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05-23-09 - Synthetic Flu (?) Analyzed and Implied to Be Natural:
- Genetic Analysis of Swine Flu Virus Reveals Diverse Parts (sciencenews)
- The Rule of Law: Someone Actually Does Care:
- High-Ranking U.S. Officials Among Targets of Inquiries by Spanish Judges (washingtonpost)
- Cleaning Up the Environment:
- Demolishing Our Freedoms, One at a Time:
- Four People Face Federal Prison for Passing Out Leaflets and Chalking Slogans (firedoglake)
- Apollo 12 and Surveyor 3 Stereo View (apod) -- Get out your 3-D glasses for this one.
05-22-09 - Barack McSame Obama:
- Sibel Edmonds: Two Sides of the Same Coin...Heads-Heads (123realchange) "Some call it [Obama's flips and flops] a major betrayal. Can we go so far as to call it a 'swindling of the voters'?" -- In reality, by covering up Bush administration's war crimes, and refusing to prosecute them, Obama has violated the Geneva Convention, his oath of office, and has already legally become an accessory to war crimes -- a war criminal who would have to be tried along with the Bush gang. Is there anything Obama won't do to protect Bush war criminals?
- Synthetic H1N1 Flu Virus:
- Madsen: H1N1 synthetic flu may be test run for H5N1 avian flu (onlinejournal)
- Military-Industrial Profiteering Idiots:
- DADT: It’s Like Setting Huge Piles Of Money On Fire (wonkroom with Maddow interview) -- Wasteful, ridiculous, bigoted, destructive 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' policy now throwing away an 18-year Lt. Colonel combat pilot who has 25 million taxpayer dollars already invested in him.
- The Costs of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (americanprogress) -- 75% of Americans believe that gays should be allowed to serve openly in the military -- (Not that I can understand why any rational openly gay man or woman would want to contribute their blood and energy to the war profiteers' ravaging perpetual money machine.)
- The Greatest Theft of All Time:
- The Fed: Unlocking The Secrets (digby)
- U.S. Double Standard About Israel's Nukes - Or, Why Do Arabs Hate Us:
- US Keeps Nuclear 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' (reuters)
- FDA - Always on the Job to Protect Health:
- Drinking All Beverages Cold From Plastic Bottles 'Increases Exposure to Gender-Bending Chemical' (telegraph/uk) -- "The results showed the volunteers' urinary BPA concentrations increased 69 per cent after drinking from the polycarbonate bottles" for only one week.
- East of Antares (apod)
05-21-09 - Global Broiling:
- The latest MIT study of global warming has now been published in the Journal of Climate, and its conclusions are grim (motherjones) "In the middle latitudes, they project warming of nearly 5ºC compared to previous projections of about 2ºC. At the poles, they project warming of 8-10ºC compared to 5-6ºC."
- 4ºC Rise in Temperature Could Cull 90 Percent of Human Population (shortnews - news.com.au) "Some fear it could happen by 2050" -- Has the human virus finally given Mother Earth a fever that will kill off most of the virus? That would take us back to the global population we had sometime after Columbus and before the Industrial Revolution. Too bad world politicians don't have the foresight and political will to set severe limits NOW on population growth, instead of suicidally calling for more breeding so there will be more people driving up special interest political power blocs -- and corporate profits.
- Securing uniformly fair and transparent elections - hardly possible without nationwide uniformity of election standards that force it to happen (along with speedy and severe penalties for violation) -- something Obama is hardly interested in and that will probably be his undoing as president after enough people have become disenchanted with him that any election could be construed by the right-leaning mainstream media as "close":
- Bev Harris: DuPage County, Illinois - one of the two "worst places to vote in America" (along with Riverside County, California) (bradblog)
- Padding the Pockets of the Rich at the Expense of Sick Americans:
- Elizabeth Edwards: $1 Of Every $700 Went To Pay Salary Of UnitedHealth CEO (wonkroom) "the President of UnitedHealth made so much money, that one of every $700 that was spent in this country on health care went to pay him"
- Obama's Actions Don't Match His Pretty Words:
- Greenwald: Obama's civil liberties speech (salon) -- How long will we let Obama play us for fools?
- Does Obama Plan to Give Up a Little Liberty to Get a Little Safety? (firedoglake)
- The President's Own Private Army (Of Which He Appears To Be Afraid) Can Do No Wrong:
- History of CIA Torture: Unraveling the Web of Deceit, Part III (bradblog)
- Madsen says David Atlee Phillips admitted shortly before his death in 1988 that the CIA had to remove JFK because they thought he was getting too close to communism (waynemadsenreport - google). Is the CIA also afraid of a president they think is getting too close to socialism? Is that the reason Obama has made so many deplorable moves in his approach to cleaning up what years of greedy capitalist deregulation created - and has taken a 'public=socialist' option in health care off the table? Is he that afraid of standing up for what is right? Did anyone ever happen to ask him during the campaign if he was willing to die for his country?
- Obama's Version of Transparency:
- Obama Issues Signing Statement, Can Withhold Information from Pecora Commission (firedoglake) "As head of the New York Fed, Timothy Geithner was smack in the middle of many conflicts of interest surrounding Goldman Sachs, AIG, and the bank bailout. This signing statement could be used to protect him from inquiry."
- Isn't this the point in California Gov. Gray Davis's administration when he was unceremoniously kicked out of office by recall?
- Voters want to stop balancing the budget on the backs of average Californians (sfgate) -- OK, Californians, time to put together that recall of the Hitler-admiring Gropinator.
- Religious Wrong Still Throwing Their Stinking Feces, Hoping Some Will Stick:
- The “Christian” Right’s still wrong and singing the same old song: Part 2 (onlinejournal)
- Synthetic H1N1 Flu Virus:
- Madsen: The history of the synthetic H1N1 flu virus and a not-so-rosy future (onlinejournal)
- IC 4592: A Blue Horsehead (apod)
05-20-09 - Padding the Pockets of the Rich:
- Robert Reich: The Health Care Cave-In (robertreich) "But the way things are going with health care, a better admonition would be: 'Don't give away the store.'" -- But Obama is a generous soul and only wants to have lots of friends, so why not give away the store, as he as already shown he likes to do.
- Honest Abe's Party - As Honest As the Day Is Long:
- Remedial Hissy (digby - onlinejournal - onlinejournal)
- Obama nominates Jesus Christ for Supreme Court; GOP concerned about Savior's "troubling Middle Eastern ties." (americablog)
- Greenwald: Terrorists in Prison: is there anything the Right doesn't fear? (salon) Of course we know the morally challenged RW leaders are just blowing more smoke up a brainwashed public's ass in order to keep Obama from accomplishing one more thing he said he would do. -- I remember when I was very young, there was a German POW camp containing thousands (perhaps 35,000 if memory serves me right) of POW's just a few miles from my hometown, and I don't remember ONCE hearing any adult ever express concern about some horrible German marauder escaping into our back yards.
- Homophobia Parade:
- The GayClic Collab Against Homophobia (youtube video) -- An appropriately worded, though highly understated, response:
- Prop 8 Decision Rumored Due Thursday Morning (americablog - twitpic) -- Police barriers being dropped off in the Castro. Such a shame our outrage at homophobia can be so easily corralled. Do you suppose it's the fluoride?
- The Bigots’ Last Hurrah (nytimes) "If it ['Gathering Storm'] advances any message, it’s mainly that homophobic activism is ever more depopulated and isolated as well as brain-dead."
- Military-Industrial Profiteering: Obama Afraid of His Own Personal Army
- Ray McGovern says that the President and CIA director seem afraid to hold the intelligence agency accountable (commondreams) -- Obama probably has plenty of good reason. Anyone remember JFK soon after he signed an ignored order to fold Agency duties into another government group?
- How Colin Powell Got Duped by the CIA (counterpunch - middle-east-online)
- Pakistan Needs Development, Not Drones (progressive)
- Above Earth, Fixing Hubble (apod)
05-19-09 - Those Venerable Members of Congress - They'll Always Do Their Best for Their Constituents - But What About For a Healthy Democracy?
- Who Needs Enemies When You Have Friends Like Harry Reid? Harry Reid Embraces Republican Talking Points (dailykos)
- Not to worry, he's making it easier for a GOPer to replace him in 2010: NV-Sen: Tough numbers for Reid (dailykos)
- Barack McSame Obama:
- Greenwald: Obama's embrace of Bush terrorism policies is celebrated as "Centrism" (salon)
- Obama is becoming a consummate politician (onlinejournal) "A presumed purveyor of change for America, Obama is showing us not so much the road to change for the nation but how he is personally accepting unsavory change. His apologists, many of my progressive friends among them, may say that there is a master plan behind the president’s surrendering on many progressive and moral issues, but that is only hope mixed with tons of rationalization on their part."
- Military-Industrial Profiteers: Pentagon Repeating the Clinton Two-Step Over DADT
- Pentagon has no plans to end Don't Ask Don't Tell (americablog) -- Like Clinton before him, Obama must be thinking his political capital is too valuable to waste on gays, who will vote Democratic anyway, by and large, even though he, like Clinton, will have shafted them yet again.
- The Biggest Theft in History:
- Krugman: Recovery years away (americablog) "'the period of a depressed economy' could last until 2013 or 2014," even though technically, the recession which began in December 2007 could end this coming August or September.
- Sagittarius and the Central Milky Way (apod)
05-18-09 - Prison-Industrial Complex - A Part of the American Dream:
- Montana town requests that U.S. government send 100 Gitmo detainees to its prison (thinkprogress)
- Israel: The Abused Victim That Has Become the Insatiable Abuser:
- Israel bans books, music and clothes from entering the Warsaw Gaza ghetto (haaretz)
- Laws Are Just to Control Little People:
- The 13 people who made torture possible (salon) "The Bush administration's Torture 13. They authorized it, they decided how to implement it, and they crafted the legal fig leaf to justify it."
- Jeremy Scahill: Spanish Investigation Reveals 'An Approved Systematic Plan of Torture' Under Bush (rebelreports)
- Glenn Greenwald: Distorting public opinion on torture investigations (salon)
- The Torturer Times: The Washington Post’s Partisan Press Release Service (emptywheel)
- The Biggest Theft in History:
- Lendman: Reviewing Ellen Brown's "Web of Debt:" Part VI (sjlendman) -- See entry on 05-15 for part V (Lendman: Reviewing Ellen . . .).
- Eta Carinae and the Homunculus Nebula (apod)
05-17-09 - Military-Industrial Profiteers: Absolutely Cynical Lunatic Playing an Absolutely Delusional Lunatic Like a Violin !!!
- Israel: The Abused Victim That Has Become the Insatiable Abuser:
- AIPAC: The Israel lobby is aiming to soften up US public opinion for an attack on Iran (guardian/uk)
- Barack McSame Obama:
- Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush (nytimes) "Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions." -- I wouldn't be so generous. From Obama's pattern of behavior so far, I would call them "the new administration's alleged high ambitions."
- Caught in Another Lie: US Is Using White Phosphorus in Afghanistan As an Illegal Weapon (commondreams)
- Obama's EPA clears 42 of 48 New Mountaintop Removal Mining Permits (wvgazette)
- Lest We Forget Sibel Edmonds: Rob Kall Interviews Sibel Edmonds (opednews) -- Still muzzled by the man who promised transparency in his government.
- Intrusive Big-Brother government:
- Mimas: Small Saturn Moon with a Big Crater (apod)
