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04-04-09

• Republicons Inciting Violence - Following the German Playbook Leading to Hitler:
• GOP talking points lead to shooting rampage, 3 cops dead (americablog)
• Military-Industrial Complex:
• Jeremy Scahill: Obama's Neoliberals: Selling His Afghan War One Report at a Time (rebelreports) "In its support for the Afghan war, the Center for American Progress is aligning itself with the ''experts'' who have been wrong about pretty much everything"
• Many, If Not Most, Ex-Blackwater Workers To Return to Iraq Jobs Under New Employer By Next Month (nytimes) -- The more they promise us change we can believe in, the more things stay the same.
• Pope Nazi a Silly--And Lethal--Fool:
• Mark Morford - Pope, extra ribbed - Benedict says condoms make AIDS worse. God recoils in shame. (sfgate)
• Witches, Condoms and the Pope (commondreams)
• Tom Lehrer - The Vatican Rag (youtube)
• Restore the Rule of Law And Legal Accountability!
• Kucinich wants House to investigate (Cheney) assassination (ring) claims (cleveland)
• Israel on Trial (nytimes) "Of 1,434 Palestinians killed in the Gaza invasion, 960 were civilians, including 121 women and 288 children"
• The Phone War on Drugs:
• Marijuana appears to aid in the destruction of brain cancer cells, offering hope for future anti-cancer therapies (google)
• Paul, Frank Introduce Hemp Legalization Bill (washingtonindependent)
• Protestors Protesting:
• Protesters rally on Wall Street, ask government to 'bail out the people,' not big business (chicagotribune)
• Anti-NATO protestors set Strasbourg hotel on fire (channnelnewsasia)
• Health Reports:
• Vitamin D From Sun Exposure Reduces Cancer Risk, Ecological Studies Find (cancermonthly)
• A Dash of Sanity:
• Big, Big Splash of Sanity: Dem Leaders Use Fast-Track to Pass Obama Budget -- No filibuster. No amendments. Why weren't they using this legislative method to pass Obama's earlier legislation, which was generally watered down by Republicons to the point of very expensive ineffectiveness? Republicons have demonstrated they will do everything possible to defeat Obama's efforts to set aright our capsized economy -- so just shut them out from the process. Give them a BIG time-out till they have a real change of heart about bipartisan cooperation. That would probably mean the remainder of Democratic rule. The filibuster should be eliminated permanently, along with secret holds and the regal power of committee chairmen.
• Gay marriages expected to begin in Iowa April 24 (yahoo/ap) -- Vote by the good people of Iowa to try to amend the state constitution against gays would likely come no earlier than 2012. Just imagine all the heterosexual marriages that will be destroyed during that time because gay Iowans will be able to marry. Just as in Massachusetts, where traditional marriage has literally collapsed because of the presence of gay marriages. Without gays and baby killers to hate, the super-elites would have nothing left to hold together their mostly brain-dead Republicon Party.
• The Great Economic Shakedown:
• Man to Get to Know: William K. Black (pbs video) -- Just watched on Bill Moyers Journal an amazing exposé of the MASSIVE fraud perpetrated by a relative handful of people to produce the present unnecessary economic collapse -- and the continuing government fraud to hide the losses and cover up those individuals' massive deliberate fraud.
• William K. Black: The Two Documents Everyone Should Read to Better Understand the Crisis (huffingtonpost) "The FBI identified the epidemic of mortgage control fraud at such an early point that the financial crisis could have been averted had the Bush administration acted with even minimal competence."
• Glenn Greenwald: Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Wall Street's ownership of government (salon)
• Summers Received Hundreds Of Thousands In Speaking Fees From TARP Recipients (huffingtonpost)
• Hedge fund paid Obama adviser Summers $5.2 million (yahoo - americablog)
• Financial crisis not hurting bank bond owners who hold on to their investments (yahoo) "Many those bondholders, in fact, are still profiting from their investments so long as they haven't had to sell, while the rest of us deal with vanishing wealth."
• Anticrepuscular Rays Over Florida (apod)
  

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04-03-09

• The Great Economic Shakedown:
• Robert Reich: It's a Depression (robertreich) "This is still not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it is a Depression. And the only way out is government spending on a very large scale. We should stop worrying about Wall Street. Worry about American workers. Use money to build up Main Street, and the future capacities of our workforce."
• Global Broiling:
• G20 stimulus package has 'short-changed the planet' (guardian/uk) "Officials stressed that the objective of the G20 summit was to agree to an economic strategy. But campaigners say that if tough measures to fight global warming are not agreed soon, the consequences will be far worse than the global financial crisis." -- Much too optimistic a statement. Because of global momentum to continue to pump more and more global warming gases into the atmosphere, our goose, dear reader, is probably already cooked. Nothing left but the basting. Enjoy the sights and sounds of nature as you have the chance, because they probably will mostly be fried over the next 100 years, including your children. Thanks a lot, G20, living up to your well-deserved reputation of being generally useless on the things that really matter.
• We spend more money on Halloween than we do on research and development of renewable energy sources.
• Your Liberal Media:
• The Real Thing: Goodman, Greenwald Honored for 'Path-Breaking' Journalism (theithican - pbs video)
• The Phony Thing: Something is Rotten at PBS (commondreams) Reid: "It might be perfectly reasonable for people to disagree about health policy. But it's not perfectly reasonable to mislead the American people on national television in the middle of a health care crises when Congress is shaping legislation that will mean life or death for the for-profit health insurance industry."
• A Dash of Sanity - Equality in Marriage:
• Iowa Supreme Court rules in favor of same-sex marriages. Unanimous decision. (americablog - lawdork)
• Light Echoes from V838 Mon (apod)
  

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04-02-09

• Steal That Vote - Something Republicans Would Never Do:
• Huckabee Jokes About Keeping Voters Away from the Polls in VA Gubernatorial Election (bradblog video)
• NGC 1850: Not Found in the Milky Way (apod)
  

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04-01-09

• Bird Flu - The Threat Goes On:
• H5N1 virus may be adapting to pigs in Indonesia (cidrap) -- Could mutate either direction in pigs.
• The Prison-Industrial Complex:
• Stirrings Of Prison Reform (digby) "Jim Webb stepped firmly on a political third rail last week when he introduced a bill to examine sweeping reforms to the criminal justice system."
• The Great Economic Shakedown:
• Treasury gets even worse with nomination of Neal Wolin as #2 (americablog) "Neal Wolin, played a key role in drafting legislation in the late 1990s deregulating the banking system, a former Treasury Department official confirms to us."
• Astronaut's Head Upgraded During Spacewalk (apod)
  

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03-31-09

• The Great Economic Shakedown:
• Geithner's Dirty Little Secret (onlinejournal) "What Geithner does not want the public to understand, his ‘dirty little secret’ is that the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000 allowed the creation of a tiny handful of banks that would virtually monopolize key parts of the global ‘off-balance sheet’ or over-the-counter derivatives issuance. Today five US banks . . . hold 96 percent of all US bank derivatives positions in terms of nominal values, and an eye-popping 81 percent of the total net credit risk exposure in event of default. The five are, in declining order of importance: JPMorgan Chase, which holds a staggering $88 trillion in derivatives (€66 trillion!). Morgan Chase is followed by Bank of America, with $38 trillion in derivatives, and Citibank with $32 trillion. Number four in the derivatives sweepstakes is Goldman Sachs, with a ‘mere’ $30 trillion in derivatives. Number five, the merged Wells Fargo-Wachovia Bank, drops dramatically in size to $5 trillion. Number six, Britain’s HSBC Bank USA has $3.7 trillion."
• Military-Industrial Complex:
• Robert Fisk: A Brave Man Who Stood Alone - If Only the World Had Listened to Him (independent/uk)
• The Phony War on Drugs:
• Pot Laws Are No Laughing Matter (sfgate) "U.S. policies are based on the fantasy that we can somehow make this industry go away, but prohibition hasn't stopped marijuana use. Indeed, federal statistics show a roughly 4,000 percent rise since the first national ban took effect in 1937. We've simply handed a virtual monopoly on production and distribution to criminals, including those brutal Mexican gangs."
• Restore the Rule of Law - Obama Guilty of War Crimes By Not Prosecuting Bush Regime for Torture:
• Obama, war crimes and defending the status quo (onlinejournal) "It is just as bad to prevent the investigation and prosecution of a war crime as its commission because you become part of it."
• In the Heart of the Tarantula Nebula (apod)
  

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03-30-09

• Global Broiling:
• Drinking From Your Toilet: One of the Perks of Overpopulation and Its Resultant Global Warming (grist)
• Military-Industrial Complex:
• Juan Cole: Obama's Domino Theory (salon) "Obama broke with his pledge of straight talk to the public and fell back on Bush-style boogeymen and implausible conspiracy theories."
• Possible Mud Volcanoes on Mars (apod)
  

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03-29-09

• Impeachment Is Off the Table:
• Taking a page from Pelosi's playbook to win in 2008, Obama afraid to reinstitute the U.S. ban on assault weapons (newsweek) -- It doesn't matter what disastrous consequences may occur in the meantime as a result of inaction, winning the next election is all that really matters to these Democrats, even though when they do win and don the mantle of power, they're still afraid to boldly do the right thing because there's always another election just a couple years away. -- The sad news is that by not doing certain of the right things that Obama is afraid to even touch, he is setting himself to be a one-termer and setting the nation up to fall again under the tyranny of conservative nutjobs who give not a whit about the meaning of democracy.
• Global Broiling:
• Obama Is Satisfied With three/tenths of a mile increase in mileage rate per gallon by 2011 (freep) -- Good Boy Scout Obama unwilling to lean on poor, destitute car manufacturers who already have the technical knowhow to kick up the mileage rate to 40 mpg or better, and have already built working prototypes, but have withheld their introduction to the marketplace for years. Well, Brother Barack, we don't have the time to fiddle with this fractional bullshit while Mother Earth is starting to simmer.
• The Great Economic Shakedown:
• Lendman: Obama's Latest No Banker Left Behind Scheme (sjlendman)
• Our Liberal Media:
• Greenwald: Newsweek's Unintentionally Revealed, Central Truth (salon) "In his just-released cover story on Paul Krugman's status as Obama critic, Newsweek's Evan Thomas includes these observations: By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring. Thomas then acknowledges what is glaringly obvious not only about himself but also most of his media-star colleagues: 'If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am) . . .'"
• A Dash of Sanity, At Least A Little:
• New York to Raise State Tax Rate on Incomes Above $300,000 (nytimes)
• Zero-Tolerance Drug Policies Wreak Havoc on Children’s Education (projo) -- These cruel, draconian laws have destroyed innumerable families and lives and have overfed the gluttonous, grotesque prison-industrial complex. Stupid, lazy politicians have taken the easy way to get votes from a stupid, lazy public that permits such laws to be passed.
• Signals of a Strange Universe (apod)