but we will get our collective butts kicked if it happens. It isn't the 1700's anymore. 2/3 of Americans (myself included) are so out of shape we couldn't kill a pint of icecream much less a trained soldier. Our current president seems to be going out of his way to piss off as many countries (that already hated us to begin with) as humanly possible. I realize all of this was started by GWB but BSO needs to end it or else we are in for a rude awakening. Reply
danno75Posted December 22nd, 2009 11:23 AM
That should have been BHO not BSO. I suppose the BS is appropriate though. Reply
MakaainanaPosted December 21st, 2009 1:32 PM
Is this preemptive war by another name or in a smaller fashion?

Preemptive war is aggression by a rogue nation on another nation, no matter what you say the reasons are.

It makes those that engage in it international terrorists and war criminals........... Reply
MakaainanaPosted December 21st, 2009 1:27 PM
This is just the beginning. Terrorists are not tied to a state or nation. Somali will come up. The Philippines, South America are both prone to terrorist activities.

That is the flaw in Obama's trying to stop terror in AfPak. Anywhere the globalization of industry has bypassed there are poor with the understandable frustrations that arise in a media shrunk world.

You will never stop terror with guns and robot bombs. All you will do is create collateral damage which creates more terrorists.

Food, medicine, humanitarian aid without political strings attached are what is needed. Spend the trillions of dollars like that and we will see some positive results. Expecting to conquer a stateless group of international criminals (terrorists) by forcing a government on citizens is as silly as trying to change the hearts and minds of mothers and fathers by killing their neighbors. Reply
Ron44Posted December 21st, 2009 1:17 PM
Well folks, is this a wake up call as to what Obama thinks about your feelings on this useless war?? We are going down the same old road of escalation and BS that Bush took us down!! A military strike to prove that he is the big man on campus and the death of over a hundred innocent people!! Nobel Peace Prize my ass!!!!!! Reply