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Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Do You Want A Toxic Manicure?
Xenophobic language laws: English only spoken here
by JohnsonA NICE little kerfuffle has begun over the decision by the township of Homer, Illinois, population around 30,000, to adopt English as its official language. Motivated, reportedly, by the harsh Arizona immigration law that is due to take effect at the end of this month, the two people on the township's board who sponsored the resolution, at least one of them a member of the local Tea Party movement, are clearly driven at least as much by the desire for a little glory as by any problems with foreigners, which in Homer at least seem rather rare:
"I knew I was going to take some heat from this," said Steve Balich, the township's clerk and author of the resolution...
...Trustee Vicki Bozen agreed, saying, "We would love this issue to explode throughout the nation."
...Balich and Bozen admitted that illegal immigration isn't a serious problem in Homer Township, where Hispanics make up about 12 percent of the population, equal to the percent in Will County as a whole. Township documents are always printed in English, and nobody, to their knowledge, has ever requested otherwise.
It remains only to reprint the text of the resolution, as it appears on the Homer/Lockport Tea Party website in the glorious and now official language of English, in full, and to ask you, dear readers, to see how many errors you can spot.
Homer Township Resolution #HT071210
State of Illinois
County of Will
Preface:
Homer Township Board recognizes that there most likely no serious problem with illegal immigration, in the Township, but wants to make it policy to enforce the Rule of law in Homer Township. We support the right to make this statement and encourage other Townships, Cities, and the State to follow suit. We are asking for nothing to be added or taken away from the existing law. We recognize Native Americans had the first language in our Country, followed by Western European dialects, with English eventually becoming dominant. Traditionally becoming a citizen required speaking English, accepting the United States as their Country, and assimilating into the population.The Homer Township Board, supports actions to enforce existing immigration law, enforce residency requirements in our school districts, and acknowledge that English the dominant language of Homer Township.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/07/xenophobic_language_laws
Monday, July 19, 2010
THE GULF WELL IS STILL LEAKING
The announcement that the Deepwater Horizon Well Head has been capped is being blared all across ABCNNBBCBS with headlines "oil no longer gushing into gulf." Among the more naive, it may be understood if they have the impression the problem is over (except for the cleanup) because that is the impression being sold to the public. But is it reality, or is it politics? There is no question that the Gulf Oil disaster is not going to help Democrats retain their hold on Congress come November. Senator David Vitter points out, correctly, that President Obama has a vested political interest in convincing the public that the problem is over, so that it will fade from public memory in the three months from now until the elections.
Yes, British Petroleum and Transocean screwed up, but it was Obama's administration which failed to get the problematic US Minerals Management Service to properly exercise their job of oversight and safety inspections on the Gulf drilling rigs. MMS had been scandalized going back to 2008 for doing favors for and accepting gifts (including sexual favors) from the oil companies they were supposed to be keeping an eye on. In some cases, MMS let the oil companies fill out their own safety reports! The US Government knew what was going on and even issued a report on the problems with MMS.
Obama had over 400 days in office to do his job os getting the government to do their job, but failed in his primary task of taking care of this country, apparently too distracted with his love of Israel to pay attention to what was going on closer to home.
Obama makes a good show of rushing down to the gulf to "kick ass" and act like he is taking care of the situation, but in truth his job was to prevent such disasters from happening, not pose like a firefighter standing heroically over the wreckage after-the-fact.
Obama needs the Gulf Oil disaster to go away because it will be an election loser for the Democrats if the public is still thinking about it in November. Obama himself may be untouchable in this election because he is not running, but the public thirst for vengeance will find easy targets in Democratic candidates.
The announcement of the attempt to cap the well this last week was greeted with stunned amazement among experts (not on BP's payroll). After all, BP had admitted back in May that the drill pipe and well casing had at least one leak 1000 feet below the blowout preventer; the reason the Top Kill procedure had failed.
CNN reported on two other potential leaks at 9,000 feet and 17,000 feet.
Back in June, video from the Remotely Operated Vehicles on the ocean floor spotted oil leaking up from fissures in the sea floor near the well.
That the drill pipe itself was destroyed in the initial methane "kick" that ignited the platform fire was underscored by the fact that two sections of the drill pipe had been jammed up inside the blowout preventer.
Common sense (and engineering) will tell you that if you have a pipe with leaks, putting a cap on one leak simply drives the oil out the other leaks. From an environmental perspective this makes no sense, because the oil is still leaking out of the well, just in a different place. Of greater concern is that the oil can flow out into the surrounding rocks the way the mud did during the failed Top Kill procedure, forming what is called a subsurface blowout. This is a huge bubble of oil inside the rock. The danger is if the bubble ruptures and the oil collected over 80 days of leakage rushed to the surface of the gulf all at once. Such a surge of oil could easily engulf and founder the surface ships.
Capping a well with known leaks below the surface really serves only one purpose, and that is to present to the media video images showing the well is capped, so that they can reassure the public the problem is over and please vote Democratic-or-you-are-just-being-a-racist.
But the hard reality being withheld from the public is that the problem is not fixed. The leak has not been stopped, it has just been moved out of sight. The camera feed of the capped well head will be shown constantly to assure Americans that all is well and lull us back to a useful torpor. No other views from around the well will be allowed.
Except that the cat is already out of the bag!
http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/the-gulf-well-is-still-leaking/blog-379559/
ACTA so transparent, the text still has to be leaked
At this point, one gets the sense that Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiators are just yanking our collective chains with their talk of "transparency." After releasing a single version of the ACTA draft text back in April, the negotiations descended into their customary and unnecessary secrecy once more. After the most recent round of negotiations in Lucerne, the governments involved didn't even bother to release the new text. And when the European Commission briefed European members of parliament, the meeting was secret—so Pirate MEP Christian Engström left.
It's hard to say why the negotiators still insist on such secrecy, especially when draft texts of the treaty keep leaking anyway. Another one appeared today (PDF), courtesy of someone in the European Parliament, and it incorporates all the most recent changes from the Lucerne round.
At least ACTA's negotiators have opened up a bit when it comes to even discussing the treaty. US negotiator Stan McCoy spoke about ACTA this week in DC, while EU Commissioner for Trade Karel De Gucht held a public briefing yesterday at the European Parliament. And ACTA negotiators did take some questions from critics at Lucerne.
So—progress, of a sort, but it wasn't enough to win over 90 academics and advocates who gathered in Lucerne to discuss the ACTA. In late June, this group issued a statement that said, "We find that the terms of the publicly released draft of ACTA threaten numerous public interests, including every concern specifically disclaimed by negotiators."
Tomgram: Ellen Cantarow, Blowback Crude
I don't know about you, but when I see a headline like this one (from the July 11th Washington Post), "White House Confident Latest BP Effort Will Work," my heart immediately sinks. Of course, there's a first time for everything, but amid the ever worsening news from the Gulf of Mexico's waters about astonishingly high methane concentrations, dangerous levels of arsenic, the lack of testing of seafood for absorption of toxic compounds from the dispersant BP has been massively pumping out, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's "hoarding" of raw scientific data about the disaster, and both BP's and the government's "stranglehold on media access" in the Gulf, that oily undercurrent of a positive narrative has been relentless (even as press coverage slowly begins to drop off). At the end of the storm lies hope and a rainbow. Or at least a permanently sealed well on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.
Of course, three days after that confident headline, the same government showed something less than confidence in BP. It suddenly moved to freeze that company's work on closing the new version of "top hat," the massive "3 ram capping stack" meant to seal off the well, until further testing could be done. Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu and his experts feared that closing the cap's valves might actually cause even more harm to a possibly already damaged well bore. In the meantime, the oil, essentially cap-less, continued to gush forth, as it had for days, even as work on the first relief well, the supposed permanent solution to the problem, was halted for fear of further problems while the testing went on.
Late Wednesday, the test of the cap finally began, only to be briefly interrupted by the discovery of a leak on a line attached to one of its valves. Everything was again halted briefly before those valves were finally closed and the oil did stop for the first time in 87 days; and yes, in the next few days, for all we know, that seal may hold, or maybe this nightmare won't really end until the dog days of late July or mid-August, all dates repeatedly promised for the completion of the relief well. Or maybe not then either. The positive story line has been offered up and deep-sixed so many times already that, as with warnings on a cigarette pack, even with good news coming in, caution is still advised. Worse yet, if the happy ending does come, we already have a reasonable hint about how this story works out. As with the Exxon Valdez spill, big oil may prefer to learn remarkably few lessons from this disaster, as it prepares to head into far rougher waters in search of ever tougher oil to extract. After all, the big oil companies have preferred to learn next to nothing, as Ellen Cantarow makes clear, from a 50-year history of disastrous spills in Nigeria and a decades-long version of the same in the Amazon.
And of course, in these last weeks when the Northeast has been sizzling under record temperatures (with more to come), and researchers at the University of Alabama's Earth System Science Center have concluded that the first five months of 2010 were the second hottest in human history (runner-up only to 1998) -- and this decade the warmest on record for the planet -- the worst disaster may prove to be not the gusher in the Gulf, but the gas in our tanks. (To catch Ellen Cantarow discussing what led her to this piece, listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview by clicking here, or to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom
Big Oil Makes War on the Earth
The Gulf Coast Joins an Oil-Soiled Planet
By Ellen CantarowIf you live on the Gulf Coast, welcome to the real world of oil -- and just know that you're not alone. In the Niger Delta and the Ecuadorian Amazon, among other places, your emerging hell has been the living hell of local populations for decades.
Even as I was visiting those distant and exotic spill locales via book, article, and YouTube, you were going through your very public nightmare. Three federal appeals court judges with financial and other ties to big oil were rejecting the Obama administration's proposed drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico. Pollution from the BP spill there was seeping into Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans. Clean-up crews were discovering that a once-over of beaches isn't nearly enough: somehow, the oil just keeps reappearing. Endangered sea turtles and other creatures were being burnt alive in swaths of ocean ("burn fields") ignited by BP to "contain" its catastrophe. The lives and livelihoods of fishermen and oyster-shuckers were being destroyed. Disease warnings were being issued to Gulf residents and alarming toxin levels were beginning to be found in clean-up workers.
None of this would surprise inhabitants of either the Niger Delta or the Amazon rain forest. Despite the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 and the Exxon Valdez in 1989, Americans are only now starting to wake up to the fate that, for half a century, has befallen the Delta and the Amazon, both ecosystems at least as rich and varied as the Gulf of Mexico.
What’s Really Going on Behind Murdoch’s Paywall?
Rupert Murdoch is trying to make news at the Times and Sunday Times in London�but he�s not reporting on it. Will his paywall work is the biggest story in the media business, and it would be quite a journalistic coup to document the progress, or lack thereof, that�s being made in trying to convince a skeptical world to shell out 2� ($3) a week for what�s heretofore been free.
He is not reporting on himself because even less than most news outlets, Murdoch outlets have no objective sense when it comes to their own interests (or the boss�s interests), or willingness to ask questions which the boss might find uncomfortable, or penchant for anything but the party line. The news from News Corp. is always snarlingly good�even when it is very bad.
My sources say that not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself�who have free access to the site�are not going beyond the registration page. It�s an empty world.
The wider implications of this emptiness are only just starting to become clear. A Murdoch and Fleet Street veteran with whom I�ve been corresponding about the paywall reported to me on his recent conversation with an A-list entertainment publicist: �What was really interesting to me was that this person volunteered a blinding realization. �Why would I get any of my clients to talk to the Times or the Sunday Times if they are behind a paywall? Who can see it? I can't even share a link and they aren't on search. It�s as though their writers don't exist anymore.��
Sphere: Related Content
He is not reporting on himself because even less than most news outlets, Murdoch outlets have no objective sense when it comes to their own interests (or the boss�s interests), or willingness to ask questions which the boss might find uncomfortable, or penchant for anything but the party line. The news from News Corp. is always snarlingly good�even when it is very bad.
My sources say that not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself�who have free access to the site�are not going beyond the registration page. It�s an empty world.
The wider implications of this emptiness are only just starting to become clear. A Murdoch and Fleet Street veteran with whom I�ve been corresponding about the paywall reported to me on his recent conversation with an A-list entertainment publicist: �What was really interesting to me was that this person volunteered a blinding realization. �Why would I get any of my clients to talk to the Times or the Sunday Times if they are behind a paywall? Who can see it? I can't even share a link and they aren't on search. It�s as though their writers don't exist anymore.��
NEW EVIDENCE that Alvin Greene’s “win” in SC was STOLEN!
by Garland Favorito
Mail-in paper ballot election results just received from each South Carolina county under
Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests confirm that there were enough voting
discrepancies in the recent U.S. Senate Democratic primary to have reversed the election
outcome. That race had dramatic, inexplicable discrepancies between the verifiable mail-in
absentee paper ballot results and the unverifiable electronic voting results recorded on Election
Day, June 8.
In that race, Alvin Greene was declared the winner based on a near landslide 60-40% margin in Election Day electronic voting results. However, certified mail-in paper ballot results, received
from the counties after a 15-business-day response period allowed under South Carolina law,
show that Vic Rawl actually won the verifiable mail-in paper ballot absentee voting by a solid 55-45% margin.
The near 30% total point differential among the two candidates is unheard-of in South Carolina election history, and, perhaps, nationally as well. Neither candidate emphasized absentee voting,
so there is no reasonable explanation for such a vast difference.
VoterGA issued the FOIA requests because South Carolina counties do not report separate
absentee totals for mail-in paper ballot votes and in-person electronic votes. While some of this information was previously known, here is what the official replies to the requests revealed:
- In not one county did Alvin Greene win the absentee mail-in vote count and lose the Election Day vote count
- In not one county did Vic Rawl win the Election Day vote count and lose the mail-in absentee vote count
- In 41 of 46 counties, Alvin Greene's Election Day vote percentage exceeded his mail-in paper ballot absentee percentage;
- In 34 of those 41 counties, Alvin Greene's Election Day electronic votes exceeded his mail-in paper ballot absentee votes by an abnormal margin of 15%
- In no counties with more than 10 paper ballot casts did Vic Rawl have an abnormal margin of 15% or more (total for both candidates)
The individual county results illustrate the differences between Election Day electronic voting results and mail-in paper ballot absentee voting results much more dramatically:
- In Aiken County, Alvin Greene won the Election Day vote 60% to 40% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 70% to 30%;
- In Barnwell County, Alvin Greene won the Election Day vote 63% to 37% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 75% to 25%;
- In Beaufort County, Alvin Greene won the Election Day vote 60% to 40% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 82% to 18%;
- In Dorchester County, Alvin Greene won the Election Day vote 60% to 40% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 67% to 33%;
- In Florence County, Alvin Greene won the Election Day vote 70% to 30% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 58% to 42%;
- In Greenwood County, Alvin Greene won the Election Day vote 76% to 24% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 51% to 49%;
- In Lancaster County, Alvin Greene won the Election Day vote 59% to 41% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 90% to 10%;
- In Newberry County, Alvin Greene won the Election Day vote 55% to 45% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 84% to 16%;
- In Spartanburg County, Alvin Greene won the Election Day vote 61% to 39% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 72% to 28%;
The differences between absentee in person electronic voting and absentee paper mail-in voting are similarly dramatic:
- In Spartanburg County, Alvin Greene won the absentee in-person electronic vote 62% to 38% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 72% to 28%;
- In Jasper County, Alvin Greene won the absentee in-person electronic vote 56% to 44% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 76% to 24%;
- In Orangeburg County, Alvin Greene won the absentee in-person electronic vote 52% to 48% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 72% to 28%
- In Chester County, Alvin Greene won the absentee in-person electronic vote 71% to 29% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 55% to 45%;
- In Coleton County, Alvin Greene won the absentee in-person electronic vote 58% to 42% but
Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 70% to 33%; - In Berkeley County, Alvin Greene won the absentee in-person electronic vote 59% to 41% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 73% to 27%;
A spreadsheet on the voterga.org home page illustrates the discrepancies so that you can review them and make your own decision about the validity of this South Carolina election. However, the spreadsheet still does not take into account the extraordinary differences in the campaigns that were conducted. As you may already know Alvin Greene, an unemployed former military veteran who paid a $10,000 qualifying fee, did not even run a campaign. Greene held no fundraisers, ran no paid advertisements, made no campaign speeches, hired no campaign manager, conducted no state wide tours, attended no Democratic Party county events, printed no yard signs and did not even establish a web site. Vic Rawl, a county commissioner, former judge and four-term state representative, ran a normal, aggressive campaign as his campaign manager, Walter Ludwig, has explained. He personally campaigned in at least half of the counties made radio and TV appearances, attended the state convention, collected official endorsements, had 600 volunteers, printed 10,000 bumper stickers, established 180,000 database contacts, created a 104,000 Email distribution list, had 3,300 Facebook Friends, sent out 300,000 Emails just prior to the election, received 20,000 web site hits on Election Day alone and was more active on Twitter than the other Democratic Party candidates.
So how did this happen?
http://markcrispinmiller.com/2010/07/new-evidence-that-alvin-greenes-win-in-sc-was-stolen/
Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams kicked out over 'Colored People' letter
Nelson/AP
Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams has offered up insulting rants regarding the proposed mosque at Ground Zero.
Mark Williams, the flamethrower leading the battle against the Ground Zero mosque, was kicked out of the National Tea Party Federation Saturday for a racist blog post.
He shrugged off the diss, calling it "grandstanding" from a "minor player on the fringe."
A California radio host and leader of the Tea Party Express, Williams had labeled the Manhattan boro president a "Jewish Uncle Tom" and President Obama an "Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug."
But when he posted a satirical letter supposedly from "the Colored People" to President Lincoln praising slavery, that apparently crossed the line.
The federation, an umbrella organization that claims to represent 85 Tea Party groups, kicked out Williams' group when it wouldn't fire him.
"We have expelled Tea Party Express and Mark Williams from the National Tea Party Federation because of the letter that he wrote," federation spokesman David Webb said on CBS's "Face the Nation."
He called the letter - written after the NAACP called on Tea Party leaders to oust racists from their ranks - "clearly offensive."
In the voice of slaves, Williams wrote: "Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house.
"We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don't cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!"
He went on to say blacks don't want taxes cut because "how will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn?"
Sphere: Related ContentThis column will change your life: What I wish I'd known
Advice based on hindsight is false wisdom
by 
A friend of mine vividly recalls, during her last week at university, asking her favourite tutor what advice she'd give her younger self. The tutor had been a pioneering feminist historian, so my friend, not unreasonably, was expecting something sweeping and profound, born of decades of reflection. "Use moisturiser every day," was the answer she got. "And don't forget your neck." True, it wasn't particularly inspirational advice. But anyone can do inspirational advice. It's actionable advice that's truly rare.
There's a hefty sub-genre of self-help built around the question of what advice people would dispense if they could travel in time and meet themselves when younger: books such as What I Know Now: Letters To My Younger Self, and What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, along with hundreds of online discussions in which older and wiser heads – some of them, admittedly, apparently only about 22 themselves – pass on the lessons of bitter experience. Some are amusingly specific ("Don't lose your virginity to Bryan") but the overwhelming majority is of the inspirational-but-empty variety: choose work you love; have more confidence in your abilities; stop worrying about insignificant stuff. A rare exception to the ruling blandness comes from the blogger Colin Marshall, who distils several such lists to their most pungent counsel. One genuinely valuable example: "Surround yourself with friends who don't care if you don't talk to them for three weeks at a stretch, but make sure you do talk to them more often than that."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/17/change-your-life-advice-hindsight-wish
Sphere: Related ContentThey Do Exorcisms, Burn "Idols," & Are Taking Whole US States
by Troutfishing
They claim to be able to raise the dead and cause miracles, such as the multiplication of Thanksgiving turkey dinners. They burn "witchcraft items" and "idols." They hold mass exorcisms to cast out alleged evil spirits they say cause lust, pornography, addiction, homosexuality, bisexuality, and perversion. They claim to be able to heal HIV, AIDS, Hepatitis C, Glaucoma, and cancer, and to break "generational curses" and "witchcraft curses." Who are they? Here are a few overviews (1, 2, 3.)
While America has fixated on the Tea Party movement, a radical, right-wing charismatic evangelical movement is burrowing into the power structures of major American cities, such as Newark, NJ [1, 2], and even entire states, such as Alaska and Hawaii.
In Hawaii, they claim to be fielding both a Republican and Democratic candidate in the 2010 race for the governor's seat. Both candidates are staunchly opposed to gay marriage and same-sex civil unions as well as legalized abortion, and both can frequently be found onstage together at movement conferences.
In 2006, movement leaders paid airfare, conference fees, and lodging costs so Hawaii Lt. Governor Duke Aiona and his wife could attend an Argentina conference of the movement which featured, as a prominent speaker, celebrated exorcist and New Apostolic Reformation leader Cindy Jacobs (see video links in first paragraph for footage of Jacobs in action.) Video footage from the event shows Aiona praying together with the First Lady of Uganda Janet Museveni.
Hawaii's Republican Lt. Governor James "Duke" Aiona has publicly dedicated his state and its school to Jesus and declared his desire to "disciple the nations, here in Hawaii and everywhere else."
[video 1, right: Duke Aiona dedicates Hawaii to Jesus. video 2, left: Aiona announces his goal of "discipling the nations" at 2009 conference.]
Endorsed by the current Republican candidate for the governorship of Hawaii, Duke Aiona (see video at end of post), E Pule Kakou is a yearly, week-long prayer initiative broadcast on major networks and multiple cable channels in the Hawaiian islands.
This might seem silly to secular America, good grist for a hearty mocking by John Stewart or Stephen Colbert. But there are real-world implications to the meteoric rise of the New Apostolic Reformation. If Sarah Palin runs for president in 2012 we could have a New Apostolic Reformation president, and the Medieval, demon haunted movement is really impacting people's lives.
Look Ahead in Anger
Hyperbolic rhetoric threatens to swamp our politics
By Sasha Abramsky
At about the same time, with health-care reform seemingly stalled, left-leaning activists grew increasingly shrill in their denunciations of President Obama. He was, many opined, a false messiah, a cheat, a Manchurian candidate for the right who had promised change and instead delivered more of the same old cronyism and corruption. Unemployment was nearing double digits; partisanship was as omnipresent as ever; government had bailed out the banks and allowed their executives to pocket obscene bonuses. When Obama announced that he would send more troops to Afghanistan—a priority he had reiterated time and again during the election campaign—the filmmaker Michael Moore wrote a public letter to the president accusing him of undermining the hopes and dreams of millions of young Americans. When Obama made compromises with Congressional figures to forge a viable coalition around health-care reform, his left flank immediately declared that he had been bought off by corporate America.
After Congress finally passed health-care reform, the rage axis tilted again. Their expectations scaled back by the upset victory of a Republican for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, progressives were a bit quieter, and it was a scarred conservative movement that was again, literally, up in arms. Scores of Democratic politicians started receiving death threats; many were so worried that they asked the FBI for extra protection. Around the country, Tea Party candidates, frequently representing little more than an inchoate rage against the zeitgeist, mounted strong primary challenges to entrenched, long-serving Republican politicians, and some sober GOP'ers, hoping to stave off defeat by the insurgents, remade themselves as rage-filled harbingers of imminent doom. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, of Ohio, repeatedly declared that passing the health-care bill was not just politically wrong but apocalyptic. As the primary season progressed, incumbent Democrats, too, began to feel the sting. Alan B. Mollohan, of West Virginia, became the first House Democrat to lose his seat. The confrontations continued, with a biker and his son, angered at government, in a shootout with the police in Arkansas.
In many ways, whether our political leanings are left, right, or middle of the road, rage is our shared experience these days. One way of looking at what is happening is that it is an expression of our anxiety over what increasingly looks to be Pax Americana's departing hegemony.
Friday, July 16, 2010
End Corporate Welfare Now
by Jon Taplin
I have a suggestion for a nervous Democratic Party going into the November elections. They should run on a simple platform: End Corporate Welfare Now.
A story in this morning's New York Times brings this issue to Page One. The oil industry while ruthlessly fighting any sort of carbon tax, is the beneficiary of Billions in corporate welfare tax breaks and subsidies.
But an examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.
According to the most recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, released in 2005, capital investments like oil field leases and drilling equipment are taxed at an effective rate of 9 percent, significantly lower than the overall rate of 25 percent for businesses in general and lower than virtually any other industry.
It's not just Big Oil on corporate welfare. How about Big Agriculture.
Seeing the Elephant
The 2010 midterm elections are still four months away, but the drama has already kicked into high gear. The seemingly settled conventional wisdom would have us believe the Democrats are running for their lives, a perception that is reinforced by any number of polls indicating there are enough seats in play for the GOP to potentially retake majority control in the House. The Senate appears safe for the Democrats, according to these polls, but four months is a long time.
The idea that the GOP could take back the House was underscored on Sunday by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, who went on "Meet The Press" and said, yeah, it could happen. House Democrats rose up in high dudgeon after Gibbs' remarks, not so much to say he was wrong but to say, hey guy, you're really not helping.
Before getting into how ridiculous it is that the Democrats could be in position to lose the House, it needs to be said that I don't believe it is going to happen. The Republican Party has become a preposterous farce, dominated by the likes of Sarah Palin and Michael Steele. The Tea Party movement is basically nothing more than a Trojan Horse filled with hard-core GOP base members whose views on everything from religion to the constitution to freedom of choice is not shared by roughly 75% of the general population.
They are the Taliban of American Christianity, and the only reason they have gotten so much ink is because the national press corps likes to take the easy way out whenever possible. Add to this the fact that the Tea Party has shot the GOP in the foot several times already by running off electable Republicans and nominating the cast from One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.
The Veil is Lifted, The Gloves Are Off
By Elaine Brower
Today at United States District Court in downtown Manhattan, around the corner from where I work, I witnessed the sentencing hearing of attorney Lynn Stewart. I only had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Stewart five years ago, along with Ralph, her jovial and loving husband. I never had the honor of her defending me, but during the course of the last 5 years, I met many people who did. The courtroom today was packed, leaving 2 overflow rooms, which were also filled to capacity.
Walking into the marble and mahogany building, which I am no stranger to since I work next door, gave me a never before eerie feeling. A bronze "Lady Justice" 2 story high statue sat in the main entrance way, greeting everyone who entered. But it did not give me comfort, it only once again reminded me of the many icons of worship this country erects to deflect the true nature of the beast underneath. I thought to myself "I'd love to hang a huge banner right in the middle of her 2 story chest with a big $ sign!"
Sitting in the elaborate overflow room, with all of Lynn's supporters, then gave me comfort. Watching Lynn on the 2 screens in front of the room was very sad. She looked weak, pale and broken. She pleaded for the court's mercy by presenting her statement to the judge. In it, she declared that she no longer had a relationship with her grandson, who could not visit her any longer in the horrible prison. She said she felt alone, and withdrawn. Only when her friends and family came to visit for one hour a week did she rejuvenate for a short period, but then would retreat back into somberness and sadness. At one point she choked up when saying that if the court decided to sentence her to anytime longer than the original 28 months, it would be a like imposing the "death sentence". She reiterated that many times, in so many different ways. She threw herself at the "mercy" of the judge.
I thought to myself this is not the Lynn Stewart that I knew, if only for a short time. She was always vibrant and unafraid. She stood for true justice for the people who went unrepresented in a system that would make every attempt to smash them. Why was she begging for mercy? It broke my heart.
Then the US Attorney stood up and for 30 minutes recounted the details of the entire trial, repeating hundreds of times "we were attacked on 9/11", and "Ms. Stewart gave comfort to Islamic terrorists." These references were the cornerstone of the prosecution's argument, and he couldn't say it enough. In every way, he connected Lynn with the terrorist "murder groups", and in reality made her the real terrorist. He said "the government trusted her as a lawyer, and she shouldn't have been trusted." He referred endless times to the DVD of her press conference prior to her remand to prison in 2009, and referenced her statements that she had "no remorse."
Lucky for me I was in an overflow room. I commented, loudly, how I hoped this guy would get the pox, and I wasn't alone. People booed, and said he better not come into their neighborhoods. How could he sleep at night? I would be embarrassed to be in his shoes. Is there no dignity?
Well, I will answer my own rhetorical questions. There is no dignity in this system. There is no justice in this system. There never was, and never will be. There is only hatred, fear, and an elite system of injustice. The judge is only a puppet of the state and did what he was told to do. The prosecutor is a prostitute and regurgitates enough bullshit to make people afraid enough to go home and lock their doors so they too won't wind up like Lynn Stewart. When she was wrongfully sentenced to 10 years behind bars, there should have been a riot in the courtroom. Instead, everyone left.
Rock impresario says file sharing is inevitable
Peter Jenner helped launch some of the most influential and soul-stirring rock 'n' roll bands ever recorded in Great Britain or anywhere else. But what does the former manager of such acts as Pink Floyd and The Clash know about the economics of digital music? Apparently, Jenner has spent some time considering the current state of affairs in music. The former Cambridge University economics lecturer has some ideas on how the industry should proceed.
"Attempts to stop people [from] copying are clearly a waste of time," Jenner said on Wednesday at the Westminster eForum. "Not only are they a waste of time, they make the law offensive. It's very similar to prohibition in America in the 1930s."
The blog Music Ally covered the conference, and you can find more of what Jenner, 66, said there.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20010553-261.html
Anti-Piracy Group Stuns The World With Torrent Site Massacre
An anti-piracy group has revealed that when it comes to shutting down torrent sites, it is the undisputed king of the Internet. BREIN, which works on behalf of the Hollywood movie studios, says that not only has it shut down several Usenet indexers and streaming sites already in 2010, but hundreds of torrent sites too. There is torrent site carnage going on in The Netherlands and we've failed to report on any of it.
When it comes to reporting on BitTorrent-related news and issues, we try our very best to cover every angle here at TorrentFreak. Admittedly we can't cover everything and sometimes it's hard to constantly turn out positive articles which fill our readers with optimism that the Internet isn't about to taken over by evil corporate entities hell bent on web-wide file-sharing destruction.
Today, however, we have a big apology to make. We've let you all down and we've let ourselves down too by completely missing one of the biggest developing stories the BitTorrent world has ever known. We've totally neglected to cover what can only be described as a wholesale slaughter of file-sharing venues in The Netherlands, and for this we wholeheartedly apologize.
Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, who have previously given Mininova, The Pirate Bay, Demonoid and What.cd a hard time in varying degrees, have been busy. And when we say busy, we aren't messing around. During the last few months it's up for debate whether the group's staff have had time to sleep. If they've even stopped to eat it would be, frankly, somewhat of a surprise.
According to BREIN, which works mainly on behalf of the Hollywood studios but has branched out to work for other rightsholders in recent times, during the first half of 2010 it shut down a staggering 422 "illegal websites".
While the whole world was focused on the U.S. Government taking down less than 10 sites this year but making a huge song and dance about it, BREIN was quietly showing them how it's really done.
In addition to 5 Usenet indexers, 6 streaming sites, an FTP server, and 29 sites linking to material on one-click hosters, this most prolific and apparently effective of anti-piracy groups took down 384 torrent sites in the last 6 months. That's more than 2 torrent sites culled every day this year and we've failed to report on just about every one of them.
In an attempt to fill this gap, TorrentFreak contacted BREIN boss Tim Kuik for information but we didn't do very well at all. We were told that they aren't releasing the URLs of the sites since they only detail those that they take to court and naming them would only give them increased traction and popularity.
We also tried to find out their names through our own network but yet again we failed miserably. For this we apologize. A bloodbath going on under our noses, in our own community, we didn't even notice and we still can't give you details since it appears all the corpses have been buried in unmarked graves surrounded by a wall of silence.
The worst part is that this failing on our part is nothing new. All the signs were there a few months ago that BREIN was capable of carrying out yet another massacre in 2010, just as they did last year.
In 2009, BREIN said it shut down 35 eD2K servers, 38 streaming video sites and 14 Usenet portals/NZB sites. It also took responsibility for the destruction of an unprecedented 393 BitTorrent sites. We didn't notice, but strangely neither did anyone else.
So what were we able to find out about the closures?
"The take down most often takes place through the hosting provider," Kuik told TorrentFreak. "We also obtain identity details from the hosting providers but these sites tend to register under a false name. If the site changes to another hosting provider, we will contact that provider. In case all else fails we will go for blocking of the site by access providers. Currently there is court case pending about that."
If BREIN is allowed to continue this rampage there won't be any torrent sites left by 2012 and we'll be left with literally nothing to report on. TorrentFreak will die, but really we only have ourselves to blame. Nearly 800 torrent sites gone already and not a whisper from us? A shameful performance. We'll try to improve, for all our sakes.
http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-group-stuns-the-world-with-torrent-site-massacre-100715/
Why I Only Hire Recent College Graduates
By Ken Sundheim
I was poking around on the net and I published a blog post on a sales blog which had some comments asking as to why I only hire recent college graduates. The reason I hire recent college graduates and only recent college graduates is that they have not been ruined by corporate thinking. I need people who are really creative. If you give the right people certain goals and let them be creative as to how to get execute them, great things will happen. For marketing purposes, I need people who are great writers. The problem with this is that Corporate America, for the most part, does not know online marketing or social media. This is despite the fact that it is on all of their resumes. Because they do not know anything about this, they don't have their employees write.
Yes, I could hire someone who is great as writing and teach them online media, however they have a predisposition as to what good salesmanship should be.
Please don't misunderstand me, I do like when people tell me I'm wrong. As a matter of fact, I welcome that. However, I am young. I'm 29 years old and am putting a team together to make my company something great. Therefore, if I continue to add recent college graduates, I can properly mold them. I would never, in a million years, hire another recruiter.
So, how do I tell if recent college graduates will work hard? First, their education. I like students who have gotten into colleges which I did not get into. If a student graduated from a great school, that alludes to the fact that they may be hard, diligent workers. Yes, some students are extremely smart and got in through sheer intelligence. That's where grades come into the mix.
Ken Sundheim
President
http://www.kasplacement.com
Anatomy of a Zombie Lie
The AP and the "charging $12.50 to quote five words" meme
By Ryan Chittum
As I wrote last week, bloggers have repeatedly pumped the story that the AP charges us to quote its stories. Problem is, that story's just false and has been so since the meme first arose two years ago.
So how did this zombie lie come to be and why can't we put it to rest?
Danny Sullivan pointed out in comments that the AP has a somewhat-confusing copyright-licensing scheme (a third party service called iCopyright) linked at the bottom of each story. But that's no excuse for savvy blogs like techdirt and TechCrunch to repeat what they know to be nonsense. Techdirt's Mike Masnick said this in comments:
Sure the AP says it won't charge, but it has threatened bloggers with lawsuits, and it hasn't changed the iCopyright form. The reason that we keep pointing it out is to highlight the blatant hypocrisy of the AP's position.
But those lawsuits takedown notices aren't related to the charging-for-quotes story.
The AP sent Rogers Cadenhead (who also comments on my original post) takedown notices after his users put up several whole AP stories on Drudge Retort, along with snippets of several other ones. Cadenhead didn't dispute the first group, but said the second was fair use. He got a lawyer, the fight went viral, a guy who came to Cadenhead's aid got wrongly mauled by a blog lynch mob, and the AP quickly apologized for being "heavy-handed" in the dustup.
During the midst of this, a blogger spotted the iCopyright thing and started the "Associated Press wants to charge you $12.50 to quote five words from them" meme.
What is iCopyright? It's a third-party company that sells licenses for commercial use of copyrighted material. "Commercial use" being the key words here—like when a company buys reprints of a favorable story about it to use in its own marketing. The iCopyright site, alas, isn't exactly clear on who should pay for a license and why.
So the AP went on the record when this story first blew up two years ago saying iCopyright is not aimed at bloggers. And then it issued an official statement in August 2009 after another fake blog controversy was stirred up—this time over the false idea that the dastardly AP was going to try to prevent people from linking to its stories. Again, it said the iCopyright form was not for bloggers.
The irony here is that by making hay and getting pageviews out of this false controversy, the bloggers perpetuating this stuff are creating more of a chilling effect on the quoting of AP material than the iCopyright boilerplate itself ever would have, linked as it is in tiny type at the bottom of the wire's stories.
Remembering Tuli
by My friend and counter-cultural icon had been suffering from a couple of strokes, hospitals, breathing tubes, feeding tubes, anemia, infections, blindness, catheter, hearing aids, wheelchairs, psychosis, memory loss, diapers, constipation, anti-depressants, sleeping pills, fatigue and a chronically bed-ridden life that seemed to be no life worth living.
Tuli was a dedicated truthseeker, and I'd like to honor that quality with a couple of truths.
There was a rumor that Philip Roth had lifted the onanistically obsessed idea for Portnoy's Complaint from a song by the Fugs -- a band on the cusp of rock and punk, named after Norman Mailer's euphemism for fuck in The Naked and the Dead -- but this notion was disavowed by Fugs leader Ed Sanders, who assured me, "Philip Roth did not plagiarize a Fugs song. He came to a Fugs show in 1966, and I think he was inspired by Tuli, in top hat and cane, singing 'Jack-Off Blues.' Many times in reunion concerts, introducing Tuli singing that song, I have suggested that Roth got some of the impetus for Portnoy's Complaint from that time he was inspired by the Tuli tune."
And then there was Allen Ginsberg's famous poem, "Howl," in which Tuli had been the inspiration for this passage: "...jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer..." Friends reacted: Rex Weiner claims, "It never actually happened that way, but Tuli happened, and that's all that matters." And Michael Simmons says, "It actually was partly true. Tuli did jump and survive, but it wasn't the Brooklyn Bridge (Williamsburg, I think), but he was worried about wrongly influencing young people, so he'd refuse to talk about it later in life. I know because he told me."
Thelma Blitz, Tuli's devoted sidekick, corrects the myth in "Howl" that "Tuli just walked away after jumping off a bridge. In fact, he was taken to a hospital, severely injured, and wanted the world to know this so that no one would take a similar chance."
And we can all be grateful he survived for all these years.
Finally, from his daughter Samara: "We have arranged to hold a service for Tuli at St. Marks church in New York from 12-3 on Saturday, with a reception following shortly thereafter. We will have a viewing in a separate room at the beginning of the service for anyone who wishes to see him. We are still working on the details for the reception and will let you know shortly. There will be no religious element to the service, and Ed Sanders will be one of the main speakers, after which anyone who wants to can talk, sing, recite poetry, or whatever they like. Tuli will be buried at Greenwood cemetery in Brooklyn on Monday morning at 9 a.m. You are welcome to tell anyone who asks, the funeral is open to whoever wishes to attend."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-krassner/remembering-tuli_b_646165.html
What Retirement? I’ve Got Kids.
by Karin Kasdin In the You Thought YOU had Problems department, consider the case of Giancarlo Casagrande of Bergamo Italy. Earlier this year, an Italian Court ordered the 60 year old father to resume paying $492/month in living expenses for his 32 year old daughter who has been working on her graduate thesis for the last eight years. Casagrande and his wife divorced in 1997. As part of the settlement he was required to pay living expenses for his then 19 year old daughter, a full-time student residing with her mother. Years later, the expense became burdensome for him, as did his daughter's inability to complete her educational requirements. Much to the outrage of the sane population, the court ruled in favor of the young woman. Silvio Berlusconi's cabinet minister, Roberto Calderoli called the verdict "a slap in the face of good sense."
Our advisor's voice is but one in a choir of voices who sing the same song. There is no doubt among financial planners and economists that the children of Babyboomers have been the most indulged generation of all time. Objects of desire are ubiquitous and marketed to death. All I remember dying for in my teenage years was a stereo and a pair of white go-go boots. (If you don't know what those are you are actually young enough to benefit from the upcoming advice.) Today our teenagers expect cellphones and computers and video game consoles and ipods and expensive jeans. And that's just for the teenagers! The recession has made matters worse. Many of us have adult children who are unable to make ends meet. Practically everyone I know has helped with student loans or mortgages or down payments on new homes or credit card debt. Some pay rent on their children's apartments while the kids go for advanced degrees. Some have invested in their kids' new businesses while also paying for weddings. We pay airfare for visits back home. We pay for health insurance. Expert opinion is unanimous. We are crazy and this has to stop. Immediately.
The Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, practically yells at you from behind your computer screen that it is unwise to sacrifice you financial wellbeing in favor of your children's. In an article titled, It's Okay to be Selfish: Your Financial Wellbeing Comes Before Your Children's, the CFP board claims that "we can no longer afford to think about our personal finances the way we did in the bubbly pre-recession days. Today there are new financial realities and we must re-examine some basic assumptions and consider some new approaches."
Apparently, the most important new approach is to put ourselves before our children.
http://thefastertimes.com/grownupkids/2010/07/14/what-retirement-ive-got-kids/
Let's put our anger to work
We regularly hear from moms across the country who are mad about being paid less for the same jobs as men.
We have a fighting chance of moving the Paycheck Fairness Act forward right now. Send a note to your Senators today!
Dear Senator,
As one of the over a million members of MomsRising.org, I urge you ask Senate leadership to take immediate action to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act this summer.
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act restored to women the right to go to court to challenge pay discrimination. But more is necessary to realize the promise of equal pay for equal work.
The Paycheck Fairness Act, which has already passed the House, would deter wage discrimination by closing loopholes in the Equal Pay Act and barring retaliation against workers who disclose their wages. The bill also allows women and men to receive the same remedies for sex-based pay discrimination that are currently available to those subject to discrimination based on race and national origin. In addition, the bill would improve the collection of pay information by the Department of Labor and the EEOC to enable those agencies to evaluate pay disparities; facilitate class actions in Equal Pay Act claims to ensure that the rules that apply to civil rights lawsuits generally also govern the Equal Pay Act; and spark the development of salary negotiation skills training.
Fair pay is especially critical in this tough economy because more and more women are the sole breadwinners in their families. On the whole, women working full-time, year-round make an average of 77 cents to every dollar that men make. [1] This means that the average woman loses $700,000 in pay due to gender discrimination in her lifetime. For women of color, this number can be even higher.[2] That's a lot of money that would come in handy right now for America's women and families.
Now is the time for Congress to take the steps necessary to effectively address wage discrimination and eliminate loopholes that have undermined the Equal Pay Act's effectiveness.
Again, I urge to take immediate action to urge Senate leadership to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act this summer.
Thank you,
This week and and next, U.S. Senators are deciding what's going to come up for a vote in the next month--and we need to let them know that the Paycheck Fairness Act needs to be on their action list.
Mel Gibson's 10 tips for sexist monsters
Many have asked, how does Mel do it? What does it take to become such a gargantuan, sexist, possibly racist, potentially violent monster, or at least give a very convincing appearance of same? Can I do it, too?
Herein, some tips for those looking to hone their own personal ranty hatemongering sexist jerkface skillset:
1. First, last and always: Make lots and lots of money. I mean, truckloads. Mountains. Even more than you are imagining right now. No, no, I mean even more than that. Look, take that amount, multiply it by 100, then smack yourself in the skull with a petrified copy of "Lethal Weapon 4" until swarms of that amount are swirling around your head like bees. We're talking giant, obscene piles of it, strewn about Mel's personal Holy Family Catholic cult compound like piles of James Caviezel's trashed career.
In the parlance of the rich and repellent, Mel's millions -- a large portion of which he made on the sick success of "Passion of the Christ" -- is called "f-- you" money. It completely inures you from the slings and arrows of outrageous bloggers, creditors, film investors and divorce attorneys. It's the kind of money that allows you to do whateverthehell you want, because no one can touch you. Even if the lawyers take half, you'll still have plenty left over to buy lots of Russian hookers, vodka and the femur bone of Michael Jackson.
Note: Does having a ton of money automatically make you a raging racist/sexist jerk? Of course not. Does it help? Absolutely.
2. A second significant benefit of the money involved in #1 is how you can, you know, own people. I mean literally own them. See, when you control every waking moment of someone else's life -- the house, the car, the food, the kids -- when they can't really do a single thing without your permission or approval, well, you get to treat them almost any way you like. Because you own them.
And if they happen to be cheap Russian whores who barely deserve to live, well, you also get the right to come over there and "put them in the rose garden." See how that works?
3. Do not ever settle for merely a single smear against your character. Anti-Semite, sexist, drunk? Big deal. Any of those on its own is easily defensible, even forgivable by your fan base, by way of some sort of excuse: terrible childhood, alcoholism, bad hair day, she deserved it, that sort of thing.
True sexist prickmonsters know that to attain true monsterhood, you gotta combine various evils. Stack them high and proud. This is the only real path to lasting disrepute. Try this: Sexist racist anti-Semitic drunk wife-beating verbal abuser sadomasochistic misogynist extremist religious bonk job with a torture fetish. See? Much better. All that's missing is raging homophobe. Wait, it was there before. Hmm.
4. Remember all the countless thousands of fundamentalist Christians and confused old people who numbly trucked in by the busload to watch "Passion of the Bloodbath" over and over again, often hauling their bewildered, horrified children along with them to witness what is easily one of the most grisly, disgusting, masochistic slasher-porn flicks masquerading as a "true" religious tale in the history of film?
They're the ones who basically made #1 possible. Which in turn, enabled #2. So on the path to monsterhood, be sure to toss a big, juicy bone to the fundamentalists, for believing so blindly in your nightmare vision of what amounts to about two lines in the Bible. Remember: Fundamentalism is always an excellent foundation for monstrous madness.
Taliban Training Monkey Terrorists?
Monkeys have been trained by the Taliban in Afghanistan to use machine guns and trench mortars against U.S. military forces, reports People's Daily Online.
According to this Chinese media story, monkeys can now operate the Kalashnikov, Bren light machine gun, and have the ability to identify and attack U.S. soldiers based on the appearance of their uniforms.
The below photo has been widely distributed over the Internet.
The report indicates the Taliban was inspired by none other than the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which it claims used peanuts and bananas to train "monkey soldiers" in Vietnam. This information was, in turn, attributed to a "British media" report from last month.
The story ends by saying, "A senior U.S. military source confirmed the existence of the Taliban monkey soldiers, military experts call armed monkeys 'monkey terrorists.'"
So we have a story built on rumor, with no named sources, quoting a media source of unknown origin. Personally, I think a clever monkey could be behind the whole thing.
Blogger Jeff Schogol, who calls himself "The Rumor Doctor" investigated the monkey terrorist claims.
NATO spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale told Schogol, "We have absolutely nothing that leads us to believe that this tale could be even remotely based in reality."
Christopher Coe, director of the Harlow Center for Biological Psychology, also is quoted as saying, "While you could train a monkey to shoot a gun, I certainly wouldn't want to be anywhere in the neighborhood after that. I rather doubt you could trust its aim," he said. "In addition, the noise would certainly scare most animals and make them stop."
Coe added that he'd heard rumors before about monkeys wielding grenades when India and Pakistan were at war, but no one has yet been able to prove that actually happened.
CNN put together a full video report on the supposed Taliban monkeys. You can watch it here.
http://news.discovery.com/animals/taliban-training-monkey-terrorists.html
Dog Guilty in Shooting
by
Sadly, shootings occur too often in Chicago...but never a shooting like this. In Wellington, New Zealand shootings of any kind are infrequent.
On Saturday, July 10 -A dog accidentally stepped on the trigger of the .22 rifle and ended up firing at his 40-year-old owner.
The injured man was among a group of four who had just killed and butchered a domestic pig. They were climbing into a SUV to leave when the gun went off.
The man was flown to Whangarei Hospital , where doctors removed the bullet from his left buttocks.
Senior Constable Ian Anderson (is this what the lead player in Jethro Tull is doing these days?) said the man was lucky not to have been more seriously injured.
No charges will be filed - for there are no laws in New Zealand which deter dogs from using firearms.
http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/steve-dale-pet-world/2010/07/dog-guilty-in-shooting.html
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