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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.
05-08-09 - Yet One More Obama Campaign Pledge Abandoned - By now, everyone should realize that to believe political candidates is utter foolishness. Their job as candidates is to lie smoothly enough to capture your vote, plain and simple. And Barack Obama is Mr. Smoothie, himself.
- Obama Budget Bans Federal Funding For Needle Exchange, Breaking Campaign Pledge (huffingtonpost) -- And assuring more deaths from the spread of HIV/AIDS. Obama is utterly terrified that the right wing whacko news media will have something juicy to complain about him that they don't have to actually make up.
- White House Silence Paved Way for ‘Cramdown’ Crash (washingtonindependent)
- From the Onion: Nation Ready To Be Lied To About Economy Again (theonion)
- Galaxies of the Perseus Cluster (apod)
05-07-09 - Great News For and About Young Americans!
- Young Americans Losing Their Religion (abcnews) "New Research Finds Number Who Claim No Church Has Risen Sharply" -- Since the brainwashing of our young with tales of a god who will torture anyone forever who disavows him or disobeys his rules, and the imposition of a false and unnecessary sense of guilt in the young -- what amounts to child abuse in every true sense of the word -- perhaps this mass exodus of the young from the Matrix of organized religion means we have a chance of having a mentally healthier population as they move on into adulthood. You don't have to go to church to be an ethical person. All you need is to want to be an ethical person and a little education into what that means. By the way, recently released information shows that non-church-goers tended to disapprove of torture, while church goers, you guessed it, approve of it. -- Could it be that the Bush years and the war-loving, gay-bashing, science-hating Religious Wrong Bush sycophants have actually done some good for society by making our young people see more clearly the hypocrisy and retardation of organized religion?
- Obama Eliminates Abstinence-Only Funding In Budget (huffingtonopost) -- Now I'd like to see a lot of lawsuits by victims of Bush's abstinence-only sex education programs.
- Restore the Rule of Law for Political and White Collar Criminals!
- Jeremy Scahill: A Response to Those Who Say Don't Prosecute Bush's Torture Lawyers (rebelreports)
- The Power Behind the Many Thrones:
- Annual Elite Conclave, 58th Bilderberg Meeting to be held in Greece, May 14-17 (canadafreepress - google search - google news) -- Ten to one, Obama drops out of sight long enough to pop in on them sometime during their meeting, but you can be sure we won't hear CNN reporting on his attendance. Adding a little context, both Obama and Hillary slipped away from the clicking cameras while the Bilderbergers were meeting in June 2008 in Northern Virginia. And I remember Dumbya once scheduled a trip to Italy where and when the Bilderbergers' were meeting. They'll smile and remain silent because we little people have no right to know what they are planning for us.
- Barack McSame Obama - Is There No Stopping Washington's Criminality?
- Confusion at the Canyon: Administration Engaging in the Same Potentially Illegal Action as Bush (newswire.ascribe) "The U.S. Department of the Interior last week authorized mining for uranium on federal land near Grand Canyon National Park in an apparent violation of a Congressional resolution passed last June that declared more than 1 million acres around the Park off-limits to new mining activity."
- A Halo for NGC 6164 (apod)
05-06-09 - The Emperor Has No Clothes! Obama, the Timid Cosmetician Who is Afraid to Face Off Against Power - Not Up To Being President After the Bush Criminal Regime Has Raped Our Country So Viciously - We Need Courage in Our President, Not Betrayal
- George W Bush lawyers to avoid 'torture memo' charges (telegraph) -- Barack Obama has betrayed the American people in so many fundamental ways. His silver-tongued lies have mesmerized a people who had been bashed into retardation by the atrocities Bush and his super-rich handlers perpetrated against the Constitution, the American supermajority, and the world -- and a people who desperately wanted to believe in Obama's lies about change we could believe in. Obama is fine at pushing papers around on his desk, of changing the way things look in little ways, of holding his chin up for photos as if to say "I am above reproach," but he is terrified of facing the real power players who are behind Bush's crimes against America and the world. We will continue to see small, cosmetic changes, some of which we may even like, but we will continue to accumulate a horrified sense of massive betrayal by our silver-tongued caretaker of the Bush and super-rich criminals protection program. I don't care for cosmetician politicians. I prefer good old basic honesty, ability to sense what is most important for the people, and the courage to do something about it. Bush left office with the country in such disarray that any next president would have his hands full just dealing with that devastation -- an effective way to interfere with Obama's plans of governance. What this country needs most, in addition to defusing of the ticking bombs Bush left us with are two changes of the utmost importance -- 1) restoring the rule of law and accountability for previous administration lawbreakers, as a precendent to warn off any future administration from trying it again and to give the nation once again a sense that we are a nation of laws, not smirking lawbreakers, and 2) complete, uniform election reform done in such a way that no election can ever again be stolen in the United States without bringing down the severest of penalties. Of course there is a myriad of other very important priorities to act upon as soon as possible. Bush must really be having a continual belly laugh that he left Obama juggling a half-dozen time bombs. I haven't voted for a Republican since the 70's out of a sense of outrage over their disrespect for ordinary people and their fawning over their rich constituents. Now, that outrage is taking on a new dimension, one where I sometimes think it possibly more honest and just about as useful to vote for what we already know are putrid, vile, lying, criminal Republicans, instead of continuing to contribute to a make-believe world that it could be better if only we had Democrats running things. And to let the Democrat money beggars know why they're not going to get more money or votes as long as they continue to fuk the nation with only a little more finnesse than the Republicans do it. Democrat pols are confident that liberals will always come through for them, regardless of how little of substance they really produce. They need to find out in no uncertain terms that it's time to earn the support of liberals, beginning with Barack Obama, not just expect it for playing follow-the-leader or for silver-tongued lying rhetoric. -- Will I actually make the leap? Probably not. I think I would probably just vote third party all the way and never give the Democrats another dime. (By way of introspection, this whole reaction reminds me a lot of the Independence Day scene of Jeff Blumberg throwing the garbage can around in Area 51 during his drunken fit of desperation and hopelessness. Too bad there's no reason to believe we'll go ahead and yet win the day, though. The David Rockefeller types already have that one all sewn up, thanks to the Obama types in government.)
- Kill 'em off, every one. That's what we humans are good at.
- Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar Sets Gray Wolves Up for Slaughter (alternet) -- Good going, Obama. Now that's change we can believe in!
- Flu Threats - Swine Flu Man-Made?
- Wayne Madsen says he has additional information that the current H1N1 flu virus was reverse engineered, beginning as early as 1997, using genetic material retrieved from a fairly intact Alaskan Inuit victim of the 1918 flu pandemic (waymemadsenreports)
- Dark Matter Ring Modeled around Galaxy Cluster CL0024+17 (apod)
05-05-09 - Christian Whackos Stirring Up Trouble in Afghanistan:
- Jeremy Scahill: Al Jazeera Releases Unedited Footage of US Soldiers' 'Bible Study' in Afghanistan (rebelreports with video)
- The Stench of Dead Rats:
- SIBEL EDMONDS: In Congress We Trust...Not (bradblog) "The former FBI translator and whistleblower suggests blackmail may be at the heart of Congressional refusal to bring accountability and oversight to its own members - such as both Hastert and Harman - in matters of espionage and national security"
- Lying for the Lord: The Mormon Way (americablog) "And it's a tenet of the Mormon faith that, Mormons think, gives them to the right to tell you a bald-faced lie, so long as it's a lie that somehow furthers the Mormon cause. . . . Why does this matter? Because the Mormons are "the" bankers of the religious right. Last fall, the Mormons dropped $20 million into California and singlehandedly turned a losing battle into the successful repeal of marriage rights for gay couples in that state. The Mormons have bankrolled hate initiatives in Alaska and Hawaii and across the northwest and midwest for the past decade. They are not some fringe "religion" to be shrugged off."
- Titan Beyond the Rings (apod)
05-04-09 - 9/11 Official Story a Complete Hoax:
- Traces of explosives in 9/11 dust, scientists say (javno - Danish News Video - globalexchange) -- Airplanes did not bring down the WTC towers. The Bush-controlled 9/11 Whitewash Commission lied. The Bush-controlled NIST lied. Neocon Rupert Murdoch's Popular Mechanics magazine lied. -- When could explosives have been placed in the WTC Towers? The elevators were being worked on all year. Explosive charges could have been placed on the central core columns under cover of ongoing elevator work. The particles found in the dust consisted of both unexploded nanoparticles of thermite and also nanospheres of iron, a byproduct of such explosions. -- Larry Silverstein admitted long ago (youtube) that WTC 7 was "pulled," a common term in controlled demolition work for bringing a building down. In order for the building to be "pulled" on 9/11 it would have had be be wired and charges set days to weeks earlier to be able to drop the 47-story building neatly into its own footprint at freefall speed. The collapse of WTC7 is the smoking gun of 9/11 that is extremely rarely shown to Americans on our highly controlled commercial television news and was not even mentioned in the 9/11 Whitewash Commission report. BBC was even caught announcing the prior collapse of WTC7 several minutes before it was actually brought down (dailymotion - notice WTC7 still standing next to the female reporter Jane Stanley's left ear), proving they were using a propagandizing script provided to them, but something went wrong and it was aired too early.
- Obamamania:
- Chris Hedges: Buying Brand Obama (truthdig)
- Christian Whackos Stirring Up Trouble in Afghanistan:
- Jeremy Scahill: US Soldiers in Afghanistan Told to "hunt people for Jesus... so we get them into the kingdom" (rebelreports)
- Flu Threats - Swine Flu Man-Made? - Maybe Mild Now - Maybe Virulent Next Time Around, As in 1918 -- And There's Still the H5N1 (Avian) Flu Mutating Out There -- Enough to Make a Feller a Little Nervous:
- Pandemic-Flu-Guide (pandemic-flu-guide.com)
- Swine Flu Expands to `Virtually All' U.S. as Signs of Mexico Epidemic Wane (bloomberg)
- Lendman: Unreported or Underreported Real Pandemics, Not Fake Ones Like Avian and Swine Flu (sjlendman)
- Rembrandt Impact Basin on Mercury (apod)
05-03-09 - To Impose Justice -- Or Not, Obama?
- Abu Ghraib Guards Say Memos Show They Were Scapegoats (washingtonpost) -- Seems to me that since Obama has excused from prosecution any CIA agent involved in torture, he is obligated to pardon "bad apple" Charles Graner, Jr. and make amends to "bad apple" Lynndie England on the same grounds, that they were 'just following orders that they believed to be legal.' -- Or might it be that only members of Obama's very own personal army, the CIA, are deserving of such lenience and understanding.
- The Greatest Theft of All Time:
- The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble (apod)
