Some Conspiracies are True, WMD and Iraq

Some Conspiracies are True, WMD and Iraq
With its troops no longer engaged in military operations inside Iraq, Great Britain has been liberated politically to conduct a postmortem of that conflict, including the sensitive issue of the primary justification used by then Prime Minister Tony Blair for going to war, namely Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or WMD.

The failure to find any WMD in Iraq following the March 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of that country by US and British troops continues to haunt those who were involved in making the decision for war. The issue of Iraqi WMD, and the role it played in influencing the decision for war, is at the centre of the ongoing Iraq war inquiry being conducted by Sir John Chilcot.

Among the more compelling testimonies provided to date has been that of Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador to the US, who served in that capacity during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Meyer convincingly portrayed an environment where the decision by the US to invade Iraq, backed by Blair, precluded any process (such as viable UN weapons inspections) that sought to compel Iraq to prove it had no WMD. Rather, Great Britain and the US were left "scrambling" to find evidence of a "smoking gun" to prove Iraq indeed possessed the WMD it was accused of having.

In short, Saddam had been found guilty of possessing WMD, and his sentence had been passed down by Washington and London void of any hard evidence that such weapons, or even related programmes, even existed. The sentence meted out – regime termination – mandated such a massive deployment of troops and material that all but the wilfully blind or intentionally ignorant had to know by the early autumn of 2002 that war with Iraq was inevitable. One simply does not initiate the movement of hundreds of thousands of troops, thousands of armoured vehicles and aircraft, and dozens of ships on a whim or to reinforce an idle threat.

President George Bush was able to disguise his blatant militarism behind the false sincerity of his ally Blair and his own secretary of state, Colin Powell. The president's task was made far easier given the role of useful idiot played by much of the mainstream media in the US and Britain, where reporters and editors alike dutifully repeated both the hyped-up charges levied against Iraq and the false pretensions that a diplomatic solution was being sought.

The tragic final act of the farce directed by Bush and Blair was the theatre of war justification known as UN weapons inspections. Having played the WMD card so forcefully in an effort to justify war with Iraq, the US (and by extension, Britain) were compelled once again to revisit the issue of disarmament. But the reality was that disarming Iraq was the furthest thing from the mind of either Bush or Blair. The decision to use military force to overthrow Saddam was made by these two leaders independent of any proof that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Having found Iraq guilty, the last thing those who were positioning themselves for war wanted was to re-engage a process that not only had failed to uncover any evidence Iraq's retention of WMD in the past, but was actually positioned to produce fact-based evidence that would either contradict or significantly weaken the case for war already endorsed by Bush and Blair.

The US and Britain had both abandoned aggressive UN weapons inspections in the spring of 1998. UN weapons inspectors were able and willing to conduct intrusive no-notice inspections of any site inside Iraq, including those associated with the Iraqi president, if it furthered their mandate of disarmament. But the US viewed such inspections as useful only in so far as they either manufactured a crisis that produced justification for military intervention (as was the case with inspections in March and December 1998), or sustained the notion of continued Iraqi non-compliance so as to justify the continuation of economic sanctions. An inspection process that diluted arguments of Iraq's continued retention of WMD by failing to uncover any hard evidence that would sustain such allegations, or worse, sustain Iraq's contention that it had no such weaponry, was not in the interest of US policy objectives that sought regime change, and as such required the continuation of stringent economic sanctions linked to Iraq's disarmament obligation.

The British were never willing (or able) to confront meaningfully the American policy of abusing the legitimate inspection-based mandate of the UN inspectors. Instead, London sought to manage inspection-based confrontation by insisting that before any intrusive inspection could be carried out, it would have to be backed by high-quality intelligence. But even this position collapsed in the face of an American decision, made in April 1998, to stop supporting aggressive inspections altogether.

In the end, the British were left with the role of fabricating legitimacy for an American policy of terminating weapons inspections in Iraq, supplying dated intelligence of questionable veracity about a secret weapons cache being stored in the basement of a Ba'ath party headquarters in Baghdad, which was used to trigger an inspection the US hoped the Iraqis would balk at. When the Iraqis (as hoped) balked, the US ordered the inspectors out of Iraq, leading to the initiation of Operation Desert Fox, a 72-hour bombing campaign designed to ensure that Iraq would not allow the return of UN inspectors, effectively keeping UN sanctions "frozen" in place.

As of December 1998, both the US and Britain knew there was no "smoking gun" in Iraq that could prove that Saddam's government was retaining or reconstituting a WMD capability. Nothing transpired between that time and when the decision was made in 2002 to invade Iraq that fundamentally altered that basic picture.

But having decided on war using WMD as the justification, both the US and Great Britain began the process of fabricating a case after the fact. Lacking new intelligence data on Iraqi WMD, both nations resorted to either recycling old charges that had been disproved by UN inspectors in the past, or fabricating new charges that would not withstand even the most cursory of investigations.

The reintroduction of UN weapons inspectors into Iraq in November 2002 was counterproductive for those who were using WMD as an excuse for war. This was aptly demonstrated when, in the first weeks following their return to Iraq, the inspectors discredited almost all of the intelligence-based charges both the US and Britain had levelled against Iraq, while failing to uncover any evidence of the massive stockpile of WMD that Iraq had been accused of retaining.

The decision for war had been made independently of any viable intelligence information on Iraqi WMD. As such, the work of the UN weapons inspectors inside Iraq following their return in November 2002 was not a factor in influencing the lead-up to the actual invasion of Iraq. Having decided that Saddam was guilty of possessing WMD, the failure of the UN weapons inspectors to uncover evidence of such retention made their efforts not only irrelevant, but undesirable. The inconvenience of the UN weapons inspectors when it comes to the truth about the lead-up to the war with Iraq continues to this day.

The parade of British diplomats and officials appearing before the Chilcot hearings rightly point out the absolute lack of any "smoking gun" concerning Iraq and WMD. But until Chilcot receives testimony from those best positioned to speak about Iraq's WMD programmes, namely the UN weapons inspectors themselves, all the hearings will succeed in doing is sustain the false appearance of well-meaning British officials, stampeded into a war with Iraq by an overbearing American ally, looking in vain for a "smoking gun" that would justify their decision to invade. The evidence needed to undermine any WMD-based case for war, derived from the work of the UN weapons inspectors, was always available to those officials in a position to weigh in on this matter, but either never consulted or deliberately ignored.

There is a big difference between searching for a "smoking gun" and searching for the truth. By ignoring and/or undermining the work of the UN weapons inspectors in the lead-up to the war with Iraq, British officials demonstrated that they were not interested in the truth about Iraqi WMD, a fact that testimony provided by the likes of Sir Christopher Meyer alludes to, but falls short of actually stating.

The search for truth can be an inconvenient process, especially when it threatens to expose potentially illegal activities in the prosecution of an unpopular war. Until he calls upon UN weapons inspectors themselves to deliver testimony before his inquiry, Sir John Chilcot perpetuates the perception that Britain simply can't handle the truth when it comes to uncovering the level of official British culpability in the deliberate fabrication of a case for war against Iraq that everyone knew, or should have known, was false.

America's Collective Short Memory and Economics

America's Collective Short Memory and Economics

Americans are often praised for their resilience in the face of calamity, but there is another quality that seems to be in greater supply these days: willful amnesia. An August Gallup Poll showed that 65 percent of Americans oppose another economic stimulus even though the first one, which was inadequate by most economists' calculations, saved or created roughly 650,000 jobs. A more recent Gallup survey had 45 percent of Americans believing that current government regulation of business and industry was too great - a 10-year high. Never mind that it was the lack of regulation that got us into our current economic predicament. Regulation is so last year. In the ingenious film "Memento,'' the protagonist had lost his capacity to remember anything. It now seems as if we live in a memento nation - a place where we too instantly forget what's happened to us.

It wasn't always this way. When Herbert Hoover and his fellow Republicans dithered while Americans sunk into an economic slough in the early 1930s, they were rewarded with a generation of Democratic hegemony, and Hoover's name was eternally blackened. Similarly, when Lyndon Johnson presided over both domestic racial chaos and a military cataclysm in Vietnam, he was rewarded with the Nixon presidency. Only Watergate spared the Democrats further electoral indignities.

These punishments were not only right; they were essential to the functioning of a democracy because they reinforced accountability. If you screw up, you lose, which is exactly how it should be.

Accountability, however, is predicated on remembering who did the screwing up and what the screwing up was. That's why there's a problem when a society suddenly forgets what failed in the past - say Hoover's unwillingness to stimulate the economy or Bush's unwillingness to police Wall Street. The philosopher George Santayana famously said that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. We have been living Santayana's dictum.

But if memory loss is the problem, the deeper issue is why we seem to have suddenly lost our memory. In looking for an answer to why we have national amnesia, one might look first to the concept of memory itself. A common memory is the consequence of shared experiences and information. Americans suffered the Great Depression together. They maintained a vivid memory of that pain, a collective memory, from personal experience but also from reading the same newspapers, listening to the same radio programs, watching the same movies. In short, memory was created not only personally but culturally.

Likewise, Americans certainly disagreed about the war in Vietnam, but they watched the same images of the war on television and read the same AP dispatches. We were a nation united by information and memory.

Things have certainly changed, so much so that the United States is something of a misnomer. The institutions that helped forge collective memories have long been in decline. Movies, newspapers, and mass circulation magazines are all gasping. Broadcast television has been usurped by cable television and the Internet, which provide a plethora of images and ideas but which are far more likely to divide us than to unite us, giving us each the images and spin we prefer. Put simply, Americans probably share less now than at any time since the rise of the mass media early in the last century, including shared memories.

What is more, the loss of collective memory has been accelerated by the speed with which we receive information. Both cable news and the Internet place a high premium on "churn'' - on providing a new story or new scoop every few minutes.

Whether this is a function of our own growing impatience or a cause of that impatience is difficult to say, but cable television and the Internet contribute to a national Attention Deficit Disorder. They disrupt continuity, break the chain of cause and effect, detach memory from action, and heighten the moment at the expense of history and the bigger picture that history provides.

In "Memento,'' the hero, unable to remember anything, is compelled to live moment by moment, without the past ever informing the present. The here and now obliterates the there and then.

We operate similarly. We not only live in a society increasingly without memory; we live in a society in which the present is unmoored, making anything that happens right now far more important than anything that has happened before. Hence, if the economy hasn't recovered, it must be President Obama's fault since he is currently president. Or if Congress hasn't enacted health reform yet, it must be the fault of the Democrats since they are the ones in majority, the history of health reform notwithstanding. Or if deficits are growing, it must mean we should stop stimulating the economy since deficits are the issue of the moment. The present moment is everything.

However much this obsession with the here and now destroys accountability, there is an additional danger to a society that lives in the moment. When our actions and opinions are no longer grounded in a larger context, we are also much more susceptible to slogans and clichés that take the place of experience and memory. Government is bad, deficits are bad, military deliberations are bad. If you repeat these mantras endlessly, the memories of government efficacy, productive deficit spending, and the catastrophes of not deliberating over military strategy all disappear. Slogans replace sense.

Santayana probably wouldn't be surprised by a society that hasn't learned from its past. That was, after all, the point of his quotation. But one wonders what he would make of a society that can't even remember its past - a society that thinks every problem suddenly springs up anew and has no memory to tell it how it used to cope. That society is déjà vu all over again. And that society is ours.

by Neal Gabler. Reprinted for educational purposes.

More Proof George W. Bush Lied the U.S. into Iraq

UK Inquiry: Blair Conspired with Bush as Early as February 2002 to Plot Iraq Invasion
Most Americans are blissfully in the dark about it, but across the Atlantic in the UK, a commission reluctantly established by Prime Minister Gordon Brown under pressure from anti-war activists in Britain is beginning hearings into the actions and statements of British leaders that led to the country’s joining the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Even before testimony began in hearings that started yesterday, news began to leak out from documents obtained by the commission that the government of former PM Tony Blair had lied to Parliament and the public about the country’s involvement in war planning.

Britain’s Telegraph newspaper over the weekend published documents from British military leaders, including a memo from British special forces head Maj. Gen. Graeme Lamb, saying that he had been instructed to begin “working the war up since early 2002.”

This means that Blair, who in July 2002, had assured members of a House of Commons committee that there were “no preparations to invade Iraq,” was lying.

Things are likely to heat up when the commission begins hearing testimony. It has the power, and intends to compel testimony from top government officials, including Blair himself.

While some American newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, have run an Associated Press report on the new disclosures and on the commission, key news organizations, including the New York Times, have not. The Times ignored the Telegraph report, but a day later ran an article about the British commission that focused entirely on evidence that British military leaders in Iraq felt “slighted” by “arrogant” American military leaders who, the article reported, pushed for aggressive military action against insurgent groups, while British leaders preferred negotiating with them.

While that may be of some historical interest, it hardly compares with the evidence that Blair and the Bush/Cheney administration were secretly conspiring to invade Iraq as early as February and March 2002.

Recall that back in the fall of 2002, the Bush/Cheney argument to Congress and the American people for initiating a war against Iraq was that Iraq was allegedly behind the 9-11 attacks and that it posed an “imminent” danger of attack against the US and Britain with its alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Of course, such arguments, which have subsequently been shown to have been bogus, would have had no merit if the planning began a year earlier, and if no such urgency was expressed by the two leaders at that time.

The Herd Mentality and Sarah Palin

Those Who Follow Sarah Palin

In the film, The American President [1], the president's speechwriter Lewis Rothschild (played by Michael J Fox) appeals to the commander-in-chief to take a firm, clear stand against the Right. "People want leadership, Mr President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone." he says. "They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand."

The president (played by Michael Douglas) retorts that the American electorate's problem is not a lack of leadership but an undiscerning palate.

"We've had presidents who were beloved, who couldn't find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight," he says. "People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference."

As the faithful wait in line in small towns across the country (some for more than a day) to see Sarah Palin on her book tour [2], the question of whether the US is deprived of a competent political class or gets the leadership it both deserves and truly desires seems as pertinent as ever.

On the one hand there is roughly between a quarter and a third of America that will clearly believe anything. That is the figure that strongly approved of George Bush's handling of the economy last year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers [3] and the bailout. That same figure, in the immediate aftermath of hurricane Katrina [4], believed that Bush's response to the disaster was "about right", and still supports the war in Iraq.

That also happens to be approximately the same proportion of Americans who back Palin for president. Most data suggest the overlap is considerable. Palin's rise to prominence, from little-known governor to one of the most popular and arguably most charismatic Republicans in the country in just a year, has been startling. She had a thin record when she was picked to run as vice-president. Today, having quit the Alaska governorship mid-term and published a bestseller, only her wallet is thicker.

Her resignation speech [5] was so rambling that you would have struggled to find a coherent sentence with an industrial-strength searchlight. "Let me go back to a comfortable analogy for me - sports," she announced. "I use it because you're naive if you don't see the national full-court press picking away right now: A good point guard drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her eye on the basket ... and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win." This was not the answer to a hostile interview from the "liberal media elite" but a prepared speech of her own making.

It would be easy to discount her as just a media phenomenon who would go away if we stopped talking about her. That would be a mistake. It would be even easier to poke fun at her as just a small town hick who has blundered into the limelight with a nod, wink and a "you betcha". That too would be a mistake.

For the very things that liberal commentators ridicule her for - being inarticulate, unworldly, simplistic and hokey - are the very things that make her attractive to her base. Indeed, every time she is taunted she becomes more popular because it reaffirms the (not entirely mistaken) view that the deeply held values of a sizable section of the population are being disparaged.

The same dynamic was true for George Bush, but with one crucial exception. Bush is the scion of a wealthy family who turned his back on the cultural trappings of his class while embracing the social confidence and political and financial entitlement that came with it. Palin had none of those advantages: she grew up far from power and privilege in every sense.

The difference in their comfort levels when put on the spot with simple questions was evident when each was asked about their newspaper reading habits [6]. Bush was cocky: "The best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world." Palin froze: "I've read most of them ... all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years."

In her world, Ivy League is a slur; cities are not the "real America"; and those who know the price of arugula [7] but cannot handle a rifle are not to be trusted. Palin is the antithesis of an aspirational figure. Her supporters love her not because they want to be like her, but because they already are like her. So for better and for worse, Palin is an entirely self-made - and, if her book is anything to go by, self-invented - personification of the kind of political animal Bush sought to both emulate and nurture. Bush was Palin-lite.

To that extent her performance over the past year has been more tragic than comic. Palin represents the thwarted aspirations and brooding resentment of a large section of white working class Americans. That is not to suggest that her supporters are necessarily racist, but polls show her support is racially exclusive.

Her base has plenty to be resentful about. Their wages are stagnant, their economic security has eroded, and their prospects for social and economic advancement have stalled. In 2004, white Americans were the only racial group for whom the poverty rate actually rose. The fact that it was lower than every other group is of little comfort. Demographically, they are set to become a minority by 2042 [8]. Geopolitically, the country for which they display so much patriotic fervour has lost one war, is losing another, and is regularly lectured by others about the urgency of putting its fiscal house in order. America is not what it used to be. The country they keep saying they want to "take back" no longer exists and is not returning.

So when Palin rails against Washington DC, bank bailouts and elitist media she catches their ear. The longer unemployment keeps rising, house prices keep falling and universal healthcare continues to be elusive, the more ears there will be. Motivated, organised and angry, Palin's wing of the Republican party does not have the numbers to make bad things happen; but, as it showed over the summer during the healthcare town hall meetings [9], its determination to derail good things should not be underestimated.

The trouble is that while many of their grievances are well founded, their affection is certainly misplaced. None of their problems can be remedied by the politics championed by Palin. Indeed, the greater the traction her politics gets, the worse things will be for her base. The America whose passing they mourn was lost precisely because of the freemarket, low-tax, warmongering agenda she advocates.

CNS News falsely suggests Senate bill "mandates federally subsidized abortion" inconsistent with Hyde Amendment

CNS News falsely suggests Senate bill "mandates federally subsidized abortion" inconsistent with Hyde Amendment

Terence Jeffrey, editor-in-chief of the conservative website CNSNews.com, falsely suggested that the Senate health care bill "would mandate federally subsidized abortion" in a manner inconsistent with the Hyde Amendment's restrictions on the types of abortions for which federal dollars can be used. But the section of the bill Jeffrey cited explicitly prohibits the use of federal funds to provide coverage for abortions that are currently restricted under Hyde, and requires segregation of non-federal funds from federal funds to pay for those procedures in a manner similar to that used in many states that cover such abortions under the federally subsidized Medicaid program.

Senate bill explicitly prohibits federal funding of abortions not covered under Hyde

*Bill requires HHS secretary ensure public option uses "no Federal funds" in providing abortion coverage beyond Hyde. Section 1303(a)(1)(C) of the Senate bill, titled "Prohibition on federal funds for abortion services in community health insurance option" -- a section that Jeffrey provided at the end of his article -- explains that the Health and Human Services secretary must ensure that "no Federal funds are used for such coverage" as outlined in Section 1303(a)(1)(B)(i). That section is defined as "Abortion for which public funding is prohibited," or, in Jeffrey's words, "those types of abortions currently banned from receiving federal funding under the Hyde Amendment."

When conservatives are not lying about health care they continue to be one of America's biggest terror threats.

Regardless of e-mail hack and how they are spun we still have global warming

The CRU hack

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

Dream of money-bags tonight by scientist David Horton

Just two weeks from Copenhagen the British Climate Research Unit computers are hacked, their emails downloaded and sent off into Deniaworld. There, just as in the lead up to the Iraq War, words are cherry picked, context removed, common sense abandoned, outrage simulated, war declared, counter views demonised. Vials of imaginary anthrax are displayed, trucks become mobile laboratories, aluminum tubes become nuclear bombs, rockets are ready to launch at New York in ten minutes.

And suddenly, it seems, temperatures are no longer rising, the Arctic is no longer melting, glaciers don't retreat, droughts don't happen, record temperatures are no longer set, marine acidity doesn't increase, sea levels don't rise, plants don't flower at different times, birds don't breed at different times, firestorms no longer erupt.

It was, apparently, all just a dream.

Andrew Breitbart and Conservatives using ACORN to Blackmail Obama Administration

Andrew Breitbart Trying To Blackmail The Obama Administration With ACORN And Other Videos

Andrew Breitbart and his team of ACORN videographers were back on Hannity last night (11/19/09) with a new undercover video that Breitbart claimed he was “forced to offer” now because California Attorney General Jerry Brown has launched an investigation into whether the filmmakers broke the law by secretly recording “confidential communication.” That was astounding enough. You’d think that if Breitbart really had something big on ACORN, he would have released it a few months ago, when he had maximum media attention, rather than withhold it until he could use it as ammunition against a personal foe. Or you’d think he’d at least have the good sense not to broadcast his self-serving machinations. Judging from the very edited video Breitbart presented last night, one suspects that the real reason it was withheld was because it did little to effectively incriminate ACORN. Breitbart, on the other hand, incriminated himself even worse. Near the end of the segment, he told Hannity that he had more videos and “not just ACORN” that he threatened to release during the 2010 election cycle unless the Department of Justice opened a federal investigation into ACORN. With video.

While ACORN is not perfect (what organization is) if Breitbart has incriminating video - a smoking gun of sorts - why not produce it now rather then the highly edited pieces. He has probably broken criminal privacy statues in two states in addition to other crimes such as inducing someone to commit a crime. Now that he might prosecuted in one state he is making bizarre threats. As a recent past president once said, bring it on. Produce this damning evidence to support his little game of guilty by insinuation.

In this L.A. Times blog post which clearly takes sides with the sleazy Breitbart ( liberal media? ) they do publish ACORN's response,
Los Angeles ACORN statement, as prepared by the organization:

1. The tapes are clearly doctored and highly edited and it is our hope this will be responsibly reported on should this become a news story.

2. The conversation took place outside of the ACORN office. The couple was taken outside of the office into the building-hallway (a common space) because the subject matter they were attempting to discuss was not appropriate and the employee made it clear that ACORN does not help with such things.

3. The couple was brought to a neighboring agency that deals specifically with international abuse.

4. The couple featured in the video did NOT portray themselves as a “prostitute” and a “pimp.”

5. The couple described themselves as “a former prostitute escaping her pimp boyfriend in Miami” and the male as her “concerned friend, a student at USC” who had political aspirations. The male was NOT dressed in “pimp” attire but instead in a white shirt and pants. This contradicts what the “videographers” have stated in the press.

6. The employee made repeated attempts to move the couple out of the office and building by suggesting a number of referrals of agencies or types of agencies to talk to.

7. It is hard to respond to this tape. It is so heavily edited that it may be constructed to conceal the reality of the interaction.

Statement:
“ACORN is moving on; an independent investigation is underway, ACORN’s services have been under review and locally we continue to fight to end the foreclosure crisis and be a voice for the underserved. It’s clear that these videographers can’t move on and have resorted to releasing highly edited tapes in an attempt to keep themselves in the press.” — Lyn Mottley, ACORN leader, South LA

Iran-Contra Criminal Ollie North Wants America to Believe His Lies about Global Warming

A former Marine - and a disgrace to the uniform - Ollie North, who was involved in a criminal plot to sell weapons to Iran and fund right-wing death squads in Latin America ( they murdered a priest and two nuns among ten of thousands of others) now wants America to believe there is no such thing as global warming. With his long record of living in a fantasy world who will beleive him, Ollie North Launches New War Against ‘Cap And Tax,’ ‘Bird Eating Machines,’ And The ‘Myth Of Global Warming’

The attached “petition to President Barack Obama” claims that the “dirty little secret” of global warming “is that it is a scam designed at increasing the wealth of frauds like Al Gore and nations like Red China at America’s expense.”

In reality, the “scientific evidence is clear,” as the American Association for the Advancement of Science said in 2006, that “global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society.” In reality, the European Trading System has worked, and Europe is on track to easily beat its 2012 Kyoto Protocol commitments. In reality, the last ten years are the hottest decade in history. In reality, as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has said, climate legislation will allow us to “help this planet” that “is in peril, create millions of new jobs for Americans that need them, and to become energy independent to make us safer.”

Fox News Runs Old Palin Campaign Footage, Reports It As Book-Signing Crowds

Why Are Rich Building Contractors Getting a Special Tax Break

Why Are Rich Building Contractors Geeting a Special Tax Break
I just don’t get it. When Congress approves gifts worth billions of dollars to people who don’t deserve a dime, why isn’t it front page news?

On Nov. 6, when President Obama signed the Worker, Home-ownership and Business Assistance Act of 2009, he extended unemployment benefits and renewed the first-time home-buyer tax credit for a while, but hidden deep inside the law was a tax break for businesses that did well in the boom years — and the resulting refund-checks will be huge.

The tax break would help struggling businesses, Obama declared, but the act actually affects big companies as well as small. Businesses are allowed to offset losses incurred in the bad years of 2008 and 2009 against profits booked as far back as 2004. Those with the biggest boom followed by the biggest bust are exactly the companies like to benefit the most. Among them, you guessed it, home-builders, exactly the folks who overbuilt and over-lent us into a mortgage and credit meltdown.

Companies like Pulte Homes will receive refunds exceeding $450 million — but Pulte’s hardly in need. The company has $1.5 billion in cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet. Standard Pacific, which is poised to reap cash refunds of $80 million has $523 million, according to the New York Times.

There’s no requirement that companies claiming the tax refunds are in need of course, or that they will create jobs with the cash. Demanding no quid pro quo worked so well for banks that Congress is trying a repeat with builders.

Will the builders nonetheless build with the bonanza? Not likely. In building, the problem’s not supply, it’s demand.

What the companies are likely to do is keep on lobbying. Gretchen Morgenson reports that “Securing this tax break was a top priority for home builders. ” According to lobbying records, home builders paid $6 million to their lobbyists through the end of October this year, “much of focused on arguing for the tax loss carry-forward.” Pulte Homes for example, spent $210,000, — for which it’ll receive $450 million in refunds.

“The problem here is that this public policy decision was made with little to no input from the public.” Reports the excellent Morgenson in her column, in the business section, Sunday.

But her own paper could help solve that problem. How about reporting on this — before it’s a done deal — on the front page?

by Laura Flanders

Why Do Conservatives Lack Faith in America and Its Institutions

Fighting Terrorism Fairly and Effectively

President Bush issued a military order in November 2001 to establish military commissions for the trial of suspected foreign terrorists. Congress authorized a modified form of these commissions in 2006 after the Supreme Court found the original commissions to be illegal. Even as modified, these military commissions lack basic fair trial guarantees. As a result, they have been subject to extensive public criticism, legal challenge, and delay. Four military prosecutors have resigned in protest from the military commissions system, including the former chief prosecutor who has denounced the system as unfair.

Although some have defended the commissions as an efficient form of military justice, their track record in prosecuting terrorism cases has been abysmal. Since their establishment, the commissions have concluded only three cases, two after trials and one based on a guilty plea. During the same time period, the federal courts have tried more than 107 terrorism cases, obtaining 145 convictions. Several defendants have been sentenced to life in prison.

Some defenders of the military commissions argue that terrorism prosecutions do not effectively protect national security evidence, are too resource-intensive, and are insufficient to prevent future acts of terrorism because they are limited to punishing past crimes.

These criticisms are unconvincing for the following reasons:

* The Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) is effective in preventing the dissemination of classified evidence. CIPA gives the government wide latitude to provide the defendant and the jury substitute forms of evidence to protect against the disclosure of evidence and sources it needs to protect. It has been used in countless terrorism cases, allowing the government to introduce evidence obtained by foreign law enforcement and intelligence sources without compromising the integrity of those sources.
* Criminal prosecutions in federal court may be resource-intensive, but so are military commission proceedings.
* It is not true that criminal prosecutions are exclusively backward-looking, responding only to terrorist acts that have already been committed. To the contrary, prosecutions are often used to prevent the commission of terrorist crimes. The Department of Justice cites with pride its reliance on federal statutes that allow prosecutors "to intervene at the early stages of terrorist planning, before a terrorist act occurs."[1] The crime of conspiracy, for example, is committed when two or more people plan to pursue an illegal act, and take at least one step to advance it, even if a terrorist act is nowhere near fruition. The same intelligence that allows investigators to identity and prevent terrorist plots should allow them to prosecute the participants for conspiracy.
* Under the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution, a suspect facing criminal charges is entitled to a lawyer, who will generally tell his or her client not to talk to interrogators outside of the lawyer's presence. But many criminal suspects with lawyers end up willingly cooperating with interrogators-providing evidence that exposes criminal plots and implicates other lawbreakers-because by doing so they can shorten the prison time they face.
* Some have suggested that it would be difficult to prosecute terrorism suspects in US federal courts because much of the evidence against them is tainted by coercion, abuse, or torture, and would not be admissible in court. However, the solution cannot be to try terrorism suspects using procedures where such evidence would be admitted, particularly given the unreliability of such tainted evidence. There is ample evidence against many terrorism suspects at Guantanamo to build cases that do not rely on statements that were coerced. Indeed, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and some of his co-defendants charged with planning and organizing the 9/11 terrorist attacks freely admit their roles in the attacks.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce Highly Partsian Political Organization

The Board Of The ‘Voice Of Business’ Is A Republican Money Machine

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which purports to be “the voice of business,” is run by a Republican money machine. As the nation’s largest lobbying shop, the Chamber is spending millions of dollars from its corporate members against President Obama’s progressive agenda of health care, energy, and financial reform. The Chamber claims that the “board’s membership is as diverse as the nation’s business community itself,” but this is false. A ThinkProgress analysis of federal election contribution data compiled by the LittleSis project has found that the Chamber’s 116-member board of directors has given more than six times as much money to Republican candidates and committees ($4,741,747) as it has to Democrats ($778,282), with $1,074,697 flowing to corporate political action committees:

Before Rogue: Sarah Palin's Top 10 past falsehoods

Palin Might be Mentally Incapable of Distinguishing Fact from Fantasy

Palin Might be Mentally Incapable of Distinguishing Fact from Fantasy

Palin goes adrift, at times, on more contemporary issues, too. She criticizes President Barack Obama for pushing through a bailout package that actually was achieved by his Republican predecessor George W. Bush – a package she seemed to support at the time.

....PALIN: Says she made frugality a point when traveling on state business as Alaska governor, asking "only" for reasonably priced rooms and not "often" going for the "high-end, robe-and-slippers" hotels.

THE FACTS: Although travel records indicate she usually opted for less-pricey hotels while governor, Palin and daughter Bristol stayed five days and four nights at the $707.29-per-night Essex House luxury hotel (robes and slippers come standard) overlooking New York City's Central Park for a five-hour women's leadership conference in October 2007. With air fare, the cost to Alaska was well over $3,000. Event organizers said Palin asked if she could bring her daughter. The governor billed her state more than $20,000 for her children's travel, including to events where they had not been invited, and in some cases later amended expense reports to specify that they had been on official business.

....Palin's views on bailouts appeared to evolve as McCain's vice presidential running mate. In September 2008, she said "taxpayers cannot be looked to as the bailout, as the solution, to the problems on Wall Street." A week later, she said "ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy."

During the vice presidential debate in October, Palin praised McCain for being "instrumental in bringing folks together" to pass the $700 billion bailout. After that, she said "it is a time of crisis and government did have to step in."

....PALIN: She says her team overseeing the development of a natural gas pipeline set up an open, competitive bidding process that allowed any company to compete for the right to build a 1,715-mile pipeline to bring natural gas from Alaska to the Lower 48.

THE FACTS: Palin characterized the pipeline deal the same way before an AP investigation found her team crafted terms that favored only a few independent pipeline companies and ultimately benefited a company with ties to her administration, TransCanada Corp. Despite promises and legal guidance not to talk directly with potential bidders during the process, Palin had meetings or phone calls with nearly every major candidate, including TransCanada.

.....PALIN: Criticizes an aide to her predecessor, Gov. Frank Murkowski, for a conflict of interest because the aide represented the state in negotiations over a gas pipeline and then left to work as a handsomely paid lobbyist for ExxonMobil. Palin asserts her administration ended all such arrangements, shoving a wedge in the revolving door between special interests and the state capital.

THE FACTS: Palin ignores her own "revolving door" issue in office; the leader of her own pipeline team was a former lobbyist for a subsidiary of TransCanada, the company that ended up winning the rights to build the pipeline.

.....PALIN: Describing her resistance to federal stimulus money, Palin describes Alaska as a practical, libertarian haven of independent Americans who don't want "help" from government busybodies.

THE FACTS: Alaska is also one of the states most dependent on federal subsidies, receiving much more assistance from Washington than it pays in federal taxes. A study for the nonpartisan Tax Foundation found that in 2005, the state received $1.84 for every dollar it sent to Washington.

Fox's Number One Clown Glenn Beck still falsely claiming you "go to jail" for not having health insurance under bill

Fox News Lets Lobbyists Play Health Care Experts Without Revealing They are Lobbyist

Fox News Lets Lobbyists Play Health Care Experts Without Revealing They are Lobbyist

Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron failed to disclose that former Sen. John Breaux , who Cameron said "warns Democratic leaders now that trying too much too fast could backfire and undermine achievable [health care] reforms," has lobbied Congress this year about health reform for the trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). This is part of a pattern on Fox: On several occasions, Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich has been provided a forum to attack health care reform without disclosing that he reportedly profits from an organization that receives annual membership fees from health insurance companies.

Of course these lobbyists are presenting a "fair and balanced" point of view, Right?

For his entire presidency Bush did not go to even one fallen soldier's memorial service, Bush Feigns Sorrow at Ft Hood, Conservatives Swoon

Only The Semi-Fascist Tea baggers Would Think Lindsay Graham is a Moderate

Under Pressure From Tea Party Activists, Charleston GOP Censures Lindsey Graham(R-SC) For Bipartisanship

On Monday, the Charleston County Republican Party’s executive committee “took the unusual step” of officially censuring Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). The local GOP committee admonished Graham for stepping across party lines to work with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) on a bipartisan clean energy bill and other pieces of legislation. The censure stated that Graham’s “bipartisanship continues to weaken the Republican brand and tarnish the ideals of freedom.”

Part of the fury from the right against Graham is being spurred by the oil and coal industry. The oil company front group “American Energy Alliance” has blanketed South Carolina with ads smearing Graham for seeking to address climate change.

The pressure against Graham has also stemmed from his criticism of hate radio and Fox News host Glenn Beck. “Only in America can you make that much money crying,” said Graham, mocking Beck in early October. Beck has responded with a slime campaign against Graham that he typically reserves for liberals.

I guess that is all it takes to be a moderate right-winger: acknowledge that there is global warming and stating the simple fact that Glenn Beck is a serial lying hate monger.

Inventing Health Care Cost Shame on Judge Napolitano

Quick fact: Fox senior judicial analyst Judge Napolitano claims "unfunded" health care bill "add[s]...another trillion"

While discussing the current economic situation on Glenn Beck and referencing the House health care bill, Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano claimed that "the government wants to add...another trillion in healthcare, unfunded healthcare."

[ ]...Fact: CBO estimated the House bill would reduce deficit by $109 billion

Contrary to Napolitano's claim that the bill is "unfunded," the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that the Affordable Health Care for America Act (H.R. 3962)"would yield a net reduction in federal budget deficits of $109 billion over the 2010-2019 period." Further, the CBO estimated that in the decade after 2019, "the legislation would slightly reduce federal budget deficits ... relative to those projected under current law -- with a total effect during that decade that is in a broad range between zero and one-quarter percent of GDP [gross domestic product]."

Republican Nut Cake More Lies Less Substance

10 of the Nuttiest Statements Elected Officials Have Made in the Health Care Battle

1. Policy Terminated!

The thing that makes the rhetoric against health care reform so outlandish is how divorced it is from reality.

The Democrats' health care proposals, as any critic on the left can tell you, are rather compromised, incremental reforms that won't directly impact the vast majority of Americans who have decent health care already. It has a public insurance option, but only 1 in 50 Americans would be covered by it in 2019. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it wouldn't add to the deficit. It's moderate.

Although the legislation is obviously significant, it's tough to portray as a radical and frightening shift in our health care system. So opponents in Congress have taken the novel approach of arguing against a bill that doesn't exist.

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, warned that the House reform bill "cancels every [health insurance] policy" in America. "[House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi's agenda takes every [policy] away," King told MSNBC.

Not to be outdone, Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann -- always a favorite of lazy left-wing bloggers on the hunt for a gem -- told Fox News the House bill would make private insurance illegal.

2. Health Care Crisis? What Health Care Crisis?

One often hears that virtually everyone agrees that the American health care system has deep, deep problems, even as they disagree on exactly where the problems lie and how they should be fixed.

But have you ever wondered who it is that is not counted among "virtually everyone"? Turns out they include some of Washington's most conservative lawmakers who insist that there is no problem and that the whole thing is just another liberal myth (like global warming, poverty or the war in Iraq).

Another member of Congress named King -- Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., -- told MSNBC that health care is "not a major issue among the American people." The Huffington Post points out that King based the claim on a poll that in fact found that Americans ranked the issue as the third most important, after jobs and the deficit.

But Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., one of the craziest members of the House (and that's saying something), took the prize when she held a press conference to proclaim, "there are no Americans who don't have health care." Which would come as a surprise for the 46 million or so who lack coverage today.

"We do have about 7.5 million Americans who want to purchase health insurance who can not afford it," she granted before urging people not to "give the government control of our lives."

More at link.

Casey Warns Against Anti-Muslim Backlash: ‘It Would Be A Shame If Our Diversity Became A Casualty’

Iowa Conservative Steve King Lauds Lobbyists as American Heros for Bussing in Health Reform Protesters

Is Ft. Hood Like Columbine?

Where is Sarah Palin's Honor - November 2009 and She Still Cannot Tell the Truth

Palin gives a lackluster speech in Wisconsin, frequently uses ‘bogus’ or ‘awesome’ to discuss weighty topics.

During the summer’s debate over health care reform, right-wing activists and lawmakers latched onto former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s false claim that President Obama and congressional Democrats were proposing government “death panels” that would “pull the plug on grandma.” While Republican leaders largely abandoned this myth, Palin revived it on Friday during a speech at a Wisconsin Right to Life fundraising banquet. In her remarks, Palin “repeatedly suggested that liberal social policies could lead to de facto euthanasia.” The speech was closed to the press and audience members were not allowed to bring cell phones, cameras, or any recording devices, but a few reporters still managed to sneak in. Politico reports that Friday’s speech was less than inspiring

.

Conservative Betsy McCaughey is a Health Care Expert?

Conservative Betsy McCaughey is a Health Care Expert?
McCaughey Claims - On Nov. 2, the Congressional Budget Office estimated what the plans will likely cost. An individual earning $44,000 before taxes who purchases his own insurance will have to pay a $5,300 premium and an estimated $2,000 in out-of-pocket expenses, for a total of $7,300 a year, which is 17% of his pre-tax income. A family earning $102,100 a year before taxes will have to pay a $15,000 premium plus an estimated $5,300 out-of-pocket, for a $20,300 total, or 20% of its pre-tax income. Individuals and families earning less than these amounts will be eligible for subsidies paid directly to their insurer.

• Partly true. As usual, Ms. McCaughey does not tell the whole story. The numbers quoted above are projected costs for the year 2016, which is 9 years away! The CBO piece referenced above actually says the following: • "Under the House bill, the maximum share of income that enrollees would have to pay for the reference plan in 2013 would range from 1.5 percent for those with income less than or equal to 133 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) to 12 percent for those with income equal to 400 percent of the FPL."

McCaughey Claims - Eviscerating Medicare:
In addition to reducing future Medicare funding by an estimated $500 billion, the bill fundamentally changes how Medicare pays doctors and hospitals, permitting the government to dictate treatment decisions.

• Not true. The bill, sadly, does NOT fundamentally change how Medicare pays doctors and hospitals. Many providers wish it would! This is the type of "throw away "line that is calculated to get people riled up, but in no way educate them. There are "pilots" and "demonstrations" allowed for Medicare that would test payment approaches, but the only way those approaches would be more broadly applied is if they actually turn out to work to lower costs without affecting quality.


• AND, the government does not dictate treatment decisions. This is a flat out lie.


McCaughey Claims - Secs. 1158-1160 (pp. 499-520) initiates programs to reduce payments for patient care to what it costs in the lowest cost regions of the country. This will reduce payments for care (and by implication the standard of care) for hospital patients in higher cost areas such as New York and Florida.

• Not true. This is way more complicated than the sound bite above. What is true is that the Institute of Medicine will study the geographic variations in cost around the country. There is a lot of evidence that paying more for care does not guarantee better care at all, and we need to know more about what those geographic differences mean. See article by Dr. Atul Gawande for more information on this.

McCaughey Claims - Sec. 1402 (p. 756) says that the results of comparative effectiveness research conducted by the government will be delivered to doctors electronically to guide their use of "medical items and services."

• There is nothing on page 756 that says "guide". This is what it actually says on page 756: "The Center shall develop protocols and strategies for the appropriate dissemination of research findings in order to ensure effective communication of findings and the use and incorporation of such findings into relevant activities for the purpose of informing higher quality and more effective and efficient decisions regarding medical items and services." (page 756) And it also says: "Nothing in this section shall be construed-- ''(A) to permit the Center or Commission to mandate coverage, reimbursement, or other policies for any public or private payer" (page 758)

Either McCaughey cannot read or like most of modern conservatives is a serial liar. Betsy McCaughey has in fact made living off Conservative-welfare from right-wing think tanks and astroturf lobbyist front groups.

Flaky Conspiracy Site WorldNetDaily Tries to Link Fort Hood Killer to White House

Flaky Conspiracy Site WorldNetDaily Tries to Link Fort Hood Killer to White House
SUMMARY: WorldNetDaily falsely claimed that alleged Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan "advised Obama transition" in the headline of an article by Jerome Corsi highlighting his listing as a "participant" in a report for the Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) at George Washington University's Presidential Transition Task Force. However, Corsi himself acknowledges that there is no evidence that "the group played any formal role in the official Obama transition" -- indeed, the Task Force was initiated in April 2008. Moreover, while Hasan was listed as one of approximately 300 "Task Force Event Participants" in the report's appendix, HSPI has reportedly said he was not a "member" of the Task Force, and was listed because he RSVP'd for several of the group's open events.

WND article featured false headline "Shooter advised Obama transition"

From the November 6 WND article:
WND claim contradicted by HSPI report and WND article itself

Corsi: No evidence "the group played any formal role in the official Obama transition." In his article, Corsi wrote: "While the GWU task force participants included several members of government, including representatives of the Department of Justice and the U.S Department of Homeland Security, there is no indication in the document that the group played any formal role in the official Obama transition, other than to serve in a university-based advisory capacity."

HSPI Presidential Transition Task Force initiated in April 2008 -- well before Obama's election. According to the HSPI Presidential Task Force report Corsi uses to establish the link between Hasan and the organization, "in April 2008 The George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) established the Presidential Transition Task Force, comprised of national and homeland security experts, policymakers and practitioners."

According to HSPI, Hasan not a Task Force member, listed because he RSVP'd for groups' open events. In a November 6 blog post, Gawker reported:

FRIDAY MORNING UPDATE: Daniel Kaniewski, the institute's deputy director, confirms that Hasan attended task force meetings as an audience member, and stresses that he was not a member of the task force. "All of our events are open to the public," Kaniewski says, "and when someone RSVPs we put their name in the [report] so everyone knows who was in the room." He says institute staffers recall Hasan attending at least one task force event, and that he RSVP'd for several. "We do recall him speaking at one of our events as an audience member," he says, "but none of us recall what he actually said. Generally, our events are attended by people in the homeland security community, and Hasan had a very legitimate reason to be there. He was a fellow at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences."

Fox News owns the extremist images featured at Capitol Hill rally it promoted

Fox News owns the extremist images featured at Capitol Hill rally it promoted

In aggressively promoting Rep. Michele Bachmann's November 5 anti-health care reform rally on Capitol Hill, Fox News has chosen to associate itself with the offensive and extremist rhetoric emanating from that event. This rhetoric includes the disturbing signs -- such as one of a pile of Holocaust victims' bodies captioned "National Socialist Health Care, Dachau, Germany - 1945" -- displayed at the event.

The images of this group of idiots that compare health-care reform to the prison camp at Dachau are at the link. The fact is that a lack of health- care is killing Americans every day, Study links 45,000 U.S. deaths to lack of insurance

Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year -- one every 12 minutes -- in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.

"We're losing more Americans every day because of inaction ... than drunk driving and homicide combined," Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters.

Conservatives continue to be the most uninformed hateful political group in the U.S.

Its Still True, Republicans Do Not Care if Americans Die

Budget Monitor Says G.O.P. Bill Leaves Many Uninsured
The Congressional Budget Office said on Wednesday that an alternative health care bill put forward by House Republicans would have little impact in extending health benefits to the roughly 30 million uninsured Americans, but would reduce average insurance premium costs for people who have coverage.

The Republican bill, which has no chance of passage, would extend insurance coverage to about 3 million people by 2019, and would leave about 52 million people uninsured, the budget office said, meaning the proportion of non-elderly Americans with coverage would remain about the same as now, at roughly 83 percent.

The budget office has said that the Democrats’ health care proposal would extend coverage to 36 million people, meaning that 96 percent of legal residents would have health benefits. The Democrats’ bill would cost $1.1 trillion, with the costs more than covered by revenues from new taxes or cuts in government spending, particularly on Medicare.

House Republicans, including their leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, have said that they did not intend for their legislation to expand insurance coverage, because they viewed that goal as unaffordable. Instead, they said the bill was tailored narrowly to reduce costs.

According to the report by nonpartisan budget office, the Republican bill would reduce future federal deficits by $68 billion over 10 years, compared to a reduction of $104 billion by the House Democrats’ legislation.

Is This as Good as It Gets

Is This as Good as It Gets From Obama?
Yeah, I'm disappointed, too. I thought we were sweeping into power; I thought change meant Change. I believed all that talk about another First 100 Days, a la Roosevelt. Well, that didn't happen. The question is, is this as good as it gets from Obama, or is he pacing himself? He may have a four and eight-year plan and they included a first year of just gettin' to know you and not gonna rock the boat too much. Well, Mission Accomplished on that.

It's still to early to lose hope in a guy as smart and talented as Barack Obama. But I would counsel him to remember: If you're going undercover to infiltrate how Washington works, so you become one of them for a while, to gain their confidence, well, it can be just like all those movies where a cop goes deep, deep, DEEP undercover with drug people and -- fuck, he's a drug addict, too!

Logic tells me that really smart guys like Obama and Rahm Emanuel know better what they're doing than I do. They certainly know things I don't know. I think we have the same general goals and beliefs. And this is what they do for a living -- I wouldn't even try it. But I will never stop having this doubt: that maybe if they had really charged in there riding the forceful energy of the historic election, and acted like it was an emergency moment -- which it was -- they could have gotten some big victories right up front, and there really could have been an historic "first hundred days" for this administration and the country. Instead of what happened, which is the Obamas got a dog. It could have worked -- the country had given its endorsement to "...and now for something completely different." There might have been a way to knock the Republicans back on their heels right away, with the argument that "The American people demanded we make these changes, and you are unpatriotic to stand in their way."

We'll never know. Because that moment passed, and now it could follow the pattern of World War I and devolve into boring, static trench warfare where nothing really gamechanging happens while both sides slowly bleed to death.

That said, I do not forget that if the election had gone the other way, we'd right now have a barter economy and be at war with Honduras.

Follow Bill Maher on Twitter: www.twitter.com/billmaher

USDA Still Pushing Loans to Factory Farms

USDA Still Pushing Loans to Factory Farms by Lenny Russo

I am a card carrying member of the Land Stewardship Project. For those of you who are unfamiliar with LSP, it is a private, nonprofit organization founded in 1982 whose stated purpose is to promote sustainable agriculture, develop sustainable communities and foster an ethic of farmland stewardship.

This morning, I received an email from them alerting me to the USDA's Farm Service Agency policy of continuing to provide loans to build new specialized hog and poultry facilities at a time when overproduction in these agricultural sectors is leading to depressed prices, contract cancellations, abusive contract terms and increased corporate consolidation of the hog and poultry industries. This policy is a reversal of a directive issued on January 8, 1999, that suspended all direct and guaranteed loan financing for the construction of such facilities. The reasoning behind the suspension was the concern that FSA loans of this type could exacerbate the crisis of oversupply and depressed prices that were already affecting the hog industry. Shortly after assuming office in 2001, the Bush Administration re-instituted the loans, and so far the Obama Administration has continued to support this policy.

LSP's position on this is clear and unequivocal. They believe that the USDA is siding with so called "mega-operations" at the expense of existing hog and poultry contract growers and independent hog farmers by issuing these loans. In short, they claim that these loans provide public financing for speculators whose strategy it is to expand in order to seize greater market share when prices are low while existing hog and poultry producers are being forced to reduce production in order to cut their losses in an effort to correct the market by bringing the supply more in line with current demand. They insist that these loans favor corporate-backed farming over small family farms. They further contend that this is bad public policy that puts taxpayers' money at risk. Why, they ask, are we increasing production at a time when overproduction is creating a crisis for America's farmers? It's a good question and one that begs to be answered.

Dick Cheney is still addicted to untruths and doesn't mind throwing old friends under the bus.

Glenn Beck Shills for Corporations Against Net Freedom

Glenn Beck Shills for Corporations Against Net Freedom

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission voted to move forward with regulations to preserve the open architecture of the Internet. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is trying to make our current system’s “net neutrality” official by ensuring that broadband providers “cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications” and are “transparent about their network management practices.” That same day, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) introduced legislation to block the FCC, inexplicably arguing that preserving net neutrality would be a “government takeover of the Internet.”

[ ]....Fox News host Glenn Beck has been fear-mongering on net neutrality for weeks, saying that the Obama administration is trying to shut down freedom of speech. “You have a freedom of speech or the government,” said Beck last week. “You can’t really have both.” He’s been getting his talking points from Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity, who also fueled Beck’s campaign against former Obama adviser Van Jones. Some telecom companies — which, along with the cable industry, is driving opposition to an open Internet — have begun astroturfing efforts as well.

The telecom and cable industries are the ones interested in controlling access to information on the Internet. What the FCC’s regulations on net neutrality would do are ensure that the Internet remains an open, non-discriminatory marketplace of ideas, rather than a pay-for-play system where broadband providers could make certain companies’ sites run faster if they’re willing to dole out large sums of money.

Net neutrality is essential to free speech, which both the Christian Coalition and the Gun Owners of America have acknowledged.