05-09-09
- Return the Rule of Law and Legal Accountability for Past Crimes:
- Torture Defensible? How about 100 Homicides During 'Enhanced Interrogation'? (dailykos) "A simple fact is being overlooked in the Bush-era torture scandal: the number of cases in which detainees have been tortured to death. . . . To date approximately 100 detainees, including CIA-held detainees, have died during U.S. interrogations, and some are known to have been tortured to death." -- 'I was only following orders' wasn't good enough at Nuremberg and it's not good enough here and now.
- More Obama Doubletalk:
- Obama again talks of "changing," not "repealing," shameful and expensive 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' military bigotry (americablog) "I'm a lawyer. He's a lawyer. Words have meaning to lawyers."
- The Biggest Theft in History:
- Supercop (digby) "President Obama reportedly wants to put the Federal Reserve in charge of managing systemic risk among "too big to fail" financial giants. And why not? They've certainly done a bang-up job so far."
- Banks successfully lobbied Fed to make ’stress tests’ less stressful (thinkprogress) "The Federal Reserve significantly scaled back the size of the capital hole facing some of the nation’s biggest banks shortly before concluding its stress tests, following two weeks of intense bargaining."
- Are The Stress Tests Not Stressful Enough (yglesias)
- Stress tests are "wimpy" and part of "big lie" (americablog) The Big Lie: Stress Test Optimism Just Wall St. Propaganda, Former Bank Regulator Says (yahootechticker video) "It's in the interest of the financial community to send this propaganda out," Black says. "It's remarkable not that they do it but that it still works."
- Fed Assured Banks They Don’t Have To Raise Amount Mandated By Stress Tests (thinkprogress)
- Lendman: Reviewing Ellen Brown's "Web of Debt" (sjlendman Part I - Part II)
- Organized Religion: The Greatest Scam of All Time
- Templeton Big Money Lures Scientists to Support Their Religious Goals (pharyngula)
- Global Broiling:
- 18,000 year-old Bolivian glacier completely melted away (miamiherald) "the rate of thaw increased threefold in the last decade"
- Dangerous change, even loosely defined, is going to be hard to avoid (dailykos - nytimes) "The New York Times exposes an internal document (pdf) from the Global Climate Coalition, a group funded by the oil, [coal] and auto industries, that shows that their own scientists were confirming the reality of human-caused global warming and the effects of greenhouse gasses as early as 15 years ago even while publicly trying to dispute that reality."
- Advisers to Industry Group Weigh In on Warming (nytimes pdf) "The resulting internal document . . . rejected a variety of what it called 'contrarian' arguments against the basic concept that accumulating heat-trapping emissions would substantially warm the planet. The coalition, according to other documents, later requested that the section of the primer endorsing the basics of global warming science be cut."
- Inhofe's 700 'Experts' (washingtonmonthly) "Problems arise, however, when Inhofe's work is subjected to scrutiny. For example, some of the senator's scientists are actually economists. Others are scientists and inventors who have "no expertise in climate science whatsoever." Many are on ExxonMobil's payroll." One such 'expert', a Fox TV weatherman "rejects global warming, in part because he doesn't believe 'God would allow humans to destroy the earth He created.'" -- Couple this list of 'experts' with the 'Templeton' and 'Dangerous change' articles above and, well, you get the idea.
- Dawn of the Large Hadron Collider (apod) -- Track Higgs boson news.
