Lady Gaga's Born This Way. Love it or hate it?
Thursday, April 28, 2011
GE Returns Billions to Public, NOT
The Yes Men punk A.P.
04.15.2011
Richard Metzger
http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/ge_to_donate_billions_to_the_federal_government_the_yes_men_punk_a.p
Once again the heroically funny Yes Men (along with the anti-Tea party patriots of “US Uncut”) have punk’d the establishment. This time their victim was the Associated Press. From the press release:
USA Today, AP fall for US Uncut ploy; GE stock loses billions
Contact: Blair Fitzgibbon 202-503-6141 blair@fitzgibbonmedia.com, Duncan Meisel 512-657-9124 duncan.meisel@gmail.com, Carl Gibson 601-454-6443 usuncut@gmail.com, The Yes Lab info@yeslab.org
Washington, DC - US Uncut, a burgeoning grassroots movement pressuring corporate tax cheats to pay their fair share, posted today a fake GE press release announcing that they would return their illegitimate (but legal) $3.2 billion tax refund, and that they would lobby to close the sort of corporate tax loopholes that had allowed them to skip taxes in the first place. Several major media outlets, including USA Today, ran the story as true. (Here is a link to the original USA Today story; here is the first article debunking the release.)
US Uncut quickly reacted with another release pretending to praise GE for this entirely unpredictable, unlikely, and in fact impossible act.
“At a time when working families are being asked to accept massive cuts nationwide, this action showed another way the world could work,” said US Uncut spokesperson Carl Gibson. “For a brief moment people believed that the biggest corporate tax dodger had a change of heart and actually did the right thing. But the only way anything like this is really going to happen is if we change the laws that allow corporate tax avoidance in the first place.”
In the period the hoax was believed, GE’s stock plunged by .6% (far more than the value of the supposed return), then quickly recovered as soon as it became apparent the press had been duped. “Obviously, GE can’t possibly be expected to do the right thing voluntarily; their stock would keep plunging,” noted Gibson. “That’s why we must change the law.”
“GE’s tax avoidance is unpatriotic, it’s undemocratic, it’s unfair,” said Andrew Boyd, a US Uncut spokesperson. “It might be legal, but that’s only because GE has used its money and lobbying influence to buy the loopholes they’re now taking advantage of.”
US Uncut developed the project with help from the Yes Lab.
US Uncut’s Andrew Boyd told MSNBC (partially owned by General Electric, of course): “It might be legal but it’s immoral.”
YES it is. The Yes Men guys are absolute geniuses. If you’re going to infiltrate capitalism, you have to do it all the way...
04.15.2011
Richard Metzger
http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/ge_to_donate_billions_to_the_federal_government_the_yes_men_punk_a.p
Once again the heroically funny Yes Men (along with the anti-Tea party patriots of “US Uncut”) have punk’d the establishment. This time their victim was the Associated Press. From the press release:
USA Today, AP fall for US Uncut ploy; GE stock loses billions
Contact: Blair Fitzgibbon 202-503-6141 blair@fitzgibbonmedia.com, Duncan Meisel 512-657-9124 duncan.meisel@gmail.com, Carl Gibson 601-454-6443 usuncut@gmail.com, The Yes Lab info@yeslab.org
Washington, DC - US Uncut, a burgeoning grassroots movement pressuring corporate tax cheats to pay their fair share, posted today a fake GE press release announcing that they would return their illegitimate (but legal) $3.2 billion tax refund, and that they would lobby to close the sort of corporate tax loopholes that had allowed them to skip taxes in the first place. Several major media outlets, including USA Today, ran the story as true. (Here is a link to the original USA Today story; here is the first article debunking the release.)
US Uncut quickly reacted with another release pretending to praise GE for this entirely unpredictable, unlikely, and in fact impossible act.
“At a time when working families are being asked to accept massive cuts nationwide, this action showed another way the world could work,” said US Uncut spokesperson Carl Gibson. “For a brief moment people believed that the biggest corporate tax dodger had a change of heart and actually did the right thing. But the only way anything like this is really going to happen is if we change the laws that allow corporate tax avoidance in the first place.”
In the period the hoax was believed, GE’s stock plunged by .6% (far more than the value of the supposed return), then quickly recovered as soon as it became apparent the press had been duped. “Obviously, GE can’t possibly be expected to do the right thing voluntarily; their stock would keep plunging,” noted Gibson. “That’s why we must change the law.”
“GE’s tax avoidance is unpatriotic, it’s undemocratic, it’s unfair,” said Andrew Boyd, a US Uncut spokesperson. “It might be legal, but that’s only because GE has used its money and lobbying influence to buy the loopholes they’re now taking advantage of.”
US Uncut developed the project with help from the Yes Lab.
US Uncut’s Andrew Boyd told MSNBC (partially owned by General Electric, of course): “It might be legal but it’s immoral.”
YES it is. The Yes Men guys are absolute geniuses. If you’re going to infiltrate capitalism, you have to do it all the way...
“A WHO’S WHO OF THE MANSON FAMILY”
“Who’s on First? Who’s on Third? Who’s on Acid?”
Authors Sort Out Confusion of Charles Manson Family Members
ATLANTA – Apr. 25, 2011 – FEEJEE PRESS (feejeepress.com) announced today the release of “A Who’s Who of the Manson Family,” a Charles Manson Family members guidebook, by authors ADAM GORIGHTLY and SHAMUS McFARLAND in traditional paperback and ebook for Amazon Kindle and Kindle app users—as well as a Companion Soundtrack to the book by film composer MICHAEL MONTES.
Gorightly and McFarland take on the daunting task of clarifying the multitude of seemingly endless nicknames, aliases and real names that cloud a reader’s understanding of the various books chronicling the Manson Family members and their bizarre activities, including murder. The terrifying Manson saga is complicated enough for readers (and Manson researchers) to comprehend without every character using six different pseudonyms at any given time. “A Who’s Who of the Manson Family” cuts through the drug-sex-and-psycho maze to compile the definitive facebook of Manson Family characters and provide an easy-to-use guide to clarify their real identities.
“Crackpot historian” Gorightly worked with co-author McFarland to create “A Who’s Who of the Manson Family” as a companion piece to Gorightly’s groundbreaking book “The Shadow Over Santa Susana: Black Magic, Mind Control & the Manson Family Mythos.”
“My original intention was to include the ‘Who’s Who’ as an appendix to the revised 2009 edition of ‘Shadow Over Santa Susana’,” Gorightly said. “But for some reason, the publishers of that edition decided not to include it. Fortunately, Feejee Press stepped forward with interest in releasing ‘A Who’s Who of the Manson Family’ as a separate book—in both paperback and ebook editions. So we had the chance to do some Manson Family current events updating. Dark, terrifying, disturbing, and yet handy!”
In addition to the paperback and ebook, Feejee Press brought in film composer Michael Montes to create a soundtrack for the book: “A Who’s Who of the Manson Family: A Companion Soundtrack to the Book,” available as an MP3 download. Seven of Montes’ hauntingly surreal tracks were carefully hand-picked as an atmospheric accompaniment, adding another dimension to Gorightly and McFarland’s Manson Family members guidebook.
The paperback edition can be purchased online for US $16.95 at CreateSpace (https://www.createspace.com/3558154) or Amazon.com (http://amzn.to/hVD8wU) where a preview of the book is also available. The Kindle edition can be purchased online for US $6.95 at Amazon’s Kindle Store:
http://amzn.to/e53a3O
Information on listening to samples, purchase and download of the US $3.99 MP3 Companion Soundtrack can be found on Feejee Press’ website:
http://feejeepress.com/whoswhomansonsoundtrack
Who’s on First? Who’s on Third? Who’s on Acid?
Press Contacts:
Adam Gorightly – Contact for Interviews
Adamgorightly.com
adamgorightly@yahoo.com
ABOUT ADAM GORIGHTLY
A certified “crackpot historian” and 23rd degree Discordian, Adam Gorightly has been chronicling fringe and conspiracy culture in an illuminating manner for over two decades. An active contributor to the ‘zine revolution of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Gorightly’s byline was a familiar sight in many cutting-edge magazines of the period where he sharpened his literary teeth. His articles have appeared in numerous publications such as “The Excluded Middle,” “UFO Magazine,” “Paranoia,” “SteamShovel Press,” and “FourTwoFour,” the largest soccer magazine in Great Britain. Gorightly’s explorations into these arcane waters eventually led to his first book, published in October 2001, “The Shadow Over Santa Susana: Black Magic, Mind Control and the Manson Family Mythos.” Other books by Gorightly include “The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture,” “James Shelby Downard’s Mystical War,” and “The Beast of Adam Gorightly: Collected Rantings 1992–2004.”
Michael Montes
MichaelMontes.com
mm@michaelmontes.com
ABOUT MICHAEL MONTES
In the late 80s Michael Montes was brought in to work with Aimee Mann's band 'Til Tuesday as keyboardist for their album "Everything's Different Now" and subsequent tour. He then began the Zoar project, a series of dark atmospheric albums. Neil Strauss of The New York Times dubbed Zoar "Masters of the cinematic instrumental." In 1995 he opened his own commercial music company, Sacred Noise and is considered one of the top composers in the field. Several of his pieces are included in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. Since that time he has composed scores for numerous films including Joan Stein's Oscar® nominated "One Day Crossing."
Editors – Feejee Press
Feejeepress.com
editors@feejeepress.com
ABOUT FEEJEE PRESS
Feejee Press (feejeepress.com) is an upstart publishing company focused on “Forbidden, Forsaken, and Forgotten Knowledge” ranging from love poetry to true crime.
Publication Date:Apr 12 2011
ISBN/EAN13:1456585010 / 9781456585013
Page Count:138
Binding Type:US Trade Paper
Trim Size:6" x 9"
Language:English
Color:Black and White
Related Categories:Biography & Autobiography / Criminals & Outlaws
Lindsay Lohan For President!
Adam Gorightly
April 12, 2011
http://gorightly.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/lindsay-lohan-for-president
With the 2012 elections (and the end of the world as we know it!) just around the corner — and the likes of Michelle Bachman and The Donald launching exploratory campaigns — we here at Untamed Dimensions have decided to fire the first election year salvo in a glorious red white and blue explosion of stars and stripes. Damn I love this country!
So, from the great State of California, I nominate that gone party girl and around Hollywood scene maker, Lindsay Lohan for President; that f-you finger-nail paint sportin’, ankle bracelet wearin’, stone fox vixen with an attitude and collagen lip injection that don’t stop. I mean, if we’re gonna throw up brainless eye candy like Sara Palin for public consumption, then we might as well run someone up the flagpole with an edge to her like Lindsay, who likes to toss a few down and isn’t all hung up in some puritanical dream world that became old news over a century ago when dear old uncle Al Crowley announced this as a new eon where mom and apple pie would take a back seat to sex, drugs and rock n’ roll!
I mean, who would you rather party with? With that in mind we’ll call our political party, The Party Party, and I hearby nominate Linday (she has dropped the Lohan part, I guess) as the next President of these here United States, and while we’re at it we might as well nominate Lindsay as Vice President as well.
Dana Milbank Red-Baits the People's Budget
04/14/2011
Peter Hart
http://www.fair.org/blog/#post-17976
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank seems to like to mock progressives almost as much as he likes to go after Glenn Beck. So it's no surprise that he turned out to "cover" the unveiling of a budget plan by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (4/13/11).
Milbank seems to think that little explanation is needed--these crazy ideas are just obviously crazy:
Among the highlights: a $4 trillion tax increase over 10 years. An increase in the top tax rate to 49 percent. A $2.3 trillion defense spending cut--and an increase in domestic spending. Oh, and they would revive the "public option" to offer government-run healthcare.
Putting "increase" in italics is Milbank's way of saying, "Can you believe these people?!" And it's worth pointing out that the "public option" isn't "government-run healthcare," but these are details.
He goes to present the nightmare vision of the future:
Still, it gives a sense of how things would be if liberals ran the world: no cuts in Social Security benefits, government-negotiated Medicare drug prices, and increased income and Social Security taxes for the wealthy. Corporations and investors would be hit with a variety of new fees and taxes. And the military would face a shock-and-awe accounting: a 22 percent cut in Army soldiers, 30 percent for the Marines, 20 percent for the Navy and 15 percent for the Air Force. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would end, and weapons programs would go begging.
Keeping Social Security as is, reducing Medicare drug prices, raising taxes on corporations, ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.... I'm sorry, are these ideas supposed to sound absurd on their face? Someone should tell the people, since much of this would be broadly popular. At least, that seems to be the case when the people are asked what they think.
Better watch our language, though--Milbank points out that this talk about "the people" is a little creepy:
Their oft-repeated slogan, "The People’s Budget," conveyed an unhelpful association with "the people's republic" and other socialist undertakings.
An "unhelpful association" made by the writer. Glenn Beck might be leaving Fox, which might open up some room for others in the media to ferret out the socialists among us.
Peter Hart
http://www.fair.org/blog/#post-17976
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank seems to like to mock progressives almost as much as he likes to go after Glenn Beck. So it's no surprise that he turned out to "cover" the unveiling of a budget plan by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (4/13/11).
Milbank seems to think that little explanation is needed--these crazy ideas are just obviously crazy:
Among the highlights: a $4 trillion tax increase over 10 years. An increase in the top tax rate to 49 percent. A $2.3 trillion defense spending cut--and an increase in domestic spending. Oh, and they would revive the "public option" to offer government-run healthcare.
Putting "increase" in italics is Milbank's way of saying, "Can you believe these people?!" And it's worth pointing out that the "public option" isn't "government-run healthcare," but these are details.
He goes to present the nightmare vision of the future:
Still, it gives a sense of how things would be if liberals ran the world: no cuts in Social Security benefits, government-negotiated Medicare drug prices, and increased income and Social Security taxes for the wealthy. Corporations and investors would be hit with a variety of new fees and taxes. And the military would face a shock-and-awe accounting: a 22 percent cut in Army soldiers, 30 percent for the Marines, 20 percent for the Navy and 15 percent for the Air Force. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would end, and weapons programs would go begging.
Keeping Social Security as is, reducing Medicare drug prices, raising taxes on corporations, ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.... I'm sorry, are these ideas supposed to sound absurd on their face? Someone should tell the people, since much of this would be broadly popular. At least, that seems to be the case when the people are asked what they think.
Better watch our language, though--Milbank points out that this talk about "the people" is a little creepy:
Their oft-repeated slogan, "The People’s Budget," conveyed an unhelpful association with "the people's republic" and other socialist undertakings.
An "unhelpful association" made by the writer. Glenn Beck might be leaving Fox, which might open up some room for others in the media to ferret out the socialists among us.
Obamanomics: Waging War on American Workers
Stephen Lendman
Friday, April 15, 2011
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/04/obamanomics-waging-war-on-american.html
Since taking office, Obama shamelessly betrayed his constituents by:
-- ignoring popular needs during America's greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression;
-- giving Wall Street crooks trillions of taxpayer dollars;
-- spending another $1.5 trillion annually on militarism, imperial wars, and related policies at a time America has no enemies;
-- waging war on organized labor and public education, as well as civil and human rights; and
-- claiming "tough choices" demand class warfare through neoliberal austerity for working Americans, mainly middle and lower income ones least able to afford it.
On April 13, he announced his latest plan through $4 trillion in largely social spending budget cuts over the next 12 years. More on them below.
The same day, New York Times writers Mark Landler and Michael Shear headlined, "Obama's Debt Plan Sets Stage for Long Battle Over Spending," saying:
Obama's Wednesday George Washington University speech "propos(ed) a mix of long-term spending cuts, tax increases, and changes to social welfare programs," omitting that they harm working Americans most.
A Times editorial headlined, "President Obama, Reinvigorated," saying:
"The man America elected president has re-emerged." His budget speech "was a reasonable basis for a conversation and is far better than its most prominent competitors. That is because it is grounded in themes of generosity and responsibility....(I)t was a relief to see Mr. Obama standing up for the values that got him to the table."
These aren't surprising comments from a broadsheet long associated with wealth and power interests, now pretending hammering working Americans is fair and just.
A supportive Washington Post editorial headlined, "President Obama's deficit plan: Benefits and drawbacks," saying:
Obama "made an important and welcome contribution to the debate over deficit reduction Wednesday...(S)orely needed presidential engagement on the nation's fiscal crisis has arrived at last."
A Wall Street Journal editorial, however, called Obama "The Presidential Divider," saying:
His speech was "toxic," "dishonest," (and) even worse (for) deficits and debt" by not matching Rep. Ryan's (R. WI) slash and burn plan even more draconian that his own - "in the midst of a fiscal crisis" both parties refuse to address responsibly, nor do major media reports, op-eds, and editorials explain it.
In fact, Obama largely embraces plans proposed by Republicans and his own deficit cutting commission, offering a different mix for the same purpose - protecting America's super-rich while hammering working Americans through "shared sacrifice."
In other words, middle and low income households "sacrifice" to let wealthy ones "share," his agenda since day one in office.
For example, his proposed tax increase plan is a sham, knowing Republicans won't agree. Moreover, since taking office, he broke every major campaign pledge, and twice, since December alone, capitulated to Republicans on taxes and spending:
-- last December, with Democrats controlling both Houses, by extending Bush's tax cuts to the rich after promising to end them; and
-- in April, agreeing to $38 billion in largely vital social services cuts after promising to preserve them, rationalized by arguing for "a willingness to give on both sides."
Representing wealth and power, his promises are empty. His April 8 budget deal includes significant social spending cuts including:
-- $3.5 billion from Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) funding;
-- $2.2 billion from nonprofit health insurance cooperatives;
-- $600 million from community healthcare centers;
-- $1 billion from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other disease prevention programs;
-- $1.6 billion from EPA's clean/safe drinking water and other projects;
-- $950 million from community development grants;
-- $504 million from nutrition aid for poor Women, Infants, and Children (WIC);
-- $500 million from education programs;
-- $390 million from home heating subsidies to the poor, as well as $2.5 billion for the Low Income Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) announced in February;
-- $350 million from labor programs, including grants for community service jobs for seniors;
-- other social service cuts;
-- $786 million from FEMA first-responder funding;
-- $407 million from energy efficiency and renewable energy programs;
-- $260 million from National Institutes of Health (NIH) medical research;
-- $127 million from the National Park Service; and
-- billions less for public infrastructure and transportation spending, while increasing war appropriations by multiples more, including for conquering and controlling Libya.
Moreover, Obama agreed to more draconian FY 2012 cuts and corporate tax breaks as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling before its limit is reached in mid-May. Appearing on NBC's Meet the Press April 10, senior White House advisor David Plouffe said he'd consider new austerity measures to raise the debt ceiling and reduce the deficit - an oxymoronic compromise, especially with unlimited defense spending and generous corporate handouts instead of major reductions.
Obama Proposes Draconian Cuts on Working Americans
According to White House.gov, Obama's plan over 12 years includes:
-- $4 trillion overall;
-- $770 billion from education, environmental, transportation, and other infrastructure cuts, as well as lower wages and benefits for federal workers when they need more, not less;
-- $480 billion from Medicare and Medicaid, besides another $1 trillion from Obamacare;
-- $360 billion from mandated domestic programs, including food stamps, home heating assistance, income for the poor and disabled, federal pension insurance, and farm subsidies;
-- $400 billion from military-related spending from unneeded weapons, as well as healthcare and other benefits for active service members and veterans - not priority items the Pentagon and war profiteers want to protect generous annual defense spending increases and supplemental add-ons, plus black-hole black budgets for intelligence and other nefarious purposes.
Like all his demagoguery, Obama hypocrically stressed we're broke and have to make shared sacrifices, suppressing how he's served wealth and power interests at the expense of working Americans during the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
The times demand stimulus, job creation, help for the working poor and unemployed, and much more, including:
-- programs to prevent banks from foreclosing on homeowners they defrauded;
-- slashing defense spending;
-- ending imperial wars and occupations;
-- using the funds for vital domestic programs;
-- breaking up the too-big-to-fail banks; prosecuting their officials guilty of grand theft;
-- reinvigorating public education;
-- strengthening Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as well as assuring universal healthcare;
-- guaranteeing every qualified student affordable higher education;
-- supporting organized labor;
-- instituting tough regulations to end monopoly and oligopoly power, punish corporate theft, curb speculation, end subsidies, and assure they all pay their fair share in taxes;
-- replacing today's dysfunctional tax system with a progressive one, making the rich share the burden they now avoid;
-- making social justice issue one at a time none exists, Democrats as mean-spirited as Republicans; and
-- instituting real government of, by and for the people, what's never existed and doesn't now under corrupted duopoly governance, ignoring people needs to serve Wall Street, war profiteers, and other corporate favorites.
The alternative assures greater militarism, social inequality and decay, growing poverty, eroding freedoms, police state harshness, and overall conditions too dire to imagine because public apathy let elected officials do nothing to change things.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
Friday, April 15, 2011
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/04/obamanomics-waging-war-on-american.html
Since taking office, Obama shamelessly betrayed his constituents by:
-- ignoring popular needs during America's greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression;
-- giving Wall Street crooks trillions of taxpayer dollars;
-- spending another $1.5 trillion annually on militarism, imperial wars, and related policies at a time America has no enemies;
-- waging war on organized labor and public education, as well as civil and human rights; and
-- claiming "tough choices" demand class warfare through neoliberal austerity for working Americans, mainly middle and lower income ones least able to afford it.
On April 13, he announced his latest plan through $4 trillion in largely social spending budget cuts over the next 12 years. More on them below.
The same day, New York Times writers Mark Landler and Michael Shear headlined, "Obama's Debt Plan Sets Stage for Long Battle Over Spending," saying:
Obama's Wednesday George Washington University speech "propos(ed) a mix of long-term spending cuts, tax increases, and changes to social welfare programs," omitting that they harm working Americans most.
A Times editorial headlined, "President Obama, Reinvigorated," saying:
"The man America elected president has re-emerged." His budget speech "was a reasonable basis for a conversation and is far better than its most prominent competitors. That is because it is grounded in themes of generosity and responsibility....(I)t was a relief to see Mr. Obama standing up for the values that got him to the table."
These aren't surprising comments from a broadsheet long associated with wealth and power interests, now pretending hammering working Americans is fair and just.
A supportive Washington Post editorial headlined, "President Obama's deficit plan: Benefits and drawbacks," saying:
Obama "made an important and welcome contribution to the debate over deficit reduction Wednesday...(S)orely needed presidential engagement on the nation's fiscal crisis has arrived at last."
A Wall Street Journal editorial, however, called Obama "The Presidential Divider," saying:
His speech was "toxic," "dishonest," (and) even worse (for) deficits and debt" by not matching Rep. Ryan's (R. WI) slash and burn plan even more draconian that his own - "in the midst of a fiscal crisis" both parties refuse to address responsibly, nor do major media reports, op-eds, and editorials explain it.
In fact, Obama largely embraces plans proposed by Republicans and his own deficit cutting commission, offering a different mix for the same purpose - protecting America's super-rich while hammering working Americans through "shared sacrifice."
In other words, middle and low income households "sacrifice" to let wealthy ones "share," his agenda since day one in office.
For example, his proposed tax increase plan is a sham, knowing Republicans won't agree. Moreover, since taking office, he broke every major campaign pledge, and twice, since December alone, capitulated to Republicans on taxes and spending:
-- last December, with Democrats controlling both Houses, by extending Bush's tax cuts to the rich after promising to end them; and
-- in April, agreeing to $38 billion in largely vital social services cuts after promising to preserve them, rationalized by arguing for "a willingness to give on both sides."
Representing wealth and power, his promises are empty. His April 8 budget deal includes significant social spending cuts including:
-- $3.5 billion from Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) funding;
-- $2.2 billion from nonprofit health insurance cooperatives;
-- $600 million from community healthcare centers;
-- $1 billion from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other disease prevention programs;
-- $1.6 billion from EPA's clean/safe drinking water and other projects;
-- $950 million from community development grants;
-- $504 million from nutrition aid for poor Women, Infants, and Children (WIC);
-- $500 million from education programs;
-- $390 million from home heating subsidies to the poor, as well as $2.5 billion for the Low Income Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) announced in February;
-- $350 million from labor programs, including grants for community service jobs for seniors;
-- other social service cuts;
-- $786 million from FEMA first-responder funding;
-- $407 million from energy efficiency and renewable energy programs;
-- $260 million from National Institutes of Health (NIH) medical research;
-- $127 million from the National Park Service; and
-- billions less for public infrastructure and transportation spending, while increasing war appropriations by multiples more, including for conquering and controlling Libya.
Moreover, Obama agreed to more draconian FY 2012 cuts and corporate tax breaks as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling before its limit is reached in mid-May. Appearing on NBC's Meet the Press April 10, senior White House advisor David Plouffe said he'd consider new austerity measures to raise the debt ceiling and reduce the deficit - an oxymoronic compromise, especially with unlimited defense spending and generous corporate handouts instead of major reductions.
Obama Proposes Draconian Cuts on Working Americans
According to White House.gov, Obama's plan over 12 years includes:
-- $4 trillion overall;
-- $770 billion from education, environmental, transportation, and other infrastructure cuts, as well as lower wages and benefits for federal workers when they need more, not less;
-- $480 billion from Medicare and Medicaid, besides another $1 trillion from Obamacare;
-- $360 billion from mandated domestic programs, including food stamps, home heating assistance, income for the poor and disabled, federal pension insurance, and farm subsidies;
-- $400 billion from military-related spending from unneeded weapons, as well as healthcare and other benefits for active service members and veterans - not priority items the Pentagon and war profiteers want to protect generous annual defense spending increases and supplemental add-ons, plus black-hole black budgets for intelligence and other nefarious purposes.
Like all his demagoguery, Obama hypocrically stressed we're broke and have to make shared sacrifices, suppressing how he's served wealth and power interests at the expense of working Americans during the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
The times demand stimulus, job creation, help for the working poor and unemployed, and much more, including:
-- programs to prevent banks from foreclosing on homeowners they defrauded;
-- slashing defense spending;
-- ending imperial wars and occupations;
-- using the funds for vital domestic programs;
-- breaking up the too-big-to-fail banks; prosecuting their officials guilty of grand theft;
-- reinvigorating public education;
-- strengthening Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as well as assuring universal healthcare;
-- guaranteeing every qualified student affordable higher education;
-- supporting organized labor;
-- instituting tough regulations to end monopoly and oligopoly power, punish corporate theft, curb speculation, end subsidies, and assure they all pay their fair share in taxes;
-- replacing today's dysfunctional tax system with a progressive one, making the rich share the burden they now avoid;
-- making social justice issue one at a time none exists, Democrats as mean-spirited as Republicans; and
-- instituting real government of, by and for the people, what's never existed and doesn't now under corrupted duopoly governance, ignoring people needs to serve Wall Street, war profiteers, and other corporate favorites.
The alternative assures greater militarism, social inequality and decay, growing poverty, eroding freedoms, police state harshness, and overall conditions too dire to imagine because public apathy let elected officials do nothing to change things.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
Great Quotes: Paul Krugman on Barack Obama
"What happened to the inspirational figure his supporters thought they elected? Who is this bland, timid guy who doesn’t seem to stand for anything in particular?”
US House of Representatives votes to abolish Medicare
By Patrick Martin
16 April 2011
http://wsws.org/articles/2011/apr2011/medi-a16.shtml
In the most reactionary social policy proposal in recent US history, the House of Representatives voted Friday afternoon to support the abolition of the Medicare program, the government health insurance system for tens of millions of retired and disabled Americans. The 235-193 margin was a near party-line vote, with only four Republicans opposing the bill and no Democrats supporting it.
The vote was to approve an overall budget resolution for fiscal year 2012, which begins October 1. The bill drafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and backed by the entire House Republican leadership calls for $6.2 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years, with at least $3 trillion of this sum to be handed over to the wealthy in the form of additional tax cuts for the highest income bracket and for corporations.
The budget resolution serves as a framework for the bills that will actually authorize spending for FY 2012 by the various departments of the federal government. Even if passed by both houses of Congress, it is not legally binding and does not go the White House for the president’s signature to become law. This House version, in any event, has little chance of being passed by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Nonetheless, from a political standpoint the House vote is of enormous significance. For the first time in modern American history, a major social benefit is being targeted by one of the chambers of Congress for complete elimination. Every US resident 65 years and older is eligible for Medicare, which pays the bulk of the cost of hospitalization and other health care.
The Ryan budget resolution phases out Medicare for all Americans now aged 55 or younger. Instead of guaranteed coverage when they reach the age of 65, they would receive “premium supports,” or vouchers, to buy private insurance once they reach the age of 67. The value of the vouchers would be capped at a level that assures ever-rising health insurance costs for all those enrolled in the program.
Current Medicare recipients, and those over 55 who will become eligible for Medicare during the next 10 years, would remain under the preset program. However, the funding would be sharply cut, forcing cuts in coverage and reimbursement rates that would lead to more and more doctors and hospitals refusing to take Medicare patients.
The Republican budget also effectively eliminates Medicaid, the companion program to Medicare that provides health coverage for the poor, as well as paying for nursing home care for many seniors.
Medicaid is now a joint federal-state program, with the federal government bearing most of the costs and setting minimum standards for coverage. The Obama health care legislation passed last year proposed to expand Medicaid as one means of providing health insurance for working people who cannot obtain it through their employers.
Under the budget resolution adopted Friday, Medicaid would become an entirely state-run program, with federal support limited to block grants that would fall steadily behind the pace of health care costs, forcing states to continuously reduce benefits, eligibility or both. Total Medicaid spending would be slashed by $771 billion over 10 years.
The Republican resolution is motivated not by the desire to reduce the federal deficit, but by class hostility to the provision of any public social benefits. When Congressman Ryan outlined the plan in a speech two weeks ago to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, he condemned such benefits as encouraging laziness and indolence—although the primary beneficiaries of Medicare and Medicaid are the elderly, poor children and the disabled, those who in any decent society should not be working.
The brutality of this proposal did not prevent an outpouring of praise from the corporate-controlled media and the Washington establishment. On the contrary, it was this characteristic that most recommended the Ryan plan, leading to effusions from pundits like David Brooks of New York Times hailing Ryan’s “courage” and “realism.”
The Democratic Party response to the proposed termination of Medicare and Medicaid is a mixture of demagogy and cowardice. President Obama, after stalling for a week to give the Ryan plan more traction, finally denounced it in his budget speech Wednesday. But the Democrats merely propose to accomplish the same social goals—slashing spending for health care and other social needs—using less strident rhetoric and more subtle tactics.
From a purely electoral standpoint, the Republican proposal to destroy Medicare and Medicaid might appear reckless, even suicidal. The policy they are proposing is deeply unpopular: a recent Gallup poll found just 13 percent supporting a complete overhaul of Medicare, and opposition was particularly strong among the elderly, who backed Republican candidates by a 21-point margin in the 2010 congressional elections.
However, the policies of the US government are not determined by public opinion, but by the class interests of the American financial aristocracy, which controls both parties and uses their largely stage-managed conflicts to delude the population and sustain the illusion of electoral “choice.” The ruling class is determined to make working people pay the price for the Wall Street bailout as well as three wars and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
The real attitude of the Democrats towards deficit reduction was demonstrated Thursday in the passage of the fiscal year 2011 budget resolution negotiated by the congressional Republicans and the White House. The bill cuts domestic social spending by $38.5 billion, the largest one-year cut ever enacted by Congress.
There was a last-minute hitch in the congressional approval process for the FY 2011 budget, after the Congressional Budget Office issued a report detailing the size and timing of the cuts and finding that the reduction in current-year outlays, as opposed to overall spending authorization, would be only $352 million. This prompted a group of the most right-wing Republicans in the House to declare their opposition to the budget deal.
The House Democrats stepped in to assure passage of the bill. According to press accounts, the Democratic leadership in the House held back the votes of some 75 Democrats, waiting to see how many votes would be needed to approve the bill. At one point, the vote tally stood at 211 for the bill and 140 against, with 66 Democrats and only 16 Republicans not yet voting. The final tally showed passage by 260 to 167.
The New York Times reported back-channel contacts between leaders of the two parties to finalize the parliamentary maneuver: “Realizing that the majority was going to need Democratic votes to pass the measure and avoid a [federal government] shutdown, aides said that Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the No. 3 Republican, reached out to Mr. Hoyer, the second-ranking Democrat, for help on Thursday. Democrats initially did not have enough firm supporters of the measure, one official said, prompting Mr. Hoyer and his allies to reach out to lawmakers and round up what ultimately amounted to 81 Democratic votes, enough to provide a comfortable margin.”
In the event, 22 of these 81 Democrats were allowed by the leadership to vote against the budget so they could posture in front of their constituents as opponents of the cuts. The remaining 59 Democrats voted for the budget, exactly offsetting the 59 Republicans who voted against the bill proposed by their own leadership. Without the Democratic votes, the deal would have collapsed.
No such horse-trading was required in the Senate, where the record cuts in domestic social spending had overwhelming bipartisan support. The budget passed by the House was approved by the Senate 81-19, with most of the opposition coming from the right wing of the Republican Party, including figures like Rand Paul of Kentucky and Jim DeMint of South Carolina who wanted even greater cuts.
16 April 2011
http://wsws.org/articles/2011/apr2011/medi-a16.shtml
In the most reactionary social policy proposal in recent US history, the House of Representatives voted Friday afternoon to support the abolition of the Medicare program, the government health insurance system for tens of millions of retired and disabled Americans. The 235-193 margin was a near party-line vote, with only four Republicans opposing the bill and no Democrats supporting it.
The vote was to approve an overall budget resolution for fiscal year 2012, which begins October 1. The bill drafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and backed by the entire House Republican leadership calls for $6.2 trillion in spending cuts over the next 10 years, with at least $3 trillion of this sum to be handed over to the wealthy in the form of additional tax cuts for the highest income bracket and for corporations.
The budget resolution serves as a framework for the bills that will actually authorize spending for FY 2012 by the various departments of the federal government. Even if passed by both houses of Congress, it is not legally binding and does not go the White House for the president’s signature to become law. This House version, in any event, has little chance of being passed by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Nonetheless, from a political standpoint the House vote is of enormous significance. For the first time in modern American history, a major social benefit is being targeted by one of the chambers of Congress for complete elimination. Every US resident 65 years and older is eligible for Medicare, which pays the bulk of the cost of hospitalization and other health care.
The Ryan budget resolution phases out Medicare for all Americans now aged 55 or younger. Instead of guaranteed coverage when they reach the age of 65, they would receive “premium supports,” or vouchers, to buy private insurance once they reach the age of 67. The value of the vouchers would be capped at a level that assures ever-rising health insurance costs for all those enrolled in the program.
Current Medicare recipients, and those over 55 who will become eligible for Medicare during the next 10 years, would remain under the preset program. However, the funding would be sharply cut, forcing cuts in coverage and reimbursement rates that would lead to more and more doctors and hospitals refusing to take Medicare patients.
The Republican budget also effectively eliminates Medicaid, the companion program to Medicare that provides health coverage for the poor, as well as paying for nursing home care for many seniors.
Medicaid is now a joint federal-state program, with the federal government bearing most of the costs and setting minimum standards for coverage. The Obama health care legislation passed last year proposed to expand Medicaid as one means of providing health insurance for working people who cannot obtain it through their employers.
Under the budget resolution adopted Friday, Medicaid would become an entirely state-run program, with federal support limited to block grants that would fall steadily behind the pace of health care costs, forcing states to continuously reduce benefits, eligibility or both. Total Medicaid spending would be slashed by $771 billion over 10 years.
The Republican resolution is motivated not by the desire to reduce the federal deficit, but by class hostility to the provision of any public social benefits. When Congressman Ryan outlined the plan in a speech two weeks ago to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, he condemned such benefits as encouraging laziness and indolence—although the primary beneficiaries of Medicare and Medicaid are the elderly, poor children and the disabled, those who in any decent society should not be working.
The brutality of this proposal did not prevent an outpouring of praise from the corporate-controlled media and the Washington establishment. On the contrary, it was this characteristic that most recommended the Ryan plan, leading to effusions from pundits like David Brooks of New York Times hailing Ryan’s “courage” and “realism.”
The Democratic Party response to the proposed termination of Medicare and Medicaid is a mixture of demagogy and cowardice. President Obama, after stalling for a week to give the Ryan plan more traction, finally denounced it in his budget speech Wednesday. But the Democrats merely propose to accomplish the same social goals—slashing spending for health care and other social needs—using less strident rhetoric and more subtle tactics.
From a purely electoral standpoint, the Republican proposal to destroy Medicare and Medicaid might appear reckless, even suicidal. The policy they are proposing is deeply unpopular: a recent Gallup poll found just 13 percent supporting a complete overhaul of Medicare, and opposition was particularly strong among the elderly, who backed Republican candidates by a 21-point margin in the 2010 congressional elections.
However, the policies of the US government are not determined by public opinion, but by the class interests of the American financial aristocracy, which controls both parties and uses their largely stage-managed conflicts to delude the population and sustain the illusion of electoral “choice.” The ruling class is determined to make working people pay the price for the Wall Street bailout as well as three wars and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
The real attitude of the Democrats towards deficit reduction was demonstrated Thursday in the passage of the fiscal year 2011 budget resolution negotiated by the congressional Republicans and the White House. The bill cuts domestic social spending by $38.5 billion, the largest one-year cut ever enacted by Congress.
There was a last-minute hitch in the congressional approval process for the FY 2011 budget, after the Congressional Budget Office issued a report detailing the size and timing of the cuts and finding that the reduction in current-year outlays, as opposed to overall spending authorization, would be only $352 million. This prompted a group of the most right-wing Republicans in the House to declare their opposition to the budget deal.
The House Democrats stepped in to assure passage of the bill. According to press accounts, the Democratic leadership in the House held back the votes of some 75 Democrats, waiting to see how many votes would be needed to approve the bill. At one point, the vote tally stood at 211 for the bill and 140 against, with 66 Democrats and only 16 Republicans not yet voting. The final tally showed passage by 260 to 167.
The New York Times reported back-channel contacts between leaders of the two parties to finalize the parliamentary maneuver: “Realizing that the majority was going to need Democratic votes to pass the measure and avoid a [federal government] shutdown, aides said that Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the No. 3 Republican, reached out to Mr. Hoyer, the second-ranking Democrat, for help on Thursday. Democrats initially did not have enough firm supporters of the measure, one official said, prompting Mr. Hoyer and his allies to reach out to lawmakers and round up what ultimately amounted to 81 Democratic votes, enough to provide a comfortable margin.”
In the event, 22 of these 81 Democrats were allowed by the leadership to vote against the budget so they could posture in front of their constituents as opponents of the cuts. The remaining 59 Democrats voted for the budget, exactly offsetting the 59 Republicans who voted against the bill proposed by their own leadership. Without the Democratic votes, the deal would have collapsed.
No such horse-trading was required in the Senate, where the record cuts in domestic social spending had overwhelming bipartisan support. The budget passed by the House was approved by the Senate 81-19, with most of the opposition coming from the right wing of the Republican Party, including figures like Rand Paul of Kentucky and Jim DeMint of South Carolina who wanted even greater cuts.
How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon
The perverse allure of a damaged woman.
Johann Hari
Monday, Nov. 2, 2009
http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/
Ayn Rand Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?
Two new biographies of Rand—Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller—try to puzzle out this question, showing how her arguments found an echo in the darkest corners of American political life. But the books work best, for me, on a level I didn't expect. They are thrilling psychological portraits of a horribly damaged woman who deserves the one thing she spent her life raging against: compassion.
Alisa Rosenbaum (her original name) was born in the icy winter of czarism, not long after the failed 1905 revolution ripped through her home city of St. Petersburg. Her father was a self-made Jewish pharmacist, while her mother was an aristocratic dilettante who loathed her three daughters. She would tell them she never wanted children, and she kept them only out of duty. Alisa became a surly, friendless child. In elementary school, her class was asked to write an essay about why being a child was a joyous thing. She instead wrote "a scathing denunciation of childhood," headed with a quote from Pascal: "I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise."
But the Rosenbaums' domestic tensions were dwarfed by the conflicts raging outside. The worst anti-Jewish violence since the Middle Ages was brewing, and the family was terrified of being killed by the mobs—but it was the Bolsheviks who struck at them first. After the 1917 revolutions, her father's pharmacy was seized "in the name of the people." For Alisa, who had grown up surrounded by servants and nannies, the Communists seemed at last to be the face of the masses, a terrifying robbing horde. In a country where 5 million people died of starvation in just two years, the Rosenbaums went hungry. Her father tried to set up another business, but after it too was seized, he declared himself to be "on strike."
The Rosenbaums knew their angry, outspoken daughter would not survive under the Bolsheviks for long, so they arranged to smuggle her out to their relatives in America. Just before her 21st birthday, she said goodbye to her country and her family for the last time. She was determined to live in the America she had seen in the silent movies—the America of skyscrapers and riches and freedom. She renamed herself Ayn Rand, a name she thought had the hardness and purity of a Hollywood starlet.
She headed for Hollywood, where she set out to write stories that expressed her philosophy—a body of thought she said was the polar opposite of communism. She announced that the world was divided between a small minority of Supermen who are productive and "the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent" who, like the Leninists, try to feed off them. He is "mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned." It is evil to show kindness to these "lice": The "only virtue" is "selfishness."
She meant it. Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that underpins all her later writings. The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should." She called him "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy," shimmering with "immense, explicit egotism." Rand had only one regret: "A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough."
It's not hard to see this as a kind of political post-traumatic stress disorder. Rand believed the Bolshevik lie that they represented the people, so she wanted to strike back at them—through theft and murder. In a nasty irony, she was copying their tactics. She started to write her first novel, We the Living (1936), and in the early drafts her central character—a crude proxy for Rand herself—says to a Bolshevik: "I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believes one's right, one shouldn't wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them."
She poured these beliefs into a series of deeply odd novels. She takes the flabby staples of romantic fiction and peppers them with political ravings and rapes for the audience to cheer on. All have the same core message: Anything that pleases the Superman's ego is good; anything that blocks it is bad. In The Fountainhead, published in 1943, a heroic architect called Howard Roark designs a housing project for the poor—not out of compassion but because he wants to build something mighty. When his plans are slightly altered, he blows up the housing project, saying the purity of his vision has been contaminated by evil government bureaucrats. He orders the jury to acquit him, saying: "The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off!"
For her longest novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957), Rand returned to a moment from her childhood. Just as her father once went on strike to protest against Bolshevism, she imagined the super-rich in America going on strike against progressive taxation—and said the United States would swiftly regress to an apocalyptic hellhole if the Donald Trumps and Ted Turners ceased their toil. The abandoned masses are described variously as "savages," "refuse," "inanimate objects," and "imitations of living beings," picking through rubbish. One of the strikers deliberately causes a train crash, and Rand makes it clear she thinks the murder victims deserved it, describing in horror how they all supported the higher taxes that made the attack necessary.
Her heroes are a cocktail of extreme self-love and extreme self-pity: They insist they need no one, yet they spend all their time fuming that the masses don't bow down before their manifest superiority.
As her books became mega-sellers, Rand surrounded herself with a tightly policed cult of young people who believed she had found the One Objective Truth about the world. They were required to memorize her novels and slapped down as "imbecilic" and "anti-life" by Rand if they asked questions. One student said: "There was a right kind of music, a right kind of art, a right kind of interior design, a right kind of dancing. There were wrong books which we should not buy."
Rand had become addicted to amphetamines while writing The Fountainhead, and her natural paranoia and aggression were becoming more extreme as they pumped though her veins. Anybody in her circle who disagreed with her was subjected to a show trial in front of the whole group in which they would be required to repent or face expulsion. Her secretary, Barbara Weiss, said: "I came to look on her as a killer of people." The workings of her cult exposed the hollowness of Rand's claims to venerate free thinking and individualism. Her message was, think freely, as long as it leads you into total agreement with me.
In the end, Rand was destroyed by her own dogmas. She fell in love with a young follower called Nathaniel Branden and had a decades-long affair with him. He became the cult's No. 2, and she named him as her "intellectual heir"—until he admitted he had fallen in love with a 23-year-old woman. As Burns explains, Rand's philosophy "taught that sex was never physical; it was always inspired by a deeper recognition of shared values, a sense that the other embodied the highest human achievement." So to be sexually rejected by Branden meant he was rejecting her ideas, her philosophy, her entire person. She screamed: "You have rejected me? You have dared to reject me? Me, your highest value?"
She never really recovered. We all become weak at some point in our lives, so a thinker who despises weakness will end up despising herself. In her 70s Rand found herself dying of lung cancer, after insisting that her followers smoke because it symbolized "man's victory over fire" and the studies showing it caused lung cancer were Communist propaganda. By then she had driven almost everyone away. In 1982, she died alone in her apartment with only a hired nurse at her side. If her philosophy is right—if the only human relationships worth having are based on the exchange of dollars—this was a happy and victorious death. Did even she believe it in the end?
Rand was broken by the Bolsheviks as a girl, and she never left their bootprint behind. She believed her philosophy was Bolshevism's opposite, when in reality it was its twin. Both she and the Soviets insisted a small revolutionary elite in possession of absolute rationality must seize power and impose its vision on a malleable, imbecilic mass. The only difference was that Lenin thought the parasites to be stomped on were the rich, while Rand thought they were the poor.
I don't find it hard to understand why this happened to Rand: I feel sympathy for her, even as I know she would have spat it back into my face. What I do find incomprehensible is that there are people—large numbers of people—who see her writing not as psychopathy but as philosophy, and urge us to follow her. Why? What in American culture did she drill into? Unfortunately, neither of these equally thorough, readable books can offer much of an answer to this, the only great question about her.
Rand expresses, with a certain pithy crudeness, an instinct that courses through us all sometimes: I'm the only one who matters! I'm not going to care about any of you any more! She then absolutizes it in an amphetamine Benzedrine-charged reductio ad absurdum by insisting it is the only feeling worth entertaining, ever.
This urge exists everywhere, but why is it supercharged on the American right, where Rand is regarded as something more than a bad, bizarre joke? In a country where almost everyone believes—wrongly, on the whole—that they are self-made, perhaps it is easier to have contempt for people who didn't make much of themselves. And Rand taps into something deeper still. The founding myth of America is that the nation was built out of nothing, using only reason and willpower. Rand applies this myth to the individual American: You made yourself. You need nobody and nothing except your reason to rise and dominate. You can be America, in one body, in one mind.
She said the United States should be a "democracy of superiors only," with superiority defined by being rich. Well, we got it. As the health care crisis has shown, today, the rich have the real power: The vote that matters is expressed with a checkbook and a lobbyist. We get to vote only for the candidates they have pre-funded and receive the legislation they have preapproved. It's useful—if daunting—to know that there is a substantial slice of the American public who believe this is not a problem to be put right, but morally admirable.
We all live every day with the victory of this fifth-rate Nietzsche of the mini-malls. Alan Greenspan was one of her strongest cult followers and even invited her to the Oval Office to witness his swearing-in when he joined the Ford administration. You can see how he carried this philosophy into the 1990s: Why should the Supermen of Wall Street be regulated to protected the lice of Main Street?
The figure Ayn Rand most resembles in American life is L. Ron Hubbard, another crazed, pitiable charlatan who used trashy potboilers to whip up a cult. Unfortunately, Rand's cult isn't confined to Tom Cruise and a rash of Hollywood dimwits. No, its ideas and its impulses have, by drilling into the basest human instincts, captured one of America's major political parties.
Johann Hari
Monday, Nov. 2, 2009
http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/
Ayn Rand Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?
Two new biographies of Rand—Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller—try to puzzle out this question, showing how her arguments found an echo in the darkest corners of American political life. But the books work best, for me, on a level I didn't expect. They are thrilling psychological portraits of a horribly damaged woman who deserves the one thing she spent her life raging against: compassion.
Alisa Rosenbaum (her original name) was born in the icy winter of czarism, not long after the failed 1905 revolution ripped through her home city of St. Petersburg. Her father was a self-made Jewish pharmacist, while her mother was an aristocratic dilettante who loathed her three daughters. She would tell them she never wanted children, and she kept them only out of duty. Alisa became a surly, friendless child. In elementary school, her class was asked to write an essay about why being a child was a joyous thing. She instead wrote "a scathing denunciation of childhood," headed with a quote from Pascal: "I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise."
But the Rosenbaums' domestic tensions were dwarfed by the conflicts raging outside. The worst anti-Jewish violence since the Middle Ages was brewing, and the family was terrified of being killed by the mobs—but it was the Bolsheviks who struck at them first. After the 1917 revolutions, her father's pharmacy was seized "in the name of the people." For Alisa, who had grown up surrounded by servants and nannies, the Communists seemed at last to be the face of the masses, a terrifying robbing horde. In a country where 5 million people died of starvation in just two years, the Rosenbaums went hungry. Her father tried to set up another business, but after it too was seized, he declared himself to be "on strike."
The Rosenbaums knew their angry, outspoken daughter would not survive under the Bolsheviks for long, so they arranged to smuggle her out to their relatives in America. Just before her 21st birthday, she said goodbye to her country and her family for the last time. She was determined to live in the America she had seen in the silent movies—the America of skyscrapers and riches and freedom. She renamed herself Ayn Rand, a name she thought had the hardness and purity of a Hollywood starlet.
She headed for Hollywood, where she set out to write stories that expressed her philosophy—a body of thought she said was the polar opposite of communism. She announced that the world was divided between a small minority of Supermen who are productive and "the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent" who, like the Leninists, try to feed off them. He is "mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned." It is evil to show kindness to these "lice": The "only virtue" is "selfishness."
She meant it. Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that underpins all her later writings. The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should." She called him "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy," shimmering with "immense, explicit egotism." Rand had only one regret: "A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough."
It's not hard to see this as a kind of political post-traumatic stress disorder. Rand believed the Bolshevik lie that they represented the people, so she wanted to strike back at them—through theft and murder. In a nasty irony, she was copying their tactics. She started to write her first novel, We the Living (1936), and in the early drafts her central character—a crude proxy for Rand herself—says to a Bolshevik: "I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believes one's right, one shouldn't wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them."
She poured these beliefs into a series of deeply odd novels. She takes the flabby staples of romantic fiction and peppers them with political ravings and rapes for the audience to cheer on. All have the same core message: Anything that pleases the Superman's ego is good; anything that blocks it is bad. In The Fountainhead, published in 1943, a heroic architect called Howard Roark designs a housing project for the poor—not out of compassion but because he wants to build something mighty. When his plans are slightly altered, he blows up the housing project, saying the purity of his vision has been contaminated by evil government bureaucrats. He orders the jury to acquit him, saying: "The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off!"
For her longest novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957), Rand returned to a moment from her childhood. Just as her father once went on strike to protest against Bolshevism, she imagined the super-rich in America going on strike against progressive taxation—and said the United States would swiftly regress to an apocalyptic hellhole if the Donald Trumps and Ted Turners ceased their toil. The abandoned masses are described variously as "savages," "refuse," "inanimate objects," and "imitations of living beings," picking through rubbish. One of the strikers deliberately causes a train crash, and Rand makes it clear she thinks the murder victims deserved it, describing in horror how they all supported the higher taxes that made the attack necessary.
Her heroes are a cocktail of extreme self-love and extreme self-pity: They insist they need no one, yet they spend all their time fuming that the masses don't bow down before their manifest superiority.
As her books became mega-sellers, Rand surrounded herself with a tightly policed cult of young people who believed she had found the One Objective Truth about the world. They were required to memorize her novels and slapped down as "imbecilic" and "anti-life" by Rand if they asked questions. One student said: "There was a right kind of music, a right kind of art, a right kind of interior design, a right kind of dancing. There were wrong books which we should not buy."
Rand had become addicted to amphetamines while writing The Fountainhead, and her natural paranoia and aggression were becoming more extreme as they pumped though her veins. Anybody in her circle who disagreed with her was subjected to a show trial in front of the whole group in which they would be required to repent or face expulsion. Her secretary, Barbara Weiss, said: "I came to look on her as a killer of people." The workings of her cult exposed the hollowness of Rand's claims to venerate free thinking and individualism. Her message was, think freely, as long as it leads you into total agreement with me.
In the end, Rand was destroyed by her own dogmas. She fell in love with a young follower called Nathaniel Branden and had a decades-long affair with him. He became the cult's No. 2, and she named him as her "intellectual heir"—until he admitted he had fallen in love with a 23-year-old woman. As Burns explains, Rand's philosophy "taught that sex was never physical; it was always inspired by a deeper recognition of shared values, a sense that the other embodied the highest human achievement." So to be sexually rejected by Branden meant he was rejecting her ideas, her philosophy, her entire person. She screamed: "You have rejected me? You have dared to reject me? Me, your highest value?"
She never really recovered. We all become weak at some point in our lives, so a thinker who despises weakness will end up despising herself. In her 70s Rand found herself dying of lung cancer, after insisting that her followers smoke because it symbolized "man's victory over fire" and the studies showing it caused lung cancer were Communist propaganda. By then she had driven almost everyone away. In 1982, she died alone in her apartment with only a hired nurse at her side. If her philosophy is right—if the only human relationships worth having are based on the exchange of dollars—this was a happy and victorious death. Did even she believe it in the end?
Rand was broken by the Bolsheviks as a girl, and she never left their bootprint behind. She believed her philosophy was Bolshevism's opposite, when in reality it was its twin. Both she and the Soviets insisted a small revolutionary elite in possession of absolute rationality must seize power and impose its vision on a malleable, imbecilic mass. The only difference was that Lenin thought the parasites to be stomped on were the rich, while Rand thought they were the poor.
I don't find it hard to understand why this happened to Rand: I feel sympathy for her, even as I know she would have spat it back into my face. What I do find incomprehensible is that there are people—large numbers of people—who see her writing not as psychopathy but as philosophy, and urge us to follow her. Why? What in American culture did she drill into? Unfortunately, neither of these equally thorough, readable books can offer much of an answer to this, the only great question about her.
Rand expresses, with a certain pithy crudeness, an instinct that courses through us all sometimes: I'm the only one who matters! I'm not going to care about any of you any more! She then absolutizes it in an amphetamine Benzedrine-charged reductio ad absurdum by insisting it is the only feeling worth entertaining, ever.
This urge exists everywhere, but why is it supercharged on the American right, where Rand is regarded as something more than a bad, bizarre joke? In a country where almost everyone believes—wrongly, on the whole—that they are self-made, perhaps it is easier to have contempt for people who didn't make much of themselves. And Rand taps into something deeper still. The founding myth of America is that the nation was built out of nothing, using only reason and willpower. Rand applies this myth to the individual American: You made yourself. You need nobody and nothing except your reason to rise and dominate. You can be America, in one body, in one mind.
She said the United States should be a "democracy of superiors only," with superiority defined by being rich. Well, we got it. As the health care crisis has shown, today, the rich have the real power: The vote that matters is expressed with a checkbook and a lobbyist. We get to vote only for the candidates they have pre-funded and receive the legislation they have preapproved. It's useful—if daunting—to know that there is a substantial slice of the American public who believe this is not a problem to be put right, but morally admirable.
We all live every day with the victory of this fifth-rate Nietzsche of the mini-malls. Alan Greenspan was one of her strongest cult followers and even invited her to the Oval Office to witness his swearing-in when he joined the Ford administration. You can see how he carried this philosophy into the 1990s: Why should the Supermen of Wall Street be regulated to protected the lice of Main Street?
The figure Ayn Rand most resembles in American life is L. Ron Hubbard, another crazed, pitiable charlatan who used trashy potboilers to whip up a cult. Unfortunately, Rand's cult isn't confined to Tom Cruise and a rash of Hollywood dimwits. No, its ideas and its impulses have, by drilling into the basest human instincts, captured one of America's major political parties.
Coming Summer 2012: $6 Gas
From CNBC.com:
A dollar plumbing three-year lows is hitting Americans squarely in the gas tank, and one economist thinks it could drive prices as high as $6 a gallon or more by summertime under the right conditions.
With the greenback coming under increased pressure from Federal Reserve policies and investor appetite for more risk, there seems little direction but up for commodity prices, in particular energy and metals.
Weakness in the US currency feeds upward pressure on commodities, which are priced in dollars and thus come at a discount on the foreign markets.
One result has been a surge higher in gasoline prices to nearly $4 a gallon before the summer driving season even starts, a trend that economists say will be aggravated as demand increases and the summer storm season threatens to disrupt oil supplies.
"All we have to have is a couple badly placed hurricanes which could constrain some of the refinery output capacity in some key locations," says Richard Hastings, strategist at Global Hunter Securities in Charlotte, N.C. "If you get weakness in the dollar concurrent with the strong driving season concurrent with the impact of one or two hurricanes in the wrong place, prices could go up in a quasi-exponential manner."
Using a model that combines "subtle rates of change" with movements in the dollar index and commodity prices, Hastings figures the low dollar is responsible for about one-third, or $1.31, of the total gas-at-the-pump cost. Regular unleaded Wednesday was $3.84 a gallon nationwide, according to AAA...
Hastings projects the dollar index to test 72 at some point—another 3 percent drop—while Peter Cardillo, chief economist at Avalon Partners in New York, sees the dollar dropping to the 73.50 level.
"The global economy is quite strong, and the weak dollar is basically fueling even higher energy prices. That's not transitory," Cardillo says. "Gas prices in the Northeast are over $4 a gallon. How could anyone say that's not a burden?"
$6 Gas? Could Happen if Dollar Keeps Getting Weaker
Jeff Cox
Wednesday, 20 Apr 2011
http://www.cnbc.com/id/42683030
A dollar plumbing three-year lows is hitting Americans squarely in the gas tank, and one economist thinks it could drive prices as high as $6 a gallon or more by summertime under the right conditions.
With the greenback coming under increased pressure from Federal Reserve policies and investor appetite for more risk, there seems little direction but up for commodity prices, in particular energy and metals.
Weakness in the US currency feeds upward pressure on commodities, which are priced in dollars and thus come at a discount on the foreign markets.
One result has been a surge higher in gasoline prices to nearly $4 a gallon before the summer driving season even starts, a trend that economists say will be aggravated as demand increases and the summer storm season threatens to disrupt oil supplies.
"All we have to have is a couple badly placed hurricanes which could constrain some of the refinery output capacity in some key locations," says Richard Hastings, strategist at Global Hunter Securities in Charlotte, N.C. "If you get weakness in the dollar concurrent with the strong driving season concurrent with the impact of one or two hurricanes in the wrong place, prices could go up in a quasi-exponential manner."
Using a model that combines "subtle rates of change" with movements in the dollar index and commodity prices, Hastings figures the low dollar is responsible for about one-third, or $1.31, of the total gas-at-the-pump cost. Regular unleaded Wednesday was $3.84 a gallon nationwide, according to AAA...
Hastings projects the dollar index to test 72 at some point—another 3 percent drop—while Peter Cardillo, chief economist at Avalon Partners in New York, sees the dollar dropping to the 73.50 level.
"The global economy is quite strong, and the weak dollar is basically fueling even higher energy prices. That's not transitory," Cardillo says. "Gas prices in the Northeast are over $4 a gallon. How could anyone say that's not a burden?"
$6 Gas? Could Happen if Dollar Keeps Getting Weaker
Jeff Cox
Wednesday, 20 Apr 2011
http://www.cnbc.com/id/42683030
Stephen Singular on Right Wing Rage
From Salon.com:
It's been almost two years since George Tiller, who was one of the country's few providers of later-term abortions, was gunned down in his church in Wichita, Kan. His brutal murder was followed by a heated national debate over who and what was responsible for it. Tiller's killer, Scott Roeder, was a diagnosed schizophrenic who appears to have acted alone. But anti-abortion activists and several prominent commentators -- most notably Fox News host Bill O'Reilly -- had spent years issuing heated attacks on Tiller for his work. Did their emotionally charged rhetoric -- O'Reilly would ridicule the doctor as "Tiller the baby killer" -- create a climate conducive to Roeder's action?
In his new book, "The Wichita Divide: The Murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Battle Over Abortion," crime journalist Stephen Singular explores these issues -- and concludes that Tiller's murder can only be understood within the context of right-wing extremism that has become increasingly mainstream. We caught up with him earlier this week:
You've been reporting on right-wing extremist activity since 1987, when you looked into the 1984 murder of talk radio host Alan Berg. How has it changed in the past 25 years?
You know, when I wrote about Alan Berg, I was writing about some very marginalized people. These were a bunch of white guys without jobs, and no money and no prospects and nothing going on; some had been to prison.
Now, [when we talk about the persecution of George Tiller,] we're talking about the attorney general of the state of Kansas. Now we're talking about some of the most successful figures in the American media -- we're talking about multimillionaires who get paid to demonize people on national television, who get paid millions and millions of dollars to tell people [that] Tiller['s] the Baby Killer, who get paid to deny all the complexities we're talking about, it's not just. It's an entire society that's said, "Hey, we're going to reward this kind of behavior."
And that filters down. It affects everything. It's an emotional atmosphere, and it not only affects the general culture -- think about the people who are at risk in that culture, emotionally, psychologically...
Revisiting the murder of Dr. George Tiller
Teresa Cotsirilos
Sunday, Apr 17, 2011
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/04/17/the_murder_of_dr_george_tiller/index.html
It's been almost two years since George Tiller, who was one of the country's few providers of later-term abortions, was gunned down in his church in Wichita, Kan. His brutal murder was followed by a heated national debate over who and what was responsible for it. Tiller's killer, Scott Roeder, was a diagnosed schizophrenic who appears to have acted alone. But anti-abortion activists and several prominent commentators -- most notably Fox News host Bill O'Reilly -- had spent years issuing heated attacks on Tiller for his work. Did their emotionally charged rhetoric -- O'Reilly would ridicule the doctor as "Tiller the baby killer" -- create a climate conducive to Roeder's action?
In his new book, "The Wichita Divide: The Murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Battle Over Abortion," crime journalist Stephen Singular explores these issues -- and concludes that Tiller's murder can only be understood within the context of right-wing extremism that has become increasingly mainstream. We caught up with him earlier this week:
You've been reporting on right-wing extremist activity since 1987, when you looked into the 1984 murder of talk radio host Alan Berg. How has it changed in the past 25 years?
You know, when I wrote about Alan Berg, I was writing about some very marginalized people. These were a bunch of white guys without jobs, and no money and no prospects and nothing going on; some had been to prison.
Now, [when we talk about the persecution of George Tiller,] we're talking about the attorney general of the state of Kansas. Now we're talking about some of the most successful figures in the American media -- we're talking about multimillionaires who get paid to demonize people on national television, who get paid millions and millions of dollars to tell people [that] Tiller['s] the Baby Killer, who get paid to deny all the complexities we're talking about, it's not just. It's an entire society that's said, "Hey, we're going to reward this kind of behavior."
And that filters down. It affects everything. It's an emotional atmosphere, and it not only affects the general culture -- think about the people who are at risk in that culture, emotionally, psychologically...
Revisiting the murder of Dr. George Tiller
Teresa Cotsirilos
Sunday, Apr 17, 2011
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/04/17/the_murder_of_dr_george_tiller/index.html
TSA Still Molesting Kids
From PrisonPlanet.com:
TSA has defended the groping of a 6 year-old girl, saying it followed policy. Yet in Nov. 2010, TSA vowed no ‘enhanced’ pat-downs for children under 12.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) contradicted itself, even to the point of outright lying, in responding to controversy about a 6 year-old girl who received a groping pat-down AFTER already being sent through a body scanner. The video went viral after appearing on DrudgeReport.com and many other sites. TSA typically explained away this unnerving experience that left the girl in tears by arguing that the action is perfectly normal, follows all procedures and keeps us safe from terrorism, all, of course, in the name of ‘safety.’
You see, the TSA rationalized in its latest defense that, “terrorists are willing to manipulate societal norms to evade detection.” Thus, TSA would have it, we must abandon societal norms [and laws] like not touching children in their private parts, and instead subject them to pre-crime inspections. According to the logic, no women & children, little old ladies or men handicapped in wheelchairs or implanted with modern medical devices, no body cavity or private part is safe from extensive probing by the “guardians” in government. As the Justice Department recently proclaimed, the TSA assumes the authority to literally strip-search people on demand.
So, the shocking video seen across the alternative blogosphere today was standard operating procedure, as the TSA pointed out in its most recent blog posting, ‘Screening of 6 Year-Old at MSY‘:
A video taken of one of our officers patting down a six year-old has attracted quite a bit of attention. Some folks are asking if the proper procedures were followed. Yes. TSA has reviewed the incident and the security officer in the video followed the current standard operating procedures.
Yet in a November 2010 posting ‘TSA Myth or Fact: Leaked Images, Handcuffed Hosts, Religious Garb, and More!,’ written in the hopes of dispelling ‘rumors’ about the new invasive pat-downs, Blogger Bob of the TSA claims that children under 12 are supposed to receive amodified pat-down.
Pat-downs Myths & Facts
Myth: All children will receive pat-downs.
Fact: TSA officers are trained to work with parents to ensure a respectful screening process for the entire family, while providing the best possible security for all travelers.Children 12 years old and under who require extra screening will receive a modified pat down.
So why did the little girl receive the full, invasive treatment, particularly after having already been screened via body scanner?
After all, the ‘modified’ TSA policy was even publicly announced back in November, as in the USA Today article, “No ‘enhanced’ pat-downs for kids, TSA says.” It cites comments from TSA spokeswoman Kristin Lee who stated, “After a thorough risk assessment and after hearing concerns from parents, we made the decision that a modified pat-down would be used for children 12 years old and under who require extra screening.”
Further, the TSA blog deceives the public over the perception that pat-downs only occur for passengers who opt-out of the scanners, writing, “Only passengers who alarm a walk through metal detector or AIT machine or opt out of the AIT receive a pat-down.” However, the girl’s parents revealed what the video did not show– that their child had already been sent through the body scanners, and was then selected for a groping ‘enhanced’ pat-down. If the girl somehow alerted the scanner, the TSA did not disclose that fact to her parents when they asked why she was receiving the additional screening. In fact, the parents were given no reason, but were instead threatened non-verbally to comply with their daughter’s pat-down or face ‘trouble,’ as they told Good Morning America. Is intimidation part of the official policy, too?
Adding insult to injury, the TSA has previously lied about the fact that body scanners can store nude images of the passengers it surveys (and have done so) . Couple that with the controversy raised over the fact that body scanners violate many child indecency laws, or that numerous cases have arisen over perverted and/or criminal TSA employees abusing their power. These parents weren’t comfortable with an officer touching their child, and they shouldn’t be comfortable sending their kids through naked body scanners either. WeWontFly.com, an organization who helped launch the would-be protests against scanners last Thanksgiving, have initiated a campaign demanding an end to pat-downs for children. Second that, but for scanners, too – scanners are both invasive and dangerous, all the more so on both counts for children...
Busted: TSA lied about promise not to grope children
Aaron Dykes
April 14, 2011
http://www.prisonplanet.com/busted-tsa-lied-about-promise-not-to-grope-children.html
TSA has defended the groping of a 6 year-old girl, saying it followed policy. Yet in Nov. 2010, TSA vowed no ‘enhanced’ pat-downs for children under 12.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) contradicted itself, even to the point of outright lying, in responding to controversy about a 6 year-old girl who received a groping pat-down AFTER already being sent through a body scanner. The video went viral after appearing on DrudgeReport.com and many other sites. TSA typically explained away this unnerving experience that left the girl in tears by arguing that the action is perfectly normal, follows all procedures and keeps us safe from terrorism, all, of course, in the name of ‘safety.’
You see, the TSA rationalized in its latest defense that, “terrorists are willing to manipulate societal norms to evade detection.” Thus, TSA would have it, we must abandon societal norms [and laws] like not touching children in their private parts, and instead subject them to pre-crime inspections. According to the logic, no women & children, little old ladies or men handicapped in wheelchairs or implanted with modern medical devices, no body cavity or private part is safe from extensive probing by the “guardians” in government. As the Justice Department recently proclaimed, the TSA assumes the authority to literally strip-search people on demand.
So, the shocking video seen across the alternative blogosphere today was standard operating procedure, as the TSA pointed out in its most recent blog posting, ‘Screening of 6 Year-Old at MSY‘:
A video taken of one of our officers patting down a six year-old has attracted quite a bit of attention. Some folks are asking if the proper procedures were followed. Yes. TSA has reviewed the incident and the security officer in the video followed the current standard operating procedures.
Yet in a November 2010 posting ‘TSA Myth or Fact: Leaked Images, Handcuffed Hosts, Religious Garb, and More!,’ written in the hopes of dispelling ‘rumors’ about the new invasive pat-downs, Blogger Bob of the TSA claims that children under 12 are supposed to receive amodified pat-down.
Pat-downs Myths & Facts
Myth: All children will receive pat-downs.
Fact: TSA officers are trained to work with parents to ensure a respectful screening process for the entire family, while providing the best possible security for all travelers.Children 12 years old and under who require extra screening will receive a modified pat down.
So why did the little girl receive the full, invasive treatment, particularly after having already been screened via body scanner?
After all, the ‘modified’ TSA policy was even publicly announced back in November, as in the USA Today article, “No ‘enhanced’ pat-downs for kids, TSA says.” It cites comments from TSA spokeswoman Kristin Lee who stated, “After a thorough risk assessment and after hearing concerns from parents, we made the decision that a modified pat-down would be used for children 12 years old and under who require extra screening.”
Further, the TSA blog deceives the public over the perception that pat-downs only occur for passengers who opt-out of the scanners, writing, “Only passengers who alarm a walk through metal detector or AIT machine or opt out of the AIT receive a pat-down.” However, the girl’s parents revealed what the video did not show– that their child had already been sent through the body scanners, and was then selected for a groping ‘enhanced’ pat-down. If the girl somehow alerted the scanner, the TSA did not disclose that fact to her parents when they asked why she was receiving the additional screening. In fact, the parents were given no reason, but were instead threatened non-verbally to comply with their daughter’s pat-down or face ‘trouble,’ as they told Good Morning America. Is intimidation part of the official policy, too?
Adding insult to injury, the TSA has previously lied about the fact that body scanners can store nude images of the passengers it surveys (and have done so) . Couple that with the controversy raised over the fact that body scanners violate many child indecency laws, or that numerous cases have arisen over perverted and/or criminal TSA employees abusing their power. These parents weren’t comfortable with an officer touching their child, and they shouldn’t be comfortable sending their kids through naked body scanners either. WeWontFly.com, an organization who helped launch the would-be protests against scanners last Thanksgiving, have initiated a campaign demanding an end to pat-downs for children. Second that, but for scanners, too – scanners are both invasive and dangerous, all the more so on both counts for children...
Busted: TSA lied about promise not to grope children
Aaron Dykes
April 14, 2011
http://www.prisonplanet.com/busted-tsa-lied-about-promise-not-to-grope-children.html
Why I left the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage
From CourageCampaign.org:
Last summer, I organized the “Summer for Marriage” Tour for NOM. For 30 days, I traveled across the nation pushing an un-American agenda that harms gays, lesbians, and their families.
I’m writing to tell you that I now regret it. Last Friday, in an interview with the Good As You blog, I renounced my past and affirmed my support for marriage equality. You know why? Because during the very summer tour that I organized, I was forced to see gays and lesbians for who they really were: real people with real lives who were hurt by the work I was doing.
I directly credit Courage Campaign members like you for playing an instrumental role in my change of heart. And that’s why I’m writing: to ask for your support to continue that work, and to make up for what I’ve done.
Can you contribute $5 right now -- $1 for each of the past 5 years I’ve spent working against equality? Courage Campaign will use the money to change more hearts and minds, as they did with mine on that summer tour.
I’m asking because I deeply regret the work I did during the summer of 2010 and over the past 5 years as a whole. I helped curtail the rights of gays and lesbians in this country and I want to make up for all of that -- with your help.
Throughout the summer tour, Courage Campaign’s Arisha and Anthony approached me several times. I remember sitting on a bench in St. Louis, Missouri alone with Anthony for a few minutes. It was then that I empathized with Anthony and who he was for the first time, although I did not tell him. I understood that my work wasn’t affecting faceless, nameless political targets but instead good people like Anthony who just wanted to participate in all that America is.
I know firsthand that anyone can change if they could just see how their anti-equality work is affecting real people. I would like to thank you, the supporters of Courage Campaign and NOM Tour Tracker, for doing the legwork and putting in the time and effort to change my life for the better. Now I want to return the favor by fighting for full marriage equality.
I’m writing to ask for your help so that you and Courage Campaign can help make up for what I’ve done. Your $5 contribution will help right those wrongs, and move more people like me towards the side of justice.
I am truly inspired by the supportive messages I have received and continue to receive since I announced my support for civil marriage equality on Friday, April 8th. So many have shown me nothing but kindness and support.
Now, we need to make LGBT people more visible to people like me. We need to have conversations with people of faith, people with deep-rooted hostility towards equality because of their upbringing. I’m being honest when I say I’ve been there and we have a lot of work to do. If someone like me can be moved, I believe folks like Courage Campaign, and its supporters like you, can move anyone.
Please chip in $5 today -- one dollar for each year I’ve spent with NOM -- and together, we can change more hearts one by one.
Thank you for your support, and for all the work that you do.
Proud to now stand with you,
Louis J. Marinelli
Formerly with National Organization for Marriage
The Courage Campaign is a multi-issue online organizing network that empowers more than 700,000 grassroots and netroots supporters to push for progressive change and full equality in California and across the country.
Last summer, I organized the “Summer for Marriage” Tour for NOM. For 30 days, I traveled across the nation pushing an un-American agenda that harms gays, lesbians, and their families.
I’m writing to tell you that I now regret it. Last Friday, in an interview with the Good As You blog, I renounced my past and affirmed my support for marriage equality. You know why? Because during the very summer tour that I organized, I was forced to see gays and lesbians for who they really were: real people with real lives who were hurt by the work I was doing.
I directly credit Courage Campaign members like you for playing an instrumental role in my change of heart. And that’s why I’m writing: to ask for your support to continue that work, and to make up for what I’ve done.
Can you contribute $5 right now -- $1 for each of the past 5 years I’ve spent working against equality? Courage Campaign will use the money to change more hearts and minds, as they did with mine on that summer tour.
I’m asking because I deeply regret the work I did during the summer of 2010 and over the past 5 years as a whole. I helped curtail the rights of gays and lesbians in this country and I want to make up for all of that -- with your help.
Throughout the summer tour, Courage Campaign’s Arisha and Anthony approached me several times. I remember sitting on a bench in St. Louis, Missouri alone with Anthony for a few minutes. It was then that I empathized with Anthony and who he was for the first time, although I did not tell him. I understood that my work wasn’t affecting faceless, nameless political targets but instead good people like Anthony who just wanted to participate in all that America is.
I know firsthand that anyone can change if they could just see how their anti-equality work is affecting real people. I would like to thank you, the supporters of Courage Campaign and NOM Tour Tracker, for doing the legwork and putting in the time and effort to change my life for the better. Now I want to return the favor by fighting for full marriage equality.
I’m writing to ask for your help so that you and Courage Campaign can help make up for what I’ve done. Your $5 contribution will help right those wrongs, and move more people like me towards the side of justice.
I am truly inspired by the supportive messages I have received and continue to receive since I announced my support for civil marriage equality on Friday, April 8th. So many have shown me nothing but kindness and support.
Now, we need to make LGBT people more visible to people like me. We need to have conversations with people of faith, people with deep-rooted hostility towards equality because of their upbringing. I’m being honest when I say I’ve been there and we have a lot of work to do. If someone like me can be moved, I believe folks like Courage Campaign, and its supporters like you, can move anyone.
Please chip in $5 today -- one dollar for each year I’ve spent with NOM -- and together, we can change more hearts one by one.
Thank you for your support, and for all the work that you do.
Proud to now stand with you,
Louis J. Marinelli
Formerly with National Organization for Marriage
The Courage Campaign is a multi-issue online organizing network that empowers more than 700,000 grassroots and netroots supporters to push for progressive change and full equality in California and across the country.
BP's Secret Deepwater Blowout
by Greg Palast exclusive for Truthout/Buzzflash Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Greg Palast investigating BP's blowout in the Caspian, Baku, Azerbaijan 2010.Only 17 months before BP's Deepwater Horizon rig suffered a deadly blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP deepwater oil platform also blew out.
You've heard and seen much about the Gulf disaster that killed 11 BP workers. If you have not heard about the earlier blowout, it's because BP has kept the full story under wraps. Nor did BP inform Congress or US safety regulators, and BP, along with its oil industry partners, have preferred to keep it that way.
The earlier blowout occurred in September 2008 on BP's Central Azeri platform in the Caspian Sea.
As one memo marked "secret" puts it, "Given the explosive potential, BP was quite fortunate to have been able to evacuate everyone safely and to prevent any gas ignition." The Caspian oil platform was a spark away from exploding, but luck was with the 211 rig workers.
It was eerily similar to the Gulf catastrophe as it involved BP's controversial "quick set" drilling cement.
The question we have to ask: If BP had laid out the true and full facts to Congress and regulators about the earlier blowout, would those 11 Gulf workers be alive today - and the Gulf Coast spared oil-spill poisons?
The bigger question is, why is there no clear law to require disclosure? If you bump into another car on the Los Angeles freeway, you have to report it. But there seems no clear requirement on corporations to report a disaster in which knowledge of it could save lives.
Five months prior to the Deepwater Horizon explosion, BP's Chief of Exploration in the Gulf, David Rainey, testified before Congress against increased safety regulation of its deepwater drilling operation. Despite the company's knowledge of the Caspian blowout a year earlier, the oil company's man told the Senate Energy Committee that BP's methods are, "both safe and protective of the environment."
Really? BP's quick-dry cement saves money, but other drillers find it too risky in deepwater. It was a key factor in the Caspian blowout. Would US regulators or Congress have permitted BP to continue to use this cement had they known? Would they have investigated before issuing permits to drill?
This is not about BP the industry Bad Boy. This is about a system that condones silence, the withholding of life-and-death information.
Even BP's oil company partners, including Chevron and Exxon, were kept in the dark. It is only through WikiLeaks that my own investigations team was able to confirm insider tips I had received about the Caspian blowout. In that same confidential memo mentioned earlier, the US Embassy in Azerbaijan complained, "At least some of BP's [Caspian] partners are similarly upset with BP's performance in this episode, as they claim BP has sought to limit information flow about this event even to its [Caspian] partners."
In defense of its behavior, BP told me it did in fact report the "gas release" to the regulators of Azerbaijan. That's small comfort. This former Soviet republic is a police state dictatorship propped up by the BP group's oil royalties. A public investigation was out of the question.
In December, I traveled to Baku, Azerbaijan's capital, to investigate BP and the blowout for British television. I was arrested, though, as a foreign reporter, quickly released. But my eye witnesses got the message and all were too afraid tell their stories on camera.
BP has, in fact, never admitted a blowout occurred, though when confronted by my network, did not deny it. At the time, BP told curious press that the workers had merely been evacuated as a "precaution" due to gas bubbles "in the area of" the drilling platform, implying a benign natural gas leak from a crack in the sea floor, not a life-threatening system failure.
In its 2009 report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), BP inched closer to the full truth. Though not mentioning "blowout" or "cement," the company placed the leak "under" the platform.
This points to a cruel irony: the SEC requires full disclosure of events that might cause harm to the performance of BP's financial securities. But reporting on events that might harm humans? That's not so clear.
However, the solution is clear as could be. International corporations should be required to disclose events that threaten people and the environment, not just the price of their stock.
As radiation wafts across the Pacific from Japan, it is clear that threats to health and safety do not respect national borders. What happens in Fukushima or Baku affects lives and property in the USA.
"Regulation" has become a dirty word in US politics. Corporations have convinced the public to fear little bureaucrats with thick rulebooks. But let us remember why government began to regulate these creatures. As Andrew Jackson said, "Corporations have neither bodies to kick nor souls to damn."
Kicking and damning have no effect, but rules do. And after all, when international regulation protects profits, as in the case of patents and copyrights, corporate America is all for it.
Our regulators of resource industries must impose an affirmative requirement to tell all, especially when people, not just song lyrics or stock offerings, are in mortal danger.
Greg Palast directed the fraud investigation of BP and Exxon in the grounding of the Exxon Valdez for the Chugach Natives of Alaska. Palast's investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight. See them at http://www.gregpalast.com/.
Greg Palast investigating BP's blowout in the Caspian, Baku, Azerbaijan 2010.Only 17 months before BP's Deepwater Horizon rig suffered a deadly blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP deepwater oil platform also blew out.
You've heard and seen much about the Gulf disaster that killed 11 BP workers. If you have not heard about the earlier blowout, it's because BP has kept the full story under wraps. Nor did BP inform Congress or US safety regulators, and BP, along with its oil industry partners, have preferred to keep it that way.
The earlier blowout occurred in September 2008 on BP's Central Azeri platform in the Caspian Sea.
As one memo marked "secret" puts it, "Given the explosive potential, BP was quite fortunate to have been able to evacuate everyone safely and to prevent any gas ignition." The Caspian oil platform was a spark away from exploding, but luck was with the 211 rig workers.
It was eerily similar to the Gulf catastrophe as it involved BP's controversial "quick set" drilling cement.
The question we have to ask: If BP had laid out the true and full facts to Congress and regulators about the earlier blowout, would those 11 Gulf workers be alive today - and the Gulf Coast spared oil-spill poisons?
The bigger question is, why is there no clear law to require disclosure? If you bump into another car on the Los Angeles freeway, you have to report it. But there seems no clear requirement on corporations to report a disaster in which knowledge of it could save lives.
Five months prior to the Deepwater Horizon explosion, BP's Chief of Exploration in the Gulf, David Rainey, testified before Congress against increased safety regulation of its deepwater drilling operation. Despite the company's knowledge of the Caspian blowout a year earlier, the oil company's man told the Senate Energy Committee that BP's methods are, "both safe and protective of the environment."
Really? BP's quick-dry cement saves money, but other drillers find it too risky in deepwater. It was a key factor in the Caspian blowout. Would US regulators or Congress have permitted BP to continue to use this cement had they known? Would they have investigated before issuing permits to drill?
This is not about BP the industry Bad Boy. This is about a system that condones silence, the withholding of life-and-death information.
Even BP's oil company partners, including Chevron and Exxon, were kept in the dark. It is only through WikiLeaks that my own investigations team was able to confirm insider tips I had received about the Caspian blowout. In that same confidential memo mentioned earlier, the US Embassy in Azerbaijan complained, "At least some of BP's [Caspian] partners are similarly upset with BP's performance in this episode, as they claim BP has sought to limit information flow about this event even to its [Caspian] partners."
In defense of its behavior, BP told me it did in fact report the "gas release" to the regulators of Azerbaijan. That's small comfort. This former Soviet republic is a police state dictatorship propped up by the BP group's oil royalties. A public investigation was out of the question.
In December, I traveled to Baku, Azerbaijan's capital, to investigate BP and the blowout for British television. I was arrested, though, as a foreign reporter, quickly released. But my eye witnesses got the message and all were too afraid tell their stories on camera.
BP has, in fact, never admitted a blowout occurred, though when confronted by my network, did not deny it. At the time, BP told curious press that the workers had merely been evacuated as a "precaution" due to gas bubbles "in the area of" the drilling platform, implying a benign natural gas leak from a crack in the sea floor, not a life-threatening system failure.
In its 2009 report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), BP inched closer to the full truth. Though not mentioning "blowout" or "cement," the company placed the leak "under" the platform.
This points to a cruel irony: the SEC requires full disclosure of events that might cause harm to the performance of BP's financial securities. But reporting on events that might harm humans? That's not so clear.
However, the solution is clear as could be. International corporations should be required to disclose events that threaten people and the environment, not just the price of their stock.
As radiation wafts across the Pacific from Japan, it is clear that threats to health and safety do not respect national borders. What happens in Fukushima or Baku affects lives and property in the USA.
"Regulation" has become a dirty word in US politics. Corporations have convinced the public to fear little bureaucrats with thick rulebooks. But let us remember why government began to regulate these creatures. As Andrew Jackson said, "Corporations have neither bodies to kick nor souls to damn."
Kicking and damning have no effect, but rules do. And after all, when international regulation protects profits, as in the case of patents and copyrights, corporate America is all for it.
Our regulators of resource industries must impose an affirmative requirement to tell all, especially when people, not just song lyrics or stock offerings, are in mortal danger.
Greg Palast directed the fraud investigation of BP and Exxon in the grounding of the Exxon Valdez for the Chugach Natives of Alaska. Palast's investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight. See them at http://www.gregpalast.com/.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Obama Wants to Read Your Email...
From Wired.com:
The Obama administration is urging Congress not to adopt legislation that would impose constitutional safeguards on Americans’ e-mail stored in the cloud.
As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than 180 days, thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act adopted in 1986. At that time, e-mail left on a third-party server for six months was considered to be abandoned, and thus enjoyed less privacy protection. However, the law demands warrants for the authorities to seize e-mail from a person’s hard drive.
A coalition of internet service providers and other groups, known as Digital Due Process, has lobbied for an update to the law to treat both cloud- and home-stored e-mail the same, and thus require a probable-cause warrant for access. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on that topic Tuesday.
The companies — including Google, AOL and AT&T — maintain that the law should be changed to reflect that consumers increasingly access their e-mail on servers, instead of downloading it to their hard drives, as a matter of course.
But the Obama administration testified that imposing constitutional safeguards on e-mail stored in the cloud would be an unnecessary burden on the government. Probable-cause warrants would only get in the government’s way...
Justice Dept. to Congress: Don’t Saddle 4th Amendment on Us
David Kravets
April 7, 2011
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/04/fourth-amendment-email-2
The Obama administration is urging Congress not to adopt legislation that would impose constitutional safeguards on Americans’ e-mail stored in the cloud.
As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than 180 days, thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act adopted in 1986. At that time, e-mail left on a third-party server for six months was considered to be abandoned, and thus enjoyed less privacy protection. However, the law demands warrants for the authorities to seize e-mail from a person’s hard drive.
A coalition of internet service providers and other groups, known as Digital Due Process, has lobbied for an update to the law to treat both cloud- and home-stored e-mail the same, and thus require a probable-cause warrant for access. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on that topic Tuesday.
The companies — including Google, AOL and AT&T — maintain that the law should be changed to reflect that consumers increasingly access their e-mail on servers, instead of downloading it to their hard drives, as a matter of course.
But the Obama administration testified that imposing constitutional safeguards on e-mail stored in the cloud would be an unnecessary burden on the government. Probable-cause warrants would only get in the government’s way...
Justice Dept. to Congress: Don’t Saddle 4th Amendment on Us
David Kravets
April 7, 2011
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/04/fourth-amendment-email-2
Obama's CIA Assassination Squad
From RawStory.com:
Disclosure of government secrets often has little to do with the public's right to know and has everything to do an official's need to tell, according to ACLU deputy director Jameel Jaffer.
And that's especially true when it comes to assassinations, which have not traditionally been an openly admitted component of U.S. foreign policy -- but the American Civil Liberities Union is cautioning that the Obama administration is changing all of that.
In an exclusive interview with Raw Story, Jaffer, a key attorney with the rights group, even warned that the Democrat in office has taken a position on unilateral murder so extreme as to be "profoundly troubling" in its legal reach and potential for future use.
"U.S. officials hurt our democracy by withholding information from the courts but then disclosing it to the public whenever it suits their needs," Jaffer wrote in a Wednesday Los Angeles Times op-ed.
For example, the CIA's "targeted killing" program has been shrouded in secrecy for years, but a recent Newsweek interview with former CIA lawyer John Rizzo shed light on the policy.
The "kill list," which Rizzo said he signed off on during his time at the agency, contains about 30 civilians or "unlawful combatants" to be targeted and killed.
In 2010, the ACLU sued the Obama administration after it was leaked that Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, was on the government's "kill list."
"The Predator [drone] is the weapon of choice, but it could also be someone putting a bullet in your head," Rizzo told the magazine.
"It's a radical departure that the administration has taken from historical practice," Jaffer told Raw Story. "The administration has taken the position that it has the authority -- not just in traditional war zones like Afghanistan, but far away from traditional war zones in places like Somalia or Yemen -- to use lethal force against anyone whom the administration concludes is an enemy of the United States."
"To us, that's a profoundly troubling assertion. The reality is that many Americans trust the Obama administration with this power. Even if it's justifiable to trust this administration with that power -- and I'm not sure that it is -- but even if it is justifiable, you have to consider what the next administration will do with this power. It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to come up with a scenario where a power like this could be abused," he said...
Exclusive: Obama has taken a ‘profoundly troubling’ position on assassinations, ACLU tells Raw
David Edwards
Thursday, April 7th, 2011
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/04/07/exclusive-obama-has-taken-a-profoundly-troubling-position-on-assassinations-aclu-tells-raw/
Disclosure of government secrets often has little to do with the public's right to know and has everything to do an official's need to tell, according to ACLU deputy director Jameel Jaffer.
And that's especially true when it comes to assassinations, which have not traditionally been an openly admitted component of U.S. foreign policy -- but the American Civil Liberities Union is cautioning that the Obama administration is changing all of that.
In an exclusive interview with Raw Story, Jaffer, a key attorney with the rights group, even warned that the Democrat in office has taken a position on unilateral murder so extreme as to be "profoundly troubling" in its legal reach and potential for future use.
"U.S. officials hurt our democracy by withholding information from the courts but then disclosing it to the public whenever it suits their needs," Jaffer wrote in a Wednesday Los Angeles Times op-ed.
For example, the CIA's "targeted killing" program has been shrouded in secrecy for years, but a recent Newsweek interview with former CIA lawyer John Rizzo shed light on the policy.
The "kill list," which Rizzo said he signed off on during his time at the agency, contains about 30 civilians or "unlawful combatants" to be targeted and killed.
In 2010, the ACLU sued the Obama administration after it was leaked that Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, was on the government's "kill list."
"The Predator [drone] is the weapon of choice, but it could also be someone putting a bullet in your head," Rizzo told the magazine.
"It's a radical departure that the administration has taken from historical practice," Jaffer told Raw Story. "The administration has taken the position that it has the authority -- not just in traditional war zones like Afghanistan, but far away from traditional war zones in places like Somalia or Yemen -- to use lethal force against anyone whom the administration concludes is an enemy of the United States."
"To us, that's a profoundly troubling assertion. The reality is that many Americans trust the Obama administration with this power. Even if it's justifiable to trust this administration with that power -- and I'm not sure that it is -- but even if it is justifiable, you have to consider what the next administration will do with this power. It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to come up with a scenario where a power like this could be abused," he said...
Exclusive: Obama has taken a ‘profoundly troubling’ position on assassinations, ACLU tells Raw
David Edwards
Thursday, April 7th, 2011
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/04/07/exclusive-obama-has-taken-a-profoundly-troubling-position-on-assassinations-aclu-tells-raw/
Pentagon Gives Dennis Kucinich Runaround
From FireDogLake.com:
Last we heard of Dennis Kucinich’s request to visit Bradley Manning, the Pentagon had spent a full month referring his request from one official to another rather than respond to his request.
On February 4, Dennis Kucinich asked DOD to allow him to visit Bradley Manning so he could assess his conditions of confinement. On February 8, Robert Gates wrote Kucinich a short note telling him we was referring his request to Secretary of the Army, John McHugh. In a letter dated February 24–but apparently not received in Kucinich’s office until March 1–McHugh told Kucinich he was referring his request to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs.
In short, a full month after the date when a member of Congress requested a visit with Manning, DOD is still stalling on a real response with bureaucratic buck-passing...
DOD Continues to Stall on Kucinich’s Request to Visit Bradley Manning
emptywheel
Monday March 14, 2011
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/03/14/dod-continues-to-stall-on-kucinichs-request-to-visit-bradley-manning/
Last we heard of Dennis Kucinich’s request to visit Bradley Manning, the Pentagon had spent a full month referring his request from one official to another rather than respond to his request.
On February 4, Dennis Kucinich asked DOD to allow him to visit Bradley Manning so he could assess his conditions of confinement. On February 8, Robert Gates wrote Kucinich a short note telling him we was referring his request to Secretary of the Army, John McHugh. In a letter dated February 24–but apparently not received in Kucinich’s office until March 1–McHugh told Kucinich he was referring his request to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs.
In short, a full month after the date when a member of Congress requested a visit with Manning, DOD is still stalling on a real response with bureaucratic buck-passing...
DOD Continues to Stall on Kucinich’s Request to Visit Bradley Manning
emptywheel
Monday March 14, 2011
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/03/14/dod-continues-to-stall-on-kucinichs-request-to-visit-bradley-manning/
Cowardly, Stupid, and Tragically Wrong
The Obama administration's appalling decision to give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a military trial. Dahlia Lithwick
Monday, April 4, 2011
http://www.slate.com/id/2290359
Today, by ordering a military trial at Guantanamo for 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants, Attorney General Eric Holder finally put the Obama administration's stamp on the proposition that some criminals are "too dangerous to have fair trials."
In reversing one of its last principled positions—that American courts are sufficiently nimble, fair, and transparent to try Mohammed and his confederates—the administration surrendered to the bullying, fear-mongering, and demagoguery of those seeking to create two separate kinds of American law. This isn't just about the administration allowing itself to be bullied out of its commitment to the rule of law. It's about the president and his Justice Department conceding that the system of justice in the United States will have multiple tiers—first-class law for some and junk law for others.
Every argument advanced to scuttle the Manhattan trial for KSM was false or feeble: Open trials are too dangerous; major trials are too expensive; too many secrets will be spilled; public trials will radicalize the enemy; the public doesn't want it.
Of course, exactly the same unpersuasive claims could have been made about every major criminal trial in Western history, from the first World Trade Center prosecution to the Rosenberg trial to the Scopes Monkey trial to Nuremburg. Each of those trials could have been moved to some dark cave for everyone's comfort and well-being. Each of those defendants could have been tried using some handy choose-your-own-ending legal system to ensure a conviction. But the principle that you don't tailor justice to the accused won out, and, time after time, the world benefited.
Now the Obama administration—having loudly and proudly made every possible argument against a two-tier justice system—is capitulating to it.
But make no mistake about it: It won't stop here. Putting the administration's imprimatur on the idea that some defendants are more worthy of real justice than others legitimates the whole creeping, toxic American system of providing one class of legal protections for some but not others: special laws for children of immigrants, special laws for people who might look like immigrants, different jails for those who seem too dangerous, special laws for people worthy of wiretapping, and special laws for corporations. After today it will be easier than ever to use words and slogans to invent classes of people who are too scary to try in regular proceedings.
Say what you want about how Congress forced Obama's hand today by making it all but impossible to try the 9/11 conspirators in regular Article III courts.* The only lesson learned is that Obama's hand can be forced. That there is no principle he can't be bullied into abandoning. In the future, when seeking to pass laws that treat different people differently for purely political reasons, Congress need only fear-monger and fabricate to get the president to cave. Nobody claims that this was a legal decision. It was a political triumph or loss, depending on your viewpoint. The rule of law is an afterthought, either way.
It may not matter to you today that the U.S. government has invented a new class of criminals fit for a new class of trials. It may bother you a lot more when special rules are created for unions, or corporations, or the poor, or the children of illegal immigrants, or eco-terrorists. Today's capitulation will just embolden Congress to do all that and more.
A year ago, Holder told the New Yorker's Jane Mayer that the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would serve as "the defining event of my time as attorney general." Sadly, he's probably right. He will be remembered for having sacrificed what he knew to be right for some payoff to be named later. We will, all of us, in the long run bear the costs of that choice.
Monday, April 4, 2011
http://www.slate.com/id/2290359
Today, by ordering a military trial at Guantanamo for 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants, Attorney General Eric Holder finally put the Obama administration's stamp on the proposition that some criminals are "too dangerous to have fair trials."
In reversing one of its last principled positions—that American courts are sufficiently nimble, fair, and transparent to try Mohammed and his confederates—the administration surrendered to the bullying, fear-mongering, and demagoguery of those seeking to create two separate kinds of American law. This isn't just about the administration allowing itself to be bullied out of its commitment to the rule of law. It's about the president and his Justice Department conceding that the system of justice in the United States will have multiple tiers—first-class law for some and junk law for others.
Every argument advanced to scuttle the Manhattan trial for KSM was false or feeble: Open trials are too dangerous; major trials are too expensive; too many secrets will be spilled; public trials will radicalize the enemy; the public doesn't want it.
Of course, exactly the same unpersuasive claims could have been made about every major criminal trial in Western history, from the first World Trade Center prosecution to the Rosenberg trial to the Scopes Monkey trial to Nuremburg. Each of those trials could have been moved to some dark cave for everyone's comfort and well-being. Each of those defendants could have been tried using some handy choose-your-own-ending legal system to ensure a conviction. But the principle that you don't tailor justice to the accused won out, and, time after time, the world benefited.
Now the Obama administration—having loudly and proudly made every possible argument against a two-tier justice system—is capitulating to it.
But make no mistake about it: It won't stop here. Putting the administration's imprimatur on the idea that some defendants are more worthy of real justice than others legitimates the whole creeping, toxic American system of providing one class of legal protections for some but not others: special laws for children of immigrants, special laws for people who might look like immigrants, different jails for those who seem too dangerous, special laws for people worthy of wiretapping, and special laws for corporations. After today it will be easier than ever to use words and slogans to invent classes of people who are too scary to try in regular proceedings.
Say what you want about how Congress forced Obama's hand today by making it all but impossible to try the 9/11 conspirators in regular Article III courts.* The only lesson learned is that Obama's hand can be forced. That there is no principle he can't be bullied into abandoning. In the future, when seeking to pass laws that treat different people differently for purely political reasons, Congress need only fear-monger and fabricate to get the president to cave. Nobody claims that this was a legal decision. It was a political triumph or loss, depending on your viewpoint. The rule of law is an afterthought, either way.
It may not matter to you today that the U.S. government has invented a new class of criminals fit for a new class of trials. It may bother you a lot more when special rules are created for unions, or corporations, or the poor, or the children of illegal immigrants, or eco-terrorists. Today's capitulation will just embolden Congress to do all that and more.
A year ago, Holder told the New Yorker's Jane Mayer that the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would serve as "the defining event of my time as attorney general." Sadly, he's probably right. He will be remembered for having sacrificed what he knew to be right for some payoff to be named later. We will, all of us, in the long run bear the costs of that choice.
Obama Kicks Base In Teeth
From Salon.com:
Rachel Maddow last night issued a very harsh and eloquent denunciation of Obama's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a military commission at Guantanamo rather than a real court. At the end of her monologue, Maddow focused on the contrast between how the Republicans treat their base and how Democrats treat theirs, specifically emphasizing that the White House announced this decision on the same day it kicked off Obama's re-election bid. About that point, Rachel said this:
A Democratic President kicks his base in the teeth on something as fundamental as civil liberties -- he puts the nail in the coffin of a civil liberties promise he made on his first full day in office -- and he does it on the first day of his re-election effort. And Beltway reaction to that is. . . huh, good move. That's the difference between Republican politics and Democratic politics. The Republicans may not love their base, but they fear them and play to them. The Democratic Party institutional structures of D.C., and the Beltway press in particular, not only hate the Democratic base -- they think it's good politics for Democratic politicians to kick that base publicly whenever possible.
Only the base itself will ever change that.
How will that happen? How can the base itself possibly change this dynamic, whereby politicians of the Democratic Party are not only willing, but eager, to "kick them whenever possible," on the ground (among others) that doing so is good politics? I'd submit that this is not only one of the most important domestic political questions (if not the most important), but also the one that people are most eager to avoid engaging. And the reason is that there are no comforting answers.
One thing is for certain: right now, the Democratic Party is absolutely correct in its assessment that kicking its base is good politics. Why is that? Because they know that they have inculcated their base with sufficient levels of fear and hatred of the GOP, so that no matter how often the Party kicks its base, no matter how often Party leaders break their promises and betray their ostensible values, the base will loyally and dutifully support the Party and its leaders (at least in presidential elections; there is a good case that the Democrats got crushed in 2010 in large part because their base was so unenthusiastic).
In light of that fact, ask yourself this: if you were a Democratic Party official, wouldn't you also ignore -- and, when desirable, step on -- the people who you know will support you no matter what you do to them? That's what a rational, calculating, self-interested, unprincipled Democratic politician should do: accommodate those factions which need accommodating (because their support is in question), while ignoring or scorning the ones whose support is not in question, either because they will never vote for them (the hard-core right) or will dutifully canvass, raise money, and vote for them no matter what (the Democratic base). Anyone who pledges unconditional, absolute fealty to a politician -- especially 18 months before an election -- is guaranteeing their own irrelevance.
It was often said that Bush/Cheney used fear as their principal political weapon -- and they did -- but that's true of the Democratic Party as well. When it comes to their base, Democratic leaders know they will command undying, unbreakable support no matter how many times they kick their base, because of the fear that has been instilled in the base -- not fear of Terrorists or Immigrants (that's the GOP's tactic), but fear of Sarah Palin, the Kochs and the Tea Party. Rachel herself made this point quite well before the 2010 election:
I talked at the top of the show tonight with Gail Collins about how one way to motivate your natural base for an election is to make your base afraid of what the other side has to offer. And that is true. That works. That works on both sides. It works for conservatives about liberals and it works for liberals about conservatives.
But one less soul-sucking way to motivate your base and to win an election and to keep winning elections and to, frankly, have history look kindly upon you, is to get your base to cheer for you -- not just to cheer against someone else, but to see you standing up, not just to bad guys with worse ideas than you, but to see you standing up for what is right because you know it is right, because we know you know it's right, even though you also know standing up for it is hard.
It may be that this fear of Republicans is rational (or, given how many GOP-replicating policies and practices the Democrats embrace, maybe it isn't). But whatever else is true, one thing is for certain: dedicated partisans who pledge their unbreakable, eternally loyal support for any Party or politician are going to be steadfastly ignored (or worse) by that Party or politician, and rightfully so. If you spend two years vehemently objecting that certain acts so profoundly offend your principles but then pledge unequivocal support no matter what almost two years in advance to the politicians who engage in them, why would you expect your objections to be heeded? Any rational person would ignore them, and stomp on your beliefs whenever doing so benefited them...
The impotence of the loyal partisan voter
Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday, Apr 5, 2011
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/04/05/democrats
Rachel Maddow last night issued a very harsh and eloquent denunciation of Obama's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a military commission at Guantanamo rather than a real court. At the end of her monologue, Maddow focused on the contrast between how the Republicans treat their base and how Democrats treat theirs, specifically emphasizing that the White House announced this decision on the same day it kicked off Obama's re-election bid. About that point, Rachel said this:
A Democratic President kicks his base in the teeth on something as fundamental as civil liberties -- he puts the nail in the coffin of a civil liberties promise he made on his first full day in office -- and he does it on the first day of his re-election effort. And Beltway reaction to that is. . . huh, good move. That's the difference between Republican politics and Democratic politics. The Republicans may not love their base, but they fear them and play to them. The Democratic Party institutional structures of D.C., and the Beltway press in particular, not only hate the Democratic base -- they think it's good politics for Democratic politicians to kick that base publicly whenever possible.
Only the base itself will ever change that.
How will that happen? How can the base itself possibly change this dynamic, whereby politicians of the Democratic Party are not only willing, but eager, to "kick them whenever possible," on the ground (among others) that doing so is good politics? I'd submit that this is not only one of the most important domestic political questions (if not the most important), but also the one that people are most eager to avoid engaging. And the reason is that there are no comforting answers.
One thing is for certain: right now, the Democratic Party is absolutely correct in its assessment that kicking its base is good politics. Why is that? Because they know that they have inculcated their base with sufficient levels of fear and hatred of the GOP, so that no matter how often the Party kicks its base, no matter how often Party leaders break their promises and betray their ostensible values, the base will loyally and dutifully support the Party and its leaders (at least in presidential elections; there is a good case that the Democrats got crushed in 2010 in large part because their base was so unenthusiastic).
In light of that fact, ask yourself this: if you were a Democratic Party official, wouldn't you also ignore -- and, when desirable, step on -- the people who you know will support you no matter what you do to them? That's what a rational, calculating, self-interested, unprincipled Democratic politician should do: accommodate those factions which need accommodating (because their support is in question), while ignoring or scorning the ones whose support is not in question, either because they will never vote for them (the hard-core right) or will dutifully canvass, raise money, and vote for them no matter what (the Democratic base). Anyone who pledges unconditional, absolute fealty to a politician -- especially 18 months before an election -- is guaranteeing their own irrelevance.
It was often said that Bush/Cheney used fear as their principal political weapon -- and they did -- but that's true of the Democratic Party as well. When it comes to their base, Democratic leaders know they will command undying, unbreakable support no matter how many times they kick their base, because of the fear that has been instilled in the base -- not fear of Terrorists or Immigrants (that's the GOP's tactic), but fear of Sarah Palin, the Kochs and the Tea Party. Rachel herself made this point quite well before the 2010 election:
I talked at the top of the show tonight with Gail Collins about how one way to motivate your natural base for an election is to make your base afraid of what the other side has to offer. And that is true. That works. That works on both sides. It works for conservatives about liberals and it works for liberals about conservatives.
But one less soul-sucking way to motivate your base and to win an election and to keep winning elections and to, frankly, have history look kindly upon you, is to get your base to cheer for you -- not just to cheer against someone else, but to see you standing up, not just to bad guys with worse ideas than you, but to see you standing up for what is right because you know it is right, because we know you know it's right, even though you also know standing up for it is hard.
It may be that this fear of Republicans is rational (or, given how many GOP-replicating policies and practices the Democrats embrace, maybe it isn't). But whatever else is true, one thing is for certain: dedicated partisans who pledge their unbreakable, eternally loyal support for any Party or politician are going to be steadfastly ignored (or worse) by that Party or politician, and rightfully so. If you spend two years vehemently objecting that certain acts so profoundly offend your principles but then pledge unequivocal support no matter what almost two years in advance to the politicians who engage in them, why would you expect your objections to be heeded? Any rational person would ignore them, and stomp on your beliefs whenever doing so benefited them...
The impotence of the loyal partisan voter
Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday, Apr 5, 2011
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/04/05/democrats
The Commodore 64 Is Back!
majestic on April 7, 2011 http://www.disinfo.com/2011/04/the-commodore-64-is-back
Ripping a move from the playbook of German auto manufacturers Volkswagen (the Beetle) and BMW (the Mini), the new owner of early home computer staple the Commodore 64 is revamping the brand but keeping the looks of the original. Nick Bilton reports for the New York Times:
The new Commodore 64, which will begin shipping at the end of the month, has been souped-up for the modern age. It comes with 1.8 gigahertz dual processors, an optional Blu-ray player and built-in ethernet and HDMI ports. The new Commodore is priced between $250 to $900.
The company’s Web site says that the new Commodore 64 is “a modern functional PC,” and that although the guts of the device have greatly improved, the exterior is “as close to the original in design as humanly possible.” Most people would not be able to visibly tell the old or new versions apart, it says.
“The response has been completely dramatic,” Mr. Altman said. “We’ve been averaging about five registrations per second on our Web site. This is from people giving us their name and e-mail address to be kept abreast of updates on the new Commodore.”
Some may wonder why someone would want to purchase this type of computer when a world of iPads and laptops exist.
Mr. Altman says he sees two types of customers for the new computer.
“There are a lot of really young computer users who want to own a retro-looking computer,” he said. ”And of course there are those 30- to 40-year-olds who owned the original Commodore 64 and want the nostalgia of their first machine.”
Ripping a move from the playbook of German auto manufacturers Volkswagen (the Beetle) and BMW (the Mini), the new owner of early home computer staple the Commodore 64 is revamping the brand but keeping the looks of the original. Nick Bilton reports for the New York Times:
The new Commodore 64, which will begin shipping at the end of the month, has been souped-up for the modern age. It comes with 1.8 gigahertz dual processors, an optional Blu-ray player and built-in ethernet and HDMI ports. The new Commodore is priced between $250 to $900.
The company’s Web site says that the new Commodore 64 is “a modern functional PC,” and that although the guts of the device have greatly improved, the exterior is “as close to the original in design as humanly possible.” Most people would not be able to visibly tell the old or new versions apart, it says.
“The response has been completely dramatic,” Mr. Altman said. “We’ve been averaging about five registrations per second on our Web site. This is from people giving us their name and e-mail address to be kept abreast of updates on the new Commodore.”
Some may wonder why someone would want to purchase this type of computer when a world of iPads and laptops exist.
Mr. Altman says he sees two types of customers for the new computer.
“There are a lot of really young computer users who want to own a retro-looking computer,” he said. ”And of course there are those 30- to 40-year-olds who owned the original Commodore 64 and want the nostalgia of their first machine.”
RIP Sidney Lumet
One of the most underrated directors in film history has died.
Sidney Lumet's first film, the courtroom drama 12 Angry Men (1957) starring Henry Fonda, is arguably the most popular film from the 50s on the Internet. In 1964, he directed Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker, a gritty drama of a Holocaust survivor in Harlem, and Fail-Safe, the more sober version of nuclear destruction than Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. During the seventies, he had three classics: Serpico (1973) starring Al Pacino, Dog Day Afternoon (1975) with Pacino as the leader of a bankrobbing outfit and Network (1976) which is still the only film besides A Streetcar Named Desire to have three Oscar-winning performances. As seventies-style cinema began to die, he made two more movies in the 80s that recalled the best of the era: Prince of the City (1981) and The Verdict (1982) with Paul Newman.
He won a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2005, which the NY Times described as a “consolation prize for a lifetime of neglect.” Looking at his contribution to film history, that's a major understatement...
Sidney Lumet's first film, the courtroom drama 12 Angry Men (1957) starring Henry Fonda, is arguably the most popular film from the 50s on the Internet. In 1964, he directed Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker, a gritty drama of a Holocaust survivor in Harlem, and Fail-Safe, the more sober version of nuclear destruction than Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. During the seventies, he had three classics: Serpico (1973) starring Al Pacino, Dog Day Afternoon (1975) with Pacino as the leader of a bankrobbing outfit and Network (1976) which is still the only film besides A Streetcar Named Desire to have three Oscar-winning performances. As seventies-style cinema began to die, he made two more movies in the 80s that recalled the best of the era: Prince of the City (1981) and The Verdict (1982) with Paul Newman.
He won a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2005, which the NY Times described as a “consolation prize for a lifetime of neglect.” Looking at his contribution to film history, that's a major understatement...
Fox Dumps Glenn Beck
Officially, that's not what happened, but that is what it amounts to.
Yes he lost nearly 40 percent of his peak audience over the last year, but he still had an audience of 2 million. So why dump him? Thanks to ad boycotts and the fact his audience was a demographic loser. Roger Ailes is no fool: getting less of an audience nobody wants while losing key advertising is not a winning strategy for cable news victory...
Yes he lost nearly 40 percent of his peak audience over the last year, but he still had an audience of 2 million. So why dump him? Thanks to ad boycotts and the fact his audience was a demographic loser. Roger Ailes is no fool: getting less of an audience nobody wants while losing key advertising is not a winning strategy for cable news victory...
Stoner Cooking: Pylsur Sausages
Is This the Best Hot Dog in the World?
Victoria Haschka
04/4/11
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victoria-haschka/best-hot-dog-in-the-world-iceland_b_844305.html
There's every chance that the best hot dog in the world is in Iceland.
It's called a pylsur.
Here are the vital details. It tastes properly of meat, not an indistinguishable blur of brown. The sausage snaps when you bite it. It comes with not one, but two types of onions (fried and raw). And as for condiments, in a pylsur there are no less than three.
The best example of it is found in Reykjavik at Baejarins Beztu Pylsur.
It's a name that translates as 'Town's Best'. Baejarins Beztu has been serving these hot dogs for more than 60 years...
Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur
Tryggvagata, Reykjavik
http://www.bbp.is/
How to make pyslur at home
Ingredients
6 long white, fluffy hot dog buns
6 pylsur sausages (you can order them here: http://nammi.is/ss-hot-dogs-500-gr-p-390.html)
4 tablespoons of Icelandic hot dog mustard (you can order it here: http://nammi.is/hot-dog-mustard-200-gr-p-407.html)
4 tablespoons of ketchup
4 tablespoons of remoulade (recipe below*)
6 tablespoons of crispy deep fried onion slivers
6 tablespoons of diced eschallots
1.5 cups of beer (Icelandic Viking or Gull are classic Icelandic beers, but any lager will do).
Instructions
1. Braise the pylsur in the beer until they are hot.
2. Split the buns down the middle and lightly toast them.
3. Add one sausage and the raw onions to each bun.
4. Add a stripe of mustard, remoulade* and ketchup down each sausage.
5. Top with the crispy fried onions.
*Recipe for remoulade
Ingredients
3/4 cup of neutral tasting oil
1 egg yolk
1 teaspoon of Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon of white wine vinegar
2 teaspoons of chopped gherkin
2 teaspoons of chopped capers
1 tablespoon of chopped chervil
Instructions
1.Whisk the egg yolk and the mustard together.
2.Slowly start dripping in the oil, whisking and emulsifying the oil into the egg yolk.
3.Continue slowly dripping in the remainder of the oil, whisking all the time.
4.When the mayonnaise is thick, add the white wine vinegar, the chopped gherkin, capers and chervil.
(Nb, depending on how heavy handed you are with your condiments you may have some remoulade left over. It is excellent with boiled potatoes.)
Manny Being Manny
When people look back on the career of Manny Ramirez, what will they remember? Is it the lifetime .312 batting average, 555 home runs and 1831 RBI? Is it the 12 All-Star selections? Is it the 21 grand slams, second only to Lou Gehrig at 23? Is it his 28 post-season HRs, the most in MLB history, and playoff heroics that lead him winning the World Series MVP in the magical 2004 Red Sox run, as well as helping another victory in 2007?
Sadly, what he'll be most remembered for is being the first player busted twice for PED violations in 2009 and again this month, the threat of an 100 game suspension inspiring his sudden retirement. (He allegedly also failed a test in 2003.) Or perhaps they'll remember his often destructive behavior. That's a shame, because at his best, whether helping Boston defeat the curse of Babe Ruth or briefly bringing Mannytown to Los Angeles, Manny was one of the most talented sports oddballs this side of Dennis Rodman...
Sadly, what he'll be most remembered for is being the first player busted twice for PED violations in 2009 and again this month, the threat of an 100 game suspension inspiring his sudden retirement. (He allegedly also failed a test in 2003.) Or perhaps they'll remember his often destructive behavior. That's a shame, because at his best, whether helping Boston defeat the curse of Babe Ruth or briefly bringing Mannytown to Los Angeles, Manny was one of the most talented sports oddballs this side of Dennis Rodman...
Kool Websites
The Tesla Secret
http://www.teslasecret.com/
In your heart, you know there’s got to be a better way. A way to get your payback on the greedy electric company fat cats... and show them there’s a better way to generate electricity - one that costs nothing.
For the first time in almost a century, the answer to free energy is here. And no… it’s not solar panels… and you definitely won’t have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to use it.
In fact, this device is so easy to build… all it takes is $100 and a trip to the local electronics store to have everything you need to make your own!
But you won’t hear about it in mainstream media… and you won’t see it featured on TV.
It’s a secret so big… it had to be locked away for 90 years, for fear it might destroy the Big Energy establishment. The genius who invented it, Nikola Tesla, had to pay a dear price for having the “nerve” to take on the big players.
It all started in 1934
When Nikola Tesla Made The Announcement That Sent Cold Shivers Through Energy Execs All Over The World!
“I have harnessed the cosmic rays and caused them to operate a motive device," Tesla said... instantly causing a few billionaires to choke on their morning coffee.
Afraid it might mean the end for a multi-billion dollar industry, Big Energy instantly withdrew all their funding… causing the invention never to be fully implemented.
Years after, when Tesla died alone and broke, the Alien Property Custodian confiscated all the sensitive files – even though he was a US citizen. And for almost a century, these files were condemned to gather dust on a government shelf.
But now, for the first time ever, a team of scientists has uncovered Tesla's missing files - and with them:
The Technology To Harness The Massive, Untapped Reserve of Cosmic Energy Has Been Unleashed!
This is going to upset many… but it’s well worth it. After years of suppression, a leaked file from the Tesla folder has made it into a few “underground” science labs.
But instead of keeping the technology for themselves… this group of secretive scientists have created a step by step handbook that ANYONE can use to build his own Tesla Generator… and tap into an almost infinite source of power.
*
Aquaponics4You
http://www.aquaponics4you.com/
Egghead Farmer Brings Leaked University Study To Life And Reveals...
“How To Transform Common Household Items Into A Fully Automated 'Organic Gardening System' That Yields TEN Times The Harvest Of A Normal Garden - In Half The Time - With Less Than 1 Hour Maintenance Per Week...”
Dear Gardener,
I've been into organic farming for over 20 years now, and there's no denying that this amazingly simple system beats anything else out there...
Whether you're into 'backyard gardening', or a full scale commercial multi-acre operation, read on to discover:
A fool-proof system that make plants grow twice as fast without the need for added fertilizers... (hint: the fish will take care of that!)
How to provide for your family in good times as well as bad times with an abundance of fresh nutritious organic food... (and earn money by selling what's left on the local market)
Fully automated system to grow up to TEN times the amount of organic produce in the same space as ONE 'conventional garden' without the need for toxic pesticides!
*
How to Disappear
http://www.disappear.info/
If you are interested in privacy, digital DNA, digital identities, disappearing in society, erasing your digital footprints and even finding people...
http://www.teslasecret.com/
In your heart, you know there’s got to be a better way. A way to get your payback on the greedy electric company fat cats... and show them there’s a better way to generate electricity - one that costs nothing.
For the first time in almost a century, the answer to free energy is here. And no… it’s not solar panels… and you definitely won’t have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to use it.
In fact, this device is so easy to build… all it takes is $100 and a trip to the local electronics store to have everything you need to make your own!
But you won’t hear about it in mainstream media… and you won’t see it featured on TV.
It’s a secret so big… it had to be locked away for 90 years, for fear it might destroy the Big Energy establishment. The genius who invented it, Nikola Tesla, had to pay a dear price for having the “nerve” to take on the big players.
It all started in 1934
When Nikola Tesla Made The Announcement That Sent Cold Shivers Through Energy Execs All Over The World!
“I have harnessed the cosmic rays and caused them to operate a motive device," Tesla said... instantly causing a few billionaires to choke on their morning coffee.
Afraid it might mean the end for a multi-billion dollar industry, Big Energy instantly withdrew all their funding… causing the invention never to be fully implemented.
Years after, when Tesla died alone and broke, the Alien Property Custodian confiscated all the sensitive files – even though he was a US citizen. And for almost a century, these files were condemned to gather dust on a government shelf.
But now, for the first time ever, a team of scientists has uncovered Tesla's missing files - and with them:
The Technology To Harness The Massive, Untapped Reserve of Cosmic Energy Has Been Unleashed!
This is going to upset many… but it’s well worth it. After years of suppression, a leaked file from the Tesla folder has made it into a few “underground” science labs.
But instead of keeping the technology for themselves… this group of secretive scientists have created a step by step handbook that ANYONE can use to build his own Tesla Generator… and tap into an almost infinite source of power.
*
Aquaponics4You
http://www.aquaponics4you.com/
Egghead Farmer Brings Leaked University Study To Life And Reveals...
“How To Transform Common Household Items Into A Fully Automated 'Organic Gardening System' That Yields TEN Times The Harvest Of A Normal Garden - In Half The Time - With Less Than 1 Hour Maintenance Per Week...”
Dear Gardener,
I've been into organic farming for over 20 years now, and there's no denying that this amazingly simple system beats anything else out there...
Whether you're into 'backyard gardening', or a full scale commercial multi-acre operation, read on to discover:
A fool-proof system that make plants grow twice as fast without the need for added fertilizers... (hint: the fish will take care of that!)
How to provide for your family in good times as well as bad times with an abundance of fresh nutritious organic food... (and earn money by selling what's left on the local market)
Fully automated system to grow up to TEN times the amount of organic produce in the same space as ONE 'conventional garden' without the need for toxic pesticides!
*
How to Disappear
http://www.disappear.info/
If you are interested in privacy, digital DNA, digital identities, disappearing in society, erasing your digital footprints and even finding people...
The Jack the Ripper Conspiracy
http://www.shout.net/~bigred/cn.html
(Melchizedek Communique, MC033011) An enormously successful silk-weaving industry was located in London's East End. Then about 1860 the "Free Trade" notions came to the fore. A "Free Trade" policy was introduced. "The effect on the British silk industry was catastrophic: in 1854 50,000 people in East London were employed in the silk industry; by 1880 the figure had shrunk to just 3,300." The word "unemployed" came first to be used as a noun circa 1882. The word "unemployment" was born in 1888, coincident to the savage Jack the Ripper crimes. Deteriorating social conditions caused by the "Free Trade" helped cause many desperate women to turn to prostitution to survive. [1] And thus did "Free Trade" provide the hunting grounds for Jack the Ripper.
Like Adolph Hitler, Jack the Ripper is a sort of ultimate symbol for human evil. Various books have claimed to solve the savage knife-attack crimes which shook London in 1888. Fascination with the case involves the Victorian era, setting for the enormously popular Sherlock Holmes stories. What dark secrets lie hidden underneath the fog of stiff upper lip Victorian respectability?
Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of Metropolitan Police during the Ripper carnage, was a staunch Freemason and "Founding Master" of Quatuor Coronati Lodge No. 2076, in 1884. Warren is the only senior official at Scotland Yard to have definitely stated later that the police knew who Jack the Ripper really was. [1]
There are troubling hints of collusion between the police and government and the brothel keepers and "white slavers." A "Mrs. Jeffries", the madame of one brothel, came under scrutiny. Evidence was obtained showing an aristocratic clientele, including Leopold, King of the Belgians and Edward, Prince of Wales. In the Summer of 1885, the Pall Mall Gazette began to expose "the sordid sink of immorality and vice that had spread its corruption through the highest levels of society." Articles by W.T. Stead were generally called "The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon." Wrote Stead, "If the daughters of the people must be served up as dainty morsels to the passions of the rich, let them at least attain an age when they can understand the nature of the sacrifice which they are asked to make." [2]
The mystery of who was "Jack the Ripper" bloomed in the 1960s. Various theories occupy the time of armchair detectives. Among the most popular theories is called "The Masonic Conspiracy": Was "Saucy Jack" a member of the British royal family? An "offshoot theory" of The Masonic Conspiracy points to Walter Sickert, a famous artist, as the villain. Authoress Patricia Cornwell, in her 2002 book, Portrait Of A Killer, uses modern forensic techniques unknown in Victorian times to support the conclusion that Walter Sickert was indeed Jack the Ripper.
The Sickert offshoot of The Masonic Conspiracy angle is summarized by Paul Begg in his even-handed Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History (London: Pearson Education Ltd., 2003). A Joseph Gorman, alias Joseph Sickert, claimed to be the unacknowledged son of Walter Sickert, suspected Ripper. Joseph Gorman surfaced and told BBC researchers (later researched by journalist Stephen Knight) what may have been the true facts. Prince Albert Victor, a British royal, and Walter Sickert were chums. Visiting at Sickert's artist studio, Prince Albert chanced to encounter one Annie Crook. The prince, it is claimed, secretly married Ms. Crook, a commoner and a Catholic. The British establishment allegedly dissolved the union by sending Annie Crook to an insane asylum and sending Prince Albert Victor off to India. But some women from the East End had evidence of the wedding and of a child fathered from the marriage. These women attempted to blackmail the British upper class parties involved. Allegedly, to silence these troublemakers, certain Freemasons were turned to.
(WARNING: Some squeamish depiction follows. If you are fairly sensitive, then you are advised to read no further.)
Other suspects include James Maybrick, a crazed arsenic addict who fled to America and whose purported diary was later discovered; "Kosminski" (Aaron Kosminski or Aaron Davis Cohen), committed to a lunatic asylum; Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston Churchill, who was called by Queen Victoria "so mad and odd"; and even Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland!
This last suspect, Lewis Carroll, is possibly revealed by anagrams found in his writings. So, for example, in The Nursery Alice (the children's version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) is found: "So we went to the cook, and we got her to make a saucerful of nice oatmeal porridge. And then we called Dash into the house, and we said, 'Now, Dash, you're going to have your birthday treat!' We expected Dash would jump for joy; but it didn't, one bit!" An article in Harper's magazine from November 1996 rearranges the above to reveal the following macabre message:
"Oh, we, Thomas Bayne, Charles Dodgson, coited into the slain, nude body, expected to taste, devour, enjoy a nice meal of a dead whore's uterus. We made do, found it awful -- wan and tough like a worn, dirty, goat hog. We both threw it out -- Jack the Ripper." [3]
Some say, "Many false trails were laid." This may be why the bloodthirsty case of Jack the Ripper seems beyond solution. But what powerful, unseen hand might have had a motive to create those false trails?
Other books and articles dealing with Jack the Ripper and his times:
* Jack the Ripper, by Edwin T. Woodhall (1937)
* The Ripper Legacy, by Martin Howells, et al.
* The Ripper and the Royals, by Melvyn Fairclough
* A Child of the Jago, by Arthur Morrison
* Tales of the Mean Streets (1894), by Arthur Morrison
* The People of the Abyss, by Jack London
* "Jack the Ripper -- A Solution?" by Dr. Thomas Eldon Stowell. The Criminologist magazine, Nov. 1970
* Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, by Stephen Knight
* Prince Jack, by Frank Spiering
* Sickert and the Ripper Crimes, by Jean Overton Fuller
* Lulu (Novel circa 1900), by Frank Wedekind
* Limehouse Nights & The Pleasantries of Old Quong (Fictional stories), by Thomas Burke
------- Notes -------
[1] Begg, Paul. Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History. London: Pearson Education Ltd., 2003
[2] qtd. in Begg, Paul, op. cit.
[3] "Malice In Wonderland", excerpted from "Jack the Ripper: 'Light-hearted Friend'", by Richard Wallace. Harper's magazine, Nov. 1996
(Melchizedek Communique, MC033011) An enormously successful silk-weaving industry was located in London's East End. Then about 1860 the "Free Trade" notions came to the fore. A "Free Trade" policy was introduced. "The effect on the British silk industry was catastrophic: in 1854 50,000 people in East London were employed in the silk industry; by 1880 the figure had shrunk to just 3,300." The word "unemployed" came first to be used as a noun circa 1882. The word "unemployment" was born in 1888, coincident to the savage Jack the Ripper crimes. Deteriorating social conditions caused by the "Free Trade" helped cause many desperate women to turn to prostitution to survive. [1] And thus did "Free Trade" provide the hunting grounds for Jack the Ripper.
Like Adolph Hitler, Jack the Ripper is a sort of ultimate symbol for human evil. Various books have claimed to solve the savage knife-attack crimes which shook London in 1888. Fascination with the case involves the Victorian era, setting for the enormously popular Sherlock Holmes stories. What dark secrets lie hidden underneath the fog of stiff upper lip Victorian respectability?
Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of Metropolitan Police during the Ripper carnage, was a staunch Freemason and "Founding Master" of Quatuor Coronati Lodge No. 2076, in 1884. Warren is the only senior official at Scotland Yard to have definitely stated later that the police knew who Jack the Ripper really was. [1]
There are troubling hints of collusion between the police and government and the brothel keepers and "white slavers." A "Mrs. Jeffries", the madame of one brothel, came under scrutiny. Evidence was obtained showing an aristocratic clientele, including Leopold, King of the Belgians and Edward, Prince of Wales. In the Summer of 1885, the Pall Mall Gazette began to expose "the sordid sink of immorality and vice that had spread its corruption through the highest levels of society." Articles by W.T. Stead were generally called "The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon." Wrote Stead, "If the daughters of the people must be served up as dainty morsels to the passions of the rich, let them at least attain an age when they can understand the nature of the sacrifice which they are asked to make." [2]
The mystery of who was "Jack the Ripper" bloomed in the 1960s. Various theories occupy the time of armchair detectives. Among the most popular theories is called "The Masonic Conspiracy": Was "Saucy Jack" a member of the British royal family? An "offshoot theory" of The Masonic Conspiracy points to Walter Sickert, a famous artist, as the villain. Authoress Patricia Cornwell, in her 2002 book, Portrait Of A Killer, uses modern forensic techniques unknown in Victorian times to support the conclusion that Walter Sickert was indeed Jack the Ripper.
The Sickert offshoot of The Masonic Conspiracy angle is summarized by Paul Begg in his even-handed Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History (London: Pearson Education Ltd., 2003). A Joseph Gorman, alias Joseph Sickert, claimed to be the unacknowledged son of Walter Sickert, suspected Ripper. Joseph Gorman surfaced and told BBC researchers (later researched by journalist Stephen Knight) what may have been the true facts. Prince Albert Victor, a British royal, and Walter Sickert were chums. Visiting at Sickert's artist studio, Prince Albert chanced to encounter one Annie Crook. The prince, it is claimed, secretly married Ms. Crook, a commoner and a Catholic. The British establishment allegedly dissolved the union by sending Annie Crook to an insane asylum and sending Prince Albert Victor off to India. But some women from the East End had evidence of the wedding and of a child fathered from the marriage. These women attempted to blackmail the British upper class parties involved. Allegedly, to silence these troublemakers, certain Freemasons were turned to.
(WARNING: Some squeamish depiction follows. If you are fairly sensitive, then you are advised to read no further.)
Other suspects include James Maybrick, a crazed arsenic addict who fled to America and whose purported diary was later discovered; "Kosminski" (Aaron Kosminski or Aaron Davis Cohen), committed to a lunatic asylum; Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston Churchill, who was called by Queen Victoria "so mad and odd"; and even Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland!
This last suspect, Lewis Carroll, is possibly revealed by anagrams found in his writings. So, for example, in The Nursery Alice (the children's version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) is found: "So we went to the cook, and we got her to make a saucerful of nice oatmeal porridge. And then we called Dash into the house, and we said, 'Now, Dash, you're going to have your birthday treat!' We expected Dash would jump for joy; but it didn't, one bit!" An article in Harper's magazine from November 1996 rearranges the above to reveal the following macabre message:
"Oh, we, Thomas Bayne, Charles Dodgson, coited into the slain, nude body, expected to taste, devour, enjoy a nice meal of a dead whore's uterus. We made do, found it awful -- wan and tough like a worn, dirty, goat hog. We both threw it out -- Jack the Ripper." [3]
Some say, "Many false trails were laid." This may be why the bloodthirsty case of Jack the Ripper seems beyond solution. But what powerful, unseen hand might have had a motive to create those false trails?
Other books and articles dealing with Jack the Ripper and his times:
* Jack the Ripper, by Edwin T. Woodhall (1937)
* The Ripper Legacy, by Martin Howells, et al.
* The Ripper and the Royals, by Melvyn Fairclough
* A Child of the Jago, by Arthur Morrison
* Tales of the Mean Streets (1894), by Arthur Morrison
* The People of the Abyss, by Jack London
* "Jack the Ripper -- A Solution?" by Dr. Thomas Eldon Stowell. The Criminologist magazine, Nov. 1970
* Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, by Stephen Knight
* Prince Jack, by Frank Spiering
* Sickert and the Ripper Crimes, by Jean Overton Fuller
* Lulu (Novel circa 1900), by Frank Wedekind
* Limehouse Nights & The Pleasantries of Old Quong (Fictional stories), by Thomas Burke
------- Notes -------
[1] Begg, Paul. Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History. London: Pearson Education Ltd., 2003
[2] qtd. in Begg, Paul, op. cit.
[3] "Malice In Wonderland", excerpted from "Jack the Ripper: 'Light-hearted Friend'", by Richard Wallace. Harper's magazine, Nov. 1996
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