In case you missed it

http://bluerootsradio.com/
If you haven't stopped by before, just click on the blue radio icon on the right hand side of the page.

shines always, but particularly when he's set up against some jackass republican...

John Denver
Sunshine on my Shoulder

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zx27dP1mTg&feature=related

The beauty and mystery of the ocean
we love

John Denver - Calypso

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35x_rwyBh-8&feature=related

Great to be hearing so much from you lately!
NN10, GritTV, RoF, That's Bullshit!, MSNBC, Young Turks, Sirius,
and thanks for making the time for BlueRootsRadio/Ya Think?, too!

I could get used to this!

John Denver
To The Wild Country

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJvHe0RJ_HQ&feature=related

You've been shining, Sam, and Laura was right that you've built up progressive media. Love how the Air America NN10 segment ended on a positive note, and rightfully so. We love seeing you out there and want more Sammy.

Thanks for visiting with the Ya Think-ers. Peace hugs from NYC!!

The Coming Era of Angry Women

By CLANCY SIGAL

I live and work in Hollywood, the capital of celebrity flameouts – Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen, Robert Downey Jr, etc. My local Beverly Hills and Malibu courthouse and police stations are stakeouts for paparazzi, snapping well-known actors looking washed-out and hungover as they do the "perp walk". As the world knows, the latest crash-dive has been performed by Mel Gibson, whose widely reported (though so far unauthenticated) tirade against his Russian girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva has gone madly viral and even penetrated the inner sanctum of his agency, William Morris, which told him to seek new representation, on the Bad Samaritan principle of "kick a man when he's down" and on the grounds that Gibson on tape supposedly screamed the "n" word, which might have offended the agents' valuable African-American clients such as Denzel Washington and Spike Lee.

This being Hollywood, where sexism is the default mode, William Morris – led by Ari Emanuel, brother of Barack Obama's chief of staff, Rahm – did not bother to cite, or perhaps even think about, Gibson's alleged physical assault against his girlfriend.

It's economics. Male superstars make a heck of a lot more money than female actors. This, plus the historical fact that in the misogynist hearts of many studio executives, women just don't count in life or at the box office (with the possible exception of Angelina Jolie). The time-worn mantra I've heard so many times is, "Women don't open", meaning a female-oriented movie is a money loser in the first two crucial weeks.
http://www.counterpunch.org/sigal07262010.html

July 23 - 25, 2010

If You Can't Lick 'Em, Buy 'Em

Progressive Bribery

By DOUG GIEBEL

A guest on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman urged that voters write to their representatives telling them to not accept contributions from tainted corporate donors.

On a recent Diane Rehm Show, Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd inelegantly dodged a question asking if he would support Elizabeth Warren to head the new consumer protection agency. Dodd opined there are many qualified people for the job.

Some believe the rumor that upon his retirement from the Senate, Christopher Dodd will take a position with Goldman Sachs and bring home sacks of cash for his willingness to cave in when Big Finance says "Cave," for Senator Dodd has willingly helped water down legislation aimed at regulating industry. But, of course, Senator Dodd is not alone, and asking the current crop in Congress to turn down big money handouts from powerful interests would be like asking someone to avoid breathing for the next twenty minutes.

A "modest proposal" has no place in the political culture of hypocrisy, cynicism and greed where modesty and virtue are virtually unknown. How deep is the cynicism? Just listen to the standard response given by elected officials when asked if big campaign donations influence their votes. "Why, no. My vote is never influenced by those contributions," they will reply with straight-faced sincerity worthy of any successful con man.

Some may ask, "How stupid do they think we are?" Well, my friends -- and you are my friends -- they think you're really stupid, and you are. This goes for those Tea Party followers who believe that throwing the bums out of office will bring purity to the hallowed halls of Congress. They ignore the fact that a "system" has been developed by Big Money and Willing Legislators making it all but impossible for anyone to be elected to national office without plenty of cash or access to cash through a willingness to play along with Big Money's demands.

Earnest but naive progressives will fail to influence most in Congress with pleas to just say "No," as they have mostly failed to get the ear of President Obama once he swore the oath and entered the White House. Money talks. Power talks. Money is power. Power is money.
http://www.counterpunch.org/giebel07232010.html

July 26, 2010

Foreclosing Justice

By GREG MOSES

Call me evangelist for anti-racist conversion and apologist for conversations that would get us there.

“Well, let's face it,” says John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute speaking Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley, “when people say that they are supposed to be in a national conversation on race, they do not mean an exchange of the kind that we are having right now. What they mean is a conversion.

“Nobody puts it in so many words,” says McWhorter, “but the way that conversation is supposed to go is that white America is supposed to realize that the civil rights revolution wasn't enough, that structural racism, et cetera, still remains prevalent, and that there is still more admitting that needs to be done and probably some sort of second civil rights revolution.

“That is the basis for what the supposed national conversation about race would be,” says McWhorter. “And I don't think that white people are interested anymore. I don't think that most black people are interested anymore. And I don't think it corresponds to modern reality.”

McWhorter was careful not to include all black people in his review of those who are no longer interested in a national conversion. If structural racism does not correspond to modern reality what is McWhorter’s account for why CNN needs him on camera this week? Or why Latino activists are stretched between Phoenix and Washington this week trying to push back an anti-civil rights stampede?
http://www.counterpunch.org/moses07262010.html

my sleep mode is going through a ‘up at 3am’ period. nice to have something to read here.

i need more of a heads up to catch BRR. events.

good to see Sam getting air time!

Federal regulators lifted a cloud of uncertainty when they announced it was lawful to hack or "jailbreak" an iPhone, declaring Monday there was "no basis for copyright law to assist Apple in protecting its restrictive business model."

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/us-government-jailbreaking-iphone-legal...

Mr Cameron's comments came during a visit to Turkey, where relations with Israel have been strained since Israeli troops stormed a flotilla of ships carrying supplies to Gaza in May, killing eight Turks and one Turkish-American.
Speaking in Ankara, the Prime Minister denounced the attack on the flotilla as ''completely unacceptable'' and restated his call for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu to deliver a ''swift, transparent and rigorous'' inquiry.

David Cameron urges EU to drop 'prejudice' against Turkey
Israeli warplane bombs Gaza's smuggling tunnels
Gaza's fragile ceasefire shaken as Israeli tanks briefly return
Gilad Shalit's parents set up camp outside Ehud Olmert's home
Israel insists on soldier's release before truce with Hamas
Gaza: UN launches £428 million appeal for civilian victims
But he also urged Turkey not to allow the incident to wreck its relationship with Israel.
Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has severely limited the movement of people and goods since 2007, has sparked outrage in Turkey, which provided the organisers and the bulk of the participants for the flotilla.
Today Mr Cameron said: ''The situation in Gaza has to change. Humanitarian goods and people must flow in both directions.
''Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp.''
And he added: ''The Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla was completely unacceptable.
''And I have told PM Netanyahu we will expect the Israeli inquiry to be swift, transparent and rigorous.''
The Prime Minister said he hoped that direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians would take place within the coming weeks and urged Turkey to press the parties to come together by ''making the case for peace''.
He said: ''Turkey's relationships in the region, both with Israel and with the Arab world, are of incalculable value.
''No other country has the same potential to build understanding between Israel and the Arab world.
''I know that Gaza has led to real strains in Turkey's relationship with Israel.
''But Turkey is a friend of Israel.
''And I urge Turkey, and Israel, not to give up on that friendship.''
At a press conference alongside Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Mr Cameron stood by his comments on Gaza, which he said were "warranted" by the situation there.
Mr Cameron added: "I speak as someone who is a friend of Israel, who desperately wants a secure and safe and stable Israel after the two-state solution has come about.
"It is very important that people remember that Israel will only agree to the final status issues if it feels that at the end of that process it will have the security that it craves.
"That is why on the issue of Gaza, while pushing for humanitarian access and the end of the blockade, we always have to remember that there have been rocket attacks from Gaza on Israel."
Mr Erdogan said Gaza resembled "a sort of open-air prison" and described the Israeli army assault on the aid flotilla as "piracy".
"The fact that this blockade has not been lifted is a tragedy," said the Turkish PM.
Addressing the raid on the flotilla, he said: "This attack in international waters can only be termed piracy. There is no other word to describe it.
"I hope we can remedy this situation and Israel turns back from this mistake. They must apologise to Turkey and compensation has to be paid and the blockade must be lifted so we can all contribute to regional peace."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/palestinianauthorit...

Tensions between the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan were further strained today after the leak of thousands of military documents about the Afghan war.
As members of the US Congress raised questions about Pakistan's alleged support for the Taliban, officials in Islamabad and Kabul also traded angry accusations on the same issue.
Further disclosures reveal more evidence of attempts by coalition commanders to cover up civilian casualties in the conflict.
The details emerge from more than 90,000 secret US military files, covering six years of the war, which caused a worldwide uproar when they were leaked yesterday.
The war logs show how a group of US marines who went on a shooting rampage after coming under attack near Jalalabad in 2007 recorded false information about the incident, in which they killed 19 unarmed civilians and wounded a further 50.
In another case that year, the logs detail how US special forces dropped six 2,000lb bombs on a compound where they believed a "high-value individual" was hiding, after "ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area". A senior US commander reported that 150 Taliban had been killed. Locals, however, reported that up to 300 civilians had died.
Other files in the secret archive reveal:
• Coalition commanders received numerous intelligence reports about the whereabouts and activity of Osama bin Laden between 2004 and 2009, even though the CIA chief has said there has been no precise information about the al-Qaida leader since 2003.
• The hopelessly ineffective attempts of US troops to win the "hearts and minds" of Afghans.
• How a notorious criminal was appointed chief of police in the south-western province of Farrah.
Speaking at a press conference at the Frontline Club in central London yesterday, Julian Assange, of Wikileaks, the website which initially published the war logs, said: "It is up to a court to decide clearly whether something is in the end a crime. That said, on the face of it, there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material."
Four days after it was first approached by the Guardian, the British Ministry of Defence said it was still unable to give an account of two questionable clusters of civilian shootings by British troops detailed in the American logs.
They were alleged to have taken place in Kabul in a month in 2007 when a detachment of the Coldstream Guards was patrolling, and in the southern province of Helmand during a six-month tour of duty by Royal Marine commandos at the end of 2008. The MoD said: "We are currently examining our records to establish the facts in the alleged civilian casualty incidents raised."
The UK foreign secretary, William Hague, told the BBC that the leaked documents could "poison the atmosphere in Afghanistan" but at the same time insisted they would not affect British troops:
Writing in the Guardian, Eric Joyce, a former soldier and parliamentary aide to the former Labour defence secretary Bob Ainsworth, described the leaked documents as a "game changer", adding that some of the questions raised were "stunning in their enormity".
The former Liberal Democrat leader and spokesman on defence and foreign affairs, Sir Menzies Campbell, said the documents showed how difficult it would be for UK troops to leave Afghanistan in 2015, the date set by David Cameron.
"The leaked documents show just how awesome the task will be to bring the Afghan police and army to a condition where they can be responsible for security," said Campbell.
Amnesty International called for reforms to the recording of civilian casualties after a row broke out over an incident in which the Afghan government says 45 villagers were killed in a rocket attack. The coalition disputes that it was responsible. Amnesty called on Nato "to provide a clear, unified system of accounting for civilian casualties in Afghanistan".
Daniel Ellsberg compared the publication of the war logs to the Pentagon Papers, which he leaked to the New York Times in 1971. "The Pentagon Papers did not stop or even affect the war but affected public opinion a great deal. Are we really going to do better with another $300bn [spent on the war in Afghanistan] on more bombs, more special forces, more drones? The Taliban are not going to quit."
The director of the military thinktank the Royal United Services Institute, Professor Michael Clarke, said in London: "There is no doubt that the leaks are politically pretty damaging. The papers give an impression of a lack of military discrimination in how operations were conducted."
The Pentagon said it was conducting an investigation into whether information in the logs placed coalition forces or their informants in danger.
Last night President Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, claimed the logs published by the Wikileaks website posed "a very real threat" to US forces: "It's not the content … there are names, there are operations, there are sources, all of that information out in the public domain has the potential to do harm."
The Guardian was allowed to investigate the logs for several weeks ahead of publication, along with the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel. The three have published excerpts from the documents which do not pose a risk to informants or military operations.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/27/afghanistan-war-logs-tension...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-10772195

Pleassssssse. New York Times allowed Cheney to use it to bolster his treasonous activities. And lets not forget what they did to ACORN.

With Donald Graham at the helm WaPo has been sliding over to center right ever so subtly.

As usual and so typical of a right wing nutjob, Matt Whatever (aptly named since he is another android sent into mainstream to overwhelm us with right-wing noise) lies and claims victim while projecting their activities and behavior onto the left. Anybody with half a brain can see a recurring pattern; and Android Matt may get his minions buying his crap but leave him to Faux News and stop wasting air time that Sam could be filling.

"Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining."

...reThugs against nation building! The military industrial complex will have to do a little more tweeking on Android Matt to hold him on the national-security-and-secrets-leaked loop.

Now here's a WHAT IF...

Could the 90,000 document leak have been a reThug set up for the November elections to support "the Dems are weak on national security and defense" talking point?

Hmmmm.

Data, diffusion, impact: Five big questions the Wikileaks story raises about the future of journalism
By C.W. Anderson / July 26 / 1 p.m.

Whenever big news breaks that’s both (a) exciting and (b) relevant to the stuff I research, I put myself through a little mental exercise. I pretend I have an army of invisible Ph.D. students at my beck-and-call and ask them to research the three most important “future of news” items that I think emerge out of the breaking news. That way, I figure out for myself what’s really important amidst all the chaos.

The Wikileaks-Afghanistan story is big. It’s big for the country, it’s big for NATO soldiers and Afghan civilians, and (probably least importantly) it’s big for journalism. And a ton of really smart commentary has been written about it already. So all I want to do here is chime in on what I’d be focusing on if I wanted to understand the Wikileaks story in a way that will still be relevant one year, five years, even twenty years from now. I want to briefly mention three quick assignments I’d give my hypothetical Ph.D. students, and two assignments I’d keep for myself.

— Watch the news diffuse: The release of the Wikileaks stories yesterday was a classic case study of the new ecosystem of news diffusion. More complex than the usual stereotype of “journalists report, bloggers opine,” in the case the Wikileaks story we got to see a far more nuanced (and, I would say, far more real) series of news decisions unfold: from new fact-gatherers, to news organizations in a different position in the informational chain, all the way to the Twittersphere in which conversation about the story was occurring in real-time, back to the bloggers, the opinion makers, the partisans, the politicians, and the hacks. This is how news works in 2010; let’s try to map it.

— What’s the frame?: This one’s simple, but interesting because of that simplicity. With the simultaneous release of the same news story by three different media organization, all in different countries (The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel), all coming out the the same set of 92,000 documents, we’ve got almost a lab-quality case study here of how different national news organizations talk about the news differently. Why did The Guardian headline civilian casualties while the Times chose to talk about the U.S. relationship with Pakistan? And what do these differences in framing say about how the rest of the world sees the U.S. military adventure in Afghanistan?

— What’s the impact?: Will the “War Logs” release have the same impact that the Pentagon Papers did, either in the short of long term? And why will the stories have the impact they do? Like Jay Rosen, I’m sadly skeptical that this huge story will change the course of the war in the way the Ellsberg leaks did. And like Rosen, I think a lot of the reasons lie beyond journalism — they lie in the nature of politics and the way society and the political elite process huge challenges to our assumed, stable world views.

I might make one addition to Jay’s list about the impact of this story though — one that has to do with the speed of the news cycle. Like I noted already, there’s nothing more exciting than watching these sorts of stories unfold in real time. But I wonder if the “meme-like” nature of their distribution — and the fact that there will always be another meme, another bombshell — blunts there impact. You don’t have to be Nicholas Carr to get the feeling that we’re living in a short-attention span, media-saturated society; I wonder what it would take for a story like the “War Logs” bombshell to stick around in the public mind long enough for it to mean something.

So those are stories I’d give my grad students. Here are the topics I’d be keeping for myself:

— Why Wikileaks?: I talked about this a bit over in my column today at NPR, so I’ll just summarize my main points from there. Looking rationally at the architecture of the news ecosystem, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that Wikileaks would have been tapped to serve as the intermediary for this story. After all, they just turned around and fed it to three big, traditional, national newspapers. There is, of course, Wikileaks’ technical expertise; what Josh Young called their “focus lower in the journalism stack…on the logistics of anonymity.” But I think there’s more to it than that. I think to understand “why Wikileaks,” you have to think in terms of organizational culture as well as network architecture and technical skills. In short, I think Wikileaks has an organizational affinity with folks who are most likely to be on the leaking end of the news in today’s increasingly wired societies. To understand the world of Wikileaks, and what it means for journalism, you have to understand the world of geeks, of hackers, and of techno-dissidents. Understanding reporting and reporters isn’t enough.

— Journalism in the era of big data: Finally, it’s here where I’d start to draw the links between the “War Logs,” the Washington Post “Top Secret America” series, and even the New York Times front page story on the increasing conservatism of the Roberts Supreme Court. What do they all have in common? Databases, big data, an attempt to get at “the whole picture” — and maybe even a slight sense of letdown. The Washington Post story took years to write and came with a giant database. The Afghanistan story was based on 92,000 documents, many of which might have been largely inaccurate. And the Roberts story unapologetically quoted “an analysis of four sets of political science data.”

We’re seeing here the full-throated emergence of what a lot of smart people have been talking about for years now: data-driven journalism, but data in the service of somehow getting to the “big picture” about what’s really going on in the world. And this attempt to get at the big picture carries with it the risk of a slight letdown, not because of journalism, but because of us. As Ryan Sholin noted on Twitter, “Much like the massive WaPo story on secrecy, I don’t see much new [in the Wikileaks story], other than the sheer weight of failure.”

Part of what we’ve been trained, as a society, to expect out of the Big Deal Journalistic Story is something “new,” something we didn’t know before. Nixon was a crook! Osama Bin Laden was found by the CIA and then allowed to escape! But in these recent stories, its not the presence of something new, but the ability to tease a pattern out of a lot of little things we already know that’s the big deal. It’s not the newsness of failure; as Sholin might put it, it’s the weight of failure. It remains to be seen how this new focus on “the pattern” will change our political culture, our news culture, and the expectations we have of journalism. And it will be interesting to see what the focus on data leaves out. This week, however, big-data journalism proved its mettle.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/07/data-diffusion-impact-five-big-question...

Book Recommendation Services

On Four Key Groups Of Americans

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

And they'll get their strike too. The conservatives scream and obama jumps. Besides with the Dems polling poorly barack is gunna need an 'October Surprise.'

Poor Iranians, and poor Julian Paul Assange. I wonder if obama will have Assange water-broaded, or just assassinated?
Either way, we'll never withdraw from any nations that border Iran, until we've turned Iran into Iraq.

“No matter what a woman looks like, if she's confident, she's sexy.”

Israel demolishes Bedouin village

Israeli authorities have demolished the homes of about 300 Bedouins in a village in the southern Negev desert.

The entire village of al-Arakib was bulldozed on Tuesday, with many of the former residents' cattle, trees and belongings lost.

Al-Arakib, which had about 40 homes, is one of 45 Bedouin villages not recognised by Israeli authorities.

Haia Noach, director of the Negev Co-existence Forum, was present at al-Arakib during the demolition and said that at least five Israeli bulldozers arrived around 5:30am (0230GMT).

"It took them about three or four hours to destroy all the houses," she said, describing the scene as "appalling."

Scuffles erupted as the villagers and around 150 rights activists tried to stop the police from carrying out the demolitions, with several people wounded and a handful arrested, activists said.

Speaking from a town near Beersheba, Noach said that many of the residents had moved to a nearby graveyard to find shade.

Evacuation notice

Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld confirmed the early-morning operation, saying the homes had been "illegally built" and were destroyed in line with a court ruling issued 11 years ago which was never implemented.....

According to the Negev Co-existence Forum,around half of the 155,000 Bedouins in the Negev - all of whom are Israeli citizens - live in villages that are unrecognised by the government, without municipal services like water and electricity.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/07/2010727133151458970...

Barack Obama enlists Afghan war leaks in support of policy switch

Material cataloguing blunders justifies decision to deploy 30,000 more US troops, US president says

...the material highlighted the challenges that led him to announce a change in strategy late last year that involved sending an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan...

"We failed for seven years to implement a strategy adequate to the challenge," Obama said today, of the period starting with the 9/11 attacks. That is why we have increased our commitment there and developed a new strategy," he said, adding he has also sent one of the finest generals in the US, General David Petraeus...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/27/barack-obama-afghan-war-logs...

Kerry dismisses leak papers as largely meaningless

The leak of tens of thousands of classified U.S. military documents on the Afghan war, while illegal, has little significance for policymaking, Sen. John Kerry said Tuesday.

Kerry, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the documents posted on the Internet on Sunday revealed little that was not already known to U.S. officials.

"I think it's important not to overhype or get excessively excited about the meaning of those documents," Kerry said at the outset of a committee hearing on prospects for negotiating an end to the Afghan war.

He said the release was unlawful and could potentially endanger U.S. troops in Afghanistan..........
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9193029

House voting big war funds, despite Afghan leaks

The House prepared Tuesday to send President Barack Obama $33 billion to pay for his troop surge in Afghanistan, unmoved by the leaking of tens of thousands of classified military documents that portray a war effort beset by Afghan shortcomings.

From Obama on down, the disclosure of the documents was condemned anew by administration officials and military leaders, but the material failed to stir new anti-war sentiment. The bad news for the White House: A pervasive weariness with the war was still there — and possibly growing....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9193040

Crews were working Tuesday to contain and clean up more than 800,000 gallons of oil that poured into a creek and flowed into the Kalamazoo River in southern Michigan, coating birds and fish.

Authorities in Battle Creek and Emmett Township were warning residents about the strong odor from the oil, which leaked Monday from a 30-inch pipeline that carries about 8 million gallons of oil per day from Griffith, Ind., to Sarnia, Ontario.

Calgary, Alberta-based Enbridge Inc.'s affiliate Enbridge Energy Partners LP of Houston estimated more than 800,000 gallons of oil spilled into Talmadge Creek before the company could stop the flow. Enbridge crews and contractors deployed oil skimmers and absorbent booms to minimize its environmental impact.

As of Tuesday afternoon, oil was reported in about 16 miles of the Kalamazoo River downstream of the spill, Mary Dettloff, spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment.

U.S. Rep. Mark Schauer, D-Mich., said he discussed the spill Tuesday with President Barack Obama at the White House. He called the spill a "public health crisis," and said he plans to hold hearings to examine the response.

"The company was originally slow to respond and it is now clear that this is an emergency," Schauer told reporters on a conference call.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9193064

http://wimp.com/dolphinbubbles/

STOP OFF SHORE DRILLING!

and as CeeCee proclaimed ...

STOP OFF SHORE DRILLING!

NO MORE SYNTHETIC PRODUCT STREAM FROM OIL.

It is a matter of Planetary Survival.

Bill passed to fund occupation and atrocity in Afghanistan.

Oil spewing from well near Louisiana marsh
Boom placed around 100-foot-high plume; tugboat hit well, officials say

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38429966/ns/us_news-environment/?om_rid=NFw2$z&om_mid=_BMTznUB8QPZ03i&

Adding insult to the Gulf's injury, an oil platform hit by a tugboat early Tuesday is now spewing oil and natural gas near a Louisiana marsh area.

While there was no estimate of how much oil was gushing, officials said the mile-long slick it created was small compared with the Gulf spill.

The oil and gas is shooting up 100 feet into the air, officials said, as a private contractor was called in to try to cap the well.

While small in size, the spill weighed heavy on locals. "We cannot catch a break," Deano Bonano, Jefferson Parish emergency management director, said in a note to parish officials.

Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer John Edwards said a strip of oil 50 yards wide and a mile long was spotted on the water near the well, which was no longer in operation when it was hit.

Some 6,000 feet of boom were placed around the site, Thad Allen, the national incident commander for the nearby BP spill, told reporters.
Continue reading here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38429966/ns/us_news-environment/?om_rid=NFw2$z&om_mid=_BMTznUB8QPZ03i&

...Clean Energy NOW!

IG: DoD can't account for almost $9 billion in Iraq funds
By TOM SPOTH | Last Updated: July 27, 2010

The Defense Department failed to properly account for almost $9 billion of Iraq reconstruction funds, which is 96 percent of the money it received from 2004 to 2007, according to a report released Tuesday by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

Eight organizations in the department were authorized to spend $9.1 billion from the Development Fund for Iraq, which is made up of funds from Iraq's oil and gas exports, surplus money from the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program and frozen Iraqi assets. The Defense organizations were supposed to set up accounts at the Treasury Department to manage the money, but only the Army Central Command did so for the roughly $400 million it received.

As a result, the SIGIR report found, the remaining $8.7 billion was "vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss."

The report faults the Pentagon for not issuing guidance on establishing the accounts at Treasury until December 2004, about six months after Defense organizations had received most of the money from the Development Fund for Iraq. The department also didn't name an official to make policy on or oversee the use of that money, the report says.

The Treasury accounts are intended to ensure accountability for non-U.S. government funds. Because Army Central Command established an account, it was able to give SIGIR a full rundown of its DFI obligations, expenditures and remaining balances. The other organizations could not.

Much of the $9.1 billion was controlled by the Joint Area Support Group-Central and the Army Corps of Engineers. Also holding funds were the Army's Project and Contracting Office for Iraq, the Multi-National Corps-Iraq, the Joint Contracting Command Iraq/Afghanistan, the Air Force Center for Engineering and the Environment, and the Navy.

The Iraqi government withdrew U.S. authority to administer the DFI funds at the end of 2007, but the SIGIR report found that the Pentagon is still holding on to millions of dollars because of its poor financial management.
http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20100727/DEPARTMENTS01/7270304/

...a common thief goes to prison for stealing much less.

But in The Wonderful Wizardry of US,
-- Bush gets a brain (a library in Texas);
-- Cheney gets a heart (numerous effort to keep him alive);
and,
-- Rumsfeld gets courage to show up at the DOD to be immortalized with a portrait.
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/06/28/rumsfeld-portrait/

I wonder if anyone got close enough to ask, "if they could spare a dime?"

Experts: Ansel Adams photos found at garage sale worth $200 millionBy Alan Duke, CNN
July 27, 2010 4:51 p.m. EDT

Los Angeles, California (CNN) -- Rick Norsigian's hobby of picking through piles of unwanted items at garage sales in search of antiques has paid off for the Fresno, California, painter.

Two small boxes he bought 10 years ago for $45 -- negotiated down from $70 -- are now estimated to be worth at least $200 million, according to a Beverly Hills art appraiser.

Those boxes contained 65 glass negatives created by famed nature photographer Ansel Adams in the early period of his career. Experts believed the negatives were destroyed in a 1937 darkroom fire that destroyed 5,000 plates.

"It truly is a missing link of Ansel Adams and history and his career," said David W. Streets, the appraiser and art dealer who is hosting an unveiling of the photographs at his Beverly Hills, California, gallery Tuesday.
Continue reading:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/07/27/ansel.adams.discovery/?hpt=Sbin

The settlement filed in Brooklyn federal court on Tuesday pays $3.25 million to the estate of Sean Bell, $3 million to Joseph Guzman and $900,000 to Trent Benefield.

Bell was killed and Guzman and Benefield were wounded outside a strip club in 2006 while leaving a bachelor party on what would have been Bell's wedding day.

Three police officers were acquitted of manslaughter and other charges in 2008. Federal authorities in February declined to bring civil rights charges against them.

The lawsuit accused the city of wrongful death, negligence, assault and civil rights violations.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9193324

...wants to be a JUDGE?

'Do Not Vote for My Dad'

Jan Schill, the daughter of a judicial candidate in Oklahoma, really doesn't want her father to be a judge. So much so that she took out a full-page ad telling people not to vote for him. And started a blog.

Yes, donotvoteformydad.com is live! The site, and its accompanying newspaper ad ("DO NOT VOTE FOR MY DAD... HE WOULD NOT BE A GOOD JUDGE!") are the products of a campaign started by Oklahoma judicial candidate John Mantooth's daughter, Jan Schill, and her husband Andrew Schill. [Click here to see a larger photo of the ad.] So far, the website consists of links to cases where Mantooth was sued, as well as a really gross story about worm-filled chocolates:

After a delightful lunch, I unwrapped the chocolates in anticipation of a quick dessert before returning to work. Also offering a chocolate to one of my friends, I took a quick bite. However, upon recognizing an unfamiliar and unpleasant taste I yelled in shock for my friend to stop. My deepest momentary fear was realized when a survey of the remaining chocolate revealed the remains of the numerous worms and weevils that had long ago devoured the aged chocolate.

The following day would find a slightly enraged voicemail from John Mantooth who had discovered that I was under the erroneous assumptions that the gift was for me. He wanted to clarify that the rusted golden basket, pocket knife, stale potpourri and worm-ridden chocolates were not for me, but were in fact for my wife, his second daughter, for Christmas! He did not want her to think she was forgotten! The slight humor I had originally felt quickly turned to anger and a renewed sadness for the years of such indifference my wife had endured.

Definitely adding this one to my Google Reader.

Apparently, the bad blood started in 1981, following a messy divorce between Mantooth and his ex-wife, Schill's mother. When asked why she decided to take up arms against her father, Schill said, "We just felt like it would be bad if he were to become a judge." Mantooth, for his part, alleges dirty dealings: Andrew Schill used to be law partners with one of Mantooth's opponents, Greg Dixon. Either way, it makes for just about the most awkward political ad we've seen since Alabama had its primaries.
For links throughout the news article:
http://gawker.com/5597258/do-not-vote-for-my-dad

:| GRRR re John Mantooth {yuck}

Man Tooth? Really? If I were his daughter, dumping that surname on me would be ample reason for resentment. The chocolate worms were perhaps (bad cliche coming - ) the icing on the cake.
This news item starts to echo conversations my sweetheart and I have had about her father.
If we lived in Oklahoma, in McClain County, we'd be out with the cardboard banners and spraypaint; i.e. information-age equivalents to torches and pitchforks.

Thanks Ms_A: Growling along with you -

In Connecticut we're working on sending the sickf**k corporate candidates (Joe Liebermannn & Linda MkkMahon) to unelected hell.
Help!

PERFECT ANALOGY ALSO! re "...i.e. information-age equivalents to torches and pitchforks." HaHaHa LOL {still snickering}

{"...i.e. information-age equivalents to torches and pitchforks."} TeaHee TeeHee TeeHee

Names do indeed play an influence. Mantooth would not be one I would choose or likely keep. But I don't have much love for Lieberman -- he is not as nice as his name rather implies -- actually Sammy has it right by calling him LIEberman. He's not up for re-election for a while is he? Guess it is good to plan.

The next time you collect your cash receipt from fast-food outlets or groceries, be careful - a new study claims the receipts contain high levels of the endocrine-disrupting chemical bisphenol A.

The study by Environmental Working Group found the plastic component BPA on 40 per cent of receipts from McDonald’s, CVS, KFC, Whole Foods, Wal-Mart, Safeway and other businesses.

Animal tests have shown that BPA can induce abnormal reproductive system development, diminished intellectual capacity and behavioural abnormalities.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/health-fitness/health/McDo...

This is horrid! ...A BULL HORN AT MC-cee D's is in order!

Opec member Ecuador says it will start renegotiating contracts with private oil companies as it moves to increase state control over the sector.

______________________
President Rafael Correa, speaking on Saturday, said: "With this law, petroleum companies that do not abide by the policies of the state will have their fields nationalised and they will leave the country."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10772445

The parliament of Catalonia has voted to ban bullfighting - the first region of mainland Spain to do so.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-10784611

Mr. Obama and top military officials said Tuesday that the disclosure of the documents should not force a rethinking of America’s commitment to the war.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/world/28prexy.html?_r=1&hp

so You want me to stand quietly as the assh*les in government stay in perpetual war .I don't think so.

WASHINGTON – Senate Democrats outlined a $15 billion energy bill Tuesday that would pay for oil-spill programs and new rebates for natural-gas vehicles with a higher tax on oil companies.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid plans an initial vote on the bill this week. The legislation doesn't include a cap on greenhouse-gas emissions, which proved too unpopular in the Senate.

The natural-gas vehicle incentives would help pay for 200,000 trucks at a cost of $3.8 billion, according to Democrats and industry officials.

The program was popularized by T. Boone Pickens of Dallas, a major investor in natural gas who forged close ties with Senate Democrats to win allies for his plan. Pickens spent more than $60 million promoting his plan through television and print ads, speeches and other events.

Yet its passage is far from certain, given opposition from Republicans, who will insist on offering amendments including measures to lift the Obama administration's moratorium on deep-water drilling. The bill may be the last chance to pass legislation responding to the gulf oil spill before the midterm elections in November.

Reid has "gotten himself in a terrible position with such limited time," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. "This is a serious topic that is worthy of serious discussion and deliberation. Other people are going to have ideas."

Democrats say the bill would hold BP PLC and other oil companies accountable by removing a $75 million cap on economic damages that can be assessed against them as a result of offshore spills. Under the Reid bill, there would be no cap.

Industry officials say removing the cap would make insurance unaffordable for all but the biggest oil companies, eliminating smaller producers from offshore activity.

The higher tax on oil companies – Democrats didn't say how much higher – would be levied per barrel and would be paid by refiners. The tax has been 8 cents per barrel; the House passed legislation in May that would raise it to 34 cents.

Democrats said the tax revenue would pay for a variety of programs, including $5 billion to provide rebates to people who improve the energy and water efficiency of their homes. Democratic leaders say that program would create jobs while helping to reduce electricity demand and greenhouse gas emissions.

The natural-gas program would award rebates of $10,000 to $64,000 per truck, depending on a vehicle's weight. The legislation also would provide grants to pay for natural-gas fueling stations and loans to U.S. manufacturers that build natural-gas-powered trucks.

Other lawmakers have sponsored legislation incorporating the Pickens plan, but Reid's bill appears to be his best shot at getting the incentives into law. A Pickens spokesman declined to comment, citing the need to study the bill further.

Some Democrats said they were disappointed by the scope of the bill, which is far more modest than the wide-ranging cap-and-trade legislation that passed the House last year. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs suggested Tuesday that the House's climate-change measures could be added in a conference committee.

"This is an absolutely minimal bill," said Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who votes with Democrats. "The components of the bill are positive.

"[But] it doesn't go anywhere near where we have to transform our energy system, cut back on greenhouse gas emissions and create the millions of jobs over time that we could create."
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/washington/stories/DN-e...

...so many have been working INTERNATIONALLY for so long! FINALLY, the MASSIVE DROPS of WATER are joining together turning into a flood - BEGINNING to wear down the stones...!

was passed today in 1868:
14th Amendment adopted

Following its ratification by the necessary three-quarters of U.S. states, the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing to African Americans citizenship and all its privileges, is officially adopted into the U.S. Constitution.

Two years after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts, where new state governments, based on universal manhood suffrage, were to be established. Thus began the period known as Radical Reconstruction, which saw the 14th Amendment, which had been passed by Congress in 1866, ratified in July 1868. The amendment resolved pre-Civil War questions of African American citizenship by stating that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States...are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside." The amendment then reaffirmed the privileges and rights of all citizens, and granted all these citizens the "equal protection of the laws."

In the decades after its adoption, the equal protection clause was cited by a number of African American activists who argued that racial segregation denied them the equal protection of law. However, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that states could constitutionally provide segregated facilities for African Americans, so long as they were equal to those afforded white persons. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which announced federal toleration of the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine, was eventually used to justify segregating all public facilities, including railroad cars, restaurants, hospitals, and schools....
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history

i applied for Canuckastani citizenship a week ago. i decided it would make crossing and returning from the border a lot easier than it has been lately.

some border guards have’nt a clue on permanent resident status papers. one told me mine were out of date. imigration canada said ‘nope, once issued they’re good from that point on’

mainly they want you to get a permanent ID card for a $150. Citizenship app is $200 and if you’re 55 or older you don’t even have to take the written test.

it’ll take a year for them to process the App though the receipt for the app is sufficient to get you across the border.

and yes that does give me dual citizenship.

THIS IS A VERY GOOD MOVE FOR YOU.

ya, i had my dotter and grandykids in mind when i applied.

Good plan. Don't wait. Run to Canada.

Jul 28, 1945:
Plane crashes into Empire State Building

A United States military plane crashes into the Empire State Building on this day in 1945, killing 14 people. The freak accident was caused by heavy fog.

The B-25 Mitchell bomber, with two pilots and one passenger aboard, was flying from New Bedford, Massachusetts, to LaGuardia Airport in New York City. As it came into the metropolitan area on that Saturday morning, the fog was particularly thick. Air-traffic controllers instructed the plane to fly to Newark Airport instead....

Upon impact, the plane's jet fuel exploded, filling the interior of the building with flames all the way down to the 75th floor and sending flames out of the hole the plane had ripped open in the building's side. One engine from the plane went straight through the building and landed in a penthouse apartment across the street. Other plane parts ended up embedded in and on top of nearby buildings. The other engine snapped an elevator cable while at least one woman was riding in the elevator car...

An 18 foot by 20 foot hole was left in the side of the Empire State Building. Though its structural integrity was not affected, the crash did cause nearly $1 million in damages, about $10.5 million in today's money.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/plane-crashes-into-empire-sta...

A bomber crashes into a skyscraper but the building doesn't collapse. I guess they just don't build 'em like they used too.

...and shoot I am not even a Canadian Border Guard {TeeHee :}.
;)

i've lived here for twenty years.

i moved here for two reasons, Bgurl and lots of fresh water.

the bonus is that i love pacific coast weather.

The world was set on fire
And everywhere I ran
There wasn't any water

Jul 28, 1943:
Hamburg suffers a firestorm

On this day in 1943, the worst British bombing raid on Hamburg so far virtually sets the city on fire, killing 42,000 German civilians.

On July 24, British bombers launched Operation Gomorrah, repeated bombing raids against Hamburg and its industrial and munitions plants. Sortie after sortie dropped fire from the sky, as thousands of tons of incendiary bombs destroyed tens of thousands of lives, buildings, and acreage. But the night of the 28th saw destruction unique in more than three years of bomb attacks: In just 43 minutes, 2,326 tons of bombs were dropped, creating a firestorm (a word that entered English parlance for the first time as a result of these events). Low humidity, a lack of fire-fighting resources (exhausted from battling blazes caused by the previous nights' raids), and hurricane-level winds at the core of the storm literally fanned the flames, scorching eight square miles of Hamburg.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/hamburg-suffers-a-firestorm

BGurl ...awww I couldn't remember name as BGirl or BGurl... & I sure didn't want to make a mistake with her name again. tsk tsk...

TeaCheers BGurl. Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ;)

Senate Republicans block measure to provide additional benefits to homeless veterans.
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/06/29/gop-homeless-veterans/

Seventy eight years ago:
Jul 28, 1932:
Bonus Marchers evicted by U.S. Army
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/bonus-marchers-evicted-by-us-...

"...British bombers launched Operation Gomorrah...."

===========================

The names given their slaughter of civilians by the Militarist Death Cult is consistently revealing and bloodthirsty.

Criminal probe of oil spill to focus on 3 firms and their ties to regulators

By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 28, 2010; A01

A team of federal investigators known as the "BP squad" is assembling in New Orleans to conduct a wide-ranging criminal probe that will focus on at least three companies and examine whether their cozy relations with federal regulators contributed to the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, according to law enforcement and other sources.

The squad at the FBI offices includes investigators from the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard and other federal agencies, the sources said. In addition to BP, the firms at the center of the inquiry are Transocean, which leased the Deepwater Horizon rig to BP, and engineering giant Halliburton, which had finished cementing the well only 20 hours before the rig exploded April 20, sources said.

While it was known that investigators are examining potential violations of environmental laws, it is now clear that they are also looking into whether company officials made false statements to regulators, obstructed justice or falsified test results for devices such as the rig's failed blowout preventer. It is unclear whether any such evidence has surfaced.

One emerging line of inquiry, sources said, is whether inspectors for the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency charged with regulating the oil industry -- which is itself investigating the disaster -- went easy on the companies in exchange for money or other inducements. A series of federal audits has documented the MMS's close relationship with the industry.

"The net is wide," said one federal official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

The Justice Department investigation -- announced in June by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and accompanied by parallel state criminal probes in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama -- is one of at least nine investigations into the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

Unlike the public hearings held last week in Kenner, La., by a federal investigatory panel, the criminal probe has operated in the shadows. But it could lead to large fines for the companies and jail time for executives if the government files charges and proves its case.
Continue reading:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/27/AR201007...

U.S. Congress Sends Obama War Bill Amid Afghan Policy Criticism
July 28, 2010, 12:02 AM EDT
By Brian Faler

July 28 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Congress sent to President Barack Obama a $60 billion war-funding bill amid attacks on his Afghanistan policies newly provoked by leaked reports suggesting that Pakistan secretly aided aiding Taliban forces.

The House voted 308-114 yesterday to forward the measure to Obama for his signature. It cleared the Senate last week after lawmakers in that chamber deleted $23 billion in unrelated spending.
Continue reading:
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-28/u-s-congress-sends-obama-war...

...Good News is PROGRESS with those voting against it (last year there were only 32 representatives voting against it.)
Roll Call:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2010/roll474.xml

Massachusetts Legislature approves plan to bypass Electoral College
July 27, 2010 05:09 PM
By Martin Finucane, Globe Staff

The Massachusetts Legislature has approved a new law intended to bypass the Electoral College system and ensure that the winner of the presidential election is determined by the national popular vote.

"What we are submitting is the idea that the president should be selected by the majority of people in the United States of America," Senator James B. Eldridge, an Acton Democrat, said before the Senate voted to enact the bill.

Under the new bill, he said, "Every vote will be of the same weight across the country."

But Senate minority leader Richard Tisei said the state was meddling with a system that was "tried and true" since the founding of the country.

"We've had a lot of bad ideas come through this chamber over the years, but this is going to be one of the worst ideas that has surfaced and actually garnered some support," said Tisei, who is also the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor.

The bill, which passed on a 28-to-9 vote, now heads to Democratic Governor Deval Patrick's desk. The governor has said in the past that he supports the bill, said his spokeswoman Kim Haberlin.

Under the law, which was enacted by the House last week, all 12 of the state's electoral votes would be awarded to the candidate who receives the most votes nationally.

Supporters are campaigning, state by state, to get such bills enacted. Once states accounting for a majority of the electoral votes (or 270 of 538) have enacted the laws, the candidate winning the most votes nationally would be assured a majority of Electoral College votes. That would hold true no matter how the other states vote and how their electoral votes are distributed.

Illinois, New Jersey, Hawaii, Maryland, and Washington have already approved the legislation, according to the National Popular Vote campaign's website.
http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/

The new system would only go into effect once a sufficient number of states have passed laws that would make it work.

The current Electoral College system is confusing and causes presidential candidates to focus unduly on a handful of battleground states, supporters say. They also say that the popular vote winner has lost in four of the nation's 56 elections.

Presidential candidates now "ignore wide swaths of the country" they consider strong blue or red states and focus their campaigning on contested states, Eldridge said. If the president were picked by national popular vote, he argued, candidates would spread their attention out more evenly.

"That's really what we're talking about is making sure that every voter, no matter where they live, that they're being reached out to," he said.

Opponents say the current system works. They are concerned about a possible scenario where Candidate X wins nationally, but Candidate Y has won in Massachusetts. In that case, all of the state's 12 electoral votes would go to Candidate X, the candidate who was not supported by Massachusetts voters.

Tisei also criticized the proponents for not following the normal procedures to seek a constitutional amendment.

"The thing about this that bothers me the most is it's so sneaky. This is the way that liberals do things a lot of times, very sneaky," he said. "This is sort of an end run around the Constitution."

The measure passed both branches of the Legislature in 2008 but did not make it all the way through the process.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/07/mass_legislatur.h...

July 27, 2010
In Study, 2 Economists Say Intervention Helped Avert a 2nd Depression
By SEWELL CHAN

WASHINGTON — Like a mantra, officials from both the Bush and Obama administrations have trumpeted how the government’s sweeping interventions to prop up the economy since 2008 helped avert a second Depression.

Now, two leading economists wielding complex quantitative models say that assertion can be empirically proved.

In a new paper, the economists argue that without the Wall Street bailout, the bank stress tests, the emergency lending and asset purchases by the Federal Reserve, and the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus program, the nation’s gross domestic product would be about 6.5 percent lower this year.

In addition, there would be about 8.5 million fewer jobs, on top of the more than 8 million already lost; and the economy would be experiencing deflation, instead of low inflation.

The paper, by Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton professor and former vice chairman of the Fed, and Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, represents a first stab at comprehensively estimating the effects of the economic policy responses of the last few years.

“While the effectiveness of any individual element certainly can be debated, there is little doubt that in total, the policy response was highly effective,” they write.

Mr. Blinder and Mr. Zandi emphasize the sheer size of the fallout from the financial crisis. They estimate the total direct cost of the recession at $1.6 trillion, and the total budgetary cost, after adding in nearly $750 billion in lost revenue from the weaker economy, at $2.35 trillion, or about 16 percent of G.D.P.

By comparison, the savings and loan crisis cost about $350 billion in today’s dollars: $275 billion in direct cost and an additional $75 billion from the recession of 1990-91 — or about 6 percent of G.D.P. at the time.

But the new analysis might not be of immediate solace to officials in the Obama administration, who have been trying to promote the “summer of recovery” at events across the nation in the face of polls indicating persistent doubts about the impact of the $787 billion stimulus program.

For one thing, Mr. Blinder and Mr. Zandi find that the financial stabilization measures — the Troubled Asset Relief Program, as the bailout is known, along with the bank stress tests and the Fed’s actions — have had a relatively greater impact than the stimulus program.

If the fiscal stimulus alone had been enacted, and not the financial measures, they concluded, real G.D.P. would have fallen 5 percent last year, with 12 million jobs lost. But if only the financial measures had been enacted, and not the stimulus, real G.D.P. would have fallen nearly 4 percent, with 10 million jobs lost.

The combined effects of both sets of policies cannot be directly compared with the sum of each in isolation, they found, “because the policies tend to reinforce each other.”

Told about the findings, another leading economist was unconvinced.

“I’m very surprised that they find these big impacts,” said John B. Taylor, a Stanford professor and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. “It doesn’t correspond at all to my empirical work.”

Mr. Taylor said the Fed had successfully stabilized the commercial paper and money markets, but he argued that its purchases of $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities have not been effective. And he said the Obama administration’s stimulus program has had “very little impact and not much to show for it except a legacy of higher debt.”

The disagreement underscored the extent to which econometric estimates are heavily reliant on underlying assumptions and models, but Mr. Blinder and Mr. Zandi said they hoped their analysis would withstand scrutiny by other scholars.

“When all is said and done, the financial and fiscal policies will have cost taxpayers a substantial sum, but not nearly as much as most had feared and not nearly as much as if policy makers had not acted at all,” they write.
For the links throughout the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/business/economy/28bailout.html?_r=2

...but only if big business, Wall Street and reThugs don't get their way or say about it.

"The thing about this that bothers me the most is it's so sneaky. This is the way that liberals do things a lot of times, very sneaky," he said. "This is sort of an end run around the Constitution."
===
The very Constitution was written in a sneaky, undemocratic manner, you asshole. Written behind closed doors, and then thrust upon the masses as fait accompli. The abolishment of the electoral college will be another important step towards democratizing the US political system.

It's amazing the cynicism of these masters of war. The CIA, MI5, the Pentagon make a sick joke of their business. "Operation Hades:" The defoliation of Vietnam.

Electric Windows: Street Artists to Breathe New Life into Vacant Buildings
By Stephanie Murg on Jul 27, 2010 12:09 PM

Installing the work created during the inaugural "Electric Windows" event in 2008

With our penchant for minimalist sculpture and born-again Nabisco factories, we already have plenty of reasons to visit the the historic river city of Beacon, New York. But should you require an extra nudge, there is "Electric Windows," a public art event and outdoor exhibition that kicks off at noon this Saturday, July 31. Local art and design purveyors Open Space and Burlock Home have invited 30 street artists to create original, large-scale works that will be permanently installed on the exteriors of vacant 19th-century buildings, including the former electric blanket factory that is the event's namesake. Among the artists who will fill the giant industrial window frames are Ron English (whose tangy illustrations punched up the flavors in Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me), Logan Hicks, Big Foot, Chor Boogie, and Paper Monster. The organizers expect approximately 5,000 people to come for the art and stay for the live music, dancing, screen printing (courtesy of Buxtonia's Alison and Garrison Buxton), and after-party at Open Space, where you can admire more works by the participating artists in a companion exhibition called "Electric Walls." Can't make it to Beacon on Saturday? Not to worry. Electric Windows will remain on view year-round as a permanent public art destination—consider making it a maximalist pit stop after you've had your fill of the the local Lewitts.
http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/mark_your_calendar/electric_windows_s...

to:
http://www.samsedershow.com/node/5923#comment-413331

Wed Jul 28, 2:27 pm ET
‘Do not vote for my dad!’ campaign heads to runoff
By Rachel Rose Hartman

It's one thing to merely state that you're not going to vote for your estranged dad (remember the Giulianis?). Jan Schill is making her disenchantment with her dad a public crusade, paying for a public effort to discredit his candidacy for a state judgeship in Oklahoma.

Schill, along with her husband, Andrew, has been urging voters to reject John Mantooth's campaign. The Schills purchased a local newspaper ad (pictured) and launched a website, Do Not Vote for My Dad, to publicize their message.

"District 21 judicial candidate John Mantooth is not a good father, not a good grandfather and in my opinion a review of his 37 year record as an attorney in Cleveland, Garvin and McClain Counties reveals that he would not be a good judge," Jan Schill explained, both in the ad and online.

But the public acrimony has not derailed Mantooth's campaign. He cleared his first election hurdle, the Norman (Okla.) Transcript reported, and will face Greg Dixon in November.

Mantooth told the Associated Press this week that the family feud stems from his 1981 divorce from Schill's mother.

"This is a family issue which should have been kept private," Mantooth told AP. "I'm very sad about this. I'm very disappointed. I'm hurt, but I love my daughter, and I want things to get better, and I hope they will."

Though the Schills set out to sway a local judicial campaign, they're now contending with a national news story.

"We were surprised both by the extent and the nature of the media coverage this story has generated," Andrew Schill wrote Tuesday.

The Schills did not immediately respond to The Upshot's request for comment Wednesday.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20100728/el_yblog_upshot/do-not-vot...

...strike Oklahoma from my list (as if) of places to live.

names given their slaughter
new
Submitted by ghettodefender on Wed, 07/28/2010 - 8:32pm.
It's amazing the cynicism of these masters of war. The CIA, MI5, the Pentagon make a sick joke of their business. "Operation Hades:" The defoliation of Vietnam.
===========================

And yet they claim they DIDN'T KNOW Agent Orange was DEADLY short- AND longterm.

Corporate profits written all over it, too. Ton$ of chemicals dropped. And now they keep up the profiteering with continued use of such poisonous stuff whether napalm on Fallujah or on Gaza, or more herbicides in the so-called "War on Drugs". It's a never-ending moneystream for the chemical corporations and all those who facilitate the purchase of their deadly stuff (including Congress that okays the appropriations for this stuff). Sickening.

Eaten by COREXIT pollution?

Since no reporters are allowed to go out there, how can we trust this?

Is the oil dissipating or just below the surface where SkyTruth monitors cannot detect it???

Wow, this appears to be SUCH good news (or good press?) following so closely behind the poorly/andUnreported news that the oil has overtaken the largest bird nesting area in the Louisiana Delta! BP COULDN'T HAVE TIMED IT BETTER.

WHEN will Obama allow reporters to report and government scientists to be interviewed on the REALITY of the BP Pollution in the Gulf and coastal areas???

The article Malloy is talking about tonight:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/us/28spill.html

[excerpt]

On the Surface, Gulf Oil Spill Is Vanishing Fast; Concerns Stay

...

The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected, a piece of good news that raises tricky new questions about how fast the government should scale back its response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The immense patches of surface oil that covered thousands of square miles of the gulf after the April 20 oil rig explosion are largely gone, though sightings of tar balls and emulsified oil continue here and there.

Reporters flying over the area Sunday spotted only a few patches of sheen and an occasional streak of thicker oil, and radar images taken since then suggest that these few remaining patches are quickly breaking down in the warm surface waters of the gulf.

John Amos, president of SkyTruth, an environmental advocacy group that sharply criticized the early, low estimates of the size of the BP leak, noted that no oil had gushed from the well for nearly two weeks.

[more at link]

==============================

While Mac McClelland at Mother Jones sounds the alarm:

http://motherjones.com/rights-stuff/2010/07/mainstream-media-helps-bp-pr...

[excerpt]

Mainstream Media Helps BP Pretend There's No Oil
— By Mac McClelland

...
As for the reporter's alarmingly unsubstantiated claim that "The beaches should be relatively painless to mop up," I can't even count the number of correspondents down here who've pointed out that digging a finger under the surface of supposedly clean sand turns up crude, or the number of cleanup workers who've said cleanup efforts are strictly cosmetic, or that no matter what they do the contamination just keeps bubbling up.

It's BP's job to whitewash this story and make it easier to indulge the desire to forget about the scope of the devastation, guys. Not the media's.

against Palestine – Now What?

The past few years have proven to be particularly awful for the Palestinian people. The suffocating Israeli siege of Gaza, despite some slight loosening, continues to this day, with Egypt’s active support and Washington’s tacit approval; Israel’s 2008-2009 attack on Gaza, was the single most devastating event for the inhabitants of the Occupied Territories since 1967; Israel’s settlement program proceeds unabated; Israel’s attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla has raised the level of violent confrontation further; and Israel’s crackdown on domestic dissent, particularly among its Palestinian citizens, has reached unprecedented levels with the arrest of activists and threatened measures against Arab MPs.

The Israeli Occupation Archive asked Noam Chomsky for his assessment of the current situation and future prospects.

IOA: The Goldstone report, the Abu Dhabi Mossad assassination, the Gaza Flotilla attack: all these have severely weakened Israel’s international reputation -- in Europe, in Turkey, in Egypt. How has the US-Israeli relationship fared through all this, and how has this affected the larger US strategic project in the Middle East and its efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Noam Chomsky: I would add the Gaza attack itself, quite apart from the Goldstone report. It was so savage that it led to a substantial change in attitudes among the general population, though not noticeably among the political class or the media. But governmental relations haven’t changed, and no change should have been expected. Washington strongly supported the Gaza attack, and participated directly in it. The attack was clearly timed so that Obama could keep to the hypocritical “there’s only one president so I cannot comment” stance. It ended, surely by plan, at the moment that he took office, so that he could adopt the posture of “let’s look forward and forget the past,” very convenient for partners in crime. The media and commentators -- unanimously, to my knowledge -- evaded the central fact about the war: the issue was not whether Israel had a right to defend itself from rockets, but whether it had the right to do so by force. It surely did not, because the US-Israel knew that peaceful means were available but refused to pursue them: accepting Hamas’s offer to renew the cease-fire, which Hamas had observed even though Israel did so only partially. That suffices to establish the criminality of the attack. Disproportionality in the use of force is a minor crime by comparison. The other events you mention had little impact in the US, with one exception: there is now some concern in the US military and intelligence that support for Israeli crimes and intransigence may harm military operations in the field. General David Petraeus quickly retracted his comments to this effect, but others are expressing the same concern, among them Bruce Riedel, an influential long-time senior intelligence official and presidential advisor. Israeli intelligence understands this problem very well. Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned the Israeli Knesset that they are treading on thin ice for this reason. That might prove significant.

IOA: The Obama administration announced a Middle East peace initiative following the president’s June 2009 speech in Cairo. What is your assessment of this initiative -- what was its original intention and where has it gone, and in what respects does it differ from the policies of previous US administrations?

NC: Obama basically reiterated the terms of the Road Map, which bans Israeli settlement expansion, but with a wink: his spokesperson informed the press that his demands were purely “symbolic” and that unlike Bush I, he would not consider penalties if Israel rejected the demands, as of course it did, in various overt and devious ways. George Mitchell is a reasonable choice as negotiator, but in nominating him Obama made it quite clear that he is not serious about a meaningful political settlement, so that Mitchell’s hands are tied. I wrote about that at the time, and won’t repeat.
http://www.israeli-occupation.org/2010-07-26/noam-chomsky-israels-war-ag...

By Michael Albert at Jul 27, 2010

What is U.S. policy regarding Venezuela seeking to achieve? One can easily think of three broad trajectories.

One: accept the existence and future elaboration - in its own chosen manner - of the Bolivarian Revolution and try to make the best of relations, ties, etc. Okay, that's obviously not on the U.S. agenda. Venezuela is a problem of potentially immense scale for the U.S. If Venezuela can manage to establish itself as a truly innovative post capitalist society - a twenty first century socialist society with popular self managing power for decentralized assemblies organized into communes, workers control of production, feminist national relations and local households, and intercommunalist culture - all of which is foreshadowed in Venezuela's current policies and constitution - it would become a "good example" on steroids, with oil to top it off, meaning, a living breathing model of how to live better, of why history is not over, of there being a real alternative to capitalism, etc. This is serious stuff, and yes, U.S. policy will attempt to actively prevent its coming to pass.

The U.S. wants the Bolivarian experiment to end. The U.S. wants Chavez gone. The U.S. wants the Bolivarian Revolution terminated and Venezuelan society returned to the dominant elites who have always owned and administered it - at least until the current trends. Okay, but how? We are left with two remaining possible broad logics of U.S. policy.

Most brutally, we could go in and make it so. The U.S. could militarily coerce desired outcomes. The U.S. could entrench forceful, coercive, U.S. force in Venezuela and impose social relations to our liking. Or, less brutally, the U.S. could enact policies social and militant as well, aimed to weaken Chavez and the Revolution and to strengthen its opponents, eventually leading to the opponents displacing the Bolivarians by election or by a coup, whichever seems more reliable and permanent.

Evidence - largely but not entirely anecdotal - suggests Venezuelan officials are worrying about the first option - the military option. The worry that U.S. troops, plus Colombian surrogates, will invade and occupy the oil fields, propping up puppets with no serious base of their own, etc. The irony is that Venezuelan worries about this military option, let's call military intervention "the rock," understandably spurred by hostile rhetoric and behavior emanating from Washington as well as by no less real troop and materials movements, wild rumors, actual/real limited incursions, etc., fuels the second option, let's call it the "hard place."
http://www.zcommunications.org/venezuela-a-rock-and-a-hard-place-by-mich...

By Ian Black and Nicholas Watt, The Guardian – 27 July 2010
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/27/david-cameron-israel-gaza-comments
David Cameron was embroiled in an angry diplomatic row with Israel tonight after describing the Gaza Strip as a prison camp for its 1.5 million Palestinian residents.
The prime minister drew fire at home and in Israel for remarks he made in Turkey about the need to further ease the blockade of the coastal territory, following the lifting of some restrictions last month. But Arabs and many others will agree wholeheartedly with his words.
“The situation in Gaza has to change,” he told businessmen in Ankara. “Humanitarian goods and people must flow in both directions. Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp.”
Foreign Office sources suggested Downing Street had been remiss in omitting from Cameron’s speech the sort of “balancing” comments that are routinely made about Israel’s security – especially the fate of a captured soldier being held by Hamas – when its policies on the Palestinians are criticised.
The prime minister condemned Israel’s attack on the Gaza aid flotilla, in which nine Turks were killed, as “completely unacceptable”, though he ignored demands by Turkey for an international investigation, expecting Israel’s inquiry to be “swift, transparent and rigorous”. But it was his message on Gaza that drew the strongest reaction.
Ron Prosor, Israel’s often combative ambassador to Britain, hit back with a sharp statement: “The people of Gaza are the prisoners of the terrorist organisation Hamas. The situation in Gaza is the direct result of Hamas’s rule and priorities.” Prosor also took aim at a striking omission by Cameron: his failure to mention the soldier Gilad Shalit, who was captured on the Gaza border in 2006 and whose freedom is a cause celebre in Israel.
http://www.israeli-occupation.org/2010-07-28/david-cameron-draws-fire-ov...

The Poor Must Die

By CHRIS FLOYD

News from Blighty: the disparity in death rates between the well-off and the poor in the UK is now greater than at any time since 1921. The London Review of Books points to a new study by the British Medical Journal that shows that by 2007, "for every 100 people under the age of 65 dying in the best-off areas, 199 were dying in the poorest tenth of areas."

The Journal study said that the data suggest "it was only prolonged and enthusiastic state intervention" that kept the disparity from being greater. On the other hand, the elite-coddling market jihadism of the Clintonian-Obamaish "New Labour" government (or as the BMJ more politely puts it, "the prolonged state disengagement in promoting equality in outcome") helped stretch the yawning gap even further.

In other words, the few spare pence that the war criminals of the Labour government threw at the poor kept them from dying quite as fast as they would have done otherwise under the system of voracious corporate rapine that Labour entrenched and expanded after inheriting it from the Thatcherite Tories in 1997.

Now, even those few pence are being stripped away -- gleefully -- by what many say is the most extremist government Britain has ever seen, outstripping even Margaret Thatcher in the scope of its draconian cuts and the fervor of its market fundamentalism. The savage cutbacks and vast, churning upheavals being pushed through, at breakneck speed, by the new Conservative government (and its truly pathetic coalition "partner," the lapdog Lib Dems) will sends millions of people tumbling down into a permanent underclass -- and finally, after 60 years of trying, gut the national health service with a stealth "Americanization" that will turn the operation of local doctors' offices over to private firms (many of them from the US) and privatize public hospitals, allowing them to "fail" -- and close -- if they don't produce enough cash for their elite shareholders. Meanwhile, the schools are now in the hands of the arch-neocon Michael Gove, who is plotting with revisionist historian Niall Ferguson to impose a pro-Empire, pro-elite "national greatness" ideology on the young. Gove is also using "emergency" legislative procedures to strip public schools away from the oversight of democratically elected local government and put them into the hands of unaccountable corporations, religious groups and wealthy elites.

This Revolution of the Rich is being justified by a carefully crafted, constantly stoked panic about budget deficits, pointing to the example of the perpetually weak government and economy of Greece as a horror story to be avoided at all costs. Yet even if the Greek situation was as dire as the fearmongers make out, the fact remains that the cuts which the Tory-LapDog coalition is making in the much stronger, much more stable UK are actually far in excess than those being imposed upon Greece. As with the fearmongering about "Iraqi WMDs," the "dangers of the deficit" are being exaggerated -- and manufactured -- in order to put into place a pre-existing (and transatlantic) ideological agenda: neo-feudal oligarchism.

But in almost all of these measures, the Tory-LapDog government is only entrenching and expanding the "market-led reforms" imposed by New Labour. And "New Labour" was of course a close copy of the "New Democrats" of Bill Clinton and his clique of "triangulating" bagmen for Big Money -- scarcely distinguishable from the Reagan-Bush faction that preceded them, and then succeeded them in the Bush dynasty's second turn in the White House. And we all know that "continuity" is the byword of the Obama administration, which is chock-a-block with holdovers not only from strangulating triangulators of the Clinton era but also the imperial militarists from the two Bush reigns.
http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd07272010.html

Intelligo ut credam.

;)

Not the leader anymore.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/education/23college.html?_r=2

Audit shows Pentagon can't account for $8.7 BILLIONS in Iraqi funds...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq-funds-20100727,...

[excerpt]

...

"The breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss," notes the audit report, a copy of which was obtained Monday by the Los Angeles Times.

Special Inspector General Stuart Bowen, who heads the agency, said repeated investigations have shown that "weak oversight is directly correlated to increased numbers of cases of theft and abuse."

In this instance, the audit focused on Iraqi revenue earmarked for reconstruction under a 2004 arrangement granting the Defense Department access to Iraq's oil proceeds at a time when the country did not have a fully functioning government and was unable to undertake urgently needed projects. The revenue was deposited in a special account in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq.

The report comes as Iraqis are increasingly frustrated with their own government's inability to provide basic services, or to explain how tens of billions of dollars' worth of oil revenue has been spent since 2007. The alleged U.S. mismanagement of Iraqi money is certain to revive grievances against the U.S. for failing to make a big dent in the country's reconstruction needs despite massive expenditures.

Iraqis are still angry about the failure to account for a separate $8.8 billion in Iraqi oil revenue spent by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003 and 2004.

If more money is found to be missing, "Iraq will definitely try to get it back," said Ali Musawi, a media advisor to Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.

Most of the money covered in the latest audit has been spent, but the study found $34.3 million that should legally have been returned to Iraq in 2007, when Iraq's government assumed responsibility for its finances.

The Defense Department has not said what it intends to do with the money, which is "at risk" of being spent, the audit said.

In response to the audit findings, the Defense Department concurred with recommendations that it establish better guidelines for managing such funds. But a letter from U.S. Central Command emphasized that failure to establish deposit accounts for the $8.7 billion does not mean it all cannot be accounted for.

The U.S. reconstruction effort is winding down as the military withdraws, and no more new U.S. funds are expected to be allocated.
[end excerrpt]

http://www.alternet.org/story/147540/

[excerpt]
...

More than 80 percent of studies on which the EPA are relying have never been published. This means that they have not undergone rigorous “peer review” by independent scientists, a customary method to ensure studies are credible and scientifically sound before they can be published in major journals.

...

[more at link]

In the following fresco, St. Augustine hears a voice in the seclusion of a garden commanding him to "take up the book and read".

St. Augustine Reading the Epistle of St. Paul

---------

The phrase coined by St. Augustine,

"credo ut intelligam, intelligo ut credam!"

mornin gang!
Submitted by Sunshine Jim on Wed, 07/28/2010 - 12:45pm.
i applied for Canuckastani citizenship a week ago.

_______________________

Sunshine Jim,
Good luck getting your dual citizenship! It sounds like a great idea!

:)

Is Solar Energy Affordable and Appropriate for Your Home?
How To Tell If Solar Is Right for You
By LAURIE BENNER
July 29, 2010 —

Powering homes with solar electricity can lower the homeowner's utility costs with minimal environmental impact.

This morning on "Good Morning America" you saw Lynn Jurich of SunRun, a San Francisco-based home solar company.

Jurich, SunRun's co-founder and president, said the benefits of solar powering homes include controlling electricity costs and making a difference in the environment.

Solar power can help reduce greenhouse gases, lower the nation's dependence on fossil fuels and increase a home's resale value, she added.

Solar Power Options
Jurich said there were two ways to obtain solar power for a home.

Homeowners can purchase a home solar system outright, or they can purchase solar electricity from a home solar company. Options for solar electricity include a solar lease or a solar power purchase agreement.

Jurich's company offers solar leases.

She said leases were a helpful option, particularly because the biggest obstacle to the purchase of a solar system was the price.

A residential solar energy system could cost between $25,000 and $45,000, she said.

Solar Power Resource Guide
How can you know if solar power is right for you? Do you qualify for a rebate? Should you buy, lease or enter into a solar power purchase agreement. Here are some resources to help you decide.

To find whether you qualify for government tax credits if you use solar power and other renewable energy systems in your home, click HERE.

If you're interested in solar power or other energy efficient systems, click HERE to see whether you can get a rebate or other incentive from your federal, state or local government, or from your utility.

You can learn more about residential solar electric systems by clicking HERE.

To find a solar contractor in your state, click HERE.

If you'd like to see how many homes have solar energy in your state, or in any state across the country, click HERE.
For links, go to:
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/JustOneThing/solar-energy-home/story?id=112745...

what would have done to Daniel Ellsberg?

...Ellsberg later claimed that after his trial ended, Watergate prosecutor William H. Merrill informed him of an aborted plot by Liddy and the "plumbers" to have 12 Cuban-Americans who had previously worked for the CIA to "totally incapacitate" Ellsberg as he appeared at a public rally, though it is unclear whether that meant to assassinate Ellsberg or merely to hospitalize him. In his autobiography, G. Gordon Liddy describes an "Ellsberg neutralization proposal" originating from Howard Hunt, which involved drugging Ellsberg with LSD, by dissolving it in his soup, at a fund-raising dinner in Washington in order to "have Ellsberg incoherent by the time he was to speak" and thus "make him appear a near burnt-out drug case" and "discredit him". The plot involved waiters from the Miami Cuban community....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg

Reflecting on his time in government, Ellsberg has said the following, based on his extensive access to classified material:

The public is lied to every day by the President, by his spokespeople, by his officers. If you can’t handle the thought that the President lies to the public for all kinds of reasons, you couldn’t stay in the government at that level, or you’re made aware of it, a week. … The fact is Presidents rarely say the whole truth—essentially, never say the whole truth—of what they expect and what they’re doing and what they believe and why they’re doing it and rarely refrain from lying, actually, about these matters.

:(

think of the Prez?

Published on Thursday, July 29, 2010 by The American Prospect
Administration Wants To Expand Reach Of National Security Letters
by Adam Serwer

Today, The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration wants Congress to expand the type of data that can be gained through the use of National Security Letters:

The administration wants to add just four words -- "electronic communication transactional records" -- to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the "content" of e-mail or other Internet communication.

This is on the heels not only of the administration blocking reasonable restrictions on what has objectively been widespread misuse of NSLs, but of the FBI recently beginning to investigate whether or not "hundreds" of agents cheated on the exam meant to "ensure that they could follow aggressive investigative guidelines without intruding on Americans' privacy rights." That's on top of threatening to veto the meager intelligence-oversight reforms being proposed by Congress. As Gene Healy wrote yesterday, "Our interminable war on terror sometimes seems designed to justify every bad thing libertarians have ever said about government." Having acted irresponsibly with the surveillance power it already has, and blocked reform that would have made the government more accountable, the Obama administration now wants even more power to violate the privacy rights of American citizens. When it comes to national security, there's nothing like failed government performance to justify giving the government more power....
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/29-11

Israeli settlers evict Palestinian family from their home of 70 years

Takeovers have created dozens of Jewish 'outposts' in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem's Old City in recent years

Israeli settlers took over a Palestinian home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem's Old City today, evicting about 45 members of an extended family which has occupied the building for more than 70 years.

The settlers claimed to have documentation to prove they had purchased the building from the owners. The Palestinian tenants, who have been fighting attempts to evict them for many years, were challenging the takeover in court...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/29/israeli-settlers-jerusalem-p...

The discovery of large natural gas reserves under the waters of the eastern Mediterranean could potentially mean a huge economic windfall for Israel and Lebanon, both resource-poor nations — if it doesn't spark new war between them.

The Hezbollah militant group has blared warnings that Israel plans to steal natural gas from Lebanese territory and vows to defend the resources with its arsenal of rockets. Israel says the fields it is developing do not extend into Lebanese waters, a claim experts say appears to be correct, but the maritime boundary between the two countries — still officially at war — has never been precisely set.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9196883

Raging forest fires encircled a southern Russian city and tore through provincial villages Thursday, forcing mass evacuations as Moscow suffered through a record, weeks-long heat wave and smog cloud caused by peat-bog fires.

Some 212,506 acres (86,000 hectares) were burning nationwide, and flames all but encircled the city of Voronezh, 300 miles southeast of Moscow. Forest fires on Moscow's outskirts reached the city's western fringe, in the Krylatskoye district, but were extinguished toward nightfall.

...Hot summers are usual even in Russia's more northern climes, where temperatures routinely reach the mid-80s. But Moscow on Thursday broke its all-time temperature record for the second time in a week....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9196908

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20100728/ARTICLES/100729459?Title=S...

[excerpt]

...

No one other than Bohemian Club members and their guests will hear the governor's speech, which is — like everything that transpires during the 17-day midsummer enclave — done in absolute privacy.

Plutocrats and powerbrokers, including former presidents, annually flock to the 2,700-acre wooded retreat where neither women, other than grove employees, nor outsiders of either gender are permitted.

“It's a private gentleman's club,” club spokesman Sam Singer said. “People are coming to get away from the duties of daily life. They don't desire to be on the front page of The Press Democrat or The New York Times.

“In real life, they get there often enough,” he said.

The club has about 2,000 members.

Mixing their revelry and weird rituals with serious issues, the Bohemians hear from a series of speakers, this year including media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who discussed “the future of news” and former secretaries of state George Shultz and James Baker on international relations and terrorism threats.

[more at link]

According to this article -- only one protester.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/us/28land.html?_r=1&sq=Bohemian Grove July 2010&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=1&adxnnlx=1280438365-zXyEToo8QwHj/nIeD9Tmjg

[excerpt]

...why has interest flagged in the goings-on at Bohemian Grove, where the likes of the singer Jimmy Buffett, Colin L. Powell and former President George W. Bush are said to assemble? Perhaps we should ask the encampment’s mascot, the owl of wisdom (and no, conspiracy theorists, the owl does not represent a demonic idol or any potato-chip concern):

O! Owl, prince of all mortal wisdom, we beseech thee: What gives?

The answer, boys: Mary Moore, 75, the area’s silver-haired earth mother of activism, is focused on other matters. So it’s just not the same.

A former beauty queen from San Luis Obispo, Ms. Moore moved to a wooded Sonoma County enclave in the mid-1970s. Although active in liberal causes, she knew nothing of the annual elite-male getaway in her community until she read “The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness,” by the sociologist G. William Domhoff.

Before you could say O Great Owl of Bohemia, everybody knew of this two-week sleep-away camp for about 2,500 members and guests of the Bohemian Club, in San Francisco.

Predominantly white, affluent and Republican, they stage theatrical acts, enjoy like-minded company, and imbibe, amid mature redwoods and old posters from past gatherings. Some of the 125 camps within have their own valets, and there is even a gift shop.

The opening Cremation of Care ceremony, an elaborate production in which hooded characters burn “Dull Care” in effigy at an altar, is meant as a cathartic release of life’s worries. And the club’s motto, “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here,” reflects the prohibition against any conducting of business.

Call them crazy, but the protesters still believed that if you corral thousands of privileged men and throw in some fine wine and a few s’mores, they cannot help but make valuable connections and, occasionally, public policy.

[more at link]

By Russell Vandenbroucke

Wednesday, July 28, 2010
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Every August, as the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki approach, comments resume about American decisions at the end of World War II. Despite the passage of 65 years, heated opinions are repeated as fact and myths become immortalized as truths. Beyond distorting the historical record, wishful thinking about it leads us to repeat past mistakes in new ways against new enemies.

Among the inaccuracies are these:

1) Japan was ready to fight to the end. Facts: In an intercepted cable of July 12, 1945, Emperor Hirohito revealed his decision to intervene to end the war. In Truman’s journal he characterized the message as “telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” Tokyo was prepared to surrender unconditionally if the monarchy would be retained, the very position the Allies accepted after Hiroshima. Five days later Truman predicted that Stalin would “be in the Jap war by August 15. Fini Japs when that comes about.” Nevertheless, he ordered the bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6. The U.S.S.R. entered the war on Aug. 8. Truman ordered the bombing of Nagasaki anyway.

2) Dropping the bomb was necessary to prevent an American invasion. Facts: In 1946, a U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report based on intelligence available to the White House concluded: “certainly prior to Dec. 31, 1945 and in all probability prior to Nov. 1, 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russian had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

3) Dropping the bomb saved lives. Facts: Stanford historian Barton Bernstein’s study of declassified documents found that the worst-case scenario by military planners was 46,000 deaths if the U.S. invaded both Kyushu and Honshu islands. Since Hiroshima, these estimates have grown exponentially as if to justify using the bomb. In notes, Truman cites 250,000 casualties (dead, wounded, missing). His published memoir raises the number to 500,000 dead. Still later, he referred to saving a million lives. In 1991, President H.W. Bush claimed that the bomb saved “millions.” Since both presidents, among countless others, ignored the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey conclusion that an invasion was unnecessary, it is no wonder average Americans do the same. All of these morbid calculations ignore the stark fact that more than 187,000 humans died at Hiroshima.
http://www.zcommunications.org/hiroshima-s-consecrated-legends-by-russel...

July 28, 2010

Abandoning the Manufacturing Sector

By DAVID MACARAY

“The most effective anti-poverty program ever invented was the labor union.”

—George Meany

There are three important things that need to be remembered about the 1947 Labor-Management Relations Act—commonly known as the “Taft-Hartley Act,” after its congressional sponsors, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, and House Representative Fred Hartley of New Jersey.

First, even though political pundits and social commentators continue to talk—60-odd years after the fact—about how Taft-Hartley was a necessary corrective, an antidote to runaway union excesses, a move that had to made to preserve the economic health of the nation, the legislation was far more toxic and insidious than these “reasonable response” accounts make it out to be.

Taft-Hartley was the naked attempt to neutralize America’s unions by revoking key provisions of the landmark 1935 National Labor Relations Act (commonly known as the “Wagner Act,” after its sponsor, New York Senator Robert Wagner), the act that legitimized a union’s right to strike, engage in collective bargaining, and serve as the workers’ sole representative.

Make no mistake, the vitality of the post-World War II labor movement was staggering—so staggering, in fact, that the federal government and America’s leading corporations were in a state of panic...
http://www.counterpunch.org/macaray07282010.html

Larry Pinkney of the real Black Panthers on tonight.
Obama's Treachery from Afganistan to Shirley Sherrod Keeping it Real By Larry Pinkney

Obama’s Treachery from Afghanistan to Shirley Sherrod
Keeping it Real
By Larry Pinkney
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

....another crucial warning sign was the corporate-stream media disinformation and distortion surrounding U.S. military veteran Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and then-candidate Barack Obama’s disgraceful and opportunistic pretense that he was unaware of the social, cultural, and political stance of Reverend Wright (whom Obama had known for many years) - as Obama threw him under the bus of political expediency, hypocrisy, and crass opportunism. All people, regardless of their color, should have been deeply alarmed, not by what Reverend Wright is purported to have said in a sermon, but by what Obama did not say and by his subsequent opportunistic and hypocritical actions thereto. It is ironic that in throwing Reverend Wright under the bus, Obama was in fact demonstrating for all to see that he would sacrifice anyone as long as it was to his personal advantage....
http://charismaticcentral.com/forums/politics/9489-obamas-treachery-afga...

Obama seeks to expand arms exports by trimming approval process

The United States is currently the world biggest weapons supplier — holding 30 per cent of the market — but the Obama administration has begun modifying export control regulations in hopes of enlarging the U.S. market share, according to U.S. officials.

President Barack Obama already has taken the first steps by tucking new language into the Iran sanctions bill signed in early July. His aides are now compiling the "munitions list," which regulates the sale of military items.

The administration's stated reason for the changes is to simplify the sale of weapons to U.S. allies, but potential spinoffs include generating business for the U.S. defense industry, creating jobs and contributing to Obama's drive to double U.S. exports by 2015.

Critics say the reforms are being rushed and warn that the expedited procedures could allow weapons technology to fall into the wrong hands.

India, which currently is seeking 126 fighter-jets worth over $10 billion, 10 large transport aircraft worth $6 billion, and other multi-billion dollar defense sales, could be among the possible beneficiaries. Allies seeking advanced U.S. weaponry and equipment, who now often buy elsewhere due to the cumbersome U.S. approval process, would draw immediate benefit from the reforms, U.S. officials said.

Obama first called for the reforms in August 2009, then referred to them in his Jan. 27 State of the Union address as an element toward doubling exports by 2015.....

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/07/29/98337/obama-seeks-to-expand-arms-e...

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain.

By David Swanson

The United States today may be the planet's greatest ever war maker, but the wars are fought, the bases maintained, and the weapons manufactured against the will of the majority of U.S. citizens. We express our opposition to wars openly in ways that could not be done at all until around 1880, and in so doing we almost certainly prevent more war making and limit the tactics our government can employ. In fact, if wars were still fought in the way the U.S. Civil War was fought, with armies on battlefields, we would probably have ended war forever some generations back. Instead, the progressive blogosphere, what passes for our anti-war fourth estate, just gathered in Las Vegas with little or no awareness or notice given to the fact that wars half-way around the world were being fought from drone control booths just down the road.

Cynthia Wachtell's excellent new book "War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature 1861-1914" tells a story of war opposition overcoming self-deceptions, self-censorship, the censorship of the publishing industry, and public unpopularity, and establishing itself as a constant thread and genre of U.S. literature (and cinema) ever since.

In the years leading up to and including the Civil War, war -- almost by definition -- could not be opposed in literature. Under the heavy influence of Sir Walter Scott, war was presented as an idealized and romantic endeavor. Death was painted with soft tones of desirable sleep, natural beauty, and chivalric glory. Wounds and injuries did not appear. Fear, frustration, stupidity, resentment and other features so central to war in reality did not exist in its fictionalized form.

"Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character," remarked Mark Twain, "as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war." Northern character bore a striking resemblance to the Southern variety. "If the North and South could agree on little else during the war years," Wachtell writes, "they were in easy agreement about their literary preferences. Whether their allegiance was to the Confederacy or the Union, readers wanted to be reassured that their sons, brothers, and fathers were playing parts in a noble endeavor that was favored by God. Popular wartime writers drew on a shared vocabulary of highly sentimentalized expressions of pain, sorrow, and sacrifice. Less rosy and idealized interpretations of the war were unwelcome."
http://www.zcommunications.org/six-generations-of-u-s-war-opposition-by-...

An Interview with Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin, and Greg Albo
By Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin
and Greg Albo
and Sasha Lilley

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Sasha Lilley: Liberals and leftists alike argue that the economic crisis was caused by a lack of state regulation over the banks and financial markets. Consequently, they conclude that we just need new regulation to keep the financial sector in line. Why don't you think that's the case?

Leo Panitch: Well, the cause of the crisis was certainly related to competition in the financial sector. But that competition was to some extent the product of state regulation. The American financial system is certainly the most regulated financial system in the world, and probably in history, if you measure it in terms of the number of pieces of legislation, the number of regulatory agencies, and the massive amounts of regulation to which finance is subject.

So, yes, there were changes that allowed for more competition in finance, although those changes were only a matter of closing the barn door after the horse had bolted. It was already the development of finance that made the old New Deal regulations impossible. The state then removed those limits and encouraged further competition in finance. So it's just a misunderstanding of what's really going on. There's a sense that the state didn't do its job in constraining markets. And there's a confusion about what a capitalist state is. A capitalist state responds to and sponsors and facilitates markets. The notion that it's there to restrain markets, to restrain capitalism, that if only it would do that it would remove the contradictions of competition in capitalism, is simply a cockamamie way of seeing the world. Although unfortunately it's the way in which it's ideologically presented to us.

Sasha Lilley: Much of this may appear counter-intuitive since the dominant narrative on the left is that over the last quarter century the state has retreated and let markets run unfettered. Could you give us some concrete examples of the ways the state actually facilitates markets?

Leo Panitch: At the most basic level, you couldn't have contracts. You couldn't have property without all of the things that the state does in the form of law, in order to guarantee to one side of a contract, or to one capitalist to another, that their deals can be validated. So at the most basic level the state is in there.

But more than that, states are oriented to facilitating accumulation on their own terrain. And some of them, the imperial states like the American, are oriented to facilitating capital accumulation and the spread of markets to do that around the world. They do that in a myriad of different ways. People think the New Deal regulations were brought in to constrain finance. Yet in many ways the Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial from investment banking, for instance, was adopted in order to stabilize finance and to nurture it back to health. Through the whole of the post-war period there was a very close corporatist relationship between the banking sector and the regulators. The regulators were oriented to nurturing finance, not only back to health, but to a new stage of development. And that's what began to happen by the 1960s.

Some of the old constraints that were put on the separation between commercial and investment banking then began to make less and less sense as finance was now very powerful and expansive and spreading around the world. And you got some removal of those. The big example was the 1975 New York Big Bang where New Deal price-ceilings on what brokers were allowed to charge for buying and selling stocks for people were broken down. They were mainly broken down because pension funds and other institutional investors were buying very large blocks of them and they wanted discounts.

Another example is the remove of Glass-Steagall, the separation of commercial and investment banking, which allowed commercial banks to be involved with derivatives and acting as brokers and selling insurance and so on. But that had already been broken down. It was never applied internationally and it had broken down domestically in the United States since the early 1980s. So it was really changing the legislation after finance had already expanded in the way it had.
http://www.zcommunications.org/capitalist-crisis-radical-renewal-by-leo-...

... & BTW a sadly great Poem 2
;)

100!

settlers evict Palestinian family
Submitted by ghettodefender on Thu, 07/29/2010 - 3:33pm.

... I want some type of ACTION to occur, but what... ?

Shattering Subconscious Isolation: Inception, Lucid Dreaming and the Collective Unconscious

http://www.realitysandwich.com/lucid_dreaming_collective_unconscious

http://www.lucidadvice.com/

http://iowapublicradio.org/single_story.php?storyid=813

Sam and Charles Wyly, billionaire Texas brothers who gained prominence spending millions of dollars on conservative political causes, committed fraud by using secret overseas accounts to generate more than $550 million in profit through illegal stock trades, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Thursday.

The Wylys, who have been generous contributors to the Republican Party and GOP candidates, have spent the past several years facing questions, including from a Senate investigative committee, about whether they hid millions of dollars in tax shelters abroad.

Through their lawyer, the Wylys denied all charges.

According to the SEC, the brothers, who live in Dallas, created an elaborate and clandestine network of accounts and companies on the Isle of Man and in the Cayman Islands. The brothers then used these accounts and companies to trade more than $750 million of stock in four public companies on whose boards they served, not filing the disclosures required for corporate insiders, the SEC said.

In one case, the SEC alleges that the Wylys traded based on insider information they learned as board members, netting a profit of $32 million.

"The cloak of secrecy has been lifted from the complex web of foreign structures used by the Wylys to evade the securities laws," Lorin L. Reisner, deputy director of SEC enforcement, said Thursday in a statement announcing the civil charges.

The agency is seeking unspecified financial penalties and a variety of other sanctions, including barring the Wylys from serving as directors or top executives of public companies.

William Brewer III, a lawyer representing the Wylys, said they intend to clear their name.

"After six years of investigations, the SEC has chosen to make claims against the Wyly brothers -- claims that, in our view, are without merit," Brewer said in a statement. "It will come as little surprise to those who know them that the Wylys intend to vigorously defend themselves -- and expect to be fully vindicated."

Charles Wyly, 76, and Sam Wyly, 75, have led a largely reclusive life, with their public persona defined by their political activities. Charles Wyly and his wife, Dee, have given more than $1.5 million to more than 200 Republican candidates, party committees and conservative political action committees over the past 20 years, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics. Sam Wyly and his wife, Cheryl, gave more than $970,000 over the same period, the analysis shows.

The Wylys have given to dozens of Republican candidates, none more so than the Bush family. The brothers were supporters of the campaigns of former President George H. W. Bush and his son, former President George W. Bush.
(more)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/29/AR201007...

Police in California say they have seized $1.7bn worth of marijuana plants in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

They have also arrested 97 people over the past three weeks, most of them Mexican nationals believed to have ties with Mexican drug cartels.

White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske said police had found industrial-sized plantations of marijuana.

Experts say Mexican cartels are increasingly growing marijuana in the US, rather than smuggling it there.

450 officers from local, state and federal agencies took part in the raids in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in California.

They found more than a hundred locations where marijuana was being grown illegally.

and
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10811870

A new breed has emerged; they set the global agenda, ride on Gulfstreams and manage the credit crunch in their spare time.

They are anything but elected; they are entrepreneurs and entertainers, media moguls and former politicians - the self-made super rich who are using their money to lay down a new set of global rules.

They have more in common with each other than with their countrymen, set apart by their ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people around the globe.

So where did this new global aristocracy come from and who is keeping them in check?

Why should Oprah Winfrey have the ear of President Obama, and who gave Shakira the right to dictate education policy?

But then again, when you have as much money as Bill Gates and you are prepared to give it over to a good cause who is going to stop you?

It is all well and good until the revolving door spins in the wrong direction. Empire talks to Christopher Hitchens about Henry Kissinger and his life beyond elected power - it does not seem to have changed that much.

Is the world suffering from a global governance gap? Should we be worried that the superclass seems to have an ever-expanding reach that bypasses governments and remains unchecked?

Empire with Marwan Bishara on Al-Jazeera

http://www.commondreams.org/video/2010/07/29-0

he obesity epidemic is rampant, and there are many reasons for this big fat problem. Although asking if antibiotics make us fat may initially sound like some type of joke, recent articles in Scientific American and Science magazine shows that some researchers are taking it seriously.

(snip)

However, even more serious problems result from killing off of the H. pylori. Blaser and Stanley Falkow, of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford School of Medicine, note, "H. pylori-positive individuals have lower risks of childhood asthma, allergic rhinitis and skin allergies than those without H. pylori." These scientists also posited that the bacteria's role in mediating the hormone ghrelin, which helps regulate fat development and hunger, might also "be contributing to the current epidemics of early-life obesity, type 2 diabetes and related metabolic syndromes."

Blaser wonders, "If [H. pylori is] disappearing...might there be other things that are disappearing?" He worries that many other, less well-known or understood microbial species and even certain metabolic pathways might also be on their way out due to antibiotic use.

Science magazine has just published on March 4, 2010, other important research that observed similar phenomena as Blaser.(3) Researchers at Cornell, Emory, and the University of Colorado have found that gut microbiota determines how food is digested and fat is stored in the body. They too noted that antibiotics disrupt certain bacteria in the gut that can lead to obesity as well as to increased inflammatory processes that can cause metabolic syndrome, a serious condition that can lead to high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, and a higher risk for developing diabetes and heart disease.

http://www.naturalnews.com/029320_antibiotics_body_fat.html

disdain"... {grrr}

I needed to hear the Union leader (Haffa (sp) - i forgot :) on B Press Show. He Confirmed My STRATEGY! WE VOTE DEM (& keep biting/byting Pres O's butt!!! YEA!!!