On Wednesday, March 25, the DEA raided a medical marijuana collective in San Francisco. This action took place a week after AG Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice would no longer target such facilities if they were operating in accordance with state law. 03/26
White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs is asked to clarify President Obama’s position on legalizing marijuana and on medical marijuana after he brought up the topic in the first Online Town Hall. Questions involving marijuana reform appeared in several categories and received far more votes than any other policy issue. 03/26/2009
What is the Republican two-word answer for all problems? Watch more at http://www.theyoungturks.com.
from The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com by Ian Masters
THE ZOMBIE PRESIDENCY
by Ian Masters
A majority of Americans breathed a sigh of relief when the Bush/Cheney regime ended, but has it? Like the zombie banks, the era of government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich lives on, with massive transfers of wealth from the poor to the rich continuing, as beleaguered poor and middle class taxpayers bail out the banks we are told are too big to fail.
Unfortunately for those of us too small to succeed, the American dream has to be deferred as our children and grandchildren get saddled with the debt we are piling up in the hope that Main Street will be stimulated once the gamblers and bookies on Wall Street come clean and get paid off with more of our money. Unwitting taxpayers are angry they rewarded bonuses to the insiders who created a rigged casino and manufactured their own chips to bet the house then bring it down. But they have focused their outrage on only one thousandth of just one shakedown, AIG, while the real scandal is the “cash for trash” transfer of what’s left of the treasury to Wall Street’s big banks who will end stronger as Main Street gets boarded up.
This Robin Hood in reverse phenomenon is not new. It began when Ronald Reagan declared he was taking the handcuffs off the millionaires and putting them on the welfare queens. Since then wages have remained stagnant as working Americans have maintained their standard of living on credit from banks who get cheap money from the Fed they then loan back at usurious rates.
Meanwhile productivity has soared, with the benefits going to capital, not labor. Under George W. Bush the transfer of public money to private hands accelerated as lobbyists and revolving door Congressmen, cashing in on public service for private gain, captured Washington to the extent that most politicians today represent special interests, not people.
When Reagan cut taxes for the rich while rewarding the Military Industrial Complex with billions from the remaining overburdened poor and middle class taxpayers, the resulting deficits his budget director David Stockman warned him about ballooned. Reagan’s deficit also became an extra burden on those unfairly taxed, since the servicing of the resulting debt, which was largely owned by the rich, had to be paid by the poor.
About the only voice of outrage back then in the Congress came from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who railed against this double jeopardy. Mercifully, Moynihan did not live to see what George W. Bush managed to pull off after Clinton paid down the debt and left a surplus for Bush.
With a self-proclaimed mandate from his “War on Terror”, Bush opened up the treasury to the usual suspects and then some. In a spree of corporate socialism he invited crony contractors to embed themselves at the government trough, in effect taking money from the Post Office to subsidize Fed Ex and UPS. However these “Beltway Bandits” who hung up their shingles did not have to deliver services, as long as they offered private jets to their political patrons. Meanwhile the rest of us have become POW’s in the class war Bush successfully waged against America’s poor and middle class.
So here we are, America the screwed, and we only have ourselves to blame since you get the government you deserve. Now the question is, does the populist rage out there get focused on political action with millions phoning, emailing and marching on Washington, or do we sullenly pay up and hope the stimulus works? The last time this happened, it was not solved by the top-down largesse of FDR, but rather from the bottom-up outrage of the American people that was felt in Washington, forcing politicians to act with a New Deal. We’ve had a bad deal for the last thirty years, now it’s time for a fair deal.
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Ian Masters is the host of “Background Briefing” and “Live From The Left Coast” Sundays 11 AM to 1PM on KPFK 90.7 FM radio and at ianmasters.org
Second attack against liberals by conservative comedian who got fired by Bill Maher.
Losing Your Religion? Poll: Growing Number Of Atheists, Religion Declining.
The American Religious Identification Survey has released numbers for 2008 (previous surveys were done in 2001 and 1990).
Survey:
• http://usatoday.com/news/religion/200…
• http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=704…
Related videos:
• JohnLArmstrong: “Christians, Read the Bible!” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xNjM3…
• KingHeathen: “Religious Identification Survey Results” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J4VHW…
Channel recommendations: http://www.atheism-magazine.com/topic…
Please subscribe to:
• http://YouTube.com/FFreeThinker
• http://YouTube.com/AtheistExperience
• http://YouTube.com/TheAtheistExperience
Watch more at http://www.theyoungturks.com
And the winner is….Twitter. Runners up John Boehner and Brit Hume.
http://earth2obama.org/
March 19, 2009 MSNBC Rachel Maddow Show
http://youtube.com/v/WDsl7OXK2WA
With members of the press constantly suggesting President Obama’s “honeymoon is over,” Media Matters is arguing that it never happened. Their proof: splicing together clips of pundits and newscasters accusing Obama of everything from socialism and Maoism to putting America in danger and enslaving our children. “If the last two months are the media’s idea of a honeymoon,” the video concludes, “all we have to say is good riddance.”
from The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com by The Huffington Post News Editors
WASHINGTON — Here’s rare good news about an environmental crisis: We dodged disaster with the ozone layer. A NASA study about ozone-munching chemicals from aerosol sprays and refrigeration used a computer model to play a game of what-if. What if the world 22 years ago didn’t agree to cut back on chlorofluorocarbons which cause a seasonal ozone hole to form near the South Pole?
NASA atmospheric scientist Paul Newman said the answer is a “bizarre world.”
By 2065, two-thirds of the protective ozone layer would have vanished and “the ozone hole covers the Earth.” And the CFCs, which are long-lived potent greenhouse gases, would have pushed the world’s temperature up an extra 4 degrees.
In mid-latitudes like Washington, DNA-damaging ultraviolet radiation would have increased more than sixfold. Just 5 minutes in the summer sunshine would have caused a sunburn, instead of 15. Typical midsummer UV levels, now around 10 or 11, would have soared to 30. Summer thunderstorms in the Northern Hemisphere would have been much stronger.
“It is a real horrible place,” Newman told The Associated Press.
But that dreadful scenario was “a world avoided,” according to the paper published this week in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
After scientists raised warnings in the early 1970s _ later earning a Nobel Prize _ 193 nations agreed in the1987 treaty called the Montreal Protocol to cut CFC emissions. CFCs had been used in air conditioning, aerosol sprays, foam packaging and other products.
Newman, the co-chair of the protocol’s scientific panel, said the study provides hope that the world can do the same thing on another looming but even harder to solve environmental problem: Global warming.
“There’s a huge lesson to be learned here,” said Paul Wapner, director of Global Environmental Politics at American University. “In significant cases, human beings can get together and arrive at international or global principles and avoid ecological catastrophe.”
___
On the Net:
NASA’s ozone study: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/world_avoided.html
The United Nations’ ozone page: http://ozone.unep.org/
Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson Reveals the Truth About Gitmo and Graib
Watch more at http://www.theyoungturks
Prosecutor to investigate these crimes. However, as we also know well in the Blogosphere, this is far more than an issue of crime, punishment and justice as it should be. It is a political issue. A ‘hot potato’ political issue considering that any and all attempts at investigation and prosecution will undoubtedly (and erroneously) be described by the Republicans, the Right Wing press and pundits, and even some (complicit?) Democrats as a ‘partisan witch hunt’ and as ‘criminalizing politics.’ in other words, there are huge political costs at stake here. It would be much, much easier to ‘move on’ or ‘not play the blame game’ or point fingers to the past.’ The Obama Administration will face incredible pressure to sweep these War Crimes under the rug of history. We in the Blogosphere need to provide the counter-pressure. We do that by making our voices heard, and one way to do that is by each and everyone of us, the thousands if not millions of blog readers, adding our names to a petition. The petition will ultimately be submitted to AG Holder, as well as to Change.gov. However it can make a great impact on the ‘public conversation’ just by being everywhere in the Blogosphere as well. . To that end, Docudharma and Democrats.com have teamed up to create, host, and distribute the following petition. The petition calls for Attorney General Designate Holder to, immediately upon being confirmed, appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all officials of the Bush Administration for Torture and War Crimes. The petition: Dear Attorney General Designate Holder, We the undersigned citizens of the United States hereby formally petition you to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all government officials who have participated in War Crimes. These crimes are being euphemistically referred to as “abusive interrogation techniques” by such respected figures as Senator John McCain. These are euphemisms for torture. Torture is a War Crime. Waterboarding is a War Crime. The CIA has admitted waterboarding detainees. Recently, Vice President Cheney has brazenly admitted authorizing the program that lead to waterboarding, other forms of torture too numerous to list, and ultimately, the deaths by homicide of detainees. As Major General Antonio Taguba, the Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison has stated: “After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.” The Washington Post recently summarized the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on detainee treatment thusly: A bipartisan panel of senators has concluded that former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials bear direct responsibility for the harsh treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and that their decisions led to more serious abuses in Iraq and elsewhere. We the undersigned citizens demand a full and thorough investigation immediately upon your taking office. This investigation should be pursued no matter where it may lead and no matter what the political implications may be. http://www.votestrike.com
A young man struggles against the pressure to Twitter his life away.
Zeitgeist 2: Addendum
ZEITGEIST, The Movie – Remastered / Final Edition – Full Production. What does Christianity, 911 and The Federal Reserve all have in common?
http://www.chucknorris.com/
http://www.infowars.com/
Alex will talk with Chuck Norris about his recent comments that he will run for the “president of Texas” and the activation of “rightwing cell groups” in response to the Obama administration..
http://www.chucknorris.com/
http://www.infowars.com/
Alex will talk with Chuck Norris about his recent comments that he will run for the “president of Texas” and the activation of “rightwing cell groups” in response to the Obama administration..
Put this one under the you’ve got to be f-ing kidding me column. And Scar manages to get a shot in on unwed mothers to end the segment up.
Matthews takes on Ari Fleischer who’s on a Bush legacy redemption media blitz for his talking point that Bush kept us safe from a terrorist attack.
Its not widely known or understood that, in American law, the business corporation has the status of a person. Wal-Mart, Microsoft, IBM, Exxon every incorporated firm is
considered, from a legal standpoint, no differently from human beings with real flesh and blood. Its a very peculiar person, one that can own assets and yet also be owned
and therefore sold by shareholders; one whose only legal responsibility is to make profits for its owners. (Thats not just capitalist economics; its a statutory mandate.) Now of course this raises some interesting civil rights issues: if a corporation is a person, isnt owning and selling it a violation of the 13th Amendment? If employees are parts of the corporation, arent they owned and sold in exactly the same way? Is the corporation a massive civil rights issue
waiting to be identified and resolved? This class will trace the history of how corporations became people; examine some of the consequences of this peculiar metaphysical and legal transformation; and suggest alternatives to the current legal and political structure of corporate business. While the activities of corporations are often considered almost solely from the standpoint of social justice, they should also be identified as issues involving the most basic questions about persons and their rights. This may be one instance in which taking away or considerably modifying rights would further the cause of social justice.
Watch more at http://www.theyoungturks.com
Watch more at http://www.theyoungturks.com
Introduction: Diversity Of Thinking – Richard Dawkins @ University Of Oklahoma March 2009: Response to OK Resolution (State Representative Todd Thomsen).
This is Richard Dawkins’ special introduction to his lecture at the University of Oklahoma on March 6th, 2009. See more about the events surrounding his visit here: http://richarddawkins.net/article,3641,Oklahoma-legislator-proposes-resolution-to-condemn-Richard-Dawkins,Todd-Thomsen
Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He was voted Britain’s leading public intellectual by readers of Prospect magazine and was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” for 2007. Among his books are “The Selfish Gene”, “The Blind Watchmaker”, “Climbing Mount Improbable”, “Unweaving the Rainbow”, “A Devils Chaplain”, “The Ancestor’s Tale”, and the New York Times best seller “The God Delusion”.
• http://www.richarddawkins.net
• http://www.youtube.com/richarddawkins…
From D.L. Hughley Breaks the News March 7, 2009.
Don’t throw it away, give it away
Freecycling is when a person passes on, for free, an unwanted item to another person who needs that item. From silverware to mobile homes, people worldwide are choosing to freecycle rather than discard. The practice frees up space in landfills and cuts down on the need to manufacture new goods. Thousands of groups dedicated to connecting people who want to give away something to people with a need are forming worldwide. Here are three steps you can take to join the freecycling movement.
1. Find a freecycling group near you at Recycling Group Finder. If you can’t find a group near you, consider starting one, either on your own or through organizations like The Freeuse Network, FREEactivate Recycling Groups, FreeSharing.org, Sharing Is Giving or The Freecycle Network. Freecycling works best when the group members live geographically close because it’s more convenient and uses less energy when stuff is exchanged.
2. Each freecycle group will have its own rules, so learn and abide by those rules. But commonly there are four kinds of posts: Wanted is you searching for an item; Found is telling others that you got what you were searching for; Offer is letting the group know what item you have to give away; and Taken is informing the group that you found a person who needed the item offered.
3. Before buying something, check to see if any one in your group is looking to get rid of the item you need. Before throwing an item in the trash, post an offer for the item to see if any one needs that item.
Now you’re freecycling! It’s a simple, economical, emotionally rewarding and morally sound practice that can literally help save the Earth.
More Information:
What to freecycle
What is freecycling etiquette?
Include a Photo
Writing a freecycle post
Oh, man! Quit with some dignity left.
Published on Wednesday, March 4, 2009 by Consortium News
How Close the Bush Bullet
by Robert Parry
Earlier this decade when some of us warned that George W. Bush was behaving more like an incipient dictator than the leader of a constitutional republic, we were dismissed as alarmists, left-wingers, traitors and a host of less printable epithets.
But it is now increasingly clear that President Bush and his top advisers viewed the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity to implement a series of right-wing legal theories that secretly granted Bush unlimited power to act lawlessly and outside the traditional parameters of the U.S. Constitution.
These theories held that at a time of war – even one as vaguely defined as the “war on terror” – Bush’s powers as Commander in Chief were “plenary,” or total. And since the conflict against terrorism had no boundaries in time or space, his unfettered powers would exist everywhere and essentially forever.
According to his administration’s secret legal memos released Monday, Bush could waive all meaningful constitutional rights of citizens, including the First Amendment’s protections on free speech and a free press.
John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department’s powerful Office of Legal Counsel – which advises a President on the limits of his constitutional powers – declared that Bush could void the First Amendment if he deemed it necessary to fight terrorism.
“First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully,” Yoo wrote in an Oct. 23, 2001, memo entitled “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.”
Yoo then added ominously, “The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”
What was particularly stunning about Yoo’s reference to waiving the First Amendment – a pillar of American democracy – was his cavalier attitude. He tossed the paragraph into a memo focused on stripping Americans of their Fourth Amendment “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
While saying that Bush could order spying on and military attacks against U.S. domestic targets at his own discretion as Commander in Chief, Yoo added, almost in passing, that the President also could abrogate the rights of free speech and a free press.
Wiping Out Public Trials
Another Yoo memo, dated June 27, 2002, essentially voided the Sixth Amendment and a federal law guaranteeing Americans the right to public trials. In the memo, Yoo asserted that Bush had the power to declare American citizens “enemy combatants” and detain them indefinitely.
“The President’s power to detain enemy combatants, including U.S. citizens, is based on his constitutional authority as Commander in Chief,” Yoo wrote, adding that “Congress may no more regulate the President’s ability to detain enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield.”
Yoo acknowledged that in “war on terror” cases, an “enemy combatant” may have no formal connection to an enemy group, may have no weapon, and may have no discernable plan for carrying out a terrorist attack. In other words, an “enemy combatant” could be anyone that Bush so designated.
Under Yoo’s analysis, an alleged “enemy combatant” would have no legal recourse, since Bush’s Commander in Chief powers trumped even habeas corpus requirements that the government must show cause for imprisoning someone. Further, this opinion wasn’t just hypothesizing; it provided the legal basis for indefinitely detaining U.S. citizen Jose Padilla.
Though the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately issued a narrow 5-4 decision overturning Bush’s supposed right to deny habeas corpus and punish “enemy combatants” through his own military court system, many of Yoo’s concepts survived in the Military Commissions Act, which was passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2006.
While the law appears on the surface to target only non-citizens, fine print deep in the legislation makes clear that the Bush administration still was asserting its power to detain U.S. citizens who were viewed as aiding and abetting foreign enemies and to punish those citizens through military commissions that denied normal due-process rights to defendants.
“Any person is punishable as a principal under this chapter who commits an offense punishable by this chapter, or aids, abets, counsels, commands, or procures its commission,” the law states, adding that “any person subject to this chapter who, in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States, knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States … shall be punished as a military commission … may direct.”
The reference to people acting “in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States” would not apply to Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda but would cover American citizens.
The Military Commissions Act remains in effect to this day, although President Barack Obama has vowed not to apply it, favoring use of regular civilian or military courts.
Loss of First Amendment
Though some of us have cited Bush’s determination to override key constitutional protections for years (see, for instance, our book Neck Deep), few critics – including me – thought to include the notion that Bush was interested in suspending the First Amendment.
The significance of Yoo’s throwaway paragraph about throwing away the First Amendment is that it suggests that the Bush administration intended as early as October 2001 to act against journalists and citizens who were viewed as undermining Bush’s “war on terror” through public comments or disclosures.
As a right-wing legal scholar, Yoo surely shared the Right’s knee-jerk animosity toward past reporting on the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War’s Pentagon Papers, as well as contempt for Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War.
But his First Amendment reference also may have reflected the thinking of senior Bush aides in those early days of the “war on terror” as they collaborated with Yoo in formulating his legal opinions.
In his 2006 book War by Other Means, Yoo describes his participation in frequent White House meetings regarding what “other means” should receive a legal stamp of approval. Yoo said the “meetings were usually chaired by Alberto Gonzales,” then White House counsel, and involved Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, David Addington.
So, a seemingly incongruous reference to overriding the First Amendment – in a memo centered on overriding the Fourth Amendment – could be explained by the desire of White House officials to have some legal cover for actions aimed at journalists who were exposing secrets or whose reporting might weaken the national resolve behind Bush’s actions.
It also suggests that Bush’s critics who exercised their free speech rights in challenging his “war on terror” could have become targets of special government operations justified under Bush’s Commander in Chief powers.
In other words, Bush’s assault on America’s constitutional Republic may have been more aggressive than many of us imagined. It was a bullet that came close to the heart of a dream dating back to 1776.
© 2009 Consortium News
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat. His two previous books are Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’.
Mike Nobody 