the Bangor Blues

“I think extremists have taken over,” the Texas Republican said, referring to neoconservatives in the government. “They’re the ones that run the foreign policy and that convinced us as a country to go along with all these wars.”

2011-12-09T06:58:00.000-08:00

Just heard a quote on Bonnie Falkner's Gun's & Butter - "If buddhists lived in oil rich countries we would have demonized them."

2011-12-05T15:40:00.001-08:00

"In the last year and a half at least 10 experts, whistleblowers and BP connected individuals have died under mysterious circumstances."

2011-12-01T12:15:00.000-08:00

2011-11-30T12:23:00.001-08:00

“I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have,” Mayor Bloomberg said. He failed to mention, despite the city voting for a two term limit, he bought himself a third term. In other words, ths fat greedy fuck of a scumbag doesn't give a flying fuck about democracy. Someone needs to tell this lazy cuntfaced twatnosed dickeared asshead that politicians were created to represent the people. Bloomberg represents Bloomberg.

2011-10-28T09:10:00.001-07:00

Now the Obama/Holder Justice Department is attempting to re-write the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), empowering or even compelling government agencies to deny the very existence of records they know to exist if they believe they are legitimately exempted from disclosure. Of course they are most likely the sole arbiter of whether they are indeed exempt from disclosure. In effect the Obama/Holder Justice Department wants to be free to legally lie about the existence of records in response to FOIA requests. Apparently they want to avoid the embarrassment and inconvenience of being officially rebuked by the courts for doing exactly that (lying to a Federal judge), as occurred earlier this year when, in a strongly worded opinion, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney wrote that the "Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court." The solution is simple: re-write the law so the government, in many circumstances, can affirmatively mislead the court.

2011-10-21T08:09:00.000-07:00

It sounds like November should be fun.

2011-10-20T06:34:00.003-07:00

Another scary outcome I discovered is that, when the protesters marched to the first precinct, the whole of Erickson Street was cordoned off – "frozen" they were told, "by Homeland Security". Obviously if DHS now has powers to simply take over a New York City street because of an arrest for peaceable conduct by a middle-aged writer in an evening gown, we have entered a stage of the closing of America, which is a serious departure from our days as a free republic in which municipalities are governed by police forces.

2011-10-20T06:34:00.001-07:00

2011-09-30T12:00:00.000-07:00

Look what the fattest fuck in nyc said:

“The protesters are protesting against people who make forty, fifty thousand dollars a year and are struggling to make ends’ meet — that’s the bottom line,” the mayor said, adding: “People in this day and age need support for their employers.”

Mr. Bloomberg, who began his career on Wall Street and made his considerable fortune in a media company that caters largely to financial institutions, has been a prominent defender of banks as they face criticism for their risky practices in the run-up to the financial crisis. On Friday, he argued, as he has done many times recently, that attacking banks is counterproductive when trying to help the economy.

Who said anyone was trying to help the economy you fat stupid FUCK?

2011-09-30T07:16:00.001-07:00

For many civil libertarians, it will be virtually impossible to vote for someone who has flagrantly ignored the Convention Against Torture or its underlying Nuremberg Principles. As Obama and Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. have admitted, waterboarding is clearly torture and has been long defined as such by both international and U.S. courts. It is not only a crime but a war crime. By blocking the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for torture, Obama violated international law and reinforced other countries in refusing investigation of their own alleged war crimes. The administration magnified the damage by blocking efforts of other countries like Spain from investigating our alleged war crimes. In this process, his administration shredded principles on the accountability of government officials and lawyers facilitating war crimes and further destroyed the credibility of the U.S. in objecting to civil liberties abuses abroad.

2011-09-29T15:09:00.001-07:00

HAS THIS TERRORIST FUCK BEEN ARRESTED YET?

2011-09-29T14:57:00.001-07:00

2011-09-29T08:38:00.001-07:00

2011-09-28T14:28:00.001-07:00

For the first time ever, a country - India - is accusing a multinational company of "bio-piracy". That means stealing indigenous plants, and then trying to develop genetically modified versions of them, without giving any compensation back to the local people or nation where the plant originally came from. Our reporters travelled to one of the affected areas and spoke to those who say it's their environment which has been stolen.

2011-09-27T13:02:00.001-07:00

2011-09-27T09:45:00.000-07:00

2011-09-27T09:21:00.001-07:00

END POLICE TERRORISM

2011-09-26T15:36:00.000-07:00

Libertarian billionaire funds university enviro-lectures
Koch Brothers Watch
By COLIN WOODARD | September 21, 2011

The University of Maine at Machias announced last week that the campus will be welcoming its first Koch Speaker on Environmentalism and Freedom on October 6.

As the name suggests, the series is underwritten by a grant from the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the philanthropy of the conservative billionaire of the same name, which has been the subject of scrutiny both inside and outside of academe. In May, an internal faculty review committee concluded Florida State University had jeopardized its academic autonomy in agreeing to give the foundation veto power over the hiring and retention of faculty members in the economics department, in exchange for a $1.5 million grant. The faculty senate at George Mason University has sought to review the terms of $30 million in grants the university received from the foundation, but have been rebuffed; GMU is a private university and not subject to public-records disclosure.

Charles Koch and his brother, David, have given more than $100 million to libertarian causes, from the effort to repeal climate-change initiatives in California to the training of Tea Party activists via Americans For Prosperity, a group they founded. They seek to promote "economic freedom" — by which they mean freedom from taxes and government regulation, policy changes that would further enrich the Kochs, whose company is one of the top ten air polluters in the country. Between 2005 and 2008, the brothers vastly outspent ExxonMobil in giving to organizations fighting efforts to address climate change, with substantial amounts passing through Charles's foundation.

2011-09-26T15:16:00.000-07:00

I ❤ NY

2011-09-22T07:44:00.000-07:00

Police Break the Law [WHICH IS ALL THEY EVER DO]: NYPD Officers Destroy Know Your Rights Billboard Posters

Recently, New Yorkers witnessed New York Police Department officers tearing down one of several billboard posters legally mounted by Peoples’ Justice for Community Control and Police Accountability (Peoples’ Justice or PJ). Peoples' Justice is a city-wide coalition of grassroots organizations working to end police violence in New York City. The coalition has been purchasing billboard space for posters that provide information about New Yorkers' rights when dealing with NYPD officers in low-income communities of color since mid-2009 as part of its Public Art and Advertising Campaign. Support for this campaign is provided by Center for Constitutional Rights through a grant from the Ford Foundation.

In the last week, New Yorkers witnessed officers from the 43rd Street Precinct tearing down one of PJ’s Know Your Rights posters in the Bronx. Neighborhood business owners and residents who witnessed the defacements reported being harassed and threatened by the police. Last year, several billboard posters in Brooklyn were also destroyed, although those responsible were not seen. Peoples’ Justice demands the NYPD stop destroying these posters, which we have paid for and posted legally. We would also like to call attention to the fact that defacing these posters constitutes criminal and unconstitutional activity, namely, the destruction of private property and a violation of the first amendment right to free speech. We ask anyone who witnesses NYPD officers defacing other posters to email us ( info@peoplesjustice.orgThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Your identity and email address will be used by someone in the People’s Justice Coalition to contact you and ask you about what you witnessed, and will not be revealed or provided to authorities.

2011-09-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

2011-09-21T12:07:00.000-07:00

Exclusive: The Washington Post now admits that the key role of Islamists in Libya’s uprising “went largely unnoticed” before Muammar Gaddafi was toppled last month. But Robert Parry asks whose fault was that, since it was the Post and other Big Media that were acting more as propagandists for “regime change” than honest brokers.

By Robert Parry

During the six-month uprising against Muammar Gaddafi, major U.S. news outlets repeated again and again that the Libyan dictator was behind the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and they ignored warnings that militant Islamists were at the core of the anti-Gaddafi rebel army.

Indeed, for Americans to get alternative views on these points, they had to search out Web sites, like Consortiumnews.com, which had the audacity not to march in lockstep with the rest of the Western media. Only outside the mainstream press would you find significant questions asked about the certainty over Libya’s guilt in the Pan Am bombing and about the makeup of the rebels.

Now, after the United States and its NATO allies have engineered the desired “regime change” in Libya – under the pretext of “protecting civilians” – those two points are coming more into focus.

The New York Times and the Washington Post on Thursday finally acknowledged that radical Islamists, including some with links to al-Qaeda, are consolidating their power inside the new regime in Tripoli.

2011-09-15T10:49:00.001-07:00

And how about New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg? When asked if he had smoked marijuana, he said yes, and even added that he enjoyed it. Yet under Mayor Bloomberg, New York has the shameful distinction of being the marijuana arrest capital of the world. Last year, more than 50,000 New Yorkers were arrested and jailed on low-level marijuana possession charges - that far exceeds the city's total marijuana arrests from 1981-1995!

2011-09-15T08:34:00.000-07:00

I propose a new law: that it would be illegal for cops, soldiers, politicians, judges, corporations, and mercenaries to commit illegal acts. If they do, they lose their job forever with no benifits and they have to spend a minimum of 5 years (no parole until five years) in a maximum security USA prison.

2011-09-14T15:04:00.001-07:00

2011-09-12T13:27:00.000-07:00

2011-07-21T07:44:00.000-07:00

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.

Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell's company, GovTech Solutions. Also included that contract a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State's election night server layout system.

2011-07-21T07:38:00.000-07:00

Now Two Murdoch Whistleblowers Dead

2011-07-20T14:02:00.001-07:00

One of the most under-reported stories of the past week is Jeremy Scahill's CIA piece in The Nation. In essence, Scahill documented the ongoing presence of a CIA "black site" despite all the Obama-administration reassurances that the practice was ended.

2011-07-18T13:25:00.001-07:00

A few years later, people are starting to agree with me..

Would We Be Better Off If John McCain Were President?
Presidents serve the institutional interests of the corporations behind them. A President McCain may have at least triggered a true progressive fight.

July 17, 2011

Democrats were united on one issue in the 2008 presidential election: the absolute disaster that a John McCain victory would have produced.

And they were right. McCain as president would clearly have produced a long string of catastrophes: He would probably have approved a failed troop surge in Afghanistan, engaged in worldwide extrajudicial assassination, destabilized nuclear-armed Pakistan, failed to bring Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to the negotiating table, expanded prosecution of whistle-blowers, sought to expand executive branch power, failed to close Guantanamo, failed to act on climate change, pushed both nuclear energy and opened new areas to domestic oil drilling, failed to reform the financial sector enough to prevent another financial catastrophe, supported an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, presided over a growing divide between rich and poor, and failed to lower the jobless rate.

Nothing reveals the true state of American politics today more than the fact that Democratic President Barack Obama has undertaken all of these actions, and even more significantly, left the Democratic Party far weaker than it would have been had McCain been elected. Few issues are more important than seeing behind the screen of a myth-making mass media, and understanding what this demonstrates about how power in America really works—and what needs to be done to change it.

2011-07-12T13:25:00.000-07:00

On May 17 at 5 in the morning the Chicano activist Carlos Montes got a wake-up call at his home in California from Barack Obama’s security state. The Los Angeles County sheriff’s SWAT team, armed with assault rifles and wearing bulletproof vests, as well as being accompanied by FBI agents, kicked down his door, burst into his house with their weapons drawn, handcuffed him in his pajamas and hauled him off to jail. Montes, one of tens of thousands of Americans who have experienced this terrifying form of military-style assault and arrest, was one of the organizers of the demonstrations outside the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., and he faces trial along with 23 other anti-war activists from Minnesota, as well as possible charges by a federal grand jury.

The widening use of militarized police units effectively nullifies the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits the use of the armed forces for civilian policing. City police forces have in the last few decades amassed small strike forces that employ high-powered assault rifles, armored personnel carriers, tanks, elaborate command and control centers and attack helicopters. Poor urban neighborhoods, which bear the brunt of the estimated 40,000 SWAT team assaults that take place every year, have already learned what is only dimly being understood by the rest of us—in the eyes of the state we are increasingly no longer citizens with constitutional rights but enemy combatants. And that is exactly how Montes was treated. There is little daylight now between raiding a home in the middle of the night in Iraq and raiding one in Alhambra, Calif."

2011-07-12T13:18:00.000-07:00

Remember when a bunch of guys from Saudi Arabia supposedly killed 3000 Americans 10 years ago?

Newly appointed US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta told American troops in Baghdad on Monday that 9/11 was the reason they were in Iraq, before he was quickly corrected by his spokesman.

"The reason you guys are here is because of 9/11. The US got attacked and 3,000 human beings got killed because of Al-Qaeda," Panetta told about 150 soldiers at the Camp Victory US base.

"We've been fighting as a result of that," he said.

2011-07-08T08:41:00.001-07:00

To clean up some of the mess, Murdoch has called upon the talents of former Bush administration Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh, whose views on privacy are enshrined in the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, and Joel Klein, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's union-bashing former schools chief, known for his phony claims of test-score gains.

2011-07-06T13:36:00.000-07:00

Just after midnight on May 16, 2010, a SWAT team threw a flash-bang grenade through the window of a 25-year-old man while his 7-year-old daughter slept on the couch as her grandmother watched television. The grenade landed so close to the child that it burned her blanket. The SWAT team leader then burst into the house and fired a single shot which struck the child in the throat, killing her. The police were there to apprehend a man suspected of murdering a teenage boy days earlier. The man they were after lived in the unit above the girl's family.

The shooting death of Aiyana Mo'Nay Stanley-Jones sounds like it happened in a war zone. But the tragic SWAT team raid took place in Detroit.

2011-07-06T08:29:00.000-07:00

A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but Narces Benoit's decision to videotape a shooting by Miami police landed him in jail after officers smashed his cell-phone camera.

It was 4am on May 30 when Benoit and his girlfriend Erika Davis saw officers firing dozens of bullets into a car driven by Raymond Herisse, a suspect who hit a police officer and other vehicles while driving recklessly. Herisse died in the hail of lead, and four bystanders also suffered gunshot wounds, the Miami Herald newspaper reported.

Police noticed the man filming the shooting and an officer jumped into his truck, and put a pistol to his head, Benoit said. The video shows officers crowding around Herisse's vehicle before opening fire, followed by indistinguishable yelling at onlookers, including Benoit, to stop filming.

The cop yelled: "Wanna be a [expletive] paparazzi?" Benoit recounted in a TV interview.

"My phone was smashed, he stepped on it, handcuffed me," the 35-year-old car stereo technician told CNN.
Despite his phone being destroyed, Benoit was able to save the footage by taking the memory card out of the device and putting it in his mouth before handing it over to police, he said, adding that officers smashed several other cameras in the chaos which followed the shooting.

2011-06-30T12:35:00.001-07:00

...We all left the venue to be greeted outside by a sea of NYPD gloved up and very aggressive. As we began to move we all witnessed the most brutal beating of a party patron. He was on the floor surrounded by 10 police officers with sticks out beating him. In shock, we must have not moved quickly enough to the officers liking and they shouted "Move the FUCK back" and then shoved myself and my daughter down to the ground. Now we were surrounded by 3 cops and 1 pinning us down. My daughter shouted "Get off my mother" and was handcuffed and arrested... Tonight with a lump in my throat my daughter remains in police custody with 4 others. She has been charged with assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct.

2011-06-30T12:33:00.000-07:00

police tasered, beat mentally handicapped Ohio teen

2011-06-29T15:56:00.001-07:00

"In this second bulletin, we're dumping booty pirated from a dozen Arizona police officer's personal email accounts looking specifically for humiliating dirt," the AntiSec hackers said in a statement released with the data. "This leak has names, addresses, phone numbers, passwords, social security numbers, online dating account info, voicemails, chat logs, and seductive girlfriend pictures belonging to a dozen Arizona police officers. We found more internal police reports, cops forwarding racist chain emails, k9 drug unit cops who use percocets, and a convicted sex offender who was part of FOP Maricopa Lodge Five."

They claimed to have also found evidence of racial discrimination. The hackers decided not to release the information stolen from one officer, they claimed, because he had notified his superiors about civil rights violations.

The hackers acknowledged that the data could put law enforcement officers lives at risk, but were unconcerned. "We are making sure they experience just a taste of the same kind of violence and terror they dish out on an every day basis," they said.

2011-06-29T08:48:00.000-07:00

In the brave new world of cloud computing, where data is stored off-site in massive server farms instead of on a user's local hard drive, privacy and security are paramount in the consumer's mind.

Unfortunately for privacy advocates, their concerns are essentially moot thanks to the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which a key Microsoft official said recently permits the U.S. to spy on data stored within cloud servers across the European Union.

2011-06-16T12:28:00.001-07:00

Death is clearly not what it used to be.

Or perhaps the people who were killed in the other attacks were not Kashmiri, Sangeen or Mehsud. Indeed, the attack on a funeral procession on June 23, 2009, which killed Sangeen was supposedly aimed at the TTP chief. It killed 83 people who certainly were not who they were supposed to be.

These are not isolated events. At the end of 2009, the Pakistani daily Dawn calculated that, of the 708 people killed in 44 drone attacks that year, only 5 were known militants. Earlier that year, The News, Pakistan's other major English-language daily, had calculated that between January 14, 2006, and April 8, 2009, 60 drone attacks killed 701 people - of whom only 14 were known militants.

The US has come a long way since July 2001 when it rebuked the Israeli government for its policy of "targeted assassination", which it said were really "extrajudicial killings". In September of that year, CIA director George Tenet confessed that it would be a "terrible mistake" for someone in his position to fire a weapon such as the predator drone. By 2009, such qualms were obsolete. Indeed, the new CIA director Leon Panetta declared predator drones "the only game in town". The catalyst was 9/11 - and lifting the ban on extrajudicial killings was just one of the many illegal policies it licensed.

Many of the post-9/11 criminalities were eventually rolled back, yet the policy of extrajudicial killings not only survived the Bush years, it was intensified. During his eight years in office, Bush ordered a total of 45 drone strikes in Pakistan; in fewer than three years, Obama has ordered more than 200. On his third day in office the president ordered two drone strikes, one of which incinerated a pro-government tribal leader along with his whole family, including three children. Obama has since also expanded the drone war in Afghanistan.

2011-06-16T08:15:00.000-07:00

2011-06-16T07:59:00.000-07:00

On 28 March 2011, President Obama was given a "transparency award" from five "open government" organisations: OMB Watch, the National Security Archive, the Project on Government Oversight, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and OpenTheGovernment.org. Ironically – and quite likely in response to growing public criticism regarding the Obama administration's lack of transparency – heads of the five organisations gave their award to Obama in a closed, undisclosed meeting at the White House. If the ceremony had been open to the press, it is likely that reporters would have questioned the organisations' proffered justification for the award, in contrast to the current reality:

• President Obama has not decreased, but has dramatically increased governmental secrecy. According to a new report to the president by the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) – the federal agency that provides oversight of the government's security classification system – the cost of classification for 2010 has reached over $10.17bn. That's a 15% jump from the previous year, and the first time ever that secrecy costs have surpassed $10bn. Last month, ISOO reported that the number of original classification decisions generated by the Obama administration in 2010 was 224,734 – a 22.6% jump from the previous year (see The Price of Secrecy, Obama Edition).

• There were 544,360 requests for information last year under the Freedom of Information Act to the 35 biggest federal agencies – 41,000 requests more than the year before. Yet the bureaucracy responded to 12,400 fewer requests than the prior year, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.

• Obama has invoked baseless and unconstitutional executive secrecy to quash legal inquiries into secret illegalities more often than any predecessor. The list of this president's invocations of the "state secrets privilege" has already resulted in shutting down lawsuits involving the National Security Agency's illegal wiretapping – Jewel v NSA and Shubert v Obama; extraordinary rendition and assassination – Anwar al-Awlaki; and illegal torture – Binyam Mohamed.

• Ignoring his campaign promise to protect government whistleblowers, Obama's presidency has amassed the worst record in US history for persecuting, prosecuting and jailing government whistleblowers and truth-tellers. President Obama's behaviour has been in stark contrast to his campaign promises, which included live-streaming meetings online and rewarding whistleblowers. Obama's department of justice is twisting the 1917 Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national security leaks – more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous administrations combined.

• The Obama justice department's prosecution of former NSA official Thomas Drake, who, up till 9 June, faced 35 years in prison for having blown the whistle on the NSA's costly and unlawful warrantless monitoring of American citizens, typifies the abusive practices made possible through expansive secrecy agreements and threats of prosecution.

• President Obama has set a powerful and chilling example for potential whistleblowers through the abuse and torture of Bradley Manning, whose guilt he has also publicly stated prior to any trial by his, Obama's, military subordinates.

• Obama is the only president who has reenacted Fahrenheit 451 by actually having his agency collect and burn a book due to a never-justified classification excuse: Lt Col Tony Shaffer's Operation Dark Heart.

• Under President Obama, the FBI has launched a series of raids and issued grand jury subpoenas targeting nearly two dozen antiwar activists. Over 2,600 arrests of protesters in the US have been made while Obama has been president, further encroaching on the exercise of first amendment rights.

• President Obama has initiated a secret assassination programme, has publicly announced that he has given himself the power to include Americans on the list of people to be assassinated, and has attempted to assassinate at least one, Anwar al-Awlaki.

• President Obama has maintained the power to secretly kidnap, imprison, rendition, or torture, and he has formalised the power to lawlessly imprison in an executive order. This also means the power to secretly imprison. There are some 1,700 prisoners outside the rule of law in Bagram alone.

• The Obama administration is also busy going after reporters to discover their sources and convening grand juries in order to target journalists and news publishers.

• President Obama promised to reveal White House visitors' logs. He didn't. In response to outrage over his refusal to reveal the names of health insurance CEOs he had met with and cut deals with on the health insurance reform bill, he announced that he would release the names going forward, but not those in the past. And going forward, he would withhold names he chose to withhold. White House staff then began regularly meeting lobbyists just off White House grounds in order to avoid the visitors' logs.

• President Obama has sent representatives to aggressively pressure Spain, England and Germany to shut down investigations that could have exposed the crimes of the Bush era, just as he has instructed the US justice department to avoid such matters. This includes his refusal to allow prosecutions of the CIA for torture, following a public letter from eight previous heads of the CIA informing him that he had better not enforce those laws.

The "transparency award" in question was described as "aspirational", similar to the rationale for awarding Obama the Nobel Peace Prize early in his presidency when he had done nothing yet to further the cause of peace. Participants admitted they used the private meeting in March to try and lobby Obama to do more to earn their award. If the president doesn't change course as a result of the lobbying and "award", there are some who would shrug and say, "no harm, no foul".

The giving of an unmerited award, however, whether for transparency or peace, is not entirely benign. No one knows better how destructive secrecy is for maintaining systems of justice, ethics and democracy than these self-proclaimed "open government" watchdogs. Especially when such a false accolade emanates, as in this case, from those who are supposed to serve as counters to secrecy and to retaliation against government whistleblowers, such appearance of approval will tend to cover up and mask the reality of the executive's increasingly undemocratic and illegal use of secrecy.

Therefore, the undersigned call on these organisations: OMB Watch, the National Security Archive, the Project on Government Oversight, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and OpenTheGovernment.org, to publicly take back their "transparency award", as difficult as that may be, from Barack Obama. The watchdog organisations should, of course, continue to promote aspirations for open, democratic government, reduced secrecy and adherence to the rule of law, in more genuine, legitimate ways than giving unmerited awards to the executive. Such false awards only stand to backfire and hurt the cause of open government.

Drafted by FBI whistleblowers Sibel Edmonds and Coleen Rowley

2011-06-14T11:59:00.001-07:00

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Saturday warned of a creeping "new colonialism" in Africa from foreign investors and governments interested only in extracting natural resources to enrich themselves.

African leaders must ensure that foreign projects are sustainable and benefit all their citizens, not only elites, she said.

Clinton did not identify any perceived culprits, but a day earlier she had urged scrutiny of China's large investments and business interests in Africa so that the African people are not taken advantage of. She said U.S. diplomats in Africa had been asked to provide Washington with assessments of Chinese projects in the countries to which they are assigned.

"We saw that during colonial times, it is easy to come in, take out natural resources, pay off leaders and leave," Clinton said Saturday in the Zambian capital of Lusaka before flying to Tanzania. "And when you leave, you don't leave much behind for the people who are there. We don't want to see a new colonialism in Africa."

2011-06-02T11:31:00.000-07:00

AFTER TEN FUCKING YEARS OF ACTING AS THE LARGEST TERRORIST ORGANIZATION IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE, AMERICA PROMISES IT WILL TRY AND DO A BETTER JOB OF EXPRESSING REGRET WHEN MURDERING THE FUCK OUT OF LITTLE FUCKING KIDS. THAT SOUNDS LIKE PROGRESS, AMERICAN-STYLE.

FUCK YOU OBAMA. FUCK YOU CLINTON. I PRAY TO THE GOOD LORD HE WILL TAKE YOU IN YOUR SLEEP AND SEND YOU TO HELL FOR AN ETERNITY OF TORTURE.

Obama Admin Rebuffs Karzai Plea to Halt Deadly Raids

The Obama administration is downplaying the latest plea from Afghan President Hamid Karzai for NATO to stop attacking Afghan homes. Karzai criticized the U.S.-led NATO forces after 12 children and two women were killed in a bombing on Sunday. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said only that the United States will continue to do everything it can—to express regret.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: "We’re going to continue to do everything we can to express our deep regret when a terrible incident occurs and civilians are injured or killed. And I would only underscore that that stands in stark contrast to the indiscriminate killing, the suicide bombing, the IED, the improvised explosive devices, that are used by the insurgents without regard for any human life."

2011-05-31T10:35:00.000-07:00

Dumb Question of the Twenty-first Century: Is It Legal? Post-Legal America and the National Security Complex
by Tom Engelhardt

Is the Libyan war legal? Was Bin Laden’s killing legal? Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen for assassination? Were those “enhanced interrogation techniques” legal? These are all questions raised in recent weeks. Each seems to call out for debate, for answers. Or does it?

Now, you couldn’t call me a legal scholar. I’ve never set foot inside a law school, and in 66 years only made it onto a single jury (dismissed before trial when the civil suit was settled out of court). Still, I feel at least as capable as any constitutional law professor of answering such questions.

My answer is this: they are irrelevant. Think of them as twentieth-century questions that don't begin to come to grips with twenty-first century American realities. In fact, think of them, and the very idea of a nation based on the rule of law, as a reflection of nostalgia for, or sentimentality about, a long-lost republic. At least in terms of what used to be called “foreign policy,” and more recently “national security,” the United States is now a post-legal society. (And you could certainly include in this mix the too-big-to-jail financial and corporate elite.)

It’s easy enough to explain what I mean. If, in a country theoretically organized under the rule of law, wrongdoers are never brought to justice and nobody is held accountable for possibly serious crimes, then you don’t have to be a constitutional law professor to know that its citizens actually exist in a post-legal state. If so, “Is it legal?” is the wrong question to be asking, even if we have yet to discover the right one.

2011-05-31T07:24:00.001-07:00

It's bad enough that ever since President Obama took office, he has repeatedly gone after whistleblowers like Sterling with a cold vengeance, charging more people in cases involving leaking information than "all previous presidents combined," as Savage noted.

But Obama administration officials are no longer content just with targeting whistleblowers like Sterling, former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake, (who goes on trial soon on charges of providing classified information to The Baltimore Sun) and of course Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst accused -- and already pronounced guilty by the president -- of passing classified documents to Wikileaks.org.

2011-05-26T11:43:00.000-07:00

An examination of Obama’s overall record — his staffing choices and his policy decisions — indicates a marked tendency for the President to choose war over peace, Wall Street over Main Street, torturers over whistleblowers, centrists over progressives, and secrecy over transparency. See this petition (not working currently) for a summary of the case against President Obama.

Worst of all, President Obama worked ardently to protect Bush Administration officials from prosecution for torture, war-mongering, and corruption. Obama thereby hid the truth about the recent past from the American people and allowed the Republicans to regroup and rebuild. Who would have thought that two years after the end of the Bush presidency, Democrats would be blamed for the economic mess and Republicans would win the House? President Obama’s lack of leadership, and his naive bipartisanship, are largely to blame. (plus the fact that he works for the CIA, not the voters of America)

Read the whole article - “The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers”

2011-05-23T09:02:00.001-07:00

According to The New Yorker, the Obama administration has used the Espionage Act of 1917 to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous administrations combined. We play excerpts of Thomas Drake’s first public comments and talk to former Justice Department whistleblower, Jesselyn Radack.

2011-05-19T09:31:00.001-07:00

2011-05-18T12:53:00.000-07:00

GOD I WISH HE WOULD HAVE

"[I]t became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, 'Oh, my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level,'" West lamented. "I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the capitalist democratic procedure that's probably the best he could do. But at least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong."

West recalled that Obama "cussed me out" after a speech about charter schools at the Urban League in 2010. It was the last time they had personal contact.

"He just lets me have it. He says, 'You ought to be ashamed of yourself, saying I'm not a progressive. Is that the best you can do? Who do you think you are?' I smiled. I shook his hand... I wanted to slap him on the side of his head."

2011-05-17T14:09:00.001-07:00

I have yet to meet someone who's not pretending.

2011-05-03T11:18:00.001-07:00

2011-04-06T19:24:00.000-07:00

Some Things I'm Really Pissed Off About

by Faith Carr

2011-04-06T10:27:00.000-07:00

via raw story...

Below are five of the biggest campaign pledges Obama failed to keep -- for which he'll likely have to answer before election day 2012.
-----

1. Health care for all
If you're an American making less than $30,000 a year, chances are you still have trouble seeing a doctor, despite the passage of President Obama's health care reform plan. In 2007, then-Senator Obama said he wanted to make sure no American is without access to vital medical attention and proposed using revenues from the soon-to-expire Bush tax cuts to fund it. When the campaign laid out their specific plans in 2008, they included a "public option" that would be paid for by the public at large and made available to anyone who could not obtain coverage through their employer or other public program.

Ultimately, the debate in Washington became so heated and rife with disinformation that the administration and its allies in Congress agreed to forgo the public option, using it as a bargaining chip to ensure other proposals, like ending the "pre-existing condition" exclusion in private insurance policies, were passed in the final bill. They also gave in to Republican demands and extended the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, promising to take on the issue again in 2012. In spite of the modest legislative victory of actually getting health reform passed, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that even after all the elements take effect in 2014, over 22 million Americans will still lack access to basic health services.

2. Close Guantanamo
As a symbol of everything that liberals thought to be wrong with the Bush-era, closing the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba should have been an easy target for the new and popular president and his Democratic super-majority in Congress -- and, in fact, then-candidate Obama promised to do just that. But as he soon found out, strategic and political calculations have made it almost impossible to shuck.

Today, Obama has turned away from his promise to close the facility and embraced the controversial terror war symbol, ordering the resumption of military tribunals and even moving the accused 9/11 plotters' trial from a civilian court in New York City to the secret military court at Guantanamo.

3. Defend labor rights
"Understand this," Obama said during a campaign rally in 2007. "If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I will put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I’ll will walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America." (Watch.)

Despite efforts by state-level Republicans in Wisconsin, Tennessee, Michigan, Ohio, Maine, Florida and Indiana to curtail collective bargaining rights, the President has yet to appear at a single protest or picket line.

4. Reform the Patriot Act
Contrary to popular belief, Obama has never actually argued for a repeal of the Bush administration's sweeping, post-9/11 security initiatives, which were passed with a mandatory "sunset" clause to overrule the concerns of civil libertarians at the time. Instead, Obama has consistently said he favors enhanced judicial oversight and a pullback from some warrantless searches -- like the provisions that allow the FBI to access library records without a warrant.

But every time the emergency laws have been due to expire, President Obama has pushed to extend them without any reforms. Most recently, the administration sought an extension of the Patriot Act that was even longer than the one Republicans wanted. They gave it to him and continued the sweeping spy powers through 2013, ensuring that the next extension doesn't become an election year issue.

5. End the wars
Even as a candidate, Obama maintained that Afghanistan should be "the focus" of Bush's terror war, and he pledged to make it so. But the president was also swept into power on a wave of anti-war fervor behind his calls to end the occupation of Iraq. Iraq has calmed down quite a bit as U.S. troops steadily stream out of the country, but Afghanistan is more violent than ever amid Obama's own "surge."

Even though the president promised his Afghan occupation would conclude in July 2011, military officials have admitted that sometime in 2014 is more likely. Elsewhere, American forces are dropping more bombs on more countries today than at any point during the Bush administration, with continued occupation forces in two massive countries even as they stage aerial bombardments of Pakistan, Libya and Yemen.

---

In other words, OBAMA IS A FUCKING LIAR and anyone who votes for him again IS A FUCKING RETARD.

2011-03-30T23:08:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK, March 23, 2011 --

/PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A December 2010 poll conducted by the prestigious Emnid Institute, and reported in the German magazine "Welt der Wunder," revealed that 89.5% of German respondents do not believe the official story of 9/11.

The issue is heating up in America as well, and will soon be heard in court.

Top Secret Military Specialist April Gallop saw disturbing things up close that have not been reported in the media.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, she was ordered by her supervisor to go directly to work at the Pentagon, before dropping off her ten-week-old son Elisha at day care.

Amazingly, the infant was given immediate security clearance upon arrival.

The instant Gallop turned on her computer an enormous explosion blew her out of her chair, knocking her momentarily unconscious.

Escaping through the hole reportedly made by Flight 77, she saw no signs of an aircraft – no seats, luggage, metal, or human remains. Her watch (and other clocks nearby) had stopped at 9:30-9:31 a.m., seven minutes before the Pentagon was allegedly struck at 9:38 a.m.

2011-03-30T18:33:00.001-07:00

How does a person as totally absurd as Obama expect to be taken seriously?

2011-03-25T08:33:00.000-07:00

Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Iran, blah, blah, blah.

Can we please talk about the REAL war?

Bennett also released a memo from acting Labor Commissioner Laura Boyett that asks staffers for suggestions about renaming the seven conference rooms, some of which are named after labor leaders.

Rooms are named after four women, including Marion Martin, the state labor commissioner from 1947 to 1972, who is credited with forming the National Federation of Republican Women; and Frances Perkins, secretary of labor under Franklin D. Roosevelt and the first woman to hold a U.S. Cabinet post.

Rooms are named after Charles Scontras, a longtime University of Maine professor and a leading authority on Maine labor history, and William Looney, a Republican state legislator from Portland who helped pass child labor laws in the late 1800s.

In the memo, Boyett makes it clear to staffers that while they are awaiting a permanent labor commissioner, she wants the department to move ahead with changes.

"We have received feedback that the administration building is not perceived as equally receptive to both businesses and workers - primarily because of the nature of the mural in the lobby and the names of our conference rooms," she wrote. "Whether or not the perception is valid is not really at issue and therefore, not open to debate."

She asks workers to suggest names for the conference rooms by April 5 and indicates there will be "a small prize" for anyone who comes up with a new name. Boyett said that replacing the mural with a neutral paint and renaming the conference rooms after mountains in Maine would be appropriate.

How about the Fat Squaw Conference Room for Horizontally Challenged Retarded Cocksuckers?

2011-03-22T09:30:00.000-07:00

Good thing we elected Obama to shut down Guantanamo.

An Afghan detainee held without charges at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp for nearly eight years has died after exercising, the US military says.

2011-03-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

Humans call him a merciless murdering mercenary. Obama calls him a "diplomat."

Raymond Davis, the CIA spy charged with murder in Pakistan, has flown out of the country after the relatives of two men he killed dropped charges in exchange for “blood money” of at least $1.4m (£874,000) and help in resettling abroad.

Well, big surprise. We paid them off. Charges dropped. Freed to murder again.

Go America.

2011-03-17T09:44:00.001-07:00

hahahahahahahahahahahahaha life is a riot

Obama: ‘the promise that we made to the American people has been kept’

2011-03-17T07:50:00.000-07:00

Dear Obama,

YOU ARE MORE EVIL THAN DICK CHENEY, YOU STUPID FUCKING COCKSUCKER.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/opinion/15tue3.html?_r=1

New York Times readers (assholes) are experts when it comes to knowing that it's interrogation when you torture nonwhite nonchristians. But when it's an American, THAT'S FUCKING TORTURE, I mean, abuse.

But at least Guantanamo is closed and we pulled out of Iraq.

2011-03-08T11:18:00.000-08:00

FUCK OBAMA AND FUCK THE USA

Bradley Manning leaked cables showing officials covering up U.S. tax dollars funding child rape in Afghanistan, illegal bombings in Yemen and more -- and he's the one in jail?

2011-02-28T15:35:00.000-08:00

Update: Last week, Joshua Holland noted that there has been talk of a general strike in Madison --an event not seen in this country since the 1930s. Today, the Capital Times talks to a range of experts about the prospect. (continue reading)

2011-02-22T12:08:00.001-08:00

"Not a single War on Terror detainee has been accorded any redress in American courts for the severe abuses to which they were subjected (including innocent people being detained for years, rendered and even tortured), and worse, no detainee has been allowed by courts even to have their claims heard. After the U.S. Government implemented a worldwide regime of torture, lawless detention, and other abuses, the doors of the American justice system have been slammed shut in the face of any and all victims seeking to have their rights vindicated or even their claims heard. If an American citizen can't even sue political officials who lawlessly imprison and torture him in his own country -- if political leaders are vested with immunity from a claim of this type -- what rational person can argue that the rule of law or the Constitution binds our government officials?"

In March, 2002, American citizen Jose Padilla was arrested in Chicago and publicly accused by then-Attorney-General John Ashcroft of being "The Dirty Bomber." Shortly thereafter, he was transferred to a military brig in South Carolina, where he was held for almost two years completely incommunicado (charged with no crime and denied all access to the outside world, including even a lawyer) and was brutally tortured, both physically and psychologically. All of this -- including the torture -- was carried out pursuant to orders from President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials. Just as the Supreme Court was about to hear Padilla's plea to be charged or released -- and thus finally decide if the President has the power to imprison American citizens on U.S. soil with no charges of any kind -- the Government indicted him in a federal court on charges far less serious than Ashcroft had touted years earlier, causing the Supreme Court to dismiss Padilla's arguments as "moot"; Padilla was then convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Padilla -- like so many other War on Terror detainees -- has spent years in American courts trying unsuccessfully to hold accountable the high-level government officials responsible for his abuse and lawless imprisonment (which occurred for years prior to his indictment). Not only has Padilla (and all other detainees) failed to obtain redress for what was done to them, but worse, they have been entirely denied even the right to have their cases heard in court. That's because the U.S. Government has invented -- and federal courts have dutifully accepted -- a whole slew of legal doctrines which have only one purpose: to insulate the country's most powerful political officials from legal accountability even when they commit the most egregious crimes, such as imprisoning incommunicado and torturing an American citizen arrested and detained on U.S. soil.

Yesterday, in South Carolina, an Obama-appointed federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by Padilla against former Bush officials Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Paul Wolfowitz and others.

2011-02-22T08:34:00.000-08:00

You can get arrested for writing a poem, or you can get arrested for not killing all the kids in your class...

2011-02-22T08:31:00.000-08:00

If Huffington has a conscience, she will sit down when the AOL check arrives and make sure every cent of it is paid out to those who worked free or at minimal wages for her over the last six years, starting with Mayhill Fowler, the blogger who broke the "clinging to guns and religion" story about Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and spent two years writing and reporting without a salary.

"She strung me along for two years while I repeatedly asked for funding for three projects, and then I quit," Fowler told me from Oakland, Calif., as I spoke with her by phone. When Fowler, whom the site nominated twice for a Pulitzer, finally resigned last year in disgust, Mario Ruiz, the spokesperson for The Huffington Post, acidly told Yahoo News: "Mayhill Fowler says that she is "resigning' from The Huffington Post. How do you resign from a job you never had?"

2011-02-18T15:03:00.001-08:00

And finally, today, a little happiness, as I reassure myself, the riots are coming.

Why?

Because the American government is completely against peaceful protest.

2011-02-18T09:55:00.000-08:00

AND THIS IS THE LUCKY WHITE GUY:

Hicks is the Australian drifter who converted to Islam, changed his name to Muhammed Dawood and ended up at training camps in Afghanistan the US government said was linked to al-Qaeda, one of which was visited by Osama bin Laden several times. Hicks was picked up at a taxi stand by the Northern Alliance in November 2001 and sold to US forces for about $1,500. Hicks was detainee 002, the second person processed into Guantanamo on January 11, 2002, the day the facility opened.

Hicks was brutally tortured. Psychologically and physically for four years, maybe longer. He was injected in the back of his neck with unknown drugs. He was sodomized with a foreign object. He spent nearly a year in solitary confinement. He was beaten once for ten hours. He was threatened with death. He was placed in painful stress positions. He was subjected to sleep deprivation. He was exposed to extremely cold temperatures, loud music and strobe lights designed to disorient his senses. He was interrogated on a near daily basis.

2011-02-17T11:53:00.001-08:00

RISE UP AND TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR AMERICA. THROW GATES AND OBAMA IN GUANTANAMO.

Yeah. You two-faced racist murderous FUCK!

2011-02-17T08:34:00.000-08:00

THIS IS AMERICA

On Tuesday, as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke on issues of free speech at George Washington University, 71-year-old former CIA analyst Ray McGovern was assaulted, dragged from the room and double handcuffed causing profuse bleeding.

"Hillary is the driving force, together with a few others, behind the wars in Afghanistan. She's one of the big hawks in Iran. When I look at her and her husband that they don't know the first thing about war. I do and so do my fellow Veterans for Peace. I have to make clear that we Veterans for Peace think that her policies are an abomination to the nation, that they are at cross purposes to the country and not everybody should applaud and give her the idea that she's doing the right thing."

"When Clinton started talking about how people beat up and arrested people in Iran, it gave some poetic justice, a great irony, to my standing there and what happened to me then, when she's talking about what happened in other countries and there I am being handled in a vicious way...God knows what would happen next. Maybe some senior would ask her questions [she doesn't take questions]. As bad as Donald Rumsfeld was, he let me speak. He let me speak and engaged me in dialog."

How DARE you turn your back on Mrs. Clinton.

2011-02-15T13:21:00.000-08:00

Shell report predicts peak oil now or soon, ponders ‘Depression 2.0′ - The industrial doomsday scenario put forward by peak oil theorists isn't just for far flung voices on the Internet anymore.

2011-02-14T13:58:00.000-08:00

Ron Paul makes Democrats look like the little fucking pussies they truly are.

‘War criminal!’: Ron Paul backers crash Cheney-Rumsfeld reunion

Congressman Ron Paul booted from conservative group for anti-war views

Ron Paul wins CPAC presidential straw poll

2011-02-14T10:50:00.000-08:00

An American jihadist who set up the terrorist training camp where the leader of the 2005 London suicide bombers learned how to manufacture explosives, has been quietly released after serving only four and a half years of a possible 70-year sentence, a Guardian investigation has learned.

The unreported sentencing of Mohammed Junaid Babar to "time served" because of what a New York judge described as "exceptional co-operation" that began even before his arrest has raised questions over whether Babar was a US informer at the time he was helping to train the ringleader of the 7 July tube and bus bombings.

2011-02-14T10:32:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, February 1 2011 - In the Media
Why the Fuss? The Call to Arms against UN Rapporteur Richard Falk for Alluding to Gaps in the 9/11 Official Story

by Elizabeth Woodworth
January 28, 2011
Foreign Policy Journal

A former Princeton international law professor has been condemned by the UN Secretary General and the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations for alluding to "an apparent cover-up" of the events of September 11th, 2001.

On January 11, 2011, UN Special Envoy to Palestine Richard Falk posted on his personal blog an article entitled "Interrogating the Arizona Killings from a Safe Distance."[1]

Dr. Falk made a tangential point in his blog-post that governments too often abuse their authority by treating "awkward knowledge as a matter of state secrets".

Richard FalkTo illustrate the point, he referred to gaps and contradictions in the official account of the 9/11 attacks, which have been documented in the scholarly works of Dr. David Ray Griffin, a professor emeritus of philosophy of religion and theology.

"What seems most disturbing about the 9/11 controversy is the widespread aversion by government and media to the evidence that suggests, at the very least, the need for an independent investigation that proceeds with no holds barred," wrote Falk.

On January 20th, executive director Hillel Neuer of UN Watch, a European NGO, called upon UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to condemn the remarks made by Falk, and to fire him, claiming that Falk had "endorsed the conspiracy theory that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were orchestrated by the U.S. government and not Al Qaeda terrorists." [2]

On January 24th, in a reply to Hillel Neuer, Vijay Nambiar, Ban Ki-moon's Chief of Staff, responded that the Secretary-General "condemns these remarks. He has repeatedly stated his view that any such suggestion is preposterous ... and an affront to the memory of the more than 3,000 people who died in the attack."[3]

The US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, called for Falk's removal, stating that "Mr. Falk's comments are despicable and deeply offensive, and I condemn them in the strongest terms." [4]

Surely, in light of what Falk actually said, these indignant cries on behalf of the victims seem more than a little apoplectic.

If Falk's suggestions were so "preposterous" and "offensive", they might have been dismissed as the ravings of a madman.

So why did officials bring out their cannons to shoot at a sparrow?

Well, turning to the work of Professor Griffin we find that there were 115 omissions and distortions in the 9/11 Commission Report, though Falk did not, in his brief remarks, provide details. [5]

A search of the Internet reveals 12 professional organizations calling for a new investigation, including Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (with over 1,400 professional members), Firefighters for 9/11 Truth, Intelligence Officers for 9/11 Truth, Lawyers for 9/11 Truth, Medical Professionals for 9/11 Truth, Pilots for 9/11 Truth, Political Leaders for 9/11 Truth, Military Officers for 9/11 Truth, and Scientists for 9/11 Truth.

In August, 2005, the New York Times printed the oral testimonies of 118 firefighters and emergency workers who reported stunning, graphic evidence of enormous explosions, including mysterious blasts in the deep sub-basements of the buildings long before the towers fell.[6]

More recently, a nine-author peer-reviewed study, which showed that the World Trade Center dust appeared to contain residue of explosive material (nanothermite), made headlines for the first week of February 2010 in major Danish newspapers. [7]

This news never reached the North American media.

A December 2010 poll by the prestigious Emnid Institute showed that 89.5% of Germans doubt the US official story about the September 11th attacks.[8]

The 9/11 commissioners themselves, in a 2008 op-ed piece to the New York Times, bemoaned the withholding of witness evidence to the 9/11 Commission by the CIA: "What we do know is that government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the president, to investigate one the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction." [9]

Perhaps this sparrow is worth a cannon or two.

In other words, was Falk attacked so strongly to try to make people fear suggesting in public even the possibility that the official story is problematic?

2011-01-28T08:33:00.000-08:00

Leaked diplomatic cables released by secrets outlet WikiLeaks show that Egyptian police regularly torture suspects due to "unrelenting pressure" from their superiors to solve criminal investigations.

which is why

Joe Biden supports them, claiming "terrorism will end only when we, the elites, torture every poor fucker we can get our hands on."

2011-01-27T15:35:00.000-08:00

FUCK SHEPARD FAIREY

2011-01-14T07:56:00.000-08:00

What influeced [spelling courtesy of glennbeck.com] Jared Lee Loughner? The media is trying to pin it on “violent rhetoric” from the right, but a friend of his disagrees.

Glenn played audio from an interview with a friend of Jared Loughner, Zach Osler. Osler said, “He did not watch TV, he disliked the news, he didn’t listen to political radio, he didn’t take sides. He wasn’t on the left, he wasn’t on the right,” adding, “I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact on Jared Loughner.”

Glenn played some audio from the documentary. Among the quotes?

- “The reality is Jesus was the sole deity of the gnostic Christian sect and like all other pagan gods, he was a mythical figure.”

- “Christianity, along with all other related theologies, is an historical front. These religions now serve to detach the species from the natural world and likewise each other.”

- “The religious myth is one of the most powerful devices ever created and it serves as the psychological soil upon which other myths can flourish.”

Now that’s some pretty horrible rhetoric. Clearly right wing, right? No. Crazy and weird, but not right wing.

And Glenn doesn’t want the documentary to be pulled either, as it would be as wrong to attribute blame to the documentary. “I’m not asking for anybody to be silenced. I’m not asking for any of those things.” Glenn only brings it up because this is someone who knew the shooter saying this probably had an influence over his actions.

2010-12-16T08:13:00.000-08:00

I watched NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams last night.

And editor for Time magazine said that Julian Assange will be a footnote in a few years. That's why they selected the "creator" of yet another silly social networking site to be Time's person of the year.

Thanks so much, nightly news.

2010-11-19T06:34:00.000-08:00

Michael Chertoff, Former Department of Homeland Security, is the head of the Chertoff Group, the lead cheerleader for what is being called the Full Body Scanner Lobby, reports the Washington Post and the Washington Examiner..."Mr. Chertoff should not be allowed to abuse the trust the public has placed in him as a former public servant to privately gain from the sale of full-body scanners under the pretense that the scanners would have detected this particular type of explosive," said Kate Hanni, founder of FlyersRights.org, which opposes the use of the scanners. -NowPublic

Keith Olbermann can't donate money to political candidates, because of rules set forth by the company he works for. Yet the company he works for can donate money to both republicans and democrats, call propaganda news, and profit over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people while talking about all the scary non-christian dark-skinned blood thirsty terrorists out there.

What does this suggest? That GE IS America.

G.E. They bring good things to death.

2010-07-13T07:35:00.001-07:00

2010-07-11T07:14:00.000-07:00

The immoral words of James Mattis, intended replacement for General Petraeus, as head of US Central Command, are, the UK's INDEPENDENT reports, circulating throughout the world, that it's fun to kill Afghanis.

"Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know it's a helluva hoot. I'll be right up front with you. I like brawling. You go into Afghanistan, you get guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil ... guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

WHAT COUNTRY WILL STOP US? WHY DON'T THEY ALL BAND TOGETHER TO PUT AN END TO THE GENOCIDE? IF WW2 WAS A NECESSARY WAR, THEN THE WAR TO END AMERICA'S ENDLESS RAMPAGE IS UNAVOIDABLE IF HUMANITY IS TO PROGRESS. FUCK AMERICA.

2010-06-29T11:51:00.001-07:00

WE PAY COPS SO THEY CAN HARASS US AND LIE ABOUT THE LAW.

DOESN"T THAT SEEM COUNTERINTUITIVE?

I WONDER WHY IT SEEMS LIKE THAT?