Nation's Morons March On Washington State

A pack of certified imbeciles makes its feelings known three time zones from the nation's capital.

OLYMPIA, WA—With random cries of "Enough is enough," "Do something now," and "Huh?" thousands of the nation's biggest morons descended on Washington State this week, some 3,000 miles from their intended destination of the nation's capital.

The march, which had no discernable goal or message, and no official organizers, began at approximately 8:45 a.m. in front of what the morons called the National Mall, but was actually the courtyard outside the Olympia Public Library.

"More government accountability, and transparency, and accountability!" shouted grade-A moron Tammy Caldwell, 37, addressing no one in particular. "On behalf of me, and all the [morons] who came here today, listen up, greedy Washington fat cats: We're not going anywhere until each and every one of our voices is heard."

The morons demand a drawdown of troops in Iraq in front

of what they believe to be a monument to fallen soldiers.

"To the Lincoln Memorial!" added Caldwell, pointing to a nearby monument dedicated to the memory of Washington State governor John Rankin Rogers.

Following a stop at what the morons believed to be Arlington National Cemetery, protestors reportedly marched east on State Avenue, south along Plum Street, paused bewilderedly when they failed to see the Reflecting Pool at the intersection of Union and Plum, and then found their way back to State to begin their march over again.

While authorities maintained that the gathering was largely peaceful and most of the fires were set purely by accident, demonstrators appeared visibly angry about a range of topics, including war, peace, food, music, money, baseball, cars, the people following them around as if this were some kind of rally, siblings, animals, plants, colors, and movies.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nations_morons_march_on_washington

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Roger Ailes

Roger Ailes for president?

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'America's Best Idea' Meets One of the Worst

by Froma Harrop

The Ken Burns series "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" got me thinking about one of America's worst ideas, the war on drugs. Particularly ill-conceived is the crusade against marijuana.

That bad idea is now threatening the good idea, as Mexican drug cartels — hampered by a tighter border — swarm over large swaths of U.S. public land to grow pot. There they dump toxic chemicals, dam streams, clear natural vegetation and leave piles of trash. Marijuana growers building a campfire set off the recent La Brea fire, which scorched 90,000 acres of Santa Barbara County.

Businesses serving tourists warn visitors against armed drug gangs protecting their crops. Last June, for example, hikers in southwest Idaho came upon a marijuana operation with a street value of over $6 million.

Pot farms have been found in, among other places, Redwood National Park in California, North Cascades National Park in Washington state and Pike National Forest in Colorado. An operation in Sequoia National Park was discovered just half a mile from a cave popular with tourists. (Part of the park had to be closed as rangers swooped down from helicopters.)

Federal and state governments spend $8 billion a year enforcing the ban on marijuana — and they can't even keep the cartels out of Yosemite. The National Park Service, meanwhile, frets about diverting its limited resources from ranger tours to stopping the marijuana growers.

And what purpose does all this spending serve? A new Gallup poll shows that nearly half of all Americans want to legalize marijuana and tax it like alcohol or tobacco. And solid majorities favor permitting medical marijuana, which is now legal in 14 states.

And so the Obama administration's decision to ease up on medical marijuana is not so much leading public opinion toward more enlightened drug policy as following it.

Under the new policy, federal agents will not bother users or sellers operating under their state medical marijuana laws.

But while model conservatives (William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, George P. Schultz) have declared the entire war on drugs a dismal failure, the Republican leadership can't seem to get its mind around ending even the struggle against marijuana. Already widely used, pot doesn't cause the serious health problems associated with cocaine or heroine and often alcohol.

Condemning the new directive, Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, said, "If we want to win the war on drugs, federal prosecutors have a responsibility to investigate and prosecute all medical marijuana dispensaries and not just those that are merely fronts for illegal marijuana distribution."

Under the old rules, Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided the backyards of cancer patients permitted by California law to grow pot to ease their discomfort. Millions, however, are still spent ruining the lives of kids caught smoking a joint behind the bleachers.

End the ban on pot, and the drug gangs go away. American farmers find a new business, and government a handsome source of tax revenues. Turning marijuana into a controlled substance could raise $6.2 billion in taxes, according to Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron.

And those who worry about exposing Americans to dangerous drugs would actually sleep better at night. Concern that today's marijuana is much stronger than the pot smoked in the '70s is warranted, but legal products are regulated for potency and purity. Alcoholic beverages became much safer after Prohibition ended. And so would all drugs.

http://www.creators.com/liberal/froma-harrop/-america-s-best-idea-meets-one-of-the-worst.html

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One ‘No’ Too Many?

By Tracie Powell

The "party of no" just might have gone one vote too far this time.

By now many, if not most, Americans have heard about the 30 Senate Republicans who voted against an amendment that would have prohibited government contracts with companies that use mandatory arbitration clauses to deny assault victims the right to have their cases heard in court.

But get this: Reports emerged Thursday that the proposal, introduced by Sen. Al Franken , D-Minn., may be stripped away by a fellow Democrat, not a Republican.

The third longest-serving senator in history, Democrat Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, is reportedly considering altering or removing the provision that is part of the fiscal 2010 Defense appropriations bill. A spokesman for the Senate Appropriations Committee, chaired by Inouye, said in an e-mail that the committee does not comment on ongoing conference negotiations and emphasized that the White House supports the intent of Franken's amendment.

Never let it be said that the Democratic Party is monolithic, or unified for that matter.

Still, it is Republicans who are currently being tagged as "pro-rape " and credited with trying to derail an amendment that helps victims get justice.

Whose bright idea was it to unify against something like this? Surely opponents are already dreaming up campaign ads for the next election cycle.

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=news-000003229332&cpage=1

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If you like chain letters, hide your eyes

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Crazy Michele Bachmann Rising Star says George Will

by Rack Jite

A quick primer on Michele Bachmann from the Ed Show

George Will, America's most ubiquitous Libertarian columnist and television pundit - who wants to repeal seat belt laws and have everyone carry around an assault rifle - has come to the defense of America's most Right-wing looneytune in Congress, Minnesota's own Michele Bachmann. Bachmann a rising figure among GOP conservatives

George Will - perhaps our most avid hater of the American Government - overlooks Bachmann's public adoration of her evil twin Glenn Beck, nor does he bother mentioning her rabid pro life evangelical creationist fundamentalism, glossing over her call to investigate Democrats for unAmerican activities, her Birther connections along and a a long list of other Right-wing swill making Sarah Palin look smart.

The center piece of Will's column is his adoration of her oppostition to the bailout of General Motors which she called "Gansta Government"! Hating the American Government is the new... Hmmm... Rage.

Of course this kind of a nutcase is expected in in Mississippi or Northern Idaho, but Minnesota?  Gosh... Having lived there for a time my guess its all those wintertime Hobbergoots! [shots of 2/3 brandy 1/3 schnapps which keeps the snow out of your craw] Our last crazy right-wing congresswoman was from Northern Idaho. Her name was Helen Chenoweth, also a big fan of Ron Paul. She is now in Heaven with Ayn Rand after refusing to wear a seat belt (thank you George Will). Holding a toddler who was also not restrained in any manner, they were both ejected from a jeep. The toddler survived and Chenoweth died instantly from a broken neck. Helen Chenoweth Good and Gone

Last month Michele Bachmann joined congressman Ron Paul at the University of Minnesota for a Town Hall meeting a. After watching it one may wonder how Bachmann - a rabid pro Life evangelical creationist Christian fundamentalist - could so completely agree with America's leading advocate for Ayn Rand and the Libertarian Party?
The answer of course is what so many on the internet refuse to admit, that Ron Paul IS ALSO a rabid Pro Life evangelical creationist Christian fundamentalist.

This Ron Paul brand of Libertarianism should be called Randian Christian Objectivism and their constituents Wallet Libertarians.    

Here is a video of their suck-up-a-thon

http://rackjite.com/archives/4072-Crazy-Michele-Bachmann-Rising-Star-says-George-Will.html

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Sean Penn heads to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro

Oscar-winning actor and political activist Sean Penn flew to Cuba hoping to interview its revolutionary icon Fidel Castro, entertainment news website TMZ reported Sunday.

"Sean (Penn) is going to the land of Fidel as a journalist, writing a story for Vanity Fair (magazine) about how the (Barack) Obama administration has affected Cuba," TMZ reported.

Penn was traveling with Diana Jenkins: "Actually ... it's her plane ... she's married to the head honcho at Barclays bank," TMZ added, noting the pair set out from Las Vegas on Saturday.

"Barclays sources say Sean and Diana are going to meet (Fidel) Castro -- presumably because that's what Diana told them," the website reported. Penn's representative also told TMZ a meeting was possible.

Since taking office in January, US President Barack Obama has moved to ease a half-century of tension with Cuba, with small steps such as relaxing rules on visits and money transfers to the island.

But so far, the US administration has not taken major strides in its approach to the Americas' only communist regime. The Obama administration has said it will not, for now, seek to end the US economic embargo, instead urging Havana to show progress on human rights.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091025/en_afp/entertainmentuscubapoliticspenn

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Gross

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Why Journalists Shouldn't Be Defending Fox News

 

by Dan Froomkin

 

The Obama administration's recent characterization of Fox News is a long overdue acknowledgment of the obvious: Fox News is not a legitimate news organization -- indeed, after many years of serving as the research and messaging wing of the Republican Party, it has now gone beyond even that, to become the electronic evangelist of an ultra-partisan and non-reality-based world view.

Historically speaking, White House criticism of the media has often been unseemly and defensive, with the president's ire generally provoked by journalists who excel at their work -- by asking cheeky questions, exposing important things that the president would prefer be kept secret, holding the powerful accountable and playing host to a vibrant and informed exchange of a wide range of political opinions.

But in this case, the critique is something else entirely. The litmus test is that the Obama White House is not upset at news gatherers for doing their job. What Obama and his aides are correctly pointing out is that the people working at Fox News are doing another job altogether.

The White House "attack" on Fox is being derided as bad politics, as ineffective and as a distraction from more important issues -- all of which may be true. But doesn't it kind of matter that, when it comes to the substance of what Anita Dunn, David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, and now even Obama himself have said, they're exactly right?

Obama on Wednesday told NBC's Savannah Guthrie: "I think that what our advisers have simply said is, is that we are going to take media as it comes. And if media is operating basically as a talk radio format, then that's one thing. And if it's operating as a news outlet, then that's another."

Fox News has, as my colleague Jason Linkins so effectively wrote earlier this week, well and truly left the fold of legitimate news outlets. The evidence is exhaustive. If you actually watch the network, it's not a close question. Indeed, as Josh Marshall writes, "as a product the straight news is almost more the stuff of parody than the talk shows which are at least more or less straightforward about what they are."

Pretending that Fox News is fair and balanced only serves the right wing, in the same way that it only served the Bush administration when traditional-media reporters pretended Bush didn't have a credibility problem -- and didn't call him out for his lies -- for fear of appearing partisan. It's self-muzzling, plain and simple.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/23/why-journalists-shouldnt_n_331748.html

 

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Glenn Beck's world order endangers the right

 

by Rod Dreher

You can say this for Glenn Beck: He's charismatic, he was right on ACORN and Van Jones, and he's correct to point out that the government in Washington doesn't work for the common good. The affable Beck articulates the legitimate anger and frustration millions of Americans feel when faced by the fact that the country is in a hot mess of trouble.

But here's the thing: Beck is a white Jeremiah Wright, a crazy-pants conspiracy theorist whose worldview is rooted in the paranoid teachings of a far-right Mormon political guru named W. Cleon Skousen. Before signing up as a recruit in Beck's army, conservative Becketeers had better think long and hard about where their affable leader is taking them.

A few weeks back, the red-hot Fox News Channel phenom spent nine minutes on the air leading a seminar on public artwork in New York City. By the time he was finished, Beck had illuminated a propaganda conspiracy linking communists, fascists, the Soviet Union, the Rockefeller family and the United Nations. This is the sort of weirdo rant you expect to encounter on fringey Web sites. You don't expect to see it on national television.

But that's a big part of Beck's shtick. He's always carrying on about sinister Obamaite conspiracies threatening to overthrow the constitutional order. On the Fox & Friends morning show, Beck declared: "The Manchurian Candidate couldn't destroy us faster than Barack Obama. If you were planning a sleeper to come in and become president of the United States, this is how he would do it."

How is it that a man can call the American president a traitorous subversive and not be laughed, or booed, off the national stage? He's a happy-go-lucky Howard Beale. Paddy Chayefsky, you should have lived to see this moment.

Beck's paranoia doesn't come from nowhere. His man Skousen was a fanatical Mormon reactionary so far to the right that the Latter-day Saints church finally felt compelled to distance itself from his teaching.

Beck, an enthusiastic Mormon convert, pushes Skousen's 1981 book, The 5,000 Year Leap, a tendentious pseudo-history of the United States that interprets the founding in religious terms. Texas Gov. Rick Perry recommended it at the recent Values Voter Summit in Washington. And if the pious nationalism of that book were all you knew about Skousen, you would be hard-pressed to see what the big deal was.

But Skousen wrote many less anodyne books about politics – and held views far darker than revealed in the hokey but harmless Leap. In a 1976 lecture, the audio of which is available on the pro-Skousen site AwakeAndArise.org, Skousen rails like an Old Testament prophet, quoting Mormon scriptures and detailing how Satan is working with "secret combinations" – a Mormon theological term – within political parties, churches, labor unions and the wealthy elite, especially the Rockefeller family, to bring about the "One World Order."

Skousen, like his follower Beck, is obsessed with the idea that these secret combinations are conniving to overthrow the U.S. Constitution. Though it is not part of official LDS doctrine, some Mormons believe in an apocalyptic prophecy attributed to church founder Joseph Smith, who supposedly taught that the Constitution would one dark day be hanging by a thread and that Mormon elders would rescue it.

The pudgy, sweet-natured Beck offers a more palatable form of this paranoia – but all his fruit and sugar can't hide the Skousenite firewater. How ironic that conservative Christians who unjustly dunned conventional Mitt Romney because of his LDS faith are uncritically backing the squirrelly Beck, who looks like he's casting himself as hero of a prophetic Mormon melodrama.

There are conservatives who know perfectly well that Beck is an unhinged buffoon who traffics in crude, ridiculous ideas. But unlike the hapless GOP, he's popular and effective in the political war against Obama. So these conservative cynics adopt a "no enemies to the right" approach to Beck, even though he's mainstreaming the ooga-booga worldview of a crank prophet who believed, with the John Birch Society, that Eisenhower was a closet commie.

This is foolish. Not every enemy of Obama is a friend to conservatism.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-dreher_0927edi.State.Edition1.1ea148d.html

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I want you to disregard facts

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Wait a minute!

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Why are we still in Afghanistan?

The country poses no threat to the U.S., but the war costs lives, drains the treasury and makes enemies

 

By Gene Lyons

 

One of the enduring oddities of the American foreign policy debate is that asking the most obvious questions is all but forbidden. For example, how does Afghanistan pose a threat to the United States?

Certainly not in any military sense. The impoverished, largely illiterate Afghans have no army apart from the one U.S. and NATO forces, with very limited success, are trying to train. No air force, no navy, no offensive military capacity whatsoever.

From the U.S. perspective, Afghanistan is the absolute end of the earth. Indeed, it's not a nation at all. The idea that well-intentioned Westerners can create an efficient central government on, say, the Swiss model, where none has ever existed, much less one acceptable to Afghanistan's many warring tribes, sects and ethnic factions, is almost certainly a delusion.

Here's the reality, as explained by a theater manager in somewhat Westernized Kabul to the New York Times: "The Afghan people are not mentally united ... An Uzbek will never vote for a Tajik. A Tajik will never vote for a Pashtun." The prevailing view, reporter Sabrina Tavernise found, appears to be that President Hamid Karzai's recent election victory was both fraudulent and inevitable.

Almost nobody believes a recount would solve anything. "Even if every Afghan casts their vote for (runner-up) (Abdullah) Abdullah, he won't be president because the foreigners don't want him to be," another man told her. "Nobody respected the people's vote."

Afghans see the Karzai government as organized thievery with a Pashtun accent. Period. Thus while veteran Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland is likely correct that President Obama's seeming indecision about sending 40,000 more American soldiers there is actually a squeeze play to pressure "Karzai into sharing power with more honest, competent Afghans," it's also apt to show more illusory than real results.

Granted, Obama's current dilemma is yet another fine mess bequeathed to him by the epic incompetence of George W. Bush. But it's a political rather than a military threat Obama faces. Terrorists can't defeat the United States; they can only cause American politicians to self-destruct in fear of taking blame for future atrocities.

Had the United States and its allies not diverted manpower and resources from Afghanistan to a futile, unnecessary war in Iraq, the counterinsurgency techniques proposed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal to persuade Taliban fighters to put down their weapons might have worked.

Eight bloody years on, however, what motivates the insurgency has been captured in an extraordinary series by David Rohde, the New York Times reporter rescued after seven months as a Taliban prisoner.

While his "captors harbored many delusions about Westerners," Rohde writes, U.S. antiterrorist policies had galvanized them. "They said large numbers of civilians had been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Palestinian territories in aerial bombings. Muslim prisoners had been physically abused and sexually humiliated in Iraq. Scores of men had been detained in Cuba and Afghanistan for up to seven years without charges."

Rohde witnessed Taliban militants weeping over a NATO airstrike that killed scores of Afghan women and children. "To Americans," he writes "these episodes were aberrations. To my captors, they were proof that the United States was a hypocritical and duplicitous power that flouted international law.

http://www.salon.com/news/afghanistan/index.html?story=/opinion/feature/2009/10/21/afghanistan

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Don't tread on my profits

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Health coverage 'plan' was no insurance at all

Mary Lloyd of East Bethel says she was "royally duped" into buying health coverage that wasn't insurance, and she's not alone.

by Maura Lerner

Mary Lloyd's husband was lying in the intensive care unit of an Arizona hospital when she got a good look at their new health insurance card for the first time.

Then she got the shock of her life. The card read: "This is NOT an insurance card."

For the retired couple from East Bethel, it was the beginning of a financial nightmare that left them with at least $50,000 in unpaid medical bills. They discovered that the new "health plan," they signed up for in January, for $499 a month, wouldn't pay for any of his medical care.

"I was royally duped," said Mary Lloyd, a painful admission from a woman who spent 27 years as a clinic and hospital manager. "I understand health care, and I understand health insurance," she said. "That's why I was so mortified that this happened to us."

No one knows how many customers have fallen into this trap. But dubious health plans are "spreading like poison oak all over the country," says James Quiggle of the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud, a nonprofit watchdog in Washington, D.C.

Consumer advocates say companies are taking advantage of the recession and the growing number of uninsured people -- 1 in 5 American adults under age 65 -- to sell "health coverage" that evaporates when customers try to use it, or provides far less than promised.

Just last month, Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson sued two out-of-state companies for allegedly misleading customers with phony claims about their health plans; and ten more investigations are underway, she said.

"Here, they're targeting people who are pretty sophisticated, and who really asked all the right questions," Swanson said. People believe them, she said, because they're "so desperate to find affordable coverage."

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/65911582.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O%20%3Cimg%20src=

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After the Billionaires Plundered Alabama Town, Troops Were Called in ... Illegally

By Mark Ames

"We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all," says one Goldman Sachs adviser. But tell that to the people of Samson, Ala.

Editor's Note: The shocking transfer of public wealth to Wall Street's pockets is illustrated vividly in Mark Ames' article below, which covers some very disturbing recent events in Alabama, where billionaires and banks are squeezing the locals so hard that they're literally going bankrupt just for flushing their toilets, where violence and the threat of violence are reaching a boiling point and where even the Posse Comitatus Act is under threat. "We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all," said one Goldman Sachs vice-chairman recently. Well, here's a tale of the kind of inequality the finance industry expects citizens to tolerate.

One of this year's more disturbing stories that were ignored was the illegal Army occupation of Samson, Alab., in March following a shooting spree that raged across two towns by a disgruntled worker, leaving 11 people dead.

As I wrote at the time, Michael McLendon, 27, went on a killing rampage following years of relentless corporate exploitation and harassment against him, his mother (whom he mercy-killed), and the entire rural Alabama region, which suffered like so many parts of rural America at the hands of billionaire goons like chicken oligarch Bo Pilgrim of Pilgrim's Pride notoriety.

One of the creepiest details to emerge in the shooting rampage were reports that troops from nearby Fort Rucker were brought into Samson and other surrounding areas to patrol the streets. This is a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, every freedom-loving American's worst nightmare.

And now, finally, the Army officially agrees that its occupation of the Alabama streets was illegal, according to an internal report the Associated Press got a hold of, following a Freedom of Information Act filing:

An Army investigation found that soldiers should not have been sent to man traffic stops in a small Alabama town after 11 people were killed in March during a shooting spree.

An Army report released to the Associated Press on Monday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request said the decision to dispatch military police to Samson from nearby Fort Rucker broke the law. But an Army spokesman said no charges have been filed following the Aug. 10 report.

The report from the Department of Army Inspector General found the use of military personnel in Samson violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits federal troops from performing law-enforcement actions. The names of those involved were redacted from the report.

According to the report, the officer's "intent was to be a good Army neighbor and help local civilian authorities facing a difficult, unique tragedy affecting the local community. There were no apparent adverse collateral effects to the support provided."

Indeed. For a lot of Americans, the sight of troops occupying their towns is their worst nightmare come true -- part of the reason that America came into existence was to create a country where this sort of thing would never happen, even if the Army's sole intent was to be a good neighbor and help old ladies cross the streets.

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/143485/after_the_billionaires_plundered_alabama_town%2C_troops_were_called_in_..._illegally?page=1

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See through Republican BS

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T. Boone Pickens confirms Iraq War for OIL

 

Straight from the horse's mouth:

Financier T. Boone Pickens speaks during the World Business Forum in New York October 6, 2009. (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)

Pickens says US Firms 'Entitled' to Iraqi Oil

by Tom Doggett

WASHINGTON - Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are "entitled" to some of Iraq's crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq. Boone, speaking to the newly formed Congressional Natural Gas Caucus, complained that the Iraqi government has awarded contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to develop Iraq's vast reserves while American companies have mostly been shut out.

"They're opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world ... We're entitled to it," Pickens said of Iraq's oil. "Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars."

President Barack Obama has pledged to withdraw U.S. troops in Iraq.

"We leave there with the Chinese getting the oil," Pickens said.

FULL TEXT

Essentially, Pickens is saying America can only get a piece of Iraq's oil if we have a gun in their face.

There are a couple of problems with that calculus though.

First, even if American oil companies get oil concessions in Iraq, there is no guarantee that means they will sell it to American citizens for less, or reward us for the sacrifices of tax dollars and our troops lives that it took to get those contracts.

And while we are rightly focused on the thousands of our troops who have died, the Iraqis might be thinking more about the over one million Iraqis killed, with every other family having lost at least one member.

The other thing to note is that China and other countries were somehow able to negotiate contracts with Iraq without invading or occupying the country. Could it be that one way to negotiate is to offer more favorable terms than you competitors instead putting a gun in the face of the people you're negotiating with?

That might be hard to grasp if you are used to calling up Washington and getting the CIA or Pentagon to remove leaders who don't agree to your terms. Military action is a form of welfare for oil companies.

That certainly seemed to be the case in Iraq since as soon as Dick Cheney came into office, he formed a secretive energy task force, and the only revealing document anyone could pry out of it was a map of Iraq's oil fields divided up and a list of foreign suitors for those fields.

And if you think taking care of the oil companies also meant getting cheap gas for the rest of us, think again. BBC journalist Greg Palast was told by a top CIA oil analyst that the war was to prevent the price of oil from going down. The industry's own journal said in 2002 that once sanctions came off Saddam, he could pump too much oil and drive the price DOWN. President Bush even seemed to confirm this when he sent Russia's Putin reassurances that an Iraq War would NOT result in lower oil prices.

The other thing the awarding of contracts to other countries proves is that the oil companies are lying, and getting politicians in DC to lie for them, about Iraqis demanding unreasonable terms that make it impossible for them to drill there and make a profit. Somehow those other countries think Iraq's terms are manageable.

http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2009/10/t-boone-pickens-confirms-iraq-war-for.html

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Ravaged by drought, Madagascar feels the full effect of climate change

Deforestation-induced erosion in Madagascar (October 2004)

A 10% increase in temperature and a 10% decrease in rainfall sees Indian Ocean island struggle to feed its children

by David Smith

Remanonjona Feroce founded the village of Anjamahavelo – meaning At the Lucky Baobab – in Madagascar a generation ago. With memories of a flood still fresh, he chose a spot far from the nearest river. He cleared the wild forest and sacrificed a sheep in the hope that it would make the owls, lemurs and snakes go away.

"Animals can't live together with little children and young girls," explained Feroce, an 85-year-old great-grandfather. "They don't want snakes to be here because they have bad spirits. They strangle children by curling around the neck. Owls are bad birds. If one hoots, it means somebody will die."

The animals did go away, but so did the luck of Anjamahavelo, a cluster of wooden houses. Southern Madagascar has had three years of crop failure in five years, resulting in chronic hunger for tens of thousands of families and soaring rates of malnutrition, stunted growth and death among children.

Three forces are combining with deadly effect on the Indian Ocean island, which is incalculably rich in wildlife but impoverished in basic infrastructure. Climate change is widely blamed for playing havoc with the seasons and destroying agricultural harvests. This is exacerbated by local deforestation, which has altered the microclimate and reduced rainfall.

Finally, a bloody political coup earlier this year paralysed essential services and led to the crippling suspension of several foreign aid programmes. The UN says that nearly half of households in the south have severe food shortages.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/23/madagascar-drought

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20 Minutes with the President

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Worst. Album. Ever.

by Michael Dare

Whether or not you like Bob Dylan could very much depend upon whether you've heard Blood on the Tracks, which is a masterpiece by absolutely any standard. On the other hand, if his Christmas album, Christmas in the Heart, is the only Bob Dylan album you've ever heard, you would have every right to rank him somewhere between Mrs. Miller and Tiny Tim in the pantheon of singing oddities. Here Comes Santa Claus, Winter Wonderland, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, O Little Town of Bethlehem, there will never, ever, be worse versions of these songs. Impossible. Christmas in the Heart bubbled up from some insane reverse Bizarro world American Idol where only those with the most disagreeable vocal cords are free to embarrass themselves.

There's no blood on these tracks, just phlegm, buckets of phlegm, tangled up in sputum, you need shelter from the expectorant, Heimlich me in the morning, the idiot cough, if you see him, say gesundheit, he's gonna make me grateful when he goes. The songs aren't uplifting, imbued with subtle texture, but Leonard Cohen times Tom Waits divided by Josh Groban. Dylan finally proves to the world that he can sing worse than ANYBODY, just try to sing worse than this, I dare you.

And all those people who think they can do a Dylan impersonation? Like Elvis impersonators, they've now got to decide between the early Dylan who couldn't sing or the older, degraded Dylan who REALLY can't sing. Good luck with it and don't hurt yourself.

Most importantly, this album is going to have a profound effect upon the war on terror. If al Qaeda wants statements from American soldiers they've captured in Afghanistan, all they have to do is play Dylan's Christmas album over and over and the troops will be begging to confess to the fact Dick Cheney was behind 9/11.

 

http://dareland.blogspot.com/2009/10/worst-album-ever.html

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The Constant Weader

Fox News shows should probably carry a warning: Contact your doctor if you have rage lasting more than four hours.
-- Louis Menand

Blue Dogs bark but never bite.
-- John McCain

This is a country that often has transformational ambitions but is saddled with an incremental system, a nation built on revolution, then engineered so the revolutionary can rarely take hold.
-- Anna Quindlen

I've not been very happy with the White House's lukewarm support of the public option. -- Sen. Tom Harkin

For Rush and Glenn and Balloon Dad, the allure of media attention is too powerful to be curbed by a sense of social responsibility.
-- John Del Cecato

Who cares? -- Joe Biden, in response to Dick Cheney's "irrelevant" anti-Obama rants

Our economy is so completely fucked, the rich are running out of things to steal. -- Matt Taibbi

A right-wing host...would turn to the conservative guest and ask, 'You think the war in Iraq is a stunning success. Please tell us why it's going so well.' Then s/he would introduce me and say, 'Now, I understand you're against fighting for freedom. Can you explain to our audience why that is?'
-- David Corn, on being a liberal pundit on Fox

It does not seem to have occurred because of some deep resolution of the theological disputes between Anglicans and Catholics, but merely by a shared abhorrence of women priests and openly gay ones.
-- Andrew Sullivan, on the Pope's announcement the Roman Church would accept Anglicans into the fold

There are 52 solid Democrats for the public option. Only about five Democrats oppose it. Should the 52 give in to the five? Or should the five go along with the vast majority of the Democratic caucus?
-- Sen. Tom Harkin

http://www.realitychex.com/

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Corporate media

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Texas, the Eyes of Justice Are Upon You

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

    On October 13, we lost a resolute champion of the law, a man who left his impact on the lives of untold numbers of Americans.

    His very name made his life's work almost inevitable, a matter of destiny. William Wayne Justice was a federal judge for the Eastern District of Texas. That's right, he was "Justice Justice." And he spent a distinguished legal career making sure that everyone - no matter their color or income or class - got a fair shake. As a former Texas lieutenant governor put it last week, "Judge Justice dragged Texas into the 20th century, God bless him."

    Dragged it kicking and screaming, for it was Justice who ordered Texas to integrate its public schools in 1971 - 17 years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision made separate schools for blacks and whites unconstitutional. Texas resisted doing the right thing for as long as it could. Many of its segregated schools for African-American children were so poor they still had outhouses instead of indoor plumbing.

    This small town lawyer appointed to the federal bench by President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered Texas to open its public housing to everyone, regardless of their skin color. He looked at the state's "truly shocking conditions" in its juvenile detention system and said, repair it. He struck down state law that permitted public schools to charge as much as $1,000 tuition for children of illegal immigrants.

    And Justice demanded a top-to-bottom overhaul of Texas prisons, some of the most brutal and corrupt in the nation. He even held the state in contempt of court when he thought it was dragging its feet cleaning up a system where thousands of inmates slept on the dirty bare floors of their cellblocks and often went without medical care. The late, great Molly Ivins said, "He brought the United States Constitution to Texas."

    Some say that justice stings. William Wayne Justice certainly did - and his detractors stung back with death threats and hate mail. Carpenters refused to repair his house, beauty parlors denied service to his wife. There were cross burnings and constant calls for his impeachment.

    After he desegregated the schools, he was offered armed guards for protection. He turned them down and instead took lessons in self-defense.

    You need to understand that while so many Texans have fought and are fighting the good fight in the Judge Justice tradition, others believe in the law only when it sides with them. They long for the good old days of Judge Roy Bean, the saloonkeeper whose barroom court was known in the frontier days as "the law west of the Pecos." His judicial philosophy was simple: "Hang 'em first, try 'em later."

    The present governor of Texas seems to be channeling Judge Bean.

http://www.truthout.org/1024091

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Is the Army fixing recruitment goal numbers to justify SURGE in Afghanistan?

Posted by indythinker

Amid charges from former Vice-President Dick Cheney and other Republicans that the Obama administration is taking too long to make a decision on sending more troops to Afghanistan, Correspondent Fred Kaplan of Slate says that the Army's claims to have exceeded its 2009 recruiting goals have been exaggerated. The numbers are very fishy, and it is what the Pentagon IS NOT telling the American people, Congress, and their Commander-In-Chief that is highly irregular.

Some Pentagon officials claim success was due to high unemployment, while others to a spurt in civic-mindedness in response to President Obama's call for national service. However, scrutiny shows that fewer people joined the Army this year than last year and the Army lowered its recruitment goals.

At a time when the administration is faced with dwindling public support for the 8-year-old war, Obama's national security team is weighing whether the United States should send more troops to the region. His team is considering as few as 10,000 and as many as 80,000 more Americans in the region, as well as whether to order more forces to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan or to focus more narrowly on al-Qaida terrorists believed to be hiding in Pakistan. The U.S. already has about 68,000 troops in Afghanistan, and NATO nations have supplied 36,000 more.

Kaplan's investigative report is timely and raises many questions about the Pentagon's anxiety to send more troops to Afghanistan. Even if troops were not being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan the shifting of military recruitment numbers to make a case for escalation of war warrants a Congressional and administration investigation to prove Kaplan mistaken. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr need to explain to their Commander-In-Chief, Congress, and the American people why Army planners saw fit to decrease military recruitment quotas for the first time in a decade while simultaneously begging for MORE TROOPS IN COMBAT.

He notes that the Army is the service that has been having the hardest time finding new recruits in recent years, because it [along with the Marine Corps] has borne the heaviest burden, and suffered by far the most casualties-in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The Pentagon's report states that the Army's goal for 2009 was to sign 65,000 new recruits. It actually signed 70,045. But the claim is not as credible as it appears on paper. Bean counters at DoD may consider this number crunching an technical increase and meeting recruitment goals, but lowering that goal by 15,000 recruits does nothing for the credibility of the Army's claim that it has met or exceeded recruiting goals. In fact, regardless if one supports the proposed surge by the Pentagon or not the time to cut military recruitment quota in our ground forces is not when Army generals are asking for more troops in the field.

What the Pentagon fails to mention to both Congress, the President, and the American public is that in each of the previous two years of the Bush administration, the Army's recruitment goal was 80,000-much higher than this year's. The Pentagon traditionally does planning in five year cycles, and during wartime it is essential to have an accurate assessment of how many troops you need in the pipeline before asking for additional troops in a combat zone. This is even more essential given we do not have a National draft.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/article9088.html

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Photo-ops you'll never see

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Goldman Sacks

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Blocking Escalation Not Good Enough

By David Swanson

Why is it that every time we elect "peace" candidates we defund the peace movement, stop calling for an end to wars, and limit our demands exclusively to opposing war escalations?

In 2006 we voted into Congress the candidates who looked most likely to end the war in Iraq. We congratulated ourselves on a job well done. Then we mildly urged them not to escalate the war they'd been elected to end, and they escalated it anyway.

In 2008 we voted into Congress and the White House the candidates who looked most likely to end the war in Iraq. Candidate Obama promised to pull out two brigades per month for sixteen months. Here we are in month 10 and that withdrawal has yet to begin. And what in the name of all that is true, good, and free-of-hope are we doing about it? Not a god damned thing.

Meanwhile Obama promised, much less noisily, to escalate a war in Afghanistan and has done so with no resistance, even as the American people have (at least in polls) turned against it. Now party leaders in Congress have given Obama the go-ahead for a larger escalation, and what have we done?

To begin with we've accepted the terms of the debate that our government officials always impose on us following an election: Are you for an escalation or do you think the current troop/mercenary levels are adequate? There is no room in that debate for arguing that the entire enterprise is illegal, barbaric, self-destructive, and must be immediately replaced with civilized acts of aid and diplomacy.

Of course we should oppose an escalation, just as we should prefer a "public option" to no healthcare reform at all. But self-censoring our demand for single-payer shifts the debate so far right that we can't even pass a public option. And self-censoring our demand for an end to wars shifts the debate to a point where the middle ground becomes an escalation of half the largest size anyone proposes -- and the war in Iraq is not even mentioned.

Well-meaning peace groups are pointlessly urging us to lobby the president, and are publicly whipping congress members on the following items: sponsorship of a bill that would require some sort of non-binding exit plan for Afghanistan if actually passed by the House and Senate and signed by the president, and sponsorship of a bill that would deny funding for an escalation in Afghanistan if actually passed by the House and Senate and signed by the president. But getting either of those bills through the Senate is going to be significantly more difficult than getting the House to stop funding the wars, and thus far no organizations have begun building a public list of House members committed to voting No on war money.

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/47250

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Oh, the shame!

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It's always sunny on West Bank's Sesame Street

By Joseph Nasr

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) – It's always a sunny day on Sesame Street in the West Bank, where the neighbors are friendly and the Muppets never see an Israeli army checkpoint all day long.

The Shara'a Simsim version of the popular television program teaches Palestinian children they can achieve their dream of an independent Palestinian state through tolerance, education and national pride -- and not anti-Israeli violence.

"Our problem is that for so long we've been focusing on resistance and we gave up on other things like culture, education and tolerance," said executive producer Daoud Kuttab.

"I believe that an educated, confident and tolerant society will help us build an independent, peaceful and non-violent state," he added.

The fourth series, which airs on Palestine TV in January and has 52 half-hour episodes, aims to teach Palestinian children -- mainly boys -- non-violent ways of expression, by exposing them to empowered characters who serve as role models.

One such is six-year-old Basel, meaning brave in Arabic, who in one episode is seen brushing his teeth, wearing his clothes and tying his shoelaces alone and then waving a Palestinian flag and declaring: "It's Basel's independence day!"

The show's Palestinian producers chose to make no reference to symbols of the Israeli occupation such as the West Bank barrier and the network of Israeli army checkpoints, which Palestinians say are sources of hardship.

"This is a program for pre-schoolers and we don't need to show them all the things they see too much of anyway, which are the tensions that exist in their daily lives," said Gary Knell, president of Sesame Workshop, which produces Sesame Street.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091022/en_nm/us_sesamestreet

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Gen. Eaton has Obama's back in war of words with Cheney

by Gregory Patin

 

President Obama has a new ally in the war of words that Dick Cheney started after leaving his coffin and running his mouth once again in a speech to the Center for Security Policy.

His name is Gen. Paul Eaton (Ret.), who served more than 30 years in the United States Army and oversaw the training of the Iraqi military from 2003-2004. He is currently the National Security Network Senior Adviser for the Obama administration.

On Wednesday former vice president Dick Cheney criticized President Obama's approach to war in Afghanistan, accusing Obama of "dithering" in his weeks-long assessment about whether to add 40,000 new U.S. troops to the fight in Afghanistan. Cheney said Obama "seems afraid" to make a decision.

On Thursday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs shot back at Cheney, dismissing the Republican's criticism of delays in President Obama's decision-making on Afghanistan strategy. "What Vice President Cheney calls 'dithering,' President Obama calls his solemn responsibility to the men and women in uniform and to the American public," Gibbs told reporters. "I think we've all seen what happens when somebody doesn't take that responsibility seriously."

Today, Gen. Paul Eaton also had a few words for Dick Cheney. His words are clear and need no further elaboration:

The record is clear: Dick Cheney and the Bush administration were incompetent war fighters. They ignored Afghanistan for 7 years with a crude approach to counter-insurgency warfare best illustrated by: 1. Deny it.  2.  Ignore it. 3. Bomb it. While our intelligence agencies called the region the greatest threat to America, the Bush White House under-resourced our military efforts, shifted attention to Iraq, and failed to bring to justice the masterminds of September 11.

The only time Cheney and his cabal of foreign policy 'experts' have anything to say is when they feel compelled to protect this failed legacy. While President Obama is tasked with cleaning up the considerable mess they left behind, they continue to defend torture or rewrite a legacy of indifference on Afghanistan. Simply put, Mr. Cheney sees history throughout extremely myopic and partisan eyes.
 
As one deeply invested in the Armed Forces of this country, I am grateful for the senior military commanders assigned to leading this fight and the men and women fighting on the ground. But I dismiss men like Cheney who inject partisan politics into the profound deliberations our Commander-in-Chief and commanders on the ground are having to develop a cohesive and comprehensive strategy, bringing to bear the economic and diplomatic as well as the military power, for Afghanistan -- something Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld never did.

No human endeavor can be as profound as sending a nation's youth to war.  I am very happy to see serious men and women working hard to get it right.

The only thing to add to that is that it is ludicrous for anyone to consider a self-proclaimed expert like Cheney, who had five draft deferments and never served a day in the military, worthy of a single word in the debate on Afghanistan or any war. It is also ironic that Cheney speaks more to the press now than he did when he was in office. Perhaps you have something to hide, Dick. Do you feel the noose tightening?

 

Read more here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-23316-Madison-Independent-Examiner~y2009m10d23-Gen-Eaton-has-Obamas-back-in-war-of-words-with-Cheney

 

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Social Media Revolution

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Shocking Vile Commentary

Intershame.com is devoted to exposing misbehavior. You can help us by nominating something you feel warrants public shaming. Thanks!

Intershame On: Pat Buchanan

 

He did it.

Pat Buchanan has written an article so racist in tone, so devoid of reason and so fundamentally ignorant of the state of the union that it might very well be remembered as height of the radical conservative movement's paranoid hysteria over the election of Barack Obama. Those mesmerized by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity will surely find Buchanan's article intoxicating. It is, perhaps, the movement's magnum opus.

Buchanan's article, "Traditional Americans are Losing Their Nation" has perfectly captured the conservative mentality. Namely, that everything wrong with the country is the doing of minorities, progressives and liberal ignorance of middle America.

The piece begins by describing a brand new inter-conservative organization called "Oath Keepers". Think of Oath Keepers as Tea Party activists with a penchant for violence. Buchanan describes the Oath Keepers movement in this way:

Formed in March, they are ex-military and police who repledge themselves to defend the Constitution, even if it means disobeying orders. If the U.S. government ordered law enforcement agencies to violate Second Amendment rights by disarming the people, Oath Keepers will not obey.

"The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here," says founding father Stewart Rhodes, an ex-Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer. "My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can't do it without them.

"We say if the American people decide it's time for a revolution, we'll fight with you."

In short, Oath Keepers are radical conservatives willing to violently oppose the government. Who would join such a group? Buchanan sheds light on this as well:

"Whites are not only more anxious, but also more alienated. Big majorities of whites say the past year's turmoil has diminished their confidence in government, corporations and the financial industry. ... Asked which institution they trust most to make economic decisions in their interest, a plurality of whites older than 30 pick 'none' – a grim statement."

...

Moreover, the alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived.

Apparently whites over the age of thirty who feel alienated by their country are the foundation of the Oath Keepers movement. Of course, Buchanan foreshadowed this segment of the population by using the divisive term "traditional Americans" in the title of his article.

More importantly than "who" however, is "why". Why are the Oath Keepers necessary and why would somebody find their positions attractive? This is where I believe Buchanan's article becomes infamous. In order to explain why a radical, violent conservative movement is needed, Buchanan assembles the definitive laundry list of modern conservative grievances:

In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates.

They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and health care and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live on – then carry Mexican flags in American cities and demand U.S. citizenship.

They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.

They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks.

America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.

To summarize Buchanan's commentary... It is reasonable and justified for white, middle-american's over the age of 30 to join a movement threatening violent revolution against their government in order to combat transgressions perceived to be aimed solely at them.

The most obvious fallacy of Buchanan's argument is that the problems he points out only affect white middle-america. There's an elderly black woman in New York who is just as disturbed by the decline of religious participation in this country as a soccer mom in South Carolina. A 19 year-old Latino citizen in LA is far more likely to lose a job opportunity to an illegal immigrant than a 40 year-old architect in Ohio. The tax dollars used to bail out the banks came from all corners of the country, not just the heartland and the bible-belt. Yet, according to Buchanan, the only people that have a justifiable gripe with the direction of the country are white's in the heartland i.e., "traditional Americans".

 

http://intershame.com/on/Pat_Buchanan/

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Glenn Beck Tries to Make a New ACORN by Attacking Net Neutrality & Changing the Definition of 'Freedom'

by Meg White

This may sound like the warning of an alarmist, but your ability to read the words I'm writing is already in danger, and the government has finally decided to decide whether or not it wants to do anything about it. Of course, Glenn Beck believes that decision is the end of the Internet as we know it.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is scheduled to vote Thursday on whether or not to begin a rule-making process on the issue of net neutrality.

What is net neutrality? Well, Science Progress has an informative but concise primer on the issue here that outlines the controversy and explains the stakes held by the government, communications companies and consumers:

Net neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet; all content on the Internet is equally accessible, and once a person pays for access to the Internet, they alone get to choose how they use it... Internet users and their advocates generally favor net neutrality, while telecom companies see it as a threat to their use of their own property.

Or, as put even more simply by this About.com article: "Net neutrality means that Internet service providers and network owners concern themselves only with efficiently moving bits -- not with the content embodied by the bits."

The attempt to turn this into a conservative conspiracy theory has been tough, so defenders of Big Telecom had to call in the experts in whipping up unfounded fears: Glenn Beck and FOX News.

Think Progress, in their second notification of how Phil Kerpen is using Glenn Beck's show on FOX as a platform for the anti-tax and anti-government ideology of his group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), detailed how the team went after the issue of net neutrality.

It's really quite similar to healthcare and climate change tactics, in that Beck uses Americans' historic distrust of government intervention as a reason to let Corporate America run the show. Of course, there's a dose of Red Scare in there too, for good measure.

Kerpen has launched an all-out attack against the net neutrality advocates at Free Press -- a nonprofit, nonpartisan group promoting media diversity and access -- on his Web site. With the amount of times Kerpen and Beck referred to Free Press employees as Marxists and/or communists, one would think they're talking about ACORN (if you can stomach it, here are links to part one, part two and part three of Beck's show featuring Kerpen).

Aside from the fear mongering, there's a lot Beck doesn't understand about both freedom and the Internet, and it seems that Kerpen wants to keep it that way.

http://blog.buzzflash.com/analysis/929

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Baby refused coverage

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The ACORN Standard

by Jeremy Scahill

The nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight and Reform recently revealed that the top 100 government contractors made nearly $300 billion from federal contracts in 2007 alone. Since 1995 these same contractors have been involved with 676 cases of "misconduct" and paid $26 billion in fines to settle cases stemming from fraud, waste or abuse. Fines and other penalties, it seems, are simply the stunningly small price of doing government business.

Take the case of the top three war contractors, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. These companies have engaged in 108 instances of misconduct since 1995 and have paid fines or settlements totaling nearly $3 billion. In 2007 they won some $77 billion in federal contracts. Or consider pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which in September paid $2.3 billion to settle a slew of criminal and civil cases, including Medicaid fraud. According to the Justice Department, this was "the largest healthcare fraud settlement" in its history. Yet Pfizer made more than $40 billion in profits last year and won $73 million in federal contracts in 2007; it continues to do robust business with the government. Not bad for a "corporate felon."

Unfortunately, neither Pfizer nor the largest US military contractors are targets of significant Congressional action. Instead it's ACORN, a community organization that trains and advocates for poor and working-class Americans. Over the past fifteen years, ACORN has received just $53 million in federal funds, much of it for low-income housing. Despite--or perhaps because of--its efforts to empower some 500,000 member families, ACORN was the subject of a sting video produced by a right-wing activist that featured a fake pimp and prostitute seeking tax advice. The group swiftly fired the handful of employees who were entrapped, but that didn't put an end to the storm. Fox News aired the video repeatedly, and right-wing astroturf operative Rick Berman set up a Rotten ACORN website. The campaign was wildly successful. In mid-September all but seventy-five House Democrats and seven senators voted with their Republican colleagues to bar the group from receiving federal funds.

ACORN, like all organizations receiving federal dollars, should be subject to Congressional scrutiny. But ACORN was clearly singled out for political reasons. Those Democrats who voted for the "defund ACORN" bill should be required to explain their reasoning to their constituents, particularly when so few of them have taken substantive actions to apply the ACORN standard to corporate criminals with real rap sheets.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/18-4

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Presidential election outcome changed voters' testosterone

DURHAM, N.C. -- Young men who voted for Republican John McCain or Libertarian candidate Robert Barr in the 2008 presidential election suffered an immediate drop in testosterone when the election results were announced, according to a study by researchers at Duke University and the University of Michigan.

In contrast, men who voted for the winner, Democrat Barack Obama, had stable testosterone levels immediately after the outcome.

Female study participants showed no significant change in their testosterone levels before and after the returns came in.

The men who participated in the study would normally show a slight night-time drop in testosterone levels anyway. But on this night, they showed a dramatic divergence: The Obama voters' levels didn't fall as they should, and the McCain and Barr voters lost more than would have been expected.

"This is a pretty powerful result," said Duke neuroscientist Kevin LaBar. "Voters are physiologically affected by having their candidate win or lose an election."

In a post-election questionnaire, the McCain and Barr backers were feeling significantly more unhappy, submissive, unpleasant and controlled than the Obama voters.

The findings mirror what other studies have found in men who participate directly in an interpersonal contest -- the winner gets a boost of testosterone, while the loser's testosterone drops. Testosterone is a steroid hormone manufactured by the testes that is linked to aggression, risk-taking and responses to threats. Women have it too but in much lesser amounts and originating from different sources (their ovaries and adrenal glands), which makes them less likely to experience rapid testosterone changes following victory or defeat.

Researchers in Durham and Ann Arbor had 183 men and women chew a piece of gum and then spit into a sample tube at 8 p.m. as the polls closed on Nov. 4, 2008. When the election results were announced at about 11:30 p.m., the subjects provided a second sample, and then two more at 20-minute intervals. Those spit samples were then analyzed for concentrations of testosterone and some related stress hormones.

It would appear that even vicarious participation in such a "macro-scale dominance competition" is enough to change hormone levels, said Duke post-doctoral researcher Steven Stanton, who is the first author on a paper appearing in PLOS One on Wednesday. (http://www.plosone.org)

"Voters participate in elections both directly by casting their ballots, and vicariously because they don't personally win or lose the election," Stanton said. "This makes democratic political elections highly unique dominance contests."

Stanton said the scientific consensus suggests the testosterone response to fighting and competition in males affects their future behavior in a beneficial way. The loser chills out a bit so he doesn't continue to press his case and perhaps become injured. In contrast, the winner may be motivated to pursue further gains in social status. "The research on this extends beyond humans and other primates," Stanton said.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/du-peo102009.php

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Warning - Republican Senators ahead

 

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The Washington Post Creates Its Own Facts to Support Afghan Nation-Building

by Melvin A. Goodman

(Photo Illustration: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t;

Adapted From: divds and zoriah/flickr)

    The Washington Post is creating its own facts in order to support its argument for US nation-building in Afghanistan. In its lead editorial on Saturday, the Post asserted that the United States is capable of building a strong government in Afghanistan at the national and local levels. The Post claimed that Afghanistan had had a "working national government through most of the 1970s and 1980s." This is simply not so.

    Afghanistan has always been a diverse, loosely organized country, although there was support for King Mohammad Zahir's reign from 1933 to 1973. King Zahir was the last Afghan ruler to pretend to play a national role, but he was a weak and indifferent ruler, spending most of his time abroad. He was ousted in a bloodless coup in 1973 by Prince Mohammad Daoud, who proclaimed himself the first president of the Republic of Afghanistan. There has not been a stable government in Afghanistan since then.

   Daoud lasted until 1978, when the same leftist officers who had ousted the king occupied the palace and killed Daoud, his wife and many of his children and grandchildren. Daoud was replaced by Nur Mohammad Taraki, secretary of the People's Democratic (Communist) party, who was ousted and eventually executed by a supposedly loyal follower, Hafizullah Amin. In this period, marked by instability and violence, there was no evidence of national support for either Taraki or Amin. The conventional wisdom was that the Soviets were responsible for Daoud's coup against the king as well as the events that led to the overthrow of Daoud. In fact, it was Iran and not the Soviet Union that was responsible, as Tehran (with the encouragement of the United States) had been trying to draw Kabul into a western-tilted, Tehran-centered security sphere.

    In any event, developments were about to get worse, and Afghanistan was going to move even further from what the Post described as a strong government at the national and local levels. On Christmas Eve, 1979, Soviet armed forces invaded Afghanistan, killed Amin and replaced him with Babrak Karmal, a Communist who was subservient to Moscow's wishes. This marked the fourth Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 54 years, following small-scale interventions in 1925, 1929 and 1930. It is not widely known, but President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, sponsored covert efforts in Central Asia to foment rebellion inside the Soviet Union even before Moscow ordered the invasion of Afghanistan. President Carter then authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to assist Afghan rebels six months before Moscow invaded.

http://www.truthout.org/1022097

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Pickens says U.S. firms 'entitled' to Iraqi oil

By Tom Doggett

WASHINGTON, Oct 21 (Reuters) - Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are "entitled" to some of Iraq's crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq.

Boone, speaking to the newly formed Congressional Natural Gas Caucus, complained that the Iraqi government has awarded contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to develop Iraq's vast reserves while American companies have mostly been shut out.

"They're opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world ... We're entitled to it," Pickens said of Iraq's oil. "Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars."

President Barack Obama has pledged to withdraw U.S. troops in Iraq.

"We leave there with the Chinese getting the oil," Pickens said.

Iraq's Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani told a Washington conference on Wednesday that his government was happy with the energy auction it held earlier this year. The auction was the first chance for foreign oil firms to compete for Iraqi oil since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

http://in.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idINN2149238420091021

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We can't pull out now

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