A bad german accent

...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zroberts/6398683225/in/photostream/

(I am however open to believing the whole pizza is a vegetable thing. Is that wrong?)

"Cops chasing Dora out of OWS. Run Dora, Run! [ed: or don't...but I prolly would]"

iywttmfawtals
ykatyhmmsttoatm
atmwsikyiywkmc

---
Meh, why bother with it; it don't bother me. Let some ganders be sick to tears.

So that's that
Case closed

(I guess)

------
Referent here in Susie Cagle on Oakland.

(I wuz inna bad mood. : } )

GA
NA
AA
ADD

?

/////?????////^

From the Fifth Chapter of Nehemiah:

And there was a great cry of the people and of their wives against their brethren... Some said, We have mortgaged our lands, vineyards, and houses, that we might buy corn, because of the dearth. Still others were saying, “We have had to borrow money to pay the king’s tax on our fields and vineyards.

Although we are of the same flesh and blood as our countrymen and though our sons are as good as theirs, yet we have to subject our sons and daughters to slavery. Some of our daughters have already been enslaved, but we are powerless, because our fields and our vineyards belong to others.”

When I heard their outcry and these charges, I was very angry. I pondered them in my mind and... rebuked the nobles, and the rulers, and said unto them, Ye exact usury, every one of his brother... What you are doing is not right. Shouldn’t you walk in the fear of our God to avoid the reproach of our Gentile enemies?

I and my brothers and my men are also lending the people money and grain. But let the exacting of usury stop! I likewise, and my brethren, and my servants, might exact of them money and corn: I pray you, let us leave off this usury.

Give back to them immediately their fields, vineyards, olive groves and houses, and also the usury you are charging them--the hundredth part of the money, grain, new wine and oil.”

Restore, I pray you, to them, even this day, their lands, their vineyards, their oliveyards, and their houses, also the hundredth part of the money, and of the corn, the wine, and the oil, that ye exact of them.

Would not Jesus, the one who said the nations will be judged by what they do and do not do for the least of these my brethren, (Mt 25:31-46) stick with his original lineóforgive us our debts? Would he not say further that debts incurred by the rich in the Global South and North together, debts which are now paid by orphans and widows, the poor and oppressed--are not only forgiven but fundamentally illegitimate?

love y'all!

isn't it strange that after thousands of years that the strategies and tactics have changed so little?

billions have lived and died...tried and failed and we always end up in the same place...why do you suppose that is?

We are still in the same place?

Nazi-baiting?

Kanzler is totally in charge.

?

(See above...)

not owed by the ppl. :)

(Sorry I only speak in song lyrics. That way I can only be told I am so dumb...cuz really it's somebody else that's dumb but I don't think these people are dumb.)

whatever...

"We are still in the same place?"

Pretty much...

Are the bankers of today different than the bankers of yesterday?

You can change the labels around...You can differentiate on scale but have the behaviors changed at all?

Stand against "zeroing out" aid to Israel

Republican candidates for president Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich all say they would cut foreign aid to Israel—and every other country—to zero.

Stand up to this extreme isolationism and join the call to reject the Romney-Perry-Gingrich plan.
====================================================
http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/om-stand-up-for-foreign-aid?source=OM20...

when you gonna get drunk again

?
----
Nah I guess that one wasn't really applicable to the argument. Seemed so at the time...

Homeland Security -- the most EXPENSIVE consumer protection agency EVER!

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/421-national-security/8549-...

[excerpt]

Homeland Security Issues Turkey Fryer Warning

By Charlie Spiering, The Washington Examiner

23 November 11

[read more at link]

Check out this ACLU alert -- a senate bill to make anyofus a 'detainee'.

http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/senators-demand-military-lock...

[excerpt]

The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world. Even Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) raised his concerns about the NDAA detention provisions during last night’s Republican debate. The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself.

The worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial provision is in S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which will be on the Senate floor on Monday. The bill was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and passed in a closed-door committee meeting, without even a single hearing.

I know it sounds incredible. New powers to use the military worldwide, even within the United States? Hasn’t anyone told the Senate that Osama bin Laden is dead, that the president is pulling all of the combat troops out of Iraq and trying to figure out how to get combat troops out of Afghanistan too? And American citizens and people picked up on American or Canadian or British streets being sent to military prisons indefinitely without even being charged with a crime. Really? Does anyone think this is a good idea? And why now?

[read more at link]

Bizarre externalized costs court decision: Corporations can pollute and NEVER pay the price of decontamination...

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201111240030

[excerpt]

During court proceedings concerning a radioactive golf course, Tokyo Electric Power Co. stunned lawyers by saying the utility was not responsible for decontamination because it no longer "owned" the radioactive substances.

“Radioactive materials (such as cesium) that scattered and fell from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant belong to individual landowners there, not TEPCO,” the utility said.

That argument did not sit well with the companies that own and operate the Sunfield Nihonmatsu Golf Club, just 45 kilometers west of the stricken TEPCO plant in Fukushima Prefecture.

The Tokyo District Court also rejected that idea.

But in a ruling described as inconsistent by lawyers, the court essentially freed TEPCO from responsibility for decontamination work, saying the cleanup efforts should be done by the central and local governments.

[read more at link]

Election fraud via privatized operation of electronic voting technology?

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8948

[excerpt]

As reported by the Daily Herald this morning...

County officials recounted the ballots cast for the Provo Municipal Council District 1 Tuesday morning, but the discrepancy between the recount total and the total from election night became so large that officials stopped the counting process.
...
"They did a recount and the numbers came out so extremely in favor of the opposite candidate that there appears to be something wrong with the machine," said Helen Anderson, spokeswoman for Provo city.

Yesterday's tally, the paper reports, were "coming out overwhelmingly in [Morrow's] favor," so officials planned to begin a hand-count --- as per "Democracy's Gold Standard" --- for today...

[read lots more at link]

Non-violence also exists at the tip of one's fork.

http://www.muttscomics.com/strip.aspx?m=11&d=24&y=11

.....INSPIRATION SOUTH OF THE BORDER

Slogans, chants and comments by Occupy Wall Street protestors calling for an end to corporate rule and demanding more equitable public spending and opportunities for the majority (the 99%) are familiar to those heard throughout Venezuela in the 1990s, when privatization overtook the oil-wealthy nation, multinationals ruled and the people were relegated to shantytowns.
Decades of exclusion, repression and mismanagement of government and resources in Venezuela led the people (the 99%) to revolt in 1989 against an administration quickly selling their nation to the highest buyer. The “Caracazo” on February 27, 1989, was a mass popular uprising in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, against privatization and globalization; against corporatocracy. The government, led by then President Carlos Andres Perez, responded with brutal repression. Over 3,000 were violently killed by state authorities. Bodies were hurled into mass graves and left to rot.

But the brutality of state violence did not stop the Venezuelan majority. Throughout the 1990s, the people began to organize their frustrations into a nationwide coalition seeking to break free of the two-party “representative” system that had ruled for decades....

...US agencies, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, Open Society Institute and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), have been funding and manipulating many of those groups and organizations involved in the different revolts in Arab nations. The Obama administration has been heavily involved in the movements in Tunisia and Egypt, evidenced by continuous visits by State Department representatives to these nations to ensure the political outcome is favorable to US interests. Washington has also been attempting to promote similar uprisings in nation’s with inconvenient governments, such as in Syria and Iran. The brutal war against Libya and extrajudicial assassination of Muammar al-Gaddafi was a skewed attempt by the US to front a “people’s revolution” in the North African nation.

The manipulation and infiltration by external forces in movements in the Arab world have contributed to their chaos, disorder and failure to materialize into real revolutions- true transformations of their political, economic and social structures. It would be a bitter, tumultuous defeat for the US and its Western allies were these Arab nations to build the sovereign, revolutionary movements millions in those lands are demanding.....
http://www.chavezcode.com/2011/11/us-arab-protests-rooted-in-latin.html

Wal-Mart customer in Los Angeles pepper sprays other Black Friday shoppers

Matthew Lopez went to the Wal-Mart in the Porter Ranch section of Los Angeles on Thursday night for the Black Friday sale but instead was caught in a pepper-spray attack by a woman who authorities said was "competitive shopping."

Lopez described a chaotic scene in the San Fernando Valley store among shoppers looking for video games soon after the sale began.

"I heard screaming and I heard yelling," said Lopez, 18. "Moments later, my throat stung. I was coughing really bad and watering up."

Authorities are searching for the woman accused of pepper-spraying other shoppers so that she could grab more discounted merchandise.

Twenty customers, including children, were hurt in the 10:10 p.m. incident, officials said............
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/11/25/131327/wal-mart-customer-in-los-an...

Greek President George Papadopoulos was ousted in a bloodless military coup.

olonel Georgios Papadopoulos (Greek: Γεώργιος Παπαδόπουλος) (5 May 1919 – 27 June 1999) was the head of the military coup d'état that took place in Greece on 21 April 1967 and leader of the military government that ruled the country from 1967 to 1974. Papadopoulos was a Colonel of Artillery. During World War II, he had initially fought against the Italian 1940 invasion and then he became a Nazi collaborator in the Security Battalions, and in the postwar years he received intelligence training in the US and became a CIA agent. He held dictatorial power in Greece from 1967-1973, until he was himself overthrown by his co-conspirator Dimitrios Ioannidis. It has been claimed that Papadopoulos was the first CIA agent to govern a Western European country....

Papadopoulos' regime imposed martial law, censorship, mass arrests, beatings and torture. Thousands of the regime's political opponents were thrown into prison or were exiled ("forced into vacation" according to the regime's friends) on small Aegean islands (Amnesty International issued a report detailing numerous instances of torture under the regime). Papadopoulos excused these actions by stating that they were being done to save the nation from a "communist takeover." Because of the regime's staunchly anti-communist stance, it was strongly supported by the United States. Many Greeks felt confirmed in their belief of USA backing and even complicity in the coup by Bill Clinton's public apology for that support on behalf of the USA, during his November 1999 visit in Greece...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgios_Papadopoulos

(2002 President George W. Bush signed legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security and appointed Tom Ridge to be its head.)

In the early morning hours of Nov. 25, 2006, Sean Bell, a 23-year-old New York City man due to be married later that day, walked out of a Queens strip club, climbed into a gray Nissan Altima with two friends who had been celebrating with him — and died in a hail of 50 bullets fired by a group of five police officers.

The shooting shocked the city and brought back memories of the deaths in other high-profile police shootings — in particular, the death of Amadou Diallo.......

In October 2011, the police department began its trial of the five officers involved in the shooting. Two of the officers, Detective Isnora and Officer Michael Carey, were fighting for their jobs, which involved clerical duties.

A police spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said that of the five officers, only one, Detective Paul Headley, had left the Police Department. The remaining two, Detective Oliver and Detective Cooper, had recently agreed to retire, according to Michael J. Palladino, the president of the detectives union. He added that the negotiations were “in the works” and had not been made final.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/sean_bell/i...

Russian anchor fired after flipping off Obama

A Russian newsreader has been fired after she “flipped the bird” to the camera after mentioning President Barack Obama, according to the Telegraph.

Tatyana Limanova, an award-winning newsreader, was talking about Russian President Dmitry Medvedev assuming the chairmanship of the Asia Pacific Cooperation organization. When she mentioned the post was previously “held by Barack Obama,” Limanova raised her arm and extended her middle finger......
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/11/24/russian-anchor-fired-after-flippin...

But the brutality of state violence did not stop the Venezuelan majority. Throughout the 1990s, the people began to organize their frustrations into a nationwide coalition seeking to break free of the two-party “representative” system that had ruled for decades....

========
One message I hear a lot from the wise is that we need to work to get solid support from huge amounts of people. Then we can tackle (and overcome) the issues that keep us weak and divided.

Police body slam leaves grandpa bloody, unconscious at Wal-Mart

Witnesses say police officers tackled a grandfather at an Arizona Wal-Mart Friday, leaving him bloody and unconscious.

The video game section of the Buckeye store got a little rowdy when people started trying to tear open boxes of games, and one woman got punched.

After one man’s grandson got trampled, he put the video game he was holding in his waistband in order to free up his hands and lift the boy out of the crowd, according to KSAZ.

That’s when cops moved in, slamming the grandfather’s head on the hard Wal-Mart floor. The aftermath was caught on cell phone video.

Black Friday Pepper Spray Incident in Porter Ranch

A customer shot pepper spray at other customers at a
busy Northridge Wal-Mart store late Thursday night, causing minor injuries to 10 people who had been waiting hours for Black Friday savings, according to Los Angeles firefighters and a police lieutenant.

A witness told NBC4 that the incident started as people waited in line for the new Xbox 360. The witness said a woman with two children in tow became upset with the way people were pushing in line. The witness said she pulled out pepper spray, and sprayed the other people in line.

Woman in Wal-Mart pepper spray attack was 'competitive shopping'

Woman who pepper-sprayed other shoppers Thursday night at the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch had armed herself with the caustic spray to gain an advantage in the fight for merchandise at the Black Friday sale, a fire captain said.

The woman, who is still being sought, used the spray in more than one area of the Wal-Mart "to gain preferred access to a variety of locations in the store," said Los Angeles Fire Capt. James Carson.

"She was competitive shopping," he said.

Twenty customers, including children, were hurt in the 10:10 p.m. incident. Shoppers complained of minor skin and eye irritation and sore throats, he said.

Black Friday shopper shot in botched robbery outside East Bay Walmart

SAN LEANDRO — A Black Friday shopper in Northern California was hospitalized in critical but stable condition after he was shot by an armed robber outside a Walmart store, police said.

The victim and his family were walking to their car around 1:45 a.m. when they were confronted by a group of men who demanded their purchases. When the family refused, a fight broke out and one of the robbers pulled out a gun and shot the man, San Leandro police Sgt. Mike Sobek said.

Off-duty police pepper spray NC Walmart shoppers

An off-duty police officer used pepper spray Friday on shoppers at a Wal-Mart in Kinston, N.C., NBC station WITN of Washington, N.C., reported.

Kinston police Sgt. Roland Davis said an off-duty officer the store had hired to help with security during Black Friday shopping used the chemical while trying to make an arrest during a disturbance.

Angel Bunting, who was shopping at the store, said a man fell into a display as people lined up for discounted cell phones. She said she believed it was an accident but security thought there was a fight.

About 20 people, including children, were affected by the pepper spray, she alleged, but that couldn't be confirmed.

that I can't quite put my finger on...With all the incarnations and flavors of both coming to the same end time and time again, I think that it speaks to something more fundemental than either being the source of the conflict. Perhaps something intrinsic to life itself...

The growing tension between capitalism and democracy

Do capitalism and democracy conflict? Does each weaken the other?

To the American ear, these questions sound bizarre. Capitalism and democracy are bound together like Siamese twins, are they not? That was our mantra during the Cold War, when it was abundantly clear that communism and democracy were incompatible. After the Cold War ended, though, things grew murkier. Recall that virtually every U.S. chief executive and every U.S. president (two Bushes and one Clinton, in particular) told us that bringing capitalism to China would democratize China.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

Over the past year, in fact, capitalism has fairly rolled over democracy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Europe, where financial institutions and large investors have gone to war under the banner of austerity, and governments of nations with not-very-productive or overextended economies have found that they could not satisfy those demands and still cling to power. The elected governments of Greece and Italy have been deposed; financial technocrats are now at the helm of both nations. With interest rates on Spanish bonds rising sharply in recent weeks, Spain’s socialist government was unseated last weekend by a center-right party that has offered no solutions to that country’s growing crisis. Now the Sarkozy government in France is threatened by rising interest rates on its bonds. It’s as though the markets throughout Europe have had enough with this democratic sovereignty nonsense.

It's time to change the roles.

Police 'killed deaf cyclist with stun gun after he failed to obey instructions to stop'

Victim: Roger Anthony, 61, died after an officer blasted him with a stun gun as he rode home on his bicycle

A police officer killed an elderly, deaf and mentally disabled man riding his bicycle by shooting him with a Taser stun gun after he failed to obey instructions to stop.

Roger Anthony, 61, was killed as he made his way home in Scotland Neck, South Carolina, after officers responded to a 911 call about a man who had fallen off his bicycle in a car park.

The caller told dispatchers that the man appeared drunk and that it looked like he had hurt himself.

I KNEW IT!!

(Said in a Click and Clack tone/accent...)

(Even though I don't need 2 buy ova...)

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy
www.guardian.co.uk
(From ^li

Ya I am still processing that one (since this morning) so just stuck on the latest adward-winning podcaster syntactical dysfunction on ROFR...Guess my brain finds it safer.

Also, _surveilled_ vs _surveyed_, an argument had around the fire last week. (I already knew I was right...)

So, um, I guess I picked a pretty shitty time to actually start using FB, huh?

signed,
>*)

:)

“ I never focused on personhood,” Grossman said last month. “I helped to explain Supreme Court cases starting with Dartmouth College in 1819 that turned business corporation directors into usurpers.”

“My focus was on the Constitution as a minority-rule plan of governance, and on usurpations galore.”

“And so this move to amend the Constitution that sprung up after the Citizens United decision – I don’t understand it as strategy, as an educational process, as an organizing process, as a goal.”

“Why validate the idea that amending the Constitution offers a remedy for two hundred years of minority rule? For today’s corporate state? Corporate ‘speech’ is such a minuscule aspect of the nation’s private governance and mass denials that have been in place since the nation was founded.”

He kept moving to root causes.

He challenged the Occupy Wall Street movement to move beyond talk of corruption and greed.

“There’s no shortage of corruption and greed going all around,” Grossman said. “But corruption and greed are not the problem. They are diversions.”

“The essence of the power arrayed against the 99 percent are structures of minority-rule governance deeply rooted, honored and celebrated, even by, I suspect, many of the people who are occupying Wall Street today.”

“I’m referring to the great myths of this nation’s founding and founders, of the U.S. Constitution and constitutional jurisprudence, the nonsense about limited governance, the sanctification of ‘the rule of law’ when lawmaking and interpreting and enforcing have been the special preserve in every generation of a small minority.”

“I’m talking about the private ordering of economic decision making, the sweeping constitutional privileges wielded by directors of the ‘creatures of law’ we call chartered, incorporated businesses camouflaged as ‘free enterprise’ and ‘the invisible hand.’”

“I hope that teach-ins about such realities in Wall Street and Washington and other places are going on. So far, I’ve not seen evidence.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/25/richard-grossman-1943-2011/
http://corporatecrimereporter.com/grossman10172011.htm

Americans must choose between conformity (as stipulated by the Corporate-created Culture) and Freedom.

Hola Sederistas!

Hope yer long Thanksgiving weekend has been good for ya! It's been like SIXTY here so we've been cleaning up the yard for one last time and just hanging out. A friend of mine has been checking out Occupy Erie PA (the closest Occupy to her) and they send this Black Friday message:

Christmas 2011 -- Birth of a New Tradition
As the holidays approach, the giant Asian factories are kicking into high gear to provide Americans with monstrous piles of cheaply produced goods -- merchandise that has been produced at the expense of American labor. This year will be different. This year Americans wil...l give the gift of genuine concern for other Americans. There is no longer an excuse that, at gift giving time, nothing can be found that is produced by American hands. Yes there is!

It's time to think outside the box, people. Who says a gift needs to fit in a shirt box, wrapped in Chinese produced wrapping paper?

Everyone -- yes EVERYONE - gets their hair cut. How about gift certificates from your local American hair salon or barber?

Gym membership? It's appropriate for all ages who are thinking about some health improvement Who wouldn't appreciate getting their car detailed? Small, American owned detail shops and car washes would love to sell you a gift certificate or a book of gift certificates.

Are you one of those extravagant givers who think nothing of plunking down the Benjamin’s on a Chinese made flat-screen? Perhaps that grateful gift receiver would like his driveway sealed, or lawn mowed for the summer, or driveway plowed all winter, or games at the local golf course.
There are a gazillion owner-run restaurants -- all offering gift certificates. And, if your intended isn't the fancy eatery sort, what about a half dozen breakfasts at the local breakfast joint. Remember, folks this isn't about big National chains -- this is about supporting your home town Americans with their financial lives on the line to keep their doors open.
How many people couldn't use an oil change for their car, truck or motorcycle - done at a shop run by the American working guy?
Thinking about a heartfelt gift for Mom? Mom would LOVE the services of a local cleaning lady for a day.

My computer could use a tune-up, and I KNOW I can find some young guy who is struggling to get his repair business up and running.

OK, you were looking for something more personal. Local crafts people spin their own wool and knit them into scarves. They make jewelry, and pottery and beautiful wooden boxes.

Plan your holiday outings at local, owner operated restaurants and leave your server a nice tip. And, how about going out to see a play or ballet at your hometown theatre.

Musicians need love too, so find a venue showcasing local bands. Honestly, people, do you REALLY need to buy another ten thousand Chinese lights for the house? When you buy a five dollar string of light, about fifty cents stays in the community. If you have those kinds of bucks to burn, leave the mailman, trash guy or babysitter a nice BIG tip.

You see, Christmas is no longer about draining American pockets so that China can build another glittering city. Christmas is now about caring about US, encouraging American small businesses to keep plugging away to follow their dreams. And, when we care about other Americans, we care about our communities, and the benefits come back to us in ways we couldn't imagine.

THIS is the new American Christmas tradition.

I would go with that.

And Brick TeeVee too! (over there) --------------->
Brick TeeVee and Scoville Units!
http://www.samsedershow.com/node/6264
http://filthy-rich.blogspot.com/2011/11/brick-teevee-and-scoville-units....

Give it up for Tom Morello everybody!

"Americans must choose between conformity (as stipulated by the Corporate-created Culture) and Freedom."

There is no such thing as freedom.

So long as you share this reality with another life you can not be free of your responsibility to that life, to at least do it no harm.

Freedom is a lie told to children, who must all too soon accept their responsibilities to each other, to every one, to every thing.

We exchange the false freedom that only exists in our childish imaginations for the ability to love selflessly, we give ourselves to each other, our children, our world. We grow up.

The corporate culture prefers that we remain children and forego our responsbilities for the selfishness that so defines their own existence.

It's not conformity they seek but divide and conquer. Freedom is "I want", responsibility is "they need"...Which do you suppose is the easiest position to exploit for gain?

It's not we that fear conformity, it's not we that fear the responsibility of our fellows, it's them that fear that they be made responsible, that fears their loss of freedom.

The majority of human beings actually care for other human beings, most of us are so altruistic that we even care for at least one other species.

It's time that corporate culture be made to grow up, to lose their freedom and accept the responsbilities of adulthood.

This world can no longer afford them the fantasies of youth.

So, the choice isn't really between freedom and conformity, the choice is between allowing ourselves to be ruled by those that couldn't progress beyond adolescence or do we force them to conform to the chains that bind us to adulthood?

with teeth bared.

Team USA Roller Derby Practice #1 from Todd Bradley on Vimeo.

Americans must choose

Submitted by nora on Sun, 11/27/2011 - 1:49am.

Americans must choose between conformity (as stipulated by the Corporate-created Culture) and Freedom.

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

I think we can use our freedom of choice to leave behind the conformity stipulated by the corporatists and their consumer culture.

The Corporatist Consumer Culture feeds on conformity -- the conformity of being wrapped up in a cocoon of consumer choice-making.

The One Percent is trying to push the conformity button by calling Occupiers 'dirty' and 'sloppy'/'unfocussed' and 'lazy' and 'hippies'. By doing this, the message is: Only those who conform are worthy of basic respect, only those who conform are worthy of being listened to, only those who conform are worthy of being allowed rights.

Authoritarian demands for conformity come in messages that say: 'Getting along' means 'going along'; if you won't 'go along' with what we want you to go along with, first, you do not deserve to participate even in any superficial way, and second, we will do whatever it takes to destroy you completely. If you do not conform, you will be singled out, subjected to humiliation and abuse.

Also, another message is: Those without the means to maintain the all-American image of healthy physique, the latest cool clothes and gadgets, even the perfect toothpast smile, are also not conforming. So those dealing with Corporatist/Bankster-caused impoverishment and disenfranchisement have lost the image celebrated in consumer advertising -- and no longer even have "what-it-takes" to attempt to conform.

It's not a new division. It's the usual Elite fingerpointing seen before. The use of epithets like "the great unwashed" are used by the Wall Street Elite sipping champagne today as they were yesteryear.

Poking ridicule at those individuals who don't adopt the latest profitstream consumer fads or at those who adopt lifestyles that are counter-culture -- it's the same message: There is no room in the Corporatist Consumer Culture for any diversity that doesn't make the Elite more profits.

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/gridlock-blessing-hell-obama-an...

[excerpt]

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

As BAR predicted, gridlock – which has finished off the congressional SuperCommittee – was the last, best hope to prevent Barack Obama from consummating his marriage with the Republicans over the past year. In the interim, a new social movement has arisen. But it, too, is threatened by Obamite cooptation. Van Jones, says an organizer of Occupy Washington DC, “is doing the dirty work of a Democratic operative and while he and other Dem front groups pretend to support Occupiers, their real mission is to co-opt it.” Gridlock has bought time for the overarching mission: “The Sword of Damocles that hovers over the planet, is Wall Street’s $600 trillion-plus derivatives, financial nuclear bombs invented by Wall Street.”

[read more at link]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27866

[excerpt]

Suffolk Co. NY to hear proposal to ban chemtrails

On Dec. 6, New York’s Suffolk County government will hold a public hearing on a proposal to ban aerial spraying of aluminum oxide, barium, sulfur, and other salts into the air over the county without first filing an Environmental Impact Statement with and receiving approval from the county’s Department of Health Services, Division of Environmental Quality.

Exempted from the proposed ban are aerosol spraying operations for agriculture, and for lyme disease, Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), West Nile virus (WNV), and other disease vector control operations.

The hearing will be held at the Riverhead Legislative Auditorium, Evans K. Griffing Building, 300 Center Drive in Riverhead, NY at 2:30 pm.

If the public is able to convince legislators of the risk from such geoengineering operations, the legislation will then be voted on at the Dec. 20th session. Otherwise, the proposed ban will be tabled indefinitely.

Initiated by Cindy Pikoulas and her husband Jim, along with Siobhan Ciresi of Long Island Sky Watch (LISW), with the assistance of chemtrail opponent Rosalind Peterson of Agriculture Defense Coalition, the bill was finalized and proposed by legislator Edward P. Romaine (1st District). (Full text below.)

...

“If this proposal becomes law in Suffolk County, Long Island, it would be the first in the nation. It would be a starting point for others to follow,” said LISW in a press release.

“Eventually, our governments would have to investigate why our trees are dying in record numbers; why our waters contain toxic levels of aluminum, barium and strontium; why 90% of us are vitamin D deficient; why our crops are failing; and where all of this crazy weather is coming from.”

Cindy Pikoulas of LISW spoke with New York Sky Watch radio on Nov. 20, when she advised that tree samples from Suffolk show high levels of barium, strontium and aluminum. She is asking Long Islanders to have their water and trees tested for these chemicals in order to build a body of evidence that would spur investigations by health and environment authorities.

[more at link]

Drones used on 9/11 to create a new Pearl Harbor have opened up a new era for control by drones, imo.

This writer's analysis of a new authoritarianism acknowledges technocrats' role in changes going on; however, he maintains it is a transitory stage only.

I wonder. With the new technologies, the aforementioned drones, the internet spying, the cashless society, the Big Brother control via SmartMeter technology -- these all speak to methods where the technocrats will have the upperhand.

Anyway, a very absorbing assessment--

http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/11/the-new-authoritarianism/
[excerpt]

The New Authoritarianism

From Decaying Democracies to Technocratic Dictatorships and Beyond

by James Petras / November 28th, 2011

We live in a time of dynamic, regressive, regime changes. A period in which major political transformations and the dramatic roll back of a half century of socio-economic legislation are accelerated by a prolonged and deepening economic crises and a world-wide financier led offensive. This essay explores major ongoing regime changes that have a profound impact on governance, the class structures, economic institutions, political freedom and national sovereignty. We delineate a two-stage process of political regression. The first stage involves the transition from a decaying democracy to an oligarchical democracy; the second stage currently unfolding in Europe involves the transition from oligarchical democracy to colonial-technocratic dictatorship. We will identify the specific features of each regime focusing on the specific conditions and socio-economic forces behind each “transition”. We will proceed to clarify the key concepts, their operative meaning: specifically the nature and dynamics of “decaying democracies” (DD), oligarchical democracies (OD), and “colonial technocratic dictatorship” (CTD).

The second half of the essay will detail the politics of CTD, the regime which has moved furthest from the notion of a sovereign representative democracy. We will clarify the differences and similarities between traditional military-civilian and fascist dictatorships and the up-to-date CTD....

[read more at link]

Vulture speculating financiers zero in on Africa.

The scheme is like a daisy chain -- devastate one country and buy up their IOUs from another country. But the USA sanctions this activity by allowing U.S. financial interests to conduct these Vulture schemes.

Greg Palast reporting via DemocracyNow! tv and his recent book "Vultures' Picnic"--

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/22/reporter_greg_palast_exposes_how_...

http://www.gregpalast.com/

Evidently, Al Qaeda is an Illusionist's assistant. Place it in a box (Iraq), saw it in two, and voila! -- it reappears whole in other countries.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29827.htm

[excerpt]

Libya’s New Rulers Offer Weapons to Syrian Rebels

Syrian rebels held secret talks with Libya's new authorities on Friday, aiming to secure weapons and money for their insurgency against President Bashar al-Assad's regime, The Daily Telegraph has learned.

[read more at link]

Nigel Farage interview--

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29824.htm

The thieving Elite Banksters have been keeping the lid on this theft for years now. Now some details are being extracted via FOIA--

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-28/secret-fed-loans-undisclosed-to...

[excerpt]

...

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

,,,

[read more at link]

War on weed continues -- even where it has been legalized.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/11/26/obama-war-...

[excerpt]

In recent months there have been several blows to the various industries who support the medical marijuana market. Paul Armentano, deputy director of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, reported in U.S. News & World Report Opinion, these disturbing changes:
•"The Department of Justice sent letters this past spring to state lawmakers that were debating legislation to allow for the licensed distribution of medical cannabis, threatening prosecution of those involved with said efforts if the measures went forward;
•The IRS has assessed crippling penalties on taxpaying medical cannabis facilities in California by denying these operations the right to file standard expense deductions;
•The Department of Treasury has strong-armed local banks and other financial institutions into closing their accounts with medicinal cannabis operators;
•The Drug Enforcement Administration has rejected a nine-year-old administrative petition that called for hearings regarding the federal rescheduling of cannabis for medical use, ignoring extensive scientific evidence of its medical efficacy;
•The National Institute on Drug Abuse rejected an FDA-approved protocol to allow for clinical research assessing the use of cannabis to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, stating, "We generally do not fund research focused on the potential beneficial medical effects of marijuana."
•Most recently, Deputy Attorney General James Cole, along with the four U.S. attorneys from California, announced plans for a coordinated effort against operations in California that provide above-ground access to cannabis for those patients qualified to use the substance in accordance with state law."

The war on marijuana is indeed a strange one, considering the legality of cigarettes and alcohol -- products that have vastly greater potential to harm public health, without any of the medicinal benefits. Not to mention that the FDA approves drugs, prescribed by doctors every day, that kill over 100,000 Americans a year.

Moreover, by shutting down reputable marijuana dispensaries, it will only force those who legitimately depend upon it to alleviate their suffering to enter the (sometimes dangerous) black market.

As Seattle Weekly wrote:

"Landlords, worried the feds will steal their property, will tell dispensaries to move out. Banks won't handle money for pot-themed businesses. Dispensaries will be taxed so heavily they won't be able to cover the payroll or pay the electric bill.

… An estimated one million people in California have obtained a doctor's recommendation to grow and use marijuana legally. Patient estimates in Washington are hazier, but the number is thought to be around 100,000.

If the feds shut down every dispensary in the country, all these people will still be able to legally possess marijuana—no matter where they bought it—under their state laws. The only difference is they'll be forced to go back to buying their weed from Mexican drug cartels, rather than from Americans who provide jobs and pay taxes."

[more at link]

Leah, please take a moment to email your senators and ask them to oppose the so-called "Protect IP Act."

Protect IP is legislation that would -- no exaggeration -- destroy the social web as we know it. In short, this proposed law would allow corporate copyright holders the ability to cut off funding and compel the government to shut down websites they deem infringing, without the need of a court order. (See here for more information on this devastating bill.)

This poorly conceived piece of legislation has been rushed through Congress without proper debate, with only Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon standing between it and the president's desk. Pro-censorship forces have spent over $90 million to get this bill passed, we have, well, social media to fight back.

If you value Daily Kos, or Facebook, or Twitter, or any website which invites your participation, please take a moment to contact your senator.

Thanks,

Markos Moulitsas
Publisher, Daily Kos

PS: Help keep Daily Kos strong by chipping in to support us.

"Use your freedom of choice to leave corporate culture conformity"

You're abusing the hell out of the word "conformity".

What you're trying to say is more along the lines of "submission" and "obedience" otherwise you wouldn't be needing to add "as stipulated" as suffix to the word.

Also, even though conformity is a synonym of both words it assumes the subtle association with conforming to the majority. I don't think this is the message that you're intending to send.

Furthermore, all of the epithets that you cite really only effect one personality type at all and the rest of us could give a shit less. All of those epithets are things that disturb the very sanitary, the very sterile, the 'inorganic leaning' nature of the right wing mind.

Keep working on it though...you're making progress.

"CTD -- Colonial Technocratic Dictatorship"

Catchy but I don't see the colony, the technocracy or the dictatorship. Could you please show an example?

"Drones used on 9/11 to create a new Pearl Harbor have opened up a new era for control by drones, imo."

Sorry, but radio controlled planes have been around for decades. When I was a kid there was an old guy in the neighborhood that had this model of the Red Barons plane, it had a 6ft wingspan. He could make it do all kinds of aerobatic tricks. That was 40 yrs ago. I sometimes wonder what planet you've been on all this time and when exactly you arrived.

"This writer's analysis of a new authoritarianism acknowledges technocrats' role in changes going on; however, he maintains it is a transitory stage only."

All things are transitory, especially technology.

"I wonder. With the new technologies, the aforementioned drones, the internet spying, the cashless society, the Big Brother control via SmartMeter technology -- these all speak to methods where the technocrats will have the upperhand. "

Drones aren't new, "cashless" is synonymous with "credit", which also isn't new. Again with the "my electric meter is spying on me" crap?

Even when someone isn't trying to take the upperhand with you, you assume the victim position.

You do know that it's the right wing brain that's prone to paranoia, right?

Here's a clue for you while you laying awake at night worrying about what your electric meter is thinking...

Big Brother can never exist for the same reason that a "prison planet" can not. Who watches the watchers? It's just not practically possible.

DERP.

"Evidently, Al Qaeda is an Illusionist's assistant. Place it in a box (Iraq), saw it in two, and voila! -- it reappears whole in other countries."

Ya know the only ones that claimed a significant al qaeda presence in Iraq was the Bushies, right?

Just another 'slip of the tounge' right?...

Thing is...that your entire premise as per usual is complete horseshit...

What you're doing is like someone saying that Occupy is controlled by Ron Pauls bunch because a few of them have joined in and then saying that Occupy protests in other countries are also Ron Pauls bunch because Occupy has professed solidarity with other movements world wide.

Why is it that you can talk so much shit about our galactic overlords and then when the people rise up any where at all, you're the first one to try and shoot them back down?

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with your head?

a kindness.

If You Want To Be a Rebel, Be Kind

The police had declared Monday, November 14th of 2011 as the day of the raid on the Occupy Oakland encampment. It was the first Occupy site to call for a general strike that shut down the fifth largest port in the country; it was also the first Occupy gathering to report a shooting and a murder, as police violence also reached new heights. With tensions mounting amidst political chaos, police escalated their violent crackdowns and the narrative of fear. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent in preparation for the raid, police from around the state were called in, and uncertainty filled the air.

The night before, Pancho Ramos Stierle heard about growing tensions in the community and thought, "If police are stepping up their violence, we need to go and step up our nonviolence." So on that Monday morning at 3:30AM, Pancho and his housemate Adelaja went to the site of the Occupy Oakland raid. With an upright back and half-lotus posture, they started meditating. Many factions of protesters were around but the presence of strong meditators changed the vibe entirely. Around 6:30AM, the police showed up in full force. Full-out riot gear, pepper spray, rubber bullets, tear gas. All media was present, expecting a headline story around this incredibly tense scene. Instead, they found 32 people, all peaceful, with Pancho and Adeleja meditating with their eyes closed in the middle of the Plaza. As the police followed their orders of arresting them, people took photos -- particularly of two smiling meditators surrounded by police looking like they're ready to go to war. Within a day, that photo would spread to millions around the world, as Occupy Oakland raid ended without any reported violence.

A second Iranian nuclear facility has exploded, as diplomatic tensions rise between the West and Tehran

A second Iranian nuclear facility has exploded, as diplomatic tensions rise between the West and Tehran

Satellite imagery seen by The Times confirmed that a blast that rocked the city of Isfahan on Monday struck the uranium enrichment facility there, despite denials by Tehran.

The images clearly showed billowing smoke and destruction, negating Iranian claims yesterday that no such explosion had taken place. Israeli intelligence officials told The Times that there was "no doubt" that the blast struck the nuclear facilities at Isfahan and that it was "no accident".

The explosion at Iran's third-largest city came as satellite images emerged of the damage caused by one at a military base outside Tehran two weeks ago that killed about 30 members of the Revolutionary Guard, including General Hassan Moghaddam, the head of the Iranian missile defence program.

...

On Monday, Dan Meridor. the Israeli Intelligence Minister, said: "There are countries who impose economic sanctions and there are countries who act in other ways in dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat."

U.S. Nears Milestone: Net Fuel Exporter

U.S. exports of gasoline, diesel and other oil-based fuels are soaring, putting the nation on track to be a net exporter of petroleum products in 2011 for the first time in 62 years.

A combination of booming demand from emerging markets and faltering domestic activity means the U.S. is exporting more fuel than it imports, upending the historical norm.

According to data released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration on Tuesday, the U.S. sent abroad 753.4 million barrels of everything from gasoline to jet fuel in the first nine months of this year, while it imported 689.4 million barrels.

Iran Oil Sanctions Set to Shrink the Circle of Foreign Buyers

Iran faces new hurdles to getting paid for its oil as the U.S. tightens financial sanctions to deter buyers from the world’s third-largest crude exporter.

The U.S. approved additional curbs on Iran’s banking system and oil industry on Nov. 21, hoping to thwart the country’s nuclear program, and the European Union may follow. Current sanctions have led Indian importers to route payments for Iranian crude through a Turkish bank. These refiners, concerned Turkey may stop cooperating amid the latest U.S. rules, are asking banks in Russia to arrange alternatives, said three people with direct knowledge of the situation.

“The idea of the sanctions is to shrink the circle of buyers and so increase their ability to extract discounts from Iran,” said Robin Mills, an analyst at Dubai-based Manaar Energy Consulting, who worked for a decade at Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) in the Middle East.

The U.S. is stepping up pressure after a Nov. 8 report from the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that Iran was working on a nuclear weapons program. At stake is crude supply from the OPEC nation, whose exports last year were exceeded only by those of Saudi Arabia and Russia. Oil is Iran’s main source of income, earning it $56 billion in the first seven months of 2011, according to U.S. Energy Department estimates.

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The United States and its allies are engaged in an Asian and African offensive, a multi-pronged assault thinly camouflaged as humanitarian intervention that, in some regions, looks like a blitzkrieg. This frenzied aggression, still in its first year, saw NATO transformed into an expeditionary force to crush the unoffending Gaddafi regime in Libya and is now poised to topple the secular order in Syria. Although drawing on longstanding schemes for overt and covert regime change in selected countries, and fully consistent with global capital’s historic imperative to bludgeon the planet into one malleable market subordinate to Washington, London and Paris, the current offensive had a particular genesis in time: the nightmare vision of an Arab awakening.

The prospect of an Arab Spring at the dawn of 2011 sparked a general hysteria in imperial capitals. Suddenly, they stared in the face of geopolitical death at the hands of the Arab “street.” Washington understands full well that the emergence of Arab governments that reflect the will of the people would soon result, as Noam Chomsky is fond of saying, in the U.S. being “thrown out” of the region – the final toll of the bell, not just for the oil-hungry West, but for international capital’s annexes in the autocratic cesspools of the Persian Gulf.

“The prospect of an Arab Spring at the dawn of 2011 sparked a general hysteria in imperial capitals.”

With centuries of Euro-American domination flashing before their eyes, Washington, London and Paris quickly configured NATO to unleash Shock and Awe on the victim of choice in North Africa: Muammar Gaddafi. The momentum of that show of force has led an expanding cast of imperial actors to the gates of Damascus. But Africa is the most vulnerable region in America’s warpath, a continent ripe for the plucking due to the multitudinous entanglements of Africa’s political and military classes with imperialism. The awful truth is, the United States and its allies, principally the French, are positioned to “take” much of the continent with the collaboration of most of its governments and, especially, its soldiers.

AFRICOM, established in 2008 by the Bush administration and now fully the creature of President Obama’s “humanitarian” interventionist doctrine, claims military responsibility for the entire continent except Egypt.........

...NATO’s aggression in Libya was made inevitable when Nigeria, South Africa and Gabon dishonored themselves by voting in favor of the bogus “No Fly Zone.” The momentum of the Euro-American offensive flows southward, and will soon set much of the continent afire. The Horn of Africa is already a carnal house of flame and famine, engineered by the Americans but fully joined by Africans and their regional institutions. In the west, ECOWAS legitimizes imperial policies, while in the Sahel, Africans scramble to identify targets for the Americans. Each year, most of the continent’s militaries gather round the Americans to learn how to command and control their own troops, thus making their armies useless to resist the real enemy: the U.S. and NATO.

Betrayed by a political/military class eager to integrate itself into the imperial system on any terms, Africa lies naked to the Euro-Americans.

It will be up to the slums and the bush to reverse this catastrophe. If the Americans and Europeans are to be resisted, Africans will have to fight their own governments, first.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/africa-lies-naked-euro-american...

"I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute."
- quoted in New York Tribune, April 15, 1906, p. 2 (in defense of Maxim Gorky)

(November 30th, 1999 The opening of a 135-nation trade gathering in Seattle was disrupted by at least 40,000 demonstrators, some of whom clashed with police.)

...loyalty to these cobras is treason to the nation; be a patriot, not a prig - set the people free."

If Twain went on CNBC and were asked about dealing with the 1% "Family:"

"A strange thing, when one considers it: to wit, the world applies to Czar and System the same moral axioms that have vogue and acceptance in civilized countries! Because, in civilized countries, it is wrong to remove oppressors otherwise than by process of law, it is held that the same rule applies in Russia, where there is no such thing as law -- except for our Family. Laws are merely restraints -- they have no other function. In civilized countries they restrain all persons, and restrain them all alike, which is fair and righteous; but in Russia such laws as exist make an exception -- our Family. We do as we please; we have done as we pleased for centuries. Our common trade has been crime, our common pastime murder, our common beverage blood -- the blood of the nation. Upon our heads lie millions of murders. Yet the pious moralist says it is a crime to assassinate us. We and our uncles are a family of cobras set over a hundred and forty million rabbits, whom we torture and murder and feed upon all our days; yet the moralist urges that to kill us is a crime, not a duty."
http://www.twainquotes.com/Revolution/revolution.html

Published on Tuesday, November 29, 2011 by The Nation
Why Naomi Wolf's Occupy Conspiracy Theory Can't Explain Occupy LA
by Tom Hayden

But to believe the writer Naomi Wolf, who was arrested during one of the New York protests, the Occupy movement inevitably faced a brutal crackdown because of its threat to the status quo. Wolf has written in the UK’s Guardian that the recent crackdowns on Occupy have been a coordinated conspiracy between local officials, police, the FBI and Homeland Security. As evidence, she points to conference calls between officials and police in eighteen cities that preceded the raids. She claims that a “shocking truth” behind the crackdown is the vested interest of Congress in protecting its own insider stock dealings on Wall Street. In one passage, Wolf accuses the White House of blessing the “war on peaceful citizens....

...But the way the LA eviction has been handled so far is a very important achievement for a city plagued by fifty years of police scandals, brutality, corruption, and court-ordered reforms. Only four years ago the LAPD’s fabled Metro Division went wild and trampled peaceful protestors and media at a huge immigrant rights rally. The LAPD still stops and frisks hundreds of thousands of inner city youth each year,a potential scandal that is so far invisible.

Under the direction of the mayor and Chief Charlie Beck, however, the LAPD officers on Sunday night were as “tactful” as could be, in the phrase one Occupy sympathizer who works at City Hall....."
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/29-8

http://www.odditycentral.com/news/woman-hasnt-used-money-in-15-years.htm...

Netanyahu Government Suggests Israelis Avoid Marrying American Jews

The Netanyahu government's Ministry of Immigrant Absorption is sponsoring advertisements in at least five American communities that warn Israeli expatriates that they will lose their identities if they don't return home.

The Ministry is also featuring on its website a series of short videos that, in an almost comically heavy-handed way, caution Israelis against raising their children in America -- one scare-ad shows a pair of Israeli grandparents seated before a menorah and Skypeing with their granddaughter, who lives in America. When they ask the child to name the holiday they're celebrating, she says "Christmas." In another ad, an actor playing a slightly-adenoidal, goateed young man (who, to my expert Semitic eye, is meant to represent a typical young American Jew) is shown to be oblivious to the fact that his Israeli girlfriend is in mourning on Yom HaZikaron, Israel's memorial day. The Jewish Channel, which broke the story of what it calls a "semi-covert national campaign," suggests that the Ministry does not differentiate between the "dangers" of marrying American Jews, and American non-Jews, and I have to agree. But let's lay that aside for a minute and watch the video:

...

These government-sponsored ads suggest that it is impossible for Jews to remain Jewish in America. How else are we supposed to understand the "Christmas" ad? Obviously, assimilation and intermarriage are issues in America in ways they aren't in Israel. Israel has other problems of course, such as the fact that many of its rabbis act like Iranian mullahs. (I'm not even going to try to unpack my complicated beliefs about intermarriage and assimilation and life in the Diaspora here; that's for a book. But let me just say that intermarriage can also be understood as an opportunity.)

The idea, communicated in these ads, that America is no place for a proper Jew, and that a Jew who is concerned about the Jewish future should live in Israel, is archaic, and also chutzpadik (if you don't mind me resorting to the vernacular). The message is: Dear American Jews, thank you for lobbying for American defense aid (and what a great show you put on at the AIPAC convention every year!) but, please, stay away from our sons and daughters.

"Here, look at this handsome L.L. Bean catalog and tell me what you want for Christmas," said a relative over Thanksgiving weekend. I started leafing through the 88 page cornucopia with hundreds of clothing and household products, garnished by free gift cards and guaranteed free shipping. I wasn't perusing it for any suggested gifts; instead, I was going through every offering to see whether they were made in the U.S.A. or in other countries.

This is what I found: over 97 percent of all the items pictured and priced were noted "imported" by L.L. Bean. The only ones manufactured in the U.S. were fireplace gloves, an L.L. Bean jean belt, a dress chino belt, quilted faux-shearling-lined L.L. Bean boots (made in Maine), a personalized web collar and leash (for your pet), and symbolically enough, the "made in Maine using American-made cotton canvas are the Original Boat and Tote Bags" to carry all those goodies coming in from China and elsewhere.

That was it for the products that were "Made in America." The former fountainhead of global manufacturing has been largely deflated by the flight of U.S. companies to fascist or communist regimes noted for holding down their repressed workers.

But there is much more to this story and the plight of millions of American workers and hundreds of their hollowed out communities that are the visible results of corporate free trade propaganda.

How many times have the politicians and their corporate paymasters told us that "free trade" with other nations is a "win-win" proposition? They win and we win. After all, isn't that what happened two hundred years ago when Portugal sold its wine to England in return for British textiles? Economists have won many prizes elaborating this theory of comparative advantage.

That is what Nobel laureate super-economist Paul Samuelson believed in the many years he wrote and updated his standard "Economics 101" textbook studied by millions of college students for nearly 50 years. For many of his colleagues, the theory of "free trade" had become an ideology bordering on a secular religion. Don't bother them with the facts.

Some of their students became reporters, such as Thomas Friedman of "The New York Times," taking this prejudgment of reality into their uncritical coverage of the very flawed NAFTA and World Trade Organization agreements under President Clinton in the 1990s.

But Samuelson increasingly became an empiricist, along with his academic contributions in mathematical economics. Before one of his book revisions in the '70s, he wrote me asking for whatever materials I thought would be useful regarding consumer protection and consumer fraud. He presaged the relatively new field of behavioral economics and their obvious findings that consumers do not always maximize their best interests, and can act "irrationally" in a fast-paced marketplace of clever or unscrupulous sellers.

Gradually, Professor Sameulson saw trade between nations move from "comparative advantage" to more and more "absolute advantage." That is, companies were using the swift mobility of capital, modern factory machinery and transport to locate all elements of production - labor, capital, raw materials, and advanced know-how in one place - now most notably in China.

Absolute advantages have been aided by the corporate-managed trade agreements of WTO and NAFTA. These treaties are also conveniently violated to facilitate large subsidies that are not supposed to be used to lure companies to move. This trade in giveaways has China winning over the U.S., most recently in pulling American solar factories to China.

If corporate "free trade" is a win-win proposition, adhered to by one president after another, including Barack Obama, how come our country has piled up bigger trade deficits every year since 1976? Big is really big. Over the past decade our country has bought from abroad more than it has sold an average of well over half a trillion dollars each year.

In 1980 the U.S. was the world leading creditor - they owed us - while now, the U.S. is by far the world's leading debtor - we owe them!

At what point do the "free traders" cry "uncle" and rethink their commercial catechism? So long as multinational corporations control our politicians, it will not happen. For these companies are looking for the most worker-controlled, environmentally-pollutable and bribable countries to locate their manufacturing bases. Global companies are just that, bereft of any allegiance or grateful patriotism to their country of birth, profit and bailout salvation.

Here are three questions you may wish to ask any self-styled "free traders":

What amount of evidence do you require to get rid of your dogma and, as a minimum, start thinking like Paul Samuelson?

How much of the savings from lower costs abroad are going for large profits and not being passed on to the consumer who also has to endure the reported hazards of unregulated imports?

And, at what point do you look at L.L. Bean-type catalogs and ask whether you are getting a price break that is worth the debilitating dependency on other nations that use exploitation, repression, violations and outright counterfeiting as unfair methods of competition against our stateside companies and workers?

http://howlingforjustice.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/thanks-to-obama-and-co...

ONE TERM I NOW PROSELYTIZE FOR OBAMA! I LOVED JIMMY CARTER - I AM ASHAMED of OBAMA & 'forced' me AGAINST THE DEMS! TOXICWHOREObama!!!

MOST WTP FAIL AGAIN - save for PETITION Signers, Protesters of ALL KINDS & OCCUPY MOVEMENTS NATIONWIDE & INTERNATIONAL OCCUPY Movements!

{Been DEM since 13/14 years - by my Choice!}

JFI

Netanyahu's version of the Nuremberg Laws.

Arundhati Roy: "The People Who Created the Crisis Will Not Be the Ones That Come Up With a Solution"
Wednesday 30 November 2011
by: Arun Gupta, The Guardian UK

....AG: What would the different imagination look like?

AR: The home minister of India has said that he wants 70% of the Indian population in the cities, which means moving something like 500 million people off their land. That cannot be done without India turning into a military state. But in the forests of central India and in many, many rural areas, a huge battle is being waged. Millions of people are being driven off their lands by mining companies, by dams, by infrastructure companies, and a huge battle is being waged. These are not people who have been co-opted into consumer culture, into the western notions of civilisation and progress. They are fighting for their lands and their livelihoods, refusing to be looted so that someone somewhere far away may "progress" at their cost.

India has millions of internally displaced people. And now, they are putting their bodies on the line and fighting back. They are being killed and imprisoned in their thousands. Theirs is a battle of the imagination, a battle for the redefinition of the meaning of civilisation, of the meaning of happiness, of the meaning of fulfilment. And this battle demands that the world see that, at some stage, as the water tables are dropping and the minerals that remain in the mountains are being taken out, we are going to confront a crisis from which we cannot return. The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution....
http://www.truthout.com/arundhati-roy-people-who-created-crisis-will-not...

"And my point is that, whoever you vote for, it doesn't have to consume all the oxygen in the political debate. It's just an artificial theatre, which in a way is designed to subsume the anger and to make you feel that this is all that you're supposed to think about and talk about, when, in fact, you're trapped between two kinds of washing powder that are owned by the same company."

AG: As a novelist, you write a lot in terms of motivations and how characters interpret reality. Around the country, many occupiers we've talked to seem unable to reconcile their desires about Obama with what Obama really represents. When I talk to them about Obama's record, they say, "Oh, his hands are tied; the Republicans are to blame, it's not his fault." Why do you think people react like this, even at the occupations?

AR: Even in India, we have the same problem. We have a right wing that is so vicious and so openly wicked, which is the Baratiya Janata party (BJP), and then we have the Congress party, which does almost worse things, but does it by night. And people feel that the only choices they have are to vote for this or for that. And my point is that, whoever you vote for, it doesn't have to consume all the oxygen in the political debate. It's just an artificial theatre, which in a way is designed to subsume the anger and to make you feel that this is all that you're supposed to think about and talk about, when, in fact, you're trapped between two kinds of washing powder that are owned by the same company.

Democracy no longer means what it was meant to. It has been taken back into the workshop. Each of its institutions has been hollowed out, and it has been returned to us as a vehicle for the free market, of the corporations. For the corporations, by the corporations. Even if we do vote, we should just spend less time and intellectual energy on our choices and keep our eye on the ball.
http://www.truthout.com/arundhati-roy-people-who-created-crisis-will-not...

S. 1253 will allow indefinite military detention of American civilians without charge or trial
Coming soon to the U.S.?
Madison Ruppert, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

A sinister bill has quietly been introduced, so expansive in scope and dangerous in nature that it makes the PATRIOT Act look like the Bill of Rights.

This bill, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012, or S. 1253, has received tragically sparse coverage and I must admit that I was not aware of it until a reader emailed me about it.

If you think the PATRIOT Act is bad, just wait until you check out sections 1031, 1032, 1033, and 1036 of this horrific bill.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 1st of this year, addressed to the Chairman of the Committee, the “Honorable” Patrick Leahy, and Ranking Member of the Committee, the “Honorable” Charles Grassley who strongly decried the bill.

The title of the four-page letter itself reveals the truly dangerous nature of this legislation, “Judiciary Committee Should Assert Its Jurisdiction Over Those Aspects of the Detention Authority Provisions in S. 1253, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (Sections 1031, 1032, and 1036), That Affect Civilians Who Are Otherwise Outside of Military Control, Including Civilians Within the United States Itself.”

If these provisions are enacted, it would give the federal government the explicit power to imprison civilians, including American citizens, indefinitely with no charges or trial..........
http://www.activistpost.com/2011/11/s-1253-will-allow-indefinite-militar...

UPDATE: This provision is now cleared to pass the Senate unchanged. On a 37-61 vote the Senate rejected an amendment from Sen. Mark Udall [D, CO] that would have struck the provision from the bill. The full bill is expected to pas the Senate this week. President Obama has already issued a veto threat over the detention language, and from the roll call on the Udall amendment it appears that senators opposing the provision would have the votes to stop a veto override.
http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/2438-Read-the-Military-Detenti...

behind the curtains...

House votes to end public financing of presidential races

The U.S. House voted this afternoon to end the $3 checkoff on Americans' income tax forms that help underwrite presidential campaigns.

The Republican-backed measure, which passed 235-190, would end the decades-old system of providing taxpayer assistance to presidential candidates and political conventions. The savings would be applied to deficit reduction. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Gregg Harper, R-Miss., also would eliminate a commission that provides election assistance to states.

The measure faces dim prospects in the Democratic-controlled Senate, where a companion measure has languished all year. President Obama and a coalition of 11 watchdog groups also have opposed the bill.

...both the regional cultural differences and that, as I've said, this country is NOT a country but a union of seperate countries...This shift in definition is critical to understanding politics and any social movements within this union. How our situation parallels that of the E.U. might also be helpful in your thinking.

A Look at America's Geography Shows That the Tea Party Is Doomed

Even as the movement's grip tightens on the GOP, its influence is melting away across vast swaths of America, thanks to centuries-old regional traditions.

When 2011 began, the Tea Party movement had reason to think it had seized control of Maine. Their candidate, Paul LePage, the manager of a chain of scrappy surplus-and-salvage stores, had won the governor’s mansion on a promise to slash taxes, regulations, spending, and social services. Republicans had captured both houses of the state legislature for the first time in decades, to the surprise of the party’s leaders themselves. Tea Party sympathizers had taken over the GOP state convention, rewriting the party’s platform to demand the closure of the borders, the elimination of the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Department of Education, a prohibition on stimulus spending, a “return to the principles of Austrian Economics,” and a prohibition on “any participation in efforts to create a one world government.” A land developer had been put in charge of environmental protection, a Tea Party activist was made economic development chief, and corporate lobbyists served as the governor’s key advisers. A northern New England state’s rather liberal Democrats and notoriously moderate Republican establishment had been vanquished.

...

The real, historically based regional map of our continent respects neither state nor international boundaries, but it has profoundly influenced our history since the days of Jamestown and Plymouth, and continues to dictate the terms of political debate today. I spent years exploring the founding, expansion, and influence of these regional entities— stateless nations, really—while writing my new book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. It demonstrates that our country has never been united, either in purpose, principles, or political behavior. We’ve never been a nation-state in the European sense; we’re a federation of nations, more akin to the European Union than the Republic of France, and this confounds both collective efforts to find common ground and radical campaigns to force one component nation’s values on the others. Once you recognize the real map (see above), you’ll see its shadow everywhere: in linguists’ dialect maps, cultural anthropologist’s maps of the spread of material culture, cultural geographer’s maps of religious regions, and the famous blue county/red county maps of nearly every hotly contested presidential election of the past two centuries. Understanding America’s true component “nations” is essential to comprehending the Tea Party movement, just as it clarifies the events of the American Revolution or the U.S. Civil War

From our friends at 4closurefraud.org ............

COMPLAINT | COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS v. BANK OF AMERICA, JPMORGAN CHASE, CITIBANK, GMAC, WELLS FARGO, MERS, et al
Five National Banks Sued by AG Coakley in Connection with
Illegal Foreclosures and Loan Servicing
Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Citi, and GMAC
All Named As Defendants;
Mortgage Electronic Registration System (“MERS”) Also Sued

“The single most important thing we can do to return to a healthy economy is to address this foreclosure crisis,” said AG Coakley. “Our suit alleges that the banks have charted a destructive path by cutting corners and rushing to foreclose on homeowners without following the rule of law. Our action today seeks real accountability for the banks' illegal behavior and real relief for homeowners.”

MATT TAIBBI is having a party somewhere!

How are ya?

Does it really matter if new language in inserted into this specific Defense funding Senate bill 1867 purporting to protect Americans from indefinite detention?

No, because even a bill with softened language is only an exercise in incremental steps toward totalitarian authoritarianism.

Once the profitstream in the Military Industrial Complex is created to build the enlarged Indefinite Detention Infrastructure (a beneficiary of which is prison investor Dick Cheney!), the detention prison system will be ready for use. And it WILL be used. People will be found to fill the cells, keep the contracts renewed and increased. (And keep the Cheney's cruel wealth growing.)

The issue is not so much Americans being subjected to indefinite detention tomorrow -- but ANYONE on Earth subjected to this nightmare of psychological torture ever. The prison/detention industry from this and all our bulging prisons in the USA which worms like the Cheneys profit off must be STOPPED.

:|

finally, something we agree on.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how 'temporary solutions' become institutionalized and then carry on like zombies...

Perhaps that's an area that you could expound on?

it is only 8:29Ppm here.

the blog server is on EST

;)

... it is 3 hrs difference, not 4.}

All is on track now. It must have been a certain 'glitch'. ;D
All is 'right' with the world.

Published on Friday, December 2, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Deranged Senate Votes for Military Detention of All Terror Suspects and a Permanent Guantánamo
by Andy Worthington
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/02-7

Pakistan Orders Troops to Return Fire

Islamabad - Pakistan's top military commander has issued orders to the country's troops to return fire should they come under attack again from U.S.-led coalition forces in a move likely to increase tensions after last week's American-led raid on two border outposts that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, Pakistan’s army chief, issued the order in a letter to his troops that set out the rules of engagement against any “aggressor......

“I want to emphasize and leave no ambiguity in the rules of engagement for everyone down the chain of command,” Kayani said in the letter to his troops. “When under attack, you have full liberty of action to respond with all capabilities at your disposal. This will require no clearance at any level.”

“I have very clearly directed that any act of aggression will be responded with full force, regardless of the cost and consequences.”....
http://www.truthout.com/pakistan-orders-troops-return-fire-if-attacked-a...

Obama administration consulting other nations on Nicaragua

The Obama administration is consulting with Western Hemisphere nations to coordinate a reaction to allegations of fraud in Nicaragua’s presidential election last month, a top White House advisor said Thursday....

....two South Florida Republicans in the U.S. Congress urged President Barack Obama to take a strong stand against Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s “unconstitutional” re-election.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who heads the House foreign affairs committee, told a committee hearing on Nicaragua that the Obama administration “appeared to do nothing” as Ortega maneuvered around a constitution that forbids re-election.

“The U.S. must not recognize Daniel Ortega as Nicaragua’s leader and should call for new free, fair, and transparent elections … that are in keeping with Nicaragua’s constitution and reflect the will of the Nicaraguan people,” Ros-Lehtinen added.

Rep. David Rivera said many of his Nicaraguan-American constituents have told him that “they see from this administration a lack of support for the forces of democracy in the region, and silence toward the forces of dictatorship in the region, such as Mr. Ortega and his dictatorial actions.”

Cuban-American Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ) at the same time introduced a bipartisan resolution supporting the democratic aspirations of the Nicaraguan people and condemning the continuing deterioration of constitutional order in the Central American nation....
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/12/02/131941/obama-administration-consul...

Chavez: New regional group revives Bolivar's dream
AP foreign, Friday December 2 2011

...Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is tapping into that legacy at a two-day summit of the Americas starting Friday. Chavez describes the new regional bloc that excludes the U.S. as a tribute to his idol, saying the time has come to put an end to U.S. hegemony.

"This is the achievement after 200 years of battle," Chavez said Thursday. "The Monroe Doctrine was imposed here: America for Americans, the Yankees. They imposed their will during 200 years, but that's enough."

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega echoed Chavez's statements, saying it's time for Latin American and Caribbean countries to ensure the policy of U.S. intervention to protect hemispheric nations, declared by President James Monroe in 1823, is never revived.

"We are sentencing the Monroe Doctrine to death," said Ortega, speaking before joining fellow presidents for the summit's opening ceremony on Friday.

Chavez also sees the nascent Community of Latin American and Caribbean States as a tool to strengthen regional integration.

"We must march toward what Bolivar called a great political body," Chavez said.

The 33-nation bloc, known by its Spanish initials CELAC, includes every country in Latin America and the Caribbean. Unlike the Washington-based Organization of American States, or OAS, it will have Cuba as a full member and will exclude the U.S. and Canada.

Cuban President Raul Castro also supported Chavez's stance as he arrived Friday, saying the creation of the new bloc is "the biggest event in 200 years." .........
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9976630

Once again, war is prime time and journalism's role is taboo
1 December 2011

On 22 May 2007, the Guardian's front page announced: "Iran's secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq." The writer, Simon Tisdall, claimed that Iran had secret plans to defeat American troops in Iraq, which included "forging ties with al-Qaida elements". The coming "showdown" was an Iranian plot to influence a vote in the US Congress. Based entirely on briefings by anonymous US officials, Tisdall's "exclusive" rippled with lurid tales of Iran's "murder cells" and "daily acts of war against US and British forces". His 1,200 words included just 20 for Iran's flat denial.

It was a load of rubbish: in effect a Pentagon press release presented as journalism and reminiscent of the notorious fiction that justified the bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003. Among Tisdall's sources were "senior advisers" to General David Petraeus, the US military commander who in 2006 described his strategy of waging a "war of perceptions... conducted continuously through the news media....

...Last month, the Guardian's front page carried another "exclusive": "MoD prepares to take part in US strikes against Iran". Again, anonymous officials were quoted. This time the theme was the "threat" posed by the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon. The latest "evidence" was warmed-over documents obtained from a laptop in 2004 by US intelligence and passed to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Numerous authorities have cast doubt on these suspected forgeries, including a former IAEA chief weapons inspector. A US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks describes the new head of the IAEA, Yukiuya Amano, as "solidly in the US court" and "ready for prime time".

The Guardian's 3 November "exclusive" and the speed with which its propaganda spread across the media were also prime time. This is known as "information dominance" by the media trainers at the Ministry of Defence's psyops (psychological warfare) establishment at Chicksands, Bedforshire, who share premises with the instructors of the interrogation methods that have led to a public enquiry into British military torture in Iraq. Disinformation and the barbarity of colonial warfare have historically had much in common.

Having beckoned a criminal assault on Iran, the Guardian opined that this "would of course be madness". Similar arse-covering was deployed when Tony Blair, once a "mystical" hero in polite liberal circles, plotted with George W. Bush and caused a bloodbath in Iraq. With Libya recently dealt with ("It worked," said the Guardian), Iran is next, it seems.

The role of respectable journalism in western state crimes -- from Iraq to Iran, Afghanistan to Libya - remains taboo. It is currently deflected by the media theatre of the Leveson enquiry into phone hacking, which Daily Telegraph's Benedict Brogan describes as "a useful stress test". Blame Rupert Murdoch and the tabloids for everything and business can continue as usual. As disturbing as the stories are from Lord Leveson's witness stand......
http://johnpilger.com/articles/once-again-war-is-prime-time-and-journali...

Wall Street’s Failed 1934 Coup
by MICHAEL DONNELLY
“In the last few weeks of the committee’s official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country…There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.”

– Report of the McCormack-Dickstein Committee

A Patriot, not the Traitor they wanted

You know the coup plot they teach all young Americans about in 10th Grade History class? Oh yeah…

In November 1934, famed double Medal of Honor winner Marine Gen. Smedley Butler gave secret testimony before the McCormack-Dickstein committee – a precursor to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In it, Butler told of a plot headed by a group of wealthy businessmen (The American Liberty League) to establish a fascist dictatorship in the United States, complete with concentration camps for “Jews and other undesirables.”

Show Me the Money

Butler had been approached by Gerald P. MacGuire of Wall Street...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/02/wall-streets-failed-1934-coup/

Don't I recall a time when it offended you when anyone here referred to Hillary Clinton in terms such as "whore"...Oh, I mean "WHORE!"?

It is offensive to me, btw. Why? Because there are SO many other worthy people in politics who are more deemed to be termed as such. Not one of the candidates in any election in my memory or in history has a person done so much for the average citizen as Ralph Nader. And even if there is such a candidate, that has done so much for so many, Ralph would still not deserve such a disrespectful title.

TOWN.

Mele: Fires Considered Act Of Terrorism

http://www.mymotherlode.com/news/local/1401757/Mele-Fires-Considered-Act...

Mele is the Sheriff.

This really irritates me. Counties or States must get money for considering something an "act of terrorism"...*grrr*

I guess you don't remember what occured - regarding utilizing the word WHORE!

RANDI RHODES, IN MY CITY, CALLED HILLARY A WHORE {FIRST}, which is to me calling me and ANYONE VOTING FOR HILLARY A WHORE = 1/2 of DEMS!

NADER SOLD OUT TO THE RETHUGS thus he SOLD HIMSELF FOR RETHUG MONEY = A WHORE.
I was Pro nader all my life until he SOLD HIMSELF TO THE ORE RETHUGS!

I was NOT naming you - I AM ALLOWED TO STATE MY OPINION ONE TIME - COMPARED TO MANY TIMES YOU ALWAYS PUT UP NADER and YOUR OPINION!

Following your opinion is my response to said opinion.

i.e. 1 divided by 10 (you have stated your & Nader's opinion and articles many more times but i am keeping it simple...{as an example}

= 1/10 {is originally stated then...whatever)

"supposed" arsonist in my ol' "stomping grounds" in/of Sonora.

http://www.mymotherlode.com/news/local/1401757/Mele-Fires-Considered-Act...

(I usually put the poster's name & time... but no way now!)

* I think I misread a 'post' thinking it was a newer one, but I 'think' I was wrong! :)

I didn't realize Carolla was such an idiot and a jerk. (Check out his OWS rant.)

Life goes on!

It's not the 4th of July....but it is Saturday....

One of my derby mates...(the one who kills animals for her families meat supply every winter)...posted that Adam Carolla rant on her fb...and my own mother sounds like him too..."Why should I pay for all the lazy people?" I can't even think of any more ways to describe my disgust with these sort of people...

from the same cloth as those who denied the Great Depression.

Does that creep still have a radio show? If so, hey Occupy LA.

http://sweet0tea.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/they-were-clean-but-inside-out...

http://bambuser.com/channel/cville/broadcast/2174799

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dceMX0rNdPA

------
I felt both of the ways that I said I might feel, Alice, cuz things are in the middle. There is still a meeting at dinner time but no dinner. Plus I lost my spiffy green LO hat. : ( The good is that we (they?) may step up our (their?) game politically. The bad is that it will have to be planned in secret among a clique...

Police arrested some 800 students at the University of California at Berkeley who had stormed the administration buildingthe previous day and staged a massive sit-in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVo4tAgMpvM

(I gave up being a whore. Nobody seems to want me.)

Brown first gained attention when he led small groups of volunteers during the Bleeding Kansas crisis. Unlike most other Northerners, who advocated peaceful resistance to the pro-slavery faction, Brown demanded violent action in response to Southern aggression. Dissatisfied with the pacifism encouraged by the organized abolitionist movement, he reportedly said, "These men are all talk. What we need is action—action!" During the Kansas campaign he and his supporters killed five pro-slavery southerners in what became known as the Pottawatomie Massacre in May 1856 in response to the raid of the "free soil" city of Lawrence. In 1859 he led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry...........
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_%28abolitionist%29

There are many white people in this country, especially the younger generation, who realize that the injustice that has been done and is being done to black people cannot go on without the chickens coming home to roost eventually. And those white people, even if they’re not morally motivated, their intelligence forces them to see that something must be done. And many of them would be willing to involve themselves in the type of operation that you were just talking about.

For one, when a white man comes to me and tells me how liberal he is, the first thing I want to know, is he a nonviolent liberal, or the other kind. I don’t go for any nonviolent white liberals. If you are for me and my problems – when I say me, I mean us, our people – then you have to be willing to do as old John Brown did. And if you’re not of the John Brown school of liberals, we’ll get you later – later.
Malcolm X

Police fired in the air, lobbed tear gas shells and baton charged as violence and arson rocked parts of Bhopal's old city on Saturday, the 27th anniversary of the 1984 gas tragedy. Thousands of activists, gas leak survivors and their supporters clashed with the police during a rail roko agitation.

Protesters pelted stones and torched vehicles. Two vehicles of SDMs were damaged by protesters. Several cars and two wheelers were torched by the mob. Train service to Bhopal was suspended till evening as demonstrators squatted on railway tracks. They pelted reporters with stones, too....

Over hundred people, including senior police officers, were injured in the violence. Many were rushed to hospitals, bleeding profusely. Prohibitory orders were imposed at Barkhedi. Police arrested 16 people. This is the first time violence erupted on the anniversary of Bhopal gas leak. Four organizations of gas leak victims and activists had announced the rail roko agitation demanding that the government at least declare the precise death toll in the gas leak case. That would help victims and survivors claim legal compensation.....
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Bhopal-gas-tragedy-Violence-mar...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

http://www.livestream.com/newchannel/popoutplayer?channel=occupyptown

and Commissioner Nick Fish
December 2nd, 2011
To Sam Adams, Mike Reese, and Nick Fish:

On December 3rd, Occupy Portland will once again occupy a public space. We have decided to do this after carefully considering many of the concerns expressed about our previous encampment, the sustainability of the space and the occupation, the environmental impact of our stay, the security concerns some have voiced, and the disruptions that may be caused to those around the park.

We do this in solidarity with Occupy movements around this country and this planet because we have the right to peacefully assemble on public property and because we have grievances with a variety of injustices in our society that have not been redressed. The proposal of this occupation is simple:

We will only occupy this park for two weeks;

We will clean up, for as long as it is necessary, to remove all litter, rake and till the ground, and replant any of the park’s plant life that requires such action under the direction of the Parks Commissioner and Portland Parks & Recreation;

We will have a group of volunteers ready to do this and will dedicate a portion (at our discretion) of any donations received by Occupy Portland toward the materials necessary to accomplish this end;

We will constantly ensure that our actions are having the smallest impact possible upon the public space, for example by using mesh tubing to ensure no damage is done to trees by any ropes which are fixed, using canopy tents instead of tarps where possible, and trying to contain much of the camp to brick or paved areas where available;

Although we attempt to make the space and the community as inclusive as possible, we will encourage a security culture in the space by rigorously keeping our protest in compliance with the established Code of Conduct which was passed by the Occupy Portland General Assembly earlier this fall, and employing an idea promoted by Gandhi known as “Shanti Sena”, or “Peace Army”, where anyone that hears this call is directed to immediately assist the person making the call with whatever issue has arisen.

Occupy Portland would like to create a space that works for all, and learning from the experiences of our first camp, we hope to see in what ways the City believes these things can best be accomplished. While we are hoping to address concerns the City may have, we categorically reject the idea that the dissolution of our encampment is an answer to any of these issues, and implore both the City of Portland and the Portland Police to be forthright, honest and measured in their interactions and expression with the public.

The ideas which the City is concerned about are solvable, and we hope to see our public officials engage in actions which attempt to solve them instead of simply shoving them aside.

Signed,
Occupy Portland

;)

December 2, 2011
Obama's November Approval Weak From Historical Perspective
Only Carter had lower job approval during November of his third year
by Jeffrey M. Jones

PRINCETON, NJ -- President Obama's 43% average job approval rating last month ranks as one of the lowest for an elected president in November of his third year in office. Only Jimmy Carter had a lower rating, at 40%.

But Carter's rating surged in late November 1979 because of a rally in support after the onset of the Iranian Hostage Crisis,

and he averaged above 50% in December.....

...Gallup finds that presidents are generally re-elected if their approval rating at the time of the election is at least 50%, though George W. Bush was re-elected with a 48% approval rating in 2004. Thus, Obama's current 43% job approval rating is not an encouraging sign for his re-election prospects.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/151106/Obama-November-Approval-Weak-Historica...

Iran shoots (sic)down US drone

Iranian military official quoted as warning of crushing response after unmanned spy plane is shot down
Iran's armed forces have shot down an unmanned US spy plane that violated Iranian airspace along its eastern border.....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/04/iran-shoots-down-us-drone

obama, now there's a real whore.

http://derbynewsnetwork.com/

......

Rudy Nguyen, 10, is homeless.

Last week, he was sleeping on the floor at a San Francisco drop-in homeless shelter with his parents and 3-year-old brother Danny. Thin mats kept them off hard linoleum.

In the last two months, he spent three nights at a bus shelter and a week on the streets, sleeping on his parents' laps in a park.

Yet every morning, Rudy Nguyen takes two Muni buses to San Francisco's Spring Valley elementary school, where the fourth-grader is expected to be ready to read, write and multiply numbers - like every other kid in school.

Rudy is among a growing number of San Francisco schoolchildren in homeless families who too often come to class cold, hungry and sleep-deprived, making learning difficult if not impossible.

"If you're not fed, if you're not warm, if you're not sleeping ... you can't turn that off and focus on double-digit multiplication," said Jessica Chiarchiaro, Rudy's fourth-grade teacher.

In the city's public schools, there are 2,200 homeless children, some in shelters, others in cars, or on couches, or in long-term hotel rooms. That's 400 more homeless children than a year ago.

...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/04/MNPB1M7IB9.D...

sleepy sunday nights )

http://thesportsstuff.com/?p=3698

Published by Dylan Richardson

Fox Business' Follow The Money Unmasks The Muppets' Liberal Agenda: "Brainwashing" Your Kids!

In Texas Welfare Office, Mother Denied Food Stamps Shoots Her Two Kids Before Killing Herself

The sad state of our economy appears to have taken at least one more life. On Monday, a Texas welfare office became the scene of an ugly suicide, where a mother shot her two children before successfully killing herself, officials told the Huffington Post. Her kids, aged 10 and 12, were in critical condition Tuesday.
Continue Reading

Court Says Blogger Isn’t a ‘Journalist’ — Implications for Hyperlocal
06 DECEMBER 2011
BY BRIAN DENGLER

A federal judge in Portland, Oregon has declared that a local “investigative blogger,” doesn’t qualify as a journalist — calling into question whether online hyperlocal news publishers should be treated differently than traditional media.

Chrystal Cox calls herself an “investigative blogger” and runs sites “exposing corruption.” Obsidian Finance Group filed a $10 million defamation claim against Cox in Portland, alleging that she made several defamatory postings against Obsidian and its co-founder, Kevin Padrick. Cox defended herself in federal court but lost. According to a report by Seattle Weekly, she faces a $2.5 million judgment.

Cox claimed her information for the Obsidian postings came from a confidential source, and, therefore, Oregon’s Shield Law protected her from disclosing her source at trial. In an opinion filed on November 30, 2011, Federal Judge Marco Hernandez (nomination/appointment and biography) disagreed, ruling that Oregon’s Shield Law was limited to traditional media like newspapers, broadcast stations, magazines, and news services — but not to an “investigative blogger” who was not affiliated with traditional media.
Continue Reading

Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.
Continue Reading

...Billion dollars - not so much.

How to Start Participatory Budgeting in Your City
by Maria Hadden and Josh Lerner

Have you noticed all the cuts being made to your city budget? To schools and libraries, fire fighters and social services, and other public spending? Think you could do a better job managing the budget? Soon, you may have that chance.

Through a process called “participatory budgeting”, residents of over 1,000 cities around the world are deciding how to spend taxpayer dollars. In October, four districts in New York City launched the second such process in the US. This article offers some initial tips for how you could start participatory budgeting in your city.
Continued Reading

NAACP Legal Defense Fund

(New York, NY) -- Today, the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office announced that it will not seek another death sentence for Mumia Abu-Jamal. Pennsylvania law now requires Mr. Abu-Jamal to be sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for his controversial 1982 murder conviction in the shooting death of a police officer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), along with Widener Law Professor Judith Ritter, represents Mr. Abu-Jamal in his appeals of the murder conviction and death sentence. John Payton, Director-Counsel of LDF stated, "The District Attorney did the right thing. After three long decades, it was time to bring the quest for a death sentence for Mr. Abu-Jamal to an end." Prof. Ritter added, "There is no question that justice is served when a death sentence from a misinformed jury is overturned. Thirty years later, the District Attorney' s decision not to seek a new death sentence also furthers the interests of justice."

Mr. Abu-Jamal will be formally resentenced to life without parole in the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas. The final sentencing hearing has not been scheduled.

YEA 99'rs!
;D

--

Federal judge: Montana blogger is not journalist

AP - By JEFF BARNARD

Dec.7th 2011

A federal judge in Oregon has ruled that a Montana woman sued for defamation was not a journalist when she posted online that an Oregon lawyer acted criminally during a bankruptcy case, a decision with implications for bloggers around the country.

Crystal L. Cox, a blogger from Eureka, Mont., was sued for defamation by attorney Kevin Padrick when she posted online that he was a thug and a thief during the handling of bankruptcy proceedings by him and Obsidian Finance Group LLC.

U.S. District Judge Marco Hernandez found last week that as a blogger, Cox was not a journalist and cannot claim the protections afforded to mainstream reporters and news outlets.

Although media experts said Wednesday that the ruling would have little effect on the definition of journalism, it casts a shadow on those who work in nontraditional media since it highlights the lack of case law that could protect them and the fact that current state shield laws for journalists are not covering recent developments in online media.

Con't..

Federal judge: Montana blogger is not journalist - Yahoo! News

--

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

MMRules

Containing Media
Submitted by CeeCee on Wed, 12/07/2011 - 11:44am.

*******

I didn't see your post above.. :)

**

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

MMRules

49ers beat Rams 26-0 for 1st playoffs since '02
Submitted by Alice on Mon, 12/05/2011 - 12:23am.

*******
Alice..
My Chargers just won a game Mon.Night..
First win since Oct. or something..Yep Pee..

Go 49ers ! :)

**

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

MMRules

http://action.foe.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=8948
;)

Sometimes ya just can't make this sh*t up.
Brick TeeVee and the Euro Disaster! over there -------->
Brick TeeVee and the Euro Disaster! at blogger/blogspot

Some weeks ago I bitched about how the "payroll tax cut" was undermining Social Security and how I wanted to EXEMPT my payroll deduction and put my $20 "tax cut" into SSN. I wrote to my congresscritters and so far NADA. But I found THIS:

National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare writes to Senate Majority Leader Harry "Milque Toast" Reid a Letter on the Social Security Payroll Tax Cut

... While we agree that providing tax relief to middle class Americans is likely to help our economic recovery continue, we do not believe that extending or expanding cuts to Social Security's revenue funding is the best way to accomplish this goal. In fact, the payroll tax cut, coupled with legislation that substitutes the trust funds' lost revenue with general fund transfers, would leave Social Security increasingly dependent on both general revenue and the actions of Congress for its funding. Such a funding mechanism would be a dramatic and dangerous departure from relying on workers' contributions, which have so successfully funded the program since its inception in 1935. Extending and expanding the payroll tax cut further endangers Social Security's financial integrity and could undermine our efforts to defend the program from benefit cuts or privatization....

We at the BTV compound basically get back about the cost of a case of beer a month we'd rather put into our SS fund now. Write, phone, text, email and basically harass your congresscritters every day!
More ideas at www.ncpssm.org !!!

LET'S ROCK!

If the thread turns over can someone repost this?
Thanks in advance!

Now let's see -- just how will today's Oppressors deal with The Wall Street Derivative Scam when they instruct their historians to write a history of this time period?

a. Government. It was all the fault of "government", for example, in the form of government-authorized Fannie May and Freddie Mac guarantors.
b. What Scam? The only scam was in the imaginations of mere conspiracy theorists.
c. The entire world economy collapsed because of a few poor Americans who finagled unsecured loans from unsuspecting mortgage companies.
d. It was caused by "global warming". "Global warming" came along a few months before the collapse. It was all due to "global warming".

Super powerful lecture shows how the history of AFRICA has been hidden, twisted and changed by Oppressors for centuries now...

Part one--

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJMrGL9_fzg&feature=related

Don't allow the Establishment Elite be the ones who prevent press/media coverage and then proceed to command the writing of the only history of the events you are now experiencing.

Case in point: The inhumane treatment of wild mustangs and the genocidal policy of the USA Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/blm-nev-horse-roundup-included-us...

[excerpt]

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s internal review of a wild horse roundup in Nevada found some mustangs were whipped in the face, kicked in the head, dragged by a rope around the neck, and repeatedly shocked with electrical prods, but the agency concluded none of the mistreatment rose to the level of being inhumane.

[read more at link]

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

Bureau of Land Management-- Isn't that the agency that could have prevented the insane decisions and missteps that lead up to the BP (British Petroleum) Deepwater Horizon Oil Drilling Disaster that continues to POLLUTE and KILL the Gulf Coast of the USA? Still up to their usual sell-out operating procedure, aren't they? Because it is no coincidence that the MINING and DRILLING CORPORATIONS want the wild horses removed so they can build their gas/fuel pipelines across wild horse habitat preserves. WHEN will the Bureau of Land Management (Interior Department) become an agency that serves the longterm needs of the nation, instead of the shortterm profiteering desires of the Corporations/Elite?

Interesting to see this at Forbes...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/12/10/sopa-the-ndaa-and-patent...

[excerpt]

...

We need to elect more men and women willing to stand up against bills that strip away our basic rights. We have more to fear from these laws than we do from terrorism or internet piracy. We need leaders on the left and the right who reflect American values, and not American fears.

[read more at link]

Max Keiser sorts out what's revealed by European Union mess and the Fraudsters...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo9o6g1-nkM&feature=player_embedded

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2011/12/11/bfp-exclusive-developing-stor...

Tell the Department of Justice to prosecute real high crimes and leave sick people alone as they receive treatment for their ills! Also, it's a fact: medical marijuana is proven successful for numerous ills; and alleviating suffering is more important than boosting corporate pharmaceutical profits. Time to expose the DOJ's screwed up priorities.--

http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=5142

(Team Red won the two day tournament...a Hellcat was on Team Blue) :)

Rocky Anderson a progressive alternative to Obama
Former Salt Lake mayor says Democrats, Republicans sustain corrupt system
by Steven Higgs
December 14, 2011

Presidential candidate Rocky Anderson is running on the Justice Party ticket. He says Barack Obama has accepted more Wall Street money than any candidate in U.S. history.

Americans who feel betrayed by timid, capitulatory leadership from Democrats like President Barack Obama and Indiana Senate candidate Joe Donnelly now have a candidate to consider at the presidential level. On Dec. 12, 2011, former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson announced his candidacy on the Justice Party ticket and the next day laid out a solidly progressive agenda on Democracy Now!........

Obama's Kansas speech on income inequality last week was "total hypocrisy," Anderson said. The president has accepted more Wall Street money than any other candidate in history, and he is surrounded by alumni from Goldman Sachs.

"All any of us have to do is look at our pension plans, our 401(k) accounts, and we can see the direct impacts of this economic disaster, brought to us through, by and large, these criminal acts committed by these Wall Street firms and their employees," he said. "And not one of them has been brought to justice under the Obama administration."

Anderson compared Obama's Wall Street contributions and subsequent timidity to his relationship with polluting industries from whom he took money and then effectively vetoed EPA efforts to impose more strict ozone standards on them.

"We know that’s not in the public interest," he said. "President Obama has to know that’s not in the public interest. He’s serving the interest of those polluting industries."

The corrupting influence of money from the medical insurance industry is why America is the only country in the industrialized world without a single-payer health care system, Anderson added.

"The failure – in terms of every major public policy issue – to serve the public interest can be attributed to that corrupting influence of money," he said. "Just follow the money, and you’ll see why Congress and the White House are pursuing these policies that are so inimical to the interest of the American people."....

Two-party collusion on retroactive immunity to telecom companies is another example of bipartisan decay, Anderson said on Democracy Now!.

"Then-Senator Obama promised this nation, before the primary, before he won the Democratic primary for the presidency, that he would join a filibuster against telecom company immunity," he said. Not only did he not filibuster, he voted for the legislation. "Who in this country gets Congress to grant them retroactive immunity for committing clearly felonious acts?"

The same goes for Obama's about face on domestic "war criminals" who engaged in torture in violation of international and domestic law, Anderson told Goodman. "We have this special class of people who aren’t even held accountable under the law."....
http://www.bloomingtonalternative.com/node/10879

Published on Wednesday, December 14, 2011 by The Providence Journal (Rhode Island)
President Obama Richly Deserves to Be Dumped
by John R. MacArthur

As evidence of a failed Obama presidency accumulates, criticism of his administration is mounting from liberal Democrats who have too much moral authority to be ignored.

Most prominent among these critics is veteran journalist Bill Moyers, whose October address to a Public Citizen gathering puts the lie to our barely Democratic president’s populist pantomime, acted out last week in a Kansas speech decrying the plight of “innocent, hardworking Americans.” In his talk, Moyers quoted an authentic Kansas populist, Mary Eizabeth Lease, who in 1890 declared, “Wall Street owns the country.. . .Money rules.. . .The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.”........
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/14-6

By the Numbers
Written on December 14, 2011

The backlash against Lowe’s home improvement story following their ad-pull from the “All American Muslim” reality TV show on TLC just won’t go away. A letter is making the blog rounds urging the home improvement chain to stop using Arabic numbers in their stores as this only supports Islamic extremism. The website patriotboy has this posted:

Please write Lowes, today, and ask them to stop exposing our children to Arabic Islamonumbers.

Here’s a sample letter:

Dear Lowes,

We’re not fooled by your paternalistic attempt to silence our righteous whining by pulling ads from the teevee show, “All-American Muslim.” You are still exposing our children to the Islamuninistoprog agenda through your use of Arabic numbers in your pricing and measurement systems.

We demand that you cease using these Islamonumbers immediately and replace them with good, old fashioned, American Roman numerals.

The change should not be difficult to make. For example, you’d simply change something currently priced at $1,783.84 to $MDCCLXXXIII.LXXXIV. Nothing to it.

Please make the change immediately. We’re watching you.

Gotta love the creativity you find on the Internets....
http://www.mikemalloy.com/

Hopefully, beating the pathetic Bills will be their last win of the year. We want them to lose out.
No excuses to save Turner or Smith.
No more wins. No more excuses.
Hopefully, we don't get Wade Phillips.

Too bad we have to lose the division to Tebow and Moral Majority, however. Every win gets Tim closer to being governor of Colorado and then the presidency.

Monday, 12 December 2011
Don't attack Iran - Stop the War meeting
George Galloway (20 minutes)
http://www.votegeorgegalloway.com/2011/12/dont-attack-iran-stop-war-meet...

Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Soviet-Armed Iraq Switches Allegiance to US Weapons Systems
by Thalif Deen

NEW YORK - As the United States withdraws the last of its 50,000 troops after a nearly nine-year military occupation of Iraq, visiting Iraqi President Nuri al-Maliki had one final request: billions of dollars worth of U.S. weapons for his ragtag armed forces.

A longstanding Soviet and later Russian ally, Iraq under former president Saddam Hussein never had an ongoing military relationship with the United States.

Now, Iraq is gradually abandoning its huge arsenal of primarily Russian and French equipment in favour of U.S. arms.

At a White House meeting Monday, al-Maliki was assured a second batch of 18 sophisticated F-16 fighter planes to help rebuild the country's dilapidated air force, whose helicopters and missiles the U.S. destroyed during its long-drawn-out war beginning March 2003.

The Iraqis have already indicated that their military needs will include a total of 96 F-16 fighter jets in four separate orders.

The Iraqi president told the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama that his country will depend on the U.S. not only for new weapons systems but also for training under the U.S. International Military Education and Training (IMET) Programme.
Continue Reading

Round and round we go. Wouldn't it be lovely:

--if we stopped the cycle;
--if those who persuaded Lowe's to stop advertising during a show portraying Muslims as actual human beings, put their effort into supporting an arrangement for Iraq that would be truly pro-life;
--if reality weren't so bleak.

Bill and Melinda Gates's Foundation Helps ALEC Undercut Public Education
From The Buzzflash Blog

...Last year, I wrote a piece about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's relationship to the chemical company Monsanto and the agribusiness giant Cargill (http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/11834). The gist of the story was that the Foundation had bought 500,000 Monsanto shares worth around $23 million in the second quarter of 2010. Critics pointed out that amongst other things, Monsanto has for years had a negative impact on small farmers, especially in Africa.

And some critics are highly skeptical about some of the Gates Foundation's choices, particularly as it relates to education in the United States. According to the Gates Foundation website, their education mission in the U.S. is pretty straightforward: "... to dramatically improve education so that all young people have the opportunity to reach their full potential. We seek to ensure that all students graduate from high school ready for college and career and prepared to complete a postsecondary degree or certificate with value in the workplace."

Would it surprise you to learn that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently gave more than $300,000 to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a shadowy right-wing organization that has inordinate power in state legislatures across the country.

In November, the foundation announced that it has awarded the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) (http://www.alec.org/) a grant of $376,635 earmarked for ALEC's work on an assortment of education projects, over a 22-month period. The Gates Foundation's official description of the grant reads: "to educate and engage its membership on more efficient state budget approaches to drive greater student outcomes, as well as educate them on beneficial ways to recruit, retain, evaluate and compensate effective teaching based upon merit and achievement."...

Rush Limbaugh's Ratings Have Fallen 30% In The Last Six Months

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/rush-limbaugh-hannity-imus-radio-ratings-...

BECOME A MEMBER

Report: Child homelessness up 33% in 3 years
By Marisol Bello
December 14, 2011

One in 45 children in the USA — 1.6 million children — were living on the street, in homeless shelters or motels, or doubled up with other families last year, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness.
Continue reading here

Just verified with Superintendent John Kerestes that Mumia Abu-Jamal is being held in Administrative
Custody at SCI Mahanoy, Frackville, PA until he is cleared to enter general population within a few days.

We need phone calls to the institution to let them know that the WORLD is watching Mumia's movements
and ask general questions so that they know that nothing they are doing is happening under cover of
darkness. Please also send cards and letters to Mumia at the new address so that he begins receiving
mail immediately and it is known to all of the people there that we are with him!

PHONE NUMBER: 570-773-2158

MAILING ADDRESS:

Mumia Abu-Jamal, #AM8335
SCI Mahanoy
301 Morea Road
Frackville, PA 17932

CURRENT VISITORS on Mumia's list will allegedly be OK'd to visit once their names are entered
into the computer at Frackville. NEW VISITORS will have to receive the pertinent forms directly
from Mumia.

DIRECTIONS TO THE PRISON are available at http://www.cheapjailcalls.com/correctional-facility-directory/state-pris...

PLEASE HELP SPREAD THE WORD!!!

Muammar Gaddafi's daughter has asked the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) whether an investigation has been launched into the killing of her father and brother.

Aisha Gaddafi's lawyer Nick Kaufman said on Wednesday that he had written to ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo asking for more information on the October 20 killing of the former Libyan leader and his son Motassim.

"Aisha wants to know if he is investigating the murders and if not, why he is not," Kaufman told AFP news agency.

The letter said that Gaddafi and his son were "murdered in the most horrific fashion with their bodies thereafter displayed and grotesquely abused in complete defiance of Islamic law," Reuters reported.....

Aisha fled with other family members to neighbouring Algeria in August.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2011/12/2011121423540435215.html

(Sitting Bull (Lakota: Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake (in Standard Lakota Orthography),[2] also nicknamed Slon-he or "Slow"; (c. 1831 – December 15, 1890) was a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux holy man who led his people as a tribal chief during years of resistance to United States government policies. Born near the Grand River in Dakota Territory, he was killed by Indian agency police on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation during an attempt to arrest him and prevent him from supporting the Ghost Dance movement....)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitting_Bull

4. Supremacy of the Military
...Soldiers and military service are glamorized

Posted on Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Marines promoted inflated story for Medal of Honor recipient

With Dakota Meyer standing at attention in his dress uniform, sweat glistening on his forehead under the television lights, President Barack Obama extolled the former Marine corporal for the “extraordinary actions” that had earned him the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor....

But there's a problem with this account: Crucial parts that the Marine Corps publicized and Obama described are untrue, unsubstantiated or exaggerated, according to dozens of military documents McClatchy examined.

Sworn statements by Meyer and others who participated in the battle indicate that he didn’t save the lives of 13 U.S. service members, leave his vehicle to scoop up 24 Afghans on his first two rescue runs or lead the final push to retrieve the four dead Americans. Moreover, it’s unclear from the documents whether Meyer disobeyed orders when he entered the Ganjgal Valley on Sept. 8, 2009.

The statements also offer no proof that the 23-year-old Kentucky native "personally killed at least eight Taliban insurgents," as the account on the Marine Corps website says. The driver of Meyer’s vehicle attested to seeing “a single enemy go down...

n response to McClatchy's findings, the Marine Corps said it stood by the official citation that was produced by the formal vetting process. Asked to explain the individual discrepancies and embellishments, the Marines drew a distinction between the citation and the account of Meyer's deeds that the Marines constructed to help tell his story to the nation. They described that account as "Meyer's narrative of the sequence of events," which Marine officials said they didn't vet.

Hours before this McClatchy report was published, the Marine Corps inserted a disclaimer into its official online account of Meyer's heroic actions. The Web page now reads that the summary "was compiled in collaboration" with Meyer and Marine Corps Public Affairs.

A prominent historian of military medals, Doug Sterner, expressed disbelief at the idea that the Marine Corps would publicize an account of a complex battle based solely on the recipient's recollections.

"Give me a break," Sterner said. "A recipient is responsible for writing his narrative? I have never heard of such a thing."

The Marine officials, who requested anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity, acknowledged that portions of the narrative were changed from the account Williams submitted. They said that the changes occurred between July, when Obama approved Meyer’s medal nomination, and the September White House ceremony. Inaccuracies were written into the citation and the narrative of Meyer’s deeds, although the narrative contained far more errors and exaggerations................

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/12/14/133134/medal-of-honor-inflated-sto...

Published on Thursday, December 15, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Congressional Tyranny, White House Surrender
by Ralph Nader

...Here is how two retired 4 star marine generals, Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar, described in the New York Times the stripmining of your freedom to resist tyranny in urging a veto by President Obama:

“One provision would authorize the military to indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil. Due process would be a thing of the past…...

...It is not as if the imperial presidencies of Bush and Obama need any more encouragement and legitimization to continue on their lawless paths to criminal wars of aggression, unlawful surveillance, arbitrary slayings of innocents, wrongful imprisonments, and unauthorized spending. Instead of Congress using its constitutional authority regarding the war, appropriations and investigative powers, it formalizes its impotence by handing the “go for it” power to the Executive branch with the vaguest of language boundaries.

Usually there are a few Senators whose upfront defense of our Constitution would lead them to stand tall against the “Senate Club” and put a “hold” on this pernicious amendment. Civil libertarians hope that, before the final Senate vote in the rush to get home for the Holidays, Senators Rand Paul, Tom Harkin, Al Franken, Richard Blumenthal, Ron Wyden, Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley, Tom Coburn or Mike Lee would step forth.

A “hold” could spark the demand for public hearings and floor debate to give the American people the time and information to react and ask themselves “how dare Congress take away our most fundamental rights?”

President Obama initially threatened to veto the entire bill and make Congress drop these pernicious dictates that so insult the memory and vision of our founding fathers. He is already signaling that he doesn’t have the backbone to reject the false choice “between our safety and our ideals,” that he asserted in his Inaugural Address.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/15-0

NDAA Gives Pentagon Green Light to Wage Internet War

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
December 15, 2011

In addition to kidnapping Americans and tossing them into Camp Gitmo without recourse or trial, the draconian NDAA bill passed in the House yesterday contains language that will allow the Pentagon to wage cyberwar on domestic enemies of the state......

In July, the Pentagon released its cybersecurity plan. It declared the internet a domain of war but did not specify how the military would use it for offensive strikes. The report claimed that hostile parties “are working to exploit DOD unclassified and classified networks, and some foreign intelligence organizations have already acquired the capacity to disrupt elements of DOD’s information infrastructure.” In addition, according to the Pentagon, “non-state actors increasingly threaten to penetrate and disrupt DOD networks and systems.”

“If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks,” an official said prior to the release of the official document.....

Singel also notes that the Pentagon is characterizing spying as an offensive act. Spying “isn’t an act of war — just ask the NSA and CIA, who spend billions of dollars a year spying on other countries by intercepting communications and persuading foreign citizens to give the U.S. valuable intelligence. It’s certainly an aggressive state action, and a diplomatic issue. But if spying was an act of war, every CIA agent hiding under diplomatic cover would count as cause for a country to attack the U.S.,” he writes.

The Pentagon has considered the internet enemy territory since it produced its Information Operations Roadmap in 2003. The document was released to the public after a Freedom of Information Request by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in 2006. The document declares the Pentagon will “fight the net” as it would a weapons system.

The document does not describes how the Pentagon will destroy the internet, but gradually degrade it.

“The internet is useful not only as a business tool but also is excellent for monitoring and tracking users, acclimatizing people to a virtual world, and developing detailed psychological profiles of every user, among many other Pentagon positives,” writes Brent Jessop. “But, one problem with the current internet is the potential for the dissemination of ideas and information not consistent with US government themes and messages, commonly known as free speech.”........
http://www.prisonplanet.com/ndaa-gives-pentagon-green-light-to-wage-inte...

Right on. Thom Hartman is a fascist Trojan Ass.

The Destruction of Haiti and Bill Clinton’s Legacy as the Death Toll Climbs.
By: Robert Alexander Dumas Thursday December 15,

One of Bill Clinton’s accomplishments during his presidency was to successfully strong-arm Haiti into joining NAFTA. Absent tariff protections, cheap imported subsidized U.S. rice flooded the Haitian market under “free trade” protocols. First destroying Haiti’s agrarian subsistence economy; then, soon after, it’s societal structure. Thanks Bill they said.

You can read Clinton’s empty one percenter apology for the destruction of the Haitian economy here, if you have a stronger stomach than I. The memorable quote is this : “We Made a Devil’s Bargain”....

....I remember the photo ops of former president Clinton visiting Haiti in the months after the earthquake, something or other to do with Sweat-Shops-R-Us job creation on behalf of transnational corporations. Meanwhile, yesterday I caught a replay of a portion of Thom Hartmann’s radio broadcast wherein he stated that he really didn’t think Clinton, or anyone else for that matter, intended any actual harm when they went about plotting and conniving and scheming to implement “Free Trade”. Thom……brother…….the least accusatory and abrasive thing I can say in reply is that you are a fucking idiot and a really big disappointment. Evil does exist in this world Thom, and at best you are a cowardly apologist.

Fuck you Bill, is what I say. Oh yeah, and you too Thom.
http://my.firedoglake.com/tucsonrobert1/2011/12/15/the-destruction-of-ha...

CounterPunch Diary
Farewell to C.H.
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
I can’t count the times, down the years, that after some new outrage friends would call me and ask, “What happened to Christopher Hitchens?” – the inquiry premised on some supposed change in Hitchens, often presumed to have started in the period he tried to put his close friend Blumenthal behind bars for imputed perjury. My answer was that Christopher had been pretty much the same package since the beginning — always allowing for the ravages of entropy as the years passed.

As so often with friends and former friends, it’s a matter of what you’re prepared to put up with and for how long. I met him in New York in the early 1980s and all the long-term political and indeed personal traits were visible enough. I never thought of him as at all radical. He craved to be an insider, a trait which achieved ripest expression when he elected to be sworn in as a U.S. citizen by Bush’s director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. In basic philosophical take he always seemed to me to hold as his central premise a profound belief in the therapeutic properties of capitalism and empire. He was an instinctive flagwagger and remained so. He wrote some really awful stuff in the early 90s about how indigenous peoples — Indians in the Americas — were inevitably going to be rolled over by the wheels of Progress and should not be mourned.

On the plane of weekly columns in the late eighties and nineties it mostly seemed to be a matter of what was currently obsessing him: for years in the 1980s he wrote scores of columns for The Nation, charging that the Republicans had stolen the 1980s election by the “October surprise”, denying Carter the advantage of a hostage release. He got rather boring. Then in the 90s he got a bee in his bonnet about Clinton which developed into full-blown obsessive megalomania: the dream that he, Hitchens, would be the one to seize the time and finish off Bill. Why did Bill — a zealous and fairly efficient executive of Empire – bother Hitchens so much? I’m not sure. He used to hint that Clinton had behaved abominably to some woman he, Hitchens, knew. Actually I think he’d got to that moment in life when he was asking himself if he could make a difference. He obviously thought he could, and so he sloshed his way across his own personal Rubicon and tried to topple Clinton via betrayal of his close friendship with Sid Blumenthal, whom he did his best to ruin financially (lawyers’ fees) and get sent to prison for perjury.

Since then it was all pretty predictable, down to his role as flagwagger for Bush. I guess the lowest of a number of low points was when he went to the White House to give a cheerleading speech on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I think he knew long, long before that this is where he would end up, as a right-wing codger. He used to go on, back in the Eighties, about sodden old wrecks like John Braine, who’d ended up more or less where Hitchens got to, trumpeting away about “Islamo-fascism” like a Cheltenham colonel in some ancient Punch cartoon. I used to warn my friends at New Left Review and Verso in the early 90s who were happy to make money off Hitchens’ books on Mother Teresa and the like that they should watch out, but they didn’t and then kept asking ten years later, What happened?
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/16/farewell-to-c-h/

Lessons from the 20th Century
Why Euro Plan Is Doomed to Fail
by GABRIEL KOLKO
There are extremely important differences between this decade and the period after the First World War and through the early 1930s.

The most crucial is that no fascist or Communist or revolutionary threats exist now if the great economic powers do not meet the economic challenges before them. Today the political and economic contexts are fundamentally different in crucial regards but still inordinately complex and dangerous. Now, nations will only face the unpredictable political consequences that always arise when economies break down. But fascism and bolshevism were a catastrophe for the status quo and led to World War Two. For a time the Nazis aborted the threat of the left in Germany and this won them a great deal of business support. Although there are many right-wing nativist movements today that may very well benefit from economic turmoil, there are important differences between contemporary yahoos in the U.S. and Europe and the fascists.

But today the world economies are in a crisis, nominally involving the “euro” nations but even more the nature and future of world economic power. This crisis involves the United States—which was crucial in the interwar period—but also China, India, Brazil, and other nations which had no economic clout whatsoever in the world economy between the two wars. The 1920s were complex in unique ways, which the draconian Versailles Peace Treaty of June 1919 guaranteed it would be both politically and economically, especially for Germany, which ultimately went Nazi, which in turn led to the Second World War. But today’s Middle East owes a great many of its problems to the settlements reached at Versailles—which broke up the Ottoman Empire and drew the borders of the new states capriciously and with almost no regard for the region’s ethnic and religious character.

Stephen V. O. Clarke was a research officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York—which has a uniquely important responsibility for many official U. S. foreign economic transactions—and then became a quite conventional professor of economics at Princeton. His most notable work was a 1967 monograph on the New York Fed, “Central Bank Cooperation, 1924-1931.” Its circulation must have been very small; its prose and charts do not lend themselves to easy reading.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/16/why-euro-plan-is-doomed-to-fail/

Bloated Imperialistic entities dislike being challenged and criticized.

We certainly see this right now with the USA Corporatist Empire expanding its 21st Century tyranny with ever-growing Indefinite Detention (with its secretive if not always secret renditions, as well as its assassination policy) and military tribunal pretense of 'law' outside current standing legal practice. The Powere Elite in control of the USA government enjoy a global monopoly and want to maintain their top bully status no matter what method is used.

This indefinite detention response by USA Imperialists is comparable to the Vatican's response in the 1500s to challenges to the Vatican's total power.

The Vatican enjoyed its empire, and was even expanding it into the so-called 'new world' of South and Central America when the Protestant Reformation occurred and challenged the totality of the Vatican's hold on the nations of Europe and minds of Europeans.

In response, the Vatican created an institution to spearhead its counterattack, an institution of its bureaucracy, an institution known as THE INQUISITION, and this institution used indefinite detention and other forms of torture in an attempt to intimidate, contain and prevent dissent, criticism, freedom of thought/choice, and creation of political momentum counter to Vatican totalitarian authoritarian policies.

The Inquisition exemplifies the Vatican machine at its worst and most abhorrent. The Inquisition hunted, both secretively and blatantly, for 'heretics' -- those who doubted, questioned or rejected church DOGMA.

The decaying late empire stage of the USA, struggles against its critics and what it reacts to as "heretics", those who doubt, question and reject USA policy of tax dollar guzzling perpetual war and support for thieving and destructive corporate behavior.

We are witnessing the development of a system of repression by the USA -- and that sysem's specific technology -- made to deal with at-home critics as well as resisters abroad.

From 16th century Inquisition informers and torture devices to the 21st century use of early torture techniques such as 'repeated drowning' (euphemisticly called "water boarding") and new-fangled spying methods and crowd-control devices that can blind and deafen victims -- we are witnessing what happens when an out-of-control power system abuses every interconnection it has with the greater mass of humans it chooses to EXPLOIT (rather than serve).

'Indefinite Detention'? The proof is in the heinousness of these policies and sameness of the tools used by higher-ups whose lust for domination knows no bounds. A 21st Century Inquisition is in process, and it is as unacceptable now as The Inquisition was unacceptable during the Renaissance-Post Renaissance period about 400 years ago.

Criticism, dissent and resistance are not revolt and only TYRANTS unwilling to change, improve, and alter course would consider these activities 'heretical' and extreme!

Dems cheer.

Pentagon chief Panetta sees close partnership with Libya

US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said on Saturday that Tripoli could become an important security partner of Washington as he visited Libya for talks with new regime officials.

“We are and will be your friend and partner,” Panetta said at a news conference with Libyan Prime Minister Abdel Rahim al-Kib......... (our neoliberal stooge.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdel_Rahim_al-Kib
The UN Security Council ended a freeze on the assets of the Central Bank of Libya and the Libyan Foreign Bank, which was ordered in February as part of sanctions against Kadhafi.

The US government said it would be freeing more than $30 billion (23 billion euros) of assets belonging to the central bank and LFB in a bid to help the new Libyan government.

The Tripoli authorities have stepped up calls in recent weeks to release the estimated $150 billion frozen abroad to help pay salaries and keep services running.

On top of the $30 billion held in the United States, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said his government would immediately act to free about 6.5 billion pounds ($10 billion) held in Britain....

“This new and free Libya can become an important security partner of the United States,” he said, adding that Washington was looking forward to building a close partnership.

“We stand ready to offer whatever assistance in the spirit of friendship and a spirit of mutual respect.”

But Panetta, who also met Defence Minister Osama Jouili, stressed that his talks in Tripoli did not involve military equipment.

“At this stage there was certainly no discussions involving arms or military equipment,” he said when asked about the type of security cooperation he envisioned.......
("Never believe anything until it has been officially denied."--Otto von Bismarck)
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/12/17/pentagon-chief-panetta-sees-close-...

Hey, don't count the Vatican out. We're at the crossroads now. They could come back as the dominant force for another thousand years.

January 30, 2006
1
Alito and Opus Dei
Jackboots of the Church
by MICHAEL CARMICHAEL

.....In 1928, a Catholic priest who acquired a doctorate in law, Josemaría Escrivá founded Opus Dei in Spain. Escrivá’s juridical attitude to religious doctrine permeates Opus Dei and is the source of its attraction to members of the legal profession. Opus Dei received massive political support after the fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War. Generalissimo Francisco Franco protected and fostered conservative elements within Opus Dei by appointing eight ministers to powerful positions in his government. In Spain, Opus Dei is still regarded as a potent political force. In 2002, Escrivá was canonized.

Why, then, is an Alito membership in Opus Dei of major significance? In addition to his activist record on the federal bench and his conservative ideology, Alito is deemed to be a menace to the balance of power as well as the constitutional rights of Americans. Judge Alito’s affiliation with Opus Dei may be a factor in the strident opposition from Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, both progressive Roman Catholics who do not approve of the influence of religious dogma on political ideology. The majority of Americans believe in the separation of church and state, while many religious conservatives such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell would transform America into a theocratic state. Robertson and Falwell are staunch supporters of Judge Alito.

While the Moral Majority, the 700 Club and a growing bloc of Christian Conservatives have wielded a great deal of political influence in America, two years ago these protestant fundamentalists formed a coalition with conservative Catholics to re-elect President George Bush. In 2004, the Vatican intervened directly into the US presidential election to endorse their champion, George Bush. The back-story is both fascinating and compelling, for it illuminates the political dynamics taking shape in the nomination, possible confirmation and conflict centring on Alito.

In June, 2004, soon after Bush’s papal audience with the late pontiff, Pope John Paul II, a letter signed by Former Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, who now reigns as Pope Benedict XVI, threatened to excommunicate any Catholic politician in favour of abortion as well as any Catholic voters who would support Kerry at the polls......
http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/01/30/jackboots-of-the-church/

President George H.W. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in separate ceremonies.

.....In the U.S., Bush, who had worked to "fast track" the signing prior to the end of his term, ran out of time and had to pass the required ratification and signing into law to incoming president Bill Clinton. Prior to sending it to the United States Senate, Clinton introduced clauses to protect American workers and allay the concerns of many House members. It also required U.S. partners to adhere to environmental practices and regulations similar to its own. With much consideration and emotional discussion, the House of Representatives approved NAFTA on November 17, 1993, by a vote of 234 to 200. The agreement's supporters included 132 Republicans and 102 Democrats. NAFTA passed the Senate 61-38. Senate supporters were 34 Republicans and 27 Democrats. Clinton signed it into law on December 8, 1993; it went into effect on January 1, 1994.[1][2] Clinton while signing the NAFTA bill stated: "...NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good-paying American jobs. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't support this agreement."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement

WOW! This thread is nearly a month old!
Did everybody book? Alice? GhettoDefender? Jim? Nora? Tea Cheers Ms_Anthrope? Well have a Happy Solstice wherever you are!

I hope y'all are still reading the Sunday BTV!
This week it's Brick TeeVee's Domestic Indefinite Detention!
Also at blogspot (now up to 19 followers!)
http://filthy-rich.blogspot.com/2011/12/brick-teevee-domestic-indefinite...

And make sure you get yer copy of GREG PALAST's new book VULTURE'S PICNIC: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores. Read an excerpt (pdf) HERE!

And OCCUPY SOMEWHERE!

Oyf Eybik Yung

Oyf Eybik Yung

The Catholic League was also a response by the Catholic Church (like the institution, The Inquisition) to stop the spreading discovery of Renaissance worldview where individual creativity and thinking stimulated one to imagine a different world based on different criteria.

The Catholic League served the purpose of rousing dissent against anyone who was 1/ tolerant of Protestants (that is, gave Protestants the freedom to practice) and 2/ tolerant of the Hermetic belief system and its application.

The Catholic League was responsible for assassinations -- including the assassination of King Henry III of France who was tolerant of Protestants and entertained Hermetic thinkers such as Giordano Bruno.

Pulling off such Catholic retribution required propaganda and the Jesuits of the time served that purpose as neatly as the Corporate Media now delivers for the Corporate Imperialists.

The methods being used against us today have been used to halt intellectual, social change/progress in the past.

As the republican party crashes and burns, and the Democratic Party takes in the corporatists and slowly but surely abandons its platform under the guise of compromise, is this the answer:

http://www.justicepartyusa.net/

Dreaming of America Beyond Capitalism?
Gar Alperovitz

Gar Alperovitz. America beyond Capitalism.
John Wiley, 2005.
Reviewed by Len Krimerman.

According to its publisher's publicity release, America Beyond Capitalism "offers hope for the future." The evidence offered for this hopeful scenario is two-fold: first, that a vast array of diverse micro-level economic alternatives, consistently ignored by the mass media, is developing throughout every region of this beleaguered land; and second, that these neighborhood-, community- and state-based alternatives are heading us towards a "radical restructuring," a new homegrown all-american macro-system-beyond capitalism, beyond socialism, neither liberal, conservative, red, or blue-which Alperowitz calls a Pluralist Commonwealth (PC). The priorities of this emerging PC vision are straightforwardly progressive; they include:

? Developing institutions that hold wealth and make investments on behalf of the public, e.g., on the model of state-wide pension funds;

? Maximizing opportunities, especially for those now excluded, to gain control over their own wealth, and that of the enterprises in which they work, e.g., through worker owned cooperatives, democratic ESOPs, and community-based economic enterprises;

? Decentralizing "continental-scale" government by transferring political power to regions, states, and municipalities;

? Increasing opportunities for democratic participation through increasing economic security and subsidizing free time for all; e.g., by cutting back the work week, while keeping income constant.

The author is at his best when he either describes the emerging panoply of micro-level economic alternatives, from worker-owned firms to state-run pension funds to municipally-owned utilities to community development corporations (Chapters 8-10), or provides a clarifying philosophical account of the basic ideals of his macro-system (Chapter 6 and Conclusion). But he leaves this reader, at least, with a strong sense of disconnect between these two levels of analysis and practice.
http://www.geo.coop/node/195

Is there a distinction that can be made between passable monopolistic corporate media and downright apalling monopolistic corporate media?

Anyway...

The NYTimes is in negotiation to sell off 16 newspapers across the country to -- are you sitting down? -- a rightwing?/libertarian? bunch out of Arkansas Walmart land via Florida who in the past have purchased press property and dismissed up to 10 percent of the staff.

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20111219/COMMUNITY/111219506?Title=...

[excerpt]

...

The Halifax Media Group is relatively new, having been formed to purchase The Daytona Beach News-Journal in 2010. One of its key investors is Stephens Capital Partners, a Little Rock, Ark.-based private equity firm that has newspaper holdings across the country.

[more at link]

----------------------------------

The following is from the print version of the article, a description of the Halifax Media Group's editorial policy sounds like code for libertarian/rightwing perspective and goals:

>>"Our own editorials will champion free enterprise, individual rights and responsibilities, and the importance of community involvement," [Michael] Redding [publisher of the Daytona acquisition] wrote.<<

By Norman Finkelstein

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Editor’s note: Norman G. Finkelstein is currently writing a political memoir, which will serve as the introduction to a new edition of his book, The Rise and Fall of Palestine, to be published by New Press next year. Below is an excerpt from the memoir on the subject of political apostasy. The title refers to how ex-leftist Christopher Hitchens used to sign off his correspondence.

"Fraternally yours, Chris"

I’m occasionally asked whether I still consider myself a Marxist. Even if my "faith" had lapsed, I wouldn’t advertise it, not from shame at having been wrong (although admittedly this would be a factor) but rather from fear of arousing even a faint suspicion of opportunism. To borrow from the lingo of a former academic fad, if, in public life, the "signifier" is "I’m no longer a Marxist," then the "signified" usually is, "I’m selling out." No doubt one can, in light of further study and life experience, come to repudiate past convictions. One might also decide that youthful ideals, especially when the responsibilities of family kick in and the prospects for radical change dim while the certainty of one’s finitude sharpens, are too heavy a burden to bear; although it might be hoped that this accommodation, however understandable (if disappointing), were accomplished with candor and an appropriate degree of humility rather than, what’s usually the case, scorn for those who keep plugging away. It is when the phenomenon of political apostasy is accompanied by fanfare and fireworks that it becomes truly repellent.

Depending on where along the political spectrum power is situated, apostates almost always make their corrective leap in that direction, discovering the virtues of the status quo. "The last thing you can be accused of is having turned your coat," Thomas Mann wrote a convert to National Socialism right after Hitler’s seizure of power. "You always wore it the `right’ way around." If apostasy weren’t conditioned by power considerations, one would anticipate roughly equal movements in both directions. But that’s never been the case. The would-be apostate almost always pulls towards power’s magnetic field, rarely away. However elaborate the testimonials on how one came to "see the light," the impetus behind political apostasy is – pardon my cynicism – a fairly straightforward, uncomplicated affair: to cash in, or keep cashing in, on earthly pleasures. Indeed, an apostate can even capitalize on the past to increase his or her current exchange value. Professional ex-radical Todd Gitlin never fails to mention, when denouncing those to his left, that he was a former head of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Never mind that this was four decades ago; although president of my sixth-grade class 40 years ago, I don’t keep bringing it up. Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on the exploitation of one’s political past? In any event, it’s hard to figure why an acknowledgment of former errors should enhance one’s current credibility. If, by a person’s own admission, he or she had got it all wrong, why should anyone pay heed to his or her new opinions? Doesn’t it make more sense attending to those who got there sooner rather than later? A member of the Flat-Earth Society who suddenly discovers the world is round doesn’t get to keynote an astronomers’ convention. Indeed, the prudent inference would seem to be, once an idiot, always an idiot. It’s child’s play to assemble a lengthy list – Roger Garaudy, Boris Yeltsin, David Horowitz, Bernard Henri-Levy… – bearing out this commonsensical wisdom.
http://www.zcommunications.org/on-christopher-hitchens-by-norman-finkels...

Free Palestine!

A friend of mine in Frankfort, MI is doing the Run Across Palestine in February:

Run Across Palestine
Click here for stories from the Run Across Palestine Scroll down for the Run Across Palestine video!

On The Ground, in partnership with the Palestinian Fair Trade Association, is thrilled to announce a new, philanthropic event, The Run Across Palestine, (RAP) for February 2012. The event will raise funds and awareness for the fair trade olive farmers of Palestine.

Funds raised from RAP will have several immediate impacts including purchasing and planting thousands of olive trees, and provide scholarships for the children of Palestinian olive farmers. All this is designed to reestablish sustainable olive growing practices in a place who’s history, economy, culture, and identity is rooted in the ancient olive tree.......

The Run Across Palestine will use the same model that On The Ground developed for the successful Run Across Ethiopia.In 2011, On the Ground organizedthe Run Across Ethiopia – a multi-stage 250 mile running expedition which raised over $200,000 to build 3 schoolsand multiple education projects in farming communities in Ethiopia. During the next few months, a team of endurance runners will be selected. These dedicated athletes will each be tasked with raising part of the $100,000 target of the RAP before the run begins. The run will span the West Bank of the Palestinian Territories, from Hebron to Jenin. Participants will run from one olive growing community to another, and sleep on farms at night, using established relationships with the Palestinian Fair Trade Association, and other organizations involved with the immediate survival of farm communities.The setting for the run is the birthplace and confluence of many of the world’s religions. Many people only know this geographical area of the world as an ongoing media sidebar to the decades of struggle for peace in the Middle East. The run seeks to transcend the daily news stories and address the the visible and hidden impacts from the loss of traditional farmlands for the individual farmers and their families. A media team will accompany the runners, and transmit daily multimedia reports, to schools, community groups and individuals throughout the world.Olive trees have been used to represent peace for thousands of years...........
http://onthegroundglobal.org/projects/run-across-palestine/

13 The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. 15 And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. 16 And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father's house a house of trade.”
John 2:13-16

1620 Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower went ashore for the first time at present-day Plymouth, Mass.

Justice Party USA
...is this the answer?...

Well, we know what parties aren't the answer.

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz’s ‘Plymouth Rock’ Speech (1964)

....We are a people who formerly were Africans who were kidnaped and brought to America. Our forefathers weren’t the Pilgrims. We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; the rock was landed on us. We were brought here against our will; we were not brought here to be made citizens. We were not brought here to enjoy the constitutional gifts that they speak so beautifully about today. Because we weren’t brought here to be made citizens–today, now that we’ve become awakened to some degree, and we begin to ask for those things which they say are supposedly for all Americans, they look upon us with a hostility and unfriendliness....

...We want to make them–we want to make them–pass the strongest civil-rights bill they ever passed, because we know that even after they pass it, they can’t enforce it.

In order to do this, we’re starting a voters’ registration drive.

We have to get everybody in Harlem registered, not as Democrats or Republicans, but registered as Independents.

We’re going to organize a corps of brothers and sisters who, after this city is mapped out, they won’t leave one apartment-house door not knocked on...
http://craigconsidine.wordpress.com/2010/06/06/el-hajj-malik-el-shabazzs...

(also today: 1996 After two years of denials, House Speaker Newt Gingrich admitted violating House ethics rules.)
http://abcnews.go.com/Archives/video/dec-21-1996-newt-gingrich-ethics-vi...

Achmed the Dead Terrorist Christmas Song!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaxXhwxiaSI&feature=youtu.be

we need a new thread please!

Happy whatever!

Well, I've come up with a few possibilities:

a. The Establishment KNOWS the Left has solutions, and knows that if those solutions were adequately understood by the public, would be desired by the majority.

b. The Establishment exists to preserve itself (a status quo position) and so must stop progress, and only the Left represents progress (as the Right represents regression).

c. The Establishment has become overrun by The Right.

Anyways, I noticed in reading the material below that back in 1971, the FBI did not want John Lennon to participate in the "new left" and any possible effect it could have on the USA's politics.

Such fear and loathing of the Left, expressed by taxpayer-paid-for institutions such as the FBI -- it appears to be alive and well and expressed by the recent federally-coordinated NATIONWIDE SWEEP of Occupy sites.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130401193

[excerpt]

...

GROSS: Now you have the FBI document that explains why the FBI stopped its surveillance of Lennon. Would you summarize and read an excerpt of that document for us?

Prof. WIENER: This is dated August 30th 1972. This is like two months before the presidential election. This is a memo to the acting director - now that's L. Patrick Gray, J. Edgar Hoover had died in May - from the special agent in charge of the New York FBI office. It says (Reading) For the past several months there has been no information received to indicate that the subject is active in the new left.

And it indicated what the sources are. (Reading) All advised that during the month of July 1972, that the subject has fallen out of favor of activists Jerry Rubin, Stewart Albert and Rennie Davis, due to subject's lack of interest in committing himself to involvement in anti-war and new left activities. In view of this information, the New York division is placing this case in a pending inactive status.

GROSS: Now is that true of the whole FBI or just the New York division?

Prof. WIENER: Well, New York was the office of origin - the OO - as its called in the files. They are the ones who are responsible for conducting the investigation. I mean, what this really is saying here is that the Immigration Service and the FBI have succeeded in pressuring Lennon to cancel his plans for this national concert tour and to withdraw from anti-war activity. His lawyers told him that his case for fighting deportation was a pretty weak one. In fact, they'd never seen anyone win a case under these terms, and therefore, the legal advice was dont do anything more that would further provoke the Nixon administration. He really wanted to stay in the United States. Yoko was involved, at that point, in a custody dispute over her daughter from a previous marriage - her daughter Kyoko. So John, if he had been deported, Yoko would've stayed behind. He didnt want to be separated from Yoko, so he cancelled the plans for the concert tour. He dropped out of movement activity and the FBI is reporting that they have accomplished their job.

GROSS: So in that sense the FBI did succeed in neutralizing - as they like to put it - in neutralizing John Lennon.

Prof. WIENER: Yeah, neutralizing is one of the scary words which appear in the file. Some people think this refers, you know, to assassination plans or something like that. I dont think that that's the case. Neutralizing means silencing him, getting him out of the picture through this deportation threat. And there's no question that Lennon was silenced as a spokesman of the anti-war movement.

...

[read more at link]

McDonald's appears to be a Meat Evangelical Corporation, as we all can see in their many tv ads that seek to win converts. Now it looks like McDonald's is sending Meat Missionaries into a very healthy community of vegetarians/vegans in search of converts into the McDonald's religion of greasy meat gluttony.

This is a very fascinating story -- proving the 21st century in the USA is a crazy experience, a pressure cooker of corporate power exercised in opposition to what few wise choices are made by even small numbers of individuals or groups.

From the NYTimes -- about a "health mecca" okaying its first McDonald's...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/us/loma-linda-calif-frets-about-first-...

[excerpt]

LOMA LINDA, Calif. — In this small city, home to a large Seventh-day Adventist community, the average lifespan goes well past 80, and it has one of the highest rates of longevity in the world according to some estimates.

When researchers descended on this affluent city east of Los Angeles several years ago to determine why, the theories piled up: Perhaps it was the vegetarian diet kept by many Adventists? Maybe it was their close communal ties? Or the frequent use of sprawling trails in the parks here?

But one thing seemed certain to researchers: residents were not living into the next century by eating fast food.

So last week, when the City Council approved Loma Linda’s first McDonald’s restaurant, many residents bemoaned the decision, worrying that the officials were jeopardizing the city’s reputation as a paragon of healthy lifestyles.

Wayne Dysinger, a physician and public health professor in the preventive medicine department at Loma Linda University’s School of Medicine, grew up in the city and remembers a time when there were no such restaurants. A generation ago, it was nearly impossible to even find meat within city limits. Now, he worries about his children.
...

[read more at link]

Repudiating Chomsky=Bar mitzvah

"His dry, or dessicated, wit."

Ouch!

so could anyone."

And a Happy Hanuka to SAM!

We at Brick TeeVee never sleep!

Go read Brick TeeVee's XMAS Edition!
And for our friends at blogspot
http://filthy-rich.blogspot.com/2011/12/brick-teevees-xmas-edition.html

So this is Christmas John Lennon & Yoko Ono: WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It)

And yummy foods of the season -- may there be plenty!

Enjoy as much as possible!

Sam and Family and Sederville-- Warmest Greetings!

And to all a good night!

Amnesty International reports on recent treatment of women protestors by the Egyptian Military...

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/egypts-women-must-be-allowed-protest-peac...

[excerpt]

"The authorities must not use force against peaceful protesters and not target women with gender-based violence"

Amnesty International's Philip Luther

[more at link]

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

A report from Cairo on The Real News--
video--

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKRe-MONpN0

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

Considering that the USA police were punching female students in the stomach at a Berkeley protest -- it looks like the USA authorities (the Feds evidently coordinated the nationwide shut down of Occupy sites and supporters) and the Egyptian military so-called government are in lock-step/goosestep in their similar decisions to TERRORIZE, abuse, injure and kill non-violent. peaceful protestors.

that tired old stuff. The war wasn't over.

How cute is that?

George Leutz
About to have my last full night's sleep until 2012. It's all Q*bert from tomorrow night, till the ball drops on New Year's Eve. Stop by the Richie Knucklez' stream and chat, starting about 24hrs from right now!

Yesterday at 8:35pm

http://www.twitch.tv/richieknucklez
www.twitch.tv

So long & I love you, Bloggie....
June 30th, 2004 - December 28, 2011

-Alice

These people have developed technology. You are very careless. Take care what you eat, what they give you to eat … a little needle and they inject you with I don’t know what,’” he said.

Venezuela’s Chavez: did U.S. give Latin American leaders cancer?

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez speculated on Wednesday that the United States might have developed a way to give Latin American leaders cancer, after Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez joined the list of presidents diagnosed with the disease.

It was a typically controversial statement by Venezuela’s socialist leader, who underwent surgery in June to remove a tumor from his pelvis. But he stressed that he was not making any accusations, just thinking aloud.

“It would not be strange if they had developed the technology to induce cancer and nobody knew about it until now … I don’t know. I’m just reflecting,” he said in a televised speech to troops at a military base.

“But this is very, very, very strange … it’s a bit difficult to explain this, to reason it, including using the law of probabilities.”

Chavez, Fernandez, Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo, Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff and former Brazilian leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva have all been diagnosed recently with cancer. All of them are leftists..........
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/12/29/venezuelas-chavez-did-u-s-give-lat...

Thursday, December 22, 2011
War on Venezuela: Washington’s False Accusations Against The Chavez Government

......Obama didn’t fail to mention his “concern” about Venezuela’s relationship with Iran, regarding which he stated, “We take Iranian activities, including in Venezuela, very seriously and we will continue to monitor them closely”. It’s no coincidence that these statements follow the airing of the Hollywood-esque Univision documentary, “The Iranian Threat”, which makes dangerous defamatory claims against the Chavez administration in an attempt to include Venezuela in a bogus terrorist plot.

Despite the ridiculousness of the Univision claims, members of Congress are bantering Obama to take preemptive action against both Iran and Venezuela. Other “commentators” and “analysts” are busy writing blogs and columns warning of the growing terrorist threat south of the US border. These dangerous, unfounded accusations could easily be used to justify an attack against Venezuela, as weapons of mass destruction was used against Iraq and “protecting the population” was used against Libya....
http://www.chavezcode.com/2011/12/war-on-venezuela-washingtons-false.htm...

US Tells Scientists to Censor Flu Research

By Steve Connor, The Independent UK

21 December 11
The United States Government has taken the unprecedented step of asking scientists to censor key parts of their work describing how they managed to mutate the H5N1 bird flu virus into a strain that could be highly infectious and deadly to humans........
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/313-17/9015-us-tells-scient...

“Fidel always told me, ‘Chavez take care. These people have developed technology. You are very careless. Take care what you eat, what they give you to eat … a little needle and they inject you with I don’t know what,’” he said.

...isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave."
Batty

Japanese firm creates humanoid robot to replace factory workers

Japanese firm Kawada Industries is on the leading edge of a growing industry that threatens to become a major disruptive force in the coming years: automated labor.

At a recent robot expo, Kawada showed off Nextage, a human-shaped robotic laborer the company says is intended to “work alongside” people. In actuality, the robot could end up replacing people whose job it is to carry out menial tasks on assembly lines. And at just 1,500 watts of power consumption while it is working — less than some hair dryers — the device or one like it could one day become a compelling alternative to sweat shop labor.

That much seems to be true for Chinese electronics manufacturer Foxconn, notorious for paying workers a pittance and demanding long hours. The company said earlier this year that it would build a robot manufacturing facility, and that it hoped to replace most of its workforce with automation in the next three years............
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/12/28/japanese-firm-creates-humanoid-rob...

Annual Chief Big Foot Memorial Ride to Wounded Knee Concludes

...As the Great Plains Examiner explains, the 191-mile horseback ride to Wounded Knee was first retraced by the Big Foot Memorial Riders in 1986. In 1990, a ceremony was performed at the site of the massacre and the group was renamed the Future Generation Riders. This year’s journey marks the 25th consecutive ride to Wounded Knee....
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/12/29/annual-chief-big-fo... http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/12/29/annual-chief-big-fo...

Confronting the Past on the Anniversary of the Massacre at Wounded Knee: Why It Matters

...The United States is also haunted by a bloody and deceitful past, as we are reminded today, the anniversary of the Massacre at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890. As Lise Balk King recently pointed out, the “apology” to American Indians President Obama signed two years ago was buried in an unrelated bill, the Defense Appropriations Act; the signing ceremony was closed to the press. That “apology” looks more like an effort to further bury the past, rather than to confront it....

After the Second World War, there was widespread acknowledgment in Germany of the atrocities of its Nazi past. Investigations and large-scale education programs were implemented to confront the past, opening the way for a free and vibrant future. Confronting the past is part of moving forward.

The question is whether the U.S. is ever going to be ready to confront its past. This is a question for white Americans, whose ancestors were the primary actors in violence and degradation, land theft and cultural destruction, major features of U.S. history. In part, it is also a question for American Indians and African-Americans, whose ancestors were the primary victims in this history....

Enslavement of black people on one hand and genocide against red people on the other are actually the foundational ‘building blocks’ of the ‘American Empire’: the United States as we know it is built on a foundation of slave labor and Indian land. Is it possible that the current condition of the U.S., with its political gridlock and economic implosion, is actually a result of the historical “evils” at the foundation—that the bloody past is poisoning the present? Is it possible that the only way forward to a free, functioning society is to face the ghosts of the past? In that case, Russia is not the only country whose failure to confront its past threatens to strangle its future.

Let us be clear here: ‘confronting the past’ means more than just looking back. It means standing in the present and looking in both directions: how we got here and where we want to go. Acknowledging the evils of the past means both to admit them and to root them out of our present, so that our future may grow from something new. Historical evils are not simply bad actions that happened in the past; they are bad actions with continuing bad effects. Treaty violations and land thefts, for example, occurred in the past, but the legal theories that were used to justify these actions—like the doctrine of ‘Christian Discovery’—are still part of federal Indian law. The violations continue in the present.

The necessary confrontation with the past is not likely to come from the Obama administration. This is the administration that promised “change” in other areas and didn’t deliver. Not surprisingly, its failure to produce change was preceded by its refusal to confront the past—the past of torture and rendition, the past of corrupt bankster rip-offs, the past of fraudulent wars.........
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/ict_sbc/confronting-the-past-o... http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/ict_sbc/confronting-the-past-o...

John Pilger
.....In Kashmir, a forgotten India barely reported abroad, a peaceful resistance as inspiring as Tahrir Square has arisen in the most militarised region on earth. As the victims of Partition, Muslim Kashmiris have known none of Nehru's noble legacies. Thousands of dissidents have "disappeared" and torture is not uncommon. "The voice that the government of India has tried so hard to silence," wrote Arundhati Roy, "has now massed into a deafening roar. Hundreds of thousands of unarmed people have come out to reclaim their cities, their streets and mohallas. They have simply overwhelmed the heavily armed security forces by their sheer numbers, and with a remarkable display of raw courage." An Indian Spring may be next.
http://johnpilger.com/articles/in-the-land-of-facades-mark-the-first-sig...

Cenk Uygur
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/12/29/1049662/-Vote-Against-Obama-in-...

Hello!

Talk to Rocky tomorrow morning on Justice Party Radio

Fri, Dec 30, 2011 10:00AM Pacific Time (1:00 pm EST) on BlogTalkRadio

Click here to listen. Call in number (347) 324-5519

Justice Party hosts Kristine Kubat and Jeff Norman will be joined by Justice Party Candidate Rocky Anderson ( VoteRocky.org ) as they celebrate the one week anniversary of the new DAILY Justice Party Radio program.

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Rocky on DemocracyNow

Join the conversation at the Justice Party

Please pass this on to everyone you know in California with these links:

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103,000 "Justice Party" California voter registrations must be received by January 2, 2012 in the proper California County Elections Office in order get ballot access.

Watch George Galloway's final PressTV on SkyTV before being banned:

Fantastic as always as he calls out the fascist bastards.

http://www.votegeorgegalloway.com/

RICHARD GOLDSTONE RENEWS ISRAEL’S LICENSE TO KILL
Norman G. Finkelstein

ABOUT THE BOOK

ON APRIL 1 2011, in the pages of the Washington Post, the international jurist Richard Goldstone dropped a bombshell. He effectively disowned the massive evidence assembled in the United Nations’ report carrying his name that Israel had committed multiple war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in Gaza during its 2008-9 invasion.
Israel was jubilant. “Everything that we said proved to be true,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu crowed. “We always said that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is a moral army that acted according to international law,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared. “We had no doubt that the truth would come out eventually,” Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman proclaimed. The Obama administration used the occasion of Goldstone’s recantation to affirm that Israel had not “engaged in any war crimes” during the Gaza assault while the U.S. Senate unanimously called on the United Nations to “rescind” the Goldstone Report.
Some commentators have endeavored to prove by parsing his words that Goldstone did not actually recant. While there are grounds for making this argument on a technical basis, such a rhetorical strategy will not wash. Goldstone is a distinguished jurist. He knows how to use precise language. If he did not want to sever his connection with the Report he could simply have said “I am not recanting my original report by which I still stand.” He must have known exactly how his words would be spun and it is this fallout—not his parsed words—that we must now confront.
Goldstone has done terrible damage to the cause of truth and justice and the rule of law. He has poisoned Jewish-Palestinian relations, undermined the courageous work of Israeli dissenters and—most unforgivably—increased the risk of another merciless IDF assault. There has been much speculation on why Goldstone recanted. Was he blackmailed? Did he finally succumb to the relentless hate campaign directed against him? Did he decide to put his tribe ahead of truth? What can be said with certainty, and what Norman Finkelstein demonstrates in these pages, is that Goldstone did not change his mind because the facts compelled him to reconsider his original findings.
Publication June 8th 2011 • 44 pages
paperback ISBN 978-1-935928-51-5 • ebook ISBN 978-1-935928-52-2

Just checking in before I head out to a New Year's Eve celebration down the street!
Wishing all of the Sederistas a great 2012!
And BTV is up early as well!
http://www.samsedershow.com/node/6272
http://filthy-rich.blogspot.com/2011/12/brick-teevee-rings-in-2012-new-y...

See you next year!

Here is wishing 2012 will bring better
times.

_ _ _ _ _ _

Here we are again, back at the same point on this space rock's trajectory around the Sun -- that point called our "New Year".

What can we accomplish on this circumnavigation called 2012 as we scurry about on the surface of our space rock Planet as it makes another spin around the Sun?

I hope a great deal.

Because it is imperative we cause the equitable 'change' our political leaders seem incapable of adequately producing and administering.

Seek facts. Spread the facts. Make goals, pursue goals. Do it all with love and kindness, commitment and resolve.

And cheers to all who are already at this work!

And thank you, Sam, for jumping into the boiling pot with The Majority Report 8 years/EarthRevolutions ago, helping to rescucitate America's ability to be questioning and discerning, and, Sam, you were definitely in the forefront of using the Internet for a political awakening (and not just more entertainment alone). Happy Happy New Year to you and yours, Sam!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY8i4JXdpxs&feature=related

Shows. ;) {I signed in then I was unable to get away from other sites. We use to have more music here 2 ... Whatever ;}

Lyndon B. Johnson
2 - Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union

........I will ask for funds to study high-speed rail transportation between urban centers. We will begin with test projects between Washington and Boston. On high-speed trains, passengers could travel this distance in less than 4 hours.

II. OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL

Second, we must open opportunity to all our people.

Most Americans enjoy a good life. But far too many are still trapped in poverty and idleness and fear.

Let a just nation throw open to them the city of promise:

--to the elderly, by providing hospital care under social security and by raising benefit payments to those struggling to maintain the dignity of their later years;

--to the poor and the unfortunate, through doubling the war against poverty this year;

--to Negro Americans, through enforcement of the civil rights law and elimination of barriers to the right to vote;

--to those in other lands that are seeking the promise of America, through an immigration law based on the work a man can do and not where he was born or how he spells his name.

III. TO ENRICH THE LIFE OF ALL

Our third goal is to improve the quality of American life.

THROUGH EDUCATION

We begin with learning.

Every child must have the best education that this Nation can provide.

Thomas Jefferson said that no nation can be both ignorant and free. Today no nation can be both ignorant and great.

In addition to our existing programs, I will recommend a new program for schools and students with a first year authorization of $1,500 million.

It will help at every stage along the road to learning.

For the preschool years we will help needy children become aware of the excitement of learning.

For the primary and secondary school years we will aid public schools serving low-income families and assist students in both public and private schools.

For the college years we will provide scholarships to high school students of the greatest promise and the greatest need and we will guarantee low-interest loans to students continuing their college studies.

New laboratories and centers will help our schools--help them lift their standards of excellence and explore new methods of teaching. These centers will provide special training for those who need and those who deserve special treatment.

THROUGH BETTER HEALTH

Greatness requires not only an educated people but a healthy people.

Our goal is to match the achievements of our medicine to the afflictions of our people.

We already carry on a large program in this country. for research and health.

In addition, regional medical centers can provide the most advanced diagnosis and treatment for heart disease and cancer and stroke and other major diseases.

New support for medical and dental education will provide the trained people to apply our knowledge.

Community centers can help the mentally ill and improve health care for school-age children from poor families, including services for the mentally retarded.

THROUGH IMPROVING THE WORLD WE LIVE IN

The City An educated and healthy people require surroundings in harmony with their hopes. In our urban areas the central problem today is to protect and restore man's satisfaction in belonging to a community where he can find security and significance.

The first step is to break old patterns--to begin to think and work and plan for the development of the entire metropolitan areas. We will take this step with new programs of help for the basic community facilities and for neighborhood centers of health and recreation.

New and existing programs will be open to those cities which work together to develop unified long-range policies for metropolitan areas.

We must also make some very important changes in our housing programs if we are to pursue these same basic goals.

So a Department of Housing and Urban Development will be needed to spearhead this effort in our cities.

Read more at the American Presidency Project: www.presidency.ucsb.edu http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=26907#ixzz1iWLGjA4P

;) Tea Cheers

http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/Return+predator+rings+howls+pr...

The Wolf Is Back ~ To My STATE CA!

What a bold & dedicated woman! She does Demosthenes one better. For purposes of elocution she keeps a turd in her mouth.