A Plan to End the Wars Updated at 10:46 AM

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There are a million and one things that people can do to try to end the U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and to prevent new ones in Iran and elsewhere, as well as to close U.S. military bases in dozens of other nations around the world. Certain people are skilled at or interested in particular approaches, and nobody should be discouraged from contributing to the effort in their preferred ways. Far too often proposals to work for peace are needlessly framed as attacks on all strategies except one. But where new energy can be created or existing resources redirected, it is important that they go where most likely to succeed.

In my analysis, we should be focusing on three things, which for purposes of brevity and alliteration I will call: Communications, Congress, and Counter recruitment / resistance. Communications encompasses all public discussion of the wars and impacts all other approaches, including targets I consider far less likely to be influenced by us than Congress, such as the president, generals, the heads of weapons companies, the heads of media companies, the people of Afghanistan, your racist neighbor, etc. If our communications strategy can change the behavior of any of these targets, terrific! We should be prepared to take advantage of such opportunities should they arise. But the first place we are likely to be able to leverage successful communications will be the House of Representatives. Counter-recruitment / resistance is another area that overlaps with communications but involves much else as well, and it is a strategy that we continue to underestimate.

COMMUNICATIONS

Our task is to communicate that:
--the wars are ongoing and will not end without our efforts,
--the wars must be ended,
--the peace movement has had many successes already and should by no means give in to frustration,
--the wars can be ended if a small fraction of the majority that wants them ended makes an effort,
--we have to choose between warfare and healthcare / other social goods,
--minimizing U.S. casualties will not satisfy the demands of the U.S. public,
--neither maximizing nor minimizing foreign casualties will satisfy the demands of the U.S. public,
--there is a personal cost to those who support wars and war crimes,
--Congress members will face opposition through negative communications, disruption of their lives, and electoral challenges if they fund wars.

We don't have to communicate all of that in one interview on cable television, or violate any other laws of physics, but we DO have to communicate ALL of that. And getting our spokespeople on TV has to be part of how it is done. But primarily we need to create our own media and work with decent independent media outlets. Online media has developed to the point where it can influence broadcast and print media. And yet we are still quite capable of creating powerful online media. We cannot overlook the need to work with communities that lack internet access, or the need to use the internet to generate offline activities. But it is very hard to overestimate the importance to our efforts of the internet, and working to get more people access to it might be one of the most helpful efforts we can make.

We stopped Bush-Cheney from invading Iran. They intended to do so, and we prevented it -- largely by exposing the grounds for invading Iraq to be lies. There was no press conference at the White House to announce this failure of theirs and success of ours, but that should have no impact on our claiming a victory and making it known to those who require encouragement and optimism. On the other hand, we have allowed the wars to be spread to Pakistan with barely a peep of recognition, and by proxy to Gaza with only a weak and muddled response. And the push to attack Iran directly or by proxy remains.

We dominated the news and the elections in the United States and shifted power in the House, Senate, and White House to a different political party. And we ended up with a House, Senate, and White House that all favor continuing or expanding wars. But we compelled President Bush to agree to withdrawal from Iraqi localities by the end of last month, complete withdrawal from the nation by the end of 2011, and a treaty that the Iraqi people have the right to reject by the end of this month in a vote that would move the complete withdrawal date to one year from now. I still question the wisdom of our having silently accepted a treaty making three years of war without the consent of the U.S. Senate, but a better way to reject the treaty is now upon us. Our focus for the next month should be on insisting that the Iraqi people are permitted to vote the treaty up or down in a verifiable election (which, of course, means that they will vote it down if those voting bear any similarity to those who have been polled). Everyone who has expressed concern for the voting rights of Iranians should be required to do the same for Iraqis.

The other advantage of our having shifted the partisan balance in our government, even without fundamentally altering our government's approach to war, is that we no longer have to do so. We can now move on to replacing pro-war Democrats with pro-peace Democrats (or Independents, Greens, Republicans, Libertarians, etc.) The claim that we should keep quiet about peace in order to elect Democrats who will then (contradictorily) give us peace can no longer be made and can no longer get in the way. And the advantage of having elected a president of a different party, without having fundamentally changed anything, is that the claim that a new president will give us peace can now be replaced by consideration of whether we should look to presidents at all, or Congress instead, to do such things.

We kept the occupation of Iraq smaller than it would have been and prevented other invasions through the success of counter-recruitment efforts and resistance within the U.S. military. Bush-Cheney having pushed the military to the breaking point is not a story of their incompetence or love for war and empire. It is a story of our efforts pushing back against theirs. The United States will always push the military to the breaking point until we succeed in countering the current militaristic agenda, but our job (one of them) is to make what is available to be pushed smaller.

We need to discuss our successes because nobody else will, and because 70 percent of Americans basically agree with us and do nothing about it, largely because many people do not believe they have the power to change anything. We have been building organizations and websites and Email lists for these past several years, and we have been achieving some successes and coming very close to more. Yet, a common response to "Will you gather signatures on this petition for peace?" is "We've tried that before and it didn't end the war." But it did expose the war lies. It did force Alberto Gonzales out. It did come within 7 votes just last month of -- at least temporarily -- stopping the war funding. And while doing all of these things, the same old tired tools can also build larger organizations, and have been doing so. I'm sure people told abolitionists not to print another newspaper because they'd printed one before and slavery was still around. Yet abolitionism was advancing despite not a single slave yet being freed. And we are advancing, but it is crucial to know where. We must absolutely put our signatures and our time and our money into those organizations that oppose war regardless of political party, and NOT into those organizations that claim to oppose war only when it allows criticism of a particular political party. (Here's a list of which is which: http://afterdowningstreet.org/32heroes The list cannot possibly be complete, of course, and I apologize for whomever I have left off the list of heroes, but the major organizations are all here, listed as either heroes or frauds.)

Just as we should continue to push the corporate media while focusing on building our own, we should continue to push the pseudo-peace organizations to do better, but we should focus on building those organizations that have consistently taken a principled stand and pushed with skill and intelligence (even if not with success) for peace.

"Healthcare Not Warfare" should be our cry (following the example of Progressive Democrats of America), along with "Housing Not Warfare," "Jobs Not Warfare," "Schools Not Warfare," etc. We have to force recognition of the financial choice before us. In that choice we find a solution to the healthcare debate that is almost too easy to be believed, but deadly real. And we find a solution to the misconception that war does not impact the "Homeland." This is a discussion that should discuss the current wars as part of an expansion of military bases around the world, bases that make us less safe but cost us over $100 billion every year. The discussion should include the non-war military budget and the trade-offs involved. We should work harder to build alliances with people and groups focused on advocating for all the things we cannot pay for because we pay for weapons and wars.

But our communications strategy should be dominated by our true central reason for opposing wars, not any secondary reason that we imagine will move someone else. If wars are made cheaper and more efficient we will still oppose them, and that is a real possibility. If American casualties are reduced, we will still oppose wars, and that is the case at the moment. If smart decisions in military terms replace comical blunders, we will oppose wars all the more, and that may be happening. Fundamentally, we oppose wars because they kill people and they are part of hostile occupations that make people around the world hate and resent our nation. When a group like Brave New Films documents the impact of our war on the people of Afghanistan, we should promote those films as far as we are able. When an election leads to the corporate media humanizing the people of Iran, we should highlight that and ask why, if we do not want them killed by riot police, we should want them killed by bombs.

There is enormous potential, but uncertain, value in seeking to end and discourage wars by holding war criminals accountable for their crimes. Those working to end torture are right to emphasize that we tortured in order to generate false justifications for war, even after the war had begun. Those working to end war should emphasize that we tortured people in order to support the lies that at least one of the wars, and arguably all of them, is based on. Every war crime for which we are able to hold anyone accountable by exposing their crimes, unelecting them, impeaching them, finding them liable in civil suits, and prosecuting them at home or abroad, should be discussed as part of the ongoing wars. Congress members should understand that we consider their funding of wars to constitute a war crime. And they should understand that we require them to place peace before party.

One useful tool for mass communications is mass rallies. As argued below, our targets should be Congress members. National mass actions should be focused on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Local actions should target local Congress members. There was an action earlier this year on Capitol Hill aimed at cleaning up the local power plant and raising the demand for action on the climate. While that struggle is far from over, the march and protest suggested a useful approach. A large number of people, including young people, were organized to march and to risk arrest. But people were invited to march without risking arrest, thus boosting the crowd size and reducing the chances of anyone being arrested. This action was held on a weekday with Congress in session, and marched adjacent to the House office buildings. An action like this one on the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, on Wednesday, October 7th, strikes me as the most obvious way to send a powerful message of opposition to wars. Combined, of course, with lobby meetings and in-district actions. And backed by lots of money and staff time.

Where do we get lots of money and staff time? That's where we'll need to be very good communicators. But there are wealthy people tired of funding politicians and ready to fund citizens, not to mention people with money who have watched Republicans prosecute and imprison top Democratic donors like Paul Minor and then watched the Democrats not lift a finger in their defense. There are no limits on contributions to peace and justice groups, and almost no limits on what we could accomplish if funded. More importantly, there are ways to influence Congress that do not require putting anyone on a bus and can be done largely by volunteers -- yes, in their pajamas in the basement eating Cheetos. Read on.


CONGRESS

While we have relatively little in the way of carrots or sticks with which to influence a president or a weapons maker (and influencing the military is discussed below), we have the ability to influence Congress members, at least those who represent districts rather than large states. And we have the ability to end the wars by succeeding only in the House of Representatives. We do not need to persuade a single senator or the president or any cabinet secretaries or any news producers. If we can do so, great. But we can end the wars by winning in the House of Representatives alone. This is because it takes two houses and the president to make a bill a law, but it only takes one house to prevent a bill from becoming law.

The House of Representatives is supposed to represent us and yet, on matters of war as on most other things, does not. Why not? Well, many flaws weaken our elections system, but on any given vote three major corrupting factors can usually be pointed to: party, media, and dollars. On an issue like healthcare, as on many issues, these factors should be listed in the opposite order. It is the dollars of corporate interests that do the greatest share of the corrupting. But on matters of war, party is the greatest corruptor. Of course, political parties are the largest funders of campaigns, so money is still right at the top. Members of Congress in both political parties have voted to fund these wars, over the wishes of their constituents, because their party leadership has told them to do so. Parties can promise money, committee memberships, chairmanships, votes on bills and amendments and earmarks, and press events in a member's district with cabinet members and presidents. Parties can threaten to withhold money, back a challenger, block measures from reaching the floor, and withhold chairmanships. It is very difficult and very rare for Congress members to oppose their parties' strong demands. But it is also rare for citizens to press them to do so, in part because many citizens and the groups through which they approach activism also take their orders from political parties.

The experience of opposing the most recent war supplemental bill, which was combined with funding for the International Monetary Fund, is instructive, especially as Congressman John Murtha has already indicated that there will be another war supplemental bill this year. Because all the Republicans in the House opposed the bill due to the IMF measure (five of them switching their votes to yes only after it had passed), 39 Democrats could have stopped the bill. This would have forced separate votes on the war and the IMF, and both might have passed. Certainly the war would have. But it would have created a serious block of peace votes in the House willing to vote for peace even when it mattered and the Democratic Party commanded otherwise. In the end, we persuaded 32 Democrats to vote No (two of them only in opposition to the IMF, 30 of them in opposition to at least the war). So we actually did establish a block of peace voters. It just contained 30 people instead of 39. And of those 30 people, three, Dennis Kucinich, Jim McGovern, and Lynn Woolsey actually urged their colleagues to vote No. This gives us 30 votes we can count on if we work like hell to hold them, and three leaders we can work with to whip together a larger caucus. And while we lost this vote, we exacted a price. We compelled the White House and the Democratic Party leadership to spend a week working on little other than bribing and blackmailing Congress members. And it will take many weeks to fulfill all the promises made. My own Congressman, who opposed the IMF but voted for it, has thus far held press events promoting himself in his district with the House Majority Leader, with the two top environmental officials in the White House, and has an event scheduled here this month with two members of the cabinet.

Over the past years, we have -- more often than not -- lacked the coordination and ability to push back hard against such intense lobbying from the other side. This time we surprised Congress and ourselves. Key to this effort was public whipping. We didn't have eight different peace groups keeping their own whip lists of who had promised them what. We had 8,000 citizen lobbyists feeding their reports to one website where the whip count was kept public, and where we promised to thank or spank people as appropriate once they had voted for peace or war. Critical to this effort were all the usual off-line activities of people in each Congress member's district. But the public whipping was central. It organized and encouraged the activism. It inspired the blogging. It infiltrated the corporate media.

Here's a history of this campaign:
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/43292
Here's the whip list:
http://action.firedoglake.com/page/s/Supplemental

Sadly, we've barely followed through on our promises to thank and spank, activities for which the Backbone Campaign offers tools and assistance. We should be celebrating and denouncing those who came through and those who let us down with at least as much energy as we threatened to do so. Otherwise we lose our credibility, and next time will be harder rather than easier. Disturbingly, even some who seemed willing to threaten repercussions to Democrats for voting yes appeared to decide afterwards that it would be inappropriate to follow through, especially since some other Democrats, not to mention most of the Republicans, were worse and never even pretended to be with us. But we're not handing out prizes in the afterlife here. We're trying to move those who might be moved.

Now, there is another reason why the next time is almost guaranteed to be harder. Unless the Democrats choose to include something else as strongly opposed by Republicans as the IMF, most of the Republicans can be expected to vote Yes. There may be nine who oppose the war funding. Combining them with the 30 Democrats gives us our block of 39 after all. (These would be the nine who voted No on the war supplemental before the IMF was added to it. But that was an easy vote. By that measure we had 51 Democrats, so these nine are not solid.) This means that, in a worst case scenario, we need to find -- in addition to these nine -- not 39 No votes, but 209 No votes, and most of them from Democrats. We're starting at 39 if we can hold them and need 179 more. This should not be considered impossible, not if we are succeeding at the communications strategy above and the counter-recruitment / resistance below. If most of the Congress members we have on our side found five more who would vote with them, we'd have a comfortable majority. We need to develop a system to whip Congress members to whip other Congress members. We also have the advantage of being able to tell them this time that when they told us last time that they were voting for the last war supplemental it was a lie.

This strategy of cutting off the funding for war, which can and should be used against standard military/war budget bills as well as supplementals, has always struck some people as a harder hill to climb than passing bills and amendments and resolutions that we approve of, steps that move us somehow in the direction of peace even while funding war. But this thinking ignores the existence of the United States Senate. While we can block a bill in the House, we have to pass a bill in both the House and Senate, and the chances of a good bill passing the Senate are smaller than Dick Cheney passing through the eye of a needle. There may be measures we want to advance in the House for communications purposes. And there may be measures we can persuade the House to slip into other bills the Senate wants to pass. But none of this should be our focus.

Bills that we might want to move in the House for communications purposes might include Rep. McGovern's bill requiring an exit strategy for Afghanistan, or legislation that turned the slogan of "Healthcare Not Welfare" into policy. A bill requiring that for every dollar spent on wars and military at least 25 cents must go into a fund for single-payer healthcare would be rhetorically useful. You can imagine the multitude of possibilities, as well as the impact if such a discussion were to penetrate the healthcare debate.

Bills that we might slip something very useful into and conceivably still get passed include House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's "paygo" bill, which has 159 cosponsors and the support of the Democratic leadership and the White House. This bill requires that any expense be paid for by a tax increase or a cutback elsewhere. But the bill makes an exception for "emergency" legislation, which is of course what war supplementals are claimed to be. An amendment to the paygo bill stipulating that no war already in progress for over five years is an "emergency" would, I think, effectively impose a paygo requirement on war supplementals. And suddenly you'd be unable to pass a war supplemental without explaining where the money was going to come from. In such a situation, it's conceivable that Blue Dogs and Republicans would join us faster than Progressives.

Congress can do other useful things as well, things that it is easier to get them to do. The House can pass a resolution supporting the right of the Iraqi people to a verifiable election this month on whether to agree to the treaty mislabeled a Status of Forces Agreement. The House can hold hearings on the subject. Advancing that issue, through Congress and elsewhere, should be our immediate priority. And in the back of our heads should be plans to demand a public vote for the people of Afghanistan.

We should also be working to sign incumbent and challenger candidates in the 2010 congressional elections onto a platform committing them to voting no funds to continue wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan. It's not that we can trust them to keep their word. Only intense immediate pressure can control them. The point is to begin shaping the election in terms of how they will vote on war money between now and the election.


COUNTER RECRUITMENT

I've gone on at too much length to burden you with a detailed discussion of counter-recruitment and resistance when others can provide more expertise than I. The National Network Opposing Militarization of Youth at http://nnomy.org provides excellent resources on the crucial work of keeping recruiters out of schools. NNOMY is holding a national conference July 17-19 in Chicago, and you are invited.

Courage to Resist at http://www.couragetoresist.org provides up-to-date information on efforts within the US military to refuse illegal orders.

Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen Gilberd's new book "Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent" is good background, as is "Army of None: Strategies to Counter Military Recruitment, End War and Build a Better World," by Aimee Allison and David Solnit.

As Rumsfeld said, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want. We must deny them the army they want. If we succeed beyond our wildest dreams for the next decade, at some point it might make sense to take into consideration the actual defense needs of the United States. At this point, the best thing our military could do to defend us would be to stop endangering us by doing everything it is doing.


COME TOGETHER RIGHT NOW

There's a national conference at which strategies to end the wars will be deliberated happening in Pittsburgh on July 10-12, and you should try to be there. The event is organized by the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations at https://www.natassembly.org

I've submitted the following action proposal to the assembly and I hope to see you there.

ACTION PROPOSAL

Organize a mass protest march and civil resistance against war funding at House side of Capitol Hill on the 8th anniversary of invading Afghanistan, on Wednesday, October 7th. The House of Representatives is where we have the greatest chance of ending these wars. If we cut off the funding there, nothing else is needed. We can influence House members with activities in districts, online, in the media, and on Capitol Hill. But not on a weekend when they aren't there. We need to be present on a weekday and lobby them before and after we march. There was an action earlier this year on Capitol Hill aimed at cleaning up the local power plant and raising the demand for action on the climate. While that struggle is far from over, the march and protest suggested a useful approach. A large number of people, including young people, were organized to march and to risk arrest. But people were invited to march without risking arrest, thus boosting the crowd size and reducing the chances of anyone being arrested. This action was held on a weekday with Congress in session, and marched adjacent to the House office buildings. An action like this one on the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, on Wednesday, October 7th, could send a powerful message of opposition to wars. Combined, of course, with lobby meetings and in-district actions. While such an action would be open to those willing to risk arrest and those not willing to do so, it would indeed fail to include those unable to participate on a Wednesday (except by making phone calls and holding in-district events). However, it WOULD include the people we intend to influence but which the corporate media cannot be counted on to inform of our doings over a weekend. Some members of Congress would even JOIN us.
http://www.davidswanson.org

Nineteen pro-life House Democrats signed a letter last week to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) expressing their opposition to any health care reform that includes abortion funding.

"We cannot support any health-care reform proposal unless it explicitly excludes abortion from the scope of any government-defined or subsidized health insurance plan," the letter read.

The 19 representatives are:

Dan Boran (D-Okla.), Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), Colin Peterson (D-Minn..), Tim Holden (D-Pa.), Travis Childers (D-Miss.), Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.), Heath Shuler (D-N.C.), Solomon Ortiz (D-TX), Mike Mclntyre (D-N.C.), Jerry Costello (D-Ill.), Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), James Oberstar (D-Minn.), Bobby Bright (D-Ala.), Steve Driehaus (D-Ohio), Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), Charlie Melancon (D-La.), John Murtha (D-Pa.), Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.), and Kathleen Dahlkemper (D-Pa.).

Source: New Statesman

Another scandal gets dodged
Vincent Bevins
Published 02 July 2009

In rural Colombia, your dead body can earn somebody a significant cash bonus – paid for indirectly by the US taxpayer.

For years, Colombia has been a recipient of large amounts of US military aid and is one of Washington´s last close allies in South America. Its government has received billions of dollars to fight drug production and the civil war with the Marxist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc). As an incentive, security forces were offered a financial reward for each guerrilla killed in combat. Soldiers have since killed hundreds of civilians, dressed up the corpses in Farc military attire, and claimed cash bonuses.

The stories of falsos positivos, or "false positives", have been in the open for more than a year, but the official position of the right-wing president, Álvaro Uribe, has been that the slayings were isolated incidents perpetrated by a few bad apples. However, the preliminary report from Philip Alston, the UN´s special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, concludes that the killings "were carried out in a more or less systematic fashion by significant elements within the military". He also takes issue with the term falsos positivos.

He prefers "cold-blooded, premeditated murder of innocent civilians for profit".

Such harsh words from the UN are a difficult blow to the Uribe government, which nevertheless maintains that many of the dead were indeed guerrillas. But Alston points to evidence of "victims dressed in camouflage outfits which are neatly pressed, or wearing clean jungle boots". There is widespread harassment of surviving relatives and those who actively pursue the cases.



Read more: http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2009/07/colom...

Sad about Michael Jackson. 
He meant well.  Designed
the meanings behind all of his actions.
Did everything with intention. 
You can see it in his dance.
 
He modeled crossing over
and staying gravity
at the same time.
 
He could turn and stop
on a dime. 
a pin.
He was soft,
and believed in people
and loved them.
He learned
to protect himself
but did not learn
how to avoid the abuse
delivered by loved ones.
 
I imagine him haunted,
not willing to look back,
but to continue forward.
It may have gotten tiresome. 
 
I want that baby to rest now.
If you have empathy or love
for Michael, let this link teach you
that self love is not ever about money.
He bathed in the sunlight
of our love.
 
Rest in Peace
 
http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Jackson.html

Dear Friend,

Given the importance and complexity of health care reform, it is critical that media report on the subject fairly and accurately. Unfortunately, a recent front-page article in the Washington Post by reporter Ceci Connolly failed on both counts.

In the June 28 article, Connolly, quoting Change Congress' interim executive director Adam Green, wrote the following:

Green, in an interview, was hard-pressed to articulate a substantive argument for the public plan but said that it "has become a proxy for the question of Democrats who stand on principle and represent their constituents."

Connolly's assertion was deeply flawed and misleading. By asserting that Green could not articulate a substantive argument supporting the "public option," and then failing to otherwise articulate that argument, Connolly suggested that there is no real case to be made for such a plan. By depriving readers of the substance and thought behind the reform plan -- both of which would have been easy to obtain from Green or any number of other prominent scholars and activists -- Connolly was in essence telling her readers that, on one of the most critical issues of our day, one side of the debate lacks a substantive basis for its position.

That is unacceptable. We need The Washington Post to address this kind of dubious and unbalanced reporting immediately. Please join me and voice your concern by emailing the Post's ombudsman today:

http://mediamatters.org/emailwashpost

According to Adam Green, Ceci Connolly's conduct was even worse than the passage above suggests. Green wrote that Connolly actually misrepresented his response to her question. Describing the exchange, Green wrote:

Connolly then asked me why progressives were picking a political fight on the public option, as opposed to another issue. I guess the fact that it's the #1 domestic issue of the day -- one that affects millions of American families -- wasn't explanation enough.

I figured she was looking for a quote summarizing the political stakes, so I thought for a moment and said, "The public option has become a proxy for the question of whether Democrats will stand on principle and represent their constituents."

I was quite proud of that answer. It summarizes what a lot of people are feeling -- the public option is the "line in the sand" issue for Democrats, something Chris has written about here on OpenLeft several times.

After relating Connolly's claim that he was "hard-pressed to articulate a substantive argument for the public plan," Green wrote:

WHAT? Connolly asked me a question on the politics, and when I gave her an answer on that, she said I didn't answer on the substance?

Given the highly misleading passage in the article, and Green's statement concerning Connolly's misrepresentation, the Washington Post's ombudsman, Andy Alexander, should assess the article and Green's statements in the context of that article. He should then let readers know whether he thinks Connolly's reporting was fair and accurate and whether her conduct was appropriate.

Please email the Post's Ombudsman today and ask that he address this seriously flawed article:

http://mediamatters.org/emailwashpost

Thank you in advance for your help in holding the media accountable on this crucial issue.

David Brock
Founder & CEO
Media Matters for America

Spreading the Wealth Around to the Insurance Industry and Friends

Monday 22 June 2009

by: Dean Baker, Truthout | Perspective

photo
(Photo: Elpis Nadya / Flickr)

This is the time when the excrement starts hitting the fan. The lobbyists are in overdrive, rounding up members of Congress just like the cowboys of the Old West would bring in the herd.

The industry groups will also have their friends in the news media working overtime hyping any possible obstacle to health care reform. And they are filling the airwaves with scary ads, warning that people will never be able to see a doctor again if meaningful health care reform passes.

Since there are trillions of dollars at stake, the effort is understandable. The basic story is simple. The insurance, pharmaceutical and medical supply industries, along with the hospitals and the American Medical Association, have rigged the deck so that they get rich at the public's expense. They have structured our health care system so that we pay more than twice as much per person as people in other wealthy countries, even though we get worse care by many measures.

The bloat in the health care sector is projected to grow rapidly over the next decade as health care consumes an ever larger share of the economy. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reports that just the increase in health care spending share of the economy over the next decade will cost us $4.3 trillion. That is equal to a health care tax of $57,000 for an average family of four.

Who benefits from the taxpayers generosity? CMS projects that $1.4 trillion, or $18,500 per family will go to the hospitals. Doctors and the pharmaceutical companies are each expected to score about $550 billion, costing families $7,300. And the insurance industry's share of GDP is projected to rise by $360 billion, or $4,800 for an average family.

These massive transfers are not the result of the wonders of the free market. These folks are getting money out of our pockets because their friends in Congress have rigged the deck so the money flows from us to them. For example, the government grants the pharmaceutical industry patent monopolies that prevent normal competition in the prescription drug market.

Unlike every other country in the world, the United States lets the drug companies use their government-granted monopolies to charge whatever they want. As a result, we pay nearly twice as much for our prescription drugs as people in countries like Canada and Germany.

Similarly, doctors are able to tightly control the supply of both US trained physicians and the number of doctors that can enter the country from abroad. If custodians had the same control over the labor market for janitors, they would all be making $80,000 a year. We pay close to twice as much for our doctors as people in other wealthy countries. The gap is especially wide for highly paid specialists like neurosurgeons and cardiologists.

Of course, the insurance industry is a total mess. They pocket more than 15 cents for every dollar they pay out to providers. By comparison, the administrative costs of Medicare are less than 2 percent of its revenue. If the insurers ever had to compete with a publicly run insurance plan on a level playing field, they would be blown out of the water.

We know that private insurers can't compete because we already had this experiment with the Medicare program. When private insurers had to compete on a level playing field with the traditional government-run plan they were almost driven from the market. That is why they got their friends in Congress to pass Medicare Advantage. This program spreads the wealth around by giving the private insurers a subsidy of more than 11 percent per patient.
As Congress debates health care reform, we should be very clear what is going on. It is easy to devise reforms that will reduce costs without jeopardizing the quality of care.

That is not the fight. The fight is over whether Congress will leave in place structures that will siphon an ever-larger amount of money out of taxpayers' pockets and put this money in the hands of the insurance industry, the hospitals, the drug companies and the doctors.

Getting a robust public plan, that both individuals and employers can buy into, will be the key indicator of whether Congress is still determined to redistribute income into the hands of the insurers, the drug companies and the rest. A robust Medicare-type plan will not only reduce the insurance industry's tax on our health care, it will also be able to bargain for lower prices from the drug companies, the medical supply companies, and other health care providers.

For this reason, most of the industry is united against any sort of serious public plan. Their latest compromise is a system of small cooperative insurers that will have no bargaining power. That's a cute joke, but it has nothing to do with health care reform.

So, keep hold of your scorecard. Unless Congress creates a serious public plan, you can expect to be hit with the largest tax increase in the history of the world - all of it going into the pockets of the health care industry.

Documents Back Saudi Link to Extremists


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By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: June 23, 2009

WASHINGTON — Documents gathered by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family, but the material may never find its way into court because of legal and diplomatic obstacles.
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Prince Turki al-Faisal is one of the gigures in a dispute over a possible Saudi role in 9/11.
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Kristen Breitweiser is an advocate for families of 9/11 victims.
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A German intelligence report described bank transfers made in the early 1990s by Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz and other members of the Saudi royal family to a charity that was suspected of financing militants´ activities in Pakistan and Bosnia.

The case has put the Obama administration in the middle of a political and legal dispute, with the Justice Department siding with the Saudis in court last month in seeking to kill further legal action. Adding to the intrigue, classified American intelligence documents related to Saudi finances were leaked anonymously to lawyers for the families. The Justice Department had the lawyers´ copies destroyed and now wants to prevent a judge from even looking at the material.

The Saudis and their defenders in Washington have long denied links to terrorists, and they have mounted an aggressive and, so far, successful campaign to beat back the allegations in federal court based on a claim of sovereign immunity.

Allegations of Saudi links to terrorism have been the subject of years of government investigations and furious debate. Critics have said that some members of the Saudi ruling class pay off terrorist groups in part to keep them from being more active in their own country.

But the thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents compiled by lawyers for the Sept. 11 families and their insurers represented an unusually detailed look at some of the evidence.

Internal Treasury Department documents obtained by the lawyers under the Freedom of Information Act, for instance, said that a prominent Saudi charity, the International Islamic Relief Organization, heavily supported by members of the Saudi royal family, showed "support for terrorist organizations" at least through 2006.

A self-described Qaeda operative in Bosnia said in an interview with lawyers in the lawsuit that another charity largely controlled by members of the royal family, the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia, provided money and supplies to the terrorist group in the 1990s and hired militant operatives like himself.

Another witness in Afghanistan said in a sworn statement that in 1998 he had witnessed an emissary for a leading Saudi prince, Turki al-Faisal, hand a check for one billion Saudi riyals (now worth about $267 million) to a top Taliban leader.

And a confidential German intelligence report gave a line-by-line description of tens of millions of dollars in bank transfers, with dates and dollar amounts, made in the early 1990s by Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz and other members of the Saudi royal family to another charity that was suspected of financing militants´ activities in Pakistan and Bosnia.

The new documents, provided to The New York Times by the lawyers, are among several hundred thousand pages of investigative material obtained by the Sept. 11 families and their insurers as part of a long-running civil lawsuit seeking to hold Saudi Arabia and its royal family liable for financing Al Qaeda.

Only a fraction of the documents have been entered into the court record, and much of the new material is unknown even to the Saudi lawyers in the case.

The documents provide no smoking gun connecting the royal family to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. And the broader links rely at times on a circumstantial, connect-the-dots approach to tie together Saudi princes, Middle Eastern charities, suspicious transactions and terrorist groups.

Saudi lawyers and supporters say that the links are flimsy and exploit stereotypes about terrorism, and that the country is being sued because it has deep pockets and was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers.

"In looking at all the evidence the families brought together, I have not seen one iota of evidence that Saudi Arabia had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks," Michael Kellogg, a Washington lawyer representing Prince Muhammad al-Faisal al-Saud in the lawsuit, said in an interview.

He and other defense lawyers said that rather than supporting Al Qaeda, the Saudis were sworn enemies of its leader, Osama bin Laden, who was exiled from Saudi Arabia, his native country, in 1996. "It´s an absolute tragedy what happened to them, and I understand their anger," Mr. Kellogg said of the victims´ families. "They want to find those responsible, but I think they´ve been disserved by their lawyers by bringing claims without any merit against the wrong people."

The Saudi Embassy in Washington declined to comment.

Two federal judges and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals have already ruled against the 7,630 people represented in the lawsuit, made up of survivors of the attacks and family members of those killed, throwing out the suit on the ground that the families cannot bring legal action in the United States against a sovereign nation and its leaders.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide this week whether to hear an appeal, but the families´ prospects dimmed last month when the Justice Department sided with the Saudis in their immunity claim and urged the court not to consider the appeal.

The Justice Department said a 1976 law on sovereign immunity protected the Saudis from liability and noted that "potentially significant foreign relations consequences" would arise if such suits were allowed to proceed.

"Cases like this put the U.S. government in an extremely difficult position when it has to make legal arguments, even when they are the better view of the law, that run counter to those of terrorist victims," said John Bellinger, a former State Department lawyer who was involved in the Saudi litigation.

Senior Obama administration officials held a private meeting on Monday with 9/11 family members to speak about progress in cracking down on terrorist financing. Administration officials at the meeting largely sidestepped questions about the lawsuit, according to participants. But the official who helped lead the meeting, Stuart A. Levey, the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, has been outspoken in his criticism of wealthy Saudis, saying they have helped to finance terrorism.

Even if the 9/11 families were to get their trial in the lawsuit, they might have difficulty getting some of their new material into evidence. Some would most likely be challenged on grounds it was irrelevant or uncorroborated hearsay, or that it related to Saudis who were clearly covered by sovereign immunity.

And if the families were to clear those hurdles, two intriguing pieces of evidence in the Saudi puzzle might still remain off limits.

One is a 28-page, classified section of the 2003 joint Congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks. The secret section is believed to discuss intelligence on Saudi financial links to two hijackers, and the Saudis themselves urged at the time that it be made public. President George W. Bush declined to do so.

Kristen Breitweiser, an advocate for Sept. 11 families, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center, said in an interview that during a White House meeting in February between President Obama and victims´ families, the president told her that he was willing to make the pages public.

But she said she had not heard from the White House since then.

The other evidence that may not be admissible consists of classified documents leaked to one of the law firms representing the families, Motley Rice of South Carolina, which is headed by Ronald Motley, a well-known trial lawyer who won lucrative lawsuits involving asbestos and tobacco.

Lawyers for the firm say someone anonymously slipped them 55 documents that contained classified government material relating to the Saudi lawsuit.

Though she declined to describe the records, Jodi Flowers, a lawyer for Motley Rice, said she was pushing to have them placed in the court file.

"We wouldn´t be fighting this hard, and we wouldn´t have turned the material over to the judge, if we didn´t think it was really important to the case," she said.

I declare that the world laid down its weapons.  The men who live in the world laid down their weapons.  The women in the world laid down their weapons.  The children of the world laid down their weapons.  The mercenaries in the world laid down their weapons.  The Alabamians in the world laid down their weapons.
 
And everyone learned how to speak.

Truthout Original

Pray tell?  Who does this lobbying money actually go to?  Do these millions of dollars contributed by big business to reps in congress and senate actually go to the members of the house and senate for their own personal use?  Or does it go to a general fund for the good of the country or does it go to a business support system of some kind, is it considered revenue?  Please explain.
_____________________
published after approval.

Obama's False Financial Reform
By William Greider
The Nation

June 19, 2009

The most disturbing thing about Barack Obama's call for financial reform was the way in which the president falsified our predicament. He tried to make it sound as though everyone was implicated in the financial breakdown and therefore no one was really to blame. "A culture of irresponsibility took root from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street," Obama explained. "And a regulatory system basically crafted in the wake of a 20th century economic crisis--the Great Depression--was overwhelmed by the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st century global economy."

That is not what happened, to put it charitably. Unlike some other presidents, Obama is much too intelligent not to know this. The regulatory system was not overwhelmed by historic forces. It was systematically gutted and dismantled by the government in Washington at the behest of the banking interests. If Obama wants details, he can consult his economic advisors--Summers-Geithner--who participated directly as accomplices in unwinding the prudential rules and regulations. Cheers were led by the Federal Reserve with heavy lifting by both political parties.

The president's benign version of events reminds me of what compliant politicians and opinion leaders said after the war in Iraq they had endorsed turned disastrous. "Hey, we were all fooled." If Obama were to tell the truth now about what went wrong in the financial system, he would face a far larger political problem trying to clean up the mess. Instead, he has opted for smooth talk and some fuzzy reforms that effectively evade the nasty complexities of our situation. He might get away with this in the short run. Congress doesn't much want to face the music either. But Obama's so-called reform is literally "kicking the can down the road," as he likes to say about other problems. In the long run, it will haunt the country because it fails to confront the true nature of the disorders.

Giving more power to the Federal Reserve to be the uber-regulator of banking and finance is a terrible idea (I examine the dangers in a forthcoming Nation article). Asking the cloistered central bank to resolve all the explosive questions about the over-reaching power of financial institutions is like throwing the problem into a black box and closing the lid, so people will be unable to see what happens next. That is the idea, after all, the reason Wall Street's leading firms first proposed the Fed as super-cop, then sold it to George W. Bush and now Barack Obama. Give the mess to the Wizard of Oz, the guy behind the curtain. He can do miracles with money, but don't watch too closely. This constitutes the high politics of evasion.

Still, I am thrilled to observe a nascent rebellion gathering strength in Congress. Some 230 House members have endorsed a measure to force GAO auditing of the Fed--a small but vital step toward dismantling the central bank's privileged secrecy and intimidating mystique. Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed concern (and gave a nice plug for my 1987 book about the Fed). "The fact is that the American people want to know more of the Secrets of the Temple," she said. If they do learn more, I guarantee shock and awe will grow into outrage.

Outrage is good. As someone who has been around this subject for three decades, I came to understand that the power of financial titans and their friends at the Fed depends crucially on public ignorance. Most elected representatives and senators are just as clueless as their constituents. This is not entirely their fault. The system is designed to encourage deference to murky power. In our present crisis, people and politicians are naturally bewildered by the complexities. If they knew more about how the system works, they might be able to see that most of Obama's reforms are insubstantial gestures, not actual remedies.

The president, for instance, proposes to raise the requirements for capital and liquidity held by commercial banks with strict limits on leverage--their ability to borrow. That is a virtuous proposal, but it begs the question. Why did the legal limits already in place fail to restrain the appetites of bankers? Indeed, several times in the last two decades the Fed and other central banks enacted new and supposedly more effective capital requirements to curb the excesses. The big dogs of banking broke free of the leash again and again while vigilant watchdogs at the Fed and elsewhere looked the other way. Why should we expect different results next time?

The rest: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090706/grei...

If anyone is on twitter, set your location to Tehran and your time zone to GMT
+3.30. Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location/timezone searches.
The more people at this location, the more of a logjam it creates for forces trying
to shut Iranians' access to the internet down. Cut & paste & pass it on.

--

http://www.earcandleproductions.com/Atlas_Wept.swf
 
you need the flash player from Adobe.com to listen

Medical evidence on marijuana blows both ways
Legalization debate is waging in America once again, but what does the research say?
By Sam McManis
McClatchy Newspapers
Page 17
2009-05-24 02:01 AM
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A customer holds up marijuana bought from a San Francisco, California medical marijuana dispensary in this February 2006 file photo.
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Medical evidence on marijuana blows both ways
Bloomberg
Sparked anew by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's call for the state to study the legalization of marijuana, both sides in the smoldering pot debate point to research to bolster their positions.

Such recitation of conflicting marijuana studies can be manipulated and selected buffet-style to serve whatever political and health agenda is being touted.

Even governmental findings can be contradictory. In 1999, for instance, the Office of National Drug Control Policy asked the Institute of Medicine to review evidence. The institute found that, "except for the harms associated with smoking, the adverse effects of marijuana use are within the range of effects tolerated for other medications."

Yet in 2006, the Food and Drug Administration ruled that marijuana has no health benefits and has known and proven harms. It is classified a Schedule 1 drug - the highest risk of addiction - in the Controlled Substances Act.

Wading through the medical literature, though, makes those conclusions less cut and dried.

"When I was a resident in Kaiser in San Francisco in 1978, I gave a lecture to physicians on marijuana, and I remember my conclusion at that time was that you can find in the literature whatever you were looking for," says Dr. Donald Abrams, a University of California, San Francisco, oncologist and leading medical marijuana researcher. "'Marijuana is good for asthma.''Marijuana's bad for asthma.''Marijuana causes schizophrenia.''Marijuana (decreases) schizophrenia.' And, the evidence is still like that."

There are many factors, of course. As noted by UCLA pulmonologist Dr. Donald Tashkin, who has studied marijuana's effects on the lungs for three decades, "That's just the nature of medical science. You have to deal with variability. The population studied may be different or the methods used to study may differ."

Yet when the arguments for legalization of marijuana, both for medicinal and recreational use, are put forth, solid medical science often gets clouded in an ideological haze.

"Although we like to say we separate politics from science, with medical marijuana, that's really difficult," Abrams says. "It depends on who does the study, where it's published and their agenda."

Bearing in mind those caveats, here is a look at the research on marijuana's effect in areas critical to health.

Lungs

UCLA's Tashkin studied heavy marijuana smokers to determine whether the use led to increased risk of lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. He hypothesized that there would be a definitive link between cancer and marijuana smoking, but the results proved otherwise.

"What we found instead was no association and even a suggestion of some protective effect," says Tashkin, whose research was the largest case-control study ever conducted. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Tobacco smokers in the study had as much as a 21-fold increase in lung cancer risk. Cigarette smokers, too, developed COPD more often in the study, and researchers found that marijuana did not impair lung function.

Tashkin, supported by other research, concluded that the active ingredient tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, has an "anti-tumoral effect" in which "cells die earlier before they age enough to develop mutations that might lead to lung cancer."

However, the smoke from marijuana did swell the airways and lead to a greater risk of chronic bronchitis.

"Early on, when our research appeared as if there would be a negative impact on lung health, I was opposed to legalization because I thought it would lead to increased use and that would lead to increased health effects," Tashkin says. "But at this point, I'd be in favor of legalization. I wouldn't encourage anybody to smoke any substances. But I don't think it should be stigmatized as an illegal substance. Tobacco smoking causes far more harm. And in terms of an intoxicant, alcohol causes far more harm."

Cognitive function

A 2006 study in the journal Neurology found that speed of thinking, attention and verbal fluency were affected as much as 70 percent by long-term heavy use (four or more joints per week).

But a 2003 review of literature in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society found that marijuana smoking had a "small effect" on memory in longtime users.

However, users had no lasting effects in reaction time, attention or verbal function. "Surprisingly, we saw very little evidence of deleterious effects," Dr. Igor Grant, researcher at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, said in a statement.

A 2002 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that heavy users did worse on recall memory tests. A 2006 study in Greece showed users had slower mental-processing speed than the control group. Then again, a 2007 study at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, published in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, found that students who smoked marijuana had better grades than those who used only tobacco or those who did not smoke any substance.

In terms of brain development, a 2000 study in the Journal of Addictive Diseases found changes in brain structure in those who started using marijuana before age 17 but not in those who started at an older age. A 2009 Children's Hospital of Philadelphia study used brain imaging to show that heavy adolescent users are more likely to have disrupted brain development in regions involving memory, attention, decision making and language. But a 2008 Ohio State University study found that marijuana can reduce brain inflammation and perhaps reduce memory impairment that could delay Alzheimer's disease.

Psychosis

Yes, there is an increased risk in psychotic behavior and long-term risk of mental illness from marijuana use, according to a 2007 review of literature commissioned by Great Britain's Department of Health and published in the Lancet.

But the risk is small, because the risk of developing psychosis in the general population is 3 percent over a lifetime and rises to 5 percent for marijuana users, lead researcher Stanley Zammit told the Los Angeles Times. "So 95 percent of the people are not going to get psychotic, even if they smoke on a daily basis," he told the paper.

In 2005, New Zealand researchers studied a group of people with a gene variant the researchers believe predisposes that group to developing psychosis. Those in the group who smoked marijuana as teens had a tenfold increase in risk of psychosis than those who abstained.

Depression

A study published in 2001 in the American Journal of Psychiatry followed nearly 2,000 adults over 15 years. It found that marijuana users who had no symptoms of depression at the start were four times more likely than non-users of developing symptoms during that time frame.

In 2008, the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy stated that early marijuana use could increase the likelihood of mental illness by as much as 40 percent later in life.

However, researchers at McGill University in Montreal in 2007 reported in the Journal of Neuroscience that THC in low doses actually serves as an antidepressant similar to Prozac, producing serotonin. But at higher doses, they found it could lead ]to depression an\d psychotic episodes.

Luminous Animal Donating Member (1000+ posts) Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Thu Jun-18-09 12:26 PM
Original message
EMERGENCY: WH says more people calling AGAINST public plan than FOR IT!!!

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/6/18/744070/-EME... !!!
However i've called the White House and the many listed senators and those of the HELP committee every day this week since before last Thursday. And after imploring daily to tell their elected official including the president that the public plan is NON-NEGOTIABLE (no to 7 year trigger, no to taxing employer health benefits, no to daschle/dole, etc) the people on the receiving end of my phonecalls say that they have BARELY heard from us. This is NO exaggeration. I was about to cry. The wingnuts and freepers are winning this.

They, even the blue states at Barbara Boxer or Diane Feinstein's office (I'm from CA) say they get FAR more calls AGAINST the public option than for it. This includes the White House. I told the comment operators at thew the whitehouse or Senate offices that a poll came out yesterday saying 76% in the new NBC/WSJ poll support the Public Option. They laughed and asked "Really????"

P.S.: The white house comment operator told me that if i really want to get my message to the president, you MUST EMAIL AS WELL AS CALLING. I say that goes for the Senators of the HELP committee listed in slinkerwink's diary.


Senate switchboard: (202) 224-3121
Capitol Hill toll free: 800-828-0498, they will connect you with your congresscritter.
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senat... to find your Senator and contact info for phone/web forms
Contact info for your Reps: http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW_by_State.shtml#ca
White house: CALL the White House at: 202-456-1111, http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact /
General White House number : 202-456-1414

Senators on the HELP Committee
Tom Harkin (IA): (202) 224-3254
Barbara A. Mikulski (MD): (202) 224-4654
Jeff Bingaman (NM): (202) 224-5521
Patty Murray (WA: (202) 224-2621
Jack Reed (RI): (202) 224-4642
Bernard Sanders (I) (VT): (202) 224-5141
Sherrod Brown (OH): (202) 224-2315
Robert P. Casey, Jr. (PA): (202) 224-6324
Kay Hagan (NC): (202) 224-6342
Jeff Merkley (OR): (202) 224-3753

Toll free numbers for Capital Hill:
800-828-0498
1-800-828-0498
1-866-338-1015
1-866-220-0044
1-877-851-6437

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/6/18/743877/-Pri...

davidswanson Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Thu Jun-18-09 10:57 AM
Original message
It Could Happen to Yoo Updated at 10:57 AM

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Sometimes, during a tsunami of bad news, it's nice to come up for a breath of encouraging air. The only way to do that this week that I know of is to read a beautiful 42-page order by a judge (PDF). Usually such things don't strike me as beautiful, but this one says that leading torture lawyer John Yoo can be sued in court by one of his victims. It also says that his arguments for immunity are a load of crap, his arguments for the legality of torture are at least plausibly as fetid a pile of feces as they appear to the naked eye, and the treatment received by Jose Padilla is rather glaringly in conflict with our laws, basic standards of decency, and the wisdom of those who have gone before us and warned against sacrificing our rights on the temple of war. Here's an analysis of exactly how well thought out (not just beautiful) this order is, and how very likely it is to withstand challenge.

So, while Congress and the Ministry of Truth, er … I mean the Department of Justice (DOJ), hold off on any attempts to hold anyone accountable for torture until the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility releases a report on the conduct of Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steven Bradbury -- a report already delayed for six weeks of integrating edits made by the three men who are supposedly the subject of the report -- a judge, by simply comparing Yoo's publicly available confessions in the form of torture memos with actual legal standards, has produced the outline of an indictment that a special prosecutor could pick up and use to put John Yoo behind bars. The only thing missing is the creation of such a special prosecutor, something Attorney General Eric Holder would have to do. Meanwhile the House of Representatives is impeaching a judge for groping female employees, but can't be bothered to impeach another judge, Jay Bybee, who was John Yoo's boss during much of the torturing, who himself signed torture memos, and who signed a memo purporting to place the "legal" power of aggressive war in the hands of any president.

Holder testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that such memos are only recommendations that higher ups must use their own judgment in accepting or rejecting. In fact, the torture memos advised attorneys general, the CIA, and Bush and Cheney to do exactly what they had requested to be advised to do. The lawyers must be held accountable, but so must those above them who bear ultimate responsibility.

A Rally Near You Next Thursday

Fortunately, throughout the course of human history, those in power have been compelled to obey laws and standards of decency by public pressure, and the public is with us on this one. A coalition of human rights organizations too lengthy to list here but available on the website has planned a day of action: Torture Accountability Action Day, June 25th, 2009. That´s next Thursday. In Washington, D.C., we will gather for a rally at 11 a.m. in John Marshall Park (501 Pennsylvania Avenue NW) and march at noon to the Department of Justice. If the DOJ does not agree to appoint a special prosecutor or to meet with us and discuss it, those who are so inclined will engage in nonviolent protest led by the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance.

Also on June 25th, there will be rallies in San Francisco, CA; Pasadena, CA; Boston, MA; Salt Lake City, UT; Seattle, WA; Portland, OR; Las Vegas, NV; Honolulu, HI; and Anchorage, AK. Details here:
http://tortureaccountability.webs.com/eventsacrossus.ht...

In Washington, D.C., more actions will follow, organized by the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International. There's a congressional hearing following the rally and protest, and then an evening speaker on the 25th, an all-day conference on the 26th, and a 24-hour vigil at the White House on Saturday the 27th. Details here: http://tassc.org/index.php?sn=309

Check the websites of the ACLU, Amnesty International, and other groups in the coalition for other actions in Washington and around the country this week.



http://www.davidswanson.org

The congressional elections of 2006 and 2008 were almost universally understood as shaped by public desire to end the war in Iraq. Last month, when a war supplemental spending bill (another $97 billion for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) was expected to easily pass in the House with bipartisan support, 51 Democrats sought to please their constituents by voting No. Tuesday evening, when the same bill stood a good chance of failing, 20 of those same Congress members voted Yes and one did not vote. But 30 stood by their vote when it actually meant something. They were joined by 2 more, for a total of 32 Democrats voting No.

A coalition of progressive bloggers had been whipping hard to reach the total of 39 and fell short by 7. In fact, we fell short by 12, because the White House persuaded 5 Republicans to oppose their own party and vote Yes. Most Republicans were voting in opposition to International Monetary Fund spending that had been added into the bill by the Senate. At least one Republican, Ron Paul, and maybe as many as 9, when they voted No were opposing the war funding as well.

These were the 51 Democrats who, along with 9 Republicans, voted No the first time around, when their votes stood no chance of actually blocking the funding: Baldwin, Capuano, Clarke, Cohen, Conyers, Cooper, Costello, Doggett, Edwards (MD), Ellison, Farr, Filner, Frank (MA), Grayson, Grijalva, Gutierrez, Honda, Inslee, Kagen, Kaptur, Kucinich, Lee (CA), Lewis (GA), Lofgren, Markey (MA), Massa, Matsui, McDermott, McGovern, Michaud, Miller, Napolitano, Neal (MA), Oberstar, Payne, Pingree (ME), Polis (CO), Schakowsky, Serrano, Shea-Porter, Speier, Thompson (CA), Tierney, Towns, Tsongas, Velázquez, Waters, Watson, Weiner, Welch, Woolsey.



The procedural vote on the rule to bring the bill up for a vote on Tuesday separated the true heroes from the merely great. Here's the roll call. Only 10 Democrats voted No: Filner, Heinrich, Kaptur, Kratovil, Kucinich, Michaud, Minnick, Mitchell, Rush, Waters. Of these, 5 voted No to oppose war funding (rather than to oppose IMF funding): Filner, Kaptur, Kucinich, Michaud, and Waters. But true heroes are also those who spoke out publicly and/or privately lobbied their colleagues to vote No with them in the days leading up to the vote. That list is even shorter, including -- as far as I know -- only Kucinich, McGovern, and Woolsey opposing the war money, with Filner and perhaps a few other Democrats publicly opposing the IMF funding. As far as I know, only Kucinich spoke on the floor of the House against war funding, and he did so repeatedly. Barbara Lee put out a statement against the war funding after it had passed.

The actual vote on the bill came shortly after the procedural vote, with 32 Democrats voting No. Here's the roll call. Of the original 51, 30 stayed strong: Tammy Baldwin, Michael Capuano, John Conyers, Lloyd Doggett, Donna Edwards, Keith Ellison, Sam Farr, Bob Filner (statement on IMF),
Alan Grayson, Raul Grijalva, Michael Honda, Marcy Kaptur, Dennis Kucinich (watch video, read statement, another statement, statement on IMF), Barbara Lee, Zoe Lofgren, Eric Massa, Jim McGovern (watch video), Michael Michaud, Donald Payne, Chellie Pingree, Jared Polis, Jose Serrano, Carol Shea-Porter, Jackie Speier, John Tierney, Nikki Tsongas, Maxine Waters, Diane Watson, Peter Welch, and Lynn Woolsey (watch video, read statement). These 30 were joined by these 2: Brad Sherman, Pete Stark.

These 32 Congress members, in many cases, stood up to threats, promises, and abuse from the White House and Nancy Pelosi. President Obama and several cabinet secretaries, the National Security Advisor, and of course the White House Chief of staff lobbied hard, including threatening to cut off all future electoral support. These members resisted and placed the interests of their constitutents and of the people of America, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, above the interests of the Democratic Party. They are heroes. They are the place to start building a caucus that might achieve peace.

We have citizen heroes too, groups and blogs and individuals who raised their voices and organized against this bill, including but not limited to: Action Center For Justice, After Downing Street, Air America, Alternet, American Friends Service Committee, the Backbone Campaign, Nick Baumann, Blue Mass Group, Brave New Films, Jennifer Brunner, Brendan Calling, Burnt Orange Report, Buzz Flash, Calitics, Cindy Sheehan, Code Pink, Common Dreams, Daily Kos, Dday, Declaration of Peace, Democracy Now!, Democrats.com, Digby, Docudharma, FireDogLake, Bruce Gagnon, Green Mountain Daily, Glenn Greenwald, the Hip Hop Caucus, Howie Klein, Humanists for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Jeremy Scahill, Just Foreign Policy, The Nation, Cynthia McKinney, Michigan Liberal, Linda Milazzo, Michael Moore, Military Families Speak Out, My Left Nutmeg, Not Larry Sabato, Open Left, Out of Iraq Blogger Caucus, Patriot Daily, Peace Action, Peace No War, Progressive Democrats of America, Jason Rosenbaum, Coleen Rowley, Santa Cruz Progressive Email List, Square State, Jonathan Tasini, True Maine Blue, Doug Tudor, United for Peace and Justice, US Labor Against the War, Veterans for Peace, Voters for Peace, Joan Wile, Win Without War, Marcy Winograd, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, World Can't Wait, the Young Turks.



But here's the Hall of Shame. These Congress members voted No for show when it didn't matter, and voted Yes to fund wars when it came to crunch time: Yvette Clarke, Steve Cohen, Jim Cooper, Jerry Costello, Barney Frank, Luis Gutierrez, Jay Inslee, Steve Kagen, Edward Markey, Doris Matsui, Jim McDermott, George Miller, Grace Napolitano, Richard Neal (MA), James Oberstar, Jan Schakowsky, Mike Thompson, Edolphus Towns, Nydia Velázquez, and Anthony Weiner. And John Lewis, for one reason or another, did not vote.

We have citizen frauds too. These are organizations that, like fraudulent Congress members, acted as if they opposed wars when it didn't much matter, when the government was run by Republicans dedicated to continuing wars. These are blogs and organizations that put the Democratic Party's positions ahead of what's good for the country or the world or -- I would argue -- even the Democratic Party. They did not lift a finger to oppose this war supplemental: Campaign for America's Future, Center for American Progress, Democracy for America, Moveon.org, Talking Points Memo, and True Majority.

Of course the bulk of Congress and the bulk of civic organizations are not mentioned here at all because they are proud war mongers or they are groups that never involve themselves in the struggle for peace even when it's safe to do so. The worst offense is not necessarily hypocrisy. The worst offense is promotion of militarism. But hypocrisy can fool you if you don't focus your vision on it. And it will continue unless we make sure Congress knows we are onto them. We've been phoning Congress nonstop for the past week, but I strongly encourage you to make a few more calls, to thank the heroes and spank the frauds. The arc of justice is long but it only bends if we keep bending it.

Everyone everywhere is getting hurt, including our soldiers, our students, our mothers, our fathers, our Americans for other people in other countries, while we are falling apart here economically, and in spirit. Some here are driven by images of angels and gods and satanic projections of their weaker selves. Some here are driven by the need to feed, clothe and shelter their families. We are all suffering, and there are some on the planet that are causing all of these casualties.
 
What do you say we address that issue? Who are the fuckheads with the money to buy and sell weapons? Who are the fuckheads making live virus vaccines to murder the masses with the fear of pandemic and the authority of police to make parents and children take the drugs? Who are the fuckheads putting people in jail for marijuana when it is a better pain killer than anything the pharmaceutical industries have on the market. It won't make you dizzy, bruise easily, keep you from engaging in healthy sex, cause you instant death, or thoughts of suicide! It makes you peaceful and happy and open to life. It has enormous medical benefits.
 
Hey Californians! A shout out- Lets take California out of debt and out of the dark ages as the leader of the USA by legalizing pot and letting the kids legitimize their businesses and their buds and make love not war! The we can tax it, and that tax will bring us enough money to balance our budget, and the rest of the country will follow suit, bringing the youth to the front so they can move on. That way we can pay attention to the jewels in all of us one place at a time. What does Iran need to pull out of it? Obama is right to keep out of this election. The Iranians can manage their potential Democracy just fine. We don't need to be in another battle, and besides these two guys are not different enough to yell about. And our intentions are clear. Keep the peace. Negotiate so we can do trade and make our world healthy again.
 
Iranians that want the USA to step in, ask too much.
Manage your own household.  We will try to manage ours.

Health Care Reform: Single Payer Vs. Public Option is Not the Most Important Issue
Posted by Time for change in General Discussion
Sat Jun 13th 2009, 06:02 PM
I believe that much of the argument over whether we should support a national health care plan that includes a public option for all Americans, but which also leaves some room for private insurance company participation (for those who choose it), vs. a pure single payer system, is misplaced.

The most important goal of a national health plan is that all Americans have access to good quality health care at an affordable cost – and also that the system be reasonably efficient, so as to keep the cost to our faltering economy within reasonable limits. A third goal, which I personally do not consider to be quite as important as the first two, but which is probably politically essential to the enactment of the plan by Congress, is that Americans maintain their choice of physicians.

A single payer system, by itself, does not guarantee any of these goals. And alternatively, it is possible for a public option plan, appropriately devised, to attain them.


The basic difference between a single payer plan and the "public option" plan

When you get down to the basics, there isn´t really that much difference between these two plans that are advocated by progressives. A single payer national health care plan is one where the government pays for all medical care for everyone. The "public option" plan is one in which all Americans would have the choice between a government sponsored health insurance plan or a private insurance plan or none at all.

Since the "public option" plan would give us all the opportunity to make our own choice, for those of us who choose the government plan the effect on us would be virtually identical to operating under a single payer system. The only difference would be that in the "public option" plan, Americans could instead choose private insurance. Therefore, private insurance companies would not be totally out of the picture – at least not initially.


The problem with private health insurance

Most of us are well aware of the problems with private health insurance, as compared to government sponsored health insurance. Private insurance companies exist to make a profit. Therefore, part of the money that could otherwise be used to provide good quality health care would instead go into profit for the insurance company. Furthermore, there are many other costs that private health insurance companies have that government sponsored health insurance does not have: they pay for screening out prospective clients whom they consider to be poor health risks, based on prior medical history or other risk factors; they pay for advertisement; and they pay of lobbying government to pass laws that are favorable to their bottom line. After they pay for all these things, what is left for providing the health care that they promise to the health care consumers who purchase their product? Not much. For all these reasons, government sponsored health insurance is much more efficient than private health insurance. And on top of all that, in their desire to make profits, private health care insurance companies often cheat their clients. I´ve had several experiences myself where they tried to cheat me and my family.


How a single payer national insurance plan could fail to provide adequate health care

Though government health insurance is far more efficient than private health insurance, for the reasons described above, that doesn´t mean that government health insurance will automatically lead to good quality, or even decent health care.

What if, due to right wing political pressure, legislation providing for single payer health care simply does not provide enough money to offer a decent health care package? If that is the case, then health care consumers under such a plan may be no better off, or even worse off than they are under private health insurance plans.


How to devise a national health care plan that provides good affordable health care to all Americans

Therefore, it seems to me that one of the first steps in devising a good national health care plan is to determine what specific health care services, and at what cost, are required in order to provide good quality health care to individual Americans. After this is determined, then do the following:

1) Offer that as the "public option" package to all Americans
All Americans would have the option of choosing that package to cover their health care needs.

2) Determine the value of the package
Determine the value of the package at today´s market prices. That would be the price that we would all be charged for the package if we chose to purchase it.

3) Help Americans to be able to afford the "public option" package
Provide Americans with the money that they need to be able to easily afford the package, either through tax credits or other means.

Those with the lowest incomes would receive the full value of the package. Essentially, that would mean that they would receive it for free – if they so chose to do so.

It does not seem feasible that the full value of the package could be provided to all Americans. That would probably make the plan too expensive, and therefore ruin our fragile economy. Therefore, those Americans making incomes above the minimum required to receive the public option plan for free would receive less tax credits (or other subsidy) than required to pay for the full plan, on a sliding scale. Persons with incomes above a certain maximum would perhaps receive no money at all to pay for it. I don´t want to specify the specifics of the sliding scale. But the purpose would be to make good quality health care affordable to all Americans without excessive cost.

A reasonable alternative to a sliding scale for subsidies would be simply to give all Americans the full value of the public option package (or simply make it available to all Americans for free), and pay for it by increasing income taxes (and the inheritance tax too) on a progressive scale.

4) Two remaining important issues
This would then leave two important structural questions: Should Americans have the option of purchasing private health insurance instead of the public option; and, should Americans have the option of not purchasing any health insurance at all, instead opting to keep the money they received from the federal government. If the answer is no to both these questions, that would leave us with a single payer system. If the answer is yes, then we would have what is commonly referred to as a "public option" plan.


What would be the effect of a "public option" plan on private insurance companies?

I´ve already discussed why private health insurance is inherently less efficient than government health insurance. Because of all the additional costs for private health insurance it would seem impossible for them to offer a comparable health care package of equivalent value to a "public option" package if the public option package really provided good quality health care.

Indeed, that is exactly why the private health insurance industry is so strenuously objecting to a "public option". They claim that a public option would make it impossible for them to offer a competitive plan and still be able to make decent profits. And they are correct about that.

So, what would happen to the private insurance companies if a good quality public option plan was available to all Americans? They would have three choices: They could quit the health care insurance business and figure out something more productive to do with their time; they could offer a much better product than they currently do; or, they could continue to offer what they currently do and take their chances. Frankly, I don´t see how it would be possible for them to offer a comparable product to government insurance if what the government offered really ensured that the health care needs of Americans would be met. But if the private insurance companies were somehow able to offer a comparable product, then fine. I say, let them do it.

Undoubtedly, no matter how inferior the health care product offered by private insurance companies, some Americans would continue to choose that over the government "public option" – either out of ignorance or ideological opposition to "big government". But, as time passed and as word got around regarding the relative value of the "public option" vs. private insurance companies, more and more people would switch over to the public option.

Some have objected to a "public option" plan that fails to completely remove private insurance companies from the market on the basis that our government would then to some extent be subsidizing private insurance companies. That would apply to any individuals who currently do not have health insurance, who decide to use their government subsidy (tax credit, or whatever) to purchase private health insurance rather than the government "public option". But I feel quite certain that any advantage they received from that would be offset (probably many times over) by individuals who currently purchase private health insurance but who would switch over to the "public option" as soon as it became available.

The net result of this would be that private health insurance companies would lose a great deal of business and most or all of them would be forced out of the market because of their inability to offer a competitive product. That is as it should be. There is no reason for private health insurance in our country or anywhere else. Private health insurance companies are nothing more than middle-men that scoop up profits as health consumers try to find a way to meet their health care needs.


What would be the effect of allowing Americans to receive government subsidies but not use them for any health insurance?

Allowing Americans to receive government subsidies for health care, while not using the money to purchase health insurance, is a little more problematic. Those people would cause a drain on the public treasury whenever they had emergency health care needs that they could not afford, which would then have to be paid for by the government. That is why during the Democratic primaries, Kucinich, Edwards and Clinton all made their health care plans mandatory rather than voluntary.


Paul Krugman´s views on this issue

I realize that some DUers don´t care much for Paul Krugman, I believe mainly because of his criticisms of Obama´s economic policies. But I have a great deal of respect for him. He was one of the most scathing and early critics of the Bush economic policies; along with several other of our best and most liberal economists (James Galbraith, Joseph Stiglitz, Dean Baker), he was a harsh critic of the Geithner bailout plan. And most important, health care is at the top of his list of interests. Here is what he had to say about our need for health care reform in "The Conscience of a Liberal":

The principal reason to reform American health care is simply that it would improve the quality of life for most Americans…

There is, however, another important reason for health care reform. It´s the same reasons movement conservatives were so anxious to kill Clinton´s plan. That plan´s success, said William Kristol, "would signal the rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy" – by which he really meant that universal health care would give new life to the New Deal idea that society should help its less fortunate members. Indeed it would – and that´s a big argument in its favor…

Getting universal care should be the key domestic priority for modern liberals. Once they succeed there, they can turn to the broader, more difficult task of reining in American inequality.

So I take what Krugman has to say on this subject very seriously. During the Democratic primaries, here is what he had to say about the Edwards plan, which was essentially a "public option" plan, meaning that it didn´t completely exclude private health insurers, though it would probably force them out of the market before too long:

Back in February John Edwards put his rivals for the Democratic nomination on the spot, by coming out with a full-fledged plan to cover all the uninsured. Suddenly, vague expressions of support for universal health care weren´t enough: candidates were under pressure to present their own specific plans. And the question was whether those plans would be as bold and comprehensive as the Edwards proposal.

My point in citing this is that Paul Krugman, for whom the provision of affordable quality health care to the American people has perhaps been his highest priority for a very long time, fully endorsed the Edwards plan as an excellent plan for delivering universal health care to the American people, even though it was not a single payer plan.


Conclusion

For all these reasons, I believe that a national health care plan with a robust universal public option for health care coverage could be nearly as good as any single payer plan. The main issue at stake is not whether private health insurance companies are immediately and completely excluded from a national health care plan, but rather the quality of the plan that is offered to all Americans. A good quality plan will force the private health care industry out of the market anyhow – which should be obvious from the vehemence with which they denounce a public option.

For those who say that any participation of private insurance companies in a national health care plan will make it inordinately expensive, I can´t see how that is possible. The added expense of such a plan will apply only to those Americans who choose private insurance over a public option. Those people will have to bear whatever added costs are attendant upon their use of private health care insurance, until they recognize the problem and switch over to the public option. (On the other hand, any plan that mandates people to use private insurance or fails to provide them with a good quality public option should be rejected out of hand.)

For all these reasons, I urge people to be supportive of a public option plan, depending upon its ability to ensure good quality health care for all Americans who choose it. If you want to advocate for single payer health care over a "public option" plan, then fine. But I urge you not to reject a public option plan if that turns out to be the only alternative left on the table. If progressives who care about the need for universal good quality health care for all Americans split up over the question of single payer vs. "public option", that will only lessen our chances of getting any meaningful health care reform.

US House to debate Ron Paul´s ´Audit the Fed´ bill

STEPHEN C. WEBSTER
Raw Story
June 11, 2009

After months of activism and lobbying by Congressman Ron Paul´s supporters, House Resolution 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, will move out of committee to be debated by the full House of Representatives.

In a show of cross-party unity, Ohio Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich became the bill´s 218th co-sponsor, pushing it over the threshold for debate in Congress.

The bill, which achieved its 222nd co-sponsorship on Thursday, has been in consideration by the House Financial Services Committee since Feb. 26.

Congressman Kucinich, along with Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-NY), announced Tuesday that the House Financial Services Committee will subpoena the Federal Reserve to ascertain the details of the Fed´s agreements with Bank of America in the institution´s acquisition of Merrill Lynch.

"The full committee and Domestic Policy Subcommittee, under the leadership of Chairman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), have been investigating the circumstances surrounding the federal government´s bailout of the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch transaction," Kucinich´s office noted in a Tuesday release. "Specific documents subpoenaed include emails, notes of conversations and other documents."

While the bill enjoys some Democratic supporters, the vast majority of H.R. 1207 co-sponsors are Republican.

"The tremendous grass-roots and bipartisan support in Congress for HR 1207 is an indicator of how mainstream America is fed up with Fed secrecy," said Congressman Paul in a Thursday media advisory. "I look forward to this issue receiving greater public exposure."

Though the move from committee to full House is sure to hearten supporters, the Senate also has pending before it a bill which would have originally given Congress greater oversight of the Federal Reserve. But in its present form, notes Huffington Post writer Ryan Grim, a recent, every-so-slight modification essentially ´neutered´ the bill.

"Thanks to an overlooked document posted on the website of Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the top ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, voters can virtually watch the water being dumped into the brew that Grassley had hoped to force the Fed to drink," he wrote.

"On page five of Grassley´s amendment, he intends to give the Comptroller General of the Government Accountability Office power to audit "any action taken by the Board under…the third undesignated paragraph of section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act" — which would be almost everything that it has done on an emergency basis to address the financial crisis, encompassing its massive expansion of opaque buying and lending."

Grim adds: "Handwritten into the margins, however, is the amendment that watered it down: ´with respect to a single and specific partnership or corporation.´ With that qualification, the Senate severely limited the scope of the oversight."

Congressman Paul, in defense of his proposal to audit the bank which controls America´s currency, argues not just for transparency. He wants to close it down.

"Detractors have [...] argued that the Fed must remain immune from the political process, and that that more congressional oversight would distort their very important decisions," Paul wrote in an editorial titled, ´Audit the Fed, Then End It!´ "On the contrary, the Federal Reserve is already heavily entrenched in the political process, as the Fed chairman is a political appointee. High-level officials routinely make the rounds between positions at the Fed, member banks, Treasury and back again, taking care of friends and each other along the way."

He continued: "As far as the foolishness of placing complex monetary policy decisions in the hands of politicians – I couldn´t agree more. No politician or central banker, no matter how brilliant, is smart enough to know more than the market itself. The failure of central economic planning has been witnessed over and over. It is frankly beyond me why we ever agreed to try it again.

"To understand how unwise it is to have the Federal Reserve, one must first understand the magnitude of the privileges they have. They have been given the power to create money, by the trillions, and to give it to their friends, under any terms they wish, with little or no meaningful oversight or accountability. Thus the loudest arguments against greater transparency are likely to come from those friends, and understandably so."

http://www.norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=7002 they are pretty smart about the benefits and medicinal value of MMJ.
 
http://www.norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=7002

McCamy Taylor (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Thu Jun-11-09 10:00 PM
Original message
Nine Proven "Natural" Remedies They Did Not Test Updated at 6:30 PM

Natural remedies don´t work. They know this, because some scientists selected a handful of herbs and tested them. If a few plants do not have an appreciable effect, then no plants have an appreciable effect. That is how the story goes.

But there is some back story. The researchers deliberately excluded remedies which have been proven effective---some of them in this country---such as the ones described below. Because, hey, you can not make a blanket pharmaceutical industry pleasing statement like "natural remedies do not work" if you test effective treatments.

Exhibit One: Red Yeast Rice Lowers Your Cholesterol

Ever wonder where Big Pharm gets the drugs that they sell to us for several dollars a pill? Sometimes they stick a patent on an herbal remedy. Case in point, the ancient Chinese medicine called Red Yeast Rice or Monascus purpureus .The active ingredient in this natural medicine is a chemical identical to Merck´s cholesterol lowering drug Mevacor, the prototype of all the "statins". Since drug companies make knock offs of their competitors best selling meds by altering the parent compound slightly (that is how we got the Frankenstein monster of the drug class, Baycol), all statins are really just Red Yeast Rice in a pill with a hefty price tag attached.

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/red-yeast-rice/NS_pati...

In the ultimate ironic twist, Merck filed a lawsuit to ban the importation and sale of Red Yeast Rice in the U.S., on the grounds that it owned the patent to the natural chemical found in the Chinese remedy.

Fortunately, there may be a simple solution to this dilemma: give red yeast rice a chance. Red yeast rice is a condiment that has been used in China with apparent safety for more than 1,000 years. It is made by fermenting white rice with a strain of red yeast. Red yeast rice naturally contains modest amounts of lovastatin, the same compound that Merck & Co. patented as Mevacor, one of the first statin drugs to reach the market. Red yeast rice also contains 8 other compounds that inhibit hydroxymethylglutaryl CoA reductase (HMG CoA reductase), an action identical to that of lovastatin and the other statin drugs. In a double-blind trial, supplementation with 2.4 g/day of red yeast rice for 8 weeks lowered the mean LDL cholesterol concentration by 22.3% in patients with hypercholesterolemia. Because its mechanism of action appears to be similar to that of statins, it is likely that red yeast rice would have similar clinical benefits, as well.
For a brief period of time several years ago, a company called Pharmanex was marketing red yeast rice as a cholesterol-lowering agent. Merck & Co. filed a lawsuit, however, claiming that Pharmanex was violating Merck's patent on lovastatin. Although a judge ruled initially in favor of Pharmanex (indicating a belief that God owns the patent on natural substances), the ruling was later overturned, and the importation of red yeast rice from China was banned. By squelching red yeast rice, Merck & Co. forfeited any right to pretend that it cares about anything other than its own bottom line.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0ISW/is_247-248/... /

I guess the lawsuit must be the reason that the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicines did not include Red Yeast Rice in its recent study of herbal remedies.

Exhibit Number Two: Foxglove Strengthens Your Heart

This site describes how an 18th century physician discovered that an old herbal remedy containing foxglove was useful for "dropsy", which we now call congestive heart failure. Foxglove contains digoxin and other active compounds which aid the heart. Eventually the active ingredients were purified. Unlike Red Yeast Rice, no drug company attached their patent to these gifts of nature.

http://www.botgard.ucla.edu/html/botanytextbooks/econom...

Exhibit Three: Willow Bark for Headache and Fever

Better known as aspirin in its modern, purified form, an extract from the bark of willows has been used for millennia to fight fever, pain and inflammation. You can read about the scientists who extracted the active ingredient from the plant and how they converted it into its modern form over one hundred years ago. Aspirin is still a powerful, important medication, because of its ability to prevent heart attacks (although the drug companies are trying like mad to convince folks that their newer, more expensive anti-clotting pills are superior).

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blaspirin....

Exhibit Four: Valerian Instead of Valium

Before the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine dismissed Valerian as not having been adequately studied

http://nccam.nih.gov/health/valerian /

It was an approved drug in the U.S. for over 100 years.

It´s widely used and approved in Europe as a mild hypnotic to induce sleep and relieve anxiety. More than 5 million units of valerian are sold in Germany and about 10 million in France every year. In the United Kingdom, valerian is also a popular and government-approved sleep aid. It is also approved in Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy as an over-the-counter medication for insomnia.
The herb valerian tranquilizes safely and gently without a risk of addiction, and is widely used and approved in other countries as an alternative. There´s evidence that is works to calm you down, tame the brain,. Reduce anxiety, induce sleep, relieve stress, and even relax muscles without a morning hangover or permanent harm.

http://www.mindpub.com/altern08.htm

Exhibit Five: Poppies for Pain

Do I even have to discuss this one? We still have not improved upon nature when it comes to pain relief.

The six opium alkaloids which occur naturally in the largest amounts are morphine, narcotine, codeine, thebaine, papaverine and narceine. Of these, three are phenanthrene alkaloids and are under international control: these are morphine, codeine, and thebaine. They are all three used in the drug industry, thebaine usually for conversion into some derivative which is more useful medically. Of the other three, not under international control, narcotine and narceine have scarcely any medical or other uses. Consequently, the four economically significant alkaloids of opium are morphine, codeine, thebaine and papaverine.
About twenty other alkaloids exist in opium but they have little or no significance medically or economically up to the present time. A number of other "opium alkaloids" are commercial products and are used medically, but•they are not obtained directly from opium, but by conversion of morphine, codeine and thebaine.
The alkaloids of the poppy plant are the same as those of opium. The relative proportions of the different alkaloids vary greatly, however, in different kinds of opium and certainly also in different varieties of the poppy. All varieties, however, belong to one species of poppy, Papaver somniferum.

http://www.poppies.org/news/99502043380992.shtml

Exhibit Six: Cannabis for Your Tummy

Everyone knows how effective cannabis aka marijuana is for easing nausea and improving appetite. Therefore, I get a chuckle out of articles like this one which boast that certain cannabis derivatives provide the same therapeutic effect without the "high". We have to pay a drug company a bunch of money to get a gimped version of a very old remedy?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2002/feb/18/health.he...

Here is a link about the use of cannabis by medical practitioners starting in ancient times.
Note that the American medical establishment was quite taken with the natural remedy during the 19th century.

http://www.maps.org/mmj/grinspoon_history_cannabis_medi...

Everyone knows that medical marijuana works. And most folks want it available in case they need it.

Medical marijuana is one of the most widely supported issues in drug policy reform. Numerous published studies suggest that marijuana has medical value in treating patients with serious illnesses such as AIDS, glaucoma, cancer, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, and chronic pain. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine, in the most comprehensive study of medical marijuana's efficacy to date, concluded, "Nausea, appetite loss, pain and anxiety . . . all can be mitigated by marijuana." Allowing patients legal access to medical marijuana has been discussed by numerous organizations, including the AIDS Action Council, American Bar Association, American Public Health Association, California Medical Association, National Association of Attorneys General, and several state nurses associations.
Public opinion is also in favor of ending the prohibition of medical marijuana. According to a 1999 Gallup poll, 73% of Americans are in favor of "making marijuana legally available for doctors to prescribe in order to reduce pain and suffering." In a 2004 poll commissioned by AARP, 72% of Americans ages 45 and older thought marijuana should be legal for medicinal purposes if recommended by a doctor. Also, since 1996, voters in eight states plus the District of Columbia have passed favorable medical marijuana ballot initiatives.

http://www.drugpolicy.org/marijuana/medical /

If a drug company could find a way to stick a patent on it and sell it for five dollars a capsule, it would probably be the new Xanax.

Exhibit Seven : Ma Huang For Your Lungs

Here is another natural remedy that we would be seeing on television if a drug company could patent it. The source of ephedrine, long used by asthmatics to control wheezing, this herb also decreases the appetite and has a stimulant effect. Yes, it is dangerous if you misuse it. So is your albuterol asthma inhaler. No medicine, herbal or patent should be taken lightly.

Read about how the herb was banned in the U.S. here.

http://www.healthcentral.com/peoplespharmacy/408/20658....

Exhibit Eight : Lycopenes From Tomatoes For Your Heart

For years the FDA has been dismissing the effects of Lycopenes, the chemical derived from tomato peels among others sources. All that may change, now that a drug company has chemically altered the active ingredient and stuck a patent on it.

http://www.nutraceuticalsworld.com/news/2009/06/04/Lyco...

Exhibit Nine: Vit D. Can Merck Put a Patent on Sunlight?

Vit. D. keeps your heart healthy, your bones strong and may fight cancer too.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/172661

Too bad so many of us live in polluted cities where our kids can not play outdoors. Oh well, the drug companies can sell us a pill to replace what nature would have given us for free.

To sum it all up, no matter how effective a natural remedy is, if some drug company can not patent it and make a fortune off of it, you will hear our FDA dismiss it, condemn it and maybe even ban it. Because their good buddies in the pharmaceutical industry do not like competition.

Bushknew (1000+ posts)

Fri Jun-12-09 11:44 AM Original message

House Democrats Pressed to Back War Supplemental

Advertisements [?] Source: CQ Politics Despite deals cut late Thursday to wrap up the fiscal 2009 war supplemental, some House Democrats say they do not yet have enough support to pass the final bill. Rep. Lynn Woolsey of California, a leader of the antiwar Democrats, said the White House is threatening to withdraw support from freshmen who oppose the bill, saying “you’ll never hear from us again.” Another antiwar leader, Dennis J. Kucinich , D-Ohio, said most on his side are holding solid: “From what I can see, people are concerned about going home and having to explain why they voted for the war when their constituents are opposed to it, and explain why they switched if they switch.” But Woolsey suggested that arguments by Democratic leaders that lawmakers should support Obama’s new strategy for Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan may prevail. “People want to give the new president a chance on this,” she said. Read more: http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=cqmidday-00... Which one of these is more likely to do harm to your family? An attack from a foreign army, a terrorist group or urban violence & unemployment due to the lack of healthcare, education & jobs? Our government spends more money in improving the military than it’s citizenry. In 2007, our government spent 700 billion on the military, that’s more than all the countries in the world spend on defense combined. Before Ronald Reagan became governor of California, tuition was free to all who wanted to attend a University. http://www.newfoundations.com/Clabaugh/CuttingEdge/Reag... Enough, I support Dennis Kucinich 100%, stop funding the war. Invest in health care, education and jobs.

McCamy Taylor (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Thu Jun-11-09 10:00 PM
Original message
Nine Proven "Natural" Remedies They Did Not Test Updated at 6:30 PM

Natural remedies don´t work. They know this, because some scientists selected a handful of herbs and tested them. If a few plants do not have an appreciable effect, then no plants have an appreciable effect. That is how the story goes.

But there is some back story. The researchers deliberately excluded remedies which have been proven effective---some of them in this country---such as the ones described below. Because, hey, you can not make a blanket pharmaceutical industry pleasing statement like "natural remedies do not work" if you test effective treatments.

Exhibit One: Red Yeast Rice Lowers Your Cholesterol

Ever wonder where Big Pharm gets the drugs that they sell to us for several dollars a pill? Sometimes they stick a patent on an herbal remedy. Case in point, the ancient Chinese medicine called Red Yeast Rice or Monascus purpureus .The active ingredient in this natural medicine is a chemical identical to Merck´s cholesterol lowering drug Mevacor, the prototype of all the "statins". Since drug companies make knock offs of their competitors best selling meds by altering the parent compound slightly (that is how we got the Frankenstein monster of the drug class, Baycol), all statins are really just Red Yeast Rice in a pill with a hefty price tag attached.

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/red-yeast-rice/NS_pati...

In the ultimate ironic twist, Merck filed a lawsuit to ban the importation and sale of Red Yeast Rice in the U.S., on the grounds that it owned the patent to the natural chemical found in the Chinese remedy.

Fortunately, there may be a simple solution to this dilemma: give red yeast rice a chance. Red yeast rice is a condiment that has been used in China with apparent safety for more than 1,000 years. It is made by fermenting white rice with a strain of red yeast. Red yeast rice naturally contains modest amounts of lovastatin, the same compound that Merck & Co. patented as Mevacor, one of the first statin drugs to reach the market. Red yeast rice also contains 8 other compounds that inhibit hydroxymethylglutaryl CoA reductase (HMG CoA reductase), an action identical to that of lovastatin and the other statin drugs. In a double-blind trial, supplementation with 2.4 g/day of red yeast rice for 8 weeks lowered the mean LDL cholesterol concentration by 22.3% in patients with hypercholesterolemia. Because its mechanism of action appears to be similar to that of statins, it is likely that red yeast rice would have similar clinical benefits, as well.
For a brief period of time several years ago, a company called Pharmanex was marketing red yeast rice as a cholesterol-lowering agent. Merck & Co. filed a lawsuit, however, claiming that Pharmanex was violating Merck's patent on lovastatin. Although a judge ruled initially in favor of Pharmanex (indicating a belief that God owns the patent on natural substances), the ruling was later overturned, and the importation of red yeast rice from China was banned. By squelching red yeast rice, Merck & Co. forfeited any right to pretend that it cares about anything other than its own bottom line.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0ISW/is_247-248/... /

I guess the lawsuit must be the reason that the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicines did not include Red Yeast Rice in its recent study of herbal remedies.

Exhibit Number Two: Foxglove Strengthens Your Heart

This site describes how an 18th century physician discovered that an old herbal remedy containing foxglove was useful for "dropsy", which we now call congestive heart failure. Foxglove contains digoxin and other active compounds which aid the heart. Eventually the active ingredients were purified. Unlike Red Yeast Rice, no drug company attached their patent to these gifts of nature.

http://www.botgard.ucla.edu/html/botanytextbooks/econom...

Exhibit Three: Willow Bark for Headache and Fever

Better known as aspirin in its modern, purified form, an extract from the bark of willows has been used for millennia to fight fever, pain and inflammation. You can read about the scientists who extracted the active ingredient from the plant and how they converted it into its modern form over one hundred years ago. Aspirin is still a powerful, important medication, because of its ability to prevent heart attacks (although the drug companies are trying like mad to convince folks that their newer, more expensive anti-clotting pills are superior).

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blaspirin....

Exhibit Four: Valerian Instead of Valium

Before the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine dismissed Valerian as not having been adequately studied

http://nccam.nih.gov/health/valerian /

It was an approved drug in the U.S. for over 100 years.

It´s widely used and approved in Europe as a mild hypnotic to induce sleep and relieve anxiety. More than 5 million units of valerian are sold in Germany and about 10 million in France every year. In the United Kingdom, valerian is also a popular and government-approved sleep aid. It is also approved in Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy as an over-the-counter medication for insomnia.
The herb valerian tranquilizes safely and gently without a risk of addiction, and is widely used and approved in other countries as an alternative. There´s evidence that is works to calm you down, tame the brain,. Reduce anxiety, induce sleep, relieve stress, and even relax muscles without a morning hangover or permanent harm.

http://www.mindpub.com/altern08.htm

Exhibit Five: Poppies for Pain

Do I even have to discuss this one? We still have not improved upon nature when it comes to pain relief.

The six opium alkaloids which occur naturally in the largest amounts are morphine, narcotine, codeine, thebaine, papaverine and narceine. Of these, three are phenanthrene alkaloids and are under international control: these are morphine, codeine, and thebaine. They are all three used in the drug industry, thebaine usually for conversion into some derivative which is more useful medically. Of the other three, not under international control, narcotine and narceine have scarcely any medical or other uses. Consequently, the four economically significant alkaloids of opium are morphine, codeine, thebaine and papaverine.
About twenty other alkaloids exist in opium but they have little or no significance medically or economically up to the present time. A number of other "opium alkaloids" are commercial products and are used medically, but•they are not obtained directly from opium, but by conversion of morphine, codeine and thebaine.
The alkaloids of the poppy plant are the same as those of opium. The relative proportions of the different alkaloids vary greatly, however, in different kinds of opium and certainly also in different varieties of the poppy. All varieties, however, belong to one species of poppy, Papaver somniferum.

http://www.poppies.org/news/99502043380992.shtml

Exhibit Six: Cannabis for Your Tummy

Everyone knows how effective cannabis aka marijuana is for easing nausea and improving appetite. Therefore, I get a chuckle out of articles like this one which boast that certain cannabis derivatives provide the same therapeutic effect without the "high". We have to pay a drug company a bunch of money to get a gimped version of a very old remedy?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2002/feb/18/health.he...

Here is a link about the use of cannabis by medical practitioners starting in ancient times.
Note that the American medical establishment was quite taken with the natural remedy during the 19th century.

http://www.maps.org/mmj/grinspoon_history_cannabis_medi...

Everyone knows that medical marijuana works. And most folks want it available in case they need it.

Medical marijuana is one of the most widely supported issues in drug policy reform. Numerous published studies suggest that marijuana has medical value in treating patients with serious illnesses such as AIDS, glaucoma, cancer, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, and chronic pain. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine, in the most comprehensive study of medical marijuana's efficacy to date, concluded, "Nausea, appetite loss, pain and anxiety . . . all can be mitigated by marijuana." Allowing patients legal access to medical marijuana has been discussed by numerous organizations, including the AIDS Action Council, American Bar Association, American Public Health Association, California Medical Association, National Association of Attorneys General, and several state nurses associations.
Public opinion is also in favor of ending the prohibition of medical marijuana. According to a 1999 Gallup poll, 73% of Americans are in favor of "making marijuana legally available for doctors to prescribe in order to reduce pain and suffering." In a 2004 poll commissioned by AARP, 72% of Americans ages 45 and older thought marijuana should be legal for medicinal purposes if recommended by a doctor. Also, since 1996, voters in eight states plus the District of Columbia have passed favorable medical marijuana ballot initiatives.

http://www.drugpolicy.org/marijuana/medical /

If a drug company could find a way to stick a patent on it and sell it for five dollars a capsule, it would probably be the new Xanax.

Exhibit Seven : Ma Huang For Your Lungs

Here is another natural remedy that we would be seeing on television if a drug company could patent it. The source of ephedrine, long used by asthmatics to control wheezing, this herb also decreases the appetite and has a stimulant effect. Yes, it is dangerous if you misuse it. So is your albuterol asthma inhaler. No medicine, herbal or patent should be taken lightly.

Read about how the herb was banned in the U.S. here.

http://www.healthcentral.com/peoplespharmacy/408/20658....

Exhibit Eight : Lycopenes From Tomatoes For Your Heart

For years the FDA has been dismissing the effects of Lycopenes, the chemical derived from tomato peels among others sources. All that may change, now that a drug company has chemically altered the active ingredient and stuck a patent on it.

http://www.nutraceuticalsworld.com/news/2009/06/04/Lyco...

Exhibit Nine: Vit D. Can Merck Put a Patent on Sunlight?

Vit. D. keeps your heart healthy, your bones strong and may fight cancer too.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/172661

Too bad so many of us live in polluted cities where our kids can not play outdoors. Oh well, the drug companies can sell us a pill to replace what nature would have given us for free.

To sum it all up, no matter how effective a natural remedy is, if some drug company can not patent it and make a fortune off of it, you will hear our FDA dismiss it, condemn it and maybe even ban it. Because their good buddies in the pharmaceutical industry do not like competition.

Obama's site declared my idea to be a duplicate of another and therefore took voting power off my possibilities!   I don't see another idea like mine.  What kind of dupery is this site anyway? 
 
here is my post to Obama's Open Government site.  Let me know where the duplicate is and I will give you a free noodlebrain t-shirt!
__________________________________

« Back To Open Government Brainstorm

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debra 14 days ago

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Vaccines as Biological Weapons? Live Avian Flu Virus Placed in Baxter Vaccine Materials Sent to 18 Countries Tuesday, March 03, 2009 by: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor Articles Related to This Article: • Timeline: World History of Viral Pandemics: 412BC to 2009 • The 1918 Influenza Pandemic, Vaccines and Flu Shots • Is it smart to prepare for bird flu? Here’s what the experts say Support NaturalNews advertisers - Advertise with NaturalNews Sign the Health Revolution Petition Join the call for genuine health freedom in America. End FDA tyranny and Big Pharma corruption. Watch the video and sign the petition here. (NaturalNews) There's a popular medical thriller novel in which a global pandemic is intentionally set off by an evil plot designed to reduce the human population. In the book, a nefarious drug company inserts live avian flu viruses into vaccine materials that are distributed to countries around the world to be injected into patients as "flu shots." Those patients then become carriers for these highly-virulent strains of avian flu which go on to infect the world population and cause widespread death. There's only one problem with this story: It's not fiction. Or, at least, the part about live avian flu viruses being inserted into vaccine materials isn't fiction. It's happening right now. Deerfield, Illinois-based pharmaceutical company Baxter International Inc. has just been caught shipping live avian flu viruses mixed with vaccine material to medical distributors in 18 countries. The "mistake" (if you can call it that, see below...) was discovered by the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada. The World Health Organization was alerted and panic spread throughout the vaccine community as health experts asked the obvious question: How could this have happened? As published on LifeGen.de (http://www.lifegen.de/newsip/showne...), serious questions like this are being raised: "Baxter International Inc. in Austria 'unintentionally contaminated samples with the bird flu virus that were used in laboratories in 3 neighbouring countries, raising concern about the potential spread of the deadly disease'. Austria, Germany, Slowenia and the Czech Republic - these are the countries in which labs were hit with dangerous viruses. Not by bioterrorist commandos, but by Baxter. In other words: One of the major global pharmaceutical players seems to have lost control over a virus which is considered by many virologists to be one of the components leading some day to a new pandemic." Or, put another way, Baxter is acting a whole lot like a biological terrorism organization these days, sending deadly viral samples around the world. If you mail an envelope full of anthrax to your Senator, you get arrested as a terrorist. So why is Baxter -- which mailed samples of a far more deadly viral strain to labs around the world -- getting away with saying, essentially, "Oops?" But there's a bigger question in all this: How could this company have accidentally mixed LIVE avian flu viruses (both H5N1 and H3N2, the human form) in this vaccine material? Was the viral contamination intentional? The shocking answer is that this couldn't have been an accident. Why? Because Baxter International adheres to something called BSL3 (Biosafety Level 3) - a set of laboratory safety protocols that prevent the cross-contamination of materials. As explained on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosaf...): "Laboratory personnel have specific training in handling pathogenic and potentially lethal agents, and are supervised by competent scientists who are experienced in working with these agents. This is considered a neutral or warm zone. All procedures involving the manipulation of infectious materials are conducted within biological safety cabinets or other physical containment devices, or by personnel wearing appropriate personal protective clothing and equipment. The laboratory has special engineering and design features."

Source: OpEdNews

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Still-Think-They-re-No...

Baxter, an International pharmaceutical company based in America, has just been caught mixing live Avian Flu virus (H5N1) with common flu virus, in a flu vaccine. Baxter International´s research facility in Orth-Donau Austria was the facility that shipped the contaminated flu vaccine to other facilities in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany. The incident was discovered by a technician in a facility in the Czech Republic, who injected ferrets with the vaccine as a normal test procedure. The ferrets died.

Let that sink in. If not discovered by a mid-level technician, many of the people immunized with the Baxter vaccine might have been infected with avian flu, which can be deadly.

But it´s worse than that. H5N1 is not easily transmissible between people. However, the common flu virus that it was mixed with does easily infect people. The real danger in this incident is that the two viruses could have mixed genetic material and mutated when injected into tens of thousands of people, and could have created a hybrid virus that was both deadly, and transmissible.

More information here from Toronto Sun:

http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2009/02/27/856078...

This has not yet hit the US media though it is being covered in Canada and Europe.

CDC to mix avian, human flu viruses in pandemic study

Jan 14, 2004 (CIDRAP News) – One of the worst fears of infectious disease experts is that the H5N1 avian influenza virus now circulating in parts of Asia will combine with a human-adapted flu virus to create a deadly new flu virus that could spread around the world.

That could happen, scientists predict, if someone who is already infected with an ordinary flu virus contracts the avian virus at the same time. The avian virus has already caused at least 48 confirmed human illness cases in Asia, of which 35 have been fatal. The virus has shown little ability to spread from person to person, but the fear is that a hybrid could combine the killing power of the avian virus with the transmissibility of human flu viruses.

Now, rather than waiting to see if nature spawns such a hybrid, US scientists are planning to try to breed one themselves—in the name of preparedness.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will soon launch experiments designed to combine the H5N1 virus and human flu viruses and then see how the resulting hybrids affect animals. The goal is to assess the chances that such a "reassortant" virus will emerge and how dangerous it might be.


http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/panf...

Robert Reich: How Pharma and Insurance Intend to Kill the Public Option Updated at 7:03 PM

How Pharma and Insurance Intend to Kill the Public Option, And What Obama and the Rest of Us Must Do


I'ved poked around Washington today, talking with friends on the Hill who confirm the worst: Big Pharma and Big Insurance are gaining ground in their campaign to kill the public option in the emerging health care bill.

You know why, of course. They don't want a public option that would compete with private insurers and use its bargaining power to negotiate better rates with drug companies. They argue that would be unfair. Unfair? Unfair to give more people better health care at lower cost? To Pharma and Insurance, "unfair" is anything that undermines their profits.

So they're pulling out all the stops -- pushing Democrats and a handful of so-called "moderate" Republicans who say they're in favor of a public option to support legislation that would include it in name only. One of their proposals is to break up the public option into small pieces under multiple regional third-party administrators that would have little or no bargaining leverage. A second is to give the public option to the states where Big Pharma and Big Insurance can easily buy off legislators and officials, as they've been doing for years. A third is bind the public plan to the same rules private insurers have already wangled, thereby making it impossible for the public plan to put competitive pressure on the insurers.

Max Baucus, Chair of Senate Finance (now exactly why does the Senate Finance Committee have so much say over health care?) hasn't shown his cards but staffers tell me he's more than happy to sign on to any one of these. But Baucus is waiting for more support from his colleagues, and none of the three proposals has emerged as the leading candidate for those who want to kill the public option without showing they're killing it. Meanwhile, Ted Kennedy and his staff are still pushing for a full public option, but with Kennedy ailing, he might not be able to round up the votes. (Kennedy's health committee released a draft of a bill today, which contains the full public option.) ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/06/public-option-s...

Discredited Research Study Stuns an Ex-Army Doctor’s Colleagues

Dr. Romney C. Andersen, a Walter Reed Army Medical Center surgeon, was surprised last summer when his neighbor, a fellow doctor, congratulated him on a new medical journal study bearing his name.


“What study?” Dr. Andersen asked.
Soon, he was not the only person asking questions. Army officials, alerted by Dr. Andersen, began an investigation. They uncovered an apparent case of falsified research by a doctor who had befriended Dr. Andersen when they both worked at Walter Reed, treating American soldiers severely injured in Iraq.
The full report of that Army investigation, recently obtained by The New York Times, provides an unusually detailed anatomy of a suspected case of medical research fraud — one all the more disturbing because it occurred at the nation’s premier military research hospital.
Within the last week, the Justice Department opened an inquiry into the episode, said two people with knowledge of it, who spoke only on condition of anonymity.
The disputed journal article was written by a former Army orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Timothy R. Kuklo, who is now a medical professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Kuklo, the investigation found, forged the signatures of Dr. Andersen and other Army doctors on his study and never showed it to them before it was published.
The British journal that published Dr. Kuklo’s study retracted it in March and has banned him from its pages. His future at Washington University will very likely be determined by an inquiry the medical school is said to be conducting. University officials declined to comment for this article.
The Walter Reed episode also shows how medical journals may fail to conduct adequate due diligence on the studies they publish — information that other doctors rely on for guidance. As happened in the Kuklo case, for example, they often deal only with a study’s principal author, rather than all the credited contributors. In his study, Dr. Kuklo, who has not responded to repeated interview requests, reported that a bone-growth product sold by Medtronic, called Infuse, performed “strikingly” better than the traditional bone-grafting technique used to heal soldiers’ shattered shin bones. Other Walter Reed doctors told an Army investigator that claim was overblown.
Medtronic financed some of Dr. Kuklo’s research and travel while he was at Walter Reed and hired him as a consultant in August 2006 when he took his current academic post. But Dr. Kuklo did not disclose his Medtronic relationship in the journal article, which was published in August 2008.
Medtronic has declined to provide the financial details of its relationship with Dr. Kuklo, although the company said Friday that it planned to provide some of that information next week to Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who is investigating the matter.
Medtronic has said that it had no involvement in the disputed Infuse study, despite its business ties to Dr. Kuklo. The report was published in Britain last August in The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery.
Colleagues and friends of Dr. Kuklo say they are shocked by the accusations against him and predict he will eventually be cleared of any wrongdoing.
“I think that Tim is a brilliant researcher and surgeon,” said Lt. Col. Richard C. Rooney, a spine surgeon at William Beaumont Army Medical Center in El Paso, Tex., who knows Dr. Kuklo and his work. “I don’t believe the accusations. I don’t care if the head of Walter Reed made them.”
For his part, Dr. Kuklo did not formally respond to Army investigators. But Col. J. Edwin Atwood, an Army cardiologist who led the Army’s inquiry, wrote in his report that even if Dr. Kuklo had participated, it might have had little influence on his findings.
“What has transpired here,” he wrote, “is the ultimate tragedy and catastrophe in academic medicine.”
Treating War’s Injured
With the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the orthopedics department of Walter Reed, a sprawling facility in Washington, became an extension of the front lines. The injured included soldiers with gaping holes in their lower legs caused by explosive devices like homemade bombs filled with ball-bearings and nails. Hundreds of them would receive amputations.
Dr. Kuklo, a native of Canton, Ohio, who had come to Walter Reed as a medical resident in the 1990s, was one of the specialists who treated the wounded.
Back then, his colleagues viewed Dr. Kuklo, a West Point graduate who is married with two children, as likable, hard-working and ambitious. Dr. Andersen also once considered him a friend, and credits Dr. Kuklo with helping him to decide to become an orthopedist. “He was a good mentor,” said Dr. Andersen, who is currently serving in a combat hospital in Baghdad.
Infuse, the subject of Dr. Kuklo’s study, is a bioengineered bone-growth protein that the Food and Drug Administration approved in 2002. Walter Reed surgeons used it both in certain spinal surgeries and to treat severe leg injuries.
Dr. Kuklo, a spine specialist, also had other research interests that dovetailed with Medtronic’s; while at the military hospital, he led five studies financed by the company, Army officials say.

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Discredited Research Study Stuns an Ex-Army Doctor´s Colleagues

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Published: June 5, 2009

(Page 2 of 2)

His controversial study had its roots in a short five-paragraph paper, or abstract, that Dr. Kuklo presented at a 2005 meeting of a medical group, the Orthopaedic Trauma Association. In it, he reported that Infuse had healed fractured shins in 28 of 32 soldiers treated, or 88 percent, adding that "further research on this exciting technology is warranted."
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Not long after that presentation, Dr. Kuklo´s military career began to wind down. Along with a consulting deal, he struck a separate arrangement with Medtronic in August 2006 that would pay him royalties for any spinal devices he developed. Army officials say they have been unable to find records to indicate that Dr. Kuklo either sought or was given permission to strike the Medtronic deals.

Dr. Kuklo, who moved into a $2.1 million home near St. Louis, was not the first departing Walter Reed doctor to get a consulting deal from Medtronic. For instance, it had struck an arrangement with Dr. Kuklo´s former boss, Dr. David W. Polly Jr., when he left the military hospital in 2003.

Dr. Polly is now one of Dr. Kuklo´s staunchest public defenders. Recently, Dr. Polly blocked a reporter´s request that the University of Minnesota, where he now works, release his financial disclosure statement showing how much he made from Medtronic.

Starting an Inquiry

When Dr. Andersen first learned about the Infuse article last summer, he said he thought that Dr. Kuklo might have made honest mistakes in his study. But after talking with the article´s other supposed co-authors and checking Walter Reed records, he became convinced that parts of it had been fabricated. So he called Dr. Kuklo and confronted him.

Dr. Kuklo defended the study, saying that all the data had been drawn either from Walter Reed files or from his personal records that he had left behind at the hospital.

Unconvinced, Dr. Andersen notified Army officials and the editor of the British journal in September about his concerns.

In his 2005 abstract, Dr. Kuklo had reported only Infuse results. But his August 2008 journal article cited other Walter Reed data to compare Infuse with the traditional bone-graft treatment for fractured shins. He declared Infuse the winner by a wide margin.

Dr. Kuklo said he had reached that finding by reviewing the records of two groups of the soldiers with similarly severe leg injuries, who had been treated either with Infuse or a bone graft. But Dr. Andersen suspected that Dr. Kuklo had fabricated the comparison groups, because many soldiers had received both Infuse and a bone graft — not one or the other.

"It was like he was comparing apples and oranges," Dr. Andersen said. "But there weren´t any apples or oranges to compare."

The British periodical was not the first place Dr. Kuklo submitted his article. Army investigators were told that he had tried first, without success, to publish it in The New England Journal of Medicine, one of the country´s premier medical journals. A spokeswoman for The New England Journal declined to comment.

Dr. Kuklo told Dr. Andersen that he had also sent the study to a leading American orthopedic periodical, The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, before submitting it to the British journal. (The two similarly named journals operate independently.)

Dr. Andersen contacted the American journal´s editor, Dr. James D. Heckman, who confirmed in an e-mail message that Dr. Kuklo had submitted the report in mid-2007. The journal rejected it two months later, sending Dr. Kuklo the comments of an editor and two outside doctors who had reviewed it, Dr. Heckman wrote.

Dr. Andersen, curious about what Dr. Kuklo had actually submitted, asked Dr. Heckman for copies of those reviews. But the editor turned him down, even though Dr. Andersen was supposedly one of the study´s authors. In a recent interview, Dr. Heckman said that his journal, like many others, considered such reviews confidential and shared them only with a study´s lead author.

"It is all confidential information," Dr. Heckman said, when asked by a reporter for the reviews. "It is protected by the peer-review process."

Last October, Dr. Kuklo received a telephone call from Colonel Atwood at Walter Reed.

After describing his inquiry, Colonel Atwood put a military lawyer on the phone who told Dr. Kuklo that he was suspected of "conduct unbecoming an officer," a formal charge, and read him his legal rights.

Questioning Signatures

Dr. Kuklo, who then hired a lawyer, did not respond to a series of questions posed by Colonel Atwood, the Army´s inquiry shows. In a recent interview, Dr. Polly, the former Walter Reed physician who is now a Medtronic consultant, said Dr. Kuklo was mistaken to sign his co-authors´ names. But he added that was not uncommon in the military for one officer, when it was expedient, to sign for another.

Dr. Kuklo, however, did not indicate that he was signing his four co-authors´ names on their behalf. He even used a distinctively different handwriting style for each of them, a form he submitted to the British journal shows.

Colonel Atwood concluded that his inquiry had substantiated all the accusations against the physician.

"I view this as potentially having the worst consequences to Walter Reed of any event that has occurred during my six-year tenure," he wrote in his report.

Later this month, Dr. Andersen expects to return to Walter Reed from Baghdad, to take a new position as the hospital´s chief orthopedic surgeon He says that it has been difficult to reconcile the Dr. Kuklo he knew with the false research he says he believes his former mentor published.

"When your impressions of someone are that they would never do something like this, it was difficult for me," Dr. Andersen said. "But the more I looked at the data, the more I said this just can´t be close to being true."

Court Indicts Bush on High Treason Charge

 

Dave Mahoney Pleads Guilty to Assault; State Drops Other Nine Felonies in Bargain

Source: Twincities Indy Media

Monday morning in Ramsey County District Court, RNC activist Dave Mahoney pled – under pressure and significant duress – to a single count of second degree assault, a felony. Instead of going to trial on the 10 felony counts stemming from a single invented incident, Dave and the office of Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner agreed to a plea bargain. Given the disproportionately ferocious, political prosecution, Dave and his attorney evidently found it in their best interest to agree to a 90-day cap on jail time, reduction of the (single) felony charge to a gross misdemeanor after the sentence is served, and the ability for Dave to return to his native England after the jail term. With credit for good behavior and time served, Dave is looking at 56 days or less in jail, as opposed to the decades possible if he had lost at trial.



Of the dozens of RNC charges heard in open court, authorities have not won a single conviction. The manipulation and reliance on overtly authoritarian pressure evidenced in Dave´s case is indicative of the only tactic the state has left to justify the police brutality and fiscal waste characterizing the RNC and its aftermath. Dave faced two, then six, and ultimately ten charges. First accused of aiding and abetting the drop of a bag of sand in front of a slow-moving delegate bus on a closed highway exit ramp, authorities then levied a count of terroristic threats and assault for each so-called "victim" on the bus who claimed to feel "terrorized." All together, Dave eventually was looking at decades behind bars and a dramatically tainted jury pool until the prosecution made the sudden plea offer last week. The absurdity of the state's persecution should be apparent, but so should the impossible position in which Dave was placed. Indeed, what would you do under similar circumstances?



In a letter to his lawyer last December, prosecutor Richard Dusterhoft called his case "by far the most serious RNC case I have" (an assertion we find silly at best). He has referred to Dave as the "poster boy of the RNC" in open court. Similarly, during the presentation of the Heffelfinger-Luger Report in January, Andrew Luger called the alleged bag of sand incident "the most frightening moment of the convention," apparently overlooking the pre-emptive raids, state-sponsored shutdown of downtown, and hundreds of brutal injuries caused by police.



Read more: http://twincities.indymedia.org/2009/jun/dave-mahoney-p...

Life, health insurers invest big in tobacco

Source: AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Major US, Canadian and British life and health insurance companies have billions of dollars invested in tobacco companies, a study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine said.

Wesley Boyd, the study's lead author, found that at least 4.4 billion dollars in insurance company funds are invested in companies whose affiliates produce cigarettes, cigars and chewing tobacco.

"Despite calls upon the insurance industry to get out of the tobacco business by physicians and others, insurers continue to put their profits above people's health," said Boyd, a faculty member of Harvard Medical School.

"It's clear their top priority is making money, not safeguarding people's well-being," he wrote.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090604/bs_afp/ushealthcan...

Air France jet likely broke apart above ocean

Source: Associated Press FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil (AP) -- Military planes located new debris from Air France Flight 447 Wednesday while investigators focused on a nightmarish ordeal in which the jetliner broke up over the Atlantic as it flew through a violent storm. Heavy weather delayed until next week the arrival of deep-water submersibles considered key to finding the black box voice and data recorders that will help answer the question of what happened to the airliner, which disappeared Sunday with 228 people on board. But even with the equipment, the lead French investigator questioned whether the recorders would ever be found in such a deep and rugged part of the ocean. As the first Brazilian military ships neared the search area, investigators were relying heavily on the plane's automated messages to help reconstruct what happened to the jet as it flew through towering thunderstorms. They detail a series of failures that end with its systems shutting down, suggesting the plane broke apart in the sky, according to an aviation industry official with knowledge of the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the crash. The pilot sent a manual signal at 11 p.m. local time saying he was flying through an area of "CBs" - black, electrically charged cumulonimbus clouds that come with violent winds and lightning. Satellite data has shown that towering thunderheads were sending 100 mph (160 kph) updraft winds into the jet's flight path at the time. Read more: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/B/BRAZIL_PLANE?SIT... Politicians are like diapers. They need to be changed often and for the same reason.

Goodbye, GM
by Michael Moore

June 1, 2009

I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.

As I sit here in GM's birthplace, Flint, Michigan, I am surrounded by friends and family who are filled with anxiety about what will happen to them and to the town. Forty percent of the homes and businesses in the city have been abandoned. Imagine what it would be like if you lived in a city where almost every other house is empty. What would be your state of mind?

It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh -- and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to "improve" the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.

So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company's body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with -- dare I say it -- joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown and brought misery, divorce, alcoholism, homelessness, physical and mental debilitation, and drug addiction to the people I grew up with. Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job.

But you and I and the rest of America now own a car company! I know, I know -- who on earth wants to run a car company? Who among us wants $50 billion of our tax dollars thrown down the rat hole of still trying to save GM? Let's be clear about this: The only way to save GM is to kill GM. Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we've allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?

Thus, as GM is "reorganized" by the federal government and the bankruptcy court, here is the plan I am asking President Obama to implement for the good of the workers, the GM communities, and the nation as a whole. Twenty years ago when I made "Roger & Me," I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided. Based on my track record, I request an honest and sincere consideration of the following suggestions:

1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.

We are now in a different kind of war -- a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call "cars" may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.

The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn't give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true -- that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.

President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately.

2. Don't put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce -- and most of those who have been laid off -- employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.

3. Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years. Japan is celebrating the 45th anniversary of its first bullet train this year. Now they have dozens of them. Average speed: 165 mph. Average time a train is late: under 30 seconds. They have had these high speed trains for nearly five decades -- and we don't even have one! The fact that the technology already exists for us to go from New York to L.A. in 17 hours by train, and that we haven't used it, is criminal. Let's hire the unemployed to build the new high speed lines all over the country. Chicago to Detroit in less than two hours. Miami to DC in under 7 hours. Denver to Dallas in five and a half. This can be done and done now.

4. Initiate a program to put light rail mass transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.

5. For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy efficient clean buses.

6. For the time being, have some factories build hybrid or all-electric cars (and batteries). It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves, so if we're going to have automobiles, let's have kinder, gentler ones. We can be building these next month (do not believe anyone who tells you it will take years to retool the factories -- that simply isn't true).

7. Transform some of the empty GM factories to facilities that build windmills, solar panels and other means of alternate forms of energy. We need tens of millions of solar panels right now. And there is an eager and skilled workforce who can build them.

8. Provide tax incentives for those who travel by hybrid car or bus or train. Also, credits for those who convert their home to alternative energy.

9. To help pay for this, impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.

Well, that's a start. Please, please, please don't save GM so that a smaller version of it will simply do nothing more than build Chevys or Cadillacs. This is not a long-term solution. Don't throw bad money into a company whose tailpipe is malfunctioning, causing a strange odor to fill the car.

100 years ago this year, the founders of General Motors convinced the world to give up their horses and saddles and buggy whips to try a new form of transportation. Now it is time for us to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine. It seemed to serve us well for so long. We enjoyed the car hops at the A&W. We made out in the front -- and the back -- seat. We watched movies on large outdoor screens, went to the races at NASCAR tracks across the country, and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time through the window down Hwy. 1. And now it's over. It's a new day and a new century. The President -- and the UAW -- must seize this moment and create a big batch of lemonade from this very sour and sad lemon.

Yesterday, the last surviving person from the Titanic disaster passed away. She escaped certain death that night and went on to live another 97 years.

So can we survive our own Titanic in all the Flint Michigans of this country. 60% of GM is ours. I think we can do a better job.

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

By Sam Prestianni; SF Weekly
Published on May 26, 2009 at 1:15pm

*
Sequoia Emmanuelle
Victor Sila runs for funk.


Where:
Mezzanine
Details:
Saturday, May 30, at 9 p.m., $15; 625-8880 or www.mezzaninesf.com
Subject(s):
Sila and the Afrofunk Experience by Sam Prestianni

While Sila and the Afrofunk Experience were recording their second album, Black President, in the Bay Area, tribal warfare was threatening the safety of band leader Victor Sila's family in the small Kenyan village where he grew up. The pointless violence drove him crazy, and you can hear the madness in his vocals. The freaked-out falsettos, random screams, and feverish ululations amid the mostly laid-back melodies speak to a lifetime of exasperation with unequal rights and injustice. Sila can't help but bring politics front and center in his songs, and he aims to get audiences directly involved in his passions.

In this way he is connected to conscious artists of the African diaspora, a proud lineage that ranges from Nigerian Afropop legend Fela Kuti to Jamaican reggae patriarch Bob Marley to the U.S.'s own Godfather of Soul, James Brown ("Sing it loud: I'm black and I'm proud!"). Like his predecessors, Sila believes it's his responsibility not only to entertain but also to raise awareness. He wants to inspire civic action, which he argues must come from the grassroots level. Sila believes we can't rely on politicians, who he says may have "the greed gene embedded in their blood." So he created Black President as a call to arms to both the public and Barack Obama to take seriously the task of self-empowerment.

On the chorus to the manic, danceable title track, Sila sings, "I am change/You are change/We are change." The song broadcasts that the only way to overcome the madness of corrupt public policy, centuries of oppression, and mindless brutality is to embrace the idea that we are all in this together. "You Love You," a chilled-out tune dripping with skunky reggae, suggests a starting point for activism with its therapeutic reminder: "Everything is nothing unless you love you."

While such mindful messages arguably serve a noble purpose, they would be little more than obnoxious dogma if the accompanying music weren't similarly ambitious. Fortunately for clubgoers, Sila's concern with the mission of his lyrics is matched by the power of his grooves, an addictive mix of heavy funk, lively Afrobeat, and sun-soaked island rhythms. His nine-piece band is tighter than the goatskin head of a djembe, and the ensemble's well-balanced instrumentation of dual guitars, bass, drums, percussion, and a trio of horns ensures a wide dynamic range. David James, former six-string slinger for the Coup and Michael Franti's Spearhead, especially stands out with his big-echo guitar solos that recall the heyday of Parliament-Funkadelic. Saxophonist David Boyce, trumpeter Mike Pitre, and trombonist Andre Webb also evoke powerful touchstones, from classic Wailers to Ethiopian-style R&B of the early '70s. There's a deep soulfulness here and the implication of cross-cultural solidarity.

Though idealistic, Sila's ambition is far from fantasy: Get enough people on the dancefloor, sweating and writhing together, and collective uplift could occur. From there, the frontman hopes, it's a short hop, skip, and jump (and maybe a booty bump or body roll) to helping your neighbors. Obama likes to talk about this being an era of personal responsibility and accountability. Sila adds to the charge by challenging us to also get our good foot up on the downbeat.

Children Raped at Abu Ghraib, General Taguba Calls it a War Crime Updated at 9:25 AM

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Edited on Thu May-28-09 12:57 PM by Vyan
Reports of children being raped to force their parent to give information have long been alleged by award winning journalist Sy Hersch (Video) but now a report via the Telegraph UK reveals that this allegation is true, and that their were even pictures.

Abu Ghraib abuse photos 'show rape'
Photographs of alleged prisoner abuse which Barack Obama is attempting to censor include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse, it has emerged.

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq



Instead of coming from some radical Human Rights organization, this information is coming from a former U.S. Army General, the man who headed the investigation into the Abu Ghraib scandal - and was prohibited from looking at the involvement of higher-ups in these crimes.

Is it rather interesting that John Yoo publicly and specifically argued that *THIS WAS LEGAL*.

John Yoo publicly argued there is no law that could prevent the President from ordering the torture of a child of a suspect in custody – including by crushing that child´s testicles.

This came out in response to a question in a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel.


Video - http://www.youtube.com/v/hz01hN9l-BM

Cassel: If the President deems that he´s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person´s child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty.

Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.



Geneva doesn't prevent that although it says there will be NO AFFRONTS TO PERSONAL DIGNITY or threats against the family of a detainee? The UN Convention Against Torture doesn't prevent that? 18 USC 2340 (The Torture Statute) and the 18 USC 2441 (The War Crimes Statues) don't outlaw this?

If so, then nothing is outlawed.

The Memo in question is Here (pdf), in it Yoo argues essentially that the Torture Statute only applies if you intent is to "cause severe physical harm" - but if you have some other reason/excuse, the law doesn't apply.

The infliction of pain must be the defendants precise objective.



Although the Torture Convention specifically argued that purposes of "pain inflicted for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person a confession of information... is prohibited" - Yoo tries to argue this away with the argument that words "specifically intended" are included within the ratification documentation of the treaty as approved by Congress.

He argued that since the intent was to gain information or cooperation from the subject, or even a third party as opposed to the simplistic sadistic goal of causing pain for it's own sake, it's legal.

Rob bank and keep the money = Illegal. Rob a bank and give the money to charity = Legal. Rape a child for shits and giggles = Illegal. Rape a child to get their parents to infiltrate the insurgency and report back to you = Legal.

Get it?

And since Yoo put this view into a memo and it was stamped as valid by the Justice Department, it's pretty hard to argue complete ignorance when exactly what he wrote - is what happened in Iraq.

Maj Gen Taguba´s internal inquiry into the abuse at Abu Ghraib, included sworn statements by 13 detainees, which, he said in the report, he found "credible based on the clarity of their statements and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses."

Among the graphic statements, which were later released under US freedom of information laws, is that of Kasim Mehaddi Hilas in which he says: "I saw ******* a kid, his age would be about 15 to 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn´t covered and I saw who was wearing the military uniform, putting his **** in the little kid´s ***…. and the female soldier was taking pictures."



Let me point out again, that various prior memos by Yoo claiming that Geneva didn't apply to the Taliban or al Qaeda were never written or amended to include civilians detained in Iraq who very clearly would be covered by Geneva and any actions such as these would clearly be - a War Crime!

General Taguba agrees:

Maj. Gen Taguba saw the horrors first hand during his Abu Ghraib investigation and he believes the Bush administration is guilty of war crimes.

In a preface to a report by Physicians for Human Rights on prisoner abuse and torture in U.S. military prisons Taguba wrote: "There is no longer any doubt that the current administration committed war crimes. The only question is whether those who ordered torture will be held to account."




Vyan

http://www.truthout.org/video/050609C
 

I am in the new Strategies and Techniques section.  I only have five votes
 
http://opengov.ideascale.com/akira/ideafactory.do?discussionID=2242
 
please vote more for this idea.  thanks, debra and davis and everyone else.

see next entry

Begin to teach and operate government services with principles of enlightened capitalism.
debra 4 hours ago

http://www.noodlebrain.com is a gateway to the humanities and teaches people about what is important regarding our economies and how humanities assure us of policies that are based in ethics, logic and passion where principles rule, not politics. First step is to change failing banks into government run banks, same employees (not management) and offer the people of America 14% interest on their savings so that we can have capital without relying on the greed of the corrupt wealthy. Second step is to offer loans at 5% interest so that we can make more money saving than we can borrowing, but the incentive to borrow is strong so that growth can occur. Third is to get HR 676 passed so that we are no longer buying crap instead of healthcare. Fourth is to standardized our public education systems across the country so that we can still communicate and avoid the tearing apart of our commonwealth by folks who believe and invest in a new world order. Forth, give the job of parenting back to the parents, and reserve the role of the press and the police for real criminals and terrorists, including those who promote hate radio. Fifth, get the Fairness Doctrine back in our rule of law so all parties can have an equal point of view and our people are no longer propagandized "1984" style but the wealthy folks point of view that really wants to cause civil war so Halliburton can rebuild America. We are not that stupid. That is why we need to review http://www.noodlebrain.com that retrains people rendered stupid by the current economy to think outside of the box. Sixth, teach people to get their integrity intact by sending them to http://www.noodlebrain.com/nbpits.swf. And finally, we need real music, not pap. on our radio stations. real music arouses the imagination and instructs the will! You can find a source on internet radio: Ear Candle Radio is a good start.

Thanks, Mr. President!

Feingold calls Obama Out on Indefinite Detention, Sets Hearings

Edited on Mon May-25-09 06:29 AM by FourScore
The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President:

I am writing to convey my appreciation for your speech of May 21 on security and values, but
also to express several concerns, particularly about your intention to design a system for what
you called "prolonged detention."

On many fronts, your speech confirmed your commitment to defending our country while
reversing the previous administration's numerous attacks on the rule of law. I was particularly
pleased by your forceful rejection of torture, an issue on which you have backed up your
campaign rhetoric with sustained action, beginning on your second day in office. I also welcome
your acknowledgment that the state secrets privilege has been overused, as well as your
commitment to reform. As you know, the Senate Judiciary Committee is currently considering
legislation on this matter, which I hope your administration will now support. I also look
forward to briefings on your administration's use ofthe privilege thus far, in keeping with your
commitment to "voluntarily report to Congress when we have invoked the privilege and why."

In addition to these substantive matters, I was encouraged by your stated commitment to working
with the judiciary and Congress as co-equal branches of government on issues of national
security. This respect for our constitutional system stands in strong contrast to the approach of
the previous administration. In light of the principles you have put forth, I look forward to full
and open discussions between your administration and Congress on policy and legal matters. I
also welcome your stated appreciation for congressional oversight and for the need for Congress
to have full access to classified programs and information. As you know, the previous
administration established numerous obstacles to effective oversight and I welcome your
commitment to tearing down what remains of those obstacles.

In the spirit of an open, productive dialogue between your administration and Congress, I wish to
layout my concerns related to the disposition of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. I strongly
supported the decision you made in January to close the detention facility at Guantanamo and
continue to do so. The facility has been used as a recruiting tool by our enemies, and allowing it
to remain open would pose an unacceptable threat to our national security. I look forward to
considering your administration's plan for closing the facility, and I welcome your decision to
bring suspected terrorists, like Ahmed Gailani, to justice.

Among the issues Congress must consider carefully is any resumption of the use of military
commissions. Like you, I voted against the Military Commissions Act of 2006. I agree with you
with regard to that statute's many flaws, but it is not clear to me that those flaws can be fixed, or
that the other options in the current federal criminal justice and courts martial systems for
bringing the detainees to justice are insufficient or unworkable. If Congress is to fully consider
your proposal for military commissions, therefore, it will need access to the same information
your administration is currently reviewing, including detailed, classified information on
individual detainees and the extent to which other options are available.

My primary concern, however, relates to your reference to the possibility of indefinite detention
without trial for certain detainees. While I appreciate your good faith desire to at least enact a
statutory basis for such a regime, any system that permits the government to indefinitely detain
individuals without charge or without a meaningful opportunity to have accusations against them
adjudicated by an impartial arbiter violates basic American values and is likely unconstitutional.
While I recognize that your administration inherited detainees who, because of torture, other
forms of coercive interrogations, or other problems related to their detention or the evidence
against them, pose considerable challenges to prosecution, holding them indefinitely without trial
is inconsistent with the respect for the rule of law that the rest of your speech so eloquently
invoked. Indeed, such detention is a hallmark of abusive systems that we have historically
criticized around the world. It is hard to imagine that our country would regard as acceptable a
system in another country where an individual other than a prisoner of war is held indefinitely
without charge or trial.

You have discussed this possibility only in the context of the current detainees at Guantanamo
Bay, yet we must be aware of the precedent that such a system would establish. While the
handling of these detainees by the Bush Administration was particularly egregious, from a legal
as well as human rights perspective, these are unlikely to be the last suspected terrorists captured
by the United States. Once a system of indefinite detention without trial is established, the
temptation to use it in the future would be powerful. And, while your administration may resist
such a temptation, future administrations may not. There is a real risk, then, of establishing
policies and legal precedents that rather than ridding our country of the burden of the detention
facility at Guantanamo Bay, merely set the stage for future Guantanamos, whether on our shores
or elsewhere, with disastrous consequences for our national security. Worse, those policies and
legal precedents would be effectively enshrined as acceptable in our system of justice, having
been established not by one, largely discredited administration, but by successive administrations
of both parties with greatly contrasting positions on legal and constitutional issues.

I do not doubt your good faith efforts to wrestle with these complex issues, and I am confident
that you would seek to use any new authorities carefully andjudiciously. But, as I know you
appreciate, fundamental changes to our constitutional system cannot be considered in the context
of individual presidents or administrations. Whatever new regimes you and the Congress choose
to enact will likely remain in place long after your administration has ended, to be used, or
abused, by future presidents.

I appreciate your efforts to reach out to Congress on this important issue. In that spirit, I intend
to hold a hearing in the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee in June
and ask that you make a top official or officials from the Department of Justice available to
testify. I recognize that your plans are not yet fully formed, but it is important to begin this
discussion immediately, before you reach a final decision. I will be sending formal invitations in
the coming weeks and look forward to hearing the testimony of your administration.

I thank you for this opportunity to convey my views and look forward to continued collaboration
as we return our country to the rule of law while aggressively targeting al Qaeda and its
affiliates.

Sincerely,

Russell D. Feingold
United States Senator

cc: The Honorable Eric Holder
Attorney General of the United States

http://feingold.senate.gov/pdf/ltr_obama_052209.pdf

guitar man Donating Member (1000+ posts) Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Tue May-19-09 12:12 PM
Original message
I just sent this to Obama and AG Holder

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I felt compelled to speak out about torture so I fired this off to The President and the Attorney General a while ago. I doubt either will get to read it in the flood of email they get, but it felt good to get it out. Just thought I'd share it with you all.


Dear Mr President and Mr Attorney General,

I am writing with concern for the future, and with the deepest concern for the very existence of the country I love. I think it is now beyond debate by any reasonable person that officials in our Government, up to and including the former President did indeed authorize and carry out brutal torture in direct and flagrant violation of US and International law.The only question that remains is, what is going to be done about it? Are we going to allow them to be above the law or are we going to hold them to the same standards every law-breaker in our Nation should be held to?

It matters not if those tortured were "bad people", a "threat to national security and the safety of American citizens" or even Beezelbub himself. The singular fact that disturbs me most and should outrage every citizen of this country is the fact that we were indeed torturing. The techniques described in the memos have, in the past resulted in the prosecution and even the execution of the people responsible for implementing them. So how could we possibly now allow any and all parties to such actions to escape justice, and if we do, what would that make us? Perhaps the largest 3rd world, tin pot dictatorship "banana republic" the world has ever seen, except with a shiny coat of gloss over the rot that lies underneath. I sincerely hope and pray my family never has to live in such a country. If we decide not to prosecute and punish the torturers, I fear the United States of America we all know and love will cease to exist and devolve into a despotic regime that knows no bounds, with no moral or ethical compass.

I have a 3 year old daughter who not long from now, will be entering school. Am I going to have to try and explain in the near future that what is described in her sanitized history book is not true? That it's a whitewash at best or an outright fabrication at worst? There is no way I will be able look into her eyes and tell her anything but the truth about what we are living through at this present moment in history. And after I tell her that truth, how am I supposed to respond if/when she asks "daddy, does this mean they can come take us away and torture us too?" My God the last thing I would ever want to have to do is to tell her that awful truth should we fail at this moment in time to do what is right and just. How do you explain to your child that our own government is free to carry out such atrocities with impunity?

And yes, I can hear the naysayers now. "We have such big problems right now, the economy, unemployment, health care etc. on the table, do we really need to pursue this now?" The short and simple answer is, yes, we do. Believe me, I'm a simple working man and I am being battered and bruised by the economy and cost of health care too, but all the economic recovery in the world isn't worth a plug nickel if it comes at the price of killing our Democratic Republic by allowing these criminals to go free and live above the law. Surely we can recover the economy and pursue justice at the same time.

I also know without a doubt that prosecuting and punishing those responsible for these atrocities will no doubt cause significant political repercussions and upheaval. No doubt, the pundits and politicians from the Republican right will scream "partisan witch hunt" and worse in relation to any such prosecutions, in spite of the ironic fact that they are the ones who impeached President Clinton over a mere tryst. Don't let them sway you, gentlemen, what's right and just must be done in spite of their incessant and irrelevant howling. Mr President, as a candidate you stood up and stared them in the eye and called them out on their hyperbolic spin, half-truths and outright fabrications. As President, I have no doubt you can do the same in that face of any opposition you and Attorney General Holder will encounter in this matter.

Mr President, Mr Attorney General, please, please don't let the people responsible get away with this, I beg of you. For the future of our Nation and for our future generations, please investigate, arrest, prosecute and punish those involved in illegal torture, up to and including former President Bush and former Vice President Cheney.Should we fail to do so, then may God help us all.

Sincerely

L M
Tulsa Oklahoma

Steny Hoyer says Dems got beaten on gun issue. So dear Mr. Hoyer, at least be honest about it. We were not beaten, we were in agreement on guns in national parks.

We have an 83 vote margin in the House. We have a 9 vote margin in the Senate. Yet we can not seem to control a single agenda.

At least on this gun issue please be honest. The Democrats are just as much for guns in national parks as are the Republicans apparently. In order to win the Democrats have had to go along on guns, a woman's right to make her own medical decisions, and give in on the DADT issue.

That is not winning, that is giving in to the vocal minority.

Steny Hoyer says Democrats beaten on guns




It appears that the amendment to allow guns in the national parks that was added to the credit card bill is more extreme by far than was the Bush version.




Here is something on the issue from the New West Politics blog. Apparently Coburn's amendment for which 27 Democrats voted allows semi-automatic weapons in parks.

The most extreme version of a bill to allow guns back in national parks overturns a Reagan-era rule.

The blog mentions how it was tied to the credit card bill.




Semi-automatic weapons in national parks?

Democrats can not control the agenda even with such good majority margins.

AmericanAcademy of Environmental Medicine calls for GMO Ban

Source: OpEd News, Associated Press

Today, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) called on "Physicians to educate their patients, the medical community, and the public to avoid GM (genetically modified) foods when possible and provide educational materials concerning GM foods and health risks." They called for a moratorium on GM foods, long-term independent studies, and labeling.
AAEM´s position paper stated, "Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food," including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system. They conclude, "There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation," as defined by recognized scientific criteria. "The strength of association and consistency between GM foods and disease is confirmed in several animal studies."

More and more doctors are already prescribing GM-free diets. Dr. Amy Dean, a Michigan internal medicine specialist, and board member of AAEM says, "I strongly recommend patients eat strictly non-genetically modified foods." Ohio allergist Dr. John Boyles says "I used to test for soy allergies all the time, but now that soy is genetically engineered, it is so dangerous that I tell people never to eat it."


Dr. Jennifer Armstrong, President of AAEM, says, "Physicians are probably seeing the effects in their patients, but need to know how to ask the right questions." World renowned biologist Pushpa M. Bhargava goes one step further. After reviewing more than 600 scientific journals, he concludes that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are a major contributor to the sharply deteriorating health of Americans.


Full story at this url
AAEM´s position paper stated, "Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food," including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system. They conclude, "There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation," as defined by recognized scientific criteria. "The strength of association and consistency between GM foods and disease is confirmed in several animal studies."

More and more doctors are already prescribing GM-free diets. Dr. Amy Dean, a Michigan internal medicine specialist, and board member of AAEM says, "I strongly recommend patients eat strictly non-genetically modified foods." Ohio allergist Dr. John Boyles says "I used to test for soy allergies all the time, but now that soy is genetically engineered, it is so dangerous that I tell people never to eat it."


Dr. Jennifer Armstrong, President of AAEM, says, "Physicians are probably seeing the effects in their patients, but need to know how to ask the right questions." World renowned biologist Pushpa M. Bhargava goes one step further. After reviewing more than 600 scientific journals, he concludes that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are a major contributor to the sharply deteriorating health of Americans.

http://tinyurl.com/osgv5w



Read more: http://tinyurl.com/osgv5w

Disbarring 12 Torture Lawyers
Posted by davidswanson in General Discussion
Mon May 18th 2009, 05:45 AM
Broad Coalition Of Groups Files Disciplinary Complaints Against Twelve Bush Administration Lawyers Who Advocated Torture Of Detainees

On Monday, May 18, 2009, a broad coalition of organizations dedicated to accountable government, and representing over one million members, filed disciplinary complaints with state bar licensing boards against twelve attorneys who advocated the torture of detainees during the Bush Administration. These detailed complaints with over 500 pages of supporting exhibits have been filed against John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Stephen Bradbury, Alberto Gonzales, John Ashcroft, Michael Chertoff, Alice Fisher, William Haynes II, Douglas Feith, Michael Mukasey, Timothy Flanigan, and David Addington. The complaints, filed with the state bars in the District of Columbia, New York, California, Texas and Pennsylvania, seek disciplinary action and disbarment. Copies of the complaints and exhibits are available at http://www.disbartorturelawyers.com

The individually tailored complaints allege that the named attorneys violated the rules of professional responsibility by advocating torture, which is illegal under both United States and international law. Specifically, the Geneva Convention, UN Convention Against Torture, the Eighth Amendment, the Army Field Manual and the United States Criminal Code against torture and war crimes all prohibit torture of detainees. The memos written and supported by these attorneys advocating torture have now been repudiated by the Department of Justice, the White House, the Department of Defense and other experts in the field. The recently released Senate and Red Cross reports on detainee treatment provide uncontroverted evidence that the torture techniques advocated by the attorneys were used on human beings over an extended period of time.

In testimony at a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Former State Department counselor Philip Zelikow told a committee panel that Bush administration officials engaged in a ´collective failure´ on detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists. He called the torture memos "unsound" because "the lawyers involved ... did not welcome peer review and indeed would shut down challenges even inside the government." Another witness testified that the legal policy constituted "an ethical train wreck" because it violated constitutional, statutory and international law.

Kevin Zeese, the attorney for the coalition who signed the complaints, said, "It is time to hold these lawyers accountable for violating their legal oath. Just as the bar would suspend an attorney who advised a police officer to torture and brutalize a detained immigrant or criminal defendant, the bar must suspend these attorneys for advocating and causing the torture of war detainees. The disciplinary boards that hear these complaints must act or they will be seen as complicit in the use of torture. This is an important step toward the ultimate accountability of criminal prosecution."

The coalition expects these twelve complaints to be followed with others after the involvement of additional attorneys is confirmed.

***

Torture is illegal under both United States and international law. The Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment, and it states that treaties signed by the U.S. are the "supreme Law of the Land" under Article Six. The Geneva Convention and The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment both prohibit torture and have been signed by the United States. These laws provide no exception for torture under any circumstances. Moreover, the United States Criminal Code prohibits both torture and war crimes, the latter which includes torture. The Army Field Manual prohibits the use of degrading treatment of detainees.

Despite this well-established law, under the Bush administration, torture was authorized by George Bush and kept secret using classified designations. The White House requested legal memoranda to support its use of torture and it received those authored by a host of attorneys, including John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Stephen Bradbury. Attorneys who advised, counseled, consulted and supported those memoranda included Alberto Gonzales, John Ashcroft, Michael Chertoff, Alice Fisher, William Haynes II, Douglas Feith, Michael Mukasey, Timothy Flanigan, and David Addington.

Several of these memoranda have recently been released, and clearly demonstrate that these attorneys conspired to violate laws against torture and that their actions resulted in torture and death. Accordingly, these attorneys must be held accountable. We have asked the respective state bars to revoke the licenses of the foregoing attorneys for moral turpitude. They failed to show "respect for and obedience to the law, and respect for the rights of others," and intentionally or recklessly failed to act competently, all in violation of legal Rules of Professional Conduct. Several attorneys failed to adequately supervise the work of subordinate attorneys and forwarded shoddy legal memoranda regarding the definition of torture to the White House and Department of Defense. These lawyers further acted incompetently by advising superiors to approve interrogation techniques that were in violation of U.S. and international law. They failed to support or uphold the U.S. Constitution, and the laws of the United States, and to maintain the respect due to the courts of justice and judicial officers, all in violation state bar rules.

***

We ask other organizations to sign on to this campaign by sending an email to DisbarTortureLawyers@velvetrevolution.us Individuals can sign on using the form at http://www.disbartorturelawyers.com . This campaign will include a broad public relations push so we urge everyone to spread the word and for the press to contact us for comment and interviews.

Torture Photos And Video For Media
Click here and here for dozens of torture photos and several anti-torture ads that we are making available to organizations and the media. Please give attribution to VelvetRevolution.us. High resolution versions and hours of torture and waterboarding footage are also available upon request.

This YouTube music video with waterboarding and torture footage is available for rebroadcast with attribution.

Our State Bar Complaints
Jay Bybee-District of Columbia Bar Microsoft Word (.doc) Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
Douglas Feith-District of Columbia Bar Microsoft Word (.doc) Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
David Addington-District of Columbia Bar Microsoft Word (.doc) Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
Stephen Bradbury-District of Columbia Microsoft Word (.doc) Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
Michael Chertoff-District of Columbia Microsoft Word (.doc) Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
John Ashcroft-District of Columbia Microsoft Word (.doc) Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
Timothy Flanigan-District of Columbia Microsoft Word (.doc) Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
Alice Fisher-District of Columbia Bar Microsoft Word (.doc) Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
Michael Haynes-California Bar Microsoft Word (.doc) Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
John Yoo- Pennsylvania Bar Microsoft Word (.doc) Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
Alberto Gonzales-Texas Bar Microsoft Word (.doc) Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
Michael Mukasey-New York Bar Microsoft Word (.doc) Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)

Exhibits Attached To Each Complaint
ACLU List of Known Torture Documents
Army Field Manual On Detainee Treatment
Bradbury 20 Page Memo 5-10-05
Bradbury 46 Page Memo 5-10-05
Bradbury Memo 5-30-05
Bybee to Gonzales Memo 8-01-02
Bybee to Rizzo Memo 8-01-02
Geneva Convention Article 3
Haynes Memo 11-27-02
Red Cross Detainee Treatment Report
Senate Detainee Treatment Report
UN Convention on Torture
U.S. Criminal Code
Yoo Memo 8-01-02
Yoo Memo 3-14-03

Organizations
Republicans for Impeachment
Progressive Democrats of America
Democrats.com
Impeach Bybee
Prosecute Bush/Cheney
After Downing Street
Buzz FlashOp Ed News
Coalition Repair Project
Progressive Magazine
Global Network
Justice Through Music
Media With Conscience
Bend-C Friendship Project
Citizens for Legitimate Government
Center for Study of Democratic Societies
The World Can´t Wait
American Freedom Campaign
Liberty Tree
BFUU Social Justice Campaign
Peace for Justice Forums
WESPAC Foundation
PDA Marin County
Central Jersey Impeach Group
Chesapeake Citizens
Topple Bush
Stop Recruiters WWU
Whatcom Peacebuilders Club
Iraq Veterans for Justice
Longmont Citizens for Justice and Democracy
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
The Democratic Activists
The Solution Zone
Patrick Henry Democratic Club
Epluribus Media
Consumers for Peace
No Nukes North
Veterans for Peace
Florida Peace Action Network
Reclaim the GOP
Boston Anti-War League
Voters for Peace
Campaign for Fresh Air and Clean Politics

Individuals
Bob Fertik
Ann Wright
Tim Carpenter
David Swanson
Benjamin David
William Crain
Phoebe Sorgen
Sphie de Vries
Bob Schecht
Susan Serpa
Peggy Love
Bruce Jones
Ben Maski
Andy Worlington
Mark Adams
William J. Cox
David Lindorff
Ann Wright
Steve Fox
Peggy Love
Pamela Selwyn
John H. Kennedy
Robley George
Bettejo Indelicato
Mike Woloshin
Bill Warick
Story Fitz
Nick Mattern
Dr. P. Thomas
Mark Hull-Richter
Laura Bonham
Amy Ferrer
Christiane Brown
Chris Borland
Chip Pitts
Ann Rick
Flux Rostrum
Evan Knapperberger
RJ Crane
Melinda Pillsbury Foster
David Wittner
David Slesinger
Mary Marino
Anita Fieldman
Nada Khader
Leslie Cagan
Kristina Borjesson
Debra Sweet
Lori Price
Timeteo Jeffries
Shahram Vahdany
Bruce Gagnon
Matthew Rothschild
David Robinson
Srena Crew
Lisa Boyd
Rob Kall
Peter Phillips
Mark Karlin
Doug Fuda

The Released Torture Memos

http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/olc/inde...
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/tortu...
http://www.propublica.org/special/missing-...

Recent Articles About Accountability For Torture
Accountability for Torture, The Nation, John Nichols, 4/22/09
Accountability Does Not Stop At White House Door, Harvard Law Record, Andrew Kallock, 4/16/09
Pressure Grows For Accountability, Amnesty International, 4/17/09
Medically Assisted Torture, New York Times, Editorial, 4/9/09
The Torturer´s Manifesto, New York Times, Editorial, 4/18/09
The Second Bybee Memo, Jurist Legal News and Research, Jordan Paust, 4/22/09
Federal Prosecution of War Criminals, Lawrence Vevel, 1/9/09
Faithfully Executing The Laws, UCLA Law Review, Dawn Johnsen, 2007
The Torture Team, Harpers Magazine, Scott Horton, 3/28/08
Torture Isn´t Patriotic, The Boston Globe, Editorial, 5/16/09
Efforts to Halt Harsh Tactics Thwarted, Washington Post, Carrie Johnson, 5/14/09
Obama Can´t Turn The Page On Bush, New York Times, Frank Rich, 5/18/09

"There is a very exclusive club, whose membership is very few, the tormentors of the human race, history will not forget you."

That is the Democracy for America DFA, the one that is working for a public option in health care. That is not the newly formed Doctors for America that suddenly called themselves DFA as well. Not sure what they are working for or against yet.

DFA Night Schools are free and online and very well worth the time and effort.

DFA Night School: Citizen Lobbying




Good for them. I guess we are all going to have to become lobbyists. Just got the email and already 380+ signed up. Not bad.

Action is my duty
Reward is not my concern
Mother of U.S. Marine Who Was Waterboarded Rips Cheney, Others
Posted by kpete in General Discussion
Sat May 16th 2009, 09:24 AM
Mother of U.S. Marine Who Was Waterboarded Rips Cheney, Others
by GregMitch

This week, I received a letter from a woman from Florida, mother of a young Marine, who has corresponded with me before about her military background and her son joining up, at Editor & Publisher. Her latest letter was extremely disturbing and also extremely relevant to the latest torture excuse. Here is it is, with her name omitted for obvious reasons.


Dear Mr. Mitchell,

I have been so profoundly upset for the last few days that I can hardly express it, so I decided to write to you again. My son is ok physically, thank God, but what was done to him by his own leaders sickens me beyond belief.

My son was in a field that required that he attend SERE school. He was trained as a member of a flight crew that could potentially go behind enemy lines, so SERE was required. I'm a veteran, I thought I had an idea of what was ahead for him, so I gave him a maternal pep talk and told him that it would be very hard but these people were on his side and were trying to prepare him for all possibilities and this would help make him prepared and tough.

I didn't know how naďve my encouragement was. I thought they would teach him how to escape, and how to survive. I had no idea that it would be a sadistic exercise in dehumanizing and terrifying him. He was 19 at the time. I am sickened by this, and outraged.

My 19 year old son was water boarded, among other despicable things, and I had encouraged him to succeed at SERE. They did more to him that he has yet to explain to me, one thing that went on long enough for him to start hallucinating and to think he was dying....

Now we all have found that the two men who came up with this program were using my son and everyone else who went through SERE as guinea pigs for their sick, sadistic torture program. Then they sold their torture program to the sadists in the Bush Administration and became overpaid military contractors who spread this poison throughout our military.

My son is not reenlisting. He is getting out soon. He has been depressed for a long time now and can't wait to get out.

This is why I'm writing to you: Yesterday on TV I saw some Republican mouthpiece, some ex-Cheney aide, who has never worn a uniform and has NO idea what the hell he is talking about, say that we never tortured anyone because we did it to our own troops and they volunteered to serve; therefore it isn't torture. His statement was allowed to stand unchallenged.

My son did NOT volunteer to be tortured. He was NOT told what would be done to him at SERE. He was told he would be taught to survive. Instead he was tortured, humiliated, degraded, shamed, and told to keep quiet about it. How in God's name would that prepare any of our troops to survive capture? It won't. It will only make them break quicker in the hopes of not having to go through more torture.

Who will speak up for my son and the others like him who joined the military to serve and who were subjected to sadistic torture, not by the enemy, but by the war criminals ostensibly on our side? These people, Cheney and his talking heads, everyone of them chicken hawks who avoided serving, should NOT be allowed to use torturing our troops as rationalization for their crimes.

There is NO excuse for this. People need to go to jail for this, and I don't mean the Lyndie Englunds and other low-ranking troops who were led into this. I mean the people who ordered it at the top. The people who are still trying to justify their crimes and are now having their mouthpieces use my son and others who were tortured as their cover. And for what? So the sadists who came up with this, and they are sadists, can keep themselves out of trouble? They all stood by silently, including Cheney, while lower-ranking troops went to prison for the evil they ordered done. Now they want to use my son's torture as their rationalization? No!

This must NOT be allowed to stand unchallenged.

I can't stand feeling so helpless. I WANT A VOICE. I want to confront those evil people who are still selling this torture as if it were our only defense against terrorists, and who now are attempting to use our troops to defend their indefensible, morally corrupt, war crimes.

My son was not given a choice, he was not made aware of what would be done to him, he was ordered not to talk about it. He was tortured - by sadists, for bigger sadists.

Who will stand up to those responsible for this?

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/5/1...

Cloud seeding
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Cloud seeding, a form of weather modification, is the attempt to change the amount or type of precipitation that falls from clouds, by dispersing substances into the air that serve as cloud condensation or ice nuclei, which alter the microphysical processes within the cloud. The usual intent is to increase precipitation (rain or snow), but hail and fog suppression are also widely practiced in airports.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 How cloud seeding works
• 2 Effectiveness
• 3 Impact on environment and health
• 4 History
• 5 Modern uses
• 6 See also
• 7 References
• 8 External links

[edit] How cloud seeding works


A ground-based Silver Iodide generator
The most common chemicals used for cloud seeding include silver iodide and dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide). The expansion of liquid propane into a gas has also been used and can produce ice crystals at warmer temperatures than silver iodide. The use of hygroscopic materials, such as salt, is increasing in popularity because of some promising research results.
Seeding of clouds requires that they contain supercooled liquid water—that is, liquid water colder than zero degrees Celsius. Introduction of a substance such as silver iodide, which has a crystalline structure similar to that of ice, will induce freezing nucleation. Dry ice or propane expansion cools the air to such an extent that ice crystals can nucleate spontaneously from the vapor phase. Unlike seeding with silver iodide, this spontaneous nucleation does not require any existing droplets or particles because it produces extremely high vapor supersaturations near the seeding substance. However, the existing droplets are needed for the ice crystals to grow into large enough particles to precipitate out.
In mid-latitude clouds, the usual seeding strategy has been predicated upon the fact that the equilibrium vapor pressure is lower over ice than over water. When ice particles form in supercooled clouds, this fact allows the ice particles to grow at the expense of liquid droplets. If there is sufficient growth, the particles become heavy enough to fall as snow (or, if melting occurs, rain) from clouds that otherwise would produce no precipitation. This process is known as "static" seeding.
Seeding of warm-season or tropical cumuliform (convective) clouds seeks to exploit the latent heat released by freezing. This strategy of "dynamic" seeding assumes that the additional latent heat adds buoyancy, strengthens updrafts, ensures more low-level convergence, and ultimately causes rapid growth of properly selected clouds.
Cloud seeding chemicals may be dispersed by aircraft (as in the second figure) or by dispersion devices located on the ground (generators, as in first figure, or canisters fired from anti-aircraft guns or rockets). For release by aircraft, silver iodide flares are ignited and dispersed as an aircraft flies through the inflow of a cloud. When released by devices on the ground, the fine particles are carried downwind and upwards by air currents after release.
[edit] Effectiveness
Referring to the 1903, 1915, 1919 and 1944 and 1947 weather modification experiments, the Federation of Meteorology discounted "rain making". By the 1950s the CSIRO Division of Radiophysics switched to investigating the physics of clouds and had hoped by 1957 to be masters of the weather. By the 1960s the dreams of weather making had truly faded only to be re-ignited post-corporatisation of the Snowy Mountains Scheme in order to achieve "above target" water for energy generation and profits.
While cloud seeding has shown to be effective in altering cloud structure and size, and converting cloud water to ice particles, it is more controversial whether cloud seeding increases the amount of precipitation at the ground. Cloud seeding may also suppress precipitation.[citation needed]
Part of the problem is that it is difficult to discern how much precipitation would have occurred had the cloud not been seeded. There are no discernible "traces" of the effectiveness of recent cloud seeding in the Snowy Mountains Australia. Nevertheless, there is hope that winter cloud seeding over mountains will produce snow. This statement arises from partial interpretation of professional societies Weather Modification Association, World Meteorological Organization, and American Meteorological Society (AMS). The AMS states that there is statistical evidence for seasonal precipitation increases of about 10% with winter seeding [1], however, this clearly does not apply to all cloud seeding activities. The World Meteorological Organization has indicated that cloud seeding does not produce positive results in all cases and is dependent on specificity of clouds, wind speed and direction, terrain and other factors.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), an institution in Boulder, Colorado, has made some statistical analysis of seeded and unseeded clouds in an attempt to understand the differences between them. They have conducted seeding research in several countries that include Mali, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Italy, and Argentina.
It has also been said that in the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing clouds were seeded so that there will be no rain during the opening ceremony.[1] The Chinese weather modification office rarely publishes in the open scientific literature and therefore their claims of success are widely disputed.
[edit] Impact on environment and health
With an NFPA 704 rating of Blue 2, silver iodide can cause temporary incapacitation or possible residual injury (e.g., chloroform) to humans and mammals with intense or continued but not chronic exposure. However, there have been several detailed ecological studies that showed negligible environmental and health impacts. [2][3][4]. The toxicity of silver and silver compounds (from silver iodide) was shown to be of low order in some studies. These findings likely result from the minute amounts of silver generated by cloud seeding, which are 100 times less than industry emissions into the atmosphere in many parts of the world, or individual exposure from tooth fillings[5].
Accumulations in the soil, vegetation, and surface runoff have not been large enough to measure above natural background[6]. A 1995 environmental assessment in the Sierra Nevada of California[7] and a 2004 independent panel of experts in Australia confirmed these earlier findings. The paper does include the names of the experts, their scientific qualifications or published research papers to support the assertion that cloud seeding will have no ecotoxic impacts or affect alpine waterways.
Cloud seeding over Kosciuszko National Park - a Biosphere Reserve - is problematic in that several rapid changes of environmental legislation were made to enable the "trial". Environmentalists are concerned about the uptake of silver in a highly sensitive environment affecting the pygmy possum amongst other species as well as recent high level algal blooms in once pristine glacial lakes. The ABC program Earthbeat on 17 July 2004 heard that not every cloud has a silver lining where concerns for the health of the pygmy possums was raised. Earlier research and analysis by the former Snowy Mountains Authority led to the cessation of the cloud seeding program in the 1950s with non-definitive results (http://cires.colorado.edu/~aslater/snowy.html). Formerly, cloud seeding was rejected in Australia on environmental grounds because of concerns about the protected species, the pygmy possum. (http://www.colongwilderness.org.au/RedIndex/NSW/Jagu99.htm)
[edit] History


Cessna 210 with cloud seeding equipment
Vincent Schaefer (1906–1993) discovered the principle of cloud seeding in July 1946 through a series of serendipitous events. Following ideas generated between himself and Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir while climbing Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, Schaefer, Langmuir's research associate, created a way of experimenting with supercooled clouds using a deep freeze unit lined with black velveteen. He tried hundreds of potential agents to stimulate ice crystal growth, i.e., salt, talcum powder, soils, dust and various chemical agents with minor effect. Then one hot and humid July day he wanted to try a few experiments at General Electric's Schenectady Research Lab. He was dismayed to find that the deep freezer was not cold enough to produce a cloud using breath air. He decided to move the process along by adding a chunk of dry ice just to lower the temperature. To his astonishment, as soon as he breathed into the chamber, a bluish haze was noted, followed by an eye-popping display of millions of tiny ice crystals, reflecting the strong light rays illuminating a cross-section of the chamber. He instantly realized that he had discovered a way to change supercooled water into ice crystals. The experiment was easily replicated and he explored the temperature gradient to establish the −40˚C[8] limit for liquid water. Within the month, Schaefer's colleague, the noted atmospheric scientist Dr. Bernard Vonnegut (brother of novelist Kurt Vonnegut) is credited with discovering another method for "seeding" supercooled cloud water. Vonnegut accomplished his discovery at the desk, looking up information in a basic chemistry text and then tinkering with silver and iodide chemicals to produce silver iodide. Both methods were adopted for use in cloud seeding during 1946 while working for the General Electric Corporation in the state of New York. Schaefer's altered a cloud's heat budget, Vonnegut's altered formative crystal structure – an ingenious property related to a good match in lattice constant between the two types of crystal. (The crystallography of ice later played a role in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle.) The first attempt to modify natural clouds in the field through "cloud seeding" began during a flight that began in upstate New York on 13 November 1946. Schaefer was able to cause snow to fall near Mount Greylock in western Massachusetts, after he dumped six pounds of dry ice into the target cloud from a plane after a 60 mile easterly chase from the Schenectady County Airport.[9]
Dry ice and silver iodide agents are effective in changing the physical chemistry of supercooled clouds, thus useful in augmentation of winter snowfall over mountains and under certain conditions, lightning and hail suppression. While not a new technique hygroscopic seeding for enhancement of rainfall in warm clouds is enjoying a revival, based on some positive indications from research in South Africa, Mexico, and elsewhere. The hygroscopic material most commonly used is salt. It is postulated that hygroscopic seeding causes the droplet size spectrum in clouds to become more maritime (bigger drops) and less continental, stimulating rainfall through coalescence.
From March 1967 until July 1972, the U.S. military's Operation Popeye cloud seeded silver iodide to extend the monsoon season over North Vietnam, specifically the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The operation resulted in the targeted areas seeing an extension of the monsoon period an average of 30 to 45 days.[2] The 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron carried out the operation to "make mud, not war". [3]
In 1969 at the Woodstock Festival, various people claimed to have witnessed clouds being seeded by the U.S. military. This was said to be the cause of the rain which lasted throughout most of the festival.
One private organization which offered, during the 1970s, to conduct weather modification (cloud seeding from the ground using silver iodide flares) was Irving P. Krick and Associates of Palm Springs, California. They were contracted by the Oklahoma State University in 1972 to conduct such a seeding project to increase warm cloud rainfall in the Lake Carl Blackwell watershed. That lake was, at that time (1972-73), the primary water supply for Stillwater, Oklahoma and was dangerously low. The project did not operate for a long enough time to show statistically any change from natural variations. However, at the same time, seeding operations have been ongoing in California since 1948.
An attempt by the United States military to modify hurricanes in the Atlantic basin using cloud seeding in the 1960s was called Project Stormfury. Only a few hurricanes were tested with cloud seeding because of the strict rules that were set by the scientists of the project. It was unclear whether the project was successful; hurricanes appeared to change in structure slightly, but only temporarily. The fear that cloud seeding could potentially change the course or power of hurricanes and negatively affect people in the storm's path stopped the project.
Two Federal agencies have supported various weather modification research projects, which began in the early 1960s: The United States Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation; Department of the Interior) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA; Department of Commerce). Reclamation sponsored several cloud seeding research projects under the umbrella of Project Skywater from 1964 to 1988, and NOAA conducted the Atmospheric Modification Program from 1979 to 1993. The sponsored projects were carried out in several states and two countries (Thailand and Morocco), studying both winter and summer cloud seeding. More recently, Reclamation sponsored a small cooperative research program with six Western states called the Weather Damage Modification Program [4], from 2002–2006.
Funding for research in the United States has declined in the last two decades. The Bureau of Reclamation sponsored a six-state research program from 2002–2006, however, called the Weather Damage Modification Program. A 2003 study by the United States National Academy of Sciences urges a national research program to clear up remaining questions about weather modification's efficacy and practice.
In Australia, CSIRO conducted major trials between 1947 and the early 1960s:
• 1947 – 1952: CSIRO scientists dropped dry ice into the tops of cumulus clouds. The method worked reliably with clouds that were very cold, producing rain that would not have otherwise fallen.
• 1953 – 1956: CSIRO carried out similar trials South Australia, Queensland and other States. Experiments used both ground-based and airborne silver iodide generators.
• Late 1950s and early 1960s: Cloud seeding in the Snowy Mountains, on the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland, in the New England district of New South Wales, and in the Warragamba catchment area west of Sydney.
Only the trial conducted in the Snowy Mountains produced statistically significant rainfall increases over the entire experiment.
An Austrian study[10] to use silver iodine seeding for hail prevention ran during 1981–2000, and the technique is still actively deployed there.[11]
[edit] Modern uses
The largest cloud seeding system in the world is that of the People's Republic of China, which believes that it increases the amount of rain over several increasingly arid regions, including its capital city, Beijing, by firing silver iodide rockets into the sky where rain is desired. There is even political strife caused by neighboring regions which accuse each other of "stealing rain" using cloud seeding. About 24 countries currently practice weather modification operationally. China used cloud seeding in Beijing just before the 2008 Olympic Games in order to clear the air of pollution, but there are disputes regarding the Chinese claims. In February 2009, China also blasted iodide sticks over Beijing to artificially induce snowfall after four months of drought, and blasted iodide sticks over other areas of northern China to increase snowfall. The snowfall in Beijing, which rarely experiences snow, lasted for approximately three days and led to the closure of 12 main roads around Beijing.[12]
In the United States, cloud seeding is used to increase precipitation in areas experiencing drought, to reduce the size of hailstones that form in thunderstorms, and to reduce the amount of fog in and around airports. Cloud seeding is also occasionally used by major ski resorts to induce snowfall. Eleven western states and one Canadian province (Alberta) have ongoing weather modification operational programs [5]. In January 2006, an $8.8 million cloud seeding project began in Wyoming to examine the effects of cloud seeding on snowfall over Wyoming's Medicine Bow, Sierra Madre, and Wind River mountain ranges. [6]
A number of commercial companies, such as Aero Systems Incorporated [7], Atmospherics Incorporated [8], North American Weather Consultants [9], Weather Modification Incorporated [10], Weather Enhancement Technologies International [11], Seeding Operations and Atmospheric Research (SOAR) [12], offer weather modification services centered on cloud seeding. The USAF proposed its use on the battlefield in 1996, although the U.S. signed an international treaty in 1978 banning the use of weather modification for hostile purposes.


This Cessna 441 is used to conduct cloud-seeding flights on behalf of Hydro Tasmania
In Australia, CSIRO´s activities in Tasmania in the 1960s were successful[citation needed]. Seeding over the Hydro-Electricity Commission catchment area on the Central Plateau achieved rainfall increases as high as 30% in autumn. The Tasmanian experiments were so successful that the Commission has regularly undertaken seeding ever since in mountainous parts of the State.
Russian military pilots seeded clouds over Belarus after the Chernobyl disaster to remove radioactive particles from clouds heading toward Moscow.[13]
Beginning in Winter 2004, Snowy Hydro Limited is conducting a six-year research project of winter cloud seeding to assess the feasibility of increasing snow precipitation in the Snowy Mountains in Australia. The NSW Natural Resources Commission, responsible for supervising the cloud seeding operations, believes that the trial may have difficulty establishing statistically whether cloud seeding operations are increasing snowfall. This project was discussed at a summit in Narrabri, NSW on 1 December 2006. The summit met with the intention of outlining a proposal for a 5 year trial, focussing on Northern NSW.
The various implications of such a widespread trial were discussed, drawing on the combined knowledge of several worldwide experts, including representatives from the Tasmanian Hydro Cloud Seeding Project however does not make reference to former cloud seeding experiments by the then Snowy Mountains Authority which rejected weather modification. The trial required changes to NSW environmental legislation in order to facilitate placement of the cloud seeding apparatus. The modern experiment is not supported for the Australian Alps.
At the July 2006 G8 Summit, President Putin commented that air force jets had been deployed to seed incoming clouds so they rained over Finland. Rain drenched the summit anyway.[14]
In Southeast Asia, open burning produces haze that pollutes the regional environment. Cloud-seeding has been used to improve the air quality by encouraging rainfall.
In December 2006, the Queensland government of Australia announced AUD$7.6 million in funding for "warm cloud" seeding research to be conducted jointly by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the United States National Center for Atmospheric Research.[15] Outcomes of the study are hoped to ease continuing drought conditions in the states South East region.
In Moscow, the Russian Airforce tried seeding clouds with bags of cement on Jun 17, 2008. One of the bags did not pulverize and went through the roof of a house.[16]
In India, Cloud seeding operations were conducted during the years 2003 and 2004 through U.S. based Weather Modification Inc. in state of Maharashtra [17]. In 2008, there are plans for 12 districts of state of Andhra Pradesh [18].
[edit] See also
• Bioprecipitation
• Chemtrail conspiracy theory
• Project Cumulus
[edit] References
1. ^ "Beijing to keep skies clear on Games' opening day", BOCOG, 2007-04-26. Retrieved on 2007-04-27.
2. ^ Bureau of Reclamation, 1977: Project Skywater, A program of Research in Precipitation Management. However, some research indicates that silver toxicity is bio-accumulative in aquatic environments, causing respiratory distress to some species of fish (Aquatic Toxicology Volume 49, Issues 1-2, May 2000, Pages 111-129). Final Environmental Statement (INT FES 77-39).
3. ^ Harris, Edward R., 1981: Sierra Cooperative Pilot Project - Environmental Assessment and Finding of No Significant Impact. U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, Denver, CO, 208 pp.
4. ^ Howell, Wallace E., 1977: Environmental Impacts of Precipitation Management: Results and Inferences from Project Skywater. Bull. American Meteorological Society, 58, 488–501
5. ^ Steinhoff, Harold W., and Jack D. Ives, Eds., 1976: Ecological Impacts of Snowpack Augmentation in the San Juan Mountains, Colorado. Final Report to the Bureau of Reclamation, 489 pp.
6. ^ Donald A. Klein , 1978: Environmental Impacts of Artificial Ice Nucleating Agents, Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, Inc., Stroudsburg, 256 pp.
7. ^ Parsons Engineering Science, Inc., 1995: Environmental Assessment for the Pacific Gas and Electric Company and the U.S. Forest Service, Stanislaus National Forest.
8. ^ http://www.nmt.edu/about/history/storms/chap3.htm
9. ^ Ted Steinberg. Oxford University Press, 2000.
10. ^ Hagelabwehr in Niederösterreich, Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik
11. ^ www.hagelabwehr.com -KSV- Herzlich Willkommen
12. ^ China Lets it Snow to End Drought, BBC, 19 February 2009.
[edit] External links
• Rainmaking in China
• North American Interstate Weather Modification Council
• Weather Modification Association
• American Meteorological Society Policy Statement
• World Meteorological Organization Policy Statement
• World Meteorological Organization Weather Modification Programme
• Nevada State Cloud Seeding Program
• "The Weather Modification Operations and Research Board (passed Oct.2005) - in corporate cooperation with BAE Systems (HAARP apparatus & facility owner, as well as current company name for the Tesla-funding Marconi Company) and Raytheon Corporation (HAARP patent owner, as well as UAV manufacturer, distributor, and operations contractor)
• "the Weather Modification Operations and Research Board on Wiki"
• "Raytheon Aircraft Company (Owner of HAARP patents, and, NOAA-funded aerosol weather modification/AESA radar weather weapons)"
• "BAE Systems - APTI/ARCO program and apparatus-owner of the HAARP facility, railgun technology, electromagnetic armor, and, a sub-corporation partner with Raytheon via British Aerospace Corporation, as well as owner of Nicola Tesla's "Wardenclyffe Tower" (first EM long-range weapon) funding company, the Marconi Company"
• "Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower (ionospheric heater) atmospheric/plasma research history, construction, utilization, & association w/ Marconi Company / GE who is now currently BAE Systems in conjunction with the current HAARP array"
• China to force rain ahead of Olympics
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding"
Categories: Weather modification

veracity (958 posts)

Wed May-13-09 09:09 PM Original message

Kafka for Dummies: The Absurd Debate over Torture!

(Excerpted with permission): Here we go again. After eight horrific years of lies and deceit and war and death, the American public once again has fallen into the abyss of self delusion. Tragically, just as we near the brink of reversal, we are about to abdicate any claim whatsoever to respect or honor anywhere. America consistently proclaims itself a nation of laws where justice is blind to privilege or class. And yet, as the world watches in disbelief, this country has become inextricably mired in non-stop debates that defy reason. It is absolutely insane to discuss the possibility that a crime has some Machiavellian validity simply because it ‘works.’ And it is equally incredulous to engage in discussions about the propriety of prosecuting those who have openly admitted their heinous actions. Something is terribly wrong with this picture. Here the facts. Check them out. They’re clear; they’re relatively simple to follow. Do the math. Full article: http://tvnewslies.org/tvnl/index.php/editorial/reggies-...

Obama Makes Terrible Mistake by Not Releasing Pictures
By Cenk Uygur

This is an unbelievable moment. Dick Cheney's PR offensive over the last month actually worked. Barack Obama just crumbled and will follow Cheney's command to not release the new set of detainee abuse pictures.

By the way, if you hadn't figured it out by now, that's why you saw every Cheney in the world on television arguing that torture works and that releasing more information would gravely harm the troops. They weren't worried about what was already released; they were worried about what was going to get released. They were trying to pre-empt the most damaging thing of all - the pictures that show the torture.

Just talk about torture doesn't really do it for the American people. But when they see pictures, they get it. That's why Bush had to apologize profusely and throw a few low-level soldiers under the bus when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out. You think there would have been anywhere near that level of controversy or accountability (such that it was) without the pictures?

How many Americans have heard of Bagram Air Base and how we tortured people to death there? A scant few. How many would have heard of it if there were pictures of detainees shackled from the ceiling in a Palestinian hanging or bleeding to death? Pictures are worth a billion words.

You know why? Television! If something isn't on television, it didn't happen. And television producers are obsessed with visuals (makes some sense since it's a visual medium, but their obsession winds up dumbing down the news if there aren't any pictures or video to go along with an important story).

Television has a multiplier effect. The New York Times story on how we beat a man named Dilawar to death at Bagram just sits there and whoever reads it, reads it. And then, it's done. On television stories spread and multiply and get spread to other channels and other mediums. Television doesn't just report the news; it decides what the news is.

So, that is what this whole fight has been about - the pictures. And now Obama adopted Cheney's position that it endangers national security to release the pictures and he will be saddled for the rest of time with the obligation to fight Cheney's battle for him. And anytime any reasonable person makes a case that as a free and open democracy we should know what our government did, the right-wing will counter with, "Even Obama thinks it endangers national security!"

The reason why this is such a maddening argument is that it is so f'in obvious that the real problem isn't releasing the pictures; it's what we did in the pictures. The argument that Obama so stupidly accepted just now shifts the blame from the people who committed the abuse to the people who want to uncover it and put an end to it.

If you released the pictures and show how the "enhanced interrogation" memos directly led to these abuses, there would be no more torture debate. Everyone could see with their own eyes the horrific results of torture. Now instead, Obama has not just protected the torturers, but empowered them. They now get to claim they tried to protect America and that anyone who tries to show their misdeeds endangers America.

The news reports will tell you that Obama listened to his generals on this. Yes, who put Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno in their current positions? Oh yes, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Very fair and balanced advice you would get from them. This isn't about protecting the troops; it's about protecting their own behinds. They might have been in the chain of command that allowed this abuse to happen. Expecting unbiased advice from them is ridiculous.

Now, it looks to the rest of the world that we are trying to hide something, that we have not turned over a new leaf, that it is the same old lies and duplicity - and that Obama is on it. This was colossally stupid.

And to add insult to injury, we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that Dick Cheney still runs DC no matter how unpopular and despicable he is. He still has the Democrats eating out of his hand. Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.

There should be an overwhelming Democratic and media revolt over this decision. The Democrats cannot be like the Republicans and bow their heads at all of the president's decisions. They should fight him tooth and nail on this. Don't hold your breath. Other than Feingold and a few others, they will all immediately lay down.

But I come back to a question that keeps popping back up - are there any real journalists in this country? Has everyone become so obsessed with access and so cowed by possible governmental reaction that they don't actually do their job anymore? They seem so damn frightened by what the big, bad government might say about them.

If there's a real journalist in this country, they will get their hands on those pictures and release them to the world. We did what is in those pictures. The longer we cover it up, the more culpable we all become. Not showing the pictures doesn't make the reality of what happened go away. It only aids and abets the torturers who did the crimes and stained this country's name. They should all be thrown into the sunlight. This is what the press is supposed to do...

Click Here for the rest of the piece (with comments) and to subscribe to Cenk's blog at DailyKos.

Click Here for the rest of the piece (with comments) and to add Cenk to your fan list at Huffington Post. He currently has the fourth most fans behind Arianna herself, John Cusack and Bill Maher.

Click Here to DIGG this to make sure more people see it.

Joanne98 (1000+ posts)

Wed May-13-09 08:03 AM Original message

The Single Payer Fire Has Been Lit

Last week when I was one of the Baucus Eight – so-named because eight of us were arrested before Sen. Baucus, I hopped others would join us. Yesterday, they did. And, the single payer movement grew stronger. Before the hearing I joined nearly 50 people in a spirited protest outside the U.S. senate letting all who entered know we wanted a single payer national health care plan. And, inside there were a series of protests. As the hearing began, and Sen. Baucus was speaking a group of about 30 nurses, dressed in their red hospital uniforms, stood up and turned their backs on Baucus. They had pinned to their backs: “Nurses Say: Stop AHIP. Pass Single Payer.” (AHIP is America’s Health Insurance Plans – the health insurance industry lobby.) The nurses left the room to applause. Then doctors, nurses and advocates stood up and one by one and spoke directly to Senator Baucus. DeAnn McEwen, a registered nurse from California said: “Today is Florence Nightingale’s birthday. Florence Nightingale said 'if there were none to hope for any better, there would never be any better.' This country needs a single payer health care system.” Then, another RN from California, Sue Cannon, stood up: “People at the table have failed Americans for 30 years. We want single payer at the table. We want guaranteed health care so we can give the care we need, when we need to give it.” She was followed by Dr. Judy Dasovich of Springfield, Missouri, who said “We request that single payer advocates be allowed at the table. Health care should be for patients not for profits.” Dr. Steven Fenichel of Ocean City, NJ followed adding: “It’s a sense of outrage that brings me to your Senate chambers today. These people were entrusted by the American people to serve the American people’s interests. And they are just serving the interests of the insurance companies and drug companies – the people be damned.” Jerry Call, a member of Physicians for a National Health Program from South Thomaston, Maine was the final advocate from the audience, speaking for the majority of Americans shut out from the discussion, and saying: “Sixty percent of Americans and sixty percent of physicians want single payer. Why aren’t sixty percent of the people up front not single payer representatives?” All five were arrested and taken away for booking. They were charged with Disruption of Congress, the same offense I will go to court for on May 26th. Now, 13 have been arrested – the Baucus 8 have morphed into the Baucus 13 – demanding a seat at the table; merely urging that the most popular health reform among the people as well as among doctors, nurses and economists be part of the conversation. Outside as each new Baucus criminal was walked before the crowd, now approximately 75 people -- they were all cheered. 1 | 2 http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Single-Payer-Fire-... "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein

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Coburn Gun Amendment Tacked Onto Credit Card Bill

Source: Rollcall

The Senate voted 67-29 to add a gun-rights provision to the consumer credit card bill on Tuesday, handing a victory to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who has employed a variety of procedural tools to advance the gun measure over the last two years.

The amendment would allow visitors to carry concealed weapons onto national park property by requiring those parks to follow state gun laws.

. . .

Noting the Senate´s heavy legislative schedule before the Memorial Day recess begins after next week, Reid urged Members Tuesday night to submit amendments so the chamber could move quickly on the credit card bill.

"We want Senators to be able to offer amendments to the bill. But we´d hope they´d be related to the bill," Reid said.

While Coburn´s gun amendment won strong approval in the Senate, it is unclear whether it will emerge once House and Senate conferees convene to craft a final measure. The version passed by the House on April 30 does not include a gun amendment.

Read more: http://www.rollcall.com/news/34853-1.html

bigtree's journal
Bombing Afghans in Defense of Afghanistan?
Posted by bigtree in General Discussion
Sat May 09th 2009, 10:46 AM
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Bombing-A...
AFTER nearly a week of denials and counter accusations, an anonymous U.S. military official admitted today that their airstrikes Monday in Afghanistan killed at least 50 civilians. Despite that conclusion, local authorities still insist that as many as 140 innocent civilians were savagely bombed in their own homes as they took refuge from an unraveling battle between Taliban and Afghan/coalition forces.

Initially, the U.S. military gave their standard (infuriating) denial that civilians were killed, as they have in all of the many instances where civilians have been killed by the collateral effects of U.S. dominated raids and bombings (several deliberately targeted, only to find later that 'faulty intelligence' led them to kill the wrong people). Later, when local police and other Afghan officials protested loudly and produced bodies of the women and children who had been caught in the way of the deliberate bombing, Pentagon officials immediately strained to find some way to blame the Taliban - by the weekend settling on claiming that it was actually the Taliban who had killed the civilians in an effort to generate protests from the Afghan population.

The anatomy of this latest in a string of collateral and bad intelligence-driven killings of Afghan civilians provides a perfect view of the state of the military mission there and its predictable effects on the population, and on the level of acceptance of our presence by Afghans. The airstrikes which destroyed a community of homes was preceded by a typically fierce firefight between Afghan/coalition forces and Taliban combatants who had gotten the better of the skirmish, managed to destroy some vehicles, and had killed a number of soldiers, including one American. It's at that point that reports say that U.S. airstrikes were called in to help in the pursuit of the fighters.

According to Patrick Cockburn, reporting from Herat for The Independent, the airstrikes were neither pinpoint nor brief:

A claim by American officials, which was repeated by the US Defence Secretary Robert Gates yesterday in Kabul, that the Taliban might have killed people with grenades because they did not pay an opium tax is not supported by any eyewitnesses and is disproved by pictures of deep bomb craters, one of which is filled with water. Mr Gates expressed regret for the incident but did not go so far as to accept blame.

The US admits that it did conduct an air strike at the time and place, but it is becoming clear, going by the account of survivors, that the air raid was not a brief attack by several aircraft acting on mistaken intelligence, but a sustained bombardment in which three villages were pounded to pieces. Farouq Faizy, an Afghan radio reporter who was one of the first to reach the district of Bala Baluk, says villagers told him that bombs suddenly, "began to fall at 8pm on Monday and went on until 10pm though some believe there were still bombs falling later". A prolonged bombing attack would explain why there are so many dead, but only 14 wounded received at Farah City hospital.


After reports from the Red Cross and others confirmed that civilians had been slaughtered in the three villages - Gerani, Gangabad and Koujaha - which sustained the brunt of the hours of bombardments, Mr. Gates (and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as well, in a statement with Karzai in D.C.) did indeed express 'regret' over the deaths. However, his comments implicating the Taliban suggest a new tactic from the Pentagon which would deflect from criticism and stifle the growing movement among Afganis who are insisting that the U.S. dominated forces stand down from these reckless and deadly raids and airstrikes.

"We regret any, even one, Afghan ... innocent civilian casualty. And we will make whatever amends are necessary," Gates said in Afghanistan Thursday. "We all know that the Taliban use civilian casualties and sometimes create them to create problems for ... the United States and our coalition partners. We will have to wait and see what happened in this particular case."

His subordinates at the Pentagon didn't wait, however, to float to the press what they admitted were "loosely sourced" rumors which suggested the combatants had taken the time during the hours of bombings to stage the killings of villagers in the Taliban stronghold to make it appear as a result of the U.S. airstrikes.

Despite admitting that, "This is not looking good," (referencing the tension between the U.S. and Karzai's Afghan regime) a 'senior military official
told CNN that, the U.S. military believed the insurgents were holding people in the homes as a means of causing civilian casualties.

Tech Sergeant Chuck Marsh repeated the accusation to VOA: "The investigation suggests that villagers had taken refuge in a number of houses in each village," he said. "Reports also indicate that Taliban fighters deliberately forced villagers into houses from which they then attacked ANSF and Coalition forces."

However, other reports show that civilians took refuge in the homes after news of the 12 hour battle between Taliban and government forces. "We know that those killed included an Afghan Red Crescent volunteer and 13 members of his family who had been sheltering from fighting in a house that was bombed in an air strike," the ICRC's head of delegation in Kabul, Reto Stocker said.

CNN also reported that 'U.S. officials' told them there is 'some information' that some civilians were beheaded by insurgents in the area during the several hours of heavy fighting." But, investigations into the killings have not supported any of the accusations that the Taliban combatants targeted members in their own villages as they fled. The investigations have, however, found many Afghans who have reported the deaths of family members and neighbors as a result of the sustained bombing numbering over 140 in total. Riots broke out Thursday after the bodies of more than a dozen of the civilians killed were brought by protesters to Farah City, with angry Afghans throwing stones at police__ who, in return, opened fire on the crowd, wounding several.

from Patrick Cockburn:

The riot started when people from three villages struck by US bombers in the early hours of Tuesday, brought 15 newly-discovered bodies in a truck to the house of the provincial governor. As the crowd pressed forward in Farah, police opened fire, wounding four protesters. Traders in the rest of Farah city, the capital of the province of the same name where the bombing took place, closed their shops, vowing they would not reopen them until there is an investigation.

A local official Abdul Basir Khan said yesterday that he had collected the names of 147 people who had died, making it the worst such incident since the US intervened in Afghanistan started in 2001. A phone call from the governor of Farah province, Rohul Amin, in which he said that 130 people had died, was played over the loudspeaker in the Afghan parliament in Kabul, sparking demands for more control over US operations. (Reuters also reported that Farah Province deputy governor Yunus Rasooli said residents of two villages hit this week by U.S. warplanes had produced lists with the names of 147 people killed in the attacks.)


The protests were elevated by the reaction of the Afghan government to the deadly airstrikes. INN reportedthat Afghanistan Speaker of the Lower House of Parliament, Mohammad Younus Qanoni warned the Afghan government to submit the ´legalisation plan´ of foreign military presence within a week to the parliament. Some MPs were said to suggest 'sealing off' the parliament as a protest.

Afghan President Karzai on Friday finally put some substance behind his repeated demands the U.S. end the bungling raids and check the collateral killings of his countryfolk. "We believe strongly that air strikes are not an effective way in fighting terrorism. That's not good for the US, that's not good for Afghanistan, that's not good for the conducting of the war," Mr. Karzai told CNN in an interview.

"We demand the proper conduction of operations. We demand an end to these operations," Karzai said. "We cannot justify in any manner, for whatever number of Taliban or for whatever number of significantly important terrorists, the accidental or otherwise loss of civilians," he said.

Karzai, upbraiding the entirety of tactics that the escalated NATO forces have been employing in their presumed 'defense' of Kabul, complained that, "the air strikes, especially, and sudden bursts into homes at night are not in any way good for this war."

Silly puppet . . . the U.S. military doesn't give a damn about what you want.

"If there's one lesson I draw from the past, it is the importance of our staying engaged," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters Friday at Forward Operating Base Airborne in northern Afghanistan. "And if there's a lesson for Americans and the international community, it's that we don't dare turn our backs on Afghanistan. This will work if we stay engaged."

That was basically the attitude back at the Pentagon today as U.S. military spokeswoman Capt. Elizabeth Mathias disputed the 140-plus that the Afghans are insisting were killed in the airstrikes. She told reporters that, "The investigators and the folks on the ground think that those numbers are extremely over-exaggerated." "We are definitely nowhere near those estimates."

The Pentagon responded with their own over-exaggeration, trotting out an 'anonymous' military official to insist the airstrikes were done in broad daylight and were actually for the Afghan's own good. "This was not a night raid, this was not a scheduled operation, we came to their assistance," the official said on condition of anonymity. "We were supporting our Afghan partners," anonymous told AFP.

If this is the best our forces have to offer in 'defense' of the Afghan regime, it's understandable why the protected head is looking to pull the plug on the military forces' most destructive tactics. Mr. Karzai has to realize, though, that the defense of his precarious regime is not the primary mission of the U.S. dominated NATO force. America is engaged in a war on an ideology in the Middle East which the leadership at the Pentagon believes can and should be 'won' in Afghanistan.

Mr. Gates last May, cast the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan as the same kind of 'ideological' battle that Bush had promoted in defense of his unbridled military aggression across sovereign borders:

"Afghanistan and Iraq are the most important battlefields in the fight today, Gates said, and his priority has been "getting us to a point where our strategic objectives are within reach in those two countries . . . America´s best opportunity to discredit and deflate the extremist ideology is in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gates said.

"Just as the hollowness of communism was laid bare by the collapse of the Soviet Union, so too would success in those countries strike a decisive blow against the ideological underpinnings of extremist movements," Gates argued.

The best evidence, so far, has not pointed to any 'collapse' of the ideology of resistance to U.S. aggression and expansionism across sovereign borders. If anything, the self-perpetuating cycle of attacks and reprisals has provided text and substance for the militarized resistance and their recruiting of Afghans driven to violent expressions of self-determination and liberty. Is anyone at the White House paying attention?

Union Yes Donating Member (324 posts) Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Sat May-09-09 06:07 AM
Original message
1995-My disabled father died at the Mayo Clinic, Billed $440,000.

I remember it vividly, like it happened yesterday.

I was 25 at the time and still somewhat naive about the ways of the world. Just out of the Army after a 4 year enlistment. High on life and ready to take on the world. Then I arrived home and saw my father in his frail state. He was suffering from wasting syndrome caused by heart complications caused by childhood Rheumatic Fever. I hadn't seen him for about 2 1/2 years and couldn't believe how much his health had deteriorated in that time.

He had no insurance and could only afford an occasional doctor visit.

Seeing him in this fragile state, I knew I had to get him to a good hospital. I offered to drive him to the Mayo Clinic in southern Minnesota, an 8 hour drive. He agreed but was reluctant to go. He was worried about surviving the trip and his lack of insurance. I told him that we'd admit him through the emergency room and go from there.

The Mayo ER accepted him and immediately placed him in the intensive care unit. He spent the next month in ICU being nursed back to health so that he could undergo major heart surgery to replace the defective heart valve destroyed by his childhood fever. The surgery was a success and he pulled through it. He was sent back to post-op ICU to once again nurse him back to health. He battled like a warrior for the next 2 months in ICU and it actually appeared for awhile that he would pull through and return to health. Sadly, his overall frail state was too much and his heart gave out. He died in peace at the Mayo clinic with his family at his side. He was 57.

He spent the last 2 years of his life on Social Security disability. 3 days after his death while planning his funeral, a thick letter arrived in the mail from the Mayo Clinic.

His bill for an almost 3 month stay in ICU and a major heart surgery- $440,000. 1995 dollars, imagine that bill today.

The sickest part of all of this, a surgical procedure to repair the heart valve was available 2 decades before his death. At an estimated cost of $50,000. The problem was that he could never find a hospital that would do the procedure because he was uninsured. He could never get insurance with a preexisting heart condition. A vicious cycle that too many Americans are caught in to this day.

I remember battling with Medicare over the phone for 2 months after his death. They finally agreed to pay the bill.

In a 2 year span my fathers ill health cost almost a half a million dollars. Paid by Medicare and SSDI.

1 persons ill health cost almost $500,000. Think about that number. Multiply it by the number of sick and uninsured Americans. Then we can see why Americans spent 2.2 TRILLION DOLLARS on health care in 2007.

After watching my father fall victim to the disgrace known as for profit health care, I've been a life long fan of single payer universal health care.

I've seen cost estimates for single payer. 200-400 billion dollars annually.

Our current system of for profit health care costs us $2.2 TRILLION and that number will explode due to job losses and loss of insurance due to the economy.

$2.2 TRILLION+ VS $400 BILLION.

$2.2 TRILLION for a system that still denies health care to any who can't afford it.

$400 BILLION for a system that covers ALL.

THERE IS NO EXCUSE TO DENY SINGLE PAYER.

THERE IS NO ARGUMENT TO SUPPORT THE VILE DISGRACE, THE GREED DRIVEN EVIL KNOWN AS AMERICAN FOR PROFIT HEALTH CARE.

60% of Americans now want Single Payer.

It is time to mobilize.

If we don't march on Washington and demand Single Payer, we may never see it.

Along with many DU'ers I watched those Patriots protest Sen Max Baucus and his panel of insurance thugs. Doctors protesting-what a beautiful thing to witness. The tears flowed as I thought of my father and the power of that protest. A very moving message.

I know many DU'ers have experienced a similar story. Either their own health or watching a loved one suffer under the current health care system. This issue hits home for almost every American.

The need for Single Payer couldn't get any clearer.

The time for Single Payer is now!

Peace.

Will people lose their jobs if they post contrary to slime capitalism? 

We need enlightened capital to acknowledge and uphold the economy we need to prosper. 

IF you own companies or just a small business try to practice using social media.
It will bring us together faster. 

Or even if you are non-profit, bear the expense, raise the funds, get grants once we get going.

Events that create action, create energy give the kids who are iching to move on something
ethical,logical,and passionate, to rise up and manage the knowledge gathering and channeling
of the stuff can be recreated and pushed on through to the other side.

We can do it.   We can do it.

sadly, this is getting few posts. 
ya know, I really think people are blind
to their own obvious routes to success,
because they don't want to offend the perpetrators,
who are wealthy and run it all and decide everything
when individuals don't respect themselves enough to
insist on the rule of law.

http://www.earcandleproductions.com/MysteryTrack.mp3



pooh on the congress and this administration as long as they are not doing their job.
and they are not.

Venezuela says weapons cache uncovered, 4 foreigners detained in suspected terrorist cell

RACHEL JONES | Associated Press Writer
8:14 PM EDT, May 9, 2009

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuelan police uncovered a cache of weapons and explosives at a Caracas apartment and later detained four foreigners on suspicion of planning terrorist acts, authorities said Saturday.

While announcing the detentions, Justice Minister Tareck El Aissami accused foes of President Hugo Chavez of "looking for violence," although he did not link the case to the political opposition. Chavez has repeatedly charged that the opposition is plotting to assassinate him or spur his ouster.

El Aissami said a police raid Friday on an apartment near the capital's center found C-4 explosive, electric detonator systems, thousands of cartridges, and 14 rifles of different models, including five with telescopic sights, five with laser sights and one with a silencer. Documents and a computer found there were being studied, he said.

"This type of military arsenal is used for military actions and operations, with the precise objective of wiping out adversaries," he said.

Without giving any details, El Aissami said the discovery led to the detention of three citizens of the Dominican Republic — Luini Omar Campusano de la Cruz, 38; Edgar Floiran Sanchez, 29; and Diomedis Campusano Perez, 31 — and a Frenchman, Laurent Frederic Bocquet, whose age was not given.

El Aissami said Bocquet was believed to be a member of the military "of a European country" as well as "terrorist organization." He did not identify either.

Chavez has long talked of opposition schemes to oust him. Last October, he accused opposition leader Manuel Rosales of involvement in a purported assassination plot. Prosecutors later accused Rosales of illegal enrichment while he was governor of western Zulia state, prompting him to get political asylum in Peru last month.

On Saturday, Chavez congratulated Venezuela's police and intelligence services for the arrests and offered praise for ordinary citizens.

"Many times, these cases happen because people see strange things — people coming, people going. And they inform," he said.

Last May, Chavez decreed that Venezuelans would have to act as informants if authorities believed they had information on national security threats, setting a four-prison term for noncooperative citizens. He rescinded the law a month later after human rights groups expressed concern that it could stifle dissent.

Action is my duty
Reward is not my concern
BLACKMAIL Is Reason For NO Oversight By Congress: SIBEL EDMONDS: In Congress We Trust...Not
Posted by kpete in General Discussion
Mon May 04th 2009, 04:12 PM
SIBEL EDMONDS: In Congress We Trust...Not

The former FBI translator and whistleblower suggests blackmail may be at the heart of Congressional refusal to bring accountability and oversight to its own members - such as both Hastert and Harman - in matters of espionage and national security

Exclusive to The BRAD BLOG...

Guest Editorial by Sibel Edmonds

......................

The recent stunning but not unexpected revelations regarding Jane Harman (D-CA) by the Congressional Quarterly provide us with a little glimpse into one of the main reasons behind the steady decline in the integrity of Congress. But the story is almost dead - ready to bite the dust, thanks to our mainstream media's insistence on burying 'real' issues or stories that delve deep into the causes of our nation's continuous downward slide. In this particular case, the 'thank you' should also be extended to certain blogosphere propagandists who, blinded by their partisanship, myopic in their assessments, and ignorant in their knowledge of the inner workings of our late Congress and intelligence agencies, helped in the post-burial cremation of this case.

...................

All for One, One for All?

How does it work? How do these people escape the consequences of accountability? Are we talking about the possible use of blackmail by the Executive Branch against Congressional representatives, as if the days of J. Edgar Hoover were never over? Cases such as NSA illegal eavesdropping come to mind, when Congressional members were briefed long before it became public, yet none took any action or even uttered a word; members of both parties. Or is it more likely to be a case of secondhand blackmail, where members of Congress watch out for each other? Or, is it a combination of the above? Regardless, we see this 'all for one, one for all' kind of solidarity in Congress when it comes to criminal conduct and scandals such as those of Hastert and Harman.

..............

But, let's not forget, the misuse of incriminating information, for the purpose of blackmail, does not turn the practitioner of the wrongful deed into a victim, nor does it make the wrongful criminal deed less wrong. Instead of spinning the story, taking away attention from the facts in hand, and making Harman a victim, we must focus on this case, on Harman, as an example of a very serious disease that has infected our Congress for far too long. Those who have been entrusted with the oversight and accountability of our government cannot do so if they are vulnerable to such blackmail from the very same people they are overseeing…Period.



much more at:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7117

Time for change's Journal
"When the President Does it that Means that it Is Not Illegal"
Posted by Time for change in General Discussion
Tue May 05th 2009, 11:24 PM
So it is that our nation´s failures to hold criminals at the highest levels of government accountable for their crimes destroys respect for the rule of law and enables more of the same.
Although the United States of America was conceived, as President Lincoln stated in his 1863 Gettysburg Address, as a "government of the people, by the people, for the people", in recent decades our government has deviated markedly from that principle, so that today it resembles a monarchy in many ways more than a government of, by, and for the people.

It could be said that the presidency of Richard Nixon, sometimes referred to as the imperial presidency, was the beginning of that trend, or at least that it represented a sharp acceleration of it. Nixon´s own words capture that principle as well as any others, perhaps none more clearly than in his interview with David Frost, which aired on television on May 19th, 1977. Here are some pertinent excerpts:

FROST (To the audience): The wave of dissent, occasionally violent, which followed in the wake of the Cambodian incursion, prompted President Nixon to demand better intelligence about the people who were opposing him. To this end, the Deputy White House Counsel, Tom Huston, arranged a series of meetings… These meetings produced a plan, the Huston Plan, which advocated the systematic use of wiretappings, burglaries, or so-called black bag jobs, mail openings and infiltration against antiwar groups and others. Some of these activities, as Huston emphasized to Nixon, were clearly illegal. Nevertheless, the president approved the plan… The president's approval was later to be listed in the Articles of Impeachment as an alleged abuse of presidential power.

FROST (To Nixon): So what in a sense, you're saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.

NIXON: Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.

FROST: By definition?

NIXON: Exactly. Exactly… Yes, and the dividing line and, just so that one does not get the impression, that a president can run amok in this country and get away with it, we have to have in mind that a president has to come up before the electorate…. We also have to have in mind, that a president has to get appropriations from the Congress….

So, what is the difference between the form of government that Richard Nixon espoused and any run of the mill dictatorship? Could it be that, as Nixon later clarified, the legality of the President´s actions hinge upon some "national security" reason or other concept of the greater good? How could it? Almost all dictators claim that their actions are motivated by the purest of motives.

The worst effect of Nixon´s crimes is that they set a precedent for exactly the dictatorial philosophy of government that Nixon had in mind. His successor pardoned him before he was even indicted for his crimes. And that set the stage for what came later.


The Iran-Contra Scandal

The war and its precedents
On July 19th, 1979, a popular uprising by the revolutionary Sandinista Party overthrew the repressive dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. The Sandinistas began reversing Somoza's devastation of the country with a program of land reform, social justice, and redistribution of wealth and income. Former members of Somoza's National Guards and other war criminals formed in opposition to the Sandanistas, and they became known as the Contras.

Supporting the Contras in their efforts to take over Nicaragua was one of the primary goals of Ronald Reagan´s presidency, despite abundant evidence of repeated atrocities perpetrated by the Contras, including:

murder, the rape of two girls in their homes, torture of men, maiming of children, cutting off arms, cutting out tongues, gouging out eyes, castration, bayoneting pregnant women in the stomach, amputating the genitals of people of both sexes, scraping the skin off the face, pouring acid on the face, breaking the toes and fingers of an 18 year old boy, and summary executions. These were the people Ronald Reagan called "freedom fighters" and "the moral equal of our founding fathers."… The human rights organization Americas Watch concluded that "the Contras systematically engage in violent abuses…. so prevalent that these may be said to be their principle means of waging war."

In addition to the Reagan administration funding the Contras, it used the CIA to assist them in their carnage, including the mining of Nicaragua´s harbors. By the mid-1980s, the Contra war had produced 14,000 casualties, including 3,000 dead children and adolescents, and 6,000 children had become war orphans.

Congress tries to fight back
The Boland Amendments were a series of laws passed by Congress beginning in 1982 for the purpose of cutting off funding to the Contras and other support of their war by the Reagan administration.

The Reagan administration basically ignored the orders of Congress, continuing to fund and support the Contras through various means, most notoriously by selling military weapons to Iran in return for assistance in obtaining the release of American hostages in Lebanon – a scandal that became known as Iran-Contra.

Avoidance of accountability by the Reagan/Bush administration
Investigations into this scandal were later led by independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, with consequent indictments of a long list of high level Reagan administration officials, most notably including the Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger. On Christmas Eve, 1992, with less than a month remaining in George H.W. Bush´s lame duck presidency, Bush issued full pardons to the top Reagan administration officials who had been indicted, even though Walsh had not yet completed his investigations.

Despite overwhelming evidence indicating that both Bush and Reagan attended several meetings where there were conversations concerning the arms-hostages swap, they both continued to plead ignorance of the affair.

There ensued a series of Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits, with the purpose of holding the Reagan administration accountable for their crimes. To prevent destruction of the relevant evidence, on January 6, 1993, Judge Charles Richey ruled that computer tapes containing copies of e-mail messages by Reagan and Bush White House staff must be preserved. However, on January 19, 1993, President Bush signed a secret agreement (See 7th paragraph) with Don Wilson, head of the National Archives and Records Administration, purporting to grant Bush exclusive legal control over the e-mail tapes of his administration.

The Clinton administration, for reasons unknown, proved reluctant to cooperate with efforts to bring crucial information to light (much less prosecute the Reagan administration crimes themselves), prompting Judge Richey on May 22, 1993,to cite the Clinton White House and the acting Archivist of the United States for contempt of court. On February 15, 1995, Judge Richey rejected the Clinton administration's arguments to continue to withhold the evidence as "arbitrary and capricious... contrary to history, past practice and the law". And on February 27, 1995, Richey addressed the Bush/Wilson agreement by declaring it "null and void" and writing that "No one, not even a President, is above the law."

But notwithstanding Judge Richey´s efforts to declare that the United States of America is not a dictatorship, neither Bush nor Reagan was ever held accountable for the Iran-Contra crimes


The George W. Bush administration crimes

Perhaps it was the failure of our system to hold previous presidential administrations accountable for serious crimes that encouraged the George W. Bush administration to embark upon a series of crimes more horrendous than ever seen in the history of our country, thus earning for Bush the reputation of the worst president in American history.

The list is too long to cover here in any substantial detail. A glimpse of the magnitude of these crimes can be seen from the 35 articles of impeachment that Congressman Dennis Kucinich presented to the U.S. House of Representatives on June 9th, 2008. Here is a summary:

Articles I – XIII: Creating a propaganda campaign and lying to the American people and Congress in order to build a false case for war against Iraq; then invading and occupying Iraq, in violation of U.S. and international law and in the absence of any good reason whatsoever; then failing to provide our troops with the body armor they needed, falsifying accounts of US troop deaths, and establishing permanent military bases in Iraq.

Article XIV: Exposing a covert CIA agent.

Articles XV-XVI: Providing immunity from prosecution to criminal contractors in Iraq and recklessly wasting US tax dollars on contractors in Iraq.

Articles XVII-XX: Indefinitely detaining our prisoners, including children, without charges or any legal rights, torturing them, and kidnapping people and transporting them to other countries to be tortured.

Article XXI: Lying to the American people and Congress, with the goal of overthrowing the Iranian government.
Article XXII: Creating secret laws.
Article XXIII: Violating the Posse Comitatus Act
Articles XXIV – XXV: Spying on American citizens in violation of our 4th Amendment.
Article XXVI: Announcing intent to violate duly enacted laws with signing statements.
Article XXVII: Failure to comply with Congressional subpoenas.
Article XXVIII - XXIX: Tampering with free and fair elections and corruption of the administration of justice.
Article XXX: Misleading Congress and the American people in an attempt to destroy Medicare.
Article XXXI: Failure to plan for or adequately respond to Hurricane Katrina.
Article XXXII: Obstructing efforts to address global climate change.

Article XXXIII - XXXV: Failure to respond to the 9/11 attacks on our country; then endangering the health of first responders and obstructing investigation into the attacks.

Failure to hold the Bush administration accountable for their crimes
Despite Congressman Kucinich spelling out the evidence for each of these serious crimes and misdeeds, the U.S. House of Representatives utterly failed to hold the Bush administration accountable for any of them, through impeachment or any other means. The idea that a sitting President would engage in such things was seen as too painful for our nation to bear.

Of all these crimes, the most horrendous were an illegal, immoral and imperial war (Articles I-XIII) and the widespread abuse and torture of our prisoners (Articles XVII-XX). The evidence for these crimes is so clear that it would hardly take an investigation to uncover them. That evidence has been staring us in the face for several years:

The Iraq War
The rationale that the Bush administration used to justify the Iraq war was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ties to al Qaeda that posed a vital threat to our country. Foremost among the WMD threats was Iraq´s alleged nuclear capability, based on their alleged attempt to purchase yellow cake (natural uranium) from Africa and their possession of aluminum tubes alleged for use in the construction of a nuclear weapon. Though these claims were frequently repeated by the Bush administration to Congress and to the American people, it is quite evident that George Bush and Dick Cheney knew all of these claims to be false.

Regarding the yellow cake claims: In March 2002, Joe Wilson, the man who was sent to Niger by Dick Cheney´s office to verify the yellow cake claim, reported that there was no evidence for that claim; our own government´s National Intelligence Estimate stated that "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are highly dubious"; and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told our government on March 3, 2003, that the Niger uranium documents were forgeries.

Regarding the aluminum tube claims: On September 7, 2002 Bush claimed that a new IAEA report stated Iraq was 6 months away from developing a nuclear weapon – though no such report existed; later that same month the Institute for Science and International Security released a report calling the aluminum tube intelligence ambiguous and warning that "U.S. nuclear experts who dissent from the Administration´s position are expected to remain silent…"; and on January 24, 2003, the Washington Post reported that the IAEA stated "It may be technically possible that the tubes could be used to enrich uranium, but you´d have to believe that Iraq…"

And to top it all off, on March 7, 2003, just a few days before Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, the IAEA reported "We have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq." George Bush and Dick Cheney had to have known all of this. Yet they uttered not a word of it to Congress or the American people as they tried to sell their war, as George Bush repeated both claims, and more, in his January 28, 2003 State of the Union speech.

Treatment of our prisoners including torture
Rep. Kucinich sums up the abuse and torture charge in his articles of impeachment:

In a statement on Feb. 7, 2002, President Bush declared that in the US fight against Al Qaeda, "None of the provisions of Geneva apply," thus rejecting the Geneva Conventions that protect captives in wars and other conflicts. By that time, the administration was already transporting captives… to US-run prisons in Afghanistan and to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The round-up and detention without charge of Muslim non-citizens inside the US began almost immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon… The US, on orders of the president, began capturing and detaining without charge alleged terror suspects in other countries and detaining them abroad and at the US Naval base in Guantanamo.

Estimates of how many prisoners have disappeared into the Bush administration´s Gulag system cannot be precise because of the secrecy. Estimates have varied from 8,500 to 35,000. An AP story estimated around 14,000. An ACLU-sponsored 2005 analysis of 44 autopsies, of men who died in our detention facilities, found 21 of the 44 deaths evaluated by autopsy to be homicides – probably only a small fraction of the total amount of Bush administration-sponsored torture-related deaths.

All of these atrocities – the same for which we sentenced Nazi war criminals to death at the Nuremberg trials – were made possible by Bush´s signing of the February 7, 2002 memo declaring that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to his "War on Terror" prisoners. Notwithstanding the fact that Bush had pressured his administration´s lawyers to write legal opinions justifying his actions, the fact remains that violation of the Geneva Conventions, to which the United States is a signatory, is a clear violation of U.S. law. The torture that Bush´s memo unleashed is also a violation of the 8th Amendment to our Constitution. And even the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Bush administration guilty of war crimes in their Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision.


Conclusion

So it is that our nation´s failures to hold criminals at the highest levels of government accountable for their crimes destroys respect for the rule of law and enables more of the same. The United States now has the current world record for per capita rate of imprisonment, standing at 702 per 100,000 persons in 2002, and continuing to increase since that time. But the vast majority of those prisoners are poor and a highly disproportionate number are of minority races.

But when it comes to holding those with wealth and power, and especially those who hold (or held) high public office, accountable for their crimes our leaders suddenly become unconcerned with law and order. Instead they tell us that it would be traumatic to our nation to prosecute them, or that we should look to the future, not the past. In other words, they want us to ignore the crimes of our leaders, with the rationale that they happened in the past. What kind of a criminal justice system is that? That kind of philosophy is more like that of a dictatorship than a government of, by and for the people. Hopefully, sooner than later, the American people will rise up and tell their leaders what they think of that kind of political philosophy.

Iraq insists on US leaving cities by June 30
By ROBERT H. REID, AP
2 hours ago
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In this photo taken Friday, May 1, 2009, a U.S. army soldier belonging to Ba...


BAGHDAD — Iraq's government Monday ruled out allowing U.S. combat troops to remain in Iraqi cities after the June 30 deadline for their withdrawal, despite concern that Iraqi forces cannot cope with the security challenge following a resurgence of bombings in recent weeks.

Asking U.S. forces to stay in the cities, including volatile Mosul in the north, would be embarrassing for Iraq's prime minister, who has staked his political future on claims that the country has turned the corner in the war against Sunni and Shiite extremists.

The departure of heavily armed combat troops from bases inside the cities is important psychologically to many Iraqis, who are eager to regain control of their country after six years of war and U.S. military occupation.

U.S. officials played down the Iraqi decision, with Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman saying it's up to the Iraqi government to request an extension of the U.S. presence in the cities and "we intend to fully abide by" terms of the security agreement.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, told reporters Monday that violence had not risen to a level that would force a change in the withdrawal schedule.

Last month, however, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. Raymond Odierno, said he was worried that Iraqi forces won't be ready to assume full responsibility for Mosul by the end of June.

Privately, some U.S. officers fear the Iraqis may lose control of Mosul within a few months after American forces pull out of Iraq's third largest city, where al-Qaida and other Sunni militants remain active.

The U.S.-Iraq security agreement that took effect this year calls for American combat troops to leave urban areas by the end of June, with all U.S. forces out of the country by the end of 2011.

But a series of high-profile bombings has raised questions whether Iraqi forces can assume more security responsibilities, especially in Mosul.

Nationwide, at least 451 people were killed in political violence last month, compared with 335 in March, 288 in February and 242 in January, according to an Associated Press tally.

Even in Baghdad, where violence is down sharply from levels of two years ago, attacks are continuing.

On Monday, two car bombs exploded almost simultaneously near the Oil Ministry and a police academy, killing at least three people and wounding eight.

Although those casualties were relatively low, the attack was significant because it occurred in a sensitive, well-guarded area in the heart of the Iraqi capital.

The security agreement allows Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to request an extension of the deadlines if he feels Iraqi forces need help. But the prime minister's spokesman said the withdrawal deadlines, including the June 30 date, were "non-extendable."

"These dates cannot be extended and this is consistent with the transfer and handover of responsibility to Iraqi security forces," spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement.

Kurdish officials would prefer to keep U.S. troops in Mosul after the deadline.

"I have doubts about security and stability in Mosul," Kurdish politician Saadi Ahmed Pera said. "Therefore, U.S forces should stay in Mosul until all the pending problems among political groups in the city are solved."

However, many other key Iraqi politicians, including the newly elected leadership in Mosul, oppose keeping U.S. combat troops in urban areas after the June deadline.

Al-Maliki, a Shiite, needs the support of the Sunni leadership in Mosul as he prepares for national elections by the end of the year.

The new governor of the Mosul area told the AP on Monday that the departure of U.S. troops from the city will actually reduce violence, since much of it is directed at the Americans.

"A U.S. withdrawal will reduce the number of targets," Gov. Atheel al-Nujaifi said. "We believe it's important for U.S. troops to stay in camps outside the cities to provide help only if needed."

The requirement to leave the cities applies only to combat troops and not to trainers, advisers and others in noncombat roles. The agreement does not preclude combat soldiers from patrolling in Baghdad, Mosul and other cities from bases outside the city limits.

But prominent Shiite lawmaker Abbas al-Bayati said extending the June 30 deadline would "send the wrong signal to the Iraqi people" that the Americans might remain in the country indefinitely.

"Thus both sides must stand together to fulfill the withdrawal timetable," he said.

U.S. combat troops largely pulled out of many cities in 2005 and 2006 but returned a year later as part of the U.S. troop surge that was designed to protect civilians from Shiite and Sunni extremists living in their neighborhoods.

This time, U.S. and Iraqi officials are gambling that Iraqi security forces are better trained and equipped to prevent the return of extremists than they were years ago.

Extending the deadline would also call into question al-Maliki's claim that his government has set the country on the road to stability — despite the occasional spike in violence.

On Monday, al-Maliki told an audience in Paris that he would not allow Iraq to be used as a "base for any terrorist organization" and that the country was ready for foreign investment.

Nevertheless, U.S. officials believe security in Iraq remains fragile because the various religious and ethnic groups have still not agreed on power-sharing arrangements necessary for long-term stability.

___

Associated Press Writers Mazin Yahya in Baghdad and Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Jenny Barchfield in Paris contributed to this report.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

View Next Article: Afghan president chooses warlord as running mate

Updated at 8:58 PM

Source: OpEdNews

Memo:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/13279605/911-Commission-Memo-...

May 1, 2009 at 06:47:56
Promoted to Headline (H2) on 5/1/09:
Newly Released Memo: Government 'Minders' at 9/11 Commission Interviews 'Intimidated' Witnesses

by Kevin Fenton (Posted by Better World Order) Page 1 of 2 page(s)

www.opednews.com

A recently released 9/11 Commission memo highlights the role of government "minders" who accompanied witnesses interviewed by the commission. It was added to the National Archives´ files at the start of the year and discovered there by History Commons contributor paxvector.

The memo, entitled "Executive Branch Minders´ Intimidation of Witnesses," complains that:

* Minders "answer questions directed at witnesses;"

* Minders acted as "monitors, reporting to their respective agencies on Commission staffs lines of inquiry and witnesses´ verbatim responses." The staff thought this "conveys to witnesses that their superiors will review their statements and may engage in retribution;" and

* Minders "positioned themselves physically and have conducted themselves in a manner that we believe intimidates witnesses from giving full and candid responses to our questions."

The memo was drafted by three staffers on the commission´s Team 2, which reviewed the overall structure of the US intelligence community. One of the drafters was Kevin Scheid, a senior staffer who led the team. His co-writers were Lorry Fenner, an air force intelligence officer, and lawyer Gordon Lederman. The complaint was sent to the commission´s counsels, Daniel Marcus and Steve Dunne, in October 2003, about halfway through the commission´s 19-month life.

Read more: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Newly-Released-Memo-Go...
action is my duty, reward is not my concern

Web guru was potential witness in Ohio voting fraud case
Bill Lueders on Thursday 04/30/2009 ,

Mike Connell had been deposed and was seen as a key witness in a lawsuit alleging voter fraud.
Credit:Shannon Connell

Shannon Connell of Madison says her brother Michael rarely talked about work. She knew he ran an Ohio company called New Media Communications that set up websites for Republicans including former President George H.W. Bush and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. But it wasn't until after he died last December, when the small plane he was piloting crashed, that she learned via the Internet of his tie to a voter fraud case and to allegations that presidential adviser Karl Rove had made threats against him.

"At first, it was really hard for me to believe Mike was dead because somebody wanted him dead," says Shannon, a buyer for a local children's resale shop. "But as time goes on, it's hard for me not to believe there was something deliberate about it."

A native of Illinois, Shannon moved to Madison in 2002, the same year as her sister, Mary Jo Walker. Walker, a former Dane County Humane Society employee, has similar concerns about their brother's death: "It doesn't seem right to me at all."

Michael Connell — who died at age 45, leaving a wife and four kids — was a computer networking expert who lived near Akron. Last July 17, an attorney who's filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging a conspiracy to rig elections in Ohio held a press conference at which he identified Connell as a principal witness.

The attorney, Cliff Arnebeck of Columbus, Ohio, tells Isthmus he doesn't believe Connell was engaged in criminal activity but may have been a "data-processing implementer" for those who were. "I was told he was at the table when some criminal things were discussed."

A week after the press conference, on July 24, Arnebeck wrote U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey seeking protection for Connell, whom he said had been "threatened" by Rove, a key player in the campaigns of George W. Bush. Arenebeck says Connell was told through an intermediary that unless he agreed to "take the fall" for election fraud in Ohio, his wife [and New Media partner] faced prosecution for lobby law violations. There was no claim of a threat on Connell's person.

Arnebeck was permitted to depose Connell last Nov. 3. The portion of this deposition that dealt with the alleged threats was sealed, but Arnebeck is preparing a motion to make it all public. He affirms that Connell denied any involvement in voter fraud, but thinks Rove still had reason to regard him as a threat.

"The problem that Mike Connell represented is [he was] a guy of conscience," says Arnebeck. "If it came right down to it, he would not commit perjury." Arnebeck "absolutely" would have called Connell as a witness in his lawsuit.

Shannon and Mary Jo both say their brother, a devout Catholic, seemed upset in the weeks before his death. Mary Jo feels he was "stressed out and depressed" on his birthday last November; Shannon says he atypically did not respond to an email she'd sent.

On Dec. 19, Connell flew alone in his single-engine Piper Supercub from a small airport near Washington, D.C. The plane crashed on its final approach to his hometown Akron-Canton Airport, between two houses. The cause is still under investigation but is presumed accidental.

The blogosphere refuses to accept this. "Mike was getting ready to talk," writes one online journalist who labels Connell a source. "He was frightened."

Connell's widow has rejected such speculation. "He wasn't about to talk, because there was nothing to talk about," Heather Connell told the Huffington Post. "Nobody did anything wrong."

Shannon Connell, for her part, dismisses reports that her brother was warned not to fly, but still considers the crash that killed him "very suspicious." Michael was an experienced pilot, and his plane had recently been serviced. Plus there's the timing — "after the deposition and before the trial. It just seems very convenient."

Arnebeck goes further in suggesting foul play. "I have been told by multiple sources," he says, "that this plane crash was not an accident, and by multiple sources that the technology is available to bring down a plane in this way."

What's his evidence? Arnebeck repeatedly cites a recent online article by Minnesota emeritus professor Jim Fetzer. The article, datelined Madison and headlined "Has Cheney Been Murdering Americans?", mentions Connell along with other possible victims, including Sen. Paul Wellstone and Pat Tillman, the former NFL player killed in Afghanistan.

Michael Connell's sisters don't know what to believe. Says Shannon, "I really just want the truth to come out." So does Mary Jo, who doubts this will happen: "With so many things that people in power get away with in this country, I don't expect anyone to ever be named, much less prosecuted, in the death of my brother."

Links to referenced articles:

* "One of My Sources Died in a Plane Crash Last Night..." by Larisa Alexandrovna, 12/20/08

* Election Attorney Arnebeck Sent E-mail to Mukasey in July Warning of Threat Against Connell by Oregon Voter Rights Coalition, 12/22/08.

* "Mike Connell Was Warned Not to Fly Before Crash" by Wayne Madsen, Online Journal, 12/22/2008

* "The Intriguing Death of Top GOP Consultant Michael Connell" by Thomas B. Edsall, Huffington Post, 1/25/09

* "Has Cheney Been Murdering Americans?" by Jim Fetzer, OpEdNews, April 12, 2009

* Wikipedia entry on Michael Connell

Tue Apr-28-09 08:19 PM
by david swanson


When Americans get "ethical" these days they ponder the great moral mysteries, like "Is public health coverage fair to insurance companies?" or "If we increase the military budget but reduce one section of it, can the whole world still be safe?" or "Would you still oppose torture if it worked?"

Let me suggest a few reasons why I think that last question is the wrong one.

First, torture DID work. It forced false agreement with war lies, helping to launch a long-desired illegal war. And it persuaded many Americans that some very scary and very foreign people were out to get them, people so scary that they had to be tortured in order to talk with them, people whose every false utterance, aimed at stopping the pain, instead generated color-coded horror warnings.

Second, torture has boosted recruitment for anti-U.S. organizations tremendously, horribly damaged the United States' image, stripped U.S. diplomats of the power to address human rights abuses abroad, as well as stripping U.S. citizens of a clear moral right to protest being tortured, and set an example that has spread far and wide. Torture has brutalized participants and witnesses, and we are all witnesses, and it has destroyed lives both through torture to the point of death and through torture to the point of unbearable life.

Third, if you're going to violate particular laws and treaties, you can either repeal them and leave all the other ones intact, or you can simply proceed criminally, thereby assaulting the whole structure of law, leaving everyone in doubt whether ANY laws will be enforced against important people. Our government has taken the latter approach and redefined crimes as "policy differences," which is why torture is ongoing and no criminal penalty will deter its future expansion or the commission of other crimes of whatever sort by high officials.

Fourth, if torture had produced life-saving information, we would have long since heard that fact shouted from every television studio. In fact, we did hear such claims made. They just all turned out to be fictional. In the latest claim of this sort, torture supposedly produced information on the planned bombing of a building in Los Angeles, and this information was transported back in time to the moment at which investigators had already discovered that proposal and laughed heartily at the then-debunked claim that a serious plot had ever developed. The fact that Dick Cheney is pushing this nonsense on us is not actually a compelling reason to believe it unquestioningly.

Fifth, if torture ever produced life-saving information it would be through sheer luck and not intention. Nobody tortures with that intention, because expert interrogators believe other methods are more effective than torture. And if that lucky day ever came, there would be no basis on which to surmise that other methods would not have been at least as effective as the torture was. So, even if a real ticking time bomb situation could be created, there would be no reason to believe torture to be the best tool. And if you could magically design a situation in which, by definition, torture was the ethical choice, you still would not have created a situation in which ignoring the crime of torture would do less damage than pardoning the torturers.

So, do ends justify means? Is torture just plain wrong even in those cases when it would save more lives than it cost? These are intensely ignorant questions. Ends must always be made to justify any means, but the ends must be understood in their entirety. If one result of an action is damage to the rule of law or exacerbation of international hatred or promotion of senseless fear, that must be part of the calculation. Of course torture would not be wrong in a situation in which, all things considered, it did more good than harm; but that situation cannot be found. Whether you claim to simply adhere to a blanket rule, or you consider all the consequences of your actions, you arrive at the same conclusion: torture must be abolished.

But so must the debate over whether torture must be abolished. Torture is illegal. Our laws must be enforced. Torture's recent prominent use by the United States came about in an attempt to promote a far worse crime than torture, the crime of aggressive war. We should not be asking ourselves whether torture was an acceptable means toward that end. We should be asking ourselves how we can best rid the world of wars of aggression.

http://www.davidswanson.org

Time for change Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Fri Apr-24-09 10:12 PM
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Grow up, America

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We live in a country where telling the hard truth with clarity has become taboo. Its implications are too alarming. Any politician who says aloud what some of them know… is vilified as defeatist or unpatriotic. Many are clueless, of course, and others are too scared to raise forbidden subjects. I understand their silence and I do not forgive them – William Greider, from his new book, "Come Home, America – The Rise and Fall (And Redeeming Promise) of our Country".

Almost two years ago I posted an essay on DU titled "Unmentionable Things in U.S. Politics". I said about these unmentionable things:

Mere mention of these things brings down the wrath of conservative pundits and moderates as well, and even some who consider themselves to be liberal or progressive. The wrath is likely to be so intense that few U.S. politicians dare mention these things because of the risk of being booted out of office – or worse. Three such things are: 1. the stealing of a U.S. presidential election; 2. referring to American military or covert actions as immoral, rather than merely as "misguided"; and, 3. imputing bad intentions, rather than mere incompetence, onto a U.S. president.

Other than being unmentionable, there are two characteristics that these things have in common: 1) They attack the arrogant myth that the United States and its people are so indisputably better than every other nation and people that we have the moral right to impose our will on them, and 2) The major purpose of this myth, as propagated by the American elites, is to maintain the status quo, and along with that, their own wealth and power and place at the top of the food chain in our nation´s hierarchy.

William Greider touches on the American taboo, its importance, and its solution in the first two paragraphs of his book:

We are in much deeper trouble than many people suppose or the authorities want to acknowledge… We must be honest with ourselves, face the hard facts, and put aside some comforting myths. Then, we must find the nerve to take responsibility again for our country and democracy…

I don´t want to argue whether Americans are better or worse than other people. My assumption is that we are no better and no worse, but that in the past several years we have strayed so far from many of our ideals that it is the height of arrogance to believe that we have the moral right to impose our will on the rest of the world. The fact of the matter is that even if it was true that we are better than other people – in intelligence, wisdom, and morality – we would still not have that right. If we are so much better than other people that we have the right to lead them, then we should do so by example, not by military threat and violence. That other nations of the world are deciding more and more not to follow our lead should cause us to rethink our position in the world rather than continue to expand our military to the point of absurdity.


American arrogance

Greider is one of a very few American journalists who has for a long time violated the standard American taboos. He notes the arrogance that pervades the thinking of the American elite and their "super-patriot" followers, as well as the taboo against challenging that arrogance:

We Americans have many outstanding qualities but, let´s face it, humility is not one of them…

When people like me come along and suggest that our claim on sole world leadership is no longer valid and may be dangerous for the country, it sounds to many like heresy, maybe even treason. But I and others like me are arguing from the perspective of a different American tradition – a self-critical and tough-minded tradition that could be called patriotic realism…

A major theme of his book is that we´d better get over this arrogance and find a better way to deal with the world, or else we´re going to pay an awful price for it:

America as "number one" is over. The United States is headed for a fall, a great comeuppance that will impose wrenching changes on our society and deliver humiliating blows to our national pride… In spite of their reluctance to speak of this honestly, I have a sense that many Americans – perhaps most of them – know this is happening…

A nation blinded by the arrogance of its own power may eventually wind up… lunging after delusional solutions and searching for scapegoats to blame…


REASONS FOR U.S. DECLINE

In chapter three, Greider discusses five reasons for the coming fall. I´ll just discuss just four of them here, since, as Greider points out, one of them, globalization, globalization, can be easily compensated for through domestic economic policies.


Militarism

According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the U.S. spent $711 on its military in 2008, which amounted to nearly half of the military spending in the world:




Consequently, Greider´s statement that the uses of our military "have been expanded far beyond the original idea of national defense" should be self evident. Today the major purpose of our military spending is the enrichment of our military industrial complex and the domination of much of the rest of the world.

Our preemptive invasion of Iraq demonstrates this point as well as any. Here was a military action that only the most delusional could honestly characterize as self-defense. Nor was the idea that its purpose was to bring democracy to the Iraqi people any more credible – in light of the million dead Iraqis, four million refugees, and anti-American hatred caused by our invasion and occupation, as demonstrated by this not atypical reaction from an "unknown Iraqi girl":

People are seething with anger… Every newspaper you pick up in Baghdad has pictures of some American or British atrocity or another. It's like a nightmare that has come to life. Everyone knew this was happening in Abu Ghraib and other places… American and British politicians have the audacity to come on television with words like, "True the people in Abu Ghraib are criminals, but…" Everyone here in Iraq knows that there are thousands of innocent people detained… In the New Iraq, it's "guilty until proven innocent"…

Why is no one condemning this? … You've seen the troops break down doors and terrify women and children… curse, scream, push, pull and throw people to the ground with a boot over their head. You've seen troops shoot civilians in cold blood. You've seen them bomb cities and towns. You've seen them burn cars and humans using tanks and helicopters…

I sometimes get emails asking me to propose solutions or make suggestions. Fine. Today's lesson: don't rape, don't torture, don't kill and get out while you can – while it still looks like you have a choice... Chaos? Civil war? Bloodshed? We´ll take our chances – just take your Puppets, your tanks, your smart weapons, your dumb politicians, your lies, your empty promises, your rapists, your sadistic torturers and go.

Yet, there is no acknowledgement of the underlying problem by the American elite. Greider points out:

After the disastrous invasion of Iraq, politicians and policy thinkers argued about whether "mistakes" were made, but very few were willing to oppose the assumption that the United States has the right to invade another country based only on our own justifications….

The end result is that we arouse the hatred of the Muslim world, waste hundreds of billions of dollars to combat that hatred, and ruin our international reputation and standing among former allies – all at the same time. None of this augers well for the future of our nation.


Free market ideology

The presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was characterized by government intervention in the economic life of our country on an unprecedented scale. Those interventions brought our country out of the Great Depression, created the American Middle Class, and led to what Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman calls "the greatest sustained economic boom in U.S. history".

But with the advent of the Reagan Revolution in 1981, characterized by a return to the "free market" ideology of the Gilded Age, the process reversed itself. Since that time, except for a brief respite during the latter years of the Clinton presidency, the income of American workers has been virtually stagnant, despite large increases in American productivity which has greatly enriched the already wealthy.

The reign of "free-market" ideology has been characterized by an ideological ban against government intervention in economic matters to help those who most need it, which has played out domestically and internationally. Greider explains how this played out on the international stage:

The World Trade Organization enforces rules that protect capital investors and corporations, but it has no rules protecting workers and communities, that is, people. The so-called Washington Consensus – a stern dogma imposed on developing countries that borrow from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund preaches that national governments must not try to protect their people from the harsh side effects of capital and commerce. America´s representative democracy, meanwhile, is offered as the model the world should follow, despite the democratic breakdown that Americans well know is in progress….

Greider mentions globalization as another of the factors contributing to the demise of the United States. However, he also notes that other nations are affected by globalization just as much as the United States is, and yet:

The advanced economies of Europe and Asia do not adhere to the economic policy prescriptions of Washington or Wall Street. Japan, Germany, France, and most other successful industrial nations pursue their national interest in the global economy quite differently than the United States does. They also get very different results – including less economic inequality – because their systems shield citizens and society from the harsher effects of market capitalism.

James Galbraith, in his book, "The Predator State", explains why globalization and free trade agreements need not cause serious adverse effects for American workers:

The populist objective is to raise American wages, create American jobs, and increase the fairness and security of our economic system… Is there a better way to do this…? Of course there is – and that is to do it directly. You want higher wages? Raise them. You want more and better jobs? Create them.


The decline of American democracy

With the increasing role of money in politics and the increase in the income gap to unprecedented levels, our elected representatives have become relatively much more focused on serving the needs of wealthy individuals and corporations, to the exclusion of other people. Greider explains:

The political system that allows powerful interests to exercise virtual veto power over major reforms is not a new condition. But the stakes of failure and paralysis are much higher today because the country is on far more dangerous ground… The status quo is stuck, deformed by the concentration of power… We may want to ask ourselves whether the great accumulations of wealth and power actually deliver the "good life" and for whom.

The result has been that the biggest divide in American politics today is no longer between the two major parties:

One crippling divide in American public life is the great gulf between the authority of the government experts and the rest of us. That separation is far more damaging than the much lamented partisan conflict between Democrats and Republicans. Many Americans, and probably most, are effectively disenfranchised – cut out of the democratic process…

Under both Democrats and Republicans, the US government first and foremost promotes and defends the fortunes of America´s multinational corporations and financial firms. If the multinationals are winning in the global competition, then it is assumed that America is winning. That assumption is clearly wrong….


Global environmental crises

The challenges of the environmental crises will affect the whole world. And yet, on a relative scale, they are likely to most severely affect the United States. Greider explains why:

We are particularly vulnerable, first because our society consumes more than any other nation and is wasteful on a bloated scale, and second because the United States lags far behind other advanced nations in developing ways to cope with the well understood imperatives. Global warming is the greatest and most obvious danger, but it is compounded by the overall destruction of nature as industrial capitalism steadily encroaches upon and undermines the finite capacities of the land, air, water, and ecosystems needed to support all life on earth.


THE HEALING POWER OF DEMOCRACY

Greider chooses to take an optimistic viewpoint and believe that our democratic foundations could help to pull us out of our crisis.

It is not that Americans are uniquely virtuous and wise. We definitely are not. We get things terribly wrong and ignore intolerable transgressions. Our saving grace lies in the hope for the self-correction a functioning democracy can achieve when people make themselves heard… Like any other people, we harbor good stuff within us, but also foul qualities that go against our proclaimed values and lead to destructive errors. The human condition is not perfectible. But democracy can alter social arrangements and economic circumstances in ways that help people uncover their better selves….

Therefore, a major theme of Greider´s book is that improving upon our democratic system will be a prerequisite for our salvation. He suggests that we should not hope that an American president will make a big difference.

Our newly elected president´s victory and inauguration have stirred the national spirit… but during the campaign Barack Obama did not stray far from the accepted assumptions about the American condition…. The ominous historical circumstances moving against the nation pose adversities that dwarf any single leader. One damaging myth Americans ought to abandon is the naďve notion that the celebrity power of the presidency can somehow solve our problems… First, the new leader is built up with miraculous powers, then cast down when he fails to prevail…

Consequently, if there is any hope for solving our problems it will have to come from ourselves. The first step is to recognize the problem and be honest about it:

Democracy begins within the self by thinking and saying what we truly feel and believe, even if only among our family members and close friends… It starts with people asking themselves gut-level questions… What are the private dreams you may be too shy to share outside the family? … Talk about… what makes you feel good about being an American. What makes you sad or angry. This is the raw material for thinking like a citizen. If you had the power to change the country for the better, where would you start? …



GROW UP, AMERICA

The title for Greider´s book, "Come Home, America", was borrowed from the George McGovern presidential campaign of 1972, which in turn was borrowed from Martin Luther King. In my opinion, those are two great American heroes, if for no other reason than that they had the courage to talk bluntly about the problems that our nation faced. McGovern suffered through one of the worst presidential election landslides in American history, and King was assassinated. As Greider says, talking about our nation´s faults has never been very popular in this country – as necessary as it may be. But even the phrase "Come home, America" somewhat sugarcoats the reality of the matter. That phrase implies that there was a time when our country came close to achieving its ideals. At the end of chapter four, Greider portrays what is probably a more accurate analogy:

I think a better word for what´s facing America is "maturity". Remember, this country of ours is still quite young as nations go… and we are still developing in many ways… This is a critical stage in human development, and for our nation it could go either way. Some nations that acted like willful children when they were young formed balanced societies when they became adults. Other nations have never really grown up. The question, I think, is whether we can mature as a society. The country can develop a deeper sense of what matters most in life and what doesn´t. It can shed some self-destructive reflexes and acquire a wiser sense of national self-interest that is anchored in the nations´ ideals.

Either we do that, or else we could go through the hell that some older nations went through:

Older societies… possess something Americans typically lack – historical memory. They remember what can happen when utopian ideologies are in the saddle. They experienced the social destruction and moral debauchery that arose when an extreme idea imposed its will. Whole sectors of society were first marginalized and then decimated. Civilized values were destroyed, along with the order of law and individual freedom. It was called fascism…

With modern weaponry and the grave crises facing the world today, that road could mean the end of world civilization as we know it.

===========================================================
PHILANTHROPY NEWS DIGEST
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April 21, 2009
Volume 15, Issue 16

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::::::::::::::::::: IN THEIR OWN WORDS ::::::::::::::::::::

"Foundations can do so much more than simply make grants. The
important thing is for them to remain true to their values and
causes and to stand by their nonprofit partners."

-- Foundation Center president Bradford K. Smith
(Foundation Center Press Release 4/20/09)

::::::::::::::::::::::: IN THE NEWS :::::::::::::::::::::::

The Web version of PND offers abstracts of philanthropy news
items each day. The following are the top stories from the past
week and their date of posting.

1) Nearly Two-Thirds of Foundations Expect to Reduce Grantmaking
in 2009, Report Finds (4/20/09)
2) New Coalition to Monitor Implementation of Education Portion
of Stimulus Package (4/21/09)
3) Ford Foundation Announces New Grantmaking Strategies
(4/15/09)
4) Nonprofits Missing Out on Pro Bono, Volunteer Opportunities,
Survey Finds (4/20/09)
5) Public-Private Partnership Launched to Provide More Afford-
able Malaria Drugs (4/21/09)
6) Illinois Grantmakers Launch Census Participation Initiative
(4/19/09)
7) 2009 Goldman Environmental Prize Winners Announced (4/21/09)
8) Jeff Skoll Launches $100 Million Organization to Be Led by
Former Google.org Executive (4/16/09)
9) Community Foundation Update (4/18/09)
10) People in the News (4/19/09)

:::::::::::::::::::::: MORE NEWS ::::::::::::::::::::::::::

11) MacArthur Foundation Announces Winners of 2009 Digital Media
and Learning Competition (4/17/09)
12) X Prize Foundation, WellPoint Unveil Proposed Competition
Design for Healthcare X Prize (4/19/09)
13) Massachusetts Nonprofits Turn to Mergers to Survive (4/16/09)
14) Colleges, Universities Shift Fundraising Strategy (4/17/09)
15) Carnegie Corporation Announces 2009 Carnegie Scholars
(4/15/09)
16) Dell Foundation Names 2009 Dell Scholars (4/15/09)
17) Poetry Foundation Awards Prizes for Lifetime Accomplishments,
Poetry Criticism (4/19/09)
18) HHMI to Award up to $85 Million to Transform Undergraduate
Science Teaching (4/16/09)
19) 'Mystery Gifts' Totaling $45 Million Bestowed on Nine Uni-
versities (4/18/09)
20) Pohlad Family Foundation Pledges Up to $20 Million to Help
Minnesota Businesses, Families (4/17/09)
21) Grady Hospital Receives $20 Million to Improve Trauma, Brain
Injury Care (4/21/09)
22) Weinberg Foundation Awards $8.2 Million for Family and
Informal Caregivers (4/20/09)
23) Gates Foundation Awards $5 Million for Campaign to Increase
Support for Public Libraries (4/17/09)
24) Sloan Consortium Receives $4 Million From Sloan Foundation to
Become Independent Proponent of Online Education (4/16/09)

-------------------------<<>>------------------------------

1) Nearly Two-Thirds of Foundations Expect to Reduce Grantmaking
in 2009, Report Finds (4/20/09)

According to a new research advisory from the Foundation Center
( http://foundationcenter.org/ ), nearly two-thirds of foundations
expect to reduce the number or the size of grants they award in
2009.

Based on a recent survey of more than 1,200 U.S. foundations, the
advisory, Foundations Address the Impact of the Economic Crisis,
found that more than half of respondents are reacting to the eco-
nomic crisis by engaging in more non-grantmaking activities, with
two-thirds of those foundations planning to pursue collaborations
and partnerships in 2009 and about a third indicating that they
will initiate more convenings. At least 20 percent of funders
said they expect to engage in more foundation staff-led activi-
ties, provide more technical assistance, offer more bridge/emer-
gency financing, or engage in more advocacy.

Funded in part by the Wallace Foundation, the report also found
that organizations seeking new sources of support and recently
established entities will be especially challenged in securing
foundation funding. Approximately 40 percent of foundations said
they expect to draw at least in part on their endowments to fund
grants this year, while roughly 14 percent either have made or
plan to make exceptional grants or launch special initiatives in
response to the economic crisis, largely by reallocating their
existing grants budgets. In addition, nearly a third of respon-
dents said they made operational changes as a result of the
2000-02 economic downturn that they believe prepared them to face
the current downturn.

"Foundations can do so much more than simply make grants," said
Foundation Center president Bradford K. Smith. "The important
thing is for them to remain true to their values and causes and
to stand by their nonprofit partners."

The advisory is the latest in a series released as part of the
Foundation Center's Focus on the Economic Crisis project, which
offers a variety of resources to help nonprofits and foundations
deal with the challenges of the unstable economy.

"Close to Two-Thirds of Foundations Expect to Reduce Their Grants
in 2009." Foundation Center Press Release 4/20/09.

http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017827/story

-------------------------<<>>------------------------------

2) New Coalition to Monitor Implementation of Education Portion
of Stimulus Package (4/21/09)

The Aspen Institute has announced that its bipartisan Commission
on No Child Left Behind and more than thirty education, business,
civil rights, and philanthropic organizations have joined forces
to launch the Coalition for Student Achievement
( http://www.coalitionforstudentachievement.org/ ), which will
work to ensure that the government's $100 billion investment in
education through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
(ARRA) yields needed reforms and results in significant, lasting
gains in student achievement.

The coalition will monitor the implementation of ARRA while sup-
porting local, state, and federal leaders as they work to meet
the law's requirements to boost teacher effectiveness, improve
academic standards and tests, upgrade data capabilities for
measuring student and teacher performance, and more effectively
intervene in struggling schools. To that end, the organization
sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan urging
him to push states and districts to use the funds to leverage
fundamental changes to the system and ensure that all children
receive an excellent education.

In addition, the coalition recommended that the U.S. Department
of Education give strong, clear direction to states and districts
about how to achieve and measure reforms and develop mechanisms
to make their progress in meeting these challenges more trans-
parent.

In order to receive funding through ARRA, governors must commit
to advancing a series of key reforms such as creating a robust
P-16 data system that tracks individual student performance and
fosters continuous improvement; designing and implementing high-
quality assessments of student learning; placing the best teach-
ers in the most challenging schools; and intervening effectively
in chronically low-performing schools. According to Commission
on No Child Left Behind director Gary Huggins, "the commission
believes that progress on these reforms, which mirror our recom-
mendations for improving NCLB, is critical in setting the stage
for an effective reauthorization of that law."

For a complete list of coalition members, visit the Aspen Insti-
tute Web site.

"Commission Joins New Coalition to Support Bold Action on Stimu-
lus Education Reforms." Aspen Institute Press Release 4/17/09.

http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017828/story

-------------------------<<>>------------------------------

3) Ford Foundation Announces New Grantmaking Strategies
(4/15/09)

The Ford Foundation ( http://fordfound.org/ ) has announced a
number of organizational changes and a comprehensive set of new
strategies aimed at creating fairness and equity for people
around the globe.

The changes were determined after a year-long evaluation process
spearheaded by Ford's president, Luis A. Ubińas, during which the
foundation gathered input from some two thousand individuals and
organizations across the many regions it serves. Under the new
plan, Ford will focus its grantmaking in eight areas: access to
education; democratic, accountable government; economic fairness
and opportunity; freedom of expression; human rights; natural
resources and sustainable development; sexuality and reproductive
health and rights; and social-justice philanthropy. The new prior-
ities are scheduled to go into full effect in October, when the
foundation begins its 2010 fiscal year.

According to the New York Times, thirty-five projects within each
area will be implemented collaboratively by teams of Ford Founda-
tion staff, marking a shift from individually directed initiatives
that once numbered more than two hundred. The foundation antici-
pates that each regional office will focus on four to six of the
new programs.

In a statement on the foundation's Web site, Ubińas said Ford's
recent efforts have resulted in a profound recommitment to the
mission and values that have long defined the foundation. "This
recommitment is expressed in a comprehensive set of new strate-
gies aimed at creating fairness and equity for people everywhere.
It is our intention to make certain that the objectives of our
programs are clear, that our grantmaking approaches are oriented
to a changing world and that our contributions help bring about
real and lasting change in people's lives."

Strom, Stephanie. "New Leader Overhauls Ford Foundation."
New York Times 4/13/09.

"Our Next Generation of Strategies." Ford Foundation Announcement
4/14/09.

http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017829/story

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an increased demand for services and keep your programs running
smoothly in tough economic times. Only FDO PROFESSIONAL provides
funder portfolios packed with important facts, continuously up-
dated. You'll find abstracts from our PHILANTHROPY NEWS DIGEST,
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-------------------------<<>>------------------------------

4) Nonprofits Missing Out on Pro Bono, Volunteer Opportunities,
Survey Finds (4/20/09)

Nonprofits and corporations are overlooking an opportunity to
leverage pro bono and skilled volunteer support to offset a
decline in corporate giving dollars, a new survey from New York
City-based Deloitte ( http://www.deloitte.com/ ) finds.

According to the 2009 Deloitte Volunteer IMPACT Survey, nearly
40 percent of nonprofit executives said that, despite the reces-
sion, they will spend between $50,000 and $250,000 or more on
outside contractors and consultants this year, while 24 percent
said they have no plans to use skilled volunteers or pro bono
support in any capacity. While 35 percent of nonprofits and
26 percent of corporations have no one in charge of volunteer
management and employee volunteer programs, respectively, 17 per-
cent of corporations have no employee volunteer program at all.

The survey suggests that the slow adoption of skilled volunteer
services has been due in part to a widespread lack of knowledge
among nonprofits when it comes to securing pro bono projects.
Nearly all nonprofits surveyed (97 percent) did not know who in
a company to approach with pro bono requests, while 95 percent
did not know which companies to appeal to with such a request.

"The current economic crisis and the new administration's na-
tional call for service underscores the need for corporations
and nonprofits alike to broaden their definition of corporate
giving," said Deloitte CEO Barry Salzberg. "Nonprofits and cor-
porations are encouraged to think of pro bono and skill-based
volunteerism as a valuable form of currency. It is an opportun-
ity to more fully maximize corporate assets, especially when
demand for nonprofit services are on the rise and corporate
giving is on the decline."

"Pro Bono as Currency: Deloitte Survey Finds Nonprofits and Cor-
porations Missing Opportunity to Offset Decline in Giving Dol-
lars." Deloitte Press Release 4/14/09.

http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017830/story

-------------------------<<>>------------------------------

5) Public-Private Partnership Launched to Provide More Afford-
able Malaria Drugs (4/21/09)

Roll Back Malaria ( http://www.rollbackmalaria.org/ ), a public-
private partnership, has announced the launch of a multimillion-
dollar initiative to provide affordable malaria drugs for
millions of people, especially children, in sub-Saharan Africa
and Asia.

Managed by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and
Malaria, the new Affordable Medicines Facility for Malaria
initiative is designed to reduce the price of effective malaria
drugs and drive older, ineffective drugs out of the market. In
the first two years of the initiative, between $225 million and
$233 million in funding will be provided by the government of
the United Kingdom and UNITAID, a partnership of twenty-seven
countries, with additional support provided by other Roll Back
Malaria members.

The initiative initially will serve Benin, Cambodia, Ghana, Kenya,
Madagascar, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda
and may be expanded to more countries after two years. According
to Britain's international development minister Ivan Lewis, the
initiative could save up to 300,000 lives a year.

Over the past few years, effective malaria medicines called ACTs
have been made available for free in public health clinics,
which, combined with efforts to distribute mosquito bed nets,
have led to a significant drop in malaria deaths in several Afri-
can nations. However, most people in developing nations only have
access to local market stalls and private pharmacies, where ACTs
are ten to forty times more expensive than older drugs that have
largely lost their effectiveness. Currently, only one in five
patients treated for malaria has access to ACTs.

"This partnership is an important part of the global effort to
control malaria worldwide," said Global Fund executive director
Michel Kazatchkine. "There is no reason any child should die of
malaria anymore. We have insecticide-impregnated bed nets to pro-
tect families from mosquitoes and effective drugs to treat those
who do fall ill. Now we only need to ensure that all who need
these things get them. This is a very wise investment in global
health -- and therefore in global development."

"$225 Million Partnership to Bring Effective Malaria Drugs to All
Who Need Them." Roll Back Malaria Press Release 4/17/09.

http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017831/story

-------------------------<<>>------------------------------

6) Illinois Grantmakers Launch Census Participation Initiative
(4/19/09)

Ten Illinois grantmakers have announced a joint $1 million ini-
tiative to improve 2010 census participation in hard-to-count,
poor, minority, rural, and high-rise communities.

Funded by Boeing, the Chicago Community Trust, the Woods Fund of
Chicago, and the Joyce, Chicago Bar, Grand Victoria, John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur, Lloyd A. Fry, Steans Family, and Polk
Bros. foundations, the Count Me In initiative will fund projects
to increase the return of completed census forms through public
education campaigns, communications, community outreach, training,
special events, and organizing. Since census data help determine
the distribution of roughly $400 billion a year in federal funds,
Illinois residents not counted in next year's census will cost
the state $12,000 each in lost funding over the next decade.

Although low-income, immigrant, minority, and rural communities
have historically been undercounted in the once-a-decade census,
achieving an accurate count could be further complicated this
year by the ailing economy. Potential challenges include a re-
duction in federal funds available for census awareness efforts,
an increase in families living in temporary quarters due to the
foreclosure crisis, and large increases since 2000 in hard-to-
count populations in the Chicago metropolitan area.

"The 2010 census will profoundly impact the lives of all Illinois
residents because it will determine spending on education, employ-
ment, public safety, the environment, and a host of other issues,
not to mention bedrock democracy issues like the size of the
state's congressional delegation," said Joyce Foundation president
Ellen S. Alberding. "The census truly has the potential to advance
or delay progress in a number of areas all across the state."

"$1 Million Will Bolster Local 2010 Census Participation." Joyce
Foundation Press Release 4/08/09.

http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017832/story

-------------------------<<>>------------------------------

7) 2009 Goldman Environmental Prize Winners Announced (4/21/09)

The 2009 Goldman Environmental Prize
( http://www.goldmanprize.org/ ) has been awarded to seven grass-
roots activists from around the world who are challenging govern-
ment and corporate interests and working to improve the environ-
ment and living conditions for people in their communities.

The recipients of this year's $150,000 prize are Maria Gunnoe
(United States), who fights mountaintop removal mining and valley
fill operations in West Virginia; Marc Ona Essangui (Gabon), who
has led efforts to expose the unlawful agreements behind a mining
development project that threatens rainforest ecosystems; Rizwana
Hasan (Bangladesh), who works to increase government regulation
and heighten public awareness about the dangers of ship breaking;
Olga Speranskaya (Russia), who works to identify and eliminate
the Soviet legacy of toxic chemicals in the environment; Yuyun
Ismawati (Indonesia), who has led efforts to provide employment
opportunities to low-income people and empower them to improve
the environment; and Wanze Eduards and Hugo Jabini (Suriname),
who successfully organized their communities against logging on
traditional lands, ultimately leading to a landmark ruling that
will help indigenous and tribal peoples throughout the Americas
fight resource exploitation.

"This group of Goldman Prize recipients are as impressive as
ever, taking on seemingly insurmountable struggles and achieving
success," said Goldman Prize founder Richard N. Goldman. "In
this, our twentieth year, we are pleased to bring attention to
their courageous work."

"Seven Grassroots Leaders Win World-Renowned Goldman
Environmental Prize." Goldman Environmental Prize Press Release
4/19/09.

http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017833/story

-------------------------<<>>------------------------------

8) Jeff Skoll Launches $100 Million Organization to Be Led by
Former Google.org Executive (4/16/09)

The Skoll Foundation ( http://www.skollfoundation.org/ ) has
announced that its founder and chairman, Jeff Skoll, has given
$100 million to launch an organization that will work to address
urgent threats confronting humanity and the planet. The new orga-
nization will be led by Larry Brilliant, the founding executive
director of Google.org ( http://www.google.org/ ).

Chaired by Jeff Skoll, the Skoll Urgent Threats Fund will focus
on identifying and supporting innovative, high-impact initiatives
to combat climate change, water scarcity, pandemics, nuclear
proliferation, and Middle East conflict. Brilliant will work to
develop the new organization's strategy and investment approach
while serving as senior adviser to Skoll to ensure alignment
across the latter's business and philanthropic efforts, which
include social business ventures Participant Media and Capricorn
Investment Group.

Brilliant recently left Google.org to become vice president and
chief philanthropy evangelist at the organization's parent com-
pany, Google. Renowned for his key role with the World Health
Organization in helping to eradicate smallpox in Asia, Brilliant
has served on the Skoll Foundation board since 2007.

According to the New York Times, the foundation has partnered
with Google.org to give $11 million to the Global Viral Forecast-
ing Initiative to identify viruses in Africa and other regions
around the globe.

"This is an extraordinary opportunity for me to bring my life's
work and experience to join with so many others who feel the
urgency of the times to work on the most critical challenges
facing us as global citizens," said Brilliant. "Jeff Skoll is
a tremendously innovative proponent of social change, creating
a unique, powerful, and diverse set of both philanthropic and
business tools to promote change. I look forward to working
closely with him, the Skoll Foundation, and his business ven-
tures to make sure we're as effective as we can be in changing
course for our children's future."

"Dr. Larry Brilliant Joins Jeff Skoll to Combat Global Chal-
lenges." Skoll Foundation Press Release 4/14/09.

http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017834/story

-------------------------<<>>------------------------------

9) Community Foundation Update (4/18/09)

Alaska

The Anchorage-based Alaska Community Foundation has announced
thirty-three grants totaling $1 million from the recently estab-
lished Pebble Fund. The first grants from the fund will support
nonprofit groups, schools, villages, and tribal councils in the
Bristol Bay area working to address renewable resources, energy,
education, and community and economic development.

Arkansas

The Mountain Home-based Twin Lakes Community Foundation has
awarded grants totaling almost $15,000 from its Giving Tree
Endowment, an unrestricted fund established with the help of
the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation Partner's Pro-
gram, the Baxter Bulletin reports. Recipients include the Black
Stallion Literacy Project at Norfork Elementary School, the
School of New Hope, and the Marion County Single Parent Scholar-
ship Fund.

California

The Marin Community Foundation has awarded $93,000 to the Marga-
ret Todd Senior Center for its Novato Independent Elders Program,
the Marin Independent Journal reports. The grant will provide
$65,000 for salaries and $28,000 for incidental expenses. The
program, which provides services such as grocery delivery and
home yard work to seniors who still live in their homes, had been
targeted for elimination.

Indiana

The Corydon-based Harrison County Community Foundation has re-
ceived approval from county commissioners to provide up to
$9 million toward the planned $14 million conversion of the old
county hospital for use as government offices, the Louisville
Courier-Journal reports. To avoid taking on debt for the project,
the commissioners reached a tentative deal with the foundation
to repay the grant from the county's casino profit-sharing money.

Kentucky

The Lexington-based Blue Grass Community Foundation has announced
that president and CEO Anne E. Nash is resigning, effective June
3, 2009.

Michigan

The Eight Mile Boulevard Association has announced a two-year,
$65,000 grant from the Detroit-based Community Foundation for
Southeast Michigan to implement an Eight Mile Corridor Keeper
program that will address public safety, urban blight, and code
violations along the corridor.

Washington

The Kitsap Community Foundation has announced more than $50,000
in grants, including $8,822 to the Port Orchard Rotary Founda-
tion, $2,500 to God's Kitchen Family of God Lutheran Church,
and $2,500 to the Central Kitsap Food Bank.

Wisconsin

An independent report commissioned by Wisconsin Governor Jim
Doyle and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett to examine the financial
state of the Milwaukee Public Schools has found opportunities for
savings that could total $100 million a year. Funded in part by
the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, the study focused on costs
savings in non-instructional areas and did not examine educa-
tional performance.

------

"Bristol Bay Nonprofits Awarded $1 Million From Pebble Fund."
Alaska Community Foundation Press Release 4/01/09.

Fletcher, Janice. "Twin Lakes Community Foundation Announces
Grants." Baxter Bulletin 4/15/09.

"Marin Community Foundation Grants Help Save Novato Seniors Prog-
ram." Marin Independent Journal 4/09/09.

Schneider, Grace. "Harrison Moves to Renovate Hospital." Louis-
ville Courier-Journal 4/07/09.

"Blue Grass Community Foundation Announces Resignation of CEO,
Anne Nash." Blue Grass Community Foundation Press Release
4/15/09.

"$65,000 Community Foundation Grant to Fund Eight Mile Code En-
forcement." Model D Media 4/14/09.

"KCF Grant Recipients." Kitsap Community Foundation Press Release
4/14/09.

"Independent Study of MPS Finances Reveals Possible Savings, Im-
provements." Greater Milwaukee Foundation Press Release 4/10/09.

http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017835/story

-------------------------<<>>------------------------------

10) People in the News (4/19/09)

The Flinn Foundation in Phoenix, Arizona, has named JACK B.
JEWETT as president and CEO.

The Los Angeles-based California Endowment has appointed BARBARA
RAYMOND as program director for policy, communication, and
strategy.

The Pittsburgh-based Heinz Endowments has named PHILIP JOHNSON as
senior program officer in its environment section.

The California Institute of Technology has named PETER DECOURCY
HERO as vice president for development and alumni relations.

In other news, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Schol-
ars of the Smithsonian Institution will present the Woodrow Wil-
son Award for Public Service to BARBARA WALTERS, and the Woodrow
Wilson Award for Corporate Citizenship to ROBERT WOOD JOHNSON IV,
in May.

-----

"Flinn Foundation Elects New President and CEO." Flinn Foundation
Press Release 4/13/09.

"The California Endowment Appoints Program Director for Policy,
Communications & Strategy." California Endowment Press Release
4/13/09.

"Environmental Health Scientist Appointed Senior Officer." Heinz
Endowments Press Release 4/13/09.

"Peter Hero Named Vice President for Development and Alumni
Relations." California Institute of Technology Press Release
4/16/09

"Awards Dinner Will Honor Barbara Walters and Robert Wood Johnson
IV in New York City." Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars Press Release 4/13/09.

http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017836/story

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::::::::::::::::::::::: MORE NEWS :::::::::::::::::::::::::

11) MacArthur Foundation Announces Winners of 2009 Digital Media
and Learning Competition (4/17/09)
http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017837/story

12) X Prize Foundation, WellPoint Unveil Proposed Competition
Design for Healthcare X Prize (4/19/09)
http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017838/story

13) Massachusetts Nonprofits Turn to Mergers to Survive (4/16/09)
http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017839/story

14) Colleges, Universities Shift Fundraising Strategy (4/17/09)
http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017840/story

15) Carnegie Corporation Announces 2009 Carnegie Scholars
(4/15/09)
http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017841/story

16) Dell Foundation Names 2009 Dell Scholars (4/15/09)
http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017842/story

17) Poetry Foundation Awards Prizes for Lifetime Accomplishments,
Poetry Criticism (4/19/09)
http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017843/story

18) HHMI to Award up to $85 Million to Transform Undergraduate
Science Teaching (4/16/09)
http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017844/story

19) 'Mystery Gifts' Totaling $45 Million Bestowed on Nine Uni-
versities (4/18/09)
http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017845/story

20) Pohlad Family Foundation Pledges Up to $20 Million to Help
Minnesota Businesses, Families (4/17/09)
http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017846/story

21) Grady Hospital Receives $20 Million to Improve Trauma, Brain
Injury Care (4/21/09)
http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017847/story

22) Weinberg Foundation Awards $8.2 Million for Family and In-
formal Caregivers (4/20/09)
http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017848/story

23) Gates Foundation Awards $5 Million for Campaign to Increase
Support for Public Libraries (4/17/09)
http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017849/story

24) Sloan Consortium Receives $4 Million From Sloan Foundation to
Become Independent Proponent of Online Education (4/16/09)
http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/pnd/15017850/story


:::::::::::::::::::: THIS WEEK IN PND :::::::::::::::::::::

NPO SPOTLIGHT: World Affairs Councils of America

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to engage and educate Americans on international affairs and
foreign policy....

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In an April 21 article, Politico reporter Carrie Budoff Brown advanced a false comparison by Richard Scott, chairman of Conservatives for Patients' Rights (CPR), between the public health insurance option supported by President Obama and the health care systems in Canada and Great Britain. In the article -- a profile and interview of Scott -- Budoff Brown also uncritically quoted Scott's repeated suggestion that the public option is tantamount to a "government-run system" or "single-payer" system, echoing the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee's claim that "the government-run plan option is the Trojan horse in health care reform" because it would inevitably lead to single-payer health insurance.

The previous week, Budoff Brown wrote a Politico article allowing former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich to attack the public health insurance option without noting that the group he founded, Center for Health Transformation, is a for-profit entity that receives annual membership fees from several major health insurance companies, which have a direct interest in whether a public insurance plan is part of health care reform.

In her April 21 article, Budoff Brown reported that Scott's group is "trying to discredit the public insurance option." She added that the group "will release a documentary illustrating what [Scott] describes as the perils of public health care in Great Britain and Canada" and that "[t]he film will feature people affected by the Canadian and British health care systems." But she did not note that Obama has explicitly rejected adopting the British and Canadian models or that the public option supported by the White House is fundamentally different than the health care systems provided in Canada and the United Kingdom. According to the White House website's Health Care agenda, the administration aims to "[e]stablish a National Health Insurance Exchange with a range of private insurance options as well as a new public plan based on benefits available to members of Congress that will allow individuals and small businesses to buy affordable health coverage" [emphasis added]. Indeed, when asked, "Why can we not have a universal health care system, like many European countries, where people are treated based on needs rather than financial resources?" during a March 26 online town hall discussion, Obama rejected such a system:

OBAMA: Now, the question is, if you're going to fix it, why not do a universal health care system like the European countries? I actually want a universal health care system; that is our goal. I think we should be able to provide health insurance to every American that they can afford and that provides them high quality.

So I think we can accomplish it. Now, whether we do it exactly the way European countries do or Canada does is a different question, because there are a variety of ways to get to universal health care coverage.

A lot of people think that in order to get universal health care, it means that you have to have what's called a single-payer system of some sort. And so Canada is the classic example: Basically, everybody pays a lot of taxes into the health care system, but if you're a Canadian, you're automatically covered. And so you go in -- England has a similar -- a variation on this same type of system. You go in and you just say, "I'm sick," and somebody treats you, and that's it.

[...]

OBAMA: [W]hat evolved in America was an employer-based system. It may not be the best system if we were designing it from scratch. But that's what everybody is accustomed to. That's what everybody is used to. It works for a lot of Americans. And so I don't think the best way to fix our health care system is to suddenly completely scrap what everybody is accustomed to and the vast majority of people already have. Rather, what I think we should do is to build on the system that we have and fill some of these gaps.

Additionally, Budoff Brown did not challenge Scott's suggestion that the public option is equivalent to a "government-run system" or "single-payer" health care. She quoted Scott saying: "'If we are going to have a government-run health care system, how does that impact individuals?'" Budoff Brown also did not challenge Scott when, in response to the question, "Would you be satisfied with the status quo if Congress fails to pass a health reform bill this year," Scott said: "If the option is a government-run system or the status quo, I will take the status quo. ... If you're going to single-payer vs. the status quo, I think most Americans are going to pick the status quo."

At no point did Budoff Brown note that the public option is not tantamount to either government-run health care or a single-payer system. As the White House's website makes clear, a public plan would compete side by side with private plans.

Scott's suggestion that the public option is equivalent to government-run health care or a single-payer system echoes the argument made in a March 24 release from the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, "A Government-Run 'Public' Health Insurance Plan: Why Doctors, Hospitals, and Patients Will Lose," that "the government-run plan option is the Trojan horse in health care reform." According to the release:

Advocates of a single payer system have stridently argued for its inclusion in a health care reform proposal because they understand that a government-run plan is the gateway to a government-run system. ... Inevitably, the government-run plan will take over the market for health insurance, leaving room for only the government-run plan making health care decisions dictated from Washington.

Budoff Brown also did not note that Scott has previously made false claims about health care proposals supported by Obama and congressional Democrats.

From Budoff Brown's April 21 article, "A conservative health care champion":

Within a month, Scott's Conservatives for Patients' Rights will release a documentary illustrating what he describes as the perils of public health care in Great Britain and Canada. He's trying to discredit the public insurance option, an idea supported by many Democrats that would force private insurers to compete with a government plan.

"If we are going to have a government-run health care system, how does that impact individuals?" Scott asked last week in an interview. "What is it like, what are the issues you deal with? And on other side, what are the benefits?"

The film will feature people affected by the Canadian and British health care systems, Scott said, and the interviews will "most likely" make it into TV ads.

Proponents of the public plan say comparisons between U.S. and foreign health care won't resonate at a time when many Americans are desperate for lower insurance costs. Not to mention, there are plenty of horror stories to highlight about health care in this country, they say.

The focus on foreign health care marks the next phase in a six-week-old effort to shape the debate by Scott, a wealthy health care entrepreneur from Florida. A Scott aide has circulated a Daily Mail story about British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologizing in March for conditions at a government-run hospital, which had 400 unexplained deaths.

[...]

Would you be satisfied with the status quo if Congress fails to pass a health reform bill this year?

If the option is a government-run system or the status quo, I will take the status quo. ... If you're going to single-payer vs. the status quo, I think most Americans are going to pick the status quo.

—M.W.

Summary: Brian Williams reported that "The New York Times led the way with five [Pulitzer Prizes], including awards for breaking news and international reporting" but did not note that the Times' David Barstow won for his reporting on the connection between numerous media military analysts and the Pentagon and defense industries.

On the April 20 edition of NBC's Nightly News, reporting on the awarding of the 2009 Pulitzer Prizes earlier that day, anchor Brian Williams stated that "The New York Times led the way with five, including awards for breaking news and international reporting." But Williams did not note that the Times' David Barstow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting that day "for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended." Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented the unwillingness of the major broadcast networks, including NBC, to report on Barstow's April 20, 2008, Times article. Moreover, NBC joined ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC in reportedly declining to participate in a segment based on Barstow's article that aired on the April 24, 2008, edition of PBS' NewsHour.

In an April 29 post on his MSNBC.com blog, Williams responded to Barstow's April 20 article, describing NBC News analyst military analyst Barry R. McCaffrey and Wayne Downing, who died in July 2007, as "honest brokers" and writing that McCaffrey and Downing were "warriors-turned-analysts, not lobbyists or politicians":

All I can say is this: these two guys never gave what I considered to be the party line. They were tough, honest critics of the U.S. military effort in Iraq. If you've had any exposure to retired officers of that rank (and we've not had any five-star Generals in the modern era) then you know: these men are passionate patriots. In my dealings with them, they were also honest brokers. I knew full well whenever either man went on a fact-finding mission or went for high-level briefings. They never came back spun, and never attempted a conversion. They are warriors-turned-analysts, not lobbyists or politicians.

Media Matters documented that between January 1, 2002, and May 13, 2008, the military analysts named in Barstow's article collectively appeared or were quoted as experts more than 4,500 times on ABC, ABC News Now, CBS, CBS Radio Network, NBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, and NPR in segments covering the Iraq war both before and after the invasion, as well as numerous other national security or government policy issues. Five of the analysts named in Barstow's article appeared on NBC:

Military analyst


Networks


Number of appearances identified by Media Matters

Barry R. McCaffrey


NBC, MSNBC, CNBC


642

Rick Francona


NBC, MSNBC, CNBC


296

Wayne A. Downing


NBC, MSNBC, CNBC


270

Kenneth Allard


NBC, MSNBC, CNBC


180

Montgomery Meigs


NBC, MSNBC, CNBC


125

Neither the CBS Evening News nor ABC's World News reported on the Pulitzer Prizes during their April 20 broadcasts.

From the April 20 broadcast of NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams:

WILLIAMS: The Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and the arts were awarded today. The New York Times led the way with five, including awards for breaking news and international reporting. Las Vegas Sun won for the public service category for its reporting on construction-worker deaths in that city. Best commentary went to Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, who, of course, was an on-air commentator for us on MSNBC all through the election season and continues to be. And the award for best biography went to Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek magazine, for his book American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.

—M.G.
Comments (26) - Join the Discussion

http://hosted.law.wisc.edu/wilj/issues/23/4/fricchione.pdf

Do you know your USA government are responsible for the development
of these groups?

Do your research. Stop these actions.

1.
Three charged in gangland-style murder of Suncruz founder 'Gus ...
Sep 27, 2005 ... The Gus Boulis murder case ... Abramoff was once a close associate of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and raised thousands of ...
www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-927boulismurder,0,6594337.story - 85k - Cached - Similar pages
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MichaelMoore.com : Three Men Allegedly Killed 'Gus' Boulis, Who ...
Sep 27, 2005 ... Three Men Allegedly Killed 'Gus' Boulis, Who Sold A Casino Cruise ... Tom DeLay (Tex.) and Robert W. Ney (Ohio) and members of their staffs ...
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3.
Three charged in gangland-style murder of Suncruz founder 'Gus ...
Three charged in gangland-style murder of Suncruz founder 'Gus' Boulis ... Abramoff was once a close associate of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, ...
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4.
DownWithTyranny!: WILL ABRAMOFF ALSO GET NAILED FOR MURDER? AND IF ...
Around that same time, in 2000, he was also tricking Gus Boulis out of his ... a former spokesman for Tom DeLay, and a business partner of Abramoff-- placed ...
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5.
Adventures of Jack Abramoff -- An Ugly Story
Nov 6, 2005 ... Tom DeLay says he had nothing to do with the mob-style execution of casino fleet founder Gus Boulis, Abramoff probably wasn't turning ...
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6.
Online NewsHour: Lobbyist Abramoff Pleads Guilty in Miami ...
Jan 4, 2006 ... Fort Lauderdale police still have their eye on Adam Kadan has far as whether or not he may have ordered the killing of Gus Boulis. ...
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7.
Three arrested in gangland-style murder of Suncruz founder 'Gus ...
61 posts - 40 authors - Last post: Sep 30, 2005
6 murder of millionaire businessman Gus Boulis, SunCruz Casinos made ..... Tom DeLay (Tex.) and Robert W. Ney (Ohio) and their staffs as he ...
www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1809114 - 240k - Cached - Similar pages
8.
Re: The Mafia Hit on Gus Boulis After His Lawsuit Against Casino ...
6,2001 Gus Boulis left his office in Fort Lauderdale about 9:30 ... Abramoff is one of the closest and dearest friends of Tom DeLay. ...
newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Alt/alt.true-crime/2006-01/msg04281.html - 13k - Cached - Similar pages
9.
Man Accused In Gus Boulis Hit May Be Released - Miami News Story ...
Sep 12, 2006 ... Gus Boulis, 51, was gunned down in the streets of Fort ... He is a key figure in investigations involving House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. ...
www.justnews.com/news/9828500/detail.html - 83k - Cached - Similar pages
10.
Talking Points Memo | August 7, 2005 - August 13, 2005 Archives
Yet more backstory on Jack Abramoff, Adam Kidan and Gus Boulis and the unfortunate ..... Tom DeLay. A congressional inquiry revealed that Abramoff, ...
www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_08_07.php - 119k - Cached - Similar pages

A call-to-arms from Don Siegelman
Posted by mcmApril 7, 2009

Dear Supporter,
I need your help on a critical issue. Time is of the essence. I´m asking that you email influential editors and Attorney General Eric Holder.

Attorney General Holder recently abandoned the conviction against former U.S. Senator Ted Stevens (R). His decision had nothing to do with the merits of the Stevens case, but was based on misconduct on the part of the Department of Justice. Attorney General Holder did the right thing.

It´s been a long time since we have seen the DOJ act courageously. Attorney General Holder´s action gives me hope that justice can be restored and our democracy can be preserved.

An important difference between the Stevens case and my case is that I was not accused of taking even a penny for myself. In my case there are many instances of government wrongdoing. American Trial Lawyer Magazine tagged me as America´s number one "Political Prisoner," Time Magazine said I was a victim of selective prosecution, and CBS´s 60 Minutes exposed that the government used false testimony to convict me and withheld critical documents from my lawyers. The House Judiciary Committee even has sworn testimony that Karl Rove was involved in my prosecution as well as other serious prosecutorial misconduct.

snip

After reading the letter, please email the following editors commending Eric Holder for helping to restore justice by dropping the charges against Senator Stevens but suggesting that the gross prosecutorial misconduct in my case far exceeds the misconduct in the Stevens case. Tell them the Attorney General should investigate my case and that, when he does, he will find it cries out for justice and should also be dismissed.

Please email your comments to:

Adam Cohen, Editorial Page Editor of the New York Times at adam@nytimes.com
Fred Hiatt, Editorial Page Editor of the Washington Post at hiattf@washpost.com
Bruce Dold, Editorial Page Editor of the Chicago Tribune at brucedold@tribune.com
Cynthia Tucker, Editorial Page Editor for the Atlanta Journal Constitutional at Cynthia@ajc.com
I am also asking that you write to Attorney General Holder at AskDOJ@usdoj.gov to express your support for his courageous step toward restoring justice and encourage him to help right the wrongs in my case as well.

Resist or Become Serfs


Posted on Apr 6, 2009
AP photo / Susan Walsh

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is overseeing the use of billions of taxpayer dollars to protect Wall Street financiers from their bad investments.

By Chris Hedges

(Page 2)

"You are going to see the biggest waste, fraud and abuse in American history," Nader warned when I asked about the bailouts. "Not only is it wrongly directed, not only does it deal with the perpetrators instead of the people who were victimized, but they don´t have a delivery system of any honesty and efficiency. The Justice Department is overwhelmed. It doesn´t have a tenth of the prosecutors, the investigators, the auditors, the attorneys needed to deal with the previous corporate crime wave before the bailout started last September. It is especially unable to deal with the rapacious ravaging of this new money by these corporate recipients. You can see it already. The corporations haven´t lent it. They have used some of it for acquisitions or to preserve their bonuses or their dividends. As long as they know they are not going to jail, and they don´t see many newspaper reports about their colleagues going to jail, they don´t care. It is total impunity. If they quit, they quit with a golden parachute. Even [General Motors CEO Rick] Wagoner is taking away $21 million."

There are a handful of former executives who have conceded that the bailouts are a waste. American International Group Inc.´s former chairman, Maurice R. Greenberg, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Thursday that the effort to prop up the firm with $170 billion has "failed." He said the company should be restructured. AIG, he said, would have been better off filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection instead of seeking government help.

"These are signs of hyper decay," Nader said from his office in Washington. "You spend this kind of money and do not know if it will work."

"Bankrupt corporate capitalism is on its way to bankrupting the socialism that is trying to save it," Nader added. "That is the end stage. If they no longer have socialism to save them then we are into feudalism. We are into private police, gated communities and serfs with a 21st century nomenclature."

We will not be able to raise another 3 or 4 trillion dollars, especially with our commitments now totaling some $12 trillion, to fix the mess. It was only a couple of months ago that our expenditures totaled $9 trillion. And it was not long ago that such profligate government spending was unthinkable. There was an $800 billion limit placed on the Federal Reserve a year ago. The economic stimulus and the bailouts will not bring back our casino capitalism. And as the meltdown shows no signs of abating, and the bailouts show no sign of working, the recklessness and desperation of our capitalist overlords have increased. The cost, to the working and middle class, is becoming unsustainable. The Fed reported in March that households lost $5.1 trillion, or 9 percent, of their wealth in the last three months of 2008, the most ever in a single quarter in the 57-year history of record keeping by the central bank. For the full year, household wealth dropped $11.1 trillion, or about 18 percent. These figures did not record the decline of investments in the stock market, which has probably erased trillions more in the country´s collective net worth.

The bullet to our head, inevitable if we do not radically alter course, will be sudden. We have been borrowing at the rate of more than $2 billion a day over the last 10 years, and at some point it has to stop. The moment China, the oil-rich states and other international investors stop buying treasury bonds the dollar will become junk. Inflation will rocket upward. We will become Weimar Germany. A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans. A cabal of proto-fascist misfits, from Christian demagogues to simpletons like Sarah Palin to loudmouth talk show hosts, who we naively dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of revenge and moral renewal. The elites, the ones with their Harvard Business School degrees and expensive vocabularies, will retreat into their sheltered enclaves of privilege and comfort. We will be left bereft and abandoned outside the gates.

`` in the United States, everybody who goes to execution is guilty of murdering someone`` (Pat Buchanan on Hard Ball)

Released from death row:

Name State Race-Date Convicted-Date Exonerated-Years Between-DNA Evidence

1 David Keaton FL B 1971 1973 2 Charges Dismissed
2 Samuel A. Poole NC B 1973 1974 1 Charges Dismissed
3 Wilbert Lee FL B 1963 1975 12 Pardoned
4 Freddie Pitts FL B 1963 1975 12 Pardoned
5 James Creamer GA W 1973 1975 2 Charges Dismissed
6 Christopher Spicer NC B 1973 1975 2 Acquitted
7 Thomas Gladish NM W 1974 1976 2 Charges Dismissed
8 Richard Greer NM W 1974 1976 2 Charges Dismissed
9 Ronald Keine NM W 1974 1976 2 Charges Dismissed
10 Clarence Smith NM W 1974 1976 2 Charges Dismissed
11 Delbert Tibbs FL B 1974 1977 3 Charges Dismissed
12 Earl Charles GA B 1975 1978 3 Charges Dismissed
13 Jonathan Treadway AZ W 1975 1978 3 Acquitted
14 Gary Beeman OH W 1976 1979 3 Acquitted
15 Jerry Banks GA B 1975 1980 5 Charges Dismissed
16 Larry Hicks IN B 1978 1980 2 Acquitted
17 Charles Ray Giddens OK B 1978 1981 3 Charges Dismissed
18 Michael Linder SC W 1979 1981 2 Acquitted
19 Johnny Ross LA B 1975 1981 6 Charges Dismissed
20 Ernest (Shujaa) Graham CA B 1976 1981 5 Acquitted
21 Annibal Jaramillo FL L 1981 1982 1 Charges Dismissed
22 Lawyer Johnson MA B 1971 1982 11 Charges Dismissed
23 Larry Fisher MS W 1984 1985 1 Acquitted
24 Anthony Brown FL B 1983 1986 3 Acquitted
25 Neil Ferber PA W 1982 1986 4 Charges Dismissed
26 Clifford Henry Bowen OK W 1981 1986 5 Charges Dismissed
27 Joseph Green Brown FL B 1974 1987 13 Charges Dismissed
28 Perry Cobb IL B 1979 1987 8 Acquitted
29 Darby (Williams) Tillis IL B 1979 1987 8 Acquitted
30 Vernon McManus TX W 1977 1987 10 Charges Dismissed
31 Anthony Ray Peek FL B 1978 1987 9 Acquitted
32 Juan Ramos FL L 1983 1987 4 Acquitted
33 Robert Wallace GA B 1980 1987 7 Acquitted
34 Richard Neal Jones OK W 1983 1987 4 Acquitted
35 Willie Brown FL B 1983 1988 5 Charges Dismissed
36 Larry Troy FL B 1983 1988 5 Charges Dismissed
37 Randall Dale Adams TX W 1977 1989 12 Charges Dismissed
38 Robert Cox FL W 1988 1989 1 Charges Dismissed
39 Timothy Hennis NC W 1986 1989 3 Acquitted
40 James Richardson FL B 1968 1989 21 Acquitted
41 Clarence Brandley TX B 1981 1990 9 Charges Dismissed
42 John C. Skelton TX W 1983 1990 7 Acquitted
43 Dale Johnston OH W 1984 1990 6 Charges Dismissed
44 Jimmy Lee Mathers AZ W 1987 1990 3 Acquitted
45 Gary Nelson GA B 1980 1991 11 Charges Dismissed
46 Bradley P. Scott FL W 1988 1991 3 Acquitted
47 Charles Smith IN B 1983 1991 8 Acquitted
48 Jay C. Smith PA W 1986 1992 6 Acquitted
49 Kirk Bloodsworth MD W 1984 1993 9 Charges Dismissed Yes
50 Federico M. Macias TX L 1984 1993 9 Charges Dismissed
51 Walter McMillian AL B 1988 1993 5 Charges Dismissed
52 Gregory R. Wilhoit OK W 1987 1993 6 Acquitted
53 James Robison AZ W 1977 1993 16 Acquitted
54 Muneer Deeb TX O 1985 1993 8 Acquitted
55 Andrew Golden FL W 1991 1994 3 Charges Dismissed
56 Adolph Munson OK B 1985 1995 10 Acquitted
57 Robert Charles Cruz AZ L 1981 1995 14 Acquitted
58 Rolando Cruz IL L 1985 1995 10 Acquitted Yes
59 Alejandro Hernandez IL L 1985 1995 10 Charges Dismissed Yes
60 Sabrina Butler MS B 1990 1995 5 Acquitted
61 Joseph Burrows IL W 1989 1996 7 Charges Dismissed
62 Verneal Jimerson IL B 1985 1996 11 Charges Dismissed Yes
63 Dennis Williams IL B 1979 1996 17 Charges Dismissed Yes
64 Roberto Miranda NV L 1982 1996 14 Charges Dismissed
65 Gary Gauger IL W 1993 1996 3 Charges Dismissed
66 Troy Lee Jones CA B 1982 1996 14 Charges Dismissed
67 Carl Lawson IL B 1990 1996 6 Acquitted
68 David Wayne Grannis AZ W 1991 1996 5 Charges Dismissed
69 Ricardo Aldape Guerra TX L 1982 1997 15 Charges Dismissed
70 Benjamin Harris WA B 1985 1997 12 Charges Dismissed
71 Robert Hayes FL B 1991 1997 6 Acquitted
72 Christopher McCrimmon AZ B 1993 1997 4 Acquitted
73 Randall Padgett AL W 1992 1997 5 Acquitted
74 James Bo Cochran AL B 1976 1997 21 Acquitted
75 Robert Lee Miller, Jr. OK B 1988 1998 10 Charges Dismissed Yes
76 Curtis Kyles LA B 1984 1998 14 Charges Dismissed
77 Shareef Cousin LA B 1996 1999 3 Charges Dismissed
78 Anthony Porter IL B 1983 1999 16 Charges Dismissed
79 Steven Smith IL B 1985 1999 14 Acquitted
80 Ronald Williamson OK W 1988 1999 11 Charges Dismissed Yes
81 Ronald Jones IL B 1989 1999 10 Charges Dismissed Yes
82 Clarence Dexter, Jr. MO W 1991 1999 8 Charges Dismissed
83 Warren Douglas Manning SC B 1989 1999 10 Acquitted
84 Alfred Rivera NC L 1997 1999 2 Charges Dismissed
85 Steve Manning IL W 1993 2000 7 Charges Dismissed
86 Eric Clemmons MO B 1987 2000 13 Acquitted
87 Joseph Nahume Green FL B 1993 2000 7 Charges Dismissed
88 Earl Washington VA B 1984 2000 16 Pardoned Yes
89 William Nieves PA L 1994 2000 6 Acquitted
90
Frank Lee Smith - died prior to exoneration FL B 1986 2000 ** 14 Charges Dismissed Yes
91
Michael Graham LA W 1987 2000 13 Charges Dismissed
92 Albert Burrell LA W 1987 2000 13 Charges Dismissed
93 Oscar Lee Morris CA B 1983 2000 17 Charges Dismissed
94 Peter Limone MA W 1968 2001 33 Charges Dismissed
95 Gary Drinkard AL W 1995 2001 6 Charges Dismissed
96 Joaquin Jose Martinez FL L 1997 2001 4 Acquitted
97 Jeremy Sheets NE W 1997 2001 4 Charges Dismissed
98 Charles Fain ID W 1983 2001 18 Charges Dismissed Yes
99 Juan Roberto Melendez FL L 1984 2002 18 Charges Dismissed
100 Ray Krone AZ W 1992 2002 10 Charges Dismissed Yes
101 Thomas Kimbell, Jr. PA W 1998 2002 4 Acquitted
102 Larry Osborne KY W 1999 2002 3 Charges Dismissed
103 Aaron Patterson IL B 1986 2003 17 Pardoned
104 Madison Hobley IL B 1987 2003 16 Pardoned
105 Leroy Orange IL B 1984 2003 19 Pardoned
106 Stanley Howard IL B 1987 2003 16 Pardoned
107 Rudolph Holton FL B 1986 2003 16 Charges Dismissed
108 Lemuel Prion AZ W 1999 2003 4 Charges Dismissed
109 Wesley Quick AL W 1997 2003 6 Acquitted
110 John Thompson LA B 1985 2003 18 Acquitted
111 Timothy Howard OH B 1976 2003 26 Charges Dismissed
112 Gary Lamar James OH B 1976 2003 26 Charges Dismissed
113 Joseph Amrine MO B 1986 2003 17 Charges Dismissed
114 Nicholas Yarris PA W 1982 2003 21 Charges Dismissed Yes
115 Alan Gell NC W 1998 2004 6 Acquitted
116 Gordon Steidl IL W 1987 2004 17 Charges Dismissed
117 Laurence Adams MA B 1974 2004 30 Charges Dismissed
118 Dan L. Bright LA B 1996 2004 8 Charges Dismissed
119 Ryan Matthews LA B 1999 2004 5 Charges Dismissed Yes
120 Ernest Ray Willis TX W 1987 2004 17 Charges Dismissed
121 Derrick Jamison OH B 1985 2005 20 Charges Dismissed
122 Harold Wilson PA B 1989 2005 16 Acquitted
123 John Ballard FL W 2003 2006 3 Acquitted
124 Curtis McCarty OK W 1986 2007 21 Charges Dismissed Yes
125 Michael McCormick TN W 1987 2007 20 Acquitted
126 Jonathon Hoffman NC B 1995 2007 12 Charges Dismissed
127 Kennedy Brewer MS B 1995 2008 13 Charges Dismissed Yes
128 Glen Chapman NC B 1994 2008 14 Charges Dismissed
129 Levon Jones NC B 1993 2008 15 Charges Dismissed
130 Michael Blair TX O 1994 2008 14 Charges Dismissed Yes

Resist or Become Serfs