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Saundra Hummer

March 27th, 2009, 04:40 PM

<><><><><> Beyond the AIG bailoutGreenwich Citizen Staff
Updated: 03/27/2009
04:52:28 PM EDT
We bail out American International Group Inc. and they party. We bail them out again and they hand out millions of dollars of the taxpayers' money in bonuses. What spectacular self-interest. Is it any wonder that some people are comparing this sort of free market capitalism to organized crime?
It is galling that we have to sit back and watch as our government bails out a few select corporations, some guilty of unbridled greed or incompetence (or both), while the rest of us are left to fend for ourselves.

AIG recently used $165 million of its bailout funds for "retention bonuses" and cited provisions of the Connecticut Wage Act as justification. AIG says it is bound by state law because its financial products division, the source of its problems, is in Wilton. The division, essentially a hedge fund attached to an insurance company, engaged in high-risk activities that some have characterized as gambling.

Edward Liddy, AIG's new chairman and chief executive officer, brought in to clean up the mess, said at last week's hearing that the "retention bonuses" were paid to people who were helping to clean up the mess and were important to the primary task of avoiding a disorderly breakdown of AIG.

U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., has characterized the argument as "specious."

In addition, if it didn't pay the bonuses, according to Liddy, the company could be sued for twice the amount of the bonus or more.

Retention bonus is an unfortunate term. These people were given a job to do. If they did it, they got the bonus. Many of them left after getting the bonus. It's not much of a surprise that people aren't enamored of working at AIG these days.

While we have some sympathy for Liddy, the fact remains that no AIG employees would have received any bonuses if the firm went bankrupt and that's what would have happened without the bailout.

Bottom line? Taxpayers paid for these bonuses and there is widespread anger as a result. People are angry with AIG but there is also a deep disenchantment with the greed of corporate America in general as well as the government's failures in oversight.

People who misuse bailout funds, whether for parties, obscene bonuses or any other self-absorbed uses, are little more than parasites feasting at the public trough. They deserve neither our trust nor our hard-earned money. Abusing the public trust in such a flagrant manner should have serious consequences. Right now, Congress is playing the Washington game, trying to find out who knew what when.

The federal government is currently seeking ways to address this egregious misuse of funds. One idea is to tax 90 to 100 percent of the bonus money. That's not ideal but at least it's something. Another idea is to sue AIG to recover the funds.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell recently wrote to the Connecticut congressional delegation and urged them to amend the Troubled Asset Relief Program to ensure that a similar debacle doesn't happen again.

"American taxpayers are rightly upset that their tax dollars would be used in such a wrong-headed manner," said Rell. "It is incredibly inappropriate to reward employees whose mismanagement and avarice have led to the failure of these companies. Our taxpayers are funding a financial system that has collapsed largely due to its own greed and a regulatory system that failed to curb the abuses."

State Sen. John McKinney, R-28, characterized AIG's actions as "outrageous." McKinney, the Senate Republican leader, hit the nail squarely on the head. Outrageous is the word, at least the one we can print.

Most of us are dealing with "voluntary" pay cuts, staff reductions, hiring freezes, cost cutting, etc., and these guys are handing out $165 million of the taxpayers' money as bonuses to executives who are probably already millionaires? The sheer audacity boggles the mind and people are hopping mad.

On the positive side, some Connecticut Republicans have seen enough and want to tighten up the Connecticut law cited by AIG as justification for this reverse Robin Hood farce.

"We are outraged to learn that AIG is using Connecticut Wage Laws as leverage to use taxpayer money to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses," said McKinney. "The legislature should move immediately to change Connecticut law. We in Connecticut can do what Congress failed to do, which is protect taxpayers from having their hard-earned money used for these exorbitant bonuses."

The Connecticut Republicans spearheading the initiative expect bipartisan support and they should get it.

Meanwhile, Rell has instructed the Consumer Protection Commission to see whether the AIG bonuses can be voided under the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act. She wants the commission to subpoena the relevant employment contracts cited by AIG.

"Since the company cited Connecticut law, they will have to live by Connecticut law," said Rell.

Liddy, who makes $1 a year, said he has asked AIG employees to give back the bonuses. So far, several have. We'll see what transpires in the days ahead.
http://www.greenwichcitizen.com/localnews/ci_12007704 <><><>

Saundra Hummer

March 27th, 2009, 05:15 PM

$$$$$$$
The Free Market, Financial StyleHow the Scam WorksBy
MICHAEL HUDSON

March 27, 2009 "Counterpunch" -- Newspaper reports seem surprised at how high banks are bidding for the junk mortgages that Treasury Secretary Geithner is now bidding for, having mobilized the FDIC and Fed to transfer yet more public funds to the banks. Bank stocks are soaring – thereby bidding up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, as if the “financial industry” really were part of the industrial economy.

Why are the very worst offenders – Bank of America (now owner of the Countrywide crooks) and Citibank the largest buyers? As the worst abusers and packagers of CDOs, shouldn’t they be in the best position to see how worthless their junk mortgages are?

That turns out to be the key! Obviously, the government has failed to protect itself – deliberately, intentionally failed to do so – in order to let the banks pull off the following scam.

Suppose a bank is sitting on a $10 million package of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that was put together by, say, Countrywide out of junk mortgages. Given the high proportion of fraud (and a recent Fitch study found that every package it examined was rife with financial fraud), this package may be worth at most only $2 million as defaults loom on Alt-A “liars’ loan” mortgages and subprime mortgages where the mortgage brokers also have lied in filling out the forms for hapless borrowers or witting operators taking out mortgages at far more than properties were worth and pocketing the excess.

The bank now offers $3 million to buy back this mortgage. What the hell, the more they bid, the more they get from the government. So why not bid $5 million. (In practice, friendly banks may bid for each other’s junk CDOs.) The government – that is, the hapless FDIC – puts up 85 per cent of $5 million to buy this – namely, $4,250,000. The bank only needs to put up 15 per cent – namely, $750,000.

Here’s the rip-off as I see it. For an outlay of $750,000, the bank rids its books of a mortgage worth $2 million, for which it receives $4,250,000. It gets twice as much as the junk is worth.

The more the banks holding junk mortgages pay for this toxic waste, the more the government will pay as part of its 85 per cent. So the strategy is to overpay, overpay, and overpay. Paying 15 per cent is a small price to pay for getting the government to put in 85 per cent to take the most toxic waste off your books.

The free market at work, financial style.

Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) He can be reached at mh@michael-hudson.com
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Saundra Hummer

March 28th, 2009, 11:24 AM

A
NEWSLETTER REQUEST

Dear Saundra R.,

I wanted to make sure you knew about a petition campaign we launched yesterday in support of the University of Notre Dame's decision to invite President Obama to deliver the 2009 commencement address.

The Notre Dame student body is proud and excited the President will be speaking at their school, but partisan operatives are working to force Notre Dame to rescind the invitation.

Our campaign to support Notre Dame has been amazingly successful, with more than 15,000 people signing up in less than 24 hours. But we need to do more. Those attacking Notre Dame are claiming more than 170,000 signatures. We clearly have a lot of work ahead of us, but I'm confident we can do it.

Have you signed our petition to support Notre Dame? Click here to make your voice heard.

We need all hands on deck to show there is another voice out there. Here's what you can do:

1. Sign the petition at: www.wesupportnotredame.org.

2. Encourage your friends and family to do the same. http://www.wesupportnotredame.org/tell-a-friend

3. Call Notre Dame president Father John Jenkins at 574-631-5000 and tell him that you stand behind the university's invitation. The far right is flooding his office with calls, and he needs to hear from those who support him.

Our nation's universities are meant to be places that embrace open discussion of the issues of our day. Don't let Notre Dame cave to political pressure. Join the campaign and register your support today.

Sincerely,

Beth, Jennifer, Dan, Kristin and Katie

The Faithful America team

All content © 2008 Faithful America
1101 Vermont Avenue,
9th Floor
Washington, DC 20005 .

Saundra Hummer

March 28th, 2009, 12:25 PM

IIIIIIIZillion TV Worth Zip
By
Art Brodsky
March 17, 2009 - 9:56amThe news from the media front was pretty dismal. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will end 146 years of printing newspapers, becoming the largest newspaper to go web only. The Hearst company couldn’t find a buyer for the P-I, leaving Seattle with the Times as the only physical newspaper.

Another venerable publisher, the E.W. Scripps Co., recently shuttered the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, just days short of its 150th birthday. Gannett is closing the Tucson Citizen, almost 140 years old, on March 21. Some of Rocky’s alumni are trying to start an online paper, if they can get 50,000 paying customers at $4.99 per month by April 23.

If there were any doubt that the Web will become not only a secondary source of news and information for millions of people, but, increasingly, a primary one, those developments should dispel the remaining questions. That’s why a concept like Zillion TV is so dangerous.

Zillion was announced earlier this month to modest fanfare as a partnership among studios, tech entrepreneurs and VISA to provide a new kind of online entertainment outlet. So far, so good. But, the kicker in the formula is that Zillion wants to enter into a partnership with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to offer the service exclusively on that ISPs network.

We’ve waited a bit before commenting on Zillion to try to get some answers from them about the technology they are using, and to see which ISP steps forward as the first partner. We haven’t been successful on the first, and no one has stepped up to the second. We’re disappointed about the first, but not disappointed about the second. Any ISP that volunteers will have some explaining to do.

In its presentation to reporters during its launch, Zillion officials said that ISPs would find affiliation “boosts customer loyalty and reduces customer churn.” That’s not good enough a reason to start destroying the open, non-discriminatory Internet.

The vehicle for Zillion’s on-demand, customer-driven service is a $50 set-top box, which would sit along side the other set-top boxes like the one Netflix uses, and would be another customer choice for video-on-demand, like those that cable systems offer for movies and the Web sites like Hulu offer to allow viewers to watch TV shows they missed and didn’t record.

What makes this different, and dangerous, is the precedent of the ISP partner. Cable, for better or worse, is a closed network, with a centralized gatekeeper. A site like Hulu is owned by NBC and Fox. While they control the content, anyone has access to it over the Web. That is how it should be.

Zillion’s model reportedly would be different. It would sign up ISPs that could confer the advantages of network control on Zillion, offering the service only on that ISP. That model is unacceptable in an open Internet environment. It would reduce consumer choice and would set a truly unfortunate precedent by encouraging just the type of exclusionary partnerships that the Internet was designed to avoid. Should Qwest be allowed to offer the Denver Post exclusively? Or Comcast offer the Washington Post? Of course not.

Having an ISP partner would only further consolidate the choke-hold ISPs are wrapping around the Web. With more video going online, not only from TV shows and movies, but also integrated into social networking, some Internet providers are instituting bandwidth caps to crunch down customer usage.

At a time when most Internet consumers have at most two realistic options (not counting wireless or satellite), the type of favoritism a Zillion model portends shouldn’t be allowed, whether it’s offered on one ISP or several. That’s why Zillion’s model is worth Zip.
About the AuthorArt Brodsky Art Brodsky is communications director of Public Knowledge. He is a veteran of Washington, D.C. telecommunications and Internet journalism and public relations.more >>
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Saundra Hummer

March 28th, 2009, 12:42 PM

))))))<>((((((
Musicians Want the Airwaves Back
March 17, 2009
Posted by Candace Clement
Passing the Local Community Radio Act will be like opening your windows on that first day of spring after a really long winter. We've been listening to the same stale, recycled music since the mid-90s. Who's particularly thrilled about the bill's potential? Musicians.
~ ~ ~
The musicians of America are packing their gear and heading to Austin, Texas, this weekend for the annual South by Southwest (or SXSW) music festival. With more than 1,900 acts expected to descend on the city (and those are just the ones we know about), SXSW presents precisely the sort of explosive and diverse soundscape we could expect to start hearing on the airwaves again if Congress takes action this year.

The Local Community Radio Act (HR 1147 / S 592) is the perfect antidote to the drudgery on the radio dial since 1996, when massive radio consolidation resulted in stations constantly spinning the same songs across the country.

For musicians, Local Community Radio Act will be invaluable. It’s become nearly impossible for local bands to get their songs played in their hometowns as playlists have become automated and computers have replaced the local deejay with her ear to the ground. Gone are the days when artists could bring their music down to the local radio station for a chance to be “discovered” as the next big thing. As far as commercial radio goes, you’re lucky if anyone’s at the station at all.

Making music, reaching people
I have a special place in my heart for this bill, both as a musician and as a former community radio station volunteer. For the past ten years, I have been making noise beside my friends and working alongside them to set up shows, promote albums, and sell t-shirts in bars, basements, attics and anywhere else people are eager to come see live music.

We do it because we love it – because we don’t know how not to – and none of us are really expecting to strike it rich. We simply want to make music, and we want that music to reach as many people as possible.

Luckily, we have a community radio station that plays our music, and the music of other artists living in the Pioneer Valley. But what about those places where only commercial radio exists? Might as well be static.

Corporate media would like us to believe they’re only feeding us the content we’re clamoring for, but don’t be fooled. We hear the same songs over and over again because it’s cheap and easy to produce and because payola – a rigged (and illegal) pay-to-play game where record execs bestow prizes and gifts on DJs – has come to dominate the commercial radio market.

Because of this crooked system, to actually get radio play is not a reflection of talent or merit or even taste. Instead, it’s all about money, and usually the only way a band can get on the radio is to follow the beaten path of seeking record deals and distribution through the major labels, who judge bands not on their sound, but on dollar signs.

No substitute for radio
The closed game of commercial radio is totally out of sync with the dramatic changes that have taken place on the production side of music. Over the past decade, technology has made it increasingly easy to record an album. The Internet has connected us to more affordable options for packaging and distribution. Social networks like MySpace have led to success stories, with unknown artists reaching a massive audience overnight. And online radio stations and podcasts have allowed new and underground content to reach even more ears.

But while the Web is great, it’s no substitute for broadcast media. With 40 percent of America still not connected to high-speed Internet (the kind of speed required to stream audio files), we can’t look to the Web as the definitive solution. Radios are a one-time cost (there is no monthly subscription fee) and you are connected for life.

The airwaves, which belong to the public in the first place, should be returned to communities. With the Local Community Radio Act, thousands of new noncommercial stations can be licensed across the country, giving musicians and fans an opportunity to hear an astonishing array of music, from local talent to a tune from across the ocean.

And if you don’t agree with the deejay, you can get your own show and share your love for reggae, metal, freak folk, electronica or whatever else you fancy.

Passing this bill will be like opening your windows on that first day of spring after a really long winter. We’ve been breathing the same stale, recycled air since the mid-90s.

Let’s turn up the volume already and make this happen.

There are numerous links within this article, just click on the URL to gain access to them>http://www.freepress.net/node/48937 )))))<>(((((

Saundra Hummer

March 29th, 2009, 01:32 AM

. . . . . . .FACT CHECK.ORG
March 27, 2009 by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Ali Frick, and Ryan Powers
MEDIA
Stop The O'Reilly Harassment Machine
Last Saturday, March 21, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly sent two of his employees to stalk, harass, and ambush ThinkProgress.org Managing Editor Amanda Terkel. Upset over a ThinkProgress report that noted O'Reilly's insensitive comment towards a rape victim, O'Reilly dispatched his producer Jesse Watters, along with a cameraman, to stake out Amanda's home in Washington, DC, follow her for two hours across state lines, and ambush her while she was on vacation in Winchester, VA. O'Reilly then used a small portion of highly-edited footage he obtained from Watters's ambush interview to falsely claim that Amanda was bringing "a lot of pain and suffering" to rape victims. Unfortunately, Amanda is just one of roughly 40 different victims of these kind of ambush tactics. Indeed, O'Reilly has hired producers whose primary job is to track, harass, and intimidate anyone whom O'Reilly perceives as an opponent or an enemy. That's not journalism -- that's a mafia-style intimidation operation, and we need to put an end to it. ThinkProgress has launched a campaign asking O'Reilly's major sponsors to issue a clear statement opposing O'Reilly's Harassment Machine. Please consider joining this campaign here.

THE ANATOMY OF AN AMBUSH: O'Reilly's ambush of Amanda was sparked by a short piece that she wrote on March 1 highlighting the fact that O'Reilly had been invited to speak at a fundraiser for a rape victims support group, the Alexa Foundation. Amanda noted in response, "O'Reilly has made controversial comments about an 18-year-old woman, Jennifer Moore, who was raped and murdered, implying that it was partially her fault." Indeed, O'Reilly called Moore "moronic" and implied that because she was "wearing a miniskirt and a halter top with a bare midriff" and had been drinking, she should have expected to be assaulted, raped, and murdered. Nowhere in her piece did Amanda comment on the Alexa Foundation itself. O'Reilly, however, couldn't stand to see Amanda highlight his offensive commentary, so he sent Watters after her. Last Saturday, Amanda left her Washington, D.C. home for a weekend trip to Winchester, VA. After driving two hours, Amanda checked into her lodgings and then decided to take a walk. As she left the hotel, Watters approached Amanda with a cameraman in tow and demanded that she explain why she had caused "pain and suffering" to rape victims and the Alexa Foundation. Amanda had told no one where she was going, so she concluded that Watters and his cameraman had "staked out my apartment and then followed me for two hours" (Amanda recalls that a tan SUV had been tracking her car). O'Reilly then spliced footage from the Watters's ambush interview to characterize Amanda as "evil" and "certainly a villain." O'Reilly never showed his audience what Amanda actually wrote and never played what he said about Moore, nor did he explain how his henchmen tracked her down.

O'REILLY'S BULLYING TACTICS: In August 2007, O'Reilly defended his ambush tactics, claiming that they are "a vital tool in holding public servants accountable for their actions" and that "we do not go after people lightly." "We always ask them on the program first or to issue a clear statement explaining their actions," he said. In Amanda's case, no one at the O'Reilly Factor or Fox News attempted to contact her for comment or a chance to appear on O'Reilly's show before stalking and ambushing her in rural Virginia. In all, O'Reilly's ambush tactics have been used on nearly 40 different individuals. Some are public servants, but many are private citizens who work at non-profit foundations, while others work as journalists, priests, actors, and authors. A woman who wrote an op-ed for Newsday suggesting that shock jocks could in some cases be inspiring violent acts, was ambushed by O'Reilly's henchmen in her driveway. Michael Hoyt, executive editor for the Columbia Journalism Review, was ambushed as he tried to board a public bus, while Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, was ambushed in a restaurant while having dinner. Such ambushes are not journalism and are hardly distinguishable from the paparazzi journalists that O'Reilly calls "the scum of the earth."

STOPPING THE MACHINE: We need to Stop O'Reilly's Harassment Machine. Therefore, ThinkProgress has launched an e-mail campaign asking O'Reilly's major corporate sponsors to issue a clear statement opposing O'Reilly's "ambush journalism." As Amanda explained on MSNBC's Keith Olbermann last night, "This is not a liberal or conservative issue." Olbermann agreed, saying in reference to ambush journalism tactics, "It's inappropriate. There are some rules here and they apply in both directions to everybody." At least some of O'Reilly's sponsors appear to agree as well. In the 48 hours since ThinkProgress first launched its campaign, over 5,000 e-mails have been sent to O'Reilly's advertisers. Ford, AT&T, UPS, and Capital One have all responded. UPS said in a statement, "We are sensitive to the type of television programming where our messages and presence are associated and continually review choices to affect future decisions. Further investigation is underway related to this placement." Similarly, Capital One said, "We regret that you found the Bill O'Reilly programming during which one of our ads was aired to be offensive. ... Capital One in no way endorses the views/opinions portrayed during the news broadcasts in which we advertise." Despite this, a number of prominent advertisers including Audi, Hyundai, Johnson and Johnson, Bayer, and Proctor & Gamble have yet to respond. O'Reilly complained on air about the campaign, calling ThinkProgress "insects" for "going after" his sponsors. If you want to help get under O'Reilly's skin and put an end to his ambush and harassment tactics, ask his advertisers to express their disapproval of his tactics. Click here to help Stop the O'Reilly Harassment Machine.

UNDER THE RADAR
RADICAL RIGHT -- KRISTOL LAUNCHES PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY 2.0: 'THE FOREIGN POLICY INITIATIVE': After Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and his neoconservative foreign policy were soundly defeated at the polls last year, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol told right-wing talker Hugh Hewitt that he was considering putting together a refashioned version of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). "A little bit of a political organization" for "the Fred Kagans and Bob Kagans and Reuel Gerechts of the world" wouldn't "be bad," said Kristol. His new "political organization" for neoconservatives is now a reality. "The blandly-named Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) -- the brainchild of Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, neo-conservative foreign policy guru Robert Kagan, and former Bush administration official Dan Senor -- has thus far kept a low profile," wrote Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe for IPS News on Wednesday. Though it's not mentioned on their Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) bio page, Kristol and Kagan were co-founders of PNAC in 1997. The Wonk Room's Matt Duss writes that Kristol and Kagan seem to be re-naming their old organization because it became "inextricably bound in the public's imagination to one of the worst foreign policy blunders in American history" -- the invasion of Iraq. Noting that FPI's first public event next week, Afghanistan: Planning For Success, features a heavy representation of Iraq war advocates, Duss suggests that a far better title for the event would be, "Afghanistan: Dealing With The Huge Problems Created By Many Of The People On This Very Stage."

ECONOMY -- REPORT: OBAMA'S BUDGET WILL HELP SMALL BUSINESSES: A common attack refrain by conservatives on President Obama's budget proposal is that tax increases will hurt small businesses. Beginning in 2011, Obama's plan would slightly increase taxes on households earning more than $250,000 and individuals earning over $200,000. In defending the Republican's alternative budget proposal that offers a large tax cut to businesses, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) said, "Republicans know that raising taxes on small businesses will only result in more workers losing their jobs." However, a new study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds that "under the Clinton Administration, when the tax treatment of high-income families was very similar to what President Obama has proposed, small businesses generated jobs at twice the rate as under the Bush tax code." During the Clinton years, small businesses generated 756,000 new jobs, versus only 367,000 new jobs under the tax conditions set by Bush, which Republicans seek to replicate. Further, "more small business owners would receive tax cuts" under Obama's plan because they do not fall into the $250,000-plus tax bracket. "Most small business owners aren't in the top two marginal tax rates," said Benjamin Harris of the Tax Policy Center. "In my opinion, there's some misunderstanding in these political debates that the people who'll be affected are middle-income Americans who run mom-and-pop stores."

JUSTICE -- ASHCROFT: 'I THINK HISTORY WILL BE VERY KIND' TO BUSH: Earlier this week, former attorney general John Ashcroft spoke at the University of Texas at Austin on the differences between the Obama and Bush administrations. Although "[m]ost in attendance were respectful of Ashcroft's right to speak," he was greeted by a group of protesters who waved "signs of dissent" and booed when he first appeared. During his speech, Ashcroft launched a vociferous defense of both Bush's career and his own, saying that history will judge Bush well: "I think history will be very kind to [him]." While Ashcroft, the chief architect of the invasive Patriot Act, admitted that Bush made some mistakes during his presidency, he claimed to have no regrets about his own tenure as attorney general. "I don't have a mark on my conscience," he said. He also defended his decision to approve waterboarding in 2003, saying, "There are things that you could call waterboarding that I am firmly convinced are not torture. There are things that you could call waterboarding that might be torture." But as Keith Olbermann and former White House counsel John Dean discussed on MSNBC last night, all waterboarding is torture. "I think waterboarding is waterboarding. Maybe this is a defense we haven't read about that John Yoo came up with, or the memo hasn't been released yet that says maybe how much water you pour may make it waterboarding or not waterboarding. But this is pretty silly," Dean said.

THINK FAST
Immigration advocates are launching a new strategy to push immigration reform through Congress. They want millions of undocumented workers legalized now, while a new independent commission would study the number of foreign workers allowed to enter the U.S. in the future -- a provision they hope will gain the backing of America's unions.

This morning, President Obama will announce a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan that "plans to further bolster American forces" and "for the first time set benchmarks for progress in fighting Al Qaeda and the Taliban there and in Pakistan." In addition to the 17,000 combat troops Obama ordered to Afghanistan last month, he will add 4,000 more troops to train Afghanistan security forces.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called the use of a budget reconciliation process -- which requires only simple majorities -- "the best prospect" for passing health care reform this year, something she said was "absolutely essential." Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) also "refused to rule out" the use of reconciliation, saying, "Let's see what happens in the next three weeks, in the next month."

Thousands of buildings at U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan "have such poorly installed wiring that American troops face life-threatening risks". Of the nearly 30,000 buildings the Army examined, more than half "failed miserably." A "majority…were wired by contractor KBR."

The Senate Budget Committee yesterday approved President Obama's "ambitious budget blueprint" giving the president "a symbolic endorsement of efforts to boost clean energy, fight global warming and improve access to health care." The party-line vote "sets the stage for floor debate next week, where moderate Democrats unhappy with deficits wield more influence."

The Obama administration plans to raise fuel efficiency standards for passenger cars to 30.2 mpg for the 2011 model year, which is "the first increase in passenger car standards in more than two decades." President Obama's new standard is "slightly less stringent" than the 31.2 mpg proposed by the Bush administration, but officials are working "on a more comprehensive set" of rules for vehicles through 2015.

"The former finance chief of a Texas company controlled by Nasser Kazeminy, a close friend of former Sen. Norm Coleman, said in a deposition last week that Kazeminy ordered $100,000 in fees be paid to a Minneapolis insurance agency where Coleman's wife was employed. The deposition is the first corroboration of claims that Kazeminy funneled payments to Hays Companies aimed at benefiting the Colemans.

And finally: Yesterday Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) spoke at the Heritage Foundation, making clear he had no illusions about what happened in the 2008 presidential election. "God bless" all the people who voted for me, said McCain, adding, "Over 50 million people voted for me and Sarah Palin -- mostly for Sarah Palin.” The audience "erupted" in laughter.

GOOD NEWS
The Senate approved the Edward Kennedy Serve America Act, expanding community service programs by "increasing the number of positions to 250,000 from 75,000 and creating new cadres of volunteers focused on education, clean energy, health care and veterans."

STATE WATCH
TEXAS: Social conservatives "succeeded in requiring teachers to evaluate critically a variety of scientific principles like cell formation and the Big Bang."

NEW HAMPSHIRE: New Hampshire House votes to allow same-sex couples to marry.

MISSOURI: "A federal appeals court has upheld a lower court's ruling that Missouri officials must issue license plates that read 'Choose Life.'"

BLOG WATCH
THINK PROGRESS: Former House speaker Newt Gingrich warns that President Obama's financial regulation plan will create a "dictatorship."

WONK ROOM: Take Action by April 9: Overturn former President Bush's rule blocking access to contraceptives and other health care services.

YGLESIAS: Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) doesn't know what the deficit would be if Pence's budget were implemented.

FEMINISTING: Announcing blog for Fair Pay Day 2009.

DAILY GRILL
"Will Obama Administration Abandon Dollar for a Multi-National Currency?"
-- Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), 3/25/09

VERSUS
"Asked if he foresaw a change in the dollar's centrality, [Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said,] 'I do not.'"
-- Politico, 3/25/09

INTERNS
The research team that brings you The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org needs summer interns! Click here for more information: http://thinkprogress.org/thinkprogress-interns/
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Saundra Hummer

March 30th, 2009, 12:34 PM

. . . . . . . OpEdNews Obama's Attack on the Middle Class
By
Paul Craig Roberts
March 29, 2009

Obama and his public relations team have made it appear that his trillion dollars in higher taxes will fall only on “the rich.” Obama stresses that his tax increase is only for the richest 5 percent of Americans while the other 95 percent receive a tax cut.

The fact of the matter is that the income differences within the top 5% are far wider than the differences between the lower tax brackets and the “rich” American in the 96th percentile.

For Obama, being “rich” begins with $250,000 in annual income, the bottom rung of the top 5 percent. Compare this “rich” income to that of, for example, Hank Paulson, President George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary when he was the head of Goldman Sachs.

In 2005 Paulson was paid $38.3 million in salary, stock and options. That is 153 times the annual income of the “rich” $250,000 person.

Despite his massive income, Paulson himself was not among the super rich of that year, when a dozen hedge fund operators made $1,000 million. The hedge fund honchos incomes were 26 times greater than Paulson’s and 4,000 times greater than the “rich” man’s or family’s $250,000.

For most Americans, a $250,000 income would be a godsend, but envy can make us blind. A $250,000 income is not one that will support a rich lifestyle. Moreover, many people prefer lesser incomes to the years of education, long work hours and stress of personal liability that are associated with many $250,000 incomes. In truth, those with $250,000 gross incomes have more in common with those at the lower end of the income distribution than with the rich. A $250,000 income is ten times greater than a $25,000 income, not hundreds or thousands of times greater. On an after-tax basis, the difference shrinks to about 6 times.

The American tax code taxes the $250,000 income at the same rate as it taxes a $100,000,000 or higher income. On an after tax basis, after the federal government grabs 30% in income taxes and state government grabs 6%, the “rich” man or woman or family earning $250,000 has $160,000. In New York City, where there is a city income tax in addition to state and federal, this sum diminishes further. State sales taxes take another 6 or more percent of most consumption expenditures.

When all is said and done, the after-tax value of a $250,000 income in New York City is about $140,000.

Is this rich? It might be in a small town in Alabama, but not in New York City. The “rich” person or family won’t be purchasing a Manhattan apartment, much less a brownstone. They won’t be driving a luxury car. Indeed, they won’t be able to afford a parking garage for an economy car. If they fly anywhere, it won’t be in a first class seat.

For the most part, $250,000 incomes are located in large cities where the cost of living is high. For example, a husband and wife who are associates at major law firms, each of whom works 60 hour weeks and has no job security, earn $125,000 each. They might both have student loans to pay down. For the Obama administration to lump these people in with Hank Paulson or billionaire hedge fund operators is propagandistic.

What is the difference between the $250,000 “rich” income and the $245,000 “non-rich” income? After Obama’s tax scheme goes into effect, the $245,000 income will benefit from a tax cut, and the $250,000 will have a tax increase. Will people in the 96th percentile ask for pay cuts that will drop them into the 95th percentile?

In America, the truly rich are those in the top 0.5% of the income distribution. These are the people with yachts, private airplanes, and who are still rich after they lose half their wealth in a stock market collapse caused by government policy that accommodated financial gangsters.

“Oh well, I was worth $600,000,000 last year and only $300,000,000 this year. Perhaps we should stop drinking $1,000 bottles of rare vintages and move down to $100 a bottle wines. Probably shouldn’t buy that new yacht or that villa in the south of France.”

The upper middle class with $250,000 gross incomes are major losers of the financial collapse. Many of the people in this income class are leveraged to the hilt in order to maintain appearances and can be swept away as easily as the very poor. But those who were frugal and invested for their future have lost 50% of their savings. These wiped out people are the ones who will bear the brunt of Obama’s tax increase.

If the tax rate on a multi-million dollar annual income goes up by 5 percentage points, the cutbacks won’t really affect the lifestyle. But for the $250,000 gross income group, it means no prospect of private schools and Ivy League education for the children, who will be attending state colleges with the rest of the non-rich.

Obama is attacking the only income class that has any independence--the upper middle class professionals. The real rich are few in number and seldom present any opposition to government. Recently, the New York Times reported (March 23, 2009) that the 400 richest Americans’ “share of the nation’s total wealth has nearly doubled to more than 22 percent.” The average income of the 400 richest Americans is $263 million annually. That is 1,052 times the income of the “rich” $250,000 income.

What the Obama administration is really doing is taxing ordinary people in order to bail out the super rich. The 95% of Americans who get the tax cut will find that it is offset many times by the depreciation in the dollar and the raging inflation that will result from monetizing the multi-trillion dollar budget deficits made necessary by the bailouts of the banksters.

In the United States, government has become expert at manipulating both left-wing and right-wing ideologies. It keeps those on both ends of the spectrum set at each other’s throats in order to ensure the government’s continuing independence from accountability.

Historically, the definition of a free person is a person who owns his own labor. Serfs were not free, because they owed their feudal lords, the government of that time, a maximum of one-third of their labor. Nineteenth century slaves were not free, because their owners could expropriate 50% of their labor.

Today, no American is a free person. The lowest tax rate, not counting state income, property tax and sales tax, is 15% Social Security tax and 15% federal income tax. The “free American” starts off with a 30% tax rate, the position of a medieval serf.

In medieval Europe, when tax rates reached beyond 30%, serfs rebelled and killed their masters.

Author's Bio: Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has held numerous academic appointments. He has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, was published by Random House in March, 2008.

Original Content at:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-s-Attack-on-the-Midd-by-Paul-Craig-Roberts-090329-895.html
COMMENTS:
Go on-site for the numerous and (this time) interesting comments, and art work. It's worth the read. SRH. . . . . . . . .

Saundra Hummer

March 30th, 2009, 01:01 PM

IIIIIIIII
Insanity: Doing the Same Thing Over and Over and Expecting Different Results
By
Bob Kendall
03/29/2009
03:24:07 PM EST
America's liberals are laying into Obama headlined the front page Financial Times March 28, an article by Edward Luce in Washington:
"Paul Krugman describes the toxic asset purchase plan as `cash for trash.' Jeffrey Sach calls it a `thinly veiled attempt to transfer hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer funds to the commercial banks.' Robert Reich depicts Tim Geithner, Treasury Secretary, as a prisoner of Wall Street while Joe Stiglitz says the plan `amounts to the robbery of the American people.'

"Democrat economists accuse Mr. Obama along with Mr. Geithner, and Lawrence Summers, the president's senior economic adviser, of taking dictation from the same financiers who have brought the economy to the brink of depression."

Herbert J. Gans, professor emeritus of Sociology at Columbia University, on March 29 was published on the New York Times editorial page:

"Perhaps political support will now begin to build for developing the considerably more progressive income and wealth taxes needed to help pay the country's bills in future years."
Kathryn Fitzgerald of Toronto was published March 24 in the New York Times Letters to the Editors:

"Your March 24 (`The Bank Rescue') editorial 'Rescue Plan, with Fine Print, Dazzles Wall St.' says it all. Wall St. caused the global financial meltdown and refuses to be held accountable for its mistakes, misdeeds and greed.

"Wall St. is now dazzled by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner's latest rescue plan suggestions that those of us on Main Street are getting a raw deal: corrupt and incompetent bankers receiving yet another windfall at taxpayers expense."

It is past time to do what should have been done long ago and nationalize the federal reserve.

Paul Schoenbaum of Williamsburg, VA on March 24 wrote this letter to the New York Times:

"You are correct on the approach that you advocate for insolvent banks. You say 'There is no getting around firing the executives and failing banks, acknowledging the losses, wiping out shareholders and then deciding how the government can best restructure the institutions.'

"What is needed is a surgical approach, rather than a series of band-aids to cleanse the banking system so the economy can be jump started sooner rather than much later if at all under the questionable plan offered by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner."

The plain truth revealed in these letters is what we do not need is more of the same, yet this is what is happening as under Obama's plan toxic assets are purchased by taxpayers while those who have failed in the past have had their risky failures underwritten.

It is indeed irrational to let the same bank bandits do the same thing over and over and expect different results.

KEYWORDS: Wall Street Bailout, Robert Reich, Joe Stiglitz, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithnerhttp://www.politicalcortex.com/story/2009/3/29/15247/3594 IIIIIIIII

Saundra Hummer

March 30th, 2009, 01:15 PM

///\\\///\\\///\\\A Shameful Right Wing Message of Hate and LiesBy
villager
10/24/2008 12:31:17 AM EST
by
CODY LYON
If it weren't for the particularly nasty tone or incessantly misleading words contained in an October 20 opine by Linda Harvey in the conservative "World Net Daily", any response to Mission America's typically insecure, filth laced and fright filled hyperbole wouldn't be worthy of time or effort.
But, in this case, a word or two, perhaps even a counter attack are warranted because, in her latest poisonous diatribe, Harvey not only spews lies about one of the LGBT community's most respected organizations, the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network, or GLSEN, but also attempts to link her lies to the candidacy of Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama.

by
CODY LYON-OPINION
cross-posted from OPEDNEWS
Barring a vision from the Lord himself,there is probably no way to alter the thinking of those who subscribe to the philosophy of fringe right wing groups like the Columbus Ohio based Mission America and its leader Linda Harvey.

And, if it weren't for the particularly nasty tone or incessantly misleading words contained in an October 20 opine by Linda Harvey in the conservative "World Net Daily", any response to Mission America's typically insecure, filth laced and fright filled hyperbole wouldn't be worthy of time or effort.

But, in this case, a word or two, perhaps even a counter attack are warranted because, in her latest poisonous diatribe, Harvey not only spews lies about one of the LGBT community's most respected organizations, the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network, or GLSEN, but also attempts to link her lies to the candidacy of Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama.

Understanding just how fringe Mission America is easy. This is a group that beckons visitors to its web page by advertising "learn the truth about homosexuality, witchcraft, changing Christian Church, Radical Feminism and the Youth Culture. Even more "mainstream" right wing groups may find this a bit outrageous.

Mission America calls itself a public policy analysis foundation. According to its 2007 tax returns, the private non operating foundation Mission America took in a meager $12,000 in contributions and donations. On its IRS Form 990 PF on a question where it asks did the foundation attempt to influence any national, state or local legislation or participate in any political campaigns, Harvey, or whoever filled out the returns, checked NO.

That said, there's no doubt Harvey and her writing is indeed attempting to influence this year's campaign. And, she's using a tired tactic, one long used by those on the far right that attempts to plant seeds of fear, be they racial, spook tactics on national security or in this case, the always reliable hot button homosexual agenda.

Currently featured in a prominent spot on the group's web page is a link to the article "Advocate of homosexual corruption of kids is leader in Obama's campaign.

That link then takes visitors to 'Gay" pedophilia and Obama', the "World Net Daily" piece where Linda Harvey asks if Obama agrees with his GLBT supporters.

Harvey's article charges that the LGBT organization GLSEN's mission "has been to plant 'gay' clubs and training programs in as many schools as possible" calling those groups a Trojan Horse into America's school children's minds.

She says that the "more closely one reads the GLSEN material, the worse it gets," implying that all manner of sexually suggestive material and pedophilia are acceptable behaviors. She says "just about every sexual practice imaginable is apparently acceptable and even worthy of celebration by any age student or teacher as far as GLSEN is concerned."

Then she asks "is this the kind of 'school reform' Obama has in mind?"

Harvey makes these charges because GLSEN's founder, Kevin Jennings, happens to be a prominent fundraiser in the LGBT community for the Obama campaign.

In the article, she says that Obama should remove Jennings from his 'position' and that voters need answers to a series of questions from Obama regarding his stance or beliefs about the origins, practice and acceptance of homosexuality especially when it comes to school aged children.

She then kicks her piece with "if we want a totalitarian, pansexual society, with its accompanying disease, dysfunction and abuse, and no room for nobility, goodness and tradition, then we need to make sure we vote for Obama with all his various revolutionary hangers-on, including Jennings." If, on the other hand, we envision another America, it's time to speak up now."

Well, Ms Harvey is correct, we do need to speak up.

It's nothing short of pathetic that Mission America would resort to such disgusting misleading smears that use vulnerable children in a Presidential campaign.

Perhaps her desperation arose out of the clear indication that If the "another America" Harvey envisions resembles the noble, good society where the 'tradition' of the past eight years are celebrated, according to a number of polls, most Americans plan to pass this go round.

Clearly, most voters are choosing to look beyond the political smokescreen of far right groups like Harvey's Mission America that have long sought to steer voters from the true issues affecting their lives, and their children's futures by raising false charges about candidates like Harvey does in her Obama/GLSEN piece. There are greater concerns occupying the minds of voters than an LGBT fundraiser at the Obama campaign.

But, besides that, if Americans look at the fine work of all the LGBT organizations in America, GLSEN has the distinction of perhaps being one of the more politically benign. It's mission is clear and it actually speaks to a fundament of who we are as a nation, the opportunity for all Americans to receive a quality education in a safe learning environment.

The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network narrows its mission 'to assure that each member of every school community is valued and respected regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression.'

Exactly how does that mission mission cross over into pedophilia?

GLSEN's battles have been defined by its own research.
According to a recent GLSEN survey of almost seven thousand school children across the nation, 86.2% of LGBT students reported being verbally harassed, 44.1% reported being physically assaulted because of their sexual orientation. Around 74 percent heard derogatory remarks like "faggot" or "dyke" used often at school. According to the survey, more than 60 percent of students felt unsafe because of their sexual orientation.

Linda Harvey and her friends at Mission America must not remember what goes on in the hallways or schoolyards of America's schools. The truth is, kids can be extremely cruel, often resorting to name calling and bullying, unfortunate behaviors usually directed at the most vulnerable, those perceived as different or weak, maybe the less than masculine male, or the masculine appearing female. Harvey fails to understand that those taunts, those abuses, that even the victims themselves are often ashamed of, have the ability to leave a child feeling isolated, alone and damaged. Those insults backed up by much of society's deep prejudices have the ability to cripple the self esteem and psychological health of children for years, if not lifetimes.

And, what good does it do the child issuing those taunts, or more importantly, the child on the receiving end of those taunts, when his or her parent, has read a piece like Linda Harvey's or any of the other vicious material on her website, where she has equated the mission of GLSEN and the candidacy of Barack Obama to pedophila or the "homosexual agenda?"

While GLSEN does indeed help in the establishment of what are called Gay Straight Alliances in schools across the nation, the fact is, they are more prominent in places that tend to be more tolerant, places with more socially open school districts, and rarely in the rural hamlets of Mississippi or Alabama, places where if a child who happens to be different, perhaps gay or lesbian, life can be hellish, perhaps destructive and very lonely.

If parents in those more conservative areas are subscribing to the hate filled vitriol of Linda Harvey and her crowd, a child may feel he or she has no place to turn.

Back in 1989, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued its "Report on the Secretary's Task Force on Youth Suicide," which found that "a majority of suicide attempts by homosexuals occur during their youth, and gay youth are 2 to 3 times more likely to attempt suicide than other young people.

In 2001, the American Psychological Association said that suicide is the number one cause of death for gay teens.

Calling someone heterosexual or straight is not a common insult or perceived as hurtful. In most school yards, shopping malls, social functions or other gathering places the straight jock or pretty cheerleader has less to worry about when it comes to the prejudices facing them. But the prejudices, even disregard for humanity that gets reinforced by the rhetoric of ghoulish figures like Linda Harvey, individuals who spew poisonous rhetoric, reinforcing hate for political gain into the minds of concerned parents and voters is nothing short of shameful.

KEYWORDS: Obama, GLSEN, Kevin Jennings, Mission America, Linda Harvey, LGBT, Campaign 2008
Sign up for a Complimentary Member Account... Join the community! It's fast. And it'll allow you to take advantage of all this site's great features!< OCT. 6. Last chance in 20 states to register to vote -OH, MI, PA, FL, GA, IN | An Endorsement, a Condemnation and an Election Reflection > Go on-site to view comments and other articles of interest:
http://www.politicalcortex.com/story/2008/10/24/03117/020 ///\\\///\\\

Saundra Hummer

March 30th, 2009, 02:08 PM

^ ^ ^ SPIEGEL ONLINE
03/30/2009 04:34 PM
MEDDLING IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Iran Ups Support for Gaza and Lebanon Hardliners
Iran is reportedly increasing its military aid to both Hezbollah and Hamas, according to Israeli intelligence sources. Meanwhile, Tehran is suspected of interfering in the reconciliation talks between the rival Palestinian factions.
It appears that Iran is continuing with is massive support for extremist groups that are intent on attacking Israel. A 20-page dossier compiled by the Israeli intelligence agencies, which has been seen by SPIEGEL, reports that Iran "has strengthened its operative help to Palestinian terror groups." The military aid is said to take the form of supplies of weapons, ammunitions and money, as well as the education and training of fighters.
REUTERS
Masked Palestinians take part on an anti-Israel rally organised by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. (PHOTO: go on-site to view.)
The weapons are reported to include mortar shells and anti-tank missiles such as RAAD missiles, which are manufactured in Iran. They are said to be transported by land, sea and air. According to the report, Teheran has sent agents to establish posts along the smuggling routes to guarantee a smooth delivery.

The findings of other intelligence agencies in the Middle East also indicate that Iran is sending weapons and explosives to Hezbollah in Lebanon and to the Palestinian radical group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. The latest indication of this kind of support came with a failed attack on a shopping center in the Israeli port of Haifa on Sunday, March 22. Security forces managed to disable several dozen kilograms of explosives that had been loaded into a car parked outside the mall. Both Palestinian and Israeli experts who cooperated on the case believe that the attempted attack was the work of Iranian-backed Hezbollah.

Meanwhile, the Israelis have carried out aerial attacks in Sudan in an attempt to halt the delivery of weapons to Hamas -- including rockets with a range of 70 kilometers, far enough to reach Tel Aviv from the Gaza Strip. The Israeli Air Force bombed a convoy of 17 trucks travelling through the Sudanese desert which were attempting to deliver weapons to Gaza via Egypt. The two bombing raids in January and February killed more than 30 people, including Sudanese, Ethiopians and Eritreans. Last Thursday a Sudanese government official confirmed the attacks took place and on Friday the New York Times quoted unnamed US officials saying Israeli warplanes had attacked the convoy.

The level to which Iran is intervening politically in the region is made evident by the failure of attempts so far to achieve reconciliation between the rival Palestinian factions. The moderate Fatah movement of President Mahmoud Abbas, which controls the West Bank, is locked in a bitter conflict with the radical Islamist group Hamas, which forced Fatah out of the Gaza Strip in June 2007. Sources close to the Egyptian mediation efforts say that an agreement between the two sides has been tentatively close on several occasions. There had even been a deal to release 450 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails in exchange for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit who is being held hostage by Hamas. However, even the veteran Egyptian mediators had underestimated Iran's influence.

Khaled Mashaal is regarded as Tehran's man in Hamas. The politburo chief lives in exile in Damascus but in recent months he has been frequently on the move, with Iran one of his most important destinations. Many Fatah officials, such as Ibrahim Abu al-Nasha from Gaza City who has known Mashaal for over 30 years, are convinced that the Hamas leader allowed the talks to fail under pressure from Tehran.

The Fatah veteran explains Mashaal's resistance to reconciliation between the Palestinian factions by rubbing his thumb and index finger together -- the sign for the money he assumes Iran has paid the Hamas leader to buy his hardline position.

Despite the setbacks talks are expected to resume this Wednesday to try to heal the rift between the rival Palestinian factions and the issue is expected to be an important item on the agenda at the Arab League summit that started in Qatar on Monday.

SPIEGEL/wire reports
URL:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,616251,00.html
RELATED SPIEGEL ONLINE LINKS:
SPIEGEL Interview with the Emir of Qatar: 'We Are Coming to Invest' (03/29/2009)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,616130,00.html
Iranian Elections: 'Khatami Sacrificed Himself' (03/23/2009)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,614940,00.html
Changing Regime Change: US and EU Need a Unified Strategy for Iran (03/02/2009)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,610693,00.html
SPIEGEL Interview with Iranian Foreign Minister Mottaki: 'The Mass Murdering Must Come to an End' (01/13/2009)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,601012,00.html
© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2009
All Rights Reserved ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

Saundra Hummer

March 30th, 2009, 03:41 PM

///\\\///\\\///\\\ Political Punch
Power, pop, and probings from ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Rick Wagoner:
"Sacrificial Lamb" or Corporate Ostrich?
March 30, 2009 11:19 AM
"PHOTO"
Go on-site to view:
Jake Tapper is ABC News' Senior White House Correspondent based in the network's Washington bureau. He writes about politics and popular culture and covers a range of national stories.
On another network this morning, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm described former General Motors chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner as a "sacrificial lamb" in the Obama administration's attempts to force U.S. automakers to, in their view, aggressively restructure.

A "sacrificial lamb"?

Under Wagoner's tenure, GM's market share declined from 29 percent in 2000, when Wagoner took the reins, to its 2008 rate of 20 percent.

When he took control of the company, the stock was peaking around $90 a share. It's currently below $3 a share. That's about $50 billion in shareholder wealth that has vanished.

GM in the last two years has lost $70 billion.

And then there's the restructuring plan Wagoner submitted to the Treasury Department last month, one the Obama administration considers weak, with unrealistic sales assessments and insufficient urgency.

"The GM plan, in its current form, is not viable and will need to be restructured substantially," a senior administration official says.

How so?

. Some of the restructuring initiatives aren't set to be finished until 2014;
. The assumptions in GM’s business plan are too optimistic -- the company has been losing 0.7 percent of the market share every year for the last 30 years, and yet GM's projections assume a decline of only 0.3 percent;
. President Obama's auto task force believes GM's plan retains too many dud nameplates (Hummer, Saturn, Saab, Pontiac) that tarnish the GM brand, "distract the focus of its management team, demand increasingly scarce marketing dollars and are a lingering drag on consumer perception, market share and margin";
. GM's plan doesn't close enough unprofitable/underperforming car dealers quickly enough, in the Obama administration's view;
. GM's plan relies too much on the high-margin trucks and SUVs that are "vulnerable to energy cost-driven shifts in consumer demand";
. GM lags significantly on green R&D;
even with all its optimistic assessments, the plan assumes too much debt.
Obviously, not all of this can be blamed on Wagoner, and GM has made a number of advances.

But as the chairman and CEO, shall we say, the Buick stops with him.

- jpt

March 30, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (39)
User Comments
Mar 30, 2009 1:29:52 PM
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/03/rick-wagoner-sa.html
///\\\

Saundra Hummer

March 30th, 2009, 07:07 PM

About our president: Just a few things being reported on today, these came in in a news brief, my alerts.

Talking about President Obama hitting the ground running, that saying can't even begin to cover it.

Here's the alerts, all in one email I might add.

Obama signs Christopher Reeve bill
C-Health Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:05 PM PDT
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama has signed into law a bill named for "Superman" actor Christopher Reeve that provides for paralysis research and rehabilitation.

White House moves dramatically on auto industry
AP via Yahoo! Finance Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:04 PM PDT
President Barack Obama declared Monday that General Motors and Chrysler restructuring plans were too little too late, leaving him no choice but to push out GM's chief executive and set a one-month deadline for Chrysler to merge with Italy's Fiat SpA.

Obama Puts GM, Chrysler on Short Leash
FOX 4 News Dallas - Fort Worth Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:03 PM PDT
President Barack Obama asserted unprecedented government control over the auto industry Monday, bluntly rejecting turnaround plans by General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, demanding fresh concessions as the price for long-term federal aid and raising the possibility of controlled bankruptcy for either ailing auto giant.

Obama signs wide-ranging conservation law
AFP via Yahoo! UK & Ireland News Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:03 PM PDT
President Barack Obama signed legislation on Monday expanding and protecting US public parks and wilderness areas from oil and gas development, billed as the largest US conservation measure in more than 15 years.

President signs bill authorizing Ute Water Project
Portales News-Tribune Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:02 PM PDT
WASHINGTON â€” President Barack Obama signed a public lands omnibus bill Monday containing authorization for the Ute Water Project.

Obama OKs New Wilderness Protections
KPRC Local 2 Houston Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:01 PM PDT
President Barack Obama has signed legislation that sets aside more than 2 million acres as protected wilderness. The president said the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 -- a collection of nearly 170 separate measures -- protects the land, lakes and shorelines for future generations.

Analysis: Obama's Afghan policy -- deja vu
UPI Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:00 PM PDT
By CLAUDE SALHANI UPI Contributing Editor WASHINGTON, March 30 (UPI) -- President Barack Obama's new Afghan policy is eerily reminiscent of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam policy, when in 1965 Johnson announced the buildup of the war in Southeast Asia, saying he was sending more U.S. combat troops to Vietnam as well as civilian workers.

The Kalamazoo Gazette Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:58 PM PDT
President Barack Obama raised the possibility of bankruptcy for General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC when he laid out his plan for the restructuring of the two troubled automakers Monday. And with that came a new term uttered by an...

Zimbabwe: Sanctions Counter-Productive
AllAfrica.com Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:57 PM PDT
For those who for what so ever reason had given United States of America President Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt have to think again especially with regards to his recent pronouncements on Zimbabwe.

Obama signs bill protecting wilderness acreage
The Jackson Sun Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:57 PM PDT
WASHINGTON â€” President Barack Obama has signed legislation that sets aside more than 2 million acres as protected wilderness.
~
These are just todays. There's been so much more since he first took office.

No one can accuse Barack Obama of being a "Do nothing" president, for good or not, now can they?

I have one thing I'm hoping to see him change and that is his approval and backing of Ethanol. Look up it's destructive properties in a google search. It needs to be stopped, the government making it mandatory for us to use in our cars and trucks. This is so wrong to my way of thinking. It destroys engine parts; the parts necessary to run gas engines. It is costly and damaging, it causes fires and it ruins valves, etc.

It's illegal in airplanes as it's known just how destructive it is. No one wants to fall out of the sky due to it's damaging properties. SRH

Saundra Hummer

March 30th, 2009, 07:30 PM

. . . . . Banks Starting to Walk Away on Foreclosureswww.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/us/30walkaway.html?_r=1&hpwsent by Fiore since 9 hours 55 minutes, published about 5 hours 24 minutesMercy James thought she had lost her rental property here to foreclosure. A date for a sheriff’s sale had been set, and notices about the foreclosure process were piling up in her mailbox.Ms. James had the tenants move out, and soon her white house at the corner of Thomas and Maple Streets fell into the hands of looters and vandals, and then, into disrepair. Dejected and broke, Ms. James said she salvaged but a lesson from her loss. So imagine her surprise when the City of South Bend contacted her recently, demanding that she resume maintenance on the property. The sheriff’s sale had been canceled at the last minute, leaving the property title — and a world of trouble — in her name. “I thought, ‘What kind of game is this?’ ” Ms. James, 41, said while picking at trash at the house, now so worthless the city plans to demolish it — another bill for which she will be liable. City officials and housing advocates here and in cities as varied as Buffalo, Kansas City, Mo., and Jacksonville, Fla., say they are seeing an unsettling development: Banks are quietly declining to take possession of properties at the end of the foreclosure process, most often because the cost of the ordeal — from legal fees to maintenance — exceeds the diminishing value of the real estate. The so-called bank walkaways rarely mean relief for the property owners, caught unaware months after the fact, and often mean additional financial burdens and bureaucratic headaches.

tags: banks, foreclosures, mortgages
4 comments/category: Business and Economy karma: 184 . . . . . . .

Saundra Hummer

March 30th, 2009, 08:55 PM

* * * * *
DICK CHENEY YOU SAY?
Conspiracy Theory (DVD) with Julia RobertsDirected
by
Richard Donner
BUZZFLASH REVIEWS
Go on-site for photo.
http://www.buzzflash.com/store/reviews/1543

Okay, Mel Gibson is a drunken, fundamentalist Catholic, Anti-Semite. We don't approve of his statements or behavior. Let's get that out of the way.

Still, you can't ignore his acting before he fell from grace due to his own offensive beliefs. And he and Julia Roberts do a bang-up job in this overlooked Hollywood conspiracy thriller from a few years back. It's especially relevant because it involves a rogue CIA assassination unit. Anyone recently read about Seymour Hersh's revelation that there was a secret assassination unit that reported only to Cheney?

So this is one conspiracy theory in a movie that has a lot of timely relevance, even though it was made some time ago.

Actually, time has proven "Conspiracy Theory" to be prescient.

Yes, there's a lot of violence in the film -- as well as a quirky, offbeat budding romance between the "crazed" conspiracy theorist (Gibson) and a lawyer in the U.S. Attorney's office (Roberts). And there are occasional chase scenes that are thrilling but push at the edge of the credibility envelope a bit.

But the basic "conspiracy" upon which the film is based has, apparently, proven true (although the assassination unit reporting to Cheney is allegedly part of the military, not the CIA). And Gibson does a convincing job of portraying a poor man's Jason Bourne, spewing out his conspiracy theories to passengers in his New York taxi cab.
And they are hesitant about investigating this man? This sorry excuse of a man, one who should have never wielded so much power, as he only abused and abused it. Maybe people are, and were, afraid of what he could do to them. He had and still has that kind of power.

Funny, now I can post about him and my computer isn't crashing, yet he is still someone to be careful of, I'd have to imagine. What is he capable of these days? A whole lot don't you think?

He's a spook.

SRH
* * * * *

Saundra Hummer

March 31st, 2009, 12:41 PM

. . . . . . . THE PROGRESS REPORT
March 31, 2009 by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Ali Frick, and Ryan Powers

NATIONAL SECURITY
Introducing PNAC 2.0
Today in Washington D.C., neoconservatives William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor will officially launch their new war incubator -- The Foreign Policy Initiative -- with a half-day conference on "the path to success in Afghanistan" (never mind the fact that Kagan and Kristol declared that "the endgame seems to be in sight in Afghanistan" almost seven years ago). Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and Kagan, Carnegie Endowment fellow and Washington Post columnist, have long histories of advocating policies that rely heavily on the United States exerting its influence throughout the world by using military force. Senor, who has stayed relatively under the radar, served as Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman in Iraq under L. Paul Bremer. But as the New Yorker's George Packer noted, Senor "slowly lost his credibility in the daily press briefings he gave...during the first year of the occupation of Baghdad." In its initial focus on the war in Afghanistan, FPI chose heavy representation of Iraq war advocates for its panelists and guest speakers. As the Wonk Room's Matt Duss recently wrote, "a far better title" for FPI's maiden voyage would be "Afghanistan: Dealing With The Huge Problems Created By Many Of The People On This Very Stage."

'PNAC=MISSION ACCOMPLISHED': Kristol and Kagan -- with support from Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld -- co-founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s with the mission "to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire." Military force was always an option, and often the preferred one. Indeed, the group led the charge to get President Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, and it served as a key lobby for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But with neoconservatism now all but dead and its principles soundly rejected in the 2006 and 2008 elections, the face of PNAC 2.0 -- The Foreign Policy Initiative -- is less bellicose. Indeed, as Duss recently noted, "this new very innocuous sounding Foreign Policy Institute" indicates that neoconservatives "understand that they have something of an image problem," adding that it is "encouraging" that they "have some relation to reality." Yet there is no reason to believe there will be much of an ideological shift from its its predecessor, as its main founders -- especially Kristol -- are still deeply wedded to neoconservatism. Indeed, Michael Goldfarb, PNAC alum and editor of The Weekly Standard, wrote on Twitter yesterday: "PNAC=Mission Accomplished; New mission begins tomorrow morning with the launch of FPI."

ALREADY AT ODDS: Senor told Foreign Policy magazine last week that part of the group's mission is to build "consensus" on major international issues that challenge the current thinking of those who currently hold power in the U.S. government. "We think there needs to be consensus on the other side of these issues," he said. Yet even before the organization's first event, it appears that FPI is having trouble building that "consensus." Kristol called President Obama's recent "historic" message to Iran "an embarrassment" and a "message of weakness," claiming Obama has "no sense of urgency about Iran's nuclear program" and is "kowtowing" to its leaders. However, it appears that Kagan did not get Senor's "consensus" memo. Days later, commenting on Obama's message, Kagan offered a relatively more sensible view. "[T]here is logic to the administration's approach. After all, if the White House is going to give diplomacy and engagement a chance, it might as well do so thoroughly and aggressively," he wrote in the Washington Post. "I honestly can't see the harm in the Obama administration's efforts. I hope they succeed," he said.

EXPECT NO ACCOUNTABILITY: Despite the fact that the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq has been regarded as one of the worst foreign policy blunders in American history, expect no remorse from the PNAC/FPI crowd. In fact, Kristol has been declaring victory in Iraq at every step of the way, from saying in April 2003 that the "battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably," to claiming last December, "We've won the war" in Iraq. Just last week, a caller on C-SPAN's Washington Journal asked Kristol if he would apologize for hyping the threat from Saddam Hussein before the war, given that no WMD existed and "the fact that there are 4,500 American lives lost there." "No. I think the war was right, and I think we've succeeded in the war," Kristol replied. While Senor thinks the war has been a huge defeat for Iran (it hasn't), Packer noted that Kagan has "written many words about the war, but has never been able to acknowledge his own intellectual failures on Iraq." Despite the failures of neoconservatism, FPI's mission statement contains the neo-neocon buzz words: military engagement in the world, "rogue regimes," "rogue states," "spread...freedom," "strong military" (with a "defense budget" to back it up), "fascism," "communism," and "pre-9/11 tactics." Discussing FPI with Duss last week, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow asked, "Why is it that people who are catastrophically wrong about big important things like foreign policy and war never, like, flunk out of that as a subject? "There seems to be this special dispensation in American foreign policy that, as long as you are wrong on the side of more military force, then all is forgiven," Duss replied. He added that "the way it works in Washington, if you're arguing for more military intervention which necessitates more military expenditures, you're always going to find someone to fund your think-tank."

UNDER THE RADAR
RADICAL RIGHT -- FORMER CHENEY AIDE SUGGESTS THAT HERSH'S ACCOUNT OF 'EXECUTIVE ASSASSINATION RING' IS 'CERTAINLY TRUE': Last month, The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh revealed in Minnesota that former vice president Cheney presided over an "executive assassination ring." "Under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving," Hersh explained. Yesterday, CNN interviewed Hersh and former Cheney national security aide John Hannah. Although he expressed regret for revealing the story (calling it a "dumb-dumb"), Hersh stood by his initial statements. "I'm sorry, Wolf, I have a lot of problems with it," he said about the assassination scheme. "I know for sure...the idea that we have a unit that goes around, without reporting to Congress...and has authority from the President to go into the country without telling the CIA station chief or the ambassador and whack somebody," said Hersh. Hannah replied that Hersh's account of the assassination scheme "is not true." Yet, in the same breath, when asked about a "list" of assassination targets, Hannah largely echoed Hersh's statements. Hannah said that "troops in the field" are given "authority" to "capture or kill certain individuals" who are perceived as a threat. "That's certainly true," said Hannah.

BUSINESS -- OUSTED GM CEO RICK WAGONER TO RECEIVE $20 MILLION RETIREMENT PACKAGE: Yesterday, CEO of General Motors Rick Wagoner announced that he was stepping down at the request of the Obama administration. Subsequently, ABC News reported that Wagoner will receive a $20.2 million retirement package, despite his ineligibility for severance pay. With Wagoner at the helm, GM lost tens of billions of dollars, requiring the federal government to loan over $13.4 billion to the ailing company. Additionally, as CEO, Wagoner "cut tens of thousands of jobs and announced plans to cut 47,000 employees by the end of 2009." In 2008, he was one of the three auto executives to travel by private jet to Washington to participate in congressional hearings on the then-proposed government bailout of the auto industry. Still, Wagoner is set to receive $20.2 million in retirement benefits for his 32 years of service. According to GM spokeswoman Julie Gibson, this will be paid out as an annuity over five years with a remaining portion saved for lifetime payments. The conditions of the current TARP agreement between GM and the Treasury Department prohibit severance pay to senior executives. Yet as the Washington Post reported, "That ban does not appear to apply to retirement benefits." "I think it's another perfect example of why there's so much frustration among working people," said Tiffany Ten Eyck of Labor Notes, a Detroit-based independent publication covering unions.

ADMINISTRATION -- CLINTON SAYS ADMINISTRATION 'OBVIOUSLY' HAS STOPPED SAYING 'WAR ON TERROR': Throughout his tenure in office, President Bush routinely lambasted critics of the phrase "war on terror," a term his administration coined in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. "This notion about how this isn’t a war on terror in my view is naive. It doesn’t reflect the true nature of the world in which we live," he said in 2007. Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that the Obama administration "appears to be backing away from the phrase 'global war on terror,' a signature rhetorical legacy of its predecessor." An Office of Management and Budget (OMB) directive reportedly said that the term "Overseas Contingency Operation" should be used instead. However, OMB Director Peter Orszag later distanced himself from the report, saying, "I'm not aware of any communication I've had on that issue. It was a communication by a mid-level career civil service." Similarly, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said he "never received such a directive. ... Perhaps somebody within OMB may have been a little over-exuberant." Today, however, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton firmly said that the Obama administration has fully broken with the Bush administration's use of the phrase. "It's just not being used," Clinton said en route to the Hague to talk about Afghanistan policy. "The administration has stopped using the phrase and I think that speaks for itself. Obviously."

THINK FAST
66 percent: President Obama's approval rating, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Forty-two percent of the public believes the country is on the "right track," the "highest percentage saying so in five years and marks a sharp turnabout from last fall, when as many as nine in 10 said the country was heading in the wrong direction."

Business Forward, a new trade group founded by several Democratic consultants, is providing business lobbyists an opportunity to court key White House staffers. "Some business trade association representatives see Business Forward as an invention of the White House to create a fissure within the business community, which typically leans Republican."

As President Obama leaves for the G20 summit in London today, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said there is only "a very small gap" between the United States and Europe on "how to make the [global financial] system more robust and stable." Geithner told the Financial Times regulation would be a sovereign issue, rejecting the idea of a global systemic risk regulator.

The Justice Department announced yesterday that it has decided to release a detainee from Guantanamo Bay named Dr. Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi. Batarfi, "a Yemeni doctor who the Bush administration once claimed had taken part in an anthrax program of Al Qaeda," will be released to "an appropriate destination country." He is the second detainee released by the Obama administration.

Today, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) will "unveil draft legislation to reduce U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 percent," with the ultimate goal being to reduce emissions to "83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050." The draft "will be missing crucial details for a cap-and-trade program, including how emission credits would be either given to businesses or sold to them via auction." Yglesias explains why auctions are preferable.

Residents in upstate New York's 20th's congressional district will pick the successor to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) today in a race between Republican Jim Tedisco and Democrat Scott Murphy. The race is "tight." President Obama has endorsed Murphy, and Vice President Biden has recorded a radio ad for him.

"Nearly 70 percent of the Pentagon's 96 largest weapons programs were over budget last year,for a combined total of $296 billion more than the original estimates," the Government Accountability Office reported yesterday. The auditing agency also found that "the programs were behind schedule by an average of 22 months, up from 21 months last year and 18 months in 2003."

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and CNBC's Suze Orman were honored last weekend for supporting and promoting equal rights for the LGBT community. They were honorees at the 20th annual Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) Media Awards.

And finally: Do the personalities on the Fox Business Network have the skills to be rock stars? David Asman, Cody Willard, and others joined together this past weekend to play "Learning to Fly" by the Foo Fighters. Watch their performance here.

GOOD NEWS
President Obama "signed legislation on Monday expanding and protecting US public parks and wilderness areas from oil and gas development, billed as the largest US conservation measure in more than 15 years."

STATE WATCH
WEST VIRGINIA: State House of Delegates "voted along party lines against advancing a proposed constitutional amendment on marriage. "

TEXAS: Eighteen leading scientists send a letter to the Legislature objecting to a Senate provision restricting funding for embryonic stem cell research.

SOUTH CAROLINA: Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) goes after health care funds in latest recovery package battle.

BLOG WATCH
THINK PROGRESS: Fox News blames unions for auto companies' demise, suggests firing the head of the United Auto Workers.

WONK ROOM: General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner heads out, as banking executives stay put.

YGLESIAS: Iraq's still unresolved political conflicts.

HUFFINGTON POST: The View gave Fox News's Bill O'Reilly a pass on his harassment tactics.

DAILY GRILL

"We contacted that Website. We heard nothing."
-- Bill O'Reilly, 3/30/09, saying he contacted ThinkProgress's Amanda Terkel before ambushing her

VERSUS

"Neither I nor anyone else at ThinkProgress ever received any sort of request from anyone at Fox News."
-- Terkel, 3/30/09
INTERNSHIPS
The research team that brings you The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org needs summer interns! Click here for more information.
Go on-site for complete articles, these are summaries.
http://www.thinkprogress.org. . . . . . . . .

Saundra Hummer

March 31st, 2009, 03:37 PM

<><><>Former Cheney Aide Suggests That Hersh’s Account Of ‘Executive Assassination Ring’ Is ‘Certainly True’
Last month, The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh revealed in Minnesota that former vice president Cheney presided over an “executive assassination ring.” “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving,” Hersh explained.

Today, CNN interviewed Hersh and former Cheney national security aide John Hannah. Although he expressed regret for revealing the story (calling it a “dumb-dumb”), Hersh stood by his initial statements. “I’m sorry, Wolf, I have a lot of problems with it,” he said about the assassination scheme:

HERSH: I know for sure…the idea that we have a unit that goes around, without reporting to Congress… and has authority from the President to go into the country without telling the CIA station chief or the ambassador and whack somebody. … You’ve delegated authority to troops in the field to hit people on the basis of whatever intelligence they think is good.

Hannah replied that Hersh’s account of the assassination scheme “is not true.” Yet in the same breath, when asked about a “list” of assassination targets, Hannah echoed Hersh’s statements. Hannah said that “troops in the field” are given “authority” to “capture or kill certain individuals” who are perceived as a threat. “That’s certainly true,” he said:

Q: Is there a list of suspected terrorists out there who can be assassinated?

HANNAH: There’s clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, interagency process…that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States or are suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given to our troops in the field in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.

Hannah didn’t directly dispute Hersh’s claim that Congress wasn’t informed about the assassinations. “It is extremely hard for me to believe,” he said. Watch it:

Speaking about the program to MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, former Nixon White House counsel John Dean said, “It’s potentially a war crime, it‘s potentially just outright murder, and it could clearly be in violation of the Ford executive order” — referring to a 1976 Executive Order that said, “No employee of the United States government shall engage in or conspire to engage in political assassination.”

Comments
55 Responses to “Former Cheney Aide Suggests That Hersh’s Account Of ‘Executive Assassination Ring’ Is ‘Certainly True'
blistex11 Says:
hate to disagree with you tokin librul but there are plenty of us who would wholeheartedly agree with anyone who believes that no one is against the law and the constitution of this country.

Obama would get incredible kudos from the american people who are sick and tired of the Bush/Cheney crimes and want to see justice served.

Not only do I disagree with you; in fact, I know what you espouse is untrue. Eric Holder is being pressed to bring investigations and charges as we type.

blistex11 Says:
On one count you are undoubtedly accurate: The longer we sit back and remain silent; the more we look like the germans during Hitler’s crimes.

blistex11 Says:
As we discovered this weekend, Spain is investigating 6 Bushitcos right now on charges of torture. If they take this to the international tribunal not only will other countries join in but this country will be essentially forced to bring these six plus Bush & Cheney to justice as well.

tokin librul Says:
People, people, people…

Do not be naive…

There is absolutely, utterly NO PHUQING WAY anybody in the Obama regime will try to bring ANY charges against ANY former Bushevik.

That is because there is not a single jury in the whole country that would convict any of them for ‘excessive’ zeal in ‘trying to protect the American people.’

We are ALL good Germans now…

Does anyone here seriously entertain the notion that it would be better to prosecute, knowing what kind of political hellstorm would be unleashed upon the country, at a time when we’re already factured along our socio-cultural axis?

It would be complete gridlock. But if Obama doesn’t prosecute, he forces The Hague to act, and it becomes a matter of honoring long-held international treaties, and not internecine conflict involving only Americans. Since we are all good germans, as you say, the same remedy must be pursued, as the WW2 war crimes tribunal. It is the natural course this inevitably must take.

Barb C. Says:
………and those that were “suicided”…..Hunter Thompson…Gary Webb?

Somebody smarter than me should write a book “The Suiciding of Hunter S. Thomson”. Lots of possibilities there. Too bad David Foster Wallace isn’t around to write it.

wizard2000 Says:
Remember the Niger forgeries?

Something similar to Cheney’s right-wing death squads happened in Italy, where forged Niger documents were planted, and then the CIA station chief and the office of the U.S. ambassador to Italy were bypassed, so the documents could wind up in the office of Vice President Cheney and his intelligence chop shop.

These forged Niger documents, alleging that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had been seeking yellow cake uranium from French-controlled uranium mines in Niger, were used by the Bush/Cheney administration to justify both their Authorization to use Military Force request in late 2002 as well as their preemptive invasion of Iraq in March 2003…along with this manufactured lie showing up in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address.

But the key was that the CIA station chief in Rome and the U.S. ambassador to Italy were apparently both bypassed so that these forged Niger documents could “get legs” and make it into the Bush/Cheney anti-Iraq portfolio.

Remember when a Muslim cleric was kidnapped off an Italian street and renditioned to a more torture-friendly location? The CIA station chief must have been involved, but the U.S. ambassador to Italy was no doubt left out of the loop. And one has to wonder who in Italian intelligence circles cooperated with the CIA agents who kidnapped this guy, even though an Italian judge later issued arrest warrants for the CIA agents who did the kidnapping?

So the idea that Cheney’s snatch and grab of (and even killing of) suspected “terrorists” has been limited to “war zones,” and executed by our soldiers in the field who are just following orders, is laughable…since in the Bush/Cheney “Global War on Terror” mindset, the entire world is a “war zone” and even our allies, like Italy, apparently have not been immune from these clandestine Bush/Cheney operations.

But Bush and Cheney are now gone (though never forgotten, since their terroristic legacy will linger for a long, long time). The real question is what President Barack Obama (and Vice President Biden) intend on doing with all the secretive, bullying, totalitarian crap handed off to them by Bush and Cheney? Will the new administration succumb to the same temptation? The jury is still out.

mjvpi Says:
This is the result of Iran/Contra being left un-investigated and, for the most part, un-prosecuted. The same characters and their proteges. This demonstrates the need to investigate and prosecute the Bush administration.

tbone Says:
I guess it is time to start writing letters again. I had stopped for awhile because it is just so tiresome, and I had hoped for more on this from Obama.

It disgusts me to no end that torture and other war crimes have been committed in the name of the people of the US.

I also disagree with the viewpoints that have expressed a desire to postpone this or punt it to the international courts. Yeah, things might get messy, but that’s what happens when the rule of law dissolves and institutions abdicate their responsibilities. This country went through 4 years of civil war, but it can’t investigate a former president? People broke laws. The slippery slope is history. We’re already sliding down, and I think it is time we start climbing back up. We should take out our own trash and show some dignity and sense of justice.

March 30th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
I have only included a few of the comments, there are many more and they're oftentimes interesting. SHR http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/30/hersh-hannah-assassination-ring/ <><><><><>

Saundra Hummer

March 31st, 2009, 03:40 PM

Saundra Hummer

April 1st, 2009, 12:05 PM

<><><><><><><>Pissed Off at the Corporate Banking Industry? Here's an Easy Way You Can Hurt Them
By
Stephen Pizzo
News for Real
Posted on April 1, 2009,
Printed on April 1, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/134392/
I voted for Barack Obama, and I continue to wish him nothing but success. But I have to admit his and Tim Geithner's solution to the banking crisis is exactly the wrong solution. The administration seems to believe the best thing to do is to throw the drunken "money center" bankers into detox, hose them off and put them back in the game.

It's a bit like asking ExxonMobil to run the Environmental Protection Agency, or appointing Charles Keating to head the General Accounting Office.

The strange thing is that others in the administration, particularly those tasked with straightening out the auto industry, are taking the opposite -- and correct -- tact. They fired the head of GM and cleaned out GM's board of directors for good measure.

That's how you begin fixing stuff that's broke -- first you get rid of the folks who broke it. What you don't do is hand them billions of free bucks, a hearty slap on the back and a rousing "Now, go get 'em tiger!" (Because they will.)

But that's precisely what the administration is doing for America's failed money center banks. The nation's largest banks are often referred to as money market banks or money center banks.

In addition to the traditional markets, to be a money center bank today means to have a global presence as well as heavy involvement in wholesale banking with clients including many retail banks and large corporations. Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America fit this description. Here's a list of America's leading money center banks.

So, it appears we will have to take matters into our own hands. By "we" I mean anyone with a checking account, savings account or certificates of deposit. That, my friends, would be you. You are up at bat, and we're counting on you.

What we need to do is force the administration to do to these tumorlike institutions -- currently hiding behind the myth they are "too big to fail" -- what they just did to GM. Tell them that, since taxpayers are now major stakeholders, they must fire their senior management and either clean up the mess they made or face immediate seizure and liquidation.

And just how are you going to force such a change? It's just this simple:

1) If you bank with any of these money center banks, withdraw your funds immediately

2) Go to this site and find an independent community bank in your area and deposit your funds there instead. (Credit unions are another excellent and safe alternative to banking a money center bank.)
http://www.icba.org/consumer/BankLocator.cfm?sn.ItemNumber=51757
That's it. That's the whole enchilada. The outflow of what bankers call "retail funds," if large enough, will become the final straw that breaks the backs of these bulls in our fiscal china shop.

But, you ask, will my money be safe in a small, community bank?

Of course it will be safe, just as safe, maybe safer, than it was at Citibank or BofA. First, community banks are covered by exactly the same deposit insurance as money center banks. But beyond that, community bankers are community bankers. They live in the communities they serve. They know their towns. And, most importantly, they know their borrowers.

Community banks are, for the most part, the last remaining healthy sector of American banking. If they are hurting at all, it's because their customers are losing their jobs, not because they lent a godzillion dollars to some fly-by-night schemer or invested in anything with an AIG logo on it.

A good community banker's definition of a toxic asset is more along the lines of Farmer Jones' wrecked pickup on which the bank holds the paper.

So, if you are customer of one of those money center banks, institutions currently hoarding hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout funds, walk right in, sit right down and tell them you want the dough that still has your name on it, and you want it now.

Otherwise these tumor-banks will survive Geithner's weak-kneed chemo treatments to emerge intact to pillage another day.

I don't know if what I am suggesting is legal or not. I remember back in 1983, when I wrote my first story about how a savings and loan was using deregulation to put taxpayers at risk. The thrift's lawyers contacted me at the paper and warned me that they were going monitor withdrawals and, if there were a lot of customers withdrawing their money, they ask that I be arrested and charge with breaking a federal law -- still on the books -- that made it illegal to spark a run on a bank.

I took my chances then, and was proved right. I'll take my chances again. So, run baby. Run.

Stephen Pizzo is the author of numerous books, including Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans, which was nominated for a Pulitzer.
© 2009 News for Real All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/134392/ <><><><><><><>

Saundra Hummer

April 1st, 2009, 12:18 PM

<><><><><><>Is Obama's Car Czar Plotting to Crush the Auto Unions?By
David Sirota
Blog for Our Future
Posted on March 1
2009, Printed on April 1, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/134389/Remember Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street? Specifically, remember how Gekko's entire scheme for the airline industry was based on crushing the blue-collar union that Bud Fox's dad (Martin Sheen) was part of? Welcome to a real life version of that story, starring corporate raider Steve Rattner, who President Obama appointed to head the White House team now overseeing the auto industry (and don't say you weren't warned).

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Rattner's strategy is to use the government's leverage to try to specifically crush auto workers and force them to accept even more contract concessions than they've already agreed to:

DETROIT -- President Barack Obama's recovery plan for General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC appears to take aim at union retirees, a usually reliable Democratic constituency. After studying the plight of the companies, the president's auto task force concluded GM and Chrysler's survival is dependent on greater concessions from the United Auto Workers union.

The White House has total leverage over the situation because the UAW knows that if the industry doesn't get the loans it needs, it will be forced into bankruptcy court, where judges will shred labor contracts (somehow, AIG bonus contracts are sacrosanct, but union worker contracts can be shredded in a heartbeat). Indeed, many analysts believe this is the administration's ultimate goal.

IMHO, The most immoral part of this is the specific targeting of retirees.

As opposed to younger workers, retirees often can't get another job or go back to work because of obvious physical limitations. As one retiree said, "What 85-year-old can go out and get another job?"

I'm not saying that the auto industry's legacy costs are sustainable - not at all. But I am saying that when you put Gordon Gekko in control of government policy overseeing an industry, you are inevitably going to get a policy that assumes workers are the big problem. If you had a different kind of team, you may have a policy that says, for instance, we have to create a robust universal health care system before throwing retirees off their existing health care.

Last I checked, we have enough money to create that system just lying around ready to be handed out to Rattner's Wall Street friends. Hell, $8 trillion will get us a damn good universal health care system, won't it? Yes, it will - but it will also buy a lot of yachts for AIG execs, and when you have Gordon Gekko making public policy yachts come before health care.

David Sirota is a best-selling author whose newest book, "The Uprising," was just released this month. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network -- both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota. © 2009 Blog for Our Future All rights reserved.Go on-site for the numerous links within this article.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/134389/ <><><><><>

Saundra Hummer

April 1st, 2009, 12:40 PM

^ ^ ^ VIDEO
&
TEXT
Why Jim Hightower Shouldn’t Be the Only One Debating John McCain on Afghanistan
Posted by
ZP Heller
Brave New Foundation
March 31, 2009 / 5:48 AM.
The same neocons who orchestrated the war in Iraq and undermined US efforts in Afghanistan the first time around are at it again, determined to sink us deeper into the costly Afghan quagmire. They have resurfaced in the form of the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a Washington think tank headed by Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, and Dan Senor. As Sam Stein reported last week on The Huffington Post, the FPI will hold a summit today titled “Afghanistan: Planning for Success.” And slated to attend the event are powerful Republicans and Democrats like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Rep. John M. McHugh (R-NY), and Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA). What’s particularly troubling about McCain and a think tank like the FPI is that they are trying to manipulate President Obama’s plans for military escalation into a massive, limitless war of Iraq proportions.

We already know where McCain stands on Afghanistan. He and fellow warmonger Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) celebrated the sixth anniversary of the Iraq war by urging the Obama administration to support an all-out military commitment in Afghanistan, regardless of cost. McCain clearly shares the FPI’s warped notion of “success” in Afghanistan, which he has discussed everywhere from the Op-Ed pages of the Washington Post to his recent speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He envisions a Utopian outcome to this war, one in which our military engages in a broad-based, long-term counterinsurgency to create “a stable, secure, self-governing Afghanistan that is not a terrorist sanctuary.” Compounding that highly improbable scenario is the fact that McCain and the FPI are getting away with defining “success” in Afghanistan because not enough mainstream journalists or members of Congress are contesting their views.

You know your foreign policy is highly questionable if Bill Kristol goes on FOX News and says he supports it, which is what happened Sunday. Kristol was able to sweep Obama’s plan into the neocon call for a major counterinsurgency, falsely claiming an all-out war is in the interest of national security and defeating al Qaeda. Kristol even managed to suggest Obama is now divided with his own administration on Afghanistan, and in a twisted retrospective kicker, Kristol compared the Afghan and Iraq surges to imply President Bush actually showed good leadership.

Because Obama is toying with escalation by sending 4,000 trainers (in addition to the 17,000 troops he already pledged), McCain, Kristol and their FPI cohorts are now taking that foreign policy to the logical extremes of military commitment. But where are the journalists to call out Kristol? Where are the members of Congress who will hold oversight hearings that bring in real experts to explain to us what escalation will mean for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States? More people ought to be picking apart McCain’s wholly unrealistic notion of victory and reclaiming the frame of success in Afghanistan; just watch Jim Hightower show you how it’s done.

The reality is that the kind of success McCain and the FPI dream of would require an commitment of at least 640,000 troops–a far fry from the 21,000 Obama has called for. And if the current rate of escalation could cost our country $1 trillion by the end of Obama’s first term, as Tom Hayden has predicted in his must-read piece “Don’t Go There, Mr. President,” then you can only imagine how much this war could cost (and how exponentially difficult it will become to pull ourselves out of this recession) if we keep allowing McCain and his neocon pals at the FPI to manipulate foreign policy.

It’s time to reclaim the frame on Afghanistan, and that starts with real debate in the mainstream media and the halls of Congress.

Tagged as: john mccain, brave new foundation, bill kristol, jim hightower, rethink afghanistan, foreign policy initiativeZP Heller is the editorial director of Brave New Films. He has written for The American Prospect, AlterNet, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Huffington Post, covering everything from politics to pop culture.
Go on-site for VIDEO & MORE
Also in Video
Stephen Colbert Rips Glenn Beck to Shreds: Building His Career On 9/11
Danny Shea Huffington Post

Is This the Moment for a True Populist Movement?
Nick Penniman, Harry Hanbury American News Project

William Greider and Bill Moyers on Washington's Unholy Alliance
with Wall Street
Bill Moyers Bill Moyers Journal
Go on-site for this articles numerous links, as well as the video:

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/134256/why_jim_hightower_shouldn%E2%80%99t_be_the_only_on e_debating_john_mccain_on_afghanistan/#more
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^^^^^^^

Saundra Hummer

April 1st, 2009, 01:45 PM

XXXXXXX Seymour Hersh: Secret U.S. Forces Carried Out Assassinations in 'a Lot of' Countries, Including in Latin America
By
Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!
Posted March 31, 2009.
The investigative journalist for The New Yorker explains his recent bombshell revelation about Dick Cheney's "executive assassination" squads.
Amy Goodman: Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh created a stir last month when he said the Bush administration ran an executive assassination ring that reported directly to Vice President Dick Cheney. Hersh made the comment during a speech at the University of Minnesota on March 10th.
Seymour Hersh: Congress has no oversight of it. It's an executive assassination wing, essentially. And it's been going on and on and on. And just today in the Times there was a story saying that its leader, a three-star admiral named McRaven, ordered a stop to certain activities because there were so many collateral deaths. It's been going in -- under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving.
Amy Goodman: Yesterday, CNN interviewed Dick Cheney's former national security adviser, John Hannah. Wolf Blitzer asked Hannah about Sy Hersh's claim.
Wolf Blitzer: Is there a list of terrorists, suspected terrorists out there who can be assassinated?
John Hannah: There is clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, inter-agency process, as I think was explained in your piece, that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States, or are suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given to the troops in the field and in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.
Wolf Blitzer: And so, this would be, and from your perspective -- and you worked in the Bush administration for many year-- it would be totally constitutional, totally legal, to go out and find these guys and to whack 'em.
John Hannah: There's no question that in a theater of war, when we are at war, and we know -- there's no doubt, we are still at war against al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and on that Pakistani border, that our troops have the authority to go after and capture and kill the enemy, including the leadership of the enemy.
Amy Goodman: That's John Hannah, Dick Cheney's former national security adviser. Seymour Hersh joins me now here in Washington, D.C., staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His latest article appears in the current issue, called "Syria Calling: The Obama Administration's Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace."

OK, welcome to Democracy Now!, Sy Hersh. It was good to see you last night at Georgetown. Talk about, first, these comments you made at the University of Minnesota.
Seymour Hersh: Well, it was sort of stupid of me to start talking about stuff I haven't written. I always kick myself when I do it. But I was with Walter Mondale, the former vice president, who was being amazingly open and sort of, for him -- he had come a long way … since I knew him as a senator who was reluctant to oppose the Vietnam War. And so, I was asked about future things, and I just -- I am looking into stuff. I've done -- there's really nothing I said at Minnesota I haven't written in the (New Yorker). Last summer, I wrote a long article about the Joint Special Operations Command.

And just to go back to what John Hannah, who … I think ended up being the senior national security adviser, almost -- if not the chief of staff, deputy chief of staff for Dick Cheney in the last three or four years, what he said is simply that, yes, we go after people suspected -- that was the word he used -- of crimes against America. And I have to tell you that there's an executive order, signed by Jerry Ford, President Ford, in the '70s, forbidding such action. It's not only contrary -- it's illegal, it's immoral, it's counterproductive.

The problem with having military go kill people when they're not directly in combat, these are asking American troops to go out and find people and, as you said earlier, in one of the statements I made that you played, they go into countries without telling any of the authorities, the American ambassador, the CIA chief, certainly nobody in the government that we're going into, and it's far more than just in combat areas. There's more -- at least a dozen countries, and perhaps more. The President has authorized these kinds of actions in the Middle East and also in Latin America, I will tell you, Central America, some countries. They've been -- our boys have been told they can go and take the kind of executive action they need, and that's simply -- there's no legal basis for it.

And not only that, if you look at Guantanamo, the American government knew by -- well, let's see, Guantanamo opened in early 2002. "Gitmo," they call it, the base down in Cuba for alleged al-Qaeda terrorists. An internal report that I wrote about in a book I did years ago, an internal report made by the summer of 2002, estimated that at least half and possibly more of those people had nothing to do with actions against America. The intelligence we have is often very fragmentary, not very good. And the idea that the American president would think he has the constitutional power or the legal right to tell soldiers not engaged in immediate combat to go out and find people based on lists and execute them is just amazing to me. It's amazing to me.

And not only that, Amy, the thing about George Bush is, everything's sort of done in plain sight. In his State of the Union address, I think January the 28th, 2003, about a month and a half before we went into Iraq, Bush was describing the progress in the war, and he said -- I'm paraphrasing, but this is pretty close -- he said that we've captured more than 3,000 members of al-Qaeda and suspected members, people suspected of operations against us. And then he added with that little smile he has, "And let me tell you, some of those people will not be able to ever operate again. I can assure you that. They will not be in a position." He's clearly talking about killing people, and to applause.

So, there we are. I don't back off what I said. I wish I hadn't said it ad hoc, because, like I hope we're going to talk about in a minute, I spend a lot of time writing stories for The New Yorker, and they're very carefully vetted, and sometimes when you speak off the top, you're not as precise.
Amy Goodman: Explain what the Joint Special Operations Command is and what oversight Congress has of it.
Seymour Hersh: Well, it's a special unit. We have something called the Special Operations Command that operates out of Florida, and it involves a lot of wings. And one of the units that work under the umbrella of the Special Operations Command is known as Joint Special Op -- JSOC. It's a special unit. What makes it so special, it's a group of elite people that include Navy Seals, some Navy Seals, Delta Force -- what we call our black units, the commando units. "Commando" is a word they don't like, but that's what we, most of us, refer to them as. And they promote from within. It's a unit that has its own promotion structure. And one of the elements, I must tell you, about getting ahead in promotion is the number of kills you have. Of course. Because it's basically devised -- it's been transmogrified, if you will, into this unit that goes after high-value targets.

And where Cheney comes in and the idea of an assassination ring -- I actually said "wing," but of an assassination wing -- that reports to Cheney was simply that they clear lists through the Vice President's office. He's not sitting around picking targets. They clear the lists. And he's certainly deeply involved, less and less as time went on, of course, but in the beginning very closely involved. And this is the elite unit. I think they do three-month tours. And last summer, I wrote a long article in The New Yorker, last July, about how the JSOC operation is simply not available, and there's no information provided by the executive to Congress.
Amy Goodman: What countries, Sy Hersh -- what countries are they operating in?
Seymour Hersh: A lot of countries.
Amy Goodman: Name some.
Seymour Hersh: No, because I haven't written about it, Amy. And I will tell you, as I say, in Central America, it's far more than just the areas that Mr. Hannah talked about -- Afghanistan, Iraq. You can understand an operation like this in the heat of battle in Iraq, killing, I mean, taking out enemy. That's war. But when you go into other countries -- let's say Yemen, let's say Peru, let's say Colombia, let's say Eritrea, let's say Madagascar, let's say Kenya, countries like that -- and kill people who are believed on a list to be al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-linked or anti-American, you're violating most of the tenets.

We're a country that believes very much in due process. That's what it's all about. We don't give the President of United States the right to tell military people, even in a war -- and it's a war against an idea, war against terrorism. It's not as if we're at war against a committed uniformed enemy. It's a very complicated war we're in. And with each of those actions, of course, there's always collateral deaths, and there's always more people ending up becoming our enemies. That's the tragedy of Guantanamo. By the time people, whether they were with us or against us when they got there, by the time they've been there three or four months, they're dangerous to us, because of the way they've been treated …
Amy Goodman: One question: Is the assassination wing continuing under President Obama?
Seymour Hersh: How do I know? I hope not.

See more stories tagged with: al qaeda, dick cheney, cnn, guantanamo, seymour hersh, latin america, barack obama, george w. bush, wolf blitzer, walter mondale, john hannah, university of minnesota
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GO ON-SITE FOR THE NUMEROUS COMMENTS & ANY LINKS. THE COMMENTS ARE INTERESTING, HERE"S JUST TWO OF THEM:
I don't get it
Posted by: ivanguar on Mar 31, 2009 3:51 PM I don't get it
I don't get you Americans. I can't believe you could be surprised about stuff like this.
When I was a little kid in early 70s growing up in South America, that was widely known, and a reality we had to deal with every single day of our lives.
Back then were the Comando Sur and the CIA who organized the "killing squads" all around Central and South America.
El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Brasil, Bolivia, Colombia... what part of your own history are you guys missing?
You guys have been assassinating us for decades and by the hundreds of thousands either by using your own hands or by hireing native mercenaries.
So, why are the news about Cheney commanding an asessination ring so scandalous but instead if the Comando Sur or the CIA does it is perfectly acceptable?
There is a lot of hipocresy in people like this journalist from the New Yorker, who "suddenly" discovers that the American Empire assassinates people all around the world, but he tries to blame it on Cheney.
Cheney may be a murderous nazi, but so it was (and may be way worst) Ronald Reagan, Ford, Nixon, Bush senior, and all.
The hipocrasy is in the fact that he tries to put the blame on one particular person, when he knows very well that these are the methodologies that allow the American Empire to mantain its economic-political and financial control over weaker countries.
These policies are not exceptional but actually the normality of the foreign policy of the Empire in the era of senility of capitalism.

JSOC? The JTTFs are worse - and see the Official Psyops Doctrine for Joint Operations.
*Posted by: gunboat diplomat on Apr 1, 2009 5:58 AM
Everyone has a fascination with "special forces" and "elite military culture" because we live in a fairly militarized society, as do many other people. Beats living under the Nazis, doesn't it?

However, the question is what they were being used for. There were numerous reports of Special Forces colonels protesting to the Pentagon about how Rumsfeld and Cheney were using their troops. The Special Forces units were set up inside Iraq outside of normal military control - the regular military didn't know what they were up to, but all the evidence points to a large-scale assassination program in Iraq that coincided with the surge - an Operation Phoenix program that really has not yet come to light.

They were used to create splits between Sunni and Shia insurgents, and were probably responsible for the bombing of the Samarra shrine - it was reported that U.S. helicopters were providing air cover over the area right before the explosion, which was a carefully planned demolition of the structure. That was intended to split the insurgency and get the Iraqis fighting each other - and it worked, for a while, anyway.

That is all due to Cheney and Rumsfeld, who have read the manual:

www.iwar.org.uk/psyops/resources/us/jp3_53.pdf
"1. Scope: This doctrine addresses the use of military psychological operations (PSYOP) assets in planning and conducting PSYOP in support of joint operations across the range of military operations."

"Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations planned to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals."

It's like some psychotic marketing program, right out of the Nazi manual. Here are their "essential concepts":

A) Persuasive Communications. All communications systematically convey information and impressions directly to all involved.

Control of the media - including the "alternative media" - is essential. Check.

B) Command Disruption. Disruption of C4 not only directly interferes with the capabilities of an opponent to succeed in combat but also can have serious impact upon the opponent’s morale, cohesion, discipline, and public support essential to efficient operations.

The use of FBI and JTTF spies to infiltrate and disrupt anti-war groups in the U.S over the past eight years? Check.

C) Information Denial. Competing parties can systematically deny opponents information they require to formulate decisions.

A corrupt pandering corporate media? Check. An alternative media that stays dead silent about certain issues (anthrax attacks, AIG counterparty kickbacks to Citigroup, etc.)? Check.

D) Intelligence Shaping. It is possible to systematically convey and deny data to opposing intelligence systems with the objective of causing opposing analysts to derive selected judgments.

Well, that was how the Iraq war was sold, wasn't it? These tactics are widely used in the U.S. - NPR and Amy Goodman are shining examples of how PYSOP tactics are used against the American public - and it's obvious with the Goodman crowd, they're way too chuckly - bad actors.

Plus, if you look at Amy Goodman's funding, it somewhere to the right of Steve Forbes. That was aided by a Bush-era decision to reduce reporting requirements for non-profits - you want to find the real shadiness in the U.S., look no further than the large private foundations.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/134347/seymour_hersh%3A_secret_u.s._forces_carried_out_as sassinations_in_%27a_lot_of%27_countries%2C_includ ing_in_latin_america/?page=entire
XXX

Saundra Hummer

April 1st, 2009, 02:43 PM

:: :: :: :: ::
"Too Big to Fail"
Is Too Big -- Period
Jim Hightower
On
Creators.com
A Syndicate of Talent
As skiers and backcountry hikers know, a whiteout is a blizzard that's so intense that those caught in it can't even see the blizzard.

That's how I think of the Wall Street bailout now swirling around us. So many trillions of our tax dollars are being blown at the financial giants that we're blinded by the density of it, unable to see where we are or know what direction we're headed.

However, one way to get your bearings in this bailout blizzard is to focus on the central point that both the bailors (Washington) and the bailees (Wall Street) keep pounding as an irrefutable truth that everyone simply has to accept — namely, the institutions being rescued are too big to fail.

Even sheep know to flee when coyotes howl in unison — and we commoners need to confront the absurdity of this "too big" claim, which forms the rationale for the entire diversion of regular people's money into rich people's pockets. Wachovia, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG — omigosh, cried the Powers That Be, these behemoths are linked to every other behemoth, so if we don't stuff them with tax dollars ... well, we have no choice, because they're just too big for the government to let fail.

Point No. 1: They have failed. They are kaput. It costs more to buy a snickerdoodle than to buy a share of Citigroup stock. AIG is 80 percent owned by you and I, the taxpayers. These once haughty outfits are insolvent — wards of the state.

Point No. 2: If they're too big, why should we sustain them? Let's be clear about something the establishment doesn't want you and me to understand — these giants did not get so big and interconnected because of natural market forces and free-enterprise efficiencies. They amassed power the old fashioned way: They got the government to give it to them. In the past 20 years or so, they lobbied furiously to get Washington to rig the rules so they could latterly bloat ... and float out of control.

A new report by wallstreetwatch.org reveals that from 1998 to 2008 the finance industry made $1.7 billion in contributions to Washington politicians (55 percent to Repubs, 45 percent to Dems), spent $3.4 billion on lobbyists (3,000 of them on the industry payroll in 2007 alone) and won a dozen key deregulatory victories that led directly to today's financial meltdown.

Inherent in the industry's push for unbridled expansion was the unstated goal of guaranteeing that they would get taxpayer bailouts if things went badly.
So many investors, businesses, employees and others would be hooked into these multi-tentacled blobs that government would be compelled to rescue the banks from their own excesses. Knowing that they could privatize all of the profits from quick-buck schemes and socialize the losses, bankers were unleashed to do their damnedest. Which they did.

What to do now? Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is calling on Congress to create a "super-regulator" to control the irrational risks that the too-big boys take. Immodestly, Bernanke suggests that the Fed be this overseer. He is backed up by Timothy Geithner, Obama's treasury secretary and point man on rescuing the giants. He has just outlined a new regulatory regime that he suggests we entrust to the Fed.

Bad idea all around. First, the Fed already has far-reaching watchdog authority that it refused to use as today's crisis built up. We heard no bark and got no bite because, while the Fed has enormous public authority to regulate America's money supply, interest rates and banks, it is governed by — guess who? — bankers, and it operates essentially as a private banking cartel.

Second, and most important, too-big-to-fail is too-big-to-regulate. And too-big-to-regulate means they are too big to tolerate. Period.

The answer is to split their investment, banking and insurance functions into separate companies and reinvigorate America's antitrust laws to restore competition in each of the three sectors of finance. As Newsweek columnist Michael Hirsh put it in an online column in February, "We can't have a free-market economy dominated by institutions so huge that they don't have to play by free-market rules."

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.http://www.creators.com/opinion/jim-hightower/-too-big-to-fail-is-too-big-period.html :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Saundra Hummer

April 1st, 2009, 03:15 PM

D.M.S.O.
Do any of you know that DMSO saved the lives of those with severe brain injury, and that it oftentimes prevents brain trauma from leaving a loved one permanently brain damaged?

It isn't approved for treatment of brain injury in humans, but it is for fallen bladders, and so you know it is going though ones system when used for this as it is absorbed throughout your whole body, excepting hair and fingernails.

It is used in burn centers when veins aren't to be found or are incapable of being used, feeding them milk and administering medications through their tissue, and it has worked wonders.

It is used by some hospitals; one here in Central Oregon, even though it isn't approved for people but for that one malady, a fallen bladder. It works on it as it shrinks scar tissue, which is part and parcel of a fallen bladder, scar tissue. When used on brain trauma, it has had miraculous results according to the head E-Ray technician. He says you wouldn't believe the lives they had saved with it and how they hadn't suffered debilitating permanent brain damage.

After the Natasha Richardson accident, I had believed she would have been treated with it, as the best we've found is made in Canada. But I do doubt that it was made available to her, or that her doctors were even aware of it's miraculous properties.

We have used it for years, using the 99% pure with 1% distilled water. It's said we don't need it that strength, but we prefer it.

We have used it on severely injured cattle, dogs, etc, and on ourselves. I can attest to it healing things and how there will oftentimes be no scar when used on 3rd degree grease burns, etc.

When animals wouldn't let us get up to them to treat an injury, we put it in a squirt bottle and treated them that way, just like you see the NFL players being squirted through their sox. Sports teams use it by the gallon we hear.

DMSO prevents and removes swelling and blood pooling, the hemorraging, it works on so many things that the pharmaceutical companies are against it as it has been around too long to patent.

Let everyone you know of in on this, and do a google search for the Oregon research on it, along with it's history. I can't begin to explain how it heals and relieves pain. Even an abcessed exposed molar tooth nerve was brought under control with it, and an oral surgeon said he wished he could use it as he could heal many gum diseases in a matter of about 3 weeks instead of several months and a fortune in medications.

So really, let everyone you know in on this an talk to doctors (who are oftentimes afraid of it's use), and get everyone you know write to their newspapers and TV stations to insist it be looked into, to try to get doctors to use it, as it truly can be a life & quality of life saver.

Saundra Hummer

April 1st, 2009, 06:32 PM

Saundra Hummer

April 3rd, 2009, 02:22 PM

X X X X X This is the truth on drugs ... any questions?
By
David Sirota
opinion
Posted: 04/03/2009 12:30:00 AM MDT
Finally, a little honesty.

It started with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stating an embarrassingly obvious truth that politicians almost never discuss. In a speech about rising violence in Mexico, she said, "Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade," and then added that "we have co-responsibility" for the cartel-driven carnage plaguing our southern border.

She's right, of course. For all the Rambo-ish talk about waging a "War on Drugs" that interdicts the supply of narcotics, we have not diminished demand — specifically, demand for marijuana that cartels base their business on.

According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Americans spend about $9 billion a year on Mexican pot.

Add that to the roughly $36 billion worth of domestically produced weed, and cannabis has become one of the continent's biggest cash crops. As any mob movie illustrates, mixing such "insatiable" demand for a product with statutes outlawing said product guarantees the emergence of a violent black market — in this case, one in which Mexican drug cartels reap 62 percent of their profits from U.S. marijuana sales.

That last stat, provided by the White House drug czar, is the silver lining. Every American concerned about Mexico's security problems should be thankful that the cartels are so dependent on marijuana, and not a genuinely hazardous substance like heroin. Why? Because that means through pot legalization, we can bring the marijuana trade out of the shadows and into the safety of the regulated economy, consequently eliminating the black market the cartels rely on. And here's the best part: We can do so without fearing any more negative consequences than we already tolerate in our keg-party culture.

Though President Obama childishly laughed at a question about legalization during his recent town hall meeting, his government implicitly admits that marijuana is safer than light beer. Indeed, as federal agencies acknowledge alcohol's key role in deadly illnesses and domestic violence, their latest anti-pot fear mongering is an ad campaign insisting — I kid you not — that marijuana is dangerous because it makes people zone out on their couches and diminishes video gaming skills.

(This is your government on drugs: Cirrhosis and angry tank-topped lushes beating their wives are more acceptable risks than stoners sitting in their basements ineptly playing Halo ... any questions?).

Despite this idiocy, despite polls showing most Americans support some form of legalization, and despite such legalization promising to generate billions of dollars in tax revenue, Clinton only acknowledged the uncomfortable reality about demand. That's certainly no small step, but she did not address drug policy reform. Confronting that taboo subject was left to Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va.

Last week, this first-term lawmaker proposed creating a federal commission to examine potential changes to the prison system, including a relaxation of marijuana statutes.

Webb hails from a conservative-leaning swing state whose criminal justice laws are among the nation's most draconian, so there's about as much personal political upside for him in this fight as there is for Clinton — that is to say, almost none. That isn't stopping him, though.

"The elephant in the bedroom in many discussions on the criminal justice system is the sharp increase in drug incarceration," he said in a speech, later telling the Huffington Post that pot legalization "should be on the table." Finally, a little honesty — and now, maybe, some action.

David Sirota is the bestselling author of the books "Hostile Takeover" (2006) and "The Uprising" (2008). He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future. Find his blog at OpenLeft.com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com. http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_12058848X X X X X X

Saundra Hummer

April 3rd, 2009, 06:10 PM

* * * * * * *
Is Homophobia Just Narcissism?
— By Debra J. Dickerson
→ Civil Liberties
Thu April 2, 2009 11:46 AM PST
Ta-Nehisi Coates thinks so:
Bigotry is the heaping of one man's insecurity on to another. Sexism, racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-Islamism, anti-immigrantism, really all come from the same place--cowardice. In his history of lynching, Phillip Dray notes that mob violence against black men wasn't simply about keeping black men in their place--it was about keeping white women in their place. Lynching peaked as white women went to work outside the home in greater numbers, developing their own financial power base. White men, afraid that they couldn't compete with their women, would cowardly resort to lynching. I am not saying that the anti-gay marriage crowd is a lynch mob. But in tying opposition to the sexual revolution what you see is, beyond a fear of gay marriage, a fear for marriage itself. A fear that their way of life can't compete in these new times. It's ridiculous, of course. But bigotry always is.
DuBois wrote about racism as "the psychological wages of whiteness". Black equality would cost white people, and, of course, it did. You can't kill or rape blacks with impunity anymore, you can't make them sit in the back of the bus or stop them from drinking from 'your' fountain. So whites definitely lost things, both tangible and intangible, with the coming of equality. Of course, whites never had a right to those things. That's why the racial hierarchy had to be established, with all the attendant bennies and burdens nicely justified (whites are smart and work harder, etc.)

So, I think Coates is on to something with this notion - heteros lose one of the few advantages left to those born on the lucky side of any hierarchy, in this case, the sexuality continuum. Homophobes are manic about losing the right to have someone to openly look down on. To consider innately inferior. Which is convenient because their unworthiness then allows you to collect those psychological wages like straights only in the military, straights only in the classroom, straights only in public office (just imagine an openly gay Prez), straights only with the right to marry and all the bennies that come with it. Notice how quickly the psychological wages become all too tangible.

But this is an issue, like race, whose time has come. Enjoy the last few years left of discriminating against gays 'cuz them days is almost gone.

It's hard out there for a bigot. Homophobia is on a short list of acceptable bigotries. But it's fading fast.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/04/homophobia-just-narcissism*******

Saundra Hummer

April 3rd, 2009, 08:24 PM

IIIIIIIIIIIII The Fallen Four are all set in BuzzFlash's Republican Race to the Bottom

Submitted by
Chad
on Fri, 04/03/2009
10:05am
We are down to the Fallen Four in our BuzzFlash Republican Race to the Bottom. We had a feeling this week's contests, motivated by the honor of reaching this echelon, would be sufficiently intense as to keep you on the edge, wanting more.

The highlight of the week clearly was Wednesday, when George "The Decider" Bush had his fate decided by you, the voters, and ousted in a climatic juggernaut by the Supreme Court Federalist Foursome 53%-47%.

This letter in the BuzzFlash mailbag captured the raw emotion expended in consuming this battle:

I am sitting here at 1:15 AM, in complete shock by the results of tonight's game. It now appears that the #2 seeded Decider has been defeated in his attempt to reach the Fallen Four. I sincerely believed that he would have no trouble defeating the #5 seeded Federalist Four.

Oh sure, the whole world knows how they overturned the will of the voters and appointed him to the throne, but that was only one crime. Just look at all of the corruption, incompetence, deception, and illegal unconstitutional acts that he was responsible for in the eight gloomy years that followed. I was so confident that he would make it to the Fallen Four. There must be some way that we can electronically get these vote totals switched.

Let's see, what did I do with that phone number for Diebold...... or whatever they're calling themselves now???

The other Fallen Four winners had an easier time. Despite Alberto Gonzales looking even more foolish than normal, he was no match for the evil stare of #1 seed Karl Rove. In Monday's contest, Rove slammed Gonzales with 88% of the vote.

The other #1 seed, Dick Cheney, also scored 88% in his second-round match, though on paper, Bill O'Reilly's loud presence on the court was thought to be more worrisome against the out-of-shape Cheney. But when you're Darth Vader in somewhat-living form, you don't have to rely on your outside shot.

In a battle of clueless, egomaniacal pundits, Ann Coulter's "all over the place" skills were no match for the heat brought by Rush Limbaugh, mostly because he breathes really hard and has a lot of hot air. In Thursday's contest, Limbaugh easily handled Coulter with 79% of the vote. For someone who doesn't normally do well with women, Limbaugh defeated Sarah Palin and Coulter to reach the Fallen Four.

As we saw in the last round, plenty of truly evil Republicans went by the wayside. Those that have clawed, lied, threatened, and intimidated their way to the Fallen Four deserve respect, but they would prefer your fear.

Secretly, we were curious to see how a battle between Bush and Bush's brain would end up, but we have the next best thing: Bush's brain (Rove) vs. the essential spirit and some of the flesh that crowned Bush, starting Rove's national road trip of evil.

The other Fallen Four battle royale involves two legendary heavyweights: Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh. One considers himself the leader of the Republican Party, and the other secretly is.

Momentum and evil are on the side of Cheney in this grudge match, but there is a small issue of what Cheney recently said about Limbaugh:

"Rush is a good friend. I love him. I think he does great work and has for years ... I think Rush is a good man and serves a very important purpose."

Last summer, Cheney sent Limbaugh a recorded message calling him "one of the great names in broadcasting history."

Uh, that isn't exactly trash talking. But knowing Cheney, he's just buttering up Limbaugh (which takes a lot of butter, seriously) in order to take him down.

Due to the extreme nature of these major contests, we will launch both games on Monday, April 6 (same day as the championship of some other tournament). You, and your many, many friends, will have TWO DAYS to make your votes known. The fate of who is the most evil may come down to these two brawls; we want to make sure everyone who wants to vote has their chance.

The beaten, bloodied winners of these contests go head-to-head Wednesday, April 8, so we may crown the champion in our Republican Race to the Bottom.

Click here for last week's roundup and here for our analysis of Week One.
Go on-site to gain access to the numerous links within this article:

http://www.buzzflash.comIIIIIIIIIII

Saundra Hummer

April 4th, 2009, 12:54 PM

. . . . . . . A
NEWSLETTER
Stop HR 875, The Food Fascism Act,
Like Our Lives Depended On It
(Because They Do)
Friday, April 3, 2009 3:51 PM
From: "The Pen"
<activist.thepen@gmail.com>

HR 875 Is Not About Food safety, It's About Genocide of Agricultural
Biodiversity

One of the most potentially dangerous bills we've ever heard of is trying to sneak its way through Congress right now, in the sheep's clothing of so-called "modernization" of food safety. HR 875 (text of bill) is a bill put up by Monsanto and other monolithic corporations trying to seize totalitarian control over all agriculture. It was introduced by Rosa DeLauro, whose husband WORKS for Monsanto, and is ultimately about one thing, defining ONLY their own GMO products as "safe".

What makes the bill so dangerous is that it is heavy on penalties including prison time, while at the same time being incredibly vague about what would actually trigger those sanctions. HR 875 is nothing but a Trojan horse, with an invading army to be designated later, in the form of an bureaucratic administrator (most likely a corporate lobbyist shill) with draconian LAW MAKING POWER to make up their own definitions so that all competitors are either driven into bankruptcy or locked up. There are problems with food safety we can talk about, but HR 875 is not going to make us safer, any more than invading Iraq made us safer. It MUST be stopped.

Stop HR 875 Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum959.php

So in the midst of this attempted Panzer action by Monsanto, are we hearing about any of this in our propaganda based mainstream media? No, they distract our attention talking about Michelle Obama's adorable organic garden at the White House, as if she is making agricultural policy.

But will that little White House garden end up as something like a diorama, a quaint reenactment of what farming used too be like when it was healthy, they way they would reenact Betsy Ross sewing the first American flag? Will they lull us into complacency while down the street Congress at the same time paves the way for breaking the back of every small farmer in the country, turning our entire agricultural system into a chemically overtreated, Genetically Mutated Organism (GMO) nightmare?

Hell, No! Not if we will have anything to say about it. And you can
bet the farm we will.

We'd like to also remind our Facebook participants that all action
pages can be found in their system as well. So let's get all our
Facebook friends in on the activist resource there.

Facebook Version:
http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum959
(must be a member of Facebook and logged in to use this link)
And we are working very hard on even more magical new code to expand the access options for getting a message through to Congress even further. Please stay tuned and we will have some amazing news for you shortly. We will start beta testing the new module by the weekend.

We just got the "Convict Dick & W" caps in for those who have requested in the last week or so, and another bulk shipment for all of you will hit the post office by this coming Tuesday. So if you have not requested yours yet, to demonstrate that the words "Justice For All" actually means something, you can request yours here.

Convict Dick & W Caps: http://www.peaceteam.net/convict_cap.php

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at:
http://www.peaceteam.net/in.htm . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Saundra Hummer

April 4th, 2009, 03:14 PM

^^^^^^^
Op-Ed Columinst
Pitchforks and Pistols
By
CHARLES M. BLOW
April 4, 2009
Lately I’ve been consuming as much conservative media as possible (interspersed with shots of Pepto-Bismol) to get a better sense of the mind and mood of the right. My read: They’re apocalyptic. They feel isolated, angry, betrayed and besieged. And some of their “leaders” seem to be trying to mold them into militias.

At first, it was entertaining — just harmless, hotheaded expostulation. Of course, there were the garbled facts, twisted logic and veiled hate speech. But what did I expect, fair and balanced? It was like walking through an ideological house of mirrors. The distortions can be mildly amusing at first, but if I stay too long it makes me sick.

But, it’s not all just harmless talk. For some, their disaffection has hardened into something more dark and dangerous. They’re talking about a revolution.

Some simply lace their unscrupulous screeds with loaded language about the fall of the Republic. We have to “rise up” and “take back our country.” Others have been much more explicit.

For example, Chuck Norris, the preeminent black belt and prospective Red Shirt, wrote earlier this month on the conservative blog WorldNetDaily: “How much more will Americans take? When will enough be enough? And, when that time comes, will our leaders finally listen or will history need to record a second American Revolution?”

Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, imagining herself as some sort of Delacroixian Liberty from the Land of the Lakes, urged her fellow Minnesotans to be “armed and dangerous,” ready to bust caps over cap-and-trade, I presume.

And between his tears, Glenn Beck, the self-professed “rodeo clown,” keeps warning of an impending insurrection by saying that he believes that we are heading for “depression” and “revolution” and then gaming out that revolution on his show last month. “Think the unthinkable” he said. Indeed.

All this talk of revolution is revolting, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed.

As the comedian Bill Maher pointed out, strong language can poison weak minds, as it did in the case of Timothy McVeigh. (We sometimes forget that not all dangerous men are trained by Al Qaeda.)

At the same time, the unrelenting meme being pushed by the right that Obama will mount an assault on the Second Amendment has helped fuel the panic buying of firearms. According to the F.B.I., there have been 1.2 million more requests for background checks of potential gun buyers from November to February than there were in the same four months last year. That’s 5.5 million requests altogether over that period; more than the number of people living in Bachmann’s Minnesota.

Coincidence? Maybe. Just posturing? Hopefully. But it all gives me a really bad feeling. (Where’s that Pepto-Bismol?!) •I invite you to visit my blog, By the Numbers:
http://blow.blogs.nytimes.com/
Please also join me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at:
chblow@nytimes.com.Go on-site to gain access to the links for these sites
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/opinion/04blow.html?_r=1&th&emc=th ^^^^^^^^^

Saundra Hummer

April 4th, 2009, 07:51 PM

:: :: ::Analysis: Negotiating a minefield of bad news
Does the name Byran Uyesugi ring a bell? Odds are not. What about Robert A. Hawkins? Or Mark Barton? Terry Ratzmann? Robert Stewart?
Each entered the national consciousness when he picked up a gun and ended multiple lives. Uyesugi, 1999, Hawaii office building, seven dead. Hawkins, 2007, Nebraska shopping mall, nine dead. Barton, Ratzmann and Stewart _ 24 dead among them in 1999 (Atlanta brokerage offices), 2005 (Wisconsin church service) and last week (North Carolina rehab center).

And each has been largely forgotten as the parade of multiple killings in America melts into an indistinguishable blur. We bemoan, we mourn, we move on.

What's even more disturbing is that the list above was cherrypicked from a far lengthier tally of recent mass shootings in the United States. And now, this weekend, on a crisp, sunny Saturday morning in Pittsburgh, the lives of three police officers ended in gunfire after a domestic dispute turned lethal.

The mass shootings that left 14 people dead in Binghamton, N.Y., on Friday were horrifying, depressing, nationally wrenching. They were also, to some extent, unsurprising in a society where the term"mass shooting" has lost its status as unthinkable aberration and become mere fodder for a fresh news cycle.

"We have to guard against the senseless violence that this tragedy represents," President Barack Obama said in Europe on Saturday. Senseless violence: Two centuries from now, if we're not careful, it could be an epitaph for our era.

Even in a media-saturated nation that encourages short memories, these numbers are conversation-stopping: Forty-seven people dead in the past month in American mass shootings and their aftermaths. It's to the point where on Saturday, dizzyingly, the mayor of Binghamton found himself offering Pittsburgh its sympathies.

Put aside for a moment the debate over guns. This isn't about policy. It's about asking the urgent question: What is happening in the American psyche that prevents people from defusing their own anguish and rage before they end the lives of others? Why are we killing each other?

This is not an era of good feeling in the United States. We have under our belt eight years of pernicious terrorism angst, six years of Iraq war weariness and, now, months of wondering how bad the American economy's going to get and when _ or, worse, whether _ it's going to come back. People are tense. There's less inclination to help out your fellow human being.

Meanwhile, anchors and analysts and witnesses and bloggers cast about in an information-age fog trying to make sense of something that is, in the worst way, nonsensical. They rush to offer solutions, but the thing they typically dodge is that we seem to be powerless to stop it all _ that our community, our neighbors, may be next. That's too terrifying to contemplate, not to mention too open-ended for American news consumers reared on tidy Hollywood endings.

The Binghamton newspaper, the Press&Sun Bulletin, seemed to acknowledge the resignation in a glum editorial Saturday that wondered if it was simply, sadly, and inevitably Binghamton's turn to give up a few of its people to the juggernaut.

"It is our turn to grieve and to rally in support of those whose lives have been shattered," the newspaper said."And it's our turn to hug those in our own families and wonder how a quiet, rainy Friday in a peaceful place became the setting for such a nightmare."

The strangest of contradictions hangs over the Binghamton shootings. The shooter and many of the victims were immigrants _ part of the pool of human beings who look to America as a place of opportunity and take often anonymous steps to realize their dreams here. On Friday, the idea that had beckoned them betrayed them.

The man believed to be the shooter, Jiverly Wong, had lost his job at an assembly plant, was barely getting by on unemployment and was frustrated that the American dream, so highly billed and coveted, wasn't coming through for him. Early reports suggest that the suspect in the Pittsburgh officers' killings, too, was angered at being laid off from a glass factory.

People are of course responsible for their actions, but it's hard to avoid wondering what's afoot in the darkest recesses of what we like to call American exceptionalism. For so long, the national narrative has been so bullish about equality of opportunity, so persuasive in its romance of possibility for all. Is it so subversive to speculate, then, that when the engine of possibility runs into roadblocks, people can't cope?

Without excusing one whit of the violent tendencies that ended with so many bullets in so many bodies from Binghamton to North Carolina to Alabama to California in the past month, isn't it time, finally, to figure out where this national dream makes a wrong turn?

"Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type," a man named Charles Whitman wrote one day in 1966. Then he ascended a tower at the University of Texas, looked out over the campus, pulled out a shotgun, three rifles and three pistols and killed 16 people.

Forty-three years and countless reams of research and lost loved ones later, we have not figured it out. Today, the American Civic Association in Binghamton says so. The Pittsburgh Police Department says so. The vulnerable people at the Pinelake Health and Rehab Center in Carthage, N.C., say so.

Of Jiverly Wong, Binghamton police Chief Joseph Zikuski had this to say Saturday:"He must have been a coward." Perhaps. But that's the beginning of an answer, not the end of one. On Friday, the federal government announced that 663,000 Americans lost their jobs in March. What's truly unsettling in America's new era of gloom and dead ends is wondering how many of those 663,000 might be deeply, irrevocably angry about it _ and might have a gun.

Because the American tragedies that haven't happened yet are the most terrifying ones of all.
___

EDITOR'S NOTE _ Ted Anthony covers American culture for The Associated Press.
04/04/09 12:33 pm | AP News

From the Hawaiian Bulletin Newsletter
http://www.mymotherlode.com/news/national/news_detail.php?ID=172928&DK=Numbed%20Nation%20Analysis
:: :: :: :: ::

Saundra Hummer

April 4th, 2009, 08:21 PM

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
--- On Sat, 4/4/09, Dr. Bruce "Snake" Gabrielson wrote:

From: Dr. Bruce "Snake" Gabrielson
Subject: [worldwidesurfers] We are Number 1
To: worldwidesurfers@ yahoogroups. com
Date: Saturday, April 4, 2009, 3:48 PM

In case anyone has been following this news groups rise, we are now the #1 ranked surfing newsgroup on yahoo. Good job all.

http://sports.groups.yahoo.com/group/worldwidesurfers/

Saundra Hummer

April 9th, 2009, 02:10 AM

<><><><><> Modern life's pressures may be hastening human evolution
By
Robert S. Boyd
McClatchy Newspapers
Wed Apr 8, 1:49 pm ET

WASHINGTON — We're not finished yet. Even today, scientists say that human beings are continuing to evolve as our genes respond to rapid changes in the world around us.

In fact, the pressures of modern life may be speeding up the pace of human evolution, some anthropologists think.

Their view contradicts the widespread 20th-century assumption that modern medical practice, antibiotics, better diet and other advances would protect people from the perils and stresses that drive evolutionary change.

Nowadays, the idea that "human evolution is a continuing process is widely accepted among anthropologists,'' said Robert Wald Sussman , the editor of the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis .

It's even conceivable, he said, that our genes eventually will change enough to create an entirely new human species, one no longer able to breed with our own species, Homo sapiens.

"Someday in the far distant future, enough genetic changes might have occurred so that future populations could not interbreed with the current one,'' Sussman said in an e-mail message.

The still-controversial concept of "ongoing evolution'' was much discussed last week at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Chicago .

It's also the topic of a new book, "The 10,000 Year Explosion,'' by anthropologists Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran of the University of Utah , Salt Lake City .

"For most of the last century, the received wisdom in the social sciences has been that human evolution stopped a long time ago,'' Harpending said. "Clearly, received wisdom is wrong, and human evolution has continued.''

In their book, the Utah anthropologists contend that "human evolution has accelerated in the past 10,000 years, rather than slowing or stopping. . . . The pace has been so rapid that humans have changed significantly in body and mind over recorded history.''

Evolutionary changes result when random mutations or damage to DNA from such factors as radiation, smoking or toxic chemicals create new varieties of genes. Some gene changes are harmful, most have no effect and a few provide advantages that are passed on to future generations. If they're particularly beneficial, they spread throughout the population.

"Any gene variant that increases your chance of having children early and often should be favored,'' Cochran said in an e-mail message.

This is the process of "natural selection,'' which Charles Darwin proposed 150 years ago and is still the heart of modern evolutionary theory.

For example, a tiny change in a gene for skin color played a major role in the evolution of pale skin in humans who migrated from Africa to northern Europe , while people who remained in Africa kept their dark skin. That dark skin protected Africans from the tropical sun's dangerous ultraviolet rays; northerners' lighter skin allowed sunlight to produce more vitamin D, important for bone growth.

Another set of gene variants produced a different shade of light skin in Asia .

"Asians and Europeans are both bleached Africans, but they evolved different bleaches,'' Harpending said.

Despite modern medical and technological advances, the pressures that lead to evolution by natural selection have continued.

The massive AIDS epidemic that's raging in southern Africa , for example, is "almost certainly'' causing gene variants that protect against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, to accumulate in the African population, Harpending said.

When he was asked how many genes currently are evolving, Harpending replied: "A lot. Several hundred at least, maybe over a thousand.''

Another anthropologist, John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison , said, "Our evolution has recently accelerated by around 100-fold.''

A key reason, Hawks said, is the enormous growth of the world's population, which multiplies the size of the gene pool available to launch new varieties.

"Today, beneficial mutation must be happening far more than ever before, since there are more than 6 billion of us,'' Cochran said.

The changes are so rapid that "we could, in the very near future, compare the genes of old people and young people'' to detect newly evolving genes, Cochran said. Skeletons from a few thousand or even a few hundred years ago also might provide evidence of genetic change.

"Human evolution didn't stop when anatomically modern humans appeared or when they expanded out of Africa ,'' Harpending said. "It never stopped.''

ON THE WEB The American Association of Physical Anthropologists
MORE FROM MCCLATCHY Some of your body's cells have a 'license to kill'

Internal clocks keep you, all living things ticking

Evolution
http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20090408/sc_mcclatchy/3208192 <><><><><><><>

Saundra Hummer

April 9th, 2009, 02:37 AM

~~~~~~~
Leroy "GRANNY" Grannis
Of Hermosa Beach & Carlsbad California
Famous For His Surfing Photo's
Is living on Social Security
&
Government Assistance from MediCal!

To my way of thinking, this is criminal

His substantial life's earnings have been eaten up by executors, and others, Renee Linton and Lars Isaacson are two of those who are involved.

Granny no longer can afford to stay in the assisted living home he has been living in.

How can this be?

Is this right?

How is this lawful? Or is it?

SRH

:shrug:

A fund is being set up by John Van Ornum in Molokai to help with Mr. Grannis's situation and I do hope that it will change how things are for him. This was being set up today, and I hope it is a success.

Check out the progress by going to:
worldwidesurfers@yahoogroups.com

Saundra Hummer

April 9th, 2009, 11:41 AM

<><><><><><>Tell Obama: Appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Rove.
Dear Friend,

For the past eight years, Karl Rove blurred the lines of legality again and again - putting his own priorities above the law, and even above the lives and safety of Americans.

In addition to being one of the chief architects behind the war in Iraq, Rove was also allegedly involved in in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, in the harassment and prosecution of Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, and in the firing of nine U.S. attorneys for political reasons.

Congress has subpoenaed Rove to testify about these matters again and again, but until recently, he's refused to testify. Rove's agreement to meet with the House Judiciary Committee is a step in the right direction, but it is nowhere near enough.

I just took action to tell President Obama to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Rove and -- pending the outcome of that investigation -- to prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law. I hope you will, too.

Please have a look and take action.

Thanks!

Sign the petition
"President Obama, we urge you to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Karl Rove. In addition to being one of the chief architects behind the war in Iraq, Rove was also allegedly involved in in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, in the harassment and prosecution of Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, and in the firing of nine U.S. attorneys for political reasons. Americans deserve to know whether Karl Rove broke the law while serving in the Bush White House. And if he did break the law, Karl Rove deserves to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Please appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Rove and, pending the outcome of that investigation, to bring him to justice."

Complete the following to sign the petition. You'll receive periodic updates on offers and activism opportunities.

Go on-site to gain access to this petition.http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/investigate_rove/?r_by=-1313778-7d5X8ox&rc=paste
<><><><><><><><><>

Saundra Hummer

April 9th, 2009, 02:25 PM

::: ::: ::: ::: :::
Keith Olbermann on Obama and Bush administration illegal wiretapping
There's more: You can watch MSNBC host Keith Olbermann and Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley discuss Obama's use of the "state secrets" privilege to protect the Bush administration on illegal wiretapping in this: YouTube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9MxVen7j7s
Says Olbermann: "The Obama administration is just flat out dead wrong about this."

Another great way to help bring the Bush administration to justice for its potentially illegal wiretapping program is to spread the word to your friends and family. You can just forward the sample letter below.

Spreading the word is critical, but please only pass this message along to those who know you -- spam hurts our campaign.

Thanks for all you do.

--The CREDO Action Team

Here's a sample message to send to your friends:

Subject: Tell Obama: Stop blocking court review of illegal wiretapping.

Dear Friend,

We have an opportunity to bring the Bush administration to justice for illegal wiretapping. But President Obama is blocking the way.

On April 2, President's Obama's lawyers invoked Bush's radical theory of executive power -- and the 'state secrets' defense -- to argue for the dismissal of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping of countless Americans.
LINK: http://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying .

MSNBC host Keith Olbermann has said "The Obama administration is just flat out dead wrong about this." You can watch Olbermann and Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley discuss Obama's use of the "state secrets" privilege to protect the Bush administration on illegal wiretapping in this YouTube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9MxVen7j7s
If EFF's case against the NSA is dismissed, we may never know the extent of the Bush administration's illegal spying on Americans.

Please join me and take action to support the Constitution.
http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/obama_wiretapping/?r_by=3421-1313778-NReEbrx&rc=confemail ::: ::: :::

Saundra Hummer

April 9th, 2009, 03:00 PM

<><><> Lipstick in School
According to a news report, a certain private school in Washington was recently faced with a unique problem.
A number of 12-year-old girls were beginning to use lipstick and would put it on in the bathroom.

That wasn't the problem, but after they put on their lipstick they would press their lips to the mirror leaving dozens of little lip prints.
Every night the maintenance man would remove them and the next day the girls would put them back.

Finally the principal decided that something had to be done.
She called all the girls to the bathroom and met them there with the maintenance man.
She explained that all these lip prints were causing a major problem for the custodian
who had to clean the mirrors every night (you can just imagine the yawns from the little princesses).

To demonstrate how difficult it had been to clean the mirrors, she asked the maintenance man to show the girls how much effort was required.
He took out a long-handled squeegee, dipped it in the toilet, and cleaned the mirror with it.
Since then, there have been no lip prints on the mirror.

There are teachers.... and then there are educators.
<><><><><><><>

Thomas McElroy

April 9th, 2009, 03:18 PM

Saundra Hummer

April 9th, 2009, 05:13 PM

IIIIIIIIIIIII
The
Regressive Antidote
David Michael Green on Politics
When The Hour Is Late, And Things Aren't Going So Great...
...Just Fabricate!!

What do you do when your politics suck, your politicians have been repudiated and thrown out of office, all your ideas have proved disastrous, and the public hates you?

Well, if you had even the slightest shred of integrity, you’d apologize, fix your politics, and start all over again.

Of course, regressives in America don’t quite meet that latter test. So maybe I better rephrase. What do you do when your politics suck, your politicians have been repudiated and thrown out of office, all your ideas have proved disastrous, the public hates you, AND you don’t have even the slightest shred of integrity?

Ah, well that’s easy. You just start fabricating reality.

And that is precisely what regressives are now doing.

Of course, this is not exactly a news flash. Remember how Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviets and won the Cold War? Remember how “the adults were back in charge” when George W. Bush came to Washington?

Without deceit, about seventy percent of the content of right-wing politics would immediately disappear. (The other thirty percent is just pure bullying.)

Just the same, it’s remarkable the degree to which regressives have gone completely off the deep-end lately, and are now absolutely just making it up as they go.

As usual, Dick Cheney sets the gold standard. In this case, not only for telling tall tales, but also just for being such a completely tacky (alleged) human being. Cheney is even making George W. Bush look good by comparison, as the latter has had the decency (or is it fear?) not to attack the new administration in its first months. I guess Cheney, who went out of office with single-digit approval ratings, is seeking to determine just how utterly despised a politician can be (hint: Mussolini was shot, hung upside-down on meathooks, and then stoned by an angry public). Are negative numbers a possibility here? Can more people hate you than there are people? If anyone can do it, it would certainly be the Dick.

Nowadays the guy is running all over creation telling anyone who’ll listen that Barack Obama’s foreign and defense policies constitute a threat to American national security. The great irony here is that Obama is basically running the same set of ugly policies that the Bush administration employed, and sometimes even going them one better when it comes to shredding the Bill of Rights. True, Obama has said that he will close down Guantánamo – not that he is setting those prisoners free to go party in Vegas, mind you – but otherwise just about the only significant change I can see between the two administrations on security policy is that the current one seems to want to fight actual enemies of the United States, rather than fabricated ones sitting on top of oceans of oil.

Good grace dictates that Cheney should just shut up. More to the point for this discussion, however, when it comes to the substance of his assertions, he’s just making it up as he goes.

So is the latest right wing media freak du jour, Glenn Beck, who has been on a tirade of late telling his audience that Obama has a secret plan to take away their guns. Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that we actually live in a country where it’s legal to buy assault rifles. And let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that even George W. Bush claimed he was opposed to that policy. All that aside, I am completely unaware of any actual evidence that the Obama administration has any plans to mess with gun control in America. Much to my chagrin, in fact, it seems pretty transparent that he has absolutely no interest in spending the enormous political capital that would be required to go after this issue, even if it was something that interested him, for which there is also absolutely no evidence that I’m aware of. This is even more embarrassingly stupid than the notion that Bill Clinton killed Vince Foster. There isn’t even a dead body to explain.

But it actually gets a whole lot weirder from here. Ralph Peters is a columnist for the New York Post and is described as a “strategic analyst” for Fox “News”. That’s pretty much all you need to know about the guy’s level of expertise. But his latest column provides an astonishing tour de force lesson in how to fabricate hysterically when the facts inconveniently don’t fit your politics.

Did you know that Barack Obama’s recent European and Middle Eastern tour was a complete disaster, and that he apologized for America everywhere he went? Did you know that Obama went to Turkey “on his knees” and “gave his seal of approval to a pungently anti-American Islamist government”? You know, the same government of the same country that has been a key US NATO ally for decades, and is one of Israel’s best friends? Did you know that Obama made “disdainful remarks” about George W. Bush? Did you know that “he told the Europeans that the global economic crisis is all our fault”? Did you know “He gave the Russians yet another blank check, too. (Meanwhile, in Moscow, Putin's thugs beat an aging pro-democracy dissident to a pulp.)”?

Did you? Personally, I didn’t know any of this stuff! Possibly because it is completely untrue. When Peters refers to the dissident-beating thugs of this “Putin” guy, does he mean the same Putin whose eyes George W. Bush looked into and saw a good-hearted soul? That Putin? Now that was some tough, skilled diplomacy right there, babe.

All in all, this is really remarkable stuff. If Peters argued that Obama had actually gone to the Gamma Quadrant, rather than Europe, and apologized to American-hating, socialist aliens, his tirade couldn’t be any more hallucinatory than it is. It’s really quite astonishing. These guys are clearly starting out with the conclusion that President Obama is badly failing, and then scrambling to fabricate ‘facts’ out of whole cloth in order to support that assertion, since reality is inconveniently spitting in their faces. And they’re doing it on national television, no less.

Another wonderful example comes from some lunatic named William Murchison. He’s real unhappy that gay marriage is on the march in America. So unhappy, in fact, that he’s decided to simply fabricate it out of existence. He writes: “You really can't have ‘gay marriage,’ you know, irrespective of what a court or a legislature may say. ... The human race – sorry ladies, sorry gents – understands marriage as a compact reinforcing social survival and projection. It has always been so. It will always be so, even if every state Supreme Court pretended to declare that what isn't suddenly is. Life does not work in this manner.”

Believe it or not, it actually gets more bizarre from there. Fundamentally, Murchison argues that gay marriage cannot exist because it doesn’t serve the purpose of procreation, and he therefore even goes on to take shots at married heterosexuals who fail to reproduce, calling that “so odd a thing, to put the matter as generously as possible”.

Addressing the Iowa Supreme Court justices who disagree with him, he writes: “These learned folk tell us earnestly that the right to ‘equal protection of the law’ necessitates a makeover of marriage. And so, by golly, get with it, you cretins! Be it ordered that. One can say without too much fear of contradiction that people who set themselves up as the sovereign arbiters of reality are – would ‘nutty’ be the word?”

Get it? Because Murchison sees marriage solely for the purpose of procreation, not only does he get to decide who can marry, he even gets to pretend that there’s no such thing as other forms of marriage outside of his narrow, bigoted and historically inaccurate definition of the term. If the guy is willing to say there’s no such thing as gay marriage, why doesn’t he just get it over with and say there’s no such thing as gays? Or Democrats? Or presidents named Obama? I mean, if you’re going to do denial, why not do it right?

There is a whole lot more of this stuff, everywhere you turn. But I guess my favorite example is given to us by a guy you may have heard of before – a certain Karl Rove. Rove is really upset – and understandably so if you’re familiar with his gentle biography – at the notion that the Obama administration might actually use leverage, or remember who its friends are, when it comes to playing legislative politics in America. So upset, in fact, that he devoted his entire last column in the Wall Street Journal (natch) to a single heinously egregious incident of this. According to Rove, Representative Peter DeFazio got a taste of the presidential backhand when he voted against the stimulus bill. According to Rove, at a subsequent closed-door meeting Obama told fellow Democrat DeFazio, “Don’t think we’re not keeping score, brother”. Oooooohh! Ouch! Now that’s some rough stuff, eh?

Of course, we don’t know if Obama actually said that. And we don’t know if he said it in jest, either. But, just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that it all went down in the way Karl Rove reports it. Does that seem like a case of particularly tough politics to you? Does that seem like a president who is really playing some serious hardball? Does that seem like something that doesn’t happen every five minutes in Washington, and arguably should happen?

More importantly, does that seem like something that the Karl Rove that we’ve all come to know and love this last decade would really have a problem with? Does it seem like a tawdry, pugilistic, or despotic behavior, far below anything Rove himself could imagine employing? One answer to those questions comes from Ron Suskind, who wrote a piece about Rove in 2003. It’s worth quoting at some length:

“Eventually, I met with Rove. I arrived at his office a few minutes early, just in time to witness the Rove Treatment, which, like LBJ's famous browbeating style, is becoming legend but is seldom reported. Rove's assistant, Susan Ralston, said he'd be just a minute. She's very nice, witty and polite. Over her shoulder was a small back room where a few young men were toiling away. I squeezed into a chair near the open door to Rove's modest chamber, my back against his doorframe.

“Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. "We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!" As a reporter, you get around – curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events – but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove, his face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me and smiled a gentle, Clarence-the-Angel smile. ‘Come on in.’ And I did. And we had the most amiable chat for a half hour.”

Of course, we could go on and on in describing the sort of hardball politics that Karl Rove used over and over again in order to win at all costs. Stuff that Barack Obama would never dream of touching. Stuff like creating rumors that Ann Richards was a lesbian. Stuff like spreading lies that John McCain had fathered a black baby out of wedlock. Stuff like scheduling the Iraq vote right before the midterm elections. Stuff like running ads against triple-amputee Vietnam vet Max Cleland, morphing his face into Osama bin Laden’s.

Stuff like that. When a guy who’s capable of this and so much more worries out loud that Barack Obama is a tyrant because maybe he made a mental note of a member of his party letting him down on a key vote, you really have to ask yourself what’s going on here. Clearly what isn’t going on here is that Rove and the regressive right have any sort of genuine concern about fair play and benighted sweetness and light in the practice of politics. Just as clearly, what is going on is that a political ideology that has exhausted its viability has now turned to wholesale fabrication in a desperate attempt to make the old voodoo work again.

Yep, it’s ugly out there, people. But there is good news in the land, nevertheless. First, what seemed false and idiotic and pernicious only to progressives five years ago now thankfully seems false and idiotic and pernicious to most Americans today. And it is therefore well that the practitioners of these gutter politics continue their practice. Indeed, the more their desperation compels them in frequency and in absurdity, the better our hopes of transcending the threat of regressive politics forever. Clearly, and finally, as Bush and Rove themselves demonstrate, they are their own worst enemies.

Second, like any good regressive should be expected to do, they have now pulled out their forks and knives and are busy eating their young. The regressive movement and its chief political agent, the Republican Party, have never been busier attacking each other and slashing each other to bits. Just last weekend the Virginia GOP had a civil war over what to do with their state chairman, truly a junior version of Michael Steele, and every bit as buffoonish. He’s now gone, and it probably won’t be long before Steele is gone as well, as Republicans seek to join the Know Nothings in the ash bin of history. Yes, as a matter of fact, it is Rush’s party now. I, for one, couldn’t be happier.

Finally, the public increasingly just has no use for these sick puppies. Go figure, eh? A lunatic in Pittsburgh killed three cops with his AK-47 the other day, because he believed that President Obama was going to take away his guns. Hard to figure why some folks might decide not to watch Glenn Beck henceforth.

A New York Times poll released this week shows that only 27 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the Republican Party. Fifty-six percent have a favorable opinion of the Democrats, and, hey, those guys are weenies! When asked which party is more concerned with the needs of people like themselves, Americans picked the Democrats over the Republicans, fifty-seven percent to twenty-two percent. They trust Obama to make the right decisions about the economy, sixty-three percent to twenty percent for the Republicans. And, remarkably, they trust Obama over the Republicans even on national security issues, sixty-one to twenty-seven percent. Can you say “finished”? When the GOP is getting clobbered more than two-to-one even on their stock-in-trade scary-movie security issues, the show’s over, folks.

That doesn’t mean we won’t continue to see outrageous fabrications of the sort chronicled above, as the regressive movement writhes through its painful and self-inflicted death throes.

It just means that such a display will lean rather more towards the comical than – as in recent years – the catastrophic.
It's a regressive world out there. Sign-up here for your Weekly Antidote. Keep your eyes on the lies.
http://www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/When_The_Hour_Is_Late_-_Just_Fabricate.html IIIIIIIIIIIII

Saundra Hummer

April 9th, 2009, 06:27 PM

I have Indian blood... Choctaw on my grandfather's side... I have studied Islam and also see it for what it is... I have always thought that any religion that tells you to either join or be beheaded cannot be real. Any religion that is real must teach Love and compassion as it's core value.. anything else is not real.

That's why people were, and are, leaving the "Desert Born" religions, they were, and are, too violent for what they want to believe in.

I don't understand violence being such an integral part of any religion.

Saundra Hummer

April 9th, 2009, 06:47 PM

XXXXXXXXX
Cheney refuses to turn over his records to Bush library
David Edwards and John Byrne
Published: Tuesday April 7, 2009

It appears that Vice President Dick Cheney's penchant for keeping things close continues even beyond his term.

The former deputy commander-in-chief won't even turn his records over to the library of President George W. Bush, though he originally appeared to be willing to do so.

"As the Republican Party searches for meaning in the political minority, one of the men who put them in the political memory, Dick Cheney, does not want his records out of his clutches, especially if they were to go to the George W. Bush presidential library in Dallas anytime soon," MSNBC's Rachel Maddow reported Monday evening.

Bush's number two says he needs his records to stay in Washington so he can tap them for his memoirs.

Last year, one of the architects of Bush's library wrote to the National Archives that "we received a call from [George W. Bush Foundation president] Mark Langdale that the Vice Presidential holdings will now be located at the GWBPL [George W. Bush Presidential Library]" and asked for assistance in revising the library's blueprints.

But according to the Dallas News, there was a "miscommunication."

Keeping vice presidential records at the National Archives is not unusual -- Al Gore opted for his records to remain there after leaving office. But Cheney's obsession with secrecy and control have raised liberal eyebrows over the revelation. A 2007 article in The Washington Post revealed that Cheney's obsession with controlling information goes so far as to involve the purging of Secret Service visitor logs.

"Across the board, the vice president's office goes to unusual lengths to avoid transparency," the Post's Barton Gellman wrote. "Cheney declines to disclose the names or even the size of his staff, generally releases no public calendar and ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs.

MSNBC's Maddow delivered the news tongue-in-cheek.

"This means that the space set aside for Vice President Cheney's official and personal records in the Bush library will remain empty, a void where information should be," she remarked. "You know, that's how I'll always think of him."

"It made more sense and was more convenient to keep them in D.C.," a Cheney spokesman told the Dallas News.
VIDEOThis video is from MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Apr. 6, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com Go on-site to gain access to the links, video, photo's etc.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Cheney_refuses_to_allow_his_records_0407.html Spirited them away, learned a lot during his Nixon days it seems, and we footed the bill for his back from him carrying out his stuffed full boxes himself, not trusting anyone digging through them finding information he can be indicted and tried for. SRHXXXXXXX

Saundra Hummer

April 9th, 2009, 07:28 PM

[!!!!!!!!!!! Kanye says 'South Park' put him in checkAP – In this animated still released by Comedy Central, a cartoon version of rapper Kanye West is shown on …Photo: go on site to gain access to this and other functions.
AP By NEKESA MUMBI MOODY,
AP Music Writer Nekesa Mumbi Moody,
2 hrs 36 mins ago
NEW YORK – "South Park" may have accomplished the impossible — getting Kanye West to check his ego. The Comedy Central show skewered the famously self-important rapper on its show Wednesday night, painting him as a narcissistic figure so out of touch with reality he couldn't even take a (very politically incorrect) joke.

West's love of himself and his work has been almost as integral to his image as his music: Just last year, he told The Associated Press that he was the "voice of this generation." Also recently, he was quoted as saying his greatest regret was not being able to see himself perform live.

Yet, on his blog Thursday, West appeared chastened, and ready to turn over a new leaf.

In typical all-caps mode, he wrote: "SOUTH PARK MURDERED ME LAST NIGHT AND IT'S PRETTY FUNNY. IT HURTS MY FEELINGS BUT WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT FROM SOUTH PARK! I ACTUALLY HAVE BEEN WORKING ON MY EGO THOUGH. HAVING THE CRAZY EGO IS PLAYED OUT IN MY LIFE AND CAREER."
West said that he started stroking his ego long ago to build up his self esteem — but he now realizes he needs to "GET PAST MYSELF."

In the self-reflective post, he said that people won't take him seriously if he keeps it up (perhaps referring to his well-documented meltdowns at awards shows when he didn't win what he expected).
"I JUST WANT TO BE A DOPER PERSON WHICH STARTS WITH ME NOT ALWAYS TELLING PEOPLE HOW DOPE I THINK I AM," he said.
And perhaps to show that he's really serious about making that change, he provided a link to one of the most biting moments from the "South Park" show, and thanked the writers as well.
___
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090409/ap_on_en_mu/people_kanye_west;_ylt=AiIdSnjf6ZAGjfQUWq8XNdWs0NU E;_ylu=X3oDMTFpMXExbGU1BHBvcwMyNwRzZWMDYWNjb3JkaW9 uX21vc3RfcG9wdWxhcgRzbGsDa2FueWVzYXlzc291On the Net:
http://www.kanyeuniversecity.com/blog/

http://www.southparkstudios.com/ !!!!!!!

Saundra Hummer

April 9th, 2009, 10:45 PM

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Chinese Art: Tricks Of The Trade
Gady Epstein
04.10.09
12:06 AM ET
Beijing Dispatch

BEIJING -- China has endured multiple market collapses in the last year, but perhaps none can teach us more about the perils of investing in China than the bust in the contemporary art market. The escalation in prices was so lightning fast that almost everyone knew it was crazy, that it couldn't last. By a year ago, both signature and lesser-known works were selling for 10 times higher than two or three years earlier, which was another 10 times higher than two or three years before that.

Since the failure of Lehman Brothers, prices and sell-through rates have plunged dramatically, and the supply of premium pieces to Sotheby's and Christie's has dried up because sellers know the buyers won't be there. The hot money is gone.

Many saw this collapse coming. They should have seen the same thing coming in Chinese real estate and stocks (See "Shanghaied"), because each market exhibited the classic features of a speculative bubble: hype, scams and insider dealing, all preying on investors' hopes that they could buy high and sell higher.

In the contemporary art market, as Forbes detailed a year ago, China's pay-for-play culture was a perfect match for the self-dealing ethos of the art world. Top Chinese artists were mass-producing paintings in almost assembly-line fashion, selling them directly out of their studios in unknown quantities for up to hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. Auction houses were working with lesser-known artists, galleries and dealers to bid up their works and set a good public price for private sales.

Artists routinely paid critics for praise and museums for exhibitions to build up their brands. Want to get prime show space at a top national museum? Artistic merit is nice, but money talks. Want the cover of an art magazine, or a lengthy article inside? That is all for sale--and still is, but presumably at a deep discount now.

The game is up, but for those who got in early enough and got out, the money's been made. "That whole Chinese collector cartel, it was kind of like a big Ponzi scheme," says Philip Tinari, an art critic and curator in Beijing. People kept recruiting new buyers to pour more money into the market, driving up prices. "It was quite clear what it was."

Similar thinking applied in other markets. The winners were whoever was in on the deal earliest. In Chinese stocks, mutual fund managers made a killing by tipping off private investors to their next buys.

More brazenly, market operators used numerous ghost accounts to manipulate the fates of some small companies. These operators are called zhuangjia, or dealers, like in a casino, which is what the Chinese stock market is often called. Such things are worth remembering when you see the Chinese markets rally and you consider investing in a China-themed index fund.

In real estate, developers bought up huge tracts of land to look more valuable at IPO. Insiders picked up properties on the cheap and made nominal sales to friends to establish a high market price. The deceptions continue, tailored for the bust: Just this week, state media reported on developers hiring actors to pose as buyers to create an illusion of a buying frenzy--an amusingly common sales trick.

Why would investors fall for any of this? Most investors know there are tricks to every hot market, but they are usually confident they're not the ones being tricked. Investors want desperately to get in on a can't-miss investment strategy, and all three of these markets offered the same tantalizing one.

There is a great story to sell about China no matter the investment opportunity: urbanization and income growth will increase demand for housing and consumer products; Chinese households have high savings, so there's plenty of money out there for the taking; and the yuan will rise in value, so you can buy just about anything and let currency appreciation make you money for free.

Taken together, this is a narrative that can be used to combat against all forces of argument, especially when you throw in the clincher: It's China. There's more than 1.3 billion people there. You can't lose. Except that it turns out you can lose, and lose big. It is not just that investors get greedy and keep increasing their bets as prices go up--it is that investors, both Chinese and foreign, do so in spite of a massive asymmetry in information. They know the can't-miss strategy, but they are not aware of what they do not know, and there is a lot they don't know.

See also:

Market Maker

Olympian Bust?

You Won't Find Your Bubble Here
http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/10/china-art-sothebys-markets-emerging-beijing-dispatch_print.html
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Saundra Hummer

April 10th, 2009, 12:14 PM

. . . . . . . ? Ask FactCheck posted these new items
during the week ending April 10, 2009
(Follow link to read complete answer)

Q: Is Snopes.com run by "very Democratic" proprietors? Did they lie to discredit a State Farm insurance agent who attacked Obama?
A: A chain email that "exposed" Snopes contains falsehoods. And in fact, the site is run by someone who has no political party affiliation, and his non-voting Canadian wife. A State Farm spokeswoman confirms what they reported about the Obama-baiting agent.

Q: Do illegal immigrants cost $338.3 billion dollars a year? More than the Iraq war?
A: A chain e-mail that makes this claim is loaded with errors and misleading assertions. Published studies vary widely but put the cost to government at a small fraction of that total.

Mobile users go here

Now you can follow us on Twitter. And we're on Facebook, too.

This message was sent from FactCheck.org to %Member:Email% . It was sent from: FactCheck.org, 320 National Press Building, Washington, DC 20045.

SECOND (2nd) QUESTION
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION FACTS
A: A chain e-mail that makes this claim is loaded with errors and misleading assertions. Published studies vary widely but put the cost to government at a small fraction of that total.

This chain e-mail has been forwarded to us by readers many times over the past year. The most recent version adds a new angle, claiming that the amount of money taxpayers spend on illegal immigrants would be enough to "stimulate the economy." But no matter the spin, the e-mail is rife with errors.

It also contains several red flags that should tip off readers that this is more bogus than believable. For one thing, the figures given don't add up to a "whopping $338.3 billion dollars a year" spent on illegal immigrants in the U.S., as the e-mail claims.

The e-mail lists 14 claims about illegal immigrants, all of which were included in a longer list penned by anti-immigration activist Frosty Wooldridge and published on the conservative Web site NewswithViews.com on Jan. 22, 2007. Another NewswithViews columnist, Lynn Stuter, included Wooldridge's list, with some updated links, in an article posted on April 15, 2008.

The source cited for at least nine of the items is either the conservative Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) or the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), both of which call for more restrictive immigration laws. CIS spokesman Bryan Griffith told us that he had never seen the e-mail but that he suspected something was out there because of occasional surges in traffic that forced him to rewrite Web pages. When told about the e-mail's contents and conclusion of a $338.3 billion yearly cost, he responded that CIS "never said anything of the like and is not going to comment on a chain e-mail that is in no way scientific."

The e-mail also continually blurs the important distinction between legal and illegal immigrants – a sign of sloppy and untrustworthy work.

SummaryBecause we're gluttons for punishment, we've gone through each claim in turn and report on each in detail farther down. But here are a few highlights (or lowlights) of what we found:

The e-mail includes a link to a CIS report that contradicts some of the e-mail's own claims. The report found that illegal immigrant welfare use "tends to be very low." It also estimates the total federal net cost of households headed by illegal immigrants at under $10.4 billion, a small fraction of what this message claims.

One "paper" that is cited is a non-peer-reviewed, non-scientific study that essentially fabricates a number for illegal immigrant criminals.

Five of the links lead to transcripts of Lou Dobbs' cable television show, which fulminates regularly against illegal immigration and is hardly a neutral source. Furthermore, in all instances, the e-mail then takes the original Dobbs reporting out of context. So, how much do illegal immigrants cost federal, state and local governments in the U.S.? Estimates vary widely, and no consensus exists. The Urban Institute put the net national cost at $1.9 billion in 1992; a Rice University professor, whose work the Urban Institute criticized, said it was $19.3 billion in 1993. More recently, a 2007 report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office examined 29 reports on state and local costs published over 15 years in an attempt to answer this question. CBO concluded that most of the estimates determined that illegal immigrants impose a net cost to state and local governments but "that impact is most likely modest." CBO said "no agreement exists as to the size of, or even the best way of measuring, that cost on a national level."

The Details
For those who want more, we take on each of the e-mail's claims in order:
1. "$11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year."
This item is completely false. The link given to "verify" the claim actually leads to an issue brief by the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform. But the FAIR brief says nothing of the sort. It says: "Each year, state governments spend an estimated $11 billion to $22 billion to provide welfare to immigrants." That's welfare payments in 2001 to all immigrants – both legal and illegal – plus households including U.S. citizens if they are headed by a person who was born outside the United States.

The site says the FAIR report was last updated in October 2002, but a footnote credits this statistic to a March 2003 report from the Center for Immigration Studies. CIS began as an off-shoot of FAIR. But the CIS report doesn't actually say anything about $11 billion or $22 billion. And it explains that its references to "immigrant households" include persons here legally and persons born outside the U.S.

CIS report: Like the Census Bureau, and other academic work that has examined this question, this report looks at welfare use by immigrant and native households. Households are defined as immigrant or native based on the nativity of the household head. As already indicated, this report uses the terms immigrant and foreign-born synonymously.

CIS estimated that welfare payments to illegal immigrant households averaged $1,040 per household in 2001, mainly Medicaid "on behalf of their U.S.-born children." But the report did not attempt to come up with a total for all such households.

2. "$2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens."
3. "$2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens."
These figures supposedly come from a 2004 report by CIS that estimated the costs to the federal government of households headed by illegal immigrants in 2002. But the CIS report actually put the costs of food stamp, WIC and free school lunch programs to "illegal alien households" at $1.9 billion, not the $2.2 billion claimed in the e-mail. The $2.5 billion figure for Medicaid to such households is quoted accurately, but again, much of this was in benefits for U.S.-born children, who are citizens.

Most interesting is that the CIS report includes a total net cost estimate to the federal government for illegal immigrants of just under $10.4 billion for the year, after accounting for the taxes these immigrants paid. That doesn't include any potential costs to state or local governments, but it's a far cry from this e-mail's cost claim of $338.3 billion.

CIS report: Households headed by illegal aliens imposed more than $26.3 billion in costs on the federal government in 2002 and paid only $16 billion in taxes, creating a net fiscal deficit of almost $10.4 billion, or $2,700 per illegal household.

Even CIS' figures have been questioned by other researchers. The Urban Institute reviewed a related 2003 CIS paper and concluded that its "methods overstate the percentage of the population receiving Medicaid and the share of immigrants on Medicaid, resulting in misleading conclusions about welfare use among immigrants."

Even so, the CIS report actually rebuts claims repeated by this chain e-mail:

CIS: Our findings show that many of the preconceived notions about the fiscal impact of illegal households turn out to be inaccurate. In terms of welfare use, receipt of cash assistance programs tends to be very low, while Medicaid use, though significant, is still less than for other households. Only use of food assistance programs is significantly higher than that of the rest of the population. Also, contrary to the perceptions that illegal aliens don’t pay payroll taxes, we estimate that more than half of illegals work “on the books.”

4. "$12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!"
5."$17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies."
Both links given to "verify" these claims lead to an April 1, 2006, episode of "Lou Dobbs Tonight" on CNN. During the show, correspondent Christine Romans cited both of these stats and attributed them to FAIR. A FAIR research paper from 2005 does include these cost projections, but a closer look shows that the underlying assumptions are inflated or unsupported.

The FAIR report starts with the presumption that there are "1.5 million school-aged illegal immigrants residing in the United States." That figure is attributed to an Urban Institute presentation that doesn't actually say that. Instead, the Urban Institute said: "We estimate that there are about 1.4 million undocumented children under 18 with about 1.1 million of school age (5 -19)."

The FAIR report also assumes there are 2 million "U.S.-born siblings" of illegal immigrant families. However, the Urban Institute makes no estimates of U.S.-born siblings and FAIR gives no citation for its figure. And in any case, again, those U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants are themselves U.S. citizens and not "illegal aliens."

6. "$3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens."
7. "30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens."

Both of these claims can be traced back to that same April 1, 2006, episode of "Lou Dobbs Tonight" on CNN, in the same segment, with the same correspondent, Christine Romans. But the e-mail misrepresents what Romans said. She gave figures for people who are "not U.S. citizens," a category that would include legal residents as well as "illegal aliens."

Romans said that "according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, 30 percent of federal prisoners are not U.S. citizens," adding that "most are thought to be illegal aliens." Actually, the Federal Bureau of Prisons does not keep figures on illegal immigrants. What solid numbers we can find point to a much smaller figure. A Department of Justice report from 2003 found that only 1.6 percent of the state and federal prison populations was under Immigration and Customs Enforcement jurisdiction, and thus known to be illegal immigrants. Half of these prisoners were detained only because they were here illegally, not for other crimes.

The Bureau of Prisons does track prisoners by offense when information is available. By that metric, 10.7 percent of prisoners in federal jails were incarcerated for immigration offenses in 2009. In 2006, when Romans gave her report, the figure was 10.2 percent.

The "$3 million dollar a day" figure is based on the false assumption that 30 percent of all inmates are illegal immigrants, and thus is greatly inflated.

8. "$90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers."

The link to "verify" this claim is dead. However, we found a transcript of a Lou Dobbs episode on Oct. 29, 2006, in which Robert Rector of the conservative Heritage Foundation made the following statement:
Robert Rector, Oct. 29, 2006: Well, assuming that we have about 11 million immigrants in the U.S., the net cost or the total cost of services and benefits provided to them, education, welfare, general social services would be about $90 billion a year, and they would pay very little in taxes. It's important to remember that at least half of illegal immigrants are high school dropouts.
We checked with Rector, who said he was referring to both legal and illegal low-skill immigrant households (those headed by someone who doesn't have a high school diploma). His research also looked at many forms of government spending per household, including money spent on parks and transportation.

9. "$200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens."

Again, this is from that same April 1, 2006, Lou Dobbs episode. On the show, Dobbs said that "estimates by the most authoritative and recent study put the suppressed wages at $200 billion a year, as a result of immigration, both legal and illegal." The e-mail continues its practice of ignoring any distinction between legal and illegal immigration.

We couldn't find any study that supported Dobb's figure.

10. "The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US"
This is false. The "verify" link leads to yet another transcript of Lou Dobbs speaking with Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. This one is dated June 12, 2006, and Rector says, "Hispanics in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-Hispanics."

Rector said Hispanics, not illegal immigrants, as the e-mail alleges. Considering there are 45.4 million Hispanics in the country, and an estimated 11.9 million illegal immigrants, the distinction is notable. Rector's statistic for all Hispanics is correct, according to a 2003 report from the Justice Department.

11. " During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border. "
The link goes to a 2006 report written by the Republican staff of the House Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Homeland Security. To start, the "19,500" number of "illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries" is nowhere to be found in this report. In fact, the report estimates the number of illegal immigrants coming over the southern border from countries known to harbor terrorists to be in the "hundreds." We've seen a similar scare tactic used previously in ads advocating for a border fence.

And the 4 million to 10 million statistic is extrapolated using some imprecise reasoning. The committee report figures that since "Border Patrol apprehended approximately 1.2 million illegal aliens" in 2005 and since "Federal law enforcement estimates that 10 percent to 30 percent of illegal aliens are actually apprehended," that "therefore, in 2005, as many as 10 to 4 million [sic] illegal aliens crossed into the United States." That simplistic math produces a figure starkly different from more widely accepted estimates. The Pew Hispanic Center estimated that in 2005 there were 11.1 million illegal immigrants total, living in the United States. The center also estimated that about 500,000 illegal immigrants a year came to the U.S. from 2005 to 2008.

12."The National Policy Institute, 'estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.' "

No, it didn't. The National Policy Institute, a group that says it promotes the rights of "white Americans," ironically was citing figures from the liberal Center for American Progress in a report that argued against mass deportation of undocumented workers. CAP said such deportation would cost more per year than the entire Department of Homeland Security budget, illustrating "the false allure of deportation as a response to our broken immigration system."

13. "In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin."

This is another bogus figure. The email's link leads to the original Frosty Wooldridge article, which in turn cites as its source for this figure a link to a Contra-Costa Times article, which is no longer working. Nevertheless, we were able to find a news release from the Inter-American Development Bank stating Latin American immigrants sent $45 billion in remittances in 2006. But that figure applies to all immigrants, including legal residents.

14. "The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million
Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States."

Once again, the "verify" link is dead. But a little Internet research found the article cited. An independently published, non-peer-reviewed study did estimate that nearly a million sex crimes have been committed by illegal immigrants over a seven-year period, but it employs some highly creative math and interesting assumptions to get there. The "study" is actually a pretty good case study in bad research.

The author assumes that 2 percent of illegal immigrants are sex offenders after "examining ICE reports and public records," but does not say how that figure was calculated. A bibliography cites miscellaneous Immigration and Customs Enforcement press releases and media accounts of instances of apprehending illegal immigrants who were sex offenders (seemingly manufacturing a "rate" based on anecdotal evidence). The author then makes no distinction between male and female illegal immigrants when estimating the number that are "sex offenders."

As we've said before, anonymous chain e-mails making dramatic claims are quite likely to be false. And that goes even for those that may seem to cite legitimate sources. This one is yet another good candidate for the "delete" key.

– Justin Bank

Sources
Steven A. Camarota, “Back Where We Started: An Examination of Trends in Immigrant Welfare Use Since Welfare Reform,” Center for Immigration Studies, March 2003.

Camarota, Steven A., "The High Cost of Cheap Labor: Illegal Immigration and the Federal Budget," Center for Immigration Studies, August 2004.

"Immigration and Welfare," Federation for American Immigration Reform, Oct 2002.

"A Line in the Sand: Confronting the Threat at the Southwest Border," prepared by the Majority Staff of House Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Investigations, Nov 2006.

Goyle, Rajeev, "Deporting the Undocumented: A Cost Assessment," Center for American Progress. 26 July 2005.

"Sending Money Home: Leveraging the Development Impact of Remittances," Inter-American Development Bank. 18 Oct 2006.

Schurman-Kauflin, Dr. Deborah, "The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants in the United States," Violent Crimes Institute, 2006.

Martin, Jack, "Breaking the Piggy Bank: How Illegal Immigration is Sending Schools Into the Red," Federation for American Immigration Reform. June 2005.

Fix, Michael and Passel, Jeffrey, "U.S. Immigration—Trends and Implications for Schools," Immigration Studies Program, The Urban Institute, 2003.

"Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States: 1990-2000," Office of Policy Planning, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, January 2003.

"Table 169, Current Expenditure Per Pupil in Fall Enrollment in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools, by State: 1969-70 to 1999-00," Digest of Education Statistics 2002, National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education.

Go on site for the first fact check and for the links in this one, the 2nd one by clicking on the following link:http://www.factcheck.org . . . . . . . . . . .

Saundra Hummer

April 10th, 2009, 01:09 PM

<><><><><><><><>Why Republican Senators Are Holding The Torture Memos For Ransom, And Why We're Not Going To Let Them Get Away With It.Friday, April 10, 2009
12:30 AM
From: "The Pen"
<activist.thepen@gmail.com>
There was a story this week that Republican senators were threatening to "go nuclear" and filibuster EVERYTHING (as if they were not already doing that) if the Justice department released the secret memos that the Bush administration had drafted to their own evil specifications to say that torture was OK. If these apparently flimsy, self-serving documents were supposed to stand as a get out of jail free card for the Bush/Cheney torturers, they must be pretty damning stuff.

Indeed, if this was supposed to be their defense for war crimes, war crimes that have made us all dramatically less safe by exponentially ramping up hatred for the U.S. all over the world, they should be proud to display their defense in the full light of day. But it is Republican members of Congress who are desperately trying to get Obama to keep their filthy, treasonous secrets with them, so we must speak out to them in particular. Shame on the so-called rule of law crowd ... for abject, irredeemable shame. And on us as well unless we demand the immediate release of these legal hack jobs.
Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum963.php
The same judge in Spain, who everyone applauded when he reached out with the doctrine of univeral jurisdiction to nail Augusto Pinochet, has already drafted a 98 page complaint against the so-called attorneys (including Gonzales) who prostituted their craft to sign off on those patently craven atrocities. Accountability is coming. Justice is coming. The only question is whether there are enough true Americans in this country with the courage to make it happen.

Will we or will we not keep speaking out on this? We have no other moral and patriotic choice but to do so.
Progress On The Real Food Safety Actions
Thanks to the magnificent response to the food safety alerts we are starting to have an impact on what the agribusiness mega-corporations assumed would just be a mow down. Chellie Pingree has now REMOVED herself as a sponsor of the HR 875 because she now sees it would have "unintended consequences" (her own words) detrimental to small and organic farms, who are the salvation of our real food safety. We applaud new House Member Pingree for listening to the wisdom her constituents, what a representative is supposed to do.

Of course, it was the terminal vagueness of HR 875 which was our PRECISE and CORE complaint in the first place. We stand by the action page in every respect. And we're not going to be distracted by talk that DeLauro is now getting input from certain still unnamed organic food advocates (after we spoke out), or any of the other various nitpicking counterattacks we're heard. We know we are winning when they start attacking the people who are speaking the truth.

HR 875 is crop failure on arrival, and what we need instead is a REAL food safety bill that squarely confronts the real problems.

We are ESPECIALLY proud of our participants who used our free "create your own action page" functions to initiate their own independent support actions on this for their own mailing lists, for your work is large part of this victory in the making as well. And you can do the same thing on any issue of your own you care about.
Create Your Own Action Page Function:
http://www.usalone.com/bladesofgrass.htm A real food safety bill would require stringent, long term affirmative safety testing of any Genetically Mutated Organism (GMO) BEFORE it is introduced into our environment. The history of nature is replete with examples of ignorant, careless human meddling that has gone horribly wrong, and that without even creating new species. Gypsy moths in the Northeast, rabbits overrunning Australia, killer bees that could arrive any day now, the list is endless. And they are seriously talking about polluting our agricultural gene pool WITHOUT even considering the potentially dire and permanent consequences? What kind of arrogant lunacy is that?

A real food safety bill would compel full disclosure to the consumer of any food products with unnatural content, including milk contaminated with bovine growth hormone. The reason they are trying to keep the infiltration of our food supply with such products a secret is they know that wise, health conscious consumers would categorically reject them.

A real food safety bill would force large factory farms, to seriously clean up their act, to stop breeding animals in cramped, unhealthy conditions where they are force fed antibiotics that help breed the resistant superbugs like the one that killed an otherwise healthy teen recently in just 5 days. These concentrated animal filth operations (CAFOs) are the sole and exclusive source of all contaminating bacteria now invading even our vegetable fields, the root cause of every food recall and scare of late. It is the massive
overflow of animal waste from these corporate cesspools that must be traced and STOPPED, not the well cared for flocks of small local farmers.

These are just some of the things that a real food safety bill would do. And we will not settle for pig in poke like HR 875 no matter how much lipstick they try to put on it. So if have not yet submitted our action page opposing the bad bill, please do so as well.

Stop HR 875 Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum959.php Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at :
http://www.peaceteam.net/in.htm
<><><><><><>

Saundra Hummer

April 10th, 2009, 01:55 PM

.
. Somali Pirates and Vanity Fair
Does anyone subscribe to, or read Vanity Fair? I subscribed to it, and have received my first two magazines and I have to say, it is impressive and cheap, ha. I got a years subscription for $15.00.

I especailly liked an older article, one which I read before finally subscribing. The article was about Somali Pirates. It was such an odd take on their lives and the why's and how's of their piracy. It is worth the price just for that one article alone.

I had always thought of Vanity Fair as just another womans magazine, but it's far from it, and there's so much in it that it's surprising. I find it well written and not just a bunch of fluff. It has longer articles than most magazines as well, & more in depth than most newspaper articles. Besides, I haven't found one thing about dieting, amazing in itself. Are you as tired of hearing about losing weight, and how to do it, as I am?

I can't figure out why I was so ill informed about Vanity Fairs content all these years. Pick up a back issue at the library and find the Somali story, I have it somewhere, if I come across it, I'll let you know which month it's in, it's probably not more than 6 months back..

Saundra Hummer

April 10th, 2009, 03:15 PM

!!!!!!!!! MR PINK & HIS FOOLISH TALK
IN OTHERWORDS, HIS USUAL TRASHING'S
SRH~~~~~~~~Karl Rove Calls Joe Biden 'Exaggerator,' 'Liar'By:
Jim Meyers
Friday, April 10, 2009 10:43 AM
Republican strategist Karl Rove has called Vice President Joe Biden a “liar” and a “serial exaggerator” for concocting a story about President George W. Bush “out of whole cloth.”

What set Rove off were comments Biden made in an interview with CNN on Tuesday regarding what he claimed was a meeting with President Bush in the Oval Office.

“Well, Joe, he said, I’m a leader. And I said, Mr. President, turn around and look behind you. No one’s following.”

Asked about the comments by Fox News' Megyn Kelly on Thursday, Rove — who was a close adviser to Bush — said: “It didn’t happen. I hate to say it, but he’s a serial exaggerator. If I was being unkind, I’d say he’s a liar. But it is a habit he ought to drop.

“You’ll notice every one of these incidents has the same structure. Joe Biden courageously raises the impudent question. The president befuddledly answers, and Joe Biden drives home the dramatic response. And I mean, it just — it’s his imagination. It’s a made-up, fictional world.”

Kelly asked: “So you’re saying he just made this thing up out of whole cloth with no basis in fact?”

Rove responded: “He’s making these things up out of whole cloth.”

Rove also disputed Biden’s claim that he had spent “a lot of hours alone with” Bush.

"Joe Biden was never alone with the president for more than a few moments," Rove said. "There was staff in the room at all times…

"I think there are very few presidents who spend hours with somebody in the Oval Office, particularly a — with all due respect, a blowhard like Joe Biden."

Rove also said: “These are the kinds of things you can get away with if you are a United States senator or a backbencher in the U.S. House of Representatives. You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you’re the vice president of the United States.”

Biden spokesman Jay Carney told Fox News earlier this week: “The vice president stands by his remarks.”

Rove pointed out that Biden dropped out of the 1988 Presidential race because he was found to be plagiarizing a speech by Neil Kinnock, the leader of the British Labour Party, “and recounting an episode in Kinnock’s life as if it were in his own life.”

Biden was also criticized for claiming last July that he had been "shot at" during a trip to Iraq, Fox reported. He later amended that assertion, telling The Hill newspaper: "I was near where a shot landed."

© 2009 Newsmax. All rights reserved. Hey, if I'm near where a shell landed, I'd be saying I was shot at as well. Not such a big fib, now is it? Karl Rove is truthful and above suspicion?, well then lets see how he himself holds up, if he ever does appear for questioning. Subpoenas don't mean doodley squat to Karl Rove, as according to how he thinks, he's still protected by executive priviledge? That's been his claim. Sheer unmitigated gall. Makes one feel ill to hear Rove spew out such garbage as he so oftentimes has and does. Give me Joe Biden's world over Karl Rove's world any day. I can live with that, as I'm sick and tired of the one Karl Rove's and his crew have already carved out for us. SRHhttp://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/rove_biden_liar/2009/04/10/201836.html?s=al&promo_code=7DBF-1 !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Saundra Hummer

April 10th, 2009, 05:03 PM

.
.
.
Maybe Billy Bob Thornton and Joaquin Phoenix have been partaking of the same sauce, or could it be the water?

What's up with these two very talented actors?

:shrug:

Saundra Hummer

April 11th, 2009, 01:48 AM

^^^^^^^ Confronting An Obstructionist Minority
FINDING A VOICE
by
Ann Davidow

Didn't the Democrats just win large majorities in both houses of Congress and didn't the country elect President Obama by a healthy eight million vote plurality? In November voters seemed ready for change and even some Republicans were willing to soften their stand on social issues in the hope that a new administration would address other more pressing national concerns.

How then has an obstructionist minority managed to gum things up, achieving power denied them in the electoral process and pretending their party is really where the country's at. Whenever an opportunity exists to impede the administration's agenda they are hard at it, which wouldn't be so hard to stomach if there were real substance behind their "no" doctrine. However, their empty sloganeering, their sniping tactics in Congress, their obeisance to the gun lobby and their financial backing of Norm Coleman's never-ending appeals of the Minnesota election are just dead-end politicking.

The right wing has its intractable advocates, of course, who support people like Representative Cantor and Senator Cornyn and think Representative Bachmann is on track even as she runs off the rails. Massaging the base works on some level, but minority efforts to hamper the simplest congressional procedures, hold up nominations and project their narrow vision on a public that has in many respects moved on, is simply a partisan blockade. Making conservative opinion part of the record is certainly one aspect of the core Republican mission, but acting as if it should serve to define our national principles is way outside the mainstream of current political thinking.

Nevertheless, Senate Republicans continue to stall Obama nominations to important posts. Tammy Duckworth, nominated to be Assistant Secretary at the Department of Veterans affairs, was held up by North Carolina's Senator Richard Burr for unknown reasons. One would think Duckworth, who lost her legs in combat serving our country, would be a shoo-in for the position. And there's the ever-present and oh-so-limited Senator Cornyn blocking the nomination of Dawn Johnsen to head the Office of Legal Counsel. Strangely, he says she lacks the "seriousness and necessary resolve to fight terrorism" although it's more likely he objects to her pro-choice advocacy.

The right wing calls Harold Koh, State Department's legal advisor nominee, a "threat to democracy" because he's an international law expert. The "fervent opponents of ...Koh turn out to be enthusiastic defenders of John Yoo" (ThinkProgress.org 4/4/09) that guy who penned the infamous memo referring to the Geneva Conventions as "quaint". As for Chris Hill, Obama's choice for Ambassador to Iraq, his nomination is being held up by Kansas Senator Brownback, a position embraced by the far right.

A conservative news group describes Obama as "polarizing", but isn't it the right wing chorus line that divides with its use of procedural impediments and claims we are headed for socialism, and questions like ‘do you want the government making health decisions for you'? In fact such decisions are made every day by insurance companies. And when clinics and hospitals servicing the needy close for lack of funds, the uninsured and under-insured, denied access to cancer therapy and meds, are essentially presented with a death warrant - - the most polarizing outcome possible.

One boost to the economy, distressingly, is that gun sales are up because the right wing claims Obama is going to take our guns away, though that isn't on his agenda. No doubt folks on society's lunatic fringe are building up their arsenals; one gun-shop owner says he's having trouble keeping ammunition in stock. In the next spate of shootings by frenzied wingers or distraught workers who have lost jobs, the charge of gun confiscation will have become moot. General Wesley Clark once invited people who like assault weapons to join the armed forces "we've got lots of them" he said. Now there's an idea.

In any case, reasonable people should be calling their senators to express displeasure about Obama's delayed nominees. Veteran's groups may have put enough pressure on Senator Burr to encourage him to finally lift his hold on Tammy Duckworth's appointment. Whatever the reason, her confirmation now appears assured.

Their constant rant often makes conservative positions seem more widely held than they really are. It can be exhausting trying to refute all the false claims and hysterical accusations that continue to consume a lot of right-wing air time. Sometimes one feels that the only thing left to say in response to all the nonsense is "oh please just shut up."

Please respond to Ann Davidow's commentary by leaving comments below and sharing them with the BuzzFlash community.

COMMENTS
I do not understand why the
Submitted by gryzelda on Fri, 04/10/2009 - 10:23am.
I do not understand why the majority of MSM, with the exception of MSNBC, some progressive radio stations and shows, and certain publications, continue to give the right so much airtime for their views and so little for progressive speakers. Anything the GOP and their pet pundits want to say against the current administration is entertained and encouraged to engender controversy and boost ratings. I agree with the previous writer, Dems in congress are wimps and fear to use the power they have. When the GOP was in power Dems were cut off from all decisions. We have tried bi-partisianship so far and it doesn't work. If they do not choose to be part of the change, to hell with them (which would not be a bad idea...)

Stop making deals - there
Submitted by Atmost11 on Fri, 04/10/2009 - 9:52am.
Stop making deals - there are two sides - down with bipartisanship - down with wusses - down with wusses - down with wusses - down with wusses - lets see some actual filibustering on TV. Stop making it easy for them - there are two sides - down with bipartisanship.

Simply Put
Submitted by sulphurdunn on Fri, 04/10/2009 - 9:13am.
minority party obstruction is actually minority party rule. This is only possible because it now requires 60 votes in the Senate to even pass a resolution to break for lunch. There is no constitutional requirement regarding this but merely an archaic rule called the filibuster. Of course, even if the Republicans held fewer than 41 seats, they could reliably count on enough Democrats to cross the isle and ensure their de facto 41 vote veto threat. Inversely, when Republicans control the Senate by even one vote, they can again rely on enough Blue Dogs to extinguish any serious threat of a Democratic filibuster.

Follow The Money
Submitted by neoconned on Fri, 04/10/2009 - 6:19am.
Deep Throat's advice to Woodward and Bernstein continues to be accurate today.

Minority obstruction could not be possible without the cooperation of the majority party. Said cooperation is being promoted by the major campaign contributors to both sides, who just happen to be America's largest corporations. They would love to do away with "quaint" and messy niceties like popular sovereignty and electoral governance and replace it with absolutist corporate directives. They will thus do everything they can to frustrate the populace with obstructionism until they can reclaim control, and they don't want to have large legal changes to reverse when they do.

Go on-site for more topical issues of the day, just click on the following link:
http://buzzflash.com/articles/davidow/106 ^^^^^^^^^^

Saundra Hummer

April 11th, 2009, 02:02 PM

$$$$$$$$$$$Showdown Seen Between Banks and Regulators
By
STEPHEN LABATON and EDMUND L. ANDREWS
April 11, 2009

WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration completes its examinations of the nation’s largest banks, industry executives are bracing for fights with the government over repayment of bailout money and forced sales of bad mortgages.

President Obama emerged from a meeting with his senior economic advisers on Friday to say “what you’re starting to see is glimmers of hope across the economy.” But there were also signs of growing tensions between the White House and the nation’s banks over the next phase of the financial rescue.

Some of the healthier banks want to pay back their bailout loans to avoid executive pay and other restrictions that come with the money. But the banks are balking at the hefty premium they agreed to pay when they took the money.

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, and two other executives of large banks raised the issue with Mr. Obama and the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, at a meeting two weeks ago.

“This is a source of considerable consternation,” said Camden R. Fine, who attended the White House meeting as president of the Independent Community Bankers, a trade group of 5,000 mostly smaller institutions, many of which are complaining about the repayment requirements.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration wants weaker banks to move more quickly to relieve their balance sheets of the toxic assets, the home loans and mortgage bonds that nobody wants to buy right now. But the banks are resisting because they would have to book big losses.

Finally, there is increasing anxiety in the industry that the administration could use the stress tests of the 19 biggest banks, due to be completed in the next three weeks, to insist on management changes, just as it did with General Motors when officials forced the resignation of its chief executive after examining that company’s books.

Senior officials, recognizing that the next few weeks could prove pivotal for both the industry and the bailout effort, are moving ahead with major plans.

“You will be seeing additional actions by the administration,” Mr. Obama said after the meeting Friday, when the officials discussed the bank stress tests and the new $500 billion to $1 trillion plan that will use public subsidies to encourage private investors to buy mortgage assets.

Attending the session were Mr. Geithner; Sheila C. Bair, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; Lawrence H. Summers, the chairman of the National Economic Council; and other top regulators.

The tension between the industry and the administration is rising as the government’s bailout fund is dwindling, putting the administration in a bind. It is all but certain to need to seek more money from Congress, which wants to see results from existing programs first.

The fund is down to its final $134 billion, according to Treasury officials, and is expected to face new requests for money in the coming weeks to aid tottering banks, the auto industry and possibly insurance companies.

“Between now and Memorial Day we’re going to know a whole lot more about the degree of trouble the banks are in,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat who is vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. “At the same time, we will begin to have a good initial reading as to how well the administration’s programs are working.”

This month, the nation’s largest banks began announcing their latest quarterly earnings. Some, like Wells Fargo, have released results early to trumpet their profitable first quarter — and possibly to give them leverage in coming negotiations with their regulator.

The immediate concern for the administration is how to get the weaker banks to relieve their books of deteriorating mortgages and mortgage-backed securities.

Industry analysts estimate that United States banks alone have more than $1 trillion of such mortgages on their books but have recognized only a small share of the likely losses.

Economists at Goldman Sachs estimated recently that banks were valuing their mortgages at about 91 cents on the dollar, far more than investors are willing to pay for them.

Even though the Treasury Department plans to subsidize the purchases of toxic assets by giving buyers low-cost loans to cover most of their upfront cost, a growing number of analysts warn that many if not most banks will remain reluctant to sell.

“The gap is still very wide,” said Frank Pallotta, a former mortgage trader at Morgan Stanley, now a consultant to institutional investors. “If every bank was forced to sell at the market-clearing price, you’d have only five banks left in the market.”

The stress tests of the banks are aimed at estimating how much each bank would lose if the economic downturn proved even deeper than currently expected.

Government officials do not plan to disclose the results for individual banks but may reveal broad results for the entire industry at the end of the month.

If the test indicates that the losses would leave a bank with too little capital, the bank will have six months to either raise extra money from private investors or get money from the government. Executives at some banks are worried that regulators will start demanding changes in management and strategy, possibly forcing them to merge with stronger institutions.

Treasury officials said they understood that banks had valid reasons for placing higher values on their mortgages than investors, and said they were hoping to avoid major conflicts.

Facing a host of government restrictions — from how much they pay executives to how many foreign citizens they employ — some small banks have returned the bailout money, and some larger ones, including Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Northern Trust, have said they want to do so as quickly as possible.

On Friday, Sun Bancorp of Vineland, N.J., became the sixth bank to exit the program, returning $89.3 million just three months after it received its loan.

Regulators are reluctant to approve the early repayments until banks can show that they have the capital to withstand further erosion in the economy and will not curtail their lending.

Both large and small banks have pressed the Obama administration to make it less costly for them to exit the bailout program by waiving the right to exercise stock warrants the banks had to grant the government in exchange for the loans. At a meeting last month, the chiefs of three of the largest banks separately asked Mr. Obama to direct the Treasury not to exercise the warrants, Mr. Fine said.

Douglas Leech, the founder and chief executive of Centra Bank, a small West Virginia bank that participated in the capital assistance program but returned the money after the government imposed new conditions, said he complained strongly about the Treasury Department’s decision to demand repayment of the warrants. That effectively raised the interest rate he paid on a $15 million loan to an annual rate of about 60 percent, he said.

“What they did is wrong and fundamentally un-American,” he said. “Even though the government told us to take this money to increase our lending, the extra charge meant we had less money to lend. It was the equivalent of a penalty for early withdrawal.”

Stephanie Cutter, a spokeswoman at the Treasury Department, said it did not comment about the participation of specific banks in the plan or their efforts to exit the program.
In a BuzzFlash newsletter: Bank Thieves Now Want to Get Out of Paying What They Agreed to Pay for the Taxpayers to Bail Them Out of Their Greed. Just Charge Them, Try Them, and Put Them in Jail. Guess What, They Don't Want to Honor the Contracts That They Signed with the Government. Tim Geithner and Barack Obama Better Not Let Them Have a Double Standard.

Go on-site to gain access to the links within this article and go to Buzz Flash.com to sign up for their informative newsletter. Just click on the following link:http://www.buzzflash.com/$$$$$$$$$

Saundra Hummer

April 12th, 2009, 12:18 PM

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Obama releases Reagan records
By: Josh Gerstein
April 10, 2009 04:40 PM EST

President Barack Obama is ordering the release of nearly a quarter of a million pages of records from the Reagan White House that were kept from the public during a lengthy review by President George W. Bush.

The Reagan documents – which include presidential briefing papers, speechwriting research materials and declassified foreign policy records — are expected to be released Monday.

Officials said the Obama administration’s quick verdict on the documents was prompted by an executive order Obama signed in January that gives the incumbent president 30 days to make such a decision, unless he sets a longer period. By contrast, Bush’s executive order on presidential records set no time limit on the White House’s review.

“With regard to the Reagan Administration records, I am writing to inform you that the President has not asserted executive privilege over any of this material,” White House Counsel Greg Craig wrote in a letter Thursday obtained by POLITICO.

“Pursuant to the President’s Executive Order, NARA may release these records — opening close to 250,000 pages of history,” Craig wrote to the director of the presidential libraries unit at the National Archives and Records Administration, Nancy Kegan Smith.

A smaller batch of 797 pages from President George H.W. Bush’s presidential library on the topic of Saudi Arabia also has been cleared for release Monday.

In recent years, historians and open-government groups complained bitterly that the review process President George W. Bush instituted was causing a backlog that was stalling the release of tens of thousands of pages of presidential records. “The cynical view is that the process is deliberately inefficient,” Thomas Blanton of the National Security Archive testified at a Congressional hearing on the issue in 2007.

One advocate for greater disclosure hailed Obama's move.

"This is a great development," Scott Nelson of the Public Citizen Litigation Group said. "It's very encouraging that the Bush order and the burden it imposes on the White House to do a page-by-page review apparently won't be taking place under this administration. We won't have this additional layer of delays."

However, there were indications that the most contested presidential records from the Reagan era might not be among the roughly 250,000 pages cleared for release by Obama.

Nelson’s group fought a court battle for about a dozen documents, including memoranda about possible pardons for Iran-Contra figures such as Oliver North and John Poindexter. Representatives of former President Reagan objected to the release of those documents and were backed up in almost all instances by lawyers for President Bush. A federal judge ruled that the requesters’ had no legal grounds to overcome the incumbent president’s assertion of privilege.

Craig’s letter says Reagan’s representative approved of the release of the documents the White House cleared on Thursday, making it unlikely the files contain the same records that led to the court battle. A representative for the elder Bush also consented to have his documents released, officials said.

Obama’s openness to releasing historical presidential records could put him at odds with former presidents or their families who seek to block such a release. But officials said there was no disagreement about the records to be released next week.

© 2009 Capitol News Company, LLC
See Also
Deadlock: Rise of the endless election
GOP govs get dose of stimulus reality
Obama may get ASU honor after all http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/21121.html

http://www.buzzflash.com //\\//\\//\\//\\//\\

Saundra Hummer

April 12th, 2009, 01:37 PM

Revive Lincoln’s Monetary Policy:
an Open Letter to President Obama
By
Ellen Brown
April 10, 2009 --

Dear President Obama:

The world was transfixed on that remarkable day in January when, to poetry, song, and dance, you gazed upon Abraham Lincoln's likeness at the Lincoln Memorial and searched for wisdom to navigate these difficult times. Indeed, you have so many things in common with that venerable President that one might imagine you were his reincarnation in different dress. You are both thin and wiry, brilliant speakers, appearing on the national stage at pivotal times. Fertile imaginations could envision you coming back triumphantly as one of those slaves you freed, to prove once and for all the proposition that all men are created equal and can achieve great things if given a fighting chance. But as Wordsworth said, our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; and if that is true, you may have forgotten a more subtle form of slavery from which Lincoln freed his countrymen, even if you were there at the time. You may have forgotten it because it has been omitted from the history books, leaving Americans ill-equipped to interpret the lessons of our own past. This letter is therefore meant to remind you.

We are now met on another battlefield of that same economic war that visited Lincoln and the Founding Fathers before him. President Obama, the fate of our economy and the nation itself may depend on how well you understand Lincoln's monetary breakthrough, the most far-reaching "economic stimulus plan" ever implemented by a U.S. President. You can solve our economic crisis quickly and permanently, by implementing the same economic solution that allowed Lincoln to win the Civil War and thus save the Union from foreign economic masters.

Lincoln's Monetary Breakthrough

The bankers had Lincoln's government over a barrel, just as Wall Street has Congress in its vice-like grip today. The North needed money to fund a war, and the bankers were willing to lend it only under circumstances that amounted to extortion, involving staggering interest rates of 24 to 36 percent. Lincoln saw that this would bankrupt the North and asked a trusted colleague to research the matter and find a solution. In what may be the best piece of advice ever given to a sitting President, Colonel Dick Taylor of Illinois reported back that the Union had the power under the Constitution to solve its financing problem by printing its money as a sovereign government. Taylor said:

"Just get Congress to pass a bill authorizing the printing of full legal tender treasury notes ... and pay your soldiers with them and go ahead and win your war with them also. If you make them full legal tender ... they will have the full sanction of the government and be just as good as any money; as Congress is given that express right by the Constitution."

The Greenbacks actually were just as good as the bankers' banknotes. Both were created on a printing press, but the banknotes had the veneer of legitimacy because they were "backed" by gold. The catch was that this backing was based on "fractional reserves," meaning the bankers held only a small fraction of the gold necessary to support all the loans represented by their banknotes. The "fractional reserve" ruse is still used today to create the impression that bankers are lending something other than mere debt created with accounting entries on their books. 1

Lincoln took Col. Taylor's advice and funded the war by printing paper notes backed by the credit of the government. These legal-tender U.S. Notes or "Greenbacks" represented receipts for labor and goods delivered to the United States. They were paid to soldiers and suppliers and were tradeable for goods and services of a value equivalent to their service to the community. The Greenbacks aided the Union not only in winning the war but in funding a period of unprecedented economic expansion. Lincoln's government created the greatest industrial giant the world had yet seen. The steel industry was launched, a continental railroad system was created, a new era of farm machinery and cheap tools was promoted, free higher education was established, government support was provided to all branches of science, the Bureau of Mines was organized, and labor productivity was increased by 50 to 75 percent. The Greenback was not the only currency used to fund these achievements; but they could not have been accomplished without it, and they could not have been accomplished on money borrowed at the usurious rates the bankers were attempting to extort from the North.

Lincoln succeeded in restoring the government's power to issue the national currency, but his revolutionary monetary policy was opposed by powerful forces. The threat to established interests was captured in an editorial of unknown authorship, said to have been published in The London Times in 1865:

"If that mischievous financial policy which had its origin in the North American Republic during the late war in that country, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without debt. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the civilized governments of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe."

In 1865, Lincoln was assassinated. According to historian W. Cleon Skousen:

"Right after the Civil War there was considerable talk about reviving Lincoln's brief experiment with the Constitutional monetary system. Had not the European money-trust intervened, it would have no doubt become an established institution."

The institution that became established instead was the Federal Reserve, a privately-owned central bank given the power in 1913 to print Federal Reserve Notes (or dollar bills) and lend them to the government. The government was submerged in a debt that has grown exponentially since, until it is now an unrepayable $11 trillion. For nearly a century, Lincoln's statue at the Lincoln Memorial has gazed out pensively across the reflecting pool at the Federal Reserve building, as if pondering what the bankers had wrought since his death and how to remedy it.

Building on a Successful Tradition

Lincoln did not invent government-issued paper money. Rather, he restored a brilliant innovation of the American colonists. According to Benjamin Franklin, it was the colonists' home-grown paper "scrip" that was responsible for the remarkable abundance in the colonies at a time when England was suffering from the ravages of the Industrial Revolution. Like with Lincoln's Greenbacks, this prosperity posed a threat to the control of the British Crown and the emerging network of private British banks, prompting the King to ban the colonists' paper money and require the payment of taxes in gold. According to Franklin and several other historians of the period, it was these onerous demands by the Crown, and the corresponding collapse of the colonists' paper money supply, that actually sparked the Revolutionary War. 2
The colonists won the war but ultimately lost the money power to a private banking cartel, one that issued another form of paper money called "banknotes." Today the bankers' debt-based money has come to dominate most of the economies of the world; but there are a number of historical examples of the successful funding of economic development in other countries simply with government-issued credit. In Australia and New Zealand in the 1930s, the Depression conditions suffered elsewhere were avoided by drawing on a national credit card issued by publicly-owned central banks. The governments of the island states of Guernsey and Jersey created thriving economies that carried no federal debt, just by issuing their own debt-free public currencies. China has also funded impressive internal development through a system of state-owned banks.

Here in the United States, the state of North Dakota has a wholly state-owned bank that creates credit on its books just as private banks do. This credit is used to serve the needs of the community, and the interest on loans is returned to the government. Not coincidentally, North Dakota has a $1.2 billion budget surplus at a time when 46 of 50 states are insolvent, an impressive achievement for a state of isolated farmers battling challenging weather. 3 The North Dakota prototype could be copied not only in every U.S. state but at the federal level.

The Perennial Inflation Question

The objection invariably raised to government-issued currency or credit is that it would create dangerous hyperinflation. However, in none of these models has that proven to be true. Price inflation results either when the supply of money goes up but the supply of goods doesn't, or when speculators devalue currencies by massive short selling, as in those cases of Latin American hyperinflation when printing-press money was used to pay off foreign debt. When new money is used to produce new goods and services, price inflation does not result because supply and demand rise together. Prices did increase during the American Civil War, but this was attributed to the scarcity of goods common in wartime rather than to the Greenback itself. War produces weapons rather than consumer goods.

Today, with trillions of dollars being committed for bailouts and stimulus plans, another objection to Lincoln's solution is likely to be, "The U.S. government is already printing its own money - and lots of it." This, however, is a misconception. What the government prints are bonds - its I.O.U.s or debt. If the government did print dollars, instead of borrowing them from a privately-owned central bank that prints them, Uncle Sam would not have an eleven trillion dollar millstone hanging around his neck. As Thomas Edison astutely observed:

"If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good, makes the bill good, also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%, whereas the currency pays nobody but those who contribute directly in some useful way. It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30 million in bonds and not $30 million in currency. Both are promises to pay, but one promise fattens the usurers and the other helps the people."

A Wake-up Call

Henry Ford observed at about the same time:

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."

Today we the people are starting to understand our banking and monetary system, and we are shocked, dismayed, and furious at what we are discovering. The wizard behind the curtain turns out to be a small group of men pulling levers and dials, creating an illusory money scheme that, behind all the talk and bravado, is mere smoke and mirrors. These levers are controlled by a privately-owned, unaccountable central bank called the Federal Reserve, which has recently dispensed billions if not trillions in funds to its banker cronies, without revealing where these monies are going even under Congressional inquiry or in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. As Chris Powell pointed out recently in conjunction with an FOIA request brought by Bloomberg News, which the Fed declined to comply with:

"Any government that can disburse $2 trillion secretly, without any accountability, is not a democratic government. It is government of, by, and, for the bankers." 4

There was a time when private central bankers were the heavyweights in control, able to run their ultra-secret agenda with impunity; but that era is coming to an end. The bankers are scrambling, trying to patch up their crumbling creations with schemes, bailouts and sleight of hand. That effort, however, must ultimately prove futile. As investment adviser Rolfe Winkler said in a recent article:

"The great Ponzi scheme that is the Western World's economy has grown so big there's simply no ‘fixing' it. Flushing more debt through the system would be like giving Madoff a few billion to tide him over. Or like adding another floor to the Tower of Babel. To what end? The collapse is already here. The question is: How much do we want it to hurt? Using the public's purse to finance ‘confidence' in a system that is already kaput may delay the Day of Reckoning, sure, but at the cost of multiplying our losses. Perhaps fantastically." 5

The bankers are on the run, feverishly trying to use the collapse of the current system to steer us toward an "Amero"-style North American currency, or a one-world private banking system and privately-issued global currency that they and only they control. We the people will not accept those solutions, however, no matter how bad things get. We demand real solutions that empower us, not enslave us.

Abraham Lincoln had such a solution. President Obama, you can finally bring his monetary solution to fruition. Manifest the vision of Lincoln, Jefferson, Madison and Franklin, and we the people will make sure you are placed in the pantheon of our greatest leaders and are revered for all time. America's greatest days can still be ahead of us; but for this to happen, we need to expose and root out the deceptive banking scheme that would enslave us to a future of debt and increasing homelessness in this great country our forefathers founded. The time has come for democracy to rise superior to a private banking cartel and take back the power to create money once again. Such a transformation would represent the most epochal and empowering shift that humanity has ever seen. As you recently said:

"This country has never responded to a crisis by sitting on the sidelines and hoping for the best. Throughout our history we have met every great challenge with bold action and big ideas."

Your words are a timely reminder of our long legacy of action and bold solutions in the face of adversity. Can we do this? Yes we can.

Ellen Brown, J.D., wrote this article in April, 2009, for Path to a New Economy, a collection of online articles for YES! Magazine, on economic and financial solutions. Ellen developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her eleven books include the bestselling Nature’s Pharmacy, co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker, and The Key to Ultimate Health (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen). Her websites arewww.webofdebt.com and www.ellenbrown.com

Click on "comments" below to read or post comments Comments (29) Comment (0)
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22391.htm http://www.informationclearinghouse.info

Saundra Hummer

April 12th, 2009, 02:40 PM

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US citizens locked up as illegal immigrants
4/12/2009 12:31 PM
By: Associated Press
3:06 pm
Pedro Guzman has been an American citizen all his life. But in 2007, the 31-year-old Los Angeles native signed a waiver agreeing to leave the country without a hearing and was deported to Mexico as an illegal immigrant.

Guzman had been jailed for a misdemeanor. He was mentally ill and illiterate.

For almost three months, he slept in streets, bathed in filthy rivers and ate out of trash cans while his mother scoured the city of Tijuana with his photo in hand. He was finally found trying to cross the border at Calexico, 100 miles away.

In a drive to crack down on illegal immigrants, the United States has locked up or thrown out dozens of its own citizens over the past eight years, probably many more.

A months-long AP investigation has documented 55 such cases on the basis of interviews, lawsuits and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. These citizens are detained for anything from a day to five years. Immigration lawyers said there are actually hundreds of such cases.

It's illegal to deport U.S. citizens or detain them for immigration violations. Yet citizens still end up in detention because the system is overwhelmed. The number of detentions overall is expected to rise by about 17 percent this year to more than 400,000, putting a severe strain on the enforcement network and legal system.

Copyright 2009 Associated Press, All rights reserved.
http://www.news8austin.com/content/your_news/default.asp?ArID=237668 XXXXXXXXX

Saundra Hummer

April 12th, 2009, 03:11 PM

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Amazing Health News
We All Should Know About

Some doctors treat eye cancer with plaque brachytherapyThis type of internal radiation therapy delivers a highly concentrated dose of radiation to the tumor. The source of the radiation is small radioactive seeds attached to a gold or steel bowl called a plaque. That plaque is attached to the wall of the eye to cover the base of the eye tumor.
FULL STORY >> 4/10/2009 1:50 PM

Amputees find hope through dolphin's surgeryA dolphin named Winter, with the help of expert prosthetists, underwent a tail replacement. The design of Winter's prosthetic may also help human amputees.
FULL STORY >> 4/9/2009 1:20 PM

Doctors 'fish' for a cure for cancerA recent step in zebrafish research involved developing a new, transparent breed of zebrafish called the "casper" to give scientists a literal peek inside how the body works, especially as it battles diseases like cancer.
FULL STORY >> 4/8/2009 9:52 AM

Surgeons navigate the spine with GPS technologySurgeons are now using image-guided spinal navigation, similar to global positioning systems, or GPS, to navigate the spine during spinal fusion surgery.
FULL STORY >> 4/7/2009 7:50 AM

Device helps patients take steps after a strokeElectrical stimulation works to help stroke patients regain mobility by delivering a shock to the survivor's muscles. That shock activates the nerves and makes the associated muscle move.
FULL STORY >> 4/6/2009 10:17 AM

Medicine opening doors to sickle cell cureA recent study at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh looked into a form of bone marrow transplantation that uses reduced-intensity conditioning prior to the transplant.
FULL STORY >> 4/3/2009 4:51 PM

Doctors use glue to fill aneurysmsDoctors have a new way to fill aneurysms: onyx, a thick black substance that turns solid when exposed to blood.
FULL STORY >> 4/2/2009 10:11 AM

Software makes childbirth saferA Web-based system can be used to predict a woman's risk of shoulder dystocia during birth from 37 weeks of gestation onward.
FULL STORY >> 4/1/2009 10:40 AM

Cane Fu seniors put up a heck of a fightThere's a new exercise trend. It's not kung fu, it's Cane Fu, and some seniors are putting up their dukes to stay healthy and live longer.
FULL STORY >> 3/27/2009 1:00 PM

A new option helps filter out bad cholesterolMore than 34 million American adults have high cholesterol levels. For some, diet and exercise can bring it down, but for others, even medication won't help. For the latter group, a new treatment is available.
FULL STORY >> 3/26/2009 3:03 PM

Hope for beating the odds of pancreatic cancerA more recent clinical trial looked into treating patients with operable pancreatic cancer with surgery, chemotherapy and the immune system stimulator interferon.
FULL STORY >> 3/25/2009 8:42 AM

Brain surgery through the eyelidsSurgeons at Allegheny General Hospital (AGH) in Pittsburgh, Pa., are using a new procedure to fix life-threatening brain aneurysms.
FULL STORY >> 3/24/2009 10:38 AM

Neck surgery leaves less scarring, less painMitchell Austin, M.D., an otolaryngologist at Nemours Children's Clinic in Orlando, Fla., describes a new kind of surgery to remove cysts that leaves kids with less scarring and less pain.
FULL STORY >> 3/23/2009 3:02 PM

Doctors test use of artificial liverSee how doctors are now testing an artificial liver that gives patients another chance at survival.
FULL STORY >> 3/19/2009 8:08 AM

On Weekdays News 8 Austin’s Health Beat brings you reports on health care, treatments and medical news from our community facilities and from around the nation. Search Health http://www.news8austin.com/content/living/health_beat/ IIIIIIIIIIIIIII

Saundra Hummer

April 13th, 2009, 12:48 PM

*$*$*$*$*$* The World Newser
World News' Daily Blog
Bailed Out Banks Jacking Up Credit Card Rates
April 13, 2009 9:58 AM
Have you gotten anything in the mail lately from your credit card company? Perhaps a letter informing you that your interest rates are going up? Or that there's a new fee for something that used to be free of charge? You are not alone.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that the committee charged with watching the dollars and cents of the bail effort is now investigating how these banks are treating their customers -- the fees, the special charges, the rates going up. Bank of America will be raising rates on 4 million. Bank of America received $45 billion from tax payers to stay afloat.

Have you seen your rates go up recently? Did you miss a payment or was this out of the blue?
* * *
April 13, 2009 | User Comments (30) Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Bailed Out Banks Jacking Up Credit Card Rates:User CommentsWe got it on a few of our credit cards, no missed payments, just out of the blue...and they jacked it up to like 28%...I sort of figured it was punishment for not using it as often and the bill being almost paid off...
^Posted by: samhiguchi | Apr 13, 2009 10:19:36 AM^
My Bank of America credit card was just raised to 28% - out of the blue. Luckily, I was able to pay off the balance right away, so no harm done immediately. But I wasn't late, and had no notice of the rates being raised. American Express did the same thing to both of my cards, as did Chase for both of those cards (not one card is below 27% now!) and my credit score is 720!!. I just paid off ALL of my credit card balances, but was completely alarmed by the rates being raised for no reason at all!! Especially when they are getting all these bailouts! It should be a crime!! I hope something is really done, because not everyone is lucky enough to be able to pay off all their cards at once!!
Megan in NH
^Posted by: Megan | Apr 13, 2009 10:22:30 AM^
I didnt get a letter.
I got my limit cut in half - my interest rate went up to 26.99%.
It made me over my limit - etc.
I transfered the balance, and cancelled the card.
Credit Card companies are like the government - THEY DONT CARE ABOUT YOU!
^Posted by: Ruby | Apr 13, 2009 10:23:43 AM^
All of my credit cards now reflect a 32% intrest rate. I have never missed a payment, always pay over the minimum and have been a valid customer. I called and all I was told that this is the new policy, and even threatening to cancel my accounts did nothing for me. Infact they were eager to help me with the process!
^Posted by: Josh | Apr 13, 2009 10:25:45 AM^
Got it. Called the company and told them to cancel the card because of it. Company promptly "reduced my rate back to the original because I am such a reliable customer".
^Posted by: John | Apr 13, 2009 10:29:46 AM^
Being a bit of a leftie, I went with a credit union long ago. My credit card rate (6.9% APR) hasn't changed for years, the minimum payment is pulled automatically from my savings account if I forget so I've never seen if they have any late fees, and the only other fee is $25 a year (and that is only because I enroll in the optional 'earn miles' program). And they have never seemed to mind that I usually pay it off in full every month.

If you can get into one of the top 10 largest US credit unions (and if you live in Washington state, you probably can), it's a little silly to stick with for-profit banks.
^Posted by: jhw539 | Apr 13, 2009 10:33:43 AM^
It isn't just BOA doing this. We have perfect credit, never late, never missed, never gone over, always pay more than asked, and we had two credit cards that raised our interest rates.....Capital One and Sears/Citi. I've been with Capital One since 1990. Mine went from a 5.99 to 15.99 interest rate, two months ago.
^Posted by: KdOklahoma | Apr 13, 2009 10:51:04 AM^
My fees on my debit card haven't changed and I haven't used a credit card for 15 years. A while back our credit score was hurt because we don't use credit cards.
^Posted by: unshrub | Apr 13, 2009 11:00:15 AM^
The interest rate on both my and my wife's CitiBank cards jumped from 7.99% where it's been for more than 5 years to 17.99% overnight about two months ago and we've never been even a minute late with a payment. With both our credit scores in the 810's there's absolutely no way that it's anything but a scam by CitiBank.
^Posted by: Kevin | Apr 13, 2009 11:15:35 AM^
Yup..Bank of America raised mine to 30%. It's crazy. I've paid thousands more than is on the card because of the 30% rate.
^Posted by: Sunflower | Apr 13, 2009 11:29:01 AM^
From an economic and personal money management standpoint these rate increases may be a good thing. We have floated along on credit for 30 years now & perhaps its time to rebalance our household books. I think the banks want a dramatically lower level of credit in the overall economy. Painful? Sure can be if you have a large balance.
^Posted by: Claude | Apr 13, 2009 11:37:40 AM^
It was bound to happen... we bail out the banks and now we are getting raped on credit card interest.... everyone should have seen this coming..

Inflation and high prices are now here...if you thought the recession was over, think again...

No bank that recieved TARP money should be allowed to raise their rates... they have already been bailed out by the taxpayers and now they want to rape us again...

Wonder what government will do about this?
^Posted by: lm | Apr 13, 2009 11:56:05 AM^
People who maintain a credit card balance are at the mercy of the lender. The answer is simple -- get out of credit card debt and stop borrowing against the unknown future!
^Posted by: dk | Apr 13, 2009 12:07:06 PM^
" and stop borrowing against the unknown future!"

Words the Coorperations should be living by right now...they over extended themselves no matter how many different ways you slice it. We 'The Taxpayer' have already paid for bad credit decisions on behalf of the credit card companies. Hell, if you think about it, I just paid off the girl's balance who didn't pay it by virtue of the money I just paid in taxes. Now, I have to incur another fee from the credit card companies by suffering a tripled interest rate? I already told my credit card company this: You're punishing the people that pay on time while rewarding the dead beat people who don't.
^Posted by: Woody | Apr 13, 2009 12:55:50 PM^ http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2009/04/bailed-out-bank.html *$*$*$*

Saundra Hummer

April 13th, 2009, 01:40 PM

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. . . . . . .
Norm Coleman knows Al Franken won.

The courts just finished counting and recounting all potential ballots, and the results are clear: Al Franken got more votes than Norm Coleman did. In fact, this last round of Coleman challenges actually widened Franken's lead.1

But Coleman is betting on the fact that Al Franken doesn't have the funds to keep fighting a long legal battle. So instead of conceding gracefully, Coleman plans to appeal this final ruling, and drag this case through the Minnesota Supreme Court for several more months.2

It's cynical. It's selfish. And it's hurting Minnesotans—not to mention Obama's ability to pass real health care reform, create millions of green jobs, and build a new-energy economy.

If Al Franken can show that he has the war chest to keep going, Coleman won't be able to justify dragging this out longer. All of us need to pitch in and help send a strong message to Norm Coleman: Al Franken won this election, and we're sticking by him until he's seated in the U.S. Senate. (I've edited out fund request. SRH)

Everyone knows this story ends with Al Franken being seated as a U.S. senator.

The question is: Can Franken raise enough money now to prove that another court appeal is pointless? Or will they have to duke it out in court for months to prove that same point?

So far, Franken's team has done a great job. For the last seven weeks, Coleman made every conceivable legal argument he could to bolster his case. They presented more than 20,000 pages of legal filings.

The outcome? Al Franken gained votes. He started with a 225-vote lead, and now is up by 312 votes.3

Republicans in Washington know Coleman's not going to win on the merits. As one former Republican senator said, their attitude is, "We will continue to fund you, just to keep the Democrat out of the Senate."4

They want Coleman to keep flogging this legal case, depriving Minnesota voters of their second senator for months or years more—and depriving Democrats of a 59th vote that they won fair and square.

The better equipped Franken's lawyers are to fight, the more easily they'll be able to defeat Coleman in court. Can you chip in (edited request) to help Al Franken finally become Senator Franken?

And there's another candidate who needs our help, too.

Democratic House candidate Scott Murphy—who President Obama called "the kind of partner I need in Washington"5—is entering a long recount battle of his own after the special election in New York's 20th District.

That race is virtually tied, so Republicans are resorting to smearing Murphy any way they can. If he's going to make it to D.C. to help Obama, he's going to need real resources to defend himself and make sure every vote gets counted and recounted. If you can, please chip in to help Murphy at the same link above.

–Nita, Joan, Peter, Eli and the rest of the team
(At MoveOn.org)

Sources:
1. "Absentees push Franken's Senate lead to 312," Associated Press, April 8, 2009,
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51304&id=15909-4054703-ppd8yux&t=5

2. "Coleman team vows to appeal tally," Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 8, 2009,
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51310&id=15909-4054703-ppd8yux&t=6

3. "Absentees push Franken's Senate lead to 312," Associated Press, April 8, 2009,
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51304&id=15909-4054703-ppd8yux&t=8

4. "The Conservative Case Against Coleman," The New Republic, April 8, 2009,
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51307&id=15909-4054703-ppd8yux&t=9

5. "New York congressional race tests Obama," AFP, March 30, 2009
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51272&id=15909-4054703-ppd8yux&t=10
For more on Murphy's recount battle, check out
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/ny-20/ . . . . . . .

Saundra Hummer

April 13th, 2009, 04:14 PM

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<><><><><>Herbal wine, just the thing for ailing pharoahs
Associated Press
04.13.09
05:00 PM EDT
When great-grandma took a nip of the elderberry wine "for medicinal purposes," she was following a tradition that goes back thousands of years.

Indeed, researchers say they have found evidence that the Egyptians spiked their wine with medicinal herbs as long as 5,000 years ago.
A chemical analysis of pottery dating to 3150 B.C. shows that herbs and resins were added to grape wine, researchers led by Patrick E. McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Adding tree resin to wine to prevent disease was widely known in ancient times, also being reported in ancient China, and continuing into the Middle Ages, the researchers say.

And they note that Egyptian records report that a variety of herbs were mixed in wine, beer and other liquids for medical uses.

Chemicals recovered from the pottery indicate that in addition to wine there were savory, blue tansy and artemisia - a member of the wormwood family - present. Other chemicals indicate the possible presence of balm, senna, coriander, germander, mint, sage and thyme.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/04/13/ap6285036.html?partner=alertsCopyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. <><><><><><><>

Saundra Hummer

April 13th, 2009, 07:11 PM

After the lock down on the "Why can't we talk religion?", take a look at Joseph Cambell's writings and discussions for an insight on myth and comparitive religion. I wish I had the whole collection, as much of it is fascinating, as are the time-lines on much of what has been written in religious tomes down through the ages. Joseph Campbell's book are listed on the following site.

He has many books on myth and his "Follow Your Bliss series on PBS" were wonderful for it's words, it's art work and photo's

http://www.biblio.com/author_biographies/2011754/Joseph_Campbell.html

Saundra Hummer

April 13th, 2009, 09:02 PM

^^^^^^^Will Israel Attack Iran?
By
Roane Carey
13 April, 2009
TomDispatch.com
JERUSALEM -- Israel has been steadily ratcheting up pressure on the United States concerning the grave threat allegedly posed by Iran, which seems poised to master the nuclear fuel cycle, and thus the capacity to produce nuclear weapons. The new Israeli prime minister, Likud Party hawk Benjamin Netanyahu, has warned President Barack Obama that if Washington does not quickly find a way to shut down Iran's nuclear program, Israel will.

Some analysts argue that this is manufactured hysteria, not so much a reflection of genuine Israeli fears as a purposeful diversion from other looming difficulties. The Netanyahu government is filled with hardliners adamantly opposed to withdrawal from, or even a temporary freeze on, settlements in the occupied territories, not to mention to any acceptance of Palestinian statehood. On his first day as foreign minister, extremist demagogue Avigdor Lieberman, with characteristic bluster, announced that Israel was no longer bound by the 2007 Annapolis agreements brokered by Washington, which called for accelerated negotiations toward a two-state settlement.

Such talk threatens to lead the Israelis directly into a clash with the Obama administration. In what can only be taken as a rebuttal of the Netanyahu government's recent pronouncements, in his speech to the Turkish Parliament Obama pointedly reasserted Washington's commitment to a two-state settlement and to the Annapolis understandings. So what better way for Netanyahu to avoid an ugly clash with a popular American president than to conveniently shift the discussion to an existential threat from Iran -- especially if he can successfully present it as a threat not just to Israel but to the West in general?

All of this adds up to a plausible argument against undue alarm over the latest Israeli warnings about an attack on Iran, but it's flawed on several grounds. There is a broad, generally accepted paranoia in Israel about Iran, a belief that its leaders must be stopped before they proceed much further in their uranium enrichment program. (This view is not shared on the Israeli left, but it's now a ghost of its former self.)

In an interview for TomDispatch, Ephraim Kam, deputy director of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv and a specialist on the Iran issue, commented, "Of course there are different opinions, but there is a general consensus, among both security experts and political leaders, from Labor to the right wing. This is not a controversial issue: if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it will pose a deep threat. It will be the first time in our history that another country can deal a major blow to Israel."

Kam hastens to add that, in his own view, the scenario Netanyahu proposes -- that Iran is led by irrational fanatics who would nuke Israel at the first chance, even knowing that an Israeli nuclear counterstrike would be swift and catastrophic -- is false. "Iran is a pragmatic, logical player," Kam says. He remains convinced that "even a radical fundamentalist regime" wouldn't attack Israel, but he adds, "This is just my assessment, and assessments can go wrong. I wrote a study on wrong assessments, so I know something about this." In other words, if Kam's claims about the Israeli consensus are correct, the country's leadership takes it for granted that Iran is indeed hell-bent on producing a nuclear weapon and is not inclined to take a chance that a nuclear Iran will play by the MAD (as in mutually assured destruction) rules hammered out by the two Cold War superpowers decades ago and never use it.

This attitude reflects a longstanding Israeli strategic principle: that no neighboring state or combination of states can ever be allowed to achieve anything faintly approaching military parity, because if they do, they will try to destroy the Jewish state. By this logic, Israel's only option is to establish and then maintain absolute military superiority over its neighbors; they will, so this view goes, accept Israel's presence only if they know they're sure to be defeated, or at least vastly outmatched.

This is the famous "iron wall," conceived by early Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky more than 80 years ago, well before the founding of Israel itself. (Jabotinsky founded the Revisionist movement, which in opposition to the Labor mainstream refused to accept any territorial compromise regarding Zionist aims, such as partition. Although he and his followers were for years shut out of the political leadership, their views regarding Israel's neighbors became deeply lodged in the public psyche.) If Iran were to acquire the capacity to build even one nuke -- Israel itself is estimated to have 150-200 of them -- that iron wall would be considered seriously breached, and the country might no longer be able to dictate terms to its neighbors. Given Iran's support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, Israel would then have to recalibrate its strategy both on its northern front and vis-à-vis the Palestinians.

Recent developments in Israel could certainly give the impression of a nation preparing for war: the Home Front command, one of four regional divisions of the Israeli army, has just announced the largest defense exercise in the country's history. It will last an entire week and is intended to prepare the civilian population for missile strikes from both conventional warheads and unconventional ones (whether chemical, biological or nuclear). Meanwhile, the country is accelerating its testing of missile defense systems, having just announced the successful launch of the Arrow II interceptor.

Can Israel Go It Alone?

Would Israel really attack Iran without at least tacit approval from Washington? Could Israel do so without such approval? At the very least, Israel would need approval simply to get permission to fly over Iraq, whose airspace is controlled by the U.S. military, not the Iraqi government in Baghdad. As columnist Aluf Benn put it in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, "Defense experts say that without a green light from Washington, Netanyahu and Barak will not be able to send in the air force." Kam adds, "In my judgment, it is somewhere between difficult to impossible for Israel to do it alone, for both technical and political reasons."

Most analysts here believe that a solo Israeli attack would, at best, set back Iran's nuclear program by several years -- not that this would necessarily be a deterrent to Netanyahu & Co. It's widely believed that, in their view, even a temporary delay in Iran's nuclear capability would be an improvement on the current course. It's worth recalling that Israel sought an explicit go-ahead from the Bush administration for an attack last year, which President Bush -- presumably fearing massive conventional retaliation from Iran in both Iraq and Afghanistan -- sensibly refused, a rare moment in his tenure when he did not accede to Israeli wishes.

It's also clear that President Obama seeks to resolve the standoff with Iran through diplomatic means. He's abandoned the confrontational rhetoric of his predecessor and continues to extend peace feelers to the Islamic Republic. Tehran's response has been mixed, but at least a new mood of negotiation is in the air.

Israeli strategists, however, see this new mood as threatening, not hopeful. Any U.S. rapprochement with Iran -- especially if carried out on terms that acknowledge Iran's status as a regional power -- could, they fear, undermine Israel's "special relationship" with Washington. As Iran analyst Trita Parsi put it in a recent piece in the Huffington Post, Iran would then "gain strategic significance in the Middle East at the expense of Israel."

It's within the realm of possibility, for example, that Washington could work out a grand bargain with Tehran terminating its policy of regime change and ending sanctions in return for Tehran's vow never to weaponize its nuclear program. Intrusive international inspections would presumably guarantee such a bargain, but Tehran's national pride would remain intact, as it would be allowed to retain the right to enrich uranium and develop a peaceful nuclear infrastructure.

There has even been some recent slippage in Washington's language when it comes to demands placed on Iran -- with an insistence on an end to all nuclear enrichment evidently being replaced by an insistence on no weapons development. To Israel, this would be a completely unsatisfactory compromise, as its leaders fear that Iran might at some point abandon such an agreement and in fairly short order weaponize.

Given Obama's new approach, it might seem that Israel is stymied for now. After all, it's hard to imagine Obama giving the go-ahead for an attack. Just this week, Vice President Joe Biden told CNN that he thought such an Israeli attack "would be ill-advised."

Other factors, however, play in the hardliners' favor: the Obama administration's new special envoy for Iran, Dennis Ross, is himself a hardliner. Last year, Ross was part of an ultra-hawkish task force that predicted the failure of any negotiations and all but called for war with Iran. Ross is a man who not only knows how to play the bureaucratic game in Washington, but has powerful backers in the administration, and his views will have plenty of support from pro-Israel hawks in Congress.

The attitude of another key sector in decision-making, the high command of the U.S. military, may also be evolving. Washington's dilemma in Iraq is not nearly as dire as it was two years ago. The nightmare envisioned by the American generals running the Iraq campaign in recent years -- that, in response to an attack on its nuclear facilities, Iran could send tens of thousands of well-trained commandos across the border and inflict grave damage on U.S. forces -- has faded somewhat. The Iraqi government's military has much better control of the country today, with insurgent violence at far lower levels. The Shiite Mahdi Army and Iran-connected "special groups" seem to be mostly quiescent.

Of course, the situation in Iraq is still unstable, and any attack on Iran could easily throw the country back into ungovernable chaos. Still, given the role we know American commanders played in nixing such an attack in the Bush years, the question remains: Has resistance to such an attack lessened in the military? It's unclear, but an issue worth monitoring, because American commanders were the most consistent, persuasive voices for moderation during the Bush administration.

It should go without saying that an Israeli attack on Iran would have disastrous consequences. No matter what Washington might claim, or how vociferously officials there denounce it, such an attack would be widely understood throughout the Muslim world as a joint U.S.-Israeli operation.

It would, as a start, serve as a powerful recruiting tool for extremist Islamist groups. In addition, an outraged Iran might indeed send commandos into Iraq, aid armed Iraqi groups determined to attack U.S. and government forces, shoot missiles into the Saudi or Kuwaiti oilfields, and attempt to block the Straits of Hormuz though which a significant percentage of global oil passes. Washington would certainly have to write off desperately needed cooperation in the war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Any attack would only strengthen the reign of the mullahs in Iran and reinforce the country's determination to acquire a nuclear deterrent force that would prevent future attacks. And keep in mind, Iran's nuclear program has overwhelming public support, even from those opposed to the current regime.

Given the Netanyahu government's visible determination to attack, an ambiguous signal from Washington, something far less than a green light, could be misread in Tel Aviv. Anything short of a categorical, even vociferous U.S. refusal to countenance an Israeli attack might have horrific consequences. So here's a message to Obama from an observer in Israel: Don't flash the yellow light -- not even once.

Roane Carey, on leave as managing editor of the Nation magazine, is on a journalism fellowship at the Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies and Diplomacy at Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva, Israel. He is co-editor of The Other Israel (New Press).
Copyright 2009 Roane Carey.
http://www.countercurrents.org/carey130409.htm ^^^^^^^^^

Saundra Hummer

April 15th, 2009, 12:39 PM

IIIII Taxing Matters
By
Robert Borosage
April 15th, 2009
9:22am ET

Tax Day. Fox News is flogging Astroturf "tea parties" underwritten by corporate lobbyists, while its pundits warn that raising the top income tax rate to the level it was under Bill Clinton constitutes "socialism." The Wall Street Journal editorializes about the evils of the estate tax. Ari Fleischer, Daddy Bush's old flack, is trotted out to complain that "redistribution of income" through the tax code "is getting out of hand."

Really? Here's the grim reality. Since 1980, when the conservative era began, inequality has reached Gilded Age extremes—while top-end tax rates have been cut. The wealthiest few captured ever more of the nation's income while successfully lowering their tax rates.

And worse, this is still going on. This month, every Republican senator—joined bizarrely by 10 Democrats—pushed for yet another tax break for the super-rich—those with fortunes over $7 million. Apparently worried that the heirs of the Paris Hilton class might not be able to keep the yacht clubs humming, Republican senators voted in lockstep to direct the Congress to raise the full exemption of estates from $7 million to $10 million per couple, and drop the top rate from 45 percent to 35 percent. Over a decade when fully in effect, this represents a bauble worth about $90 billion to the 1 in 400 estates (one-fourth of one percent) that reach that level.

Fleischer would suggest this is a small, but inadequate step to curb the confiscatory redistribution of the tax code. But he's peddling bull.

In 1980, as "Gilded Age Taxation," a study by the Institute for America's Future shows, the richest 1 percent of Americans captured fully 7.7 percent of the nation's after-tax income. The middle 60 percent captured about 50.9 percent. By 2006, the latest Congressional Budget Office figures show the opulent 1 percent—making an average $1.3 million —captured a staggering 16.3 percent of the nation's income after all that tax-code redistribution, while the middle 60percent garnered only 44.1 percent. If class war is being waged, the rich are on the march.

The Institute for Policy Studies in a new report details the staggering contrast to the Eisenhower years. In 1955, the top 400 taxpayers averaged about $12.3 million in income (2006 dollars) and paid, after exploiting every loophole imaginable, 51.2 percent of that in federal income tax. A half century later, the richest 400 average a breath-taking $263.3 million in income each, and pay a mere 17.2 percent of that in federal income taxes—a lower tax rate than paid by most of their secretaries.

If those 400 taxpayers had paid at the same rate in 2006 as a half century earlier, the federal treasury would have collected $35.9 billion more in revenue, or enough to double the energy and transportation budget combined. No wonder Ike, clearly a stealth "socialist," could afford to build the interstate transport system.

So why do Republican senators en mass and 10 wayward Democrats—Max Baucus, Evan Bayh, Maria Cantwell, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Patty Murray, Bill Nelson, Ben Nelson and Jon Testor—think the wealthiest one-fourth of one percent of Americans need another tax break? They wax eloquent about saving family farms and small businesses. But upon sober review, The New York Times editorial board provided a tempered evaluation of the argument: "That is swill." Opponents of the estate tax haven't been able to dig up a family that was forced to liquidate its farm or business due to the tax because these folks simply do not exist.

The sad reality is that conservative dominance over the last decades has had profound effects. One of these is that income inequality grew to Gilded Age extremes, while top-end tax rates were slashed. Fleischer is right. We did witness a lot of redistribution. But it went from the middle class to the very top, not the other way around.

Incidentally the new tax break isn't a done deal. A conference committee will decide its fate in the next week or two. You might want to call or write Republican senators or the wayward Democratic 10 and tell them enough already.

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Saundra Hummer

April 15th, 2009, 01:34 PM

. :wohoo: :elephant: :wohoo: :elephant: :wohoo: :elephant: :wohoo: A Mad Tea-Party
By
Bernie Horn
April 14th, 2009
11:30am ET

Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” says the White Rabbit who looks remarkably like Fox News bloviator Glenn Beck.

Beck and his fellow Fox partisans Sean Hannity, Neil Cavuto, and Greta Van Susteren are hurrying to publicize and legitimize the so-called “Tax Day Tea Party” tomorrow. But the multi-city event makes as much sense as a caterpillar smoking a hookah.

Organizers claim that “Tea Party” refers to the Boston Tea Party—which was a protest against taxation by the British Parliament without representation from America. But you don’t hear them crying out “no taxation without representation” or calling for D.C. statehood.

Also, unlike the 1773 protest in Boston, this is hardly a grassroots affair. It’s actually being organized by corporate front groups, including Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, and literally sponsored by Fox News.
So it must be inspired by some other kind of tea party…

Go on-site for cartoon drawingYes, the right wingers have fallen Down the Rabbit-Hole into a Wonderland where the absurd becomes entirely routine.

First the riddle, what is the Tax Day Tea Party about? What do the participants want?
“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
“No, I give it up,” Alice replied: “what's the answer?”
“I haven't the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.
“Nor I,” said the March Hare. Look at the wild comments on their website. Like Alice’s tea, it’s not about anything. No doubt there will be participants who don’t like paying taxes. But that’s hardly newsworthy. The Mad Haters' cacophony of complaints fall into three categories.

The loudest howls are about the $700 billion TARP bailout of Wall Street. Which is fine. Except Congress authorized that six months ago—at the insistence of President George W. Bush. If they’re fuming about TARP, isn’t this party a little late? And how do they explain all the anti-Obama signs?

“Curiouser and curiouser!”Okay, their second biggest complaint is about the $787 billion economic recovery act, enacted by Congress to create or preserve 3.5 million jobs. At least this one is Obama’s responsibility. But you’ve got to wonder, what do these people have against jobs? Every intellectually honest economist in the nation told us that Congress had to enact a stimulus package this year and many experts believe we will need another one before the year is over. The choice was between economic stimulus and something like a global depression.

The folks coming to a Tax Day Tea Party are either cynically dishonest or woefully ignorant. Either way, they are certainly mad…steaming, boiling mad.

“But I don't want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can't help that,” said the Cat: “we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn't have come here.” Of course, the corporate organizers of the Tax Day Tea Party are neither ignorant nor mad. They have an agenda, but you have to dig a little to find it. Look at their Resources page. It takes you to “The Tool Kit for Tea Parties,” which is a few PDFs on a website called “American Solutions.”

And what are the principal solutions? Cut tax rates for the rich. Cut the corporate tax rate. Abolish the capital gains tax. Abolish the estate tax. Oh, and oppose the Employee Free Choice Act.

Wow! Who in the world is American Solutions? Why it’s Newt Gingrich’s organization. (Click here for a fine picture of Newt grinning like a Cheshire Cat. Go on-site to gain access to this function.)
The whole tea party scam is designed to push people toward the maddest, craziest, most irresponsible right-wing corporate agenda Gingrich could imagine. And—once again—the lower-income, right wing rank-and-file are just being played as suckers by the rich.

Any tea party protester with half a grain of sense will come back agreeing with the girl who, 144 years ago, fell down the rabbit hole:

“At any rate I'll never go there again!” said Alice as she picked her way through the wood. “It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!” * * * The writer is a Senior Fellow at Campaign for America’s Future and author of the recent book, "Framing the Future: How Progressive Values Can Win Elections and Influence People."

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Saundra Hummer

April 15th, 2009, 02:11 PM

:: :: :: :: :: OUR TAX DOLLARS ARE PAYING FOR THIS?
DAMN!
SRHACCUSATIONS OF ABUSE
Guantanamo Prisoner Calls Al-Jazeera
By
Yassin Musharbash
Once a week Mohammed el Gharani, Guantanamo inmate number 269, is allowed to call a relative. But the 'uncle' he claimed to be speaking to was a journalist at Al-Jazeera. He spoke of being beaten with a baton, having his head beaten against the ground and being doused in tear gas. DDP
Prisoners in Guantanamo. Mohammed El Gharani says the running of the camp hasn't changed since Barack Obama took office.
Go on-site to view photo.
Arab news channel Al-Jazeera on Tuesday published the first interview ever conducted with a current inmate of Guantanamo, the US prison camp. "They had a thick rubber or plastic baton they beat me with," said Mohammed el Gharani, a 21-year-old Chadian national who has been held in the camp for seven years.

El Gharani makes further accusations. He says guards broke one of his front teeth, that they beat his head against the ground and emptied about two canisters of tear gas on him. All this happened after he refused to leave his cell. He said six men wearing helmets and protective clothing came into his cell and were accompanied by a soldier with a camera and canisters of tear gas.

His mistreatment in Guantanamo took place just 20 days before the inauguration of US President Barack Obama, el Gharani said. Obama declared on his second day in office that the camp would be closed within a year. But el Gharani says regardless of the new president, "there has been no change in the administration of Guantanamo."

Prisoner Knows Al-Jazeera Journalist
It seems that el Gharani, who was 14 when the Pakistani police handed him over to the US military, gave the interview by tricking prison authorities. He enjoys certain privileges because he is no longer classified as an "enemy combatant" thanks to a court ruling in January 2009. That means he is allowed to call relatives once a week -- or, to be precise, he can have them called. The number of the "uncle" he asked to be called was in fact the number of Sami al-Hajj, an Al-Jazeera cameraman who had spent six years in Guantanamo before being released last year.

Al-Hajj transcribed part of the interview and Al-Jazeera put it on its Web site on Tuesday.

The broadcaster also confronted the Pentagon and the US Justice Ministry with el Gharani's statements, but received an evasive response from the spokesman of the camp. Commander Brook DeWalt said he had no evidence that the phone transcript was authentic or that the claims were true.

Sami al-Hajj, the Al-Jazeera cameraman who spoke to el Gharani, told SPIEGEL ONLINE on Wednesday that the published phone conversation wasn't the first he had with the man from Chad. The first contact was about 10 days ago. He said he had given el Gharani his number when he had still been a detainee in Guantanamo. "So I know him well," Hajj said. "I'm convinced that he's telling the truth. Just as I'm convinced that he never had any links with the Taliban or al-Qaida."

Insufficient Evidence
El Gharani is being held in Camp Iguana, al-Hajj said. That part of Guantanamo is where inmates are held who are to be released. El Gharani has been part of that group ever since a judge ruled on January 19 that the US government doesn't have reliable evidence of his involvement in international terrorism.

According to documents in his case published by the New York Times, the US government accused el Gharani of having received military training in an al-Qaida-affiliated military training camp, been a courier for high-ranking members of the network and having been a member of an al-Qaida cell based in Lolndon.

Judge Richard J. Leon concluded that too many of the accusations were based on possibly unreliable statements by fellow detainees, or on secret documents that were inconsistent. He said that while doubts remained, none of the evidence justified classifying him as an "enemy combatant." As a result, all possible diplomatic steps should be taken to release him.

Al-Hajj said el Gharani was now aware of this decision and was preparing to be deported to Chad, although he had never been there before. According to US government documents, el Gharani is a citizen of Chad but was born in Saudi Arabia, from where he is alleged to have entered Pakistan with a forged passport.

It is difficult to verify el Gharani's accusations. Ever since Guantanamo was set up in 2002, the US government has prohibited any contact between inmates and journalists. El Gharani was one of the first, and one of the youngest, inmates to arrive in the prison camp in Cuba.

RELATED SPIEGEL ONLINE LINKS
Released Guantanamo Detainee: What Did Tony Blair Know? (02/23/2009)
UK Lawyer on Renditions Victim: The British Government Is 'Hiding Things' (02/18/2009)http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,619195,00.html#ref=nlint :: :: :: :: :: ::

Saundra Hummer

April 15th, 2009, 02:58 PM

....... THE PROGRESS REPORTApril 15, 2009
By
Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley,
Benjamin Armbruster, Ali Frick, Ryan Powers, and Lee Fang
RADICAL RIGHT
Tea Baggers Against Obama
While Americans across the country prepare to pay their taxes today, many right-wing activists plan to spend the day dressed in colonial tri-corner hats as they wave tea bags in the air. Conservatives are calling for these "tea party" protests, allegedly modeled on the Boston Tea Party, to oppose President Obama and to denounce taxes. Though the "tea" in tea party supposedly stands for "Taxed Enough Already," no American household or business will face higher taxes this tax day. In fact, the economic stimulus package signed into law by Obama enacted one of the largest tax cuts ever for middle-class families, making good on Obama's campaign promise to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans. The first benefits from these cuts arrived in paychecks earlier this month. What's more, a recent Gallup poll found that Americans' views of income taxes are among the most positive since 1956. In his budget proposal, Obama has recommended raising the top income tax brackets back to rates under the Clinton administration and closing corporate loopholes, two issues he campaigned on, in order to strengthen America's economy by funding health care, clean energy, and education reform. Well-heeled corporate lobbyists are helping engineer today's "tea party" protests as an act of opposition to the Obama agenda.

SPONTANEOUS UPRISING?: Although spokesmen of the tea parties have made significant efforts to portray the protests as organic uprisings of like-minded citizens, corporate lobbyists have engineered much of the planning and execution of the events. The corporate front group FreedomWorks, run by lobbyist and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX), had its staff organize the very first tea party on Feb. 27 in Tampa, FL, following CNBC's Rick Santelli's call for a Boston Tea Party-like upheaval to protest Obama's housing plan. Soon after, FreedomWorks began planning nationwide tea party protests and had their operatives help coordinate logistics, call conservative activists, and provide activists with everything from organizing tips to sign ideas. Americans for Prosperity, a front group run by corporate lobbyist Tim Phillips (a former partner to Ralph Reed), assisted with the effort, drawing upon its extensive field staff to plan events, write press releases, and distribute talking points for people on the ground. Newt Gingrich's American Solutions for Winning the Future -- which is funded by polluters and helped orchestrated the "Drill Here, Drill Now" campaign last summer -- has also signed on to support the protests.

FOX NEWS MEGAPHONE: Both Fox News and Fox Business have run back-to-back promotions explicitly encouraging viewers to attend the tea parties. The Fox broadcasts are in turn being used by the tea party organizers to promote their protests. Promising "fair and balanced" coverage, Fox News hosts such as Glenn Beck, Neil Cavuto, and Sean Hannity are all planning to broadcast live from the events. The segments for the tea parties are replete with enthusiastic endorsements, like the recent announcement of one Fox pundit that it's "time to party like it's 1773!" In their drive to promote the protests, Fox is fueling paranoia by making unsubstantiated, conspiratorial claims that the Obama administration may send "spies" to the tea parties. Another claim Fox asserts to justify its nonstop promotional coverage is that the network provided similar coverage for the Million Man March in 1995. However, Fox News didn't launch until 1996.

A POLITICAL STRATEGY: Congressional Republicans have fully embraced the tea parties as a channel for opposing Obama. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) is speaking at a tea party in Bakersfield; Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) will be speaking at an Americans for Prosperity tea party in Madison. Over 35 other Republican lawmakers have been invited to speak at other tea party rallies. Republican governors who opposed the economic stimulus package -- such as Rick Perry of Texas and Mark Sanford of South Carolina -- plan to address tea party protests in their own states. Even after being rebuked by organizers of the tea parties, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has moved the RNC to officially support the protests. If the GOP's effort to brand and own the protests weren't already apparent, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) introduced legislation formally honoring April 15th as "National Tea Party Day." "It's going to be more directed at Obama," observed Daily Beast reporter Ana Marie Cox on the Republican Party's obsession with the tea parties. "This is very much, I think, part of the midterm strategy."

THE UNIFYING MESSAGE -- OPPOSE OBAMA: Despite steady, high approval ratings for President Obama, the proponents of the tea parties seem intent on demonizing him as the cause of the country's problems. The ostensible anti-tax platform of the tea parties in fact has not resonated with all the participants. The events have drawn various elements of the fringe right-wing movement, with gun rights militias, secessionists, radical anti-immigrant organizations, and neo-Nazi groups currently working to contribute to the organizing effort, bringing with them their own pet issues. Past tea parties have featured gatherings of people inspired to protest Obama over conspiracies related to the President's birth certificate. One of the most prominent Obama birth certificate conspiracy theorists, Alan Keyes, is the keynote speaker of the Washington, D.C. tea party today.

UNDER THE RADAR
RADICAL RIGHT -- DHS REPORT: AFTER OBAMA'S ELECTION, RIGHT-WING EXTREMISM 'MAY BE GAINING NEW RECRUITS': The extreme right -- those who are "hate-oriented," "mainly antigovernment," or those dedicated to a "single issue" -- is a legitimate threat that law enforcement must deal with, according to a new assessment from the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security. The report, which was coordinated with the FBI and is being given to federal, state, and local law enforcement, warns, "The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment." Most extremists have made "rhetorical" statements and have "stopp[ed] short of calls for violent action," but since the 2008 election, right-wing extremists are "reaching out to a wider audience of potential sympathizers." The DHS under President Bush was apparently more reluctant to make such assessments about the right. According to CQ, a 2005 report outlining terrorist threats "does not mention anti-government groups, white supremacists and other radical right-wing movements." Conservative bloggers -- such as Michelle Malkin and Newsbusters -- are up in arms over the report. A DHS official responded to the right's criticism, noting that DHS did an assessment of left-wing extremism in January. "This is nothing unusual. ... This is about awareness," the official said.

IMMIGRATION -- REPORT: 75% OF IMMIGRANTS DEPORTED FOR CRIMES COMMITTED NON-VIOLENT CRIMES: A report by Human Rights Watch finds that "the U.S. government's stepped-up enforcement in recent years has led to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants convicted of nonviolent crimes," despite the government's claims that it is prioritizing violent criminals. According to the report, nearly 75 percent of the 897,000 immigrants deported between 1997 and 2007 after serving criminal sentences were nonviolent offenders, and one-fifth were legal permanent residents. "The top reasons for deportation during the 10-year period were entering the U.S. illegally, driving while under the influence of alcohol, assault and immigration crimes, such as selling false citizenship papers." The report comes just days after the AP released an investigation showing the the U.S. has imprisoned or even deported "dozens, probably many more" of legal U.S. citizens. "A monthslong AP investigation has documented 55 such cases, on the basis of interviews, lawsuits and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. These citizens are detained for anything from a day to five years. Immigration lawyers say there are actually hundreds of such cases." Last week, Obama administration officials said the White House's push to enact comprehensive immigration reform could come as early as this year.

MEDIA -- EDITOR: 'I'M EMBARRASSED' I PUBLISHED REP. BACHMANN'S CAP AND TRADE LIES: On April 8, global warming denier Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) published an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that attacked green economy legislation by claiming that "cap and trade" is really "cap and tax." To make her argument, Bachmann wrote, "[A]ccording to an analysis by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the average American household could expect its yearly energy bill to increase by $3,128 per year." This claim, however, was a flat lie, as a letter to the editor published the very next day pointed out. In fact, Bachmann's lie had been debunked publicly by MIT's John Reilly with Politifact.com on Tuesday, March 24. Reilly also sent a letter to the congressional Republican leadership denouncing their repeated use of the fabricated figure. In an interview with the Wonk Room's Brad Johnson, Eric Ringham, the opinion page editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, acknowledged that the MIT lie was fully debunked before the column was submitted by Bachmann. "It wasn't on my radar. I'm embarrassed to have let it go unchallenged," said Ringham. Ringham told Johnson that with both the limited resources he has and the role of the opinion page as a forum for argument, it is "an uncomfortable role" for an op-ed editor to run corrections after a column's publication. "I'm not equipped -- or really inclined -- to go, after the fact, probing someone's assertions," said Ringham. Despite the fact that a correction will not be run, Ringham said, "You can rest assured this study is never going to be represented in the paper again without confirmation it's being accurately portrayed."

THINK FAST

Forty-one percent of Americans now believe that lower-income people are paying their "fair share" of federal taxes, up from 32 percent last year, according to a new Gallup poll. At the same time, just 23 percent say that upper-income taxpayers pay their “fair share," while 60 percent say they pay too little.

The Obama administration plans to "disclose the conditions of the 19 biggest banks in the country." Administration officials concluded that "keeping many of the findings secret could send investors fleeing from financial institutions rumored to be weakest." All the banks are expected to pass the "stress tests," but "some are expected to be graded more highly than others."

While details remain vague, "clues are now emerging" that suggest President Obama intends to strengthen President Bush's No Child Left Behind law by toughening "requirements on topics like teacher quality and academic standards" and increasing the law's emphasis on helping failing schools.

"The Obama administration is leaning toward keeping secret some graphic details of tactics allowed" in CIA interrogations, which include stories about head smashing. Top CIA officials and "some in the White House...argue that disclosing such secrets will undermine the agency's credibility with foreign intelligence services."

A 21-year-old Guantanamo detainee, Mohammed el Gharani, called Al-Jazeera "to say he was severely beaten for refusing to leave his cell." Al-Jazeera would not disclose how it managed to speak with el Gharani, whom a judge ordered to be released in January.

Human Rights Watch reports that the government has deported hundreds of thousands of immigrants convicted of nonviolent crimes in recent years, despite its claim to prioritize violent criminals for deportation. "Nearly three-quarters of the roughly 897,000 immigrants deported from 1997 to 2007 after serving criminal sentences were convicted of nonviolent offenses, and one-fifth were legal permanent residents."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said today "that he was preparing a new proposal to resolve disputes with the West over Iran's nuclear program, opening the door to talks with the United States." Ahmadinejad "did not elaborate on the contents of the proposal," but his announcement appeared to be a response to the recent U.S. decision to join discussions with Iran on its disputed nuclear program.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told an audience at Morehouse College that "recently we have seen tentative signs that the sharp decline in economic activity may be slowing," noting that housing and consumer spending may be flattening. "A leveling out of economic activity is the first step toward recovery," he said.

And finally: It seems that fallen governor Rod Blagojevich isn't quite ready to get out of the spotlight. Since losing his gubernatorial perch, Blagojevich has filled in as a talk radio host on WLS radio in Chicago. Now he may star in an NBC reality TV show called "I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here."

GOOD NEWS
Today, a U.S. ship carrying food aid destined for Kenya "foiled an attack by Somali pirates" who are pledging revenge for their recent defeat by Navy SEALs.

STATE WATCH
ALASKA: Gov. Sarah Palin (R) says global warming is real but advocates more drilling to solve it.

ILLINOIS: Former governor Rod Blagojevich pleads not guilty in federal court to sweeping corruption charges

CALIFORNIA: Los Angeles school district plans to lay off more than 5,000 teachers, counselors, custodians, and other staff.

BLOG WATCH
THINK PROGRESS: Sen. John Ensign (R-NV): Republicans will revive "Drill Here, Drill Now" push this summer.

WONK ROOM: Ralph Peters plays his only tune, "crush the barbarians."

YGLESIAS: Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) is trying to start bank runs.

FIREDOGLAKE: Newt Gingrich's American Solutions spent over $3 million on private planes in 2008.

DAILY GRILL

"There's a big difference between covering something and promoting it."
-- Fox Business's Charles Payne, 4/14/09, on Fox News advocating for the tea parties
VERSUS
"It's now my great duty to promote the tea parties."
-- Fox News's Stuart Varney, 4/13/09

INTERNSHIPS
The research team that brings you The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org needs summer interns! Click here for more information.
This post is only a summary.
Go on-site to gain access to complete articles
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Saundra Hummer

April 15th, 2009, 03:48 PM

<><><><><><>Somalian 'Piracy Can Only Be Ended on Land'In the aftermath of Sunday's dramatic rescue of an American ship captain from Somali pirates, US President Barack Obama has pledged to work with partners to prevent further attacks. Some German newspapers Tuesday argue that the only way to solve the crisis is to sort out the chaos in Somalia.The dramatic rescue on Sunday of the American ship captain held by pirates off the Horn of Africa may have ended the hostage crisis that had gripped the US, but the scourge of Somali piracy continues. On Tuesday, a Greek ship was hijacked in the Gulf of Aden, the third act of piracy following the two daring rescues by French forces on Friday and the US Navy on Sunday night which left five Somali pirates and one French hostage dead.
REUTERS
US Naval Forces rescued Richard Phillips, right, on Sunday
Go on-site for photo. Captain Richard Phillips was freed from his five-day ordeal on Sunday night when Navy SEAL snipers killed three of the four pirates who had been holding him on a drifting lifeboat. The capture of a US citizen has pushed the issue of piracy in one of the world's busiest shipping routes firmly up the White House agenda. Speaking in Washington on Monday, President Barack Obama said that he was committed to working with other nations to "halt the rise of piracy" and "prevent further attacks."

The United States is reportedly considering new military and diplomatic strategies in the aftermath of the hostage crisis, including deploying Navy gunships along the Somali coastline and launching a campaign to disable pirate "mother ships."

While the US president has been praised for giving the go-ahead for the rescue operation, some experts warn that the fatal shooting of three of Phillips' captors could lead to an escalation of the piracy conflict. Heavily armed gunmen, often teenagers, have seized dozens of vessels in recent years and most have negotiated a ransom from the ship owners, with the gangs generally treating their captives well. However, Somali pirate leaders have now vowed to take revenge on US and French citizens for the killing of the pirates this week.

The relatives of the 228 foreign nationals, many from the Philippines, still being held hostage by Somali pirate gangs have voiced fears that their loved ones could bear the brunt of the US and French military action.

The ongoing anarchy in Somalia has created conditions that allow groups of pirates to launch their attacks, and the United Nations in December authorized nations to "use all measures," including land assaults to combat the pirate problem. However, following the disastrous US peacekeeping mission in Somalia in the early 1990s, which saw 18 American soldiers killed, there is little appetite in Washington for a land operation in the chaotic country.

On Tuesday, German commentators look at the options facing the international community and the United States in particular in the aftermath of Sunday's successful operation. Many argue that the only way out of the crisis is to address the political chaos in Somalia itself.

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

REUTERS
An image of the lifeboat where Maersk-Alabama captain Richard Phillips was held hostage, as taken by an American drone. Photo: go on site to view."The president has proved to his conservative critics, who had vilified him for being too weak on questions of national security, that he does not shy away from using military force if it is required. He also did not balk at the risk that it could end in a possible failure. It must have been clear to him how much a failure of a commando action can damage the reputation of a president -- particularly a Democrat -- after Clinton's unsuccessful intervention in Haiti in 1993 and Jimmy Carter's disastrous attempt to rescue embassy hostages in Tehran."

"However, the pirates will hardly be deterred. They have already threatened to kill future US hostages. The US Navy warns that the violence will escalate. Even if Obama only wanted to rescue one life, the pirates feel challenged to a battle to the end. And the international community does not have a coherent strategy to win such a battle. The real test of Commander in Chief Obama will be whether he can change that."

The conservative Die Welt writes:

"Captain Richard Phillips' rescue from Somali pirates was a welcome success for President Barack Obama. Shortly before his 100th day in office the man who up to now appeared as a fine orator has also proven himself to be a resolute commander in chief. However, he cannot rest on his laurels. The pirates are holding several other hostages and have scouts all along the African coast. There is a possible link to Islamist groups close to al-Qaida -- groups that want try to take control of the country. A second Afghanistan could emerge on the Horn of Africa."

"Obama is now openly considering trying to put a spoke in al-Qaida's wheel in Somalia. This is not supposed to look like the start of a second Afghanistan war, but it could become one under the force of circumstances."

The left-leaning Die Tageszeitung writes:

"The most likely outcome is that in the future pirates will give ships sailing under the US flag a wide berth. Instead they will concentrate on other countries' ships -- for the time being. If, for example, Germany sends in troops to storm its ships ... then the pirates will at some point rearm -- and the ships of the rich nations will do the same. The result would be an arms race on the high seas."

"It's clear already who the losers will be. They are the sailors from low-wage countries like the Philippines who already make up the majority of the 240 hostages held by the pirates. Hardly anyone cares about them. Their governments lack the money, know-how and often the political will to attempt a rescue. The West doesn't care about them unless they happen to be on board a European ship. This means they will be the victims of future pirate attacks."

The Financial Times Deutschland writes:

"The pirate attacks off the Horn of Africa have been a growing problem for months -- but until now it was not a big problem for the Americans. It was European ships that were being hijacked and the hostages were primarily Asian sailors."

"Since the weekend the pirate plague has become an issue in Washington. The fact that the US will now be drawn deeper into the conflict should prompt the international community to change its strategy for dealing with the problem. It is time to understand that the fight against piracy along one of the most important trading routes cannot be won on the ocean. The area surrounding Somalia is simply too big to be controlled by war ships."

"The pirate chaos can only be ended on land. As long as anarchy reigns in the Puntland region, because the Somali government has no influence there, the pirates will not give up their lucrative business."

"An immediate military action on land to clear the pirate villages is not what is required. What is urgently needed is for the West to get involved in the Somali civil war, which it has largely ignored since the traumatic peacekeeping mission of the 1990s. The African Union is too weak to put pressure on the warring parties, or to build up the state structures and give the shattered country any economic prospects. This is where the US government can play an important role."

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

"Rescues by force cannot become the rule. The principle that seafaring nations should not allow themselves to be blackmailed into paying ransoms is a noble one, but it doesn't increase the risks for the pirates. The battle against piracy cannot be a rivalry about who has the best snipers -- it is simply not clear how many new pirates are emerging. "

"The power struggle on the Horn of Africa is far from decided, neither between the pirates and the war ships, nor between the schools of thought about the best course of action to take."

-- Siobhán Dowling, 1.20 p.m. CET

RELATED SPIEGEL ONLINE LINKS
Somalia Swashbucklers: Pirates Extend their Hunting Grounds (04/09/2009)
Photo Gallery: Pirate-Infested Waters
Policing the Gulf of Aden: Somali Pirate Trial Tests Limits of EU Mission (04/01/2009)
Prelude to Piracy: The Poor Fishermen of Somalia (12/04/2008)

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2009
All Rights Reserved
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,618904,00.html#ref=nlint <><><><><><><><><>

Saundra Hummer

April 15th, 2009, 06:13 PM

. . . . . . . . . Karl Rove Wouldn't Know the Truth
if it
Bit Him on the Butt

posted by: Aaron Pendell
4 days ago

Go on-site for photo.

Oh how I wish, ha.
SRH

Hello,

When I heard Karl Rove call Vice President Joe Biden a "liar" yesterday, I had to laugh. Rove, "The Architect," or "Turd Blossom," as George W. Bush nicknamed him, is a man whose relationship with the truth is adversarial in nature. He's a man who is so full of crap that you can hear it slosh about when he goes into a turn. That Karl Rove is assigned any credibility at all, that he's still allowed a public platform from which to spew such nonsense, is mind boggling, to say the least.

Rove's on-air slight of the Vice President stemmed from Biden's statement that he had once confronted Bush about the latter's lacking leadership skills. In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Biden recalled a brief exchange with the former President:

I remember President Bush saying to me one time in the Oval Office, "Well, Joe," he said, "I'm a leader." And I said: "Mr. President, turn and around look behind you. No one is following."

Rove responded Thursday from the "fair and balanced," bastion of objectivity (sarcasm intended), Fox News:

It didn't happen. Look, Joe Biden does this. I remember this a couple of years ago when he made a similar claim. Joe Biden said, for example, that he spent hours with the president. Joe Biden was never alone with the president for more than a few moments. There were staff in the room at all times. He never said these kinds of things.

I hate to say it, but he's a serial exaggerator. If I was being unkind I would say he's a liar. But it is a habit he ought to drop...

It is worth noting that Karl Rove avoided taking issue with what Biden told his interviewers just before the above quote:

...the last administration left us in a weaker posture than we've been any time since World War II: less regarded in the world, stretched more thinly than we ever have been in the past, two wars under way, virtually no respect in entire parts of the world...

I imagine that Rove left that tidbit untouched because truer words have yet to be spoken.

Rove's accusation can only be taken seriously if you discount his previous behavior. Consider his disclosure of Valerie Plame's identity to Time's Matt Cooper. After weeks of denying his involvement, Rove admitted his role in the leak.

As recently as this week, Rove circumvented the truth in his Wall Street Journal column, within which he declared that Obama had become a "divisive figure." Rove based his assessment on figures from a Pew poll, which would be fine, except Pew had already publicly stated that their figures weren't supportive of that argument.

Rove even had the audacity to lie in the same interview in which he asserted that Biden was a "liar." He dusted off the old, discredited, nugget that gets brought up every time conservatives discuss Joe Biden. The "Biden is a plagerist" meme:

Look, this is a guy whose 1988 presidential campaign was derailed because he was found to have been copying, plagiarizing a speech by Neil Kinnock, the leader of the British Labor Party, and recounting an episode in Kinnock's life as if it were in his own life, involving I think a coal miner relative or something.

As David Neiwert wrote in his April 10 post at CrooksAndLiars.com, "This is a lie -- or at least a grotesque enough distortion of what happened to count as one."

These are only the most recent examples of Karl Rove's apparant inability to tell the truth. I could go on, but a proper listing of his falsehoods would be too exhaustive for a mere blog post. However, please be sure to tell me your opinion in the comments section below. Better yet, give me your favorite example of Rove's deviousness. There are plenty to choose from.

Read more:
bush, rove, politics, political, opinion, cnn, george bush, obama, vp, george w bush, plamegate, Biden, Karl Rove, fox news, obama administration, rove lies, turd blossom, joe biden, vice president, bushs brain, valerie plame, biden interview
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Saundra Hummer

April 16th, 2009, 11:20 AM

<><><><><> BUZZFLASH.COM
Fox News Sponsors Teabagging Tax Day Parties, Wins BuzzFlash's Media PUTZ of the Week
Submitted by
Chad
Wed, 04/15/2009
9:00pm. BuzzFlash Honors
BUZZFLASH MEDIA PUTZ OF THE WEEK Media PUTZ.com
April 16, 2009
Fox News
For reporting that is an embarrassment to the profession of journalism, and for being beholden to corporate paymasters rather than the citizens of America.
Go on-site for photo/graph.
The bowl games at the end of the college football season used to have simple names: Cotton, Rose, Sun, Orange. Now, we get AT&T Fed Ex Capital One Papa John's Tostitos bowls. Sponsorships run amok, but these are businesses trying to associate their name on a product for publicity.

This week, we had the "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties" -- at least, this is the way the events were portrayed on the Fox News Channel (LINK). The day featured FNC personalities on the road as part of the process: Neil Cavuto in Sacramento, CA, Glenn Beck in San Antonio, TX, Sean Hannity in Atlanta, and Greta Van Susteren in Washington, DC.

You may have heard the phrase from serious journalists that "they never want to be part of the story." A good journalist knows this. But then again, we are talking about the Fox News Channel.

Covering events is part of what journalists do. Promoting events, including but not limited to putting your initials before the event, is not what journalists do.

There are several Fox News contributors who are directly involved with the teabagging parties. Then there is the outright hosting of a party as Fox News' new Web site, The Fox Nation, will "host a virtual tea party."

What's funny is watching how the Fox "News" Channel promotes the tea parties, but sometimes goes out of their way to say that they aren't sponsoring the tea parties. From Steve Doocy of "Fox and Friends":

"Right here on Fox & Friends, we're going to be kicking things off throughout the day. And Fox isn't sponsoring any of this stuff."

Gee, Steve. According to the transcript, no one said you were sponsoring the events. Guilty conscience??

Having Neil Cavuto try and justify the difference in covering events was made even more hilarious as he claimed the channel covered an event (Million Man March) that happened before the channel went on the air. Nice research there, Neil.

But it's what Cavuto said before his Million Man goof that speaks volumes to the "journalism" practiced by FNC.

"we are going to be right in the middle of these protests because at FOX we do not pick and choose these rallies and protests."

Smack in the middle of the teabagging: a very strategic position. Seriously though, you aren't supposed to be in the middle of anything. You stand outside and you cover.

It would be nice if there was footage of Fox News covering the Iraq War protests with equal passion, but of course, there is no video.

The piece de resistance was on Teabagging, er, Tax Day when Cavuto was caught exaggerating the crowd in Sacramento by at least 100%-200%, according to Daily Kos.

Why would you need to exaggerate the count unless your tie-in credibility would have otherwise suffered?

Fox News likes to pretend it's in the journalism and cable news business. But its support of teabagging events ins much more in line with its actual mission, spreading right-wing propaganda under the guise of "fair and balanced" and "journalism."

For giving this honorable profession yet another black eye, Fox News wins the Media PUTZ of the Week award.

Fox News previously won the Media PUTZ of the week on May 15, 2008.

BUZZFLASH MEDIA PUTZ OF THE WEEK
COMMENTS:
Fixed Noise Media Putz of the MillenniumSubmitted by Malgoska on Thu, 04/16/2009 - 11:33am.
I think they richly deserve the title. Media Putz of the week does not even scratch the surface.
I guess greta van susteren
Submitted by christopherflynn on Thu, 04/16/2009 - 10:16am.
I guess greta van susteren is a "foxy lady"...(albeit, a stupid one...)

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/honors/155 <><><><><><><><><>

Saundra Hummer

April 16th, 2009, 11:31 AM

IIIIIIIIIII News Hounds
We watch FOX so you don't have to

Glenn Beck Praises Texas Secessionists As Patriots: They Just Think Texas Does America Best
Reported by Ellen
April 16, 2009
57 comments
Go on-site to read
On last night's (4/15/09) On The Record, Greta Van Susteren interviewed Glenn Beck at a tea party protest at The Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. Beck who, you may recall burst into tears on national television just thinking about how much he loves his country, nonetheless praised the Texans behind him who cheered raucously when Van Susteren referred to Texas Governor Rick Perry's recent statement that Texas might have to secede. “They just think Texas does America best,” Beck said jovially about the secessionist-supporting crowd. With video.

Standing in front of the Alamo, Beck said, “This is the place – everybody's always heard, you know, 'Draw a line in the sand' – this is where it happened. They drew a line in the sand and said 'Enough is enough.'”

Beck later told Van Susteren, “Texans understand a republic better than anybody else in the country.” Wild cheers erupted behind him.

At that point, Van Susteren brought up Governor Rick Perry's statement earlier in the day, after speaking at that same protest, in which he suggested to reporters that Texas might have to secede. “Governor Perry has some pretty harsh words for the federal government right now,” she said. Another wild cheer broke out at those words.

Beck responded by saying he had talked to the governor and while he didn't know how popular Perry is (another big cheer), “His words rang true to an awful lot of people, not just in Texas, but I think a lot of people all around the country.” Speaking figuratively to the federal government, Beck said, “You need to back off!” That brought on another burst of loud approval.

“I don't want to be too dramatic,” Van Susteren said, “but it almost seems like Texas is looking to secede from the rest of the nation.” Now there were cheers, applause and banner-waving.”

Beck didn't disagree. He asked the cameras to get a shot of a large banner of the Texas flag with the words, “Texas Independence” on it. That prompted what were probably the loudest, longest cheers yet.

Bragging about how well he understands Texas (because he lived there for four years), Beck said, “These people love America (more cheers). They just think Texas does America best.”

The crowd erupted into a “USA!” chant.

VIDEO: Go on-site to view.
http://www.newshounds.us/2009/04/16/glenn_beck_praises_texas_secessionists_as_patriots _they_just_think_texas_does_america_best.php IIIIIIIIIII

Saundra Hummer

April 16th, 2009, 12:16 PM

:::::::::::The Graveyard of Empires:
America's New Asian QuagmireSubmitted by rick on Thu, 02/19/2009 - 20:48
Anti-Imperialism/Anti-War Central Asia
With the situation on the ground rapidly deteriorating, U.S. imperialism's South
Asian adventure is going off the rails.The New York Times reported February 4 that supplies "intended for NATO forces in Afghanistan were suspended Tuesday after Taliban militants blew up a highway bridge in the Khyber Pass region, a lawless northwestern tribal area straddling the border with Afghanistan."

The 30-yard-long iron bridge, located 15 miles northwest of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) provincial capital, Peshawar, a thriving metropolis of several million people, was a major supply route ferrying some 80 percent of NATO supplies into Afghanistan.

Tuesday's attacks were followed-up Wednesday when insurgents torched 10 supply trucks returning from Afghanistan, the Los Angeles Times reported. Supplies destined for NATO forces in Afghanistan--primarily food and fuel--are trucked through Pakistan by local contractors. Many are now refusing to drive the circuitous route through the Khyber Pass because of the dangerous conditions.

As Asia Times reported January 29, Peshawar "is the commercial, economic, political and cultural capital of the Pashtuns in Pakistan." Increasingly, it is morphing into a major power center for jihadists--on both sides of the border.

Peshawar and its surrounds are also now the epicenter for the Taliban and other militants in their struggle not only in Afghanistan and Pakistan but also in their bid to establish a base from which to wage an "end-of-time battle" that would stretch all the way to the Arab heartlands of Damascus and Palestine. (Syed Saleem Shahzad, "On the Militant Trail, Part 1: A battle before a battle," Asia Times Online, January 29, 2009)

With kidnappings--whether by militants or criminal gangs--and beheadings on the rise, the city is cloaked in fear. Residents believe "a major showdown" between the state and the jihadists "is imminent."

Daily Times reported February 4 that the "Talibanization" of Orakzai Agency near Peshawar has accelerated to such an extent that local people have fled the area to "escape Taliban-style rule." Daily Times avers,

Orakzai, which borders Kurram in the west and Hangu district in the east, provides a means to the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to expand its influence to Peshawar through Khyber Agency. The organisation has already made its presence in the region known by attacking truck terminals for Afghanistan-bound supplies for NATO and US forces. Despite government attempts to block their infiltration, the Taliban recently celebrated their "complete control" over the region by inviting a group of journalists to the area in a show of power. (Abdul Saboor Khan, "Orakzai becomes a new have for Taliban," Daily Times, February 4, 2009)

Pakistani officials told the New York Times "it was not immediately clear how soon the trucks carrying crucial supplies for NATO forces would be able to travel throughthe Khyber Pass to Afghanistan."

Meanwhile, in a further setback for U.S. regional plans, The Guardian reported
February 3, that the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet Republic, was threatening to close the U.S. airbase of Manas "a key staging post for coalition forces fighting in nearby Afghanistan."

Both US and Nato commanders have expressed dismay at the possible closure. It comes at a time when Nato is desperately trying to expand its supply routes to Afghanistan via the northern countries of central Asia following a series of devastating attacks on truck convoys from Pakistan. (Luke Harding, "Closure of US base in Kyrgyzstan could alter Afghanistan strategy," The Guardian, February 3, 2009)

In an echo of the 19th century "Great Game" for the control of Central Asia by
Czarist Russia and Imperial Britain, Russia has been pressuring Kurmanbek Bakiyev's authoritarian regime to expel the Americans, viewed as a destabilizing power in the region.

The expulsion of U.S. forces from the Manas airbase would be a blow to U.S. efforts to control vital routes of licit and illicit cargo--including the booming heroin trade--and would follow a similar expulsion from Uzbekistan in 2006 following a deal between Moscow and the Uzbek kleptocracy run by President Islam Karimov.

The Kyrgyz Parliament is expected to vote next week on a measure to expel the Americans from Manas. The "loss of the base would present a significant problem for the Obama administration," The New York Times reported February 5. TheTimes averred, "About 15,000 personnel and 500 tons of cargo pass through Manas each month. The base is also the home of large tanker aircraft that are used for in-air refueling of fighter planes on combat missions over Afghanistan."

But behind the posturing over money and loans to the impoverished Central Asian nation, the Russian government is expecting a quid pro quo from the Obama administration if the U.S. is allowed to continue to use Manas as a launching pad into Afghanistan. In a move designed to pressure the U.S., the Russians are playing hardball, seeking concessions from the administration to scrap planned "missile defense" facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic, viewed by Moscow as a first strike weapon.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. imperialism and their NATO partners have encircled Russia with a string of bases in Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus in tandem with the eastward expansion of NATO. Additionally, the CIA, Britain's MI6 as well as Pakistan's ISI have fueled the on-again, off-again "Islamist" insurgency in Chechnya; a move designed to hasten the disintegration of the Russian Federation into docile statelets aligned with the United States--a familiar playbook used in the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia.

With the Obama administration banking on a favorable outcome in Afghanistan as the United States ramps-up military operations, doubling American forces to some 60,000 troops within twelve months, the prospects for resupplying those troops without Russian cooperation are grim.

The Washington Post reported February 4 that "newly installed officials describe a situation on the ground that is far more precarious than they had anticipated." On Monday, The Independent averred that the situation on the ground in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan is particularly unnerving for NATO operations.

During Operation Kapcha Salaam or "Cobra Salute," a joint British and Afghan army offensive that included heavy armor and warplanes, soldiers were under near continuous attack by insurgents firing rockets, heavy mortars and detonating sophisticated roadside bombs. According to The Independent, insurgent ranks were filled with Pakistani and Chechen militants. The fighting has taken a heavy toll on Afghan citizens.The Independent revealed,

Outside Koshtay, Haji Mohammed Amin came up to complain that "Talibans and bandits" were preying on residents. "They come at night and ask us to feed them, sometimes they ask for money; they are not Afghans, they are Pakistanis. We have had 30 years of war and it still continues. Where is our government? Why don't they help us? We hardly have enough to eat." Another, Ahmed Jan, complained: "This is our land, we need this land to live. And you and the Taliban are using it to fight your wars. We want to be left in peace. You are here but then you will go away and the Taliban will come back." (Kim Sengupta, "Under fire in the Afghan badlands," The Independent, February 2, 2009)

If the U.S. administration has its way, there won't be peace any time soon. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Bush holdover, told Congress last week that the war would be a "long slog" with an uncertain outcome. But if history is a predictor of future events, it may not be a pretty finale for imperialism--or the people of South Asia.

While top Obama administration officials and Pentagon bureaucrats are relying on the government of President Asif Ali Zadari to stabilize the situation on Pakistan's side of the border, reports indicate that the ISI continue to fund and advise various proxy armies.

The Los Angeles Times revealed February 3, that Afghan security officials had broken up a suicide bombing cell in the capital, Kabul, and that the 17 men arrested were believed "to be affiliated with a Pakistan-based militant group known as the Haqqani network and that the cell's ringleader was a Pakistani national."

Although relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have "warmed considerably" since Zadari took over the reins from the despised Musharraf regime according to the L.A. Times, the ISI's policy of seeking "strategic depth" over geopolitical rival India by controlling a compliant Afghan client state has not changed, despite billions of dollars in U.S. military and "counterterrorism" assistance showered on the Army and ISI.

The spy agency's long-standing ties to the Haqqani network, led by veteran Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin, were spotlighted last year whenU.S. intelligence backed up Afghan authorities' assertion that the ISI had aided the group in its bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul in July. That attack killed nearly 60 people. (M. Karim Faiez and Laura King, "Suicide Bombing Ring Is Brought Down in Afghanistan, Officials Say," Los Angeles Times, February 3, 2009)

With a two month deadline tied to an April 3 NATO summit, the Pentagon is scrambling to come come up with a comprehensive strategy. It won't be an easy sell for America's NATO partners, outraged by orders from NATO's commander, U.S. General John Craddock, to kill opium dealers.

Protected Drug Trade and American HypocrisyIn a bid to import the Iraqi "surge strategy" into Afghanistan, the United States is fielding armed militias to fight the Taliban, theAssociated Press reported.

Afghanistan's interior minister announced the program had begun with the U.S. "paying for all aspects" including "buying Kalashnikov automatic rifles for members of the Afghan Public Protection Force," modeled after the American-sponsored Awakening Councils in Iraq. A sceptical Afghan official told theAssociated Press, "only criminals would join because most citizens wouldn't want to face the Taliban in combat."

But perhaps this is precisely the intent of the program; to wrest control of the
lucrative heroin trade from unreliable elements beholden to the Taliban and
al-Qaeda, who allegedly derive $100 million a year from the global drug trade. What better means to disrupt the "Islamist" insurgency than to grant U.S.-allied criminals and warlords a piece of the action.

In this context, Craddock's orders are all the more ironic when one considers that the forces currently battering NATO in Afghanistan grew rich during the 1980s when Washington turned a blind-eye to drug networks they themselves encouraged as a means to wound their Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union.

According to scholar Alfred W. McCoy, "During the 1980s CIA covert operations in Afghanistan transformed southern Asia from a self-contained opium zone into a major supplier of heroin for the world market." As a cats' paw for imperialism, the ISI doled out funds, weapons and expertise to far-right militants such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Coming to prominence as a thug who attacked communist students and infamously threw acid into the faces of unveiled women at Kabul University during the 1970s, Hekmatyar was a major narcotrafficker--and darling of the CIA and their ISI partners in crime. McCoy writes,

As the ISI's mujaheddin clients used their new CIA munitions to capture prime
agricultural areas in Afghanistan during the early 1980s, the guerrillas urged their peasant supporters to grow poppies, thereby doubling the country's opium harvest to 575 tons between 1982 and 1983. Once these mujaheddin elements brought the opium across the border, they sold it to Pakistani heroin refiners who operated under the protection of General Fazle Huq, governor of the North-West Frontier province. By 1988, there were an estimated 100 to 200 heroin refineries in the province's Khyber district alone. Trucks from the Pakistan army's National Logistics Cell (NLC) arriving with CIA arms from Karachi often returned loaded with heroin--protected by ISI papers from police search. (The Politics of Heroin, CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991, pp. 453-454)

The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel revealed January 28 that "top NATO commander John Craddock wants the alliance to kill opium dealers, without proof of connection to the insurgency. NATO commanders, however, do not want to follow the order."

In a classified document leaked to Der Spiegel, Craddock issued a "guidance"
providing NATO troops with the authority "to attack directly drug producers and facilities throughout Afghanistan." In other words, the United States wants to widen the free-fire zone that already exists, one directly responsible for thousands of civilian casualties. Der Spiegel reports,

According to the document, deadly force is to be used even in those cases where there is no proof that suspects are actively engaged in the armed resistance against the Afghanistan government or against Western troops. It is "no longer necessary to produce intelligence or other evidence that each particular drug trafficker or narcotics facility in Afghanistan meets the criteria of being a military objective," Craddock writes. (Susanne Koelbl, "NATO High Commander Issues Illegitimate Order to Kill," Spiegel Online, January 28, 2009)

German NATO General Egon Ramms and other European commanders are refusing to "deviate from the current rules of engagement for attacks," a move that has outraged Craddock. Considered a loyal Bushist who "fears that he could be replaced by the new US president," Craddock is threatening to remove any commander who doesn't toe the new party line and "follow his instructions to go after the drug mafia."

But here as elsewhere, things aren't always what they seem. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that General Craddock, under pressure from the Obama administration's new anti-Karzai policy, particularly now that Washington is eyeing newer, more compliant "provincial allies" in the Afghan Public Protection Force will target some narcotraffickers--those in Karzai's orbit--while handing their new "best friends forever," Afghan warlords and Pakistani "businessmen," the lucrative opium concession.

As Peter Dale Scott documented in Drugs, Oil and War, "conscious decisions were definitely made, time after time, to ally the United States with local drug
proxies." In Central- and South Asia such "drug proxies" and the financial
institutions which served powerful political, intelligence and military interests
such as the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and that institution's shadowy "Black Network," helped transform the Afghan mujaheddin into al-Qaeda.

While espousing an overt Islamist discourse, al-Qaeda and their various affiliates continued to serve Western intelligence agencies as disposable assets used in various destabilization operations in Europe, the Middle East and Asia during the 1990s and today. While "the routes shifted with the politics of the times," Scott writes, "the CIA denominator remained constant."

Absurd? Consider this. When the U.S. Army's Special Forces Operational
Detachment-Delta (known as Delta Force) "brought down" Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel in the early 1990s, they relied on other narcotrafficking cartels, notably the larger and more profitable Cali Cartel run by the Orejuela brothers, Gilberto Rodríguez and Miguel Rodríguez, to get the job done.

We now know with last year's release of declassified CIA and U.S. Embassy documents by the National Security Archive that this was indeed the case. More importantly, the documents provided confirmation that CIA "anti-narcotics interdiction efforts" did not target the drug trade per se, but only those criminal gangs who ran afoul of wider U.S. geostrategic interests in resource rich Colombia.

In other words, U.S. policy in the area amounted to a protected drug traffic for allies engaged in anti-left counterinsurgency operations. While U.S. Special
Operations Command and the CIA were targeting Escobar's Medellín cartel, they were directly collaborating with a death squad that later morphed into the Colombian Army-allied paramilitary group, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). Founded by major international narcotrafficker Carlos Castaño, the AUC were close political allies of the Orejuela brothers and the man who would later become Colombia's president, Alvaro Uribe.

The parallels between these two resource rich regions couldn't be more striking. Pakistani investigative journalist Ahmed Rashid described a similar pattern when the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan began in 2001.

The Pentagon had a list of twenty-five or more drug labs and warehouses in
Afghanistan but refused to bomb them because some belonged to the CIA's new NA [Northern Alliance] allies. The United States told its British allies that the war on terrorism had nothing to do with counter-narcotics. Instead, drug lords were fêted by the CIA and asked if they had any information about Osama bin Laden. Thus, the United States sent the first and clearest message to the drug lords: that they would not be targeted. (Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, New York: Viking, 2008, pp. 320-321)

Under America's ever so tolerant counterterrorist regional strategy, Afghanistan produced a staggering 8,700 metric tons of opium and now accounts for 92% of global opium production, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) in their 2008 World Drug Report.

Meanwhile, as the Obama administration and the Pentagon prepare a major military escalation in the region and the Taliban expand their writ, "efforts to stem cultivation of opium poppies and the narcotics trade that lines Taliban and government pockets," the Washington Post reports, "have made little discernible progress."

Rather, such "efforts" on the part of NATO allies and Islamist adversaries alike
presage a strategic battle for control over the multibillion dollar heroin market.
Whoever "wins," the people of South Asia will certainly suffer the consequences.
http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2009/02/graveyard-of-empires-ame

rick's blog Add new comment Email this blog .
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Saundra Hummer

April 16th, 2009, 01:47 PM

.
Why Hydrogenated Fat Is So Bad
(Part 1 of a series on trans fats)
by
Heidi Stevenson

Trans fats, whether fully or partially hydrogenated, are not simply foods from which nutrition has been leached. They're poison. To suggest that partially hydrogenated oils are okay is like suggesting that it's better to take one poison because it's less poisonous than another. Both are poisons. When you consider how heavily vegetable oils have been pushed—virtually defined as
the key to good health—it isn't difficult to see why cancer, heart disease, and many other chronic diseases have become so common.

Risks of Hydrogenated Fats (Part 2 of a series on trans fats) continues with a discussion of the types of diseases trans fats can cause.
A 2008 report from the University of Paris in France found a connection between breast cancer and trans fats(3). A report in the American Journal of Epidemiology found direct evidence to connect trans fats to colon polyps, which are noted to be precursors of cancer(4).
http://gaia-health.com/articles/000036-Hydrogenated-Fat-Risks.shtml

Overview of Harm from Trans Fats
Rather than bore you with details, here's an overview of other harm done by trans fats:

<>Neurological problems may develop or be aggravated. These can include attention deficit disorder, autism, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and multiple sclerosis.
<>The lungs may be damaged.
<>Reproductive organs and other areas that are affected by their hormones can be harmed.
<>Arthritis risk and other immune system disorders may be increased.
<>Aging may be speeded up.
<>Glandular function is harmed, which can have knock-on effects throughout the body.
<>Energy levels may be depressed.
<>Digestion can be deranged.
<>The ability to think clearly may be damaged.
<>Liver function can be harmed.
<>The obesity epidemic is likely caused, in part, by trans fats.

The known harms from trans fats are so extensive that governments have started to limit them. Denmark has banned them completely.
http://gaia-health.com/articles/000036-Hydrogenated-Fat-Risks.shtml

How to Identify and Avoid Trans Fats in Foods
(Part 3 of a series on trans fats) discusses how you can spot trans fats when you shop.

Foods Particularly Heavy in Trans Fats
Anything deep-fat fried will be very heavy in trans fats, unless it's been fried in a naturally saturated fat, like lard—which is not something you're likely to find in a supermarket. Thus, crisps, chips, fries, doughnuts, poppadums—all are loaded with trans fats. Other foods to be wary of include:

Baked goods
Breakfast cereals
Bread & crackers
Fish sticks and other breaded fish
Frozen pizzas & pot pies
"Health" bars
Margarine
Microwave popcorn (one of the worst)
Nondairy creamers (known as lighteners in the UK)
Peanut butter
Puddings (trans fats used for creamy consistency)
Ramen noodles are particularly bad
Sauces
Shortening
Tortillas (more often known as wraps in the UK)
This list is, of course, far from exhaustive. It should, though, give you a good idea of what foods to be particularly careful about

References:The Weston A. Price Foundation for Wise Traditions, The Importance of Saturated Fats for Biological Functions, by Mary G. Enig, PhD
ScientificPsychic, Fats, Oils, Fatty Acids, Triglycerides

http://gaia-health.com/articles/000037-Avoid-Trans-Fats.shtml

>>>>><<<<<I've only posted a summary, go on site to view these information filled articles in their entirety.
High Fructose is another killer, and it is in so many things, even our breads, crackers, cereals, etc., so it's hard to keep trans fats, as well as fructose out of our everyday meals, drinks, and snacks, but we work at it, especially after a serious health issue brought on by high fructose. We try to use pure butter or a transfat free buttery spread, we also use oils which have been cold pressed with no trans fats and the difference in how we feel is amazing, and age spots?; they disappear. You're better off with pure butter or lard than you are trans fats. Then again, any fat or oil has to be fresh, not rancid or turning as then it works in reverse. Don't ever eat stale breads, crackers, etc. Old oils and fats are very harmful. SRH
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Saundra Hummer

April 16th, 2009, 02:14 PM

. . . . . . .
The Truth Hurts?
Well isn't that something?
SRH

McClellan: Bush insiders planning to 'spin an alternative reality'
04/15/2009 @ 9:20 am
Filed by David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Former President George W. Bush has been holding a reunion of his "old gang" in Texas this week to make plans for his presidential library and policy institute.

According to Scott McClellan, one-time Bush White House press secretary, those plans can be expected to center on attempting to spin the history of the Bush administration rather than addressing it honesty.

"This gathering in Dallas is really the first meeting of the Bush legacy-shaping group," McClellan told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Tuesday, "which happens to include the core members of the White House Iraq Group. And I think some of their thinking is still grounded in the mentality that was used to sell the war in Iraq in the first place."

As described by McClellan in his book, What Happened, the White House Iraq Group was "set up in the summer of 2002 to coordinate the marketing of the war to the public" and "to convince Americans that war with Iraq was inevitable and necessary."

"There's more of a focus on trying to create, or spin, an alternative reality," McClellan told Olbermann, "than coming to grips with the reality of where things went wrong and how this administration went off course."

"The only way he can actually shape his legacy for the better is to begin by addressing those issues," McClellan emphasized, "the controversial decisions that he made, whether it was Iraq or Katrina or the economic crisis that unfolded on his watch. The only way he can shape his legacy for the better is to accept responsibility for those mistakes and those management failures."

VIDEOThis video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast Apr. 14, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com
. . . . . . .A "Bush Policy Institute"?
I'm going to have to get arm rests for my office chair to prevent me from falling on the floor whenever I read such as this again, and somehow I believe something just as ludicrious will pop up about the man.

Knock me on the floor amazing, and fall on the floor comical; both at the same time. Unbelievable. Bush Policy Institute: How to orchestrate failure?
Still can't get over this one. Go on-site for the video. Just click on the following link:

http://www.rawstory.com/

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Bush_insiders_reunite_to_defend_policies_0415.html . . . . . . . . . . .

Saundra Hummer

April 17th, 2009, 10:36 AM

............... U.S. future depends on torture accountabilityOlbermann: We cannot let mistakes of the past haunt our future
Video
VIDEOApril 16: In a Special Comment, Countdown’s Keith Olbermann makes one more plea to President Barack Obama to prosecute Bush administration officials who allowed the torture of prisoners to occur, to set an example for the future that America does not tolerate torture.
CountdownKeith Olbermann
Anchor, 'Countdown'
• Profile
As promised, a Special Comment now on the president's revelation of the remainder of this nightmare of Bush Administration torture memos. This President has gone where few before him, dared. The dirty laundry — illegal, un-American, self-defeating, self-destroying — is out for all to see.

Mr. Obama deserves our praise and our thanks for that. And yet he has gone but half-way. And, in this case, in far too many respects, half the distance is worse than standing still. Today, Mr. President, in acknowledging these science-fiction-like documents, you said that:

"This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke."

"We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history.

"But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.

Mr. President, you are wrong. What you describe would be not "spent energy" but catharsis.
Not "blame laid," but responsibility ascribed. You continued:

"Our national greatness is embedded in America's ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future."

Indeed we must, Mr. President. And the forces of which you speak are the ones lingering — with pervasive stench — from the previous administration. Far more than a criminal stench, Sir. An immoral one. One we cannot let be re-created.

One, President Obama, it is your responsibility to make sure cannot be re-created. Forgive me for quoting from a Comment I offered the night before the inauguration. But this goes to the core of the President's commendable, but wholly naive, intention. This country has never "moved forward with confidence".without first cleansing itself of its mistaken past.

In point of fact, every effort to merely draw a line in the sand and declare the past dead has served only to keep the past alive and often to strengthen it. We "moved forward" with slavery in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And four score and nine years later, we had buried 600,000 of our sons and brothers, in a Civil War.

After that war's ending, we "moved forward" without the social restructuring — and protection of the rights of minorities — in the south. And a century later, we had not only not resolved anything, but black leaders were still being assassinated in our southern cities.

We "moved forward" with Germany in the reconstruction of Europe after the First World War.

Nobody even arrested the German Kaiser, let alone conducted war crimes trials then. And 19 years later, there was an indescribably more evil Germany and a more heart-rending Second World War.

We "moved forward" with the trusts of the early 1900s. And today, we are at the mercy of corporations too big to fail. We "moved forward" with the Palmer Raids and got McCarthyism.
And we "moved forward" with McCarthyism and got Watergate. We "moved forward" with Watergate and junior members of the Ford administration realized how little was ultimately at risk.

They grew up to be Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. But, Mr. President, when you say we must "come together on behalf of our common future" you are entirely correct. We must focus on getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past.

That means prosecuting all those involved in the Bush administration's torture of prisoners, even if the results are nominal punishments, or merely new laws. Your only other option is to let this set and fester indefinitely. Because, Sir, some day there will be another Republican president, or even a Democrat just as blind as Mr. Bush to ethics and this country's moral force. And he will look back to what you did about Mr. Bush. Or what you did not do.

And he will see precedent. Or as Cheney saw, he will see how not to get caught next time. Prosecute, Mr. President. Even if you get not one conviction, you will still have accomplished good for generations unborn. Merely by acting, you will deny a further wrong — that this construction will enter the history books: Torture was legal. It worked. It saved the country.

The end. This must not be. "It is our intention," you said today, "to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution." Mr. President, you are making history's easiest, most often made, most dangerous mistake — you are accepting the defense that somebody was "just following orders." At the end of his first year in office, Mr. Lincoln tried to contextualize the Civil War for those who still wanted to compromise with evils of secession and slavery. "The struggle of today," Lincoln wrote, "is not altogether for today. It is for a vast future also."

Mr. president, you have now been handed the beginning of that future. Use it to protect our children and our distant descendants from anything like this ever happening again — by showing them that those who did this, were neither unfairly scapegoated nor absolved. It is good to say "we won't do it. again." It is not, however...enough

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30254776/.............

Saundra Hummer

April 17th, 2009, 02:15 PM

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~Sewing machine hoax hits Saudi Arabia Saudi police say they are investigating a hoax that has seen people rushing to buy old-fashioned sewing machines for up to $50,000 (£33,500).
The Singer sewing machines are said to contain traces of red mercury, a substance that may not exist.

But it is widely thought that it can be used to find treasure, ward off evil spirits or even make nuclear bombs.

It is believed that tiny amounts can sell for millions of dollars, the Saudi Gazette reported.

The paper said that trade in the sewing machines was brisk across the country.

Rumours about the sewing machines have been spreading for days by word of mouth and over the internet, it said.

These included rumours that foreign experts and companies had been buying up Singers.

In Dhulum, it was reported that people had broken into two tailors' shops to steal the machines.

In the city of Madina, people were holding mobile phones up to the machines, due to the belief that they could be used to detect the presence of red mercury.

An interior ministry spokesman said authorities were trying to discover who had spread the rumours.

"We have to find out who started this hoax," he told Reuters news agency.

"People hope to make profit," he added. "This is no different to cases of citizens who put their money in untrustworthy schemes."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/7999168.stm
Published: 2009/04/14 21:37:02 GMT© BBC MMIX They have that kind of money to spend, while loaded down with such backwards superstitions? One foot in the modern world, the other back in another time altogether. Will they have learned from this, that it's time to move forward? Get over it all of you with such inane superstitions.

Will they quit killing endangered species just so they can, well you know, now that they have Viagra and other performance enhancing pharmaceuticals? It's a topsy turvy world we live in. You'd think it would improve drastically, but as we can see, ..... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Saundra Hummer

April 17th, 2009, 07:57 PM

^^^^^^^
Decriminalization of drugs in Portugal:
5 years later
DRUG PLAN: Portugal decriminalized the use and possession of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other illicit street drugs in an attempt to cut down on related deaths and infectionsSTOCKPHOTO/TOLGAKOLACK
In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.

Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank.

"Now instead of being put into prison, addicts are going to treatment centers and they're learning how to control their drug usage or getting off drugs entirely," report author Glenn Greenwald, a former New York State constitutional litigator, said during a press briefing at Cato last week.

Under the Portuguese plan, penalties for people caught dealing and trafficking drugs are unchanged; dealers are still jailed and subjected to fines depending on the crime. But people caught using or possessing small amounts—defined as the amount needed for 10 days of personal use—are brought before what's known as a "Dissuasion Commission," an administrative body created by the 2001 law.

Each three-person commission includes at least one lawyer or judge and one health care or social services worker. The panel has the option of recommending treatment, a small fine, or no sanction.

Peter Reuter, a criminologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, says he's skeptical decriminalization was the sole reason drug use slid in Portugal, noting that another factor, especially among teens, was a global decline in marijuana use. By the same token, he notes that critics were wrong in their warnings that decriminalizing drugs would make Lisbon a drug mecca.

"Drug decriminalization did reach its primary goal in Portugal," of reducing the health consequences of drug use, he says, "and did not lead to Lisbon becoming a drug tourist destination."

Walter Kemp, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, says decriminalization in Portugal "appears to be working." He adds that his office is putting more emphasis on improving health outcomes, such as reducing needle-borne infections, but that it does not explicitly support decriminalization, "because it smacks of legalization."

Drug legalization removes all criminal penalties for producing, selling and using drugs; no country has tried it. In contrast, decriminalization, as practiced in Portugal, eliminates jail time for drug users but maintains criminal penalties for dealers. Spain and Italy have also decriminalized personal use of drugs and Mexico's president has proposed doing the same. .

A spokesperson for the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy declined to comment, citing the pending Senate confirmation of the office's new director, former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs also declined to comment on the report.

COMMENTSThursday April 16, 2009, 11:52 am
Hmmm...what novel concepts. Not putting thousands of people in jail whose only "crime" is making an adult decision about their own lives. Addressing drug use as a social "problem" rather than a criminal one. I wonder if anyone in out government is taking notes.
Kit B. (160) Thursday April 16, 2009, 11:55 amAlmost ever thing we think and believe about all drugs is filtered through a concentrated effort of propaganda. There are many healthy, reasonable and logical ways of dealing with problems with out probhibition which has never worked, is costly in both human life and fiscal expenses. Education and careful management will serve us far better then continuing on path of death, and more drug wars and ever increased prison populations.
Gini Brown (8) Thursday April 16, 2009, 3:42 pmThere is no One solution to this issue. We need to stop the drug trade period. We have lost too many people to something we should have taken care of before it got this big.
Aletta Kraan (23) Thursday April 16, 2009, 4:03 pmNoted . thanks !!
Steven Wells (10) Thursday April 16, 2009, 7:03 pmClose analysis of the US Drug War since Reagan ironically ISN'T about drugs at all. On the international front. Internationally the war is all about removing the competition that the CIA faced utilizing the drug trade to raise funds for covert operations unaccountable to Congress. General Noriega was taken out because he was starting to squeal on Daddy Bush's Directorship of CIA operations.Ironic that all those pictures of Bush senior with Noriega disappeared after daddy started to run for president in the primary against Reagan. Noriega was on the CIA payroll. The illegal funds from the CIA drug running thru Panama with Noriega's Cover. was used to help fund the illegal CIA covert support Contra war. (Iran-Contra scandal ring a bell) CIA helped train and supply those solders who killed the priests and nuns. There was a California investigative journalist who had started to piece together the operations and started publishing a series on the issue. soon he was found in his apartment dead of two (YES 2) shots to the head. Ruled a "suicide".Go figure.
On the domestic front, the war is being fought for two reasons. All the millions of dollars funneling to the law enforcement agencies to buy all their neat toys that the corporate suppliers are making a ton of profit off of. Secondly a side benefit is it racially rids communities by the locking up of their blacks and undesirable who lives are a miserable existence anyways who turn to drugs for the mental anguish relief. That feeds the pockets of yet another growing corporate greed holder, Privatized prisons. And the CIA keeps the price fixed just low enough to sucker the dealers and users.enabled to funnel the money to the Big man with CIA connections. Make no mistake. The US Drug war has nothing to do with drugs, but a method to get the corporate world's hand in the taxpayers treasury and fund the propaganda, that their being "effective" Bullshit! A third aspect allowed law enforcement to confiscate anything that was used in the domestic operations. I recall a private jet had been stolen and used for a couple of Colombian drug runs. The owners, who had no connection to the illegal activity never got their multimillion dollar plane back. Remember all those ads that ran about buy Govt confiscated luxury homes, cars boats and plane at auction?? How's your math skills at putting 2 + 2 together. Wouldn't that be a conflict of interest?? Jack up fake charges on someone and ever though the cases are dropped for lack of evidence, you still lost you house??
Yes this MADNESS HAS TO STOP!!! Besides you only hear about these Drug war crime bills during election time, and those who want to appear and take the common sense approach are labeled "SOFT ON CRIME!!! MONEY, MONEY, the love of which is the root of all government corruption!
Robert Garvin (18) Friday April 17, 2009, 4:06 pmThe way you guys are down on the CIA, anyone might begin to think that they are the investigative side of the Society of Jesus and that they funnel untold billions into the coffers of their mother Church. You better stop this incriminating evidence or you may be next on the hit list. OR worse still, you might have your internet access denied and you will just be another bit of collateral damage. You will be charged with fomenting insurrection and any other charge that they can put against you to shut you up. So, what else have you got to say?

I thought Umerica was supposed to be the mouth piece of freedom. ha ha ha, they will get you where ever you are and in whatever country, the holy Roman Empire WILL rule the world ( at least for a short while before they go under.) War on drugs? YES, so they have NO competition and they are financed by every country that is supposedly against drugs. then when the drugs ARE legalised, who will be in control of the supply? Same mob. They win either way.
http://www.crowdcontrolrecords.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=41201&sid=f2b01c18c37247200a8ff4028b47c13f^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Saundra Hummer

April 17th, 2009, 09:55 PM

//\\//\\//\\ NSA spied on member of Congress
and broke new laws, report says
04/16/2009 @ 8:47 am
Filed by RAW STORY
UPDATE (at bottom): Senate intelligence committee plans hearing on reported NSA violations
An article in The New York Times detailing new violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reports that in recent months the National Security Agency has been intercepting the communications of Americans on a scale going well beyond the broad legal limits established last year by Congress.

Even more shocking, the paper reveals that under the Bush administration the NSA spied on a member of Congress and sought to wiretap the lawmaker without a warrant.

Reports the Times:
And in one previously undisclosed episode, the N.S.A. tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant, an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The agency believed that the congressman, whose identity could not be determined, was in contact — as part of a Congressional delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006 — with an extremist who had possible terrorist ties and was already under surveillance, the official said. The agency then sought to eavesdrop on the congressman’s conversations, the official said.

The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some intelligence officials about using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.
According to the Times, the NSA unintentionally spies on many Americans because it can't distinguish between American and non-American calls as "it uses its access to American telecommunications companies’ fiber-optic lines and its own spy satellites to intercept millions of calls and e-mail messages."

The NSA's operational problems have "come under scrutiny from the Obama administration, Congressional intelligence committees and a secret national security court," and officials are concerned that the controversy "could damage the credibility of legitimate intelligence-gathering efforts."

The Justice Department has already issued a statement confirming the problems but insisting that it has taken "comprehensive steps to correct the situation and bring the program into compliance."

However, constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald suggests that "these widespread eavesdropping abuses enabled by the 2008 FISA bill -- a bill passed with the support of Barack Obama along with the entire top Democratic leadership in the House, including Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, and substantial numbers of Democratic Senators -- aren't a bug in that bill, but rather, were one of the central features of it."

"Everyone knew that the FISA bill which Congressional Democrats passed -- and which George Bush and Dick Cheney celebrated -- would enable these surveillance abuses," Greenwald continues. "That was the purpose of the law: to gut the safeguards in place since the 1978 passage of FISA, destroy the crux of the oversight regime over executive surveillance of Americans, and enable and empower unchecked government spying activities. This was not an unintended and unforeseeable consequence of that bill. To the contrary, it was crystal clear that by gutting FISA's safeguards, the Democratic Congress was making these abuses inevitable."

"There are exceedingly few specifics in [the Times] story detailing exactly what the abuses were," Greenwald says in conclusion "In other words, most of the information about the NSA's abuses remain concealed. We have learned only a small fraction of what took place."

Read the full New York Times story here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/16nsa.html?_r=1&hp
UPDATE: Senate intelligence committee plans hearing on reported NSA violations

According to a follow-up report published mid-day, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) told the Times:

“These are serious allegations, and we will make sure we get the facts. The committee is looking into this, and we will hold a hearing on this subject within one month."

Sen. Feinstein is the head of the Senate intelligence committee.

Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, sent out a press release in the Thursday morning hours after the Times story was published.

In reaction, Feingold writes, "Since 2001, I have spent a lot of time in the Intelligence Committee, the Judiciary Committee, and on the floor of the Senate bringing attention to both the possible and actual effects of legislation that has dangerously expanded the power of the executive branch to spy on innocent Americans."

"Despite these efforts, Congress insisted on enacting several measures including the USA PATRIOT Act, the Protect America Act, and the FISA Amendments Act, embarking on a tragic retreat from the principles that had governed the sensitive area of government surveillance for the previous three decades," Feingold added.
Go on-site to gain accsss to the links within this article. Just click on the following URL:
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/NSA_spied_on_member_of_Congress_0416.html
//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\

Saundra Hummer

April 20th, 2009, 11:58 AM

................. THE PROGRESS REPORT
April 20, 2009 by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Ali Frick, Ryan Powers, and Igor Volsky
NATIONAL SECURITYRight-Wing Extremists Threaten The Nation
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a report warning that the economic recession and the election of the first African-American president could mobilize right-wing extremist groups inside the United States to gain new recruits. To bolster their ranks, the groups may target veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the analysis. The report concluded that while the DHS "has no specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence," right-wing extremists -- or movements that it defined as "primarily hate-oriented...and those that are mainly antigovernment" -- "are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda." This document, along with an earlier report on radicalized left-wing groups, was requested by the Bush administration after FBI Director Robert Mueller and other Bush appointees acknowledged the threat of right-wing extremism. One DHS official described the report as "nothing unusual." "This is the job of DHS, to assess what is happening in this country, with regard to homegrown terrorism, and determine whether it's an actual threat or not, and that's what these assessments do. ... These assessments are done all the time," the official said. But despite the nature of the report, conservative commentators are outraged, insisting that the document's characterization of "right-wing extremism" represents a direct attack on Republican loyalists, conservative ideology, and veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson went so far as to suggest that the report "shows somebody down in the bowels of that organization is either a convinced left winger or somebody whose sexual orientation is somewhat in question."

WHAT THE REPORT SAYS: According to the report, "the consequences of a prolonged economic downturn -- including real estate foreclosures, unemployment, and an inability to obtain credit -- could create a fertile recruiting environment for rightwing extremists and even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities." Specifically, the report finds that "rightwing extremist groups' frustration over a perceived lack of government action on illegal immigration" and the government's "heightened interest in legislation for tighter firearms, may be invigorating rightwing extremist activity." The report also found that extremist groups may "attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat." In February, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that the "number of hate groups operating in the United States continued to rise in 2008 and has grown by 54 percent since 2000 -- an increase fueled last year by immigration fears, a failing economy and the successful campaign of Barack Obama."

CONSERVATIVES PRETEND THEY ARE TARGETS: Most conservative commentators passionately argued that the report's description of right-wing extremists represented a politically-motivated attempt to "smear" conservatives. In a column published on FoxNews.com, Oliver North declared that his Christian faith and respect for the second amendment "makes me a 'right-wing extremist.'" Fox News host Neil Cavuto asserted that the report "more or less states the government considers you a terrorist threat if you oppose abortion, speak out against illegal immigration, or you are a returning war veteran." Sean Hannity announced that "if you disagree with that liberal path that President Obama's taken the country down, you may soon catch the attention of the Department of Homeland Security." Appearing on Hannity's Fox News show to rant about the report, RNC Chairman Michael Steele similarly declared that "to segment out Americans who dissent from this administration, to segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration and labeling them as terrorists...to me is the height of insult." Rush Limbaugh claimed that the report portrayed "standard, ordinary, everyday conservatives as posing a bigger threat to this country than al Qaeda terrorists or genuine enemies of this country like Kim Jong Il," and Rep. Peter King (R-NY), the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, even "asked for a hearing into the matter," suggesting that the DHS should focus on the threat emanating from Muslims instead. The DHS report did not target "conservatives" or "Republican loyalists." Indeed, it's odd that conservatives would willingly group themselves and Republicans in with "rightwing extremist activity, specifically the white supremacist and militia movements" -- the actual focus of the DHS report.

CONSERVATIVES CLAIM OBAMA TARGETED VETERANS: Several conservatives also misrepresented the intelligence assessment as an attack on American veterans. The Obama administration is "specifically warning that veterans returning home from war, are to be feared -- that they could be right-wing extremists that want to launch terror attacks on America," Joe Scarborough argued on MSNBC's Morning Joe. House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) claimed that "to characterize men and women returning home after defending our country as potential terrorists is offensive and unacceptable. The Department of Homeland Security owes our veterans an apology." But the report actually argued that the danger isn't from veterans themselves, but from the efforts of right-wing extremists to "recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat." "The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today," the report concluded. And while Napolitano apologized to those who found the report offensive, she explained that "the report is not saying that veterans are extremists. Far from it. What it is saying is returning veterans are targets of right-wing extremist groups that are trying to recruit those to commit violent acts within the country. We want to do all we can to prevent that." In fact, as Media Matters pointed out, the report even "cited a 2008 FBI report -- authored during the Bush administration -- as evidence that 'some returning military veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have joined extremist groups.'" The 2.2 million-member Veterans of Foreign Wars also issued a statement clarifying that "the report should have been worded differently, but it made no blanket accusation that every soldier was capable of being a traitor like Benedict Arnold, or every veteran could be a lone wolf, homegrown terrorist like Timothy McVeigh. It was just an assessment about possibilities that could take place."

UNDER THE RADAR
ENVIRONMENT -- BOEHNER CITES COW FARTS IN ORDER TO DOWNPLAY GLOBAL WARMING: Yesterday on ABC's This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) to describe the GOP "plan" for dealing with global warming. Boehner downplayed the risk of carbon dioxide and global warming, claiming carbon dioxide is simply a natural compound that is present even in cow flatulence. "George, the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you've got more carbon dioxide," he said. While humans and animals exhale carbon dioxide naturally, no one is arguing that CO2 itself is harmful. But excessive carbon dioxide in the air is harming the planet and human health. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency recently ruled in a landmark decision that carbon dioxide emissions are "a danger to human health and welfare." Furthermore, it is methane, not carbon dioxide, that is the primary chemical in cow flatulence that contributes to global warming. Boehner also expressed skepticism about the degree that global warming is caused by man. "The question is how much does man have to do with it, and what is the proper way to deal with this?" he asked. Boehner isn't the only Republican to downplay the risk of greenhouse emissions recently. Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) said last month that capping carbon dioxide would take away "plant food" from the atmosphere.

ADMINISTRATION -- OBAMA CHIEF OF STAFF: WHITE HOUSE OPPOSES PROSECUTING TORTURE MEMO AUTHORS: Last week, when President Obama released four Bush-era legal memos authorizing the use of torture against terrorist suspects, he declared that his administration would not seek to prosecute those "who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice." The declaration seemed to leave the door open to prosecutions of the Justice Department officials, like current federal judge Jay Bybee, who authorized illegal torture. However, on ABC's This Week yesterday, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel rejected such a possibility. "[T]hose who devised the policies...should not be prosecuted either. And it's not the place that we go," Emanuel said. However, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, Professor Manfred Nowak, said in a recent interview that any grant of immunity from Obama is likely a violation of international law. When asked if Obama's decision not to pursue prosecutions of CIA officials was "supportable," Nowak replied, "Absolutely not. The United States has, like all other Contracting Parties to the U.N. Convention Against Torture, committed itself to investigate instances of torture and to prosecute all cases in which credible evidence of torture is found." To those who call for investigations, Emanuel simply stated, "This is not a time for retribution. It's a time for reflection." Fire Dog Lake's Jane Hamsher asks, "Is Rahm saying that President Obama believes they're nothing more than an angry, vindictive mob, and that nobody could possibly have a rational basis for believing that our laws should be enforced?"

RADICAL RIGHT -- CITING NO EVIDENCE, STEELE ALLEDGES GOVERNMENT WAS SPYING ON ANTI-ABORTION RALLY HE ATTENDED: Last Friday on Fox News, host Sean Hannity and his guest, RNC Chairman Michael Steele, ranted and raved about a Department of Homeland Security report requested by the Bush administration that warned of increasing incidents of "rightwing radicalization and recruitment." Hannity responded by implying that President Obama himself is a possible terrorist threat. "If you're pro-life, you're viewed as the potential extremist," he complained, but "you can start your career in the home of an unrepentant terrorist and hang out with a guy named Jeremiah Wright." "I don't want to beat an old horse here," said Hannity, who incessantly harps on Obama's past affiliations. "But I'm telling you if anyone hung out with radicals that needs to be investigated by Homeland Security," he said, cutting himself off before explicitly stating that the President of the United States might be a terrorist threat. Steele, who spoke at an anti-abortion rally in Indiana this past week,then said he was "sure" that the government spied on the event. "They've got their eye on the 3,000 Americans who assembled in Indiana last night, in Evansville, Indiana, to profess their continued effort to save the life of the unborn....I'm sure there was somebody in the room with a notepad and a camera taking snapshots and writing down names. But that's not the place our government needs to be," Steele said. Of course, Steele offered no evidence that the government was monitoring the event.

THINK FAST
President Obama will visit the CIA today, "in a bid to reassure staff stung by the release of memos detailing harsh interrogation techniques." Obama will discuss "the importance of the CIA" and "reassure CIA officers of his promise not to seek prosecution of CIA agents or former officials" involved in torture.

Days after Gov. David Paterson (D-NY) unveiled a same-sex marriage bill, Rudy Giuliani is "declaring war on gay marriage." Giuliani, who is pro-civil unions, is "vowing to use his strong opposition of it against the Democrats if he runs for governor next year."

Republicans are struggling with a health care reform "message [that] is still vague and unformed." "I thought we would have been much farther along than we are," said Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX). Rep. Roy Blunt's (R-MO) Health Care Task Force "wants to come up with fresh solutions and not just party rhetoric -- and that takes some time," said a spokesman for Blunt.

ExxonMobil has supplanted Wal-Mart atop the Fortune 500 list, which ranks companies by their annual earnings. "Texas-based Exxon took in $442.85 billion in revenue last year, up almost 19% from 2007." Wal-Mart, which had held the top spot for six of the last seven years, had revenues of $405.6 billion.

Every day, the White House sorts through its mail and picks at least 10 letters for President Obama to read, a process designed to "offer a sampling of what Americans are thinking." The letters are read by the president, and he sometimes answers them by hand. In a letter to the mother of a soldier, Obama wrote, "I will do everything in my power to make troops like Matthew my priority. ...Please tell him 'thank you for your service' from his commander in chief!"

Today, the Senate is scheduled to vote to end debate on the nomination of Chris Hill to be ambassador to Iraq. The opposition to Hill's nomination from several Republican senators led by Sam Brownback (KS) is "not expected to derail Hill's eventual confirmation."

Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, posted a video online today, urging "Muslims not to be fooled by U.S. President Barack Obama's policies, which he said...are no different to those of his predecessor, George W. Bush." "[Obama] is calling for change, but he aims to change us so that we abandon our religion and rights," al-Zawahri said.

And finally: First runner-up Miss California caused a stir in yesterday's Miss USA pageant when she was asked a question about legalizing same-sex marriage. "We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage," Carrie Prejean said. "And you know what, I think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that's how I was raised." Scott Ihrig, a gay man who attended the pageant with his partner, called her answer "ugly," adding, "That is not the value of 95 percent of the people in this audience. Look around this audience and tell me how many gay men there are."

GOOD NEWS
President Obama plans to order Cabinet secretaries to cut $100 million from their combined budgets over the next 90 days, a signal of "the president's determination to cut spending and reform government."

STATE WATCH
NORTH CAROLINA: Recession is leading to a health-care crisis.

MISSOURI: State House approves legislation rejecting Real ID.

NEW JERSEY: Bills offering in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants face an uncertain future.

BLOG WATCH
THINK PROGRESS: Alberto Gonzales stopped an FBI probe of Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) because he "needed Jane" to sell warrantless wiretapping.

WONK ROOM: Rep. Bob Latta (R-OH): With cap-and-trade, President Obama "has declared war on Ohio and Indiana."

YGLESIAS: Commentary's Abe Greenwald is pro-torture.

GRIST: How to comment on the Environmental Protection Agency's finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health.

DAILY GRILL
"McCain for the longest time said torture doesn't work, then he admitted...last summer that he was broken by the North Vietnamese."
-- Rush Limbaugh, 4/17/09, advocating the use of torture

VERSUS
"I gave the names of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line, and said they were members of my squadron. When asked to identify future targets, I simply recited the names of a number of North Vietnamese cities that had already been bombed."
-- Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), from his memoir, Faith of My Fathers

This is only a summary. Go on-site for complete articles and to gain access to the links within this post. They're numerous.
http://www.thinkprogress.org..................

Saundra Hummer

April 20th, 2009, 02:57 PM

> > >$$$$$< < <
New bill would better protect farmland

If passed, the bill would eliminate six different uses of land zoned EFU
By
Kevin Gaboury
A new bill that would increase protection on Oregon farmland was heard by the Oregon House Land Use committee last week.
HB 3099 would eliminate six uses on land zoned EFU (exclusive farm use) - landfills, dog kennels, model airplane clubs, living history museums, spring water bottling and fireworks displays
Along with this, the bill would require rural schools sited on EFU land to serve primarily rural students and limit aggregate mining on farmland. It would also ban golf courses on EFU land require non-farm dwellings to be located where they would least interfere with farming.
Supporters, including the Oregon Farm Bureau and 1,000 Friends of Oregon, say it's time to limit the number of uses allowed on farmland. (I take issue with these restrictions, doing so for any number of reasons. Our property taxes being just one of them, since we won't be allowed to profit from sales or development, and we are in need of doing so at this time. Their restrictions are already a burden, and our taxes will still come due each year with these new restrictions as well. Are they willing to absorb our tax burden in full for their unrestricted views, and rural uncrowded roads, the ones they say will be congested if we are allowed to develop our own land? SRH)
"Farmland is not undeveloped land waiting for one of these conflicting uses. It is already developed land that supports one of Oregon's leading industries," 1,000 Friends of Oregon said in a statement. "The agricultural industry is a primary driver of the Oregon economy and it keeps growing every year. Most of these conflicting uses have nothing to do with farming. It's time to simplify our land use laws so that exclusive farm use zones are exclusively for farming."
Representatives with the Oregon Farm Bureau could not be reached for comment.
However, opponents feel that there are already too many restrictions on farmland. (Most of our neighbors don't own over 200 acres, and these little farms aren't enough acreage to support one's family, just enough to supplement ones income, if that, as there are so many variables in farming, supply and demand, the weather, etc., and if you figure in the time and effort spent keeping up farms of this size and smaller, you lose money, & you and lose bigtime. SRH)
"We should be allowing more uses of rural land to improve Oregon's economic situation," said Bill Mashofsky, vice president of Oregonians in Action, a non-profit organization dedicated to land-use and property rights. "They are taking away some of the uses that are important to a number of people, so we just believe that it's wrong at this stage to take away some of the limited uses that landowners can have."
In Oregon, more than 16 million acres are zoned EFU, and Mashofsky said some is not exactly suitable for farming and is a product of "open-space zoning." He added that over the years, exceptions have been made to allow landowners to use farmland in other ways.
"(This bill) is a huge barrier to common sense and the sensible use of land," he said. "It's heading the state in the wrong direction. It's a matter of principle and a matter of preserving the rights for the landowners who would be directly affected."
According to Crook County Judge Mike McCabe, the majority of the county's land is zoned EFU, and the county has made efforts to keep compatible uses in EFU zones.
However, he does not feel the state should make broad decisions regarding land use.
"I think the state should refer to counties in all land-use matters," he said. "We're here, we have to live with it, so we should be able to have some control over our destiny. In land use, one size does not fit all, and what "works in Multnomah County sometimes doesn't work here. http://www.centraloregonian.com/PCONews10.shtml >>>$$$$$$$<<<

Saundra Hummer

April 20th, 2009, 06:06 PM

:: :: :: A NEWLETTER FROM SPLC
SPLC
~~~
SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER
April 20, 2009

Dear Friend,

Today we filed suit to stop the horrible abuse of children at a Mississippi detention center, where they are confined in filthy, bug-infested cells for 23 hours a day with no adequate mental health or education services.

Our client, D.W., is a 17-year-old African-American youth who endured a brutal physical assault by guards who slammed his face into a concrete floor. After a week at the facility, he tried to hang himself with a bed sheet. But rather than provide him counseling, guards harassed and taunted him — telling him his mother no longer cared and would not visit him again.

The children held at the Harrison County Juvenile Detention Center in Biloxi are not hardened criminals. Most are accused of minor, nonviolent offenses and are simply awaiting court hearings.

This detention center is operated for profit by a company that has blocked civil rights investigators from inspecting the facility, even though they have a right under federal law to monitor the conditions there.

Dozens of other children describe their own nightmarish experiences. Because their cells were overcrowded, many slept on the floor next to dirty toilets. Infections were rampant. Guards were quick to use violence. One teen described conditions as "unbearable" and said children were treated like "dogs."

It's appalling that a private company is being allowed to profit from the misery and suffering of these children.

This lawsuit is just one of the strategies we're using to protect children from a broken system that would rather spend money on prisons than mental health services and education. Across the country, thousands of children — disproportionately black and many suffering from mental disabilities — are being needlessly incarcerated for petty offenses.

We're doing everything we can to stop this unconscionable abuse. You can help by adding your voice to this fight. Click here to tell Harrison County officials to stop abusing children.
http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?aid=374&splcnewsletter=newsgen-042009
We'll make sure they get your message.

Thanks for your support.

Richard Cohen
President
Add your voice to this fight. Tell Harrison County officials to stop abusing children.http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?aid=374&splcnewsletter=newsgen-042009
We welcome your feedback.
Contact us online.

Or by mail:
Southern Poverty Law Center
400 Washington Ave.
Montgomery, AL 36104:: :: :: :: ::

Saundra Hummer

April 21st, 2009, 01:36 PM

.............
THE PROGRESS REPORT
April 21, 2009
by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Ali Frick, and Ryan Powers
JUSTICE
Impeach Judge Bybee
Last week, President Obama released four Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel memos that had authorized torture. "In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior operatives of Al Qaeda are spelled out in careful detail -- like keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, placing them in a dark, cramped box or putting insects into the box to exploit their fears," The New York Times writes. The earliest memo, from 2002, was signed by Jay Bybee, then an Assistant Attorney General and now a federal judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Bybee's memo provided "a legal authorization for a laundry list of proposed C.I.A. interrogation techniques," including waterboarding. The techniques Bybee approved are illegal by U.S. statute and an international treaty to which the U.S. is a signatory. Bybee attempted to give legal cover to illegal acts, and thus broke the ethical, professional, and legal standards that govern lawyers. For this, Judge Jay Bybee should be impeached. The Progress Report has launched a campaign to persuade the House Judiciary Committee to initiate impeachment hearings against Bybee. Already, more than 3,000 of you have taken action. Join our effort to convince the committee to launch hearings.

WHAT BYBEE APPROVED: "n the finest legalese" and with "grotesque, lawyerly logic," Bybee wrote 40 pages of justification for treatment that clearly constituted "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." He approved a method called "walling," which entailed slamming a detainee against a wall. Bybee claimed that "any pain experienced is not of the intensity associated with serious physical injury." He also gave a thumbs up to slapping a detainee's face as long as the interrogator took off any rings. "The facial slap does not produce pain that is difficult to endure," he insisted. And feel free to place detainees in stress positions, Bybee said: these "simply involve forcing the subject to remain in uncomfortable positions." Most notoriously, Bybee declared that waterboarding -- a technique perfected during the Spanish Inquisition that the United States later prosecuted Japanese officers for conducting against U.S. POWs -- was both legal and safe. "The waterboard…inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever," Bybee claimed. He said that U.S. law bans only techniques that cause "pain and suffering," a phrase "best understood as a single concept, not distinct concepts of 'pain' as distinguished from 'suffering.'" Since waterboarding causes no "pain," Bybee declares it legal. In fact, he wrote, even one separates "pain" from "suffering," waterboarding would still be acceptable: "The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering."

HOW TO IMPEACH BYBEE: The Progress Report is asking readers to sign a petition to be sent to the House Judiciary Committee, urging it to hold hearings on Bybee. After the hearings, the Committee would draw up articles of impeachment, and pass them with a simple majority vote. From there, the articles move to the full House, which can also approve them with a simple majority. The House sends two "managers" to serve as prosecutors in the impeachment trial, conducted in the Senate if a majority agrees to move forward. It takes 67 Senators to convict -- and a conviction would remove Bybee from the bench. Calling for his impeachment in January, Yale Law professor Bruce Ackerman wrote, " impeachment is not a prelude to a sweeping political vendetta. It focuses on a very particular problem: Jay Bybee may serve for decades on one of the highest courts in the land. Is his continued service consistent with his role in the systematic perpetration of war crimes?" The New York Times called for Bybee's impeachment this weekend, writing that the "memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution." "His flagrant contempt for the rule of law is utterly inconsistent with his judicial position and speaks directly to his competency to function in that office," stated the Center for Constitutional Rights. "He ought to be impeached," House Judiciary Committee member Jerry Nadler (D-NY) told the Huffington Post yesterday. "It was not an honest legal memo. It was an instruction manual on how to break the law. "Senate Judiciary Committee member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) agreed that impeachment is "certainly possible." "The idea of the author of one of these memos sitting on the federal bench makes a farce of the whole legal system," wrote the Center for American Progress Action Fund's Matthew Yglesias.

A PATH TO ACCOUNTABILITY: In 2003, Bybee was nominated by President Bush and approved by the Senate to sit on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. During his confirmation hearing, Bybee refused to answer questions, citing executive privilege at least 20 separate times. "If the Senate had known the truth, it would have rejected him," Ackerman wrote. Launching the impeachment process would force Bybee to finally answer questions. And with the Obama administration hesitant to launch prosecutions of any kind, an impeachment hearing might be the closest thing Americans get to a full accounting of Bush's torture program. Indeed, when pressed yesterday on why Obama was refusing to hold Bush administration lawyers who authored the torture memos "accountable," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs stated simply, "The president is focused on looking forward. That's why." Looking forward, however, "it is simply obvious that, if there is no accountability when wrongdoing is exposed, future violations will not be deterred," House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) said yesterday. Sign our petition here

UNDER THE RADAR
ENERGY -- HEARINGS ON CLEAN ENERGY BILL START TODAY: Today, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will begin four days worth of hearings on a draft of The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. The bill requires utilities companies to generate 25 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2025; promotes carbon capture and sequestration for coal plants; increases incentives for electric vehicles; and requires energy savings in buildings, manufactured homes, industry, and government. Most importantly, it creates a cap-and-trade system, ensuring that carbon emissions that are 83 percent lower in 2050 than in 2005. Tomorrow, Secretaries Steven Chu (Energy) and Ray LaHood (Transportation), as well as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, will testify; on Thursday, Al Gore will address the panel. A wide variety of government and business leaders will also talk about green job opportunities and local steps to addressing climate change. Recent statements from GOP congressman could serve as a preview of their witnesses' views. Just this weekend, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) nonsensically declared that "it's almost comical" to think carbon dioxide emissions are dangerous, claiming that since humans exhale carbon dioxide, it could never be dangerous, no matter how large the dose. Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) recently said the planet is "carbon-starved" and wondered, "If we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere?" Yet just last week, the EPA reported that "the case for finding that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere endanger public health and welfare is compelling and, indeed, overwhelming."

ETHICS -- NEW YORK TIMES ACKNOWLEDGES THAT HARMAN URGED THE PAPER TO HOLD WIRETAPPING ARTICLE IN 2004: Yesterday, CQ's Jeff Stein reported that in 2005 Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) was "overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department [to] reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committe." In exchange, Harman asked for help lobbying Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to "appoint her chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win." Stein also reported that contrary to previous reports that an FBI probe into Harman had been dropped due to "lack of evidence," it was actually then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who intervened on Harman's behalf in mid-2005 to stop the FBI's investigation because he needed her help selling the Bush administration's warrantless wiretap program. According to Stein, Gonzales told then-CIA Director Porter Goss that Harman had helped persuade the New York Times to hold a story on the wiretapping program before the 2004 elections. In an initial statement to The Plum Line's Greg Sargent yesterday, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said "Ms. Harman did not influence my decision. I don't recall that she even spoke to me." But in a second statement yesterday, Keller acknowledged that "Harman called Philip Taubman, then the Washington bureau chief of The Times, in October or November of 2004" and "urged that The Times not publish the article." Harman's office released a statement yesterday as well, arguing "the CQ Politics story simply recycles three year-old discredited reporting of largely unsourced material." Harman said that she "never contacted the Justice Department" about the prosecution. Harman's statement did not address whether she had "contacted anyone at the White House."

JUSTICE -- ORDER FOR BUSH TO TESTIFY IN LAWSUIT AGAINST SMU RELATED TO ACQUISITION OF LAND FOR BUSH LIBRARY: After weeks of legal battles to keep President Bush out of court, Texas district judge Martin Hoffman ruled last Friday that Bush could be deposed in a lawsuit against Southern Methodist University (SMU). The case was brought by two condominium owners near SMU who are claiming "the university bullied owners into selling without disclosing plans to build a presidential library at the site." Hoffman ruled that Bush can be deposed because he has "clearly relevant and material information about the central issues of the case," including if SMU shared building plans with him before buying the land. The plaintiffs have already received statements from Dallas businessman Ray Hunt and former White House counsel Harriet Miers. Still, Larry Friedman, the lawyer representing the condominium owners, said in response that this new development is "monumental for our case. We've been seeking transparency." Immediately following the ruling, however, Bush's lawyers said they will file a claim that the judge "abused his discretion" in ordering the former president to testify. Judge Hoffman stated in his ruling that he would not enforce the order while Bush's legal team sustained such an appeal. A sitting or former president has been called to testify in a civil court case only three times. Yet as Judge Hoffman said, "Presidents are not immune from the judicial process."

THINK FAST

The debate over health care reform is intensifying as liberals are warning their Democratic allies to resist caving. Recently, more than 70 House Democrats "warned party leaders that they will not support a broad health reform bill that does not offer consumers a government-sponsored policy, and two unions withdrew from a high-profile health coalition because it would not endorse a public plan."

A new poll released yesterday found that 67 percent of Cuban-Americans "now support the removal of all restrictions for travel to Cuba, an 18-point increase from three years ago, when the same question was asked." Despite the community's "reputation for loyalty to Republicans, the poll found widespread approval for Mr. Obama," with 67 percent having a favorable or somewhat favorable opinion of the president.

"House leaders in both parties were publicly mum" in the wake of a CQ report yesterday alleging that Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) "engaged in a quid pro quo with a suspected Israeli agent to advance her stature in Congress." Further, "the Republican messaging machine, usually quick to churn out e-mails alerting reporters to every alleged ethical misstep by a Congressional Democrat, stayed silent on the news."

Three Bush administration lawyers who signed the OLC torture memos -- John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steven Bradbury -- "are the subjects of a coming report by the Justice Department’s ethics office that officials say is sharply critical of their work." The office has the "power to recommend disbarment or other professional penalties or, less likely, to refer cases for criminal prosecution."

As of 8 a.m. ET this morning, more than 3,000 of you have taken action to urge the House Judiciary Committee to begin impeachment hearings against Jay Bybee. Please join our campaign by clicking here.

CongressDaily reports that, "despite criticism of earmarks by House Republican leaders during completion of the FY09 appropriations process," many are still requesting them. Reps. Jerry Lewis (R-CA) and Bill Young (R-FL) are among those in the Republican leadership still asking for and receiving millions in earmarks.

Yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for the "speedy release" of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, who has been convicted of spying by a court in Tehran. Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi has agreed to take up Saberi's defense, and the head of Iran's judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, has spoken out calling for a fair trial.

On Thursday, President Obama will meet with credit card executives "to tell them to support strict measures that curb lending abuses or face the wrath of angry consumers and a determined Congress." Lawmakers are launching efforts "to crack down on credit card companies for such practices as arbitrarily raising interest rates on existing balances...and charging interest on debt that was paid on time."

A TARP watchdog report said "the Treasury should take steps to better manage its financial-rescue effort so that taxpayer dollars are safeguarded and programs are more fraud-resistant, accountable and transparent." The report also said the total bailout price tag could reach $3 trillion "when Federal Reserve loans, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. guarantees and private money are factored in."

And finally: George W. Bush has "gone from commander-in-chief to chief pooper-scooper." Speaking to an audience in China on Saturday, Bush recounted how he recently took his beloved Scottish terrier Barney on a walk -- and brought along his own baggies to clean up the mess. "I was picking up what I had been dodging for eight years," Bush said, "scoring laughs" from the crowd.

GOOD NEWS
Today, President Obama is expected to sign a bill expanding the AmeriCorps program which will provide more funding to help more Americans mentor children, clean up parks, or build and weatherize homes for the poor.

STATE WATCH
FLORIDA: "A top House Republican will unveil legislation Tuesday that could open the door to the first oil and gas drilling off Florida's coast in decades."

NEW YORK: Gay rights groups are angry with former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani's war on same-sex marriage.

TEXAS: State Senate goes against Gov. Rick Perry (R) on unemployment aid in the federal stimulus.

BLOG WATCH
THINK PROGRESS: Newt Gingrich falsely claims U.S. presidents don't "smile and greet" Russian leaders.

WONK ROOM: Steel town mayor to testify on behalf of green jobs during whirlwind week of clean energy hearings.

YGLESIAS: The United States is falling behind in the development of clean energy technology.

GLENN THRUSH: Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) defends Texas secession as "very much an American principle."

DAILY GRILL
"He's just an entertainer."
-- Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS), 4/14/09, referring to right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh

VERSUS

"The congressman believes Rush is a great leader of the conservative movement in America."
-- Tiahrt's spokesperson, 4/19/09

INTERNSHIPS
The research team that brings you The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org needs summer interns! Click here for more information.
There are [B][I]numerous links within this newsletter, , this is only a summary click on the following link for more of the articles, etc.
http://www.thinkprogress.org
A LINK TO TAKE ACTION:
http://thinkprogress.org/impeach-jay-bybee/ ...............

Saundra Hummer

April 21st, 2009, 04:55 PM

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I I I I I I I
Meet the Press and the Media’s Distortions of the Bush Prosecutions Debate
By
Salon.
PHOTO – By Glenn Greenwald
Go on-site to view.
Whatever else one thinks about the debate over investigations and prosecutions for Bush crimes, there is no question that huge numbers of Americans — likely majorities — favor them. And that was true even before the release of the most graphic and stomach-turning evidence yet: the 4 DOJ memos released this past week which describe the torture in detail. The assertion that “most Americans” don’t want investigations — whether made by media stars to argue against investigations or Obama supporters to justify the immunity the President wants to extend to everyone involved — is factually false.

A USA Today from February — headlined: ”Poll: Most want inquiry into anti-terror tactics” — found “two-thirds of those surveyed said there should be investigations into allegations that the Bush team used torture to interrogate terrorism suspects and its program of wiretapping U.S. citizens without getting warrants,” and “four in 10 favor criminal investigations.” A Gallup poll from mid-February found that between 60 to 70% of Americans favor investigations for torture, warrantless eavesdropping and DOJ politicization, and that majorities of Democrats (and more than 40% of all Americans and independents) favor criminal prosecutions. Only small percentages of independents — between 25-38% — oppose investigations for each of the three lawbreaking allegations. A Washington Post/ABC News poll from January similarly found that a majority of Americans (50-47%) — and an overwhelming majority of Democrats (69%) – believe that the Obama administration should investigate whether the Bush administration’s treatment of detainees was illegal. While polls can vary based on how the questions are asked, every poll shows substantial percentages favoring investigations.

These facts about public opinion are virtually always excluded from establishment media discussions, and those who advocate investigations and prosecutions — the view held by large percentages, if not majorities, of Americans — are virtually never heard from. That’s because the belief that elites should be exempted from all consequences when they break the law is as close to a trans-partisan religious tenet of Beltway culture as it gets.

Consider yesterday’s Meet the Press panel discussion of this issue involving David Gregory and five exceedingly typical Beltway insiders — The Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein, Fortune’s Nina Easton, Time’s Rick Stengel, former GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey, and former “moderate” Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr. That’s three ostensibly non-partisan journalists, a right-wing fanatic, and a New Republic/DLC Democrat from Tennessee whose career was built on proving how much he embraces GOP policies — that’s called ”diversity of views” in Establishment Media World.

Exactly as one would expect, they were all in full and complete agreement that there must be no investigations or prosecutions. There was not a syllable uttered that political officials should be treated the same as ordinary Americans when they got caught breaking the law. As always, only the suffocatingly narrow Beltway consensus is heard in our political debates, even when huge percentages of Americans reject it:

ARMEY:Forget about–why are you talking, smacking George Bush around now? Look for the future.”

STENGEL: ”[Obama] is very Mandelalike in the sense that he’s saying let the past be the past and let us move into the future.”

FORD: ”Look, I think the president said it best . . . He said look, the past is the past, let’s move forward. . . . After September the 11th we asked men and women in this country serving in our military and our intelligence agencies to go out and find bad guys. I’m always a little hesitant afterwards when we try to judge the kinds of things they did. “

EASTON: ”I was just going to say that he clearly wanted to put this behind him, or behind the country, by releasing them. . . . Dennis Blair, the director of National Intelligence, said in, in one very telling quote, “It’s very easy to look back on this safe, warm April 2009 day and second guess a lot of these decisions.”

What a vibrant, spirited debate that was. And the way they all harmoniously recite the same White House Orwellian script — look to the glorious future, citizens, for that is where your salvation lies — is almost as creepy as the OLC torture memos themselves. Too bad for the 2.1 million Americans in prison — the largest prison population on the planet — that the profound sense of forgiveness exuded by Obama and our Beltway elites only seems to apply to themselves, and especially to Bush officials who systematically violated the law. For ordinary citizens caught in America’s criminal justice system, mercy and understanding are the rarest commodities one can imagine. Perhaps it’s time to begin a FREE BERNIE MADOFF campaign based on Obama’s oh-so-moving decree that this is a time for reflection, not retribution, and that we must look forward, not backwards.

Last week, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, argued that Obama’s pledged immunity for CIA officials who tortured detainees violates international law and our treaty obligations — and the clear language of both the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture seem to leaves no doubt about that. Other legal experts have made the same point. And that was argued before Rahm Emanuel said yesterday that the immunity applies not only to the torturing CIA agents but also the Bush officials who designed the torture policies. How are those who spent the last eight years venerating international law, our treaty obligations, and U.N. pronouncements going to justify that? As the early, vigorous Obama supporter Andrew Sullivan put it today:

"And so Obama’s refusal to investigate war crimes is itself against the law. And so torture’s cancerous route through the legal and constitutional system continues, contaminating the future as well as the past, rendering the US incapable of upholding Geneva against other nations, because it has violated Geneva itself, and giving to every tyrant on the planet a justification for the torture of prisoners.

In this scenario, America becomes a city on a hill, where the rule of law is optional and torture acceptable if parsed into legal memos that do not pass the most basic professional sniff-test.

America becomes a banana republic.
Despite Obama’s desire to extend immunity beyond CIA agents to Bush officials, Digby notes that credible reports now suggest that “Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. is seriously considering appointing an outside counsel to investigate whether CIA interrogators exceeded legal boundaries—and whether Bush administration officials broke the law by giving the CIA permission to torture in the first place.”

It’s worth remembering that the decision of whether to prosecute is not Obama’s to make. We are supposed to have an independent Justice Department which makes descisions about prosecutions free of the type of political influence Obama and Rahm Emanuel seem eager to exert on the decision-making process. That, one might recall, was the crux of the various Alberto Gonzales scandals — that he was making prosecution decisions based on the dictates and interests of the White House rather than apolitical legal considerations. One could actually argue that Obama’s opinion about who should and should not be prosecuted is entirely irrelevant. The Attorney General has the independent obligation to make those decisions without regard to the President’s political wishes. Either way, at this point, given how aggressive Obama has become about demanding that there be no prosecutions, it seems clear that only a Special Prosecutor can discharge that duty.

Contrary to the debates which the establishment media presents about these matters, there is clearly a very substantial portion of public opinion that wants investigations. Beltway mavens love the idea that Beltway elites have exemption from legal consequences, but — for obvious reasons — that is not an idea embraced by many Americans. These latest revelations, and the ones to come, can be used to expand and channel this substantial public opinion to pressure Holder to ignore Obama’s wishes and instead act in accordance with basic legal principles that compel equal treatment under the law, rather than the two-tiered justice system (legal immunity for political elites) that is becoming increasingly undeniable by the day.
* * * * *
Here is one online commentator, sharing his views about the Obama/Emanuel approach of calling for “refleciton, not retribution” and “looking to the future” as a reason why war crimes should be forgotten and the high-level criminals immunized:
VIDEO:
Regarding torture..... Go on-line to gain access to this function and to the numerous links within this article.

UPDATE: My podcast interview with CQ’s Jeff Stein, the reporter who wrote the story on Jane Harman, Alberto Gonzales and AIPAC, is now posted at the bottom of my post from earlier today on Stein’s story.

UPDATE II: As Think Progress notes, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs today was forced explicitly to acknowledge that the architects of the torture policy are “not being held accountable.” Gibbs, too, recited like some religious chant the increasingly compulsory mantra that we must “look forward, not backwards.” The President can look as foward as he wants. Nobody needs him to prosecute. They can just appoint a Special Prosecutor with the mandate to follow the law, and then Obama can spend all of his time contemplating the future.

Credit where it’s due: CNN’s Ed Henry did a good job of asking these questions:
VIDEO: GIBBS: We're not holding torture authors accountable
UPDATE III: msnbc.com
Case (not) closed
More on the very important (and overlooked) duty of the responsibilities of the Attorney General to make decisions about prosecutions free and independent of the political desires of the President, from Newsweek’s Mike Isikoff, with Rachel Maddow:
VIDEO: I I I I I I I I I
2 Responses to “Meet the Press and the Media’s Distortions of the Bush Prosecutions Debate”
Posted on 21 Apr 2009 at 2:11 pm by Adamwestiii
I certainly support a full investigation and if there is sufficient evidence, then let’s haul’em off to court and let the court decide. To just move on and forget the past only sets a precident for this President and future Presidents.
Chaney definitely needs to be proscuted as he has done nothing but lied and put this great country in tremendous risk, besides killing innocent women and children in Iraq! - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Posted on 21 Apr 2009 at 3:38 pm by Ralph White
If the Bush Administration get by with this, what about an administration four or five times down the line. Obama needs to re-think this and let’s get on with investigations and prosecutions.
http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2009/04/21/meet-the-press-and-the-medias-distortions-of-the-bush-prosecutions-debate/I I I I I I I I I I I I I

Saundra Hummer

April 21st, 2009, 05:10 PM

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ Top Democrat tried to kill wiretap story in 2004
From:
"Raw Story"
Tuesday
April 21, 2009 7:55 AM

The New York Times confirmed late Monday that a top Democratic congresswoman called the paper in 2004 and tried to keep it from publishing an article exposing the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program — possibly helping to sway the balance in the 2004 presidential election.

The New York Times exposed the warrantless wiretapping program in 2005, revealing that the National Security Agency had engaged in the interception of thousands of American and foreign calls without a warrant as part of a program intended to disrupt terrorist plots. Upon running the story, they also admitted that they had withheld the article for a year at the urging of Bush Administration officials.

But buried in a Times article published Tuesday is the revelation that the top Democratic congresswoman on the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman (D-CA), called the paper’s Washington, D.C. editor in “October or November” of 2004 in an effort to quash the story.

“Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement Monday that Ms. Harman called Philip Taubman, then the Washington bureau chief of The Times, in October or November of 2004,” the Times writes. “Mr. Keller said she spoke to Mr. Taubman — apparently at the request of Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the N.S.A. director — and urged that The Times not publish the article.”

“She did not speak to me,” Keller said in a statement, “and I don't remember her being a significant factor in my decision.”

In addition, “Shortly before the article was published more than a year later, in December 2005, Mr. Taubman met with a group of Congressional leaders familiar with the eavesdropping program, including Ms. Harman. They all argued that The Times should not publish,” they Times reporters added.

At the time of her calls in 2004, Harman was part of the Gang of 8 — one of eight powerful members of Congress who are briefed on heavily classified intelligence matters. She was the most senior Democrat in the House dealing with intelligence affairs, and was sidelined after the 2006 congressional elections.

“October or November” 2004 would have been the month before, or the month of, respectively, of the election that Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) lost to then-incumbent President George W. Bush.

The paper did not give the exact date of Harman’s call.

Harman’s role in the wiretapping scandal emerged after a story Sunday in Congressional Quarterly, which disclosed that the California Democrat had been caught on an NSA wiretap promising an Israeli agent that she’d lobby to get the charges for two Israeli lobbyists accused of espionage reduced. The Times expanded on the story today.

An “official with access to the transcripts said someone seeking help for the employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a prominent pro-Israel lobbying group, was recorded asking Ms. Harman, a longtime supporter of its efforts, to intervene with the Justice Department,” the paper wrote. “She responded, the official recounted, by saying she would have more influence with a White House official she did not identify.

“In return, the caller promised her that a wealthy California donor — the media mogul Haim Saban — would threaten to withhold campaign contributions to Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who was expected to become House speaker after the 2006 election, if she did not select Ms. Harman for the intelligence post,” the paper added.

The full Times story is available here.

-John Byrne

http://rawstory.com/08/blog/2009/04/21/times-confirms-democrat-tried-to-stop-wiretapping-story-possibly-before-2004-election/
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

Saundra Hummer

April 21st, 2009, 05:46 PM

???????Dick Cheney: Obama’s Acting Like a Weak President
Monday, April 20, 2009 7:35 PM
Former Vice President Dick Cheney slammed the Obama administration Monday night for what he described as a disturbing tendency to criticize America abroad and embrace avowed enemies like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez while not praising the nation’s success in the war against terrorism.

As an example, Cheney revealed that he had pressed for the release of documents that would show how the Bush administration’s allegedly harsh interrogation techniques had thwarted major terrorist attacks. Instead, President Barack Obama only ordered the release of memos detailing the controversial techniques, not the results.

Cheney made the statements in a two-part interview with Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity. The first part was broadcast Monday night; the second will be broadcast Tuesday night at 9 p.m.

“What I find disturbing is the extent to which he has gone to Europe, for example, and seemed to apologize profusely in Europe, and then to Mexico, and apologize there, and so forth,” Cheney told Hannity.

“And I think you have to be very careful. The world outside there, both our friends and our foes, will be quick to take advantage of a situation if they think they're dealing with a weak president or one who is not going to stand up and aggressively defend America's interests.”

“The United States provides most of the leadership in the world… I don’t think we have much to apologize for.”

Cheney also said that: the release of CIA memos detailing interrogation techniques was a “little bit disturbing” because the administration hadn’t released documents detailing how those techniques were successful in thwarting terrorism.

the Bush administration’s policy of ignoring Chavez and other leftist leaders like Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua was more effective than embracing a dialogue with them. That only serves to validate their anti-democratic tendencies at home.

Obama’s habit of traveling abroad – to Europe and Mexico – and apologizing “profusely” for American actions signal weakness to friends and foes alike.

criticizing the previous administration is nothing new, and is to be expected from a new president. “We did it. I'm sure the Obama administration is not the first one ever to do that.”

Cheney told Hannity that he had “formally asked” for the declassification of documents he says would “lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country.”

he had no substantive policy discussions with Vice President Joe Biden, who never asked Cheney for his insight on policy. They only met once after the election.

Cheney explained the Bush administration's interrogation methods in terms of the situation after 9/11. The Bush administration knew little about al-Qaida, and had to quickly get up to speed with much of New York City already in ruins.

“One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort,” the former vice president said. “And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified.”

“I formally asked that they be declassified now,” Cheney said. “I haven't announced this up until now, I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country.”

“And I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was, as well as to see this debate over the legal opinions.”

The handshake between Obama and Chavez was not good because it only serves to undermine the cause of democratic oppositions in countries like Venezuela, where the Chavez regime has moved to crush dissent.

“You have millions of people all across South America who are watching how we respond,” Cheney said. “And if they see an American president sort of cozying up to somebody like Daniel Ortega or Chavez, I think it's not helpful. I think it sort of sets the wrong standard.”

“I've seen Hugo Chavez in operation before, and Daniel Ortega down in Nicaragua,” Cheney said. “These are people who operate in our hemisphere, but who don't believe in and aren't supportive of basic fundamental principles and policies that most of us in this hemisphere adhere to.”

“Basically, the position we took in the Bush administration was to ignore it. I think that was the right thing to do.”

One of the biggest temptations for a new administration is to focus on being liked rather than respected, Cheney said.

“The United States provides most of the leadership in the world. We have for a long time. And I don't think we've got much to apologize for. You can have a debate about that. But the bottom line is that, you know, when you go to Europe and deal with our European friends and allies, some things they do very well, some things they don't.”

“Sometimes it's important that a president speak directly and forthrightly to our European friends. And you don't get there if you're so busy apologizing for past U.S. behavior.” © 2009 Newsmax. All rights reserved
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Now he shows his face and has lots to say after he made himself so scarce for so long. President Obama Weak? President Obama bowing to foreign powers? Have they ever heard of diplomacy? What did they do that was better? Did they ever really work to improve our country and our world? This man, this Cheney character would be laughable if he weren't so dangerous. Assassination teams? Only answerable to him? So beyond our laws as to be a criminal offense? This is what we now have to overcome, the upside down world Cheney and Bush have left us. I see just the opposite in President Obama, a man who hit the ground running and who's doing all in his power and knowledge to undo the damage brought on our country by these two neer-do-wells, Dick Cheney, and GW Bush.

Could be this is his problem, in that he he equates intelligence, strength and know-how with being one sneaky, mean bastard. This is his M.O. and it seems that President Obama is light years away from fitting into the Dick Cheney, or, GW Bush molds. Thankfully so. Barack Obama comes nowhere near what the worst administration in our history ideals are. The Cheney/Bush administration was so out of it that even in hindsight, failure is impossible for them to admit. But wait, Cheney is off in his counting house taking stock of all the money he made for Halliburton and it's subsideries during his watch. Cheney a failure? Depends on what one's ideals are. If it is only about his own money and the companies he had run, he's a blarring success.

Mistakes made? Obama has made mistakes? Sure, and who hasn't? In his situtaion, who wouldn't? I don't always like some of what he's doing, nor what he plans on doing, with coal and ethanol being a prime example, so sure, and then there's those emotions, those thoughts, but he isn't as Cheney is saying, and where is his glass house anyway? Maybe I want to throw some rocks.

100 days, and who's to say what else will happen down the road? It's been a really busy time.

I wish our president my best.
SRH

Saundra Hummer

April 22nd, 2009, 12:07 PM

. . . The Pirate Latitudes
PHOTO:Go on-site to view:The 290-foot, three-masted cruise ship Le Ponant was targeted last year by Somali pirates, who held hostage its crew of 30—a harbinger of attacks to come. By Thierry Lacour/Gamma/Eyedea/Zuma Press.

When the French luxury cruise ship Le Ponant was captured by a raggedy, hopped-up band of Somali pirates last spring, in the Gulf of Aden, it looked as if the bandits had bitten off more than they could chew. But after a week-long standoff, they got what they had come for—a $2.15 million ransom. Describing the terrifying attack, the ordeal of the ship’s epicurean crew, and the tense negotiations, the author examines the ruthless calculus behind a new age of piracy.
By
William Langewiesche
April 2009 Last spring, as crew members of the small French-flagged cruise ship Le Ponant prepared to sail through the Gulf of Aden, off the coast of Somalia, they taped blackout cardboard over the windows, readied fire hoses to repel boarders, and mounted a special pirate watch to port and starboard. The Gulf of Aden is a hotbed of piracy, a crucial waterway where over the past several years Somali gangs operating far from shore have been hijacking ships, and allied navies have tried to respond. The Ponant was not built for such places. It is a modern, 290-foot, three-masted sailing vessel, with Riviera-style raked lines, that sells luxurious holidays to a maximum of 64 passengers at a time. It has four decks (including an upper one for lounging in the sun), two restaurants serving sophisticated French cuisine, individually air-conditioned cabins, a bar, a library, and a marina platform close to the water at the stern, for the launching of Zodiacs and water toys. It spends Northern Hemisphere summers in the Mediterranean on old-stone excursions to dead-city sites, and Southern Hemisphere summers in the Indian Ocean, visiting Madagascar and the pristine islands of the Seychelles. Its customers tend to be silver-haired and genteel. Most are American or French, traveling in groups sufficiently large to charter the entire ship. On this run now, however, no passengers were aboard. The ship was being repositioned to the Mediterranean for the summer season—a trip requiring a monotonous passage beyond sight of land for a full week at sea. The crew took advantage of the pause to relax and perform minor chores. Despite their precautions they did not believe that the Ponant would be attacked.

There were 30 crew members aboard—the ship’s full complement, less one professional pianist. They occupied cramped but adequate quarters on the lowest deck, toward the bow. Most were not sailors but hotel staff. Six were Filipinos, and formed a group apart. In the kitchen, the chef was an African from Cameroon, but because he had learned to cook in Lyon from Paul Bocuse, a famous father of nouvelle cuisine, he was considered to be as French as the French themselves. Of the rest of the crew all except one Ukrainian were as French as the French, but by birth. This meant that nouvelle cuisine was important to them, and, generally speaking, so was sex. With the exception of a 69-year-old ship’s doctor who had gone to sea after a rough divorce, they were young to middle-aged. Seven of them were women, and sporting as European women can be. Three couples had formed—the cruise director with the chief mechanic, a chambermaid with a steward, and the sports coordinator with the third mechanic. Their liaisons were discreet but of interest to everyone. There were no secrets on a ship the size of the Ponant. Surprisingly, there were also few jealousies.

You had to be sociable to endure in the job, because however pleasant the Ponant seemed to its passengers, the conditions of work aboard were not easy. The wages were low, the hours were long, and no retirement benefits were provided. During rotations ashore there were no wages at all. These terms were non-negotiable. They stemmed from the culture of a global shipping industry which over the past 60 years has pursued profit and efficiency in part by ridding itself of labor unions, and more fundamentally by freeing itself from the constraints of the nation-state and its laws. The company that owns the Ponant is a Marseille-based shipping conglomerate called CMA CGM, which is held by a Franco-Syrian-Lebanese family named Saadé, and does business through 650 agencies and offices worldwide, serving 403 ports in 150 countries, and operating more than 400 container ships, many of them under flags of convenience—cherry-picking the official home ports in a mockery of national chauvinisms. If there were a God looking down from above, he would have to approve, if only on the basis that all are equal in his sight. Appropriately, the CMA CGM personnel department promotes the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and vigorously denounces “any kind of discrimination, based on national, social or ethnic origin, race, sex, age, religion, political or other opinions.” This means, of course, that the company denounces discrimination in favor of the French.

The WarningIt has to deal with the customers’ prejudices nonetheless. As is well known, the French still think that French is better, and many Americans quietly go along. It might be difficult to sell expensive cruises on a truly non-discriminatory ship, for instance sailing under the Mongolian flag with a mixed Pakistani and Indonesian crew. A partial answer for the Ponant is a special registry based 10,000 miles from Marseille in the South Pacific, in a tax haven that does not impose French labor laws on shipowners but allows the French flag to be flown. The tax haven is Mata-Utu, the home port painted on the Ponant’s stern, and the capital of a loosely held French protectorate called Wallis and Futuna, where the Ponant has never been. There are three main islands there, one of which has been uninhabited for more than a century—ever since, it is reputed, the last of its residents were killed and eaten. Today the territory is ruled by a French envoy, a fractious assembly, and three local kings. CMA CGM maintains a mailbox and an e-mail address there, in Mata-Utu, through which employment inquiries can be routed. But these are details that did not have to concern the passengers, for whom, by appearances, the Ponant was a French ship with a French crew that was happy and healthy and did not require tips.

The crew were romantics, or they never would have gone to sea. The captain was a die-hard sailor named Patrick Marchesseau, aged 40, who came from La Rochelle, on the French Atlantic coast, and had three young daughters, two of whom, Alizéa and Océana, had nautical names. Marchesseau is a gracious, soft-spoken man, whose appearance, except for the crow’s feet around his eyes, is unmarked by the sea. I met him in a village in the center of France. He told me that he started sailing as a child in nine-foot Optimists, became a sailing instructor as a teenager, made his first ocean trip at age 18 in a 41-foot fiberglass sloop, went off to merchant-marine school, graduated, rose through the ranks aboard various vessels, and at the age of 35, in 2003, assumed command of the largest passenger ship then operating under the French flag—a 700-foot, 1,700-person monster called the Mistral, which belonged to the Greek-owned Festival Cruises and was home-ported (naturally) in Mata-Utu. Marchesseau had 500 crew members representing 40 nationalities under his command, and as captain of a ship was rather far removed from the sea. The job was above all an exercise in scheduling, logistics, and personnel management. Then Festival Cruises went broke, and creditors stepped in to seize the Mistral in Marseille. It was January 16, 2004. One day later Océana was born. Eventually, Marchesseau flew to Tahiti, where he captained a yacht for a few months, before returning to Marseille to manage a small maintenance crew on the Mistral, which remained blocked in port. These were hard times, but to be expected in the business.

In the fall of 2004, Marchesseau’s luck changed, and he was hired to serve as one of two rotating captains of the Ponant. The split duty placed him onshore more than he would have preferred, and meant that he would be paid for only half of every year, but the offer was better than others in sight and had the added attraction that the Ponant is a true sailing ship, capable of moving under wind power alone. Marchesseau flew to the Seychelles and assumed command. Soon afterward, on December 26, 2004, the ship was anchored in deep water off an island called Curieuse, tending to a group of French passengers, most of whom had gone ashore to loll on a beach. Around noon a sailor radioed from the island reporting in confusion that the ocean had suddenly somehow withdrawn. It was the ebb before the surge of the murderous Asian tsunami that was reaching across the Indian Ocean and slamming into its shores. Marchesseau had received no warning of the event, and he had no time to make sense of the sailor’s call. The tsunami swept smoothly under the Ponant’s keel, in the form of a current, pivoting the ship 90 degrees around its anchor, and then rearing up into a steep wave which obliterated the beach from right to left before Marchesseau’s eyes. Marchesseau was horrified, but perhaps because the French are so well practiced with beaches, it turned out that every passenger survived. Elsewhere, a quarter-million people died. Marchesseau retrieved his wards. He was annoyed that some of them then made a fuss about losing their sunglasses.

PHOTO:Patrick Marchesseau, captain of the Ponant, at the harbor of La Flotte, France, near his home. Photograph by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson.

On a larger ship a captain would not have had to listen to such complaints. Nonetheless, Marchesseau was pleased with the Ponant’s modest size. He liked the proximity to the sea and the crew, and he appreciated the flexibility that comes with attending to only 64 passengers at a time.

Many of the trips were full charters. Among the national groups, the French were the easiest to handle, if not necessarily to like. They slept late, savored the refined cuisine, and demanded little of an itinerary beyond the chance to lie in the sun. They could be imperious with the waiters and maids, but overall they were simple to satisfy. American passengers were different—individually more accessible than the French, but collectively exhausting. The problem seemed to stem from a lack of skepticism, or of philosophical distance from themselves. Certainly this was not true of all Americans, but it did seem to apply to the types who came to these cruises. They sincerely regarded traveling on the Ponant as an opportunity for self-improvement. They would read up beforehand (from recommended lists), and then appear for the trips with sunblock creams and special shoes, accompanied by lecturers who were expected to enrich their minds. They were nice people, but of the sort who go for swims wearing long-brimmed visors and drawstring hats. Rather than lingering late in the Ponant’s bar, they retired after dining because they wanted to be fresh for sunrise departures and goal-oriented hikes. They did not walk, but trekked. They did not like long lunches of nouvelle cuisine. Midday they preferred quick meals of barbecued burgers and New York cheesecake, or Caesar salad. They did not mean to offend. But their tastes were insulting to the chef, and upsetting by birthright to the crew.

Three such American groups had chartered the Ponant consecutively just prior to the repositioning run last spring, and another was scheduled to join the ship a week ahead, on the far side of Yemen, for a self-improvement sail up the Red Sea. Marchesseau wanted to give the crew a rest. From Victoria, the capital of the Seychelles, they motored north for several days, doing 12 knots across a flat sea and tidying the ship when not sleeping or reading or sitting down to eat. On the first night out, a Sunday, they enjoyed an exquisite dinner of freshly caught bonito. We know about the food because Marchesseau later published a book in France recounting the ship’s ordeal, and, as a Frenchman writing for the French, he kept the readers closely informed on matters of cuisine. The book is called Prise d’Otages sur le Ponant. It is a chronological account, informed by technical detail. In the absence of the ship’s log, which has never been made public, it is the closest thing to a document of record, and a helpful supplement to the captain’s memories.

On the morning of the second day, a Monday, a breeze arrived from the northeast, and the c