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Walls of Conflict

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Link TV - Nov. 12 (News Analysis) - Many walls stand around the world, even as Germany celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Berlin wall coming down. As most media focused on the anniversary celebrations, others tied the plight of Koreans and Palestinians, who are still separated by walls, to the festivities. When trying to keep the peace, are walls ever a good idea?

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The Republican War Against ACORN

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Jason Leopold - Sep. 27 (News Report) - In recent days, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other major news outlets have recounted the "troubled" history of the poor people's advocacy group ACORN, but left out the five-year anti-ACORN campaign led by White House adviser Karl Rove and other Republican operatives.

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ACORN and Accountability

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Christopher Hayes - Sep. 23 (News Analysis) - With the notable exception of handing over $700 billion to Wall Street last year, the United States Congress is not known for quick, decisive action. But recently, in a resounding bipartisan vote, members of both houses voted to deny federal dollars to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Over the past fifteen years, ACORN and its affiliates have received on average about $3.5 million a year from the government, or approximately one-millionth of this year's budget. The votes came just a few days after the release of a series of (now infamous) videos in which young right-wing activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles pose as a pimp and a prostitute. They take a hidden camera to a number of ACORN tax preparation offices around the country seeking tax and business advice. (Why a pimp and prostitute? Who the hell knows. Neither answered my request for an interview.) The undercover duo provoked responses from ACORN staff that ranged from the unconscionable (an employee in Baltimore reacting to O'Keefe's plan to bring in thirteen Salvadoran girls as prostitutes with the suggestion he claim some as dependents) to the obviously sketchy (a Brooklyn tax adviser suggesting the couple put their cash profits in a can and bury it in the backyard) to the praiseworthy (the ACORN offices in Philadelphia called the cops and filed a police report)--O'Keefe and Giles haven't seen fit to post that tape. Mostly, though, the tapes are a testament to what might be called the Borat Effect: human beings' intense socialization to be helpful and not rock the boat, even when confronted with someone doing something objectionable, outrageous or preposterous.

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Sam Stein Discusses Cheney 2012, Condoleeza Rice's Afghanistan Comments On Rachel Maddow Show (VIDEO)

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Huff TV - Sep. 23 (News Analysis) - Huffington Post political reporter Sam Stein weighed in on Condoleeza Rice's comments on Afghanistan during his appearance Tuesday evening on The Rachel Maddow Show.

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Flushing Blackwater

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Jeremy Scahill - Aug. 26 (Investigative Report) - Blackwater, the private mercenary company owned by Erik Prince, has been thrust back into the spotlight by a series of stunning revelations about its role in covert US programs. Since at least 2002, Blackwater has worked for the CIA in Afghanistan and Pakistan on "black" contracts. On August 19, the New York Times revealed that the company was, in fact, a central part of a secret CIA assassination program that Dick Cheney allegedly ordered concealed from Congress. The paper then reported that Blackwater remains a key player in the widening air war in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it arms drone aircraft. These disclosures follow allegations--made under oath by former Blackwater employees--that Prince murdered or facilitated the murder of potential government informants and that he "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe."

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Campers for Peace

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

flypmedia.com - By Tara Kyle - Jul. 29 (Special Report) - A summer camp famous for bringing Israeli and Palestinian teens together takes on the conflicts of South Asia.

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What Housing Downturn?

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

spot.us - By Alice Chen - Jul. 15 (Special Report) - If you’ve been keeping up with the news, you’d probably think that housing in the Bay Area would be a bargain right now– or at the very least, much more affordable. After all, many news outlets have reported that median prices for homes sold in April dropped an astonishing 41% compared to last April, and 54% from the peak. But if you’re a buyer, especially in prime areas like Berkeley, Mountain View or Lafayette, you’d quickly discover that home values have not dropped anywhere near that amount. In some cases, like Palo Alto or Sausalito, prices have even gone up slightly. (See this spreadsheet for more info: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/6177652/Bay-Area-Home-Prices also embeded at bottom of this post) Why the discrepancy? First off, you should probably look at the data. Many news outlets focus on prices of sold homes. The problem is that about half of the homes sold in the past few months have been foreclosures, and sales volumes at high-end markets have been anemic. Both of those factors drag down the median price for homes sold.

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Ethnic Healthcare Groups Prescribe Prevention and Access to Care

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New America Media - By Jun Wang - Jul. 03 (News Report) - As the U.S. Congress considers proposals to reform the nation’s healthcare system, participants at a day-long health policy conference highlighted the importance of primary and preventive care and the need to improve access to quality care for low income communities.

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t r u t h o u t | Supreme Court Opens Door to Possibility of Corporate Political Spending

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Reid Wilson - Jun. 30 (News Analysis) - Campaign finance watchdogs are concerned that a little-seen order issued on the Supreme Court's final day could lead to tens of millions of corporate dollars being spent on television advertising - an ad blitz candidates would have difficulty countering.

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California Budget Cuts Could Cause ‘Public Safety Emergency'

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

ProPublica - By Emily Witt, Ben Protess - Jun. 23 (Investigative Report) - That may not sound like much alongside the hundreds of millions in proposed slashes to the state's education, prison and health care systems. But it's half the lab's budget and would likely halt or delay the testing of rape kits, DNA and other crucial crime scene evidence in many counties, law enforcement officials warn.

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California Wants To Cut Legal Aid Attorneys For Poor

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Deborah Hastings - Jun. 15 (News Report) - Unlike any other public service, court-appointed counsel cannot be scaled back. According to the Constitution, every criminal defendant, rich or poor, gets one. If the defendant can't pay, the government does. And if public defenders aren't available, private attorneys must be hired, at rates costing at least twice as much and often more.

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Bush's Shocking Biblical Prophecy Emerges: God Wants to "Erase" Mid-East Enemies "Before a New Age Begins"

Mon, 25 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Clive Hamilton - May. 25 (News Analysis) - The revelation this month in GQ Magazine that Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary embellished top-secret wartime memos with quotations from the Bible prompts a question. Why did he believe he could influence President Bush by that means? The answer may lie in an alarming story about George Bush's Christian millenarian beliefs that has yet to come to light.

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Political storm in Britain, as speaker resigns

Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

GlobalPost - By Michael Goldfrab - May. 20 (Breaking News) - LONDON — The scandal of British members of Parliament fiddling with their expenses started almost two weeks ago as a joke, but has become more serious by the day. This afternoon, it claimed its first high-profile victim as the speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, resigned.

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California takes on King Corn

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

wwwp.dailyclimate.org - By Matthew Cimitile - Apr. 21 (News Report) - As they see it, corn is no better – and might be worse – than petroleum when total greenhouse gas emissions are considered. Such a declaration, to be considered later this week by the California Air Resources Board, would be a considerable blow to the corn-ethanol industry in the United States.

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Obama's Transparency Promise: We're Still Waiting | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

eff.org - By David L. Sobel - Apr. 19 (Special Report) - When President Obama – in one of his first official acts – committed his new administration to an "unprecedented" level of transparency, EFF applauded the change in policy. Likewise, when Attorney General Holder, at the President's direction, issued new guidelines liberalizing agency implementation of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), we welcomed it as a "particularly promising development." But we also noted that it remained to be seen whether reality would match the rhetoric as the new policy was applied, particularly in the context of pending lawsuits – several of which EFF is pursuing – that challenge Bush-era decisions to withhold requested information. Unfortunately, the early indicators are not encouraging. Last week, the Justice Department told a federal judge (PDF) in Washington that the FBI – despite the new Holder FOIA guidelines – will not be altering its previous decision to withhold a substantial amount of information concerning its massive Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW), which the Bureau describes as "the FBI’s single largest repository of operational and intelligence information." The database contains hundreds of millions of records and has been characterized as an "uber-Google."

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Feinstein Seeks To Block Solar Power From California Desert Land

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Kevin Freking - Mar. 21 (News Report) - California's Mojave Desert may seem ideally suited for solar energy production, but concern over what several proposed projects might do to the aesthetics of the region and its tortoise population is setting up a potential clash between conservationists and companies seeking to develop renewable energy.

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Yankee shutdown fund bill advances

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

rutlandherald.com - By Daniel Barlow - Mar. 21 (News Report) - The decommissioning bill – which was opposed this week by Entergy Nuclear Vermont, the state's top two utilities and the Public Service Department – is expected to appear on the House floor for a vote late next week. Rep. Tony Klein, D-East Montpelier, the chairman of the committee, said Vermonters need to be protected from the possibility that Entergy would delay the full cleanup of the Vernon facility for decades as it builds up the money in its decommissioning fund.

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Paul Schene: King County Deputy Caught On Tape Punching, Kicking 15-Year-Old Girl (VIDEO)

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Manuel Valdes - Feb. 28 (News Report) - A King County sheriff's deputy kicks a 15-year-old girl, slams her to the floor of a jail cell, strikes her and pulls her hair in violence captured on videotape.

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California Declares Drought Emergency

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Common Dreams - By Peter Henderson - Feb. 28 (News Report) - California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday declared a state emergency due to drought and said he would consider mandatory water rationing in the face of nearly $3 billion in economic losses from below-normal rainfall this year.

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Putin takes a chance

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

GlobalPost - By Kevin O'Flynn - Feb. 24 (News Analysis) - Vladimir Putin appears worried that a performance by an ABBA tribute band could be his Waterloo......Although it may sound like harmless gossip, there are serious questions about who paid for the concert and whether a prime minister should accept such largesse in a country where billions of dollars have been stolen, where the press is heavily controlled, and where it would be naive to think there would ever be much scandal over a private concert.

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The $4.7 trillion pyramid

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Harper's - By Michael Hudson - Feb. 13 (Special Report) - Social Security, formerly the “third rail” of American politics, has now been trod upon, in rather dramatic fashion, by George W. Bush. Given that the maneuver is both stupid and unnecessary, one must ask why. After all, the program's alleged deficiencies, if there are any, will not manifest themselves until at least 2018. This is not quite the same as worrying about the sun's eventual collapse into a black hole, but for most politicians a problem that lies thirteen years in the future is nearly the same thing. Clearly all is not what it seems. Bush himself offers two reasons for the present boldness. The first—that Social Security is “in crisis”—is easily dismissed. Government actuaries, backed by economists from across the political spectrum, insist there is no funding problem. The Social Security Administration will take in more money than it pays out for the next thirteen years; it has built up a reserve of $1.8 trillion in interest-bearing Treasury bonds for the years after that; and any later shortfall can be covered easily by even a partial rollback of the recent tax cuts for the rich. Bush's second argument sounds more promising. If the American people will simply follow his plan, he says, they too will become rich.

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How to Save Capitalism: Fundamental fixes for a collapsing system (Harper's Magazine)

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Harper's - By Michael Hudson - Feb. 13 (Special Report) - If the financial debacles of the past decade—the enormous bubbles, the credit collapse and its trillion-dollar consequences—have taught us anything about the American economy, it is that capitalists have done a remarkably poor job of safeguarding the future of capitalism. Our system became so dominated by finance, insurance, and real estate, and by the complex derivative securities these industries engendered, that the most eminent financiers (and their unsleeping computers) were unable to protect us from economic shocks. For a number of years, farsighted commentators—including in this magazine—warned of the looming credit collapse, and yet the masters of our economy took no action until the crisis was already upon us. Now we must not only repair our tenuous financial system but shore it up to withstand two great, gathering storms: dwindling energy supplies and accelerating climate change. To this end, Harper’s Magazine asked a group of leading economic thinkers to offer sweeping but concrete proposals for the rescue of capitalism, and capitalists, from doom.

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Exclusive: Leahy Talks To White House About Investigating Bush

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Sam Stein - Feb. 10 (News Report) - Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy and White House Chief Counsel Greg Craig discussed on Tuesday the Senator's proposal to set up a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate potential crimes of the Bush administration. "I went over some of the parameters of it and they were well aware at the White House of what I'm talking about," Leahy told the Huffington Post. "And we just agreed to talk further."

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More Young Girls in Dallas Arrested for 'Cheese' Heroin - NAM

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New America Media - By Al Dia - Feb. 07 (News Report) - More young girls have been arrested in the last two years in Dallas county on charges related to "cheese" heroin, a highly addictive mixture of so-called black tar Mexican heroin and crushed over-the-counter medications that contain an antihistamine, according to Al Dia. Dallas officials say that up to 139 female minors were processed for having consumed "cheese," the highest number in the last few years.

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Environmental Activists Bring Coal Fight to Seacoast

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Portsmouth Herald News - By Jeanné McCartin - Feb. 05 (News Report) - There's 600 miles as the crow flies between New Hampshire and West Virginia's mountain coal country. Worlds apart. No connection beyond a national affiliation. Deb Cinamon Whalen of East Kingston, like many of her fellow New Hampshire-ites, held that view -- if she ever gave it any thought at all. But since becoming aware there's a grave thread between them, Whalen has become a connection between the states and is trying to forge an ever-greater awareness of how the two are tied together. "It's coal," she says. "Mountain Top Removal." Her interest and concern led her to Larry Gibson, a West Virginian environmental activist who has made it his calling to enlighten those outside Kayford Mountain home that we're in this together. Whalen has helped arrange a number of events featuring Gibson, here to shed light on a dark subject. "Most of us don't think we use coal. ...; But we use it for our electricity here in New Hampshire." Much of it comes directly from Mountain Top Removal (MTR), she says.

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