Similar to the Greenwald post below on torture, Juan Cole examines the illegitimacy of the Bush/Cheney Wars

"....What is it about the United States that makes for harsh prosecutions over sex crimes but lets leaders off the hook when it comes to war crimes? New York police rushed to arrest Dominique Strauss-Kahn , the head of the international Monetary Fund, on Saturday on learning of charges against him by a hotel maid of sexual assault. This quick action against a wealthy and powerful individual, seeking justice for a person at the bottom rung of the American social hierarchy, is praiseworthy. It affirms the principle that no one is above the law.

"But the widows and orphans of Iraq cannot hope that the New York police would similarly frog-march George W. Bush off his first-class flight and arrest him for crimes against humanity....

"....The body that could most easily gather evidence against Bush, Cheney and others in that administration and begin the process of subpoenas is the two houses of the US Congress. But the Democratic-dominated Senate has openly eschewed prosecution. And the Republican-controlled House of Representatives would resist such a move on partisan grounds. The documentary evidence for criminal activity would surely not be so hard for our national legislature to get hold of, if the will existed to do the right thing. President Eisenhower did not hesitate to defend the UN Charter even against close allies. His like, unfortunately, would be hard to find in American politics today."

Yes, America protects its own. Its own rich, white males.

Glenn Greenwald, as do I, feels that our glorification of the killing of Bin Laden ignores the principles formed from the Nuremberg Trials and those of basic humanity (snippet):

"....It's always easier -- and more satisfying -- to condemn the crimes of others rather than one's own. There's always a temptation to find excuses, mitigations and even justifications for one's own crimes while insisting that the acts of others -- especially one's enemies -- are expressions of pure evil. But a country that regrets the Iraq War only because it was not prosecuted as competently as it should have been -- and which as elite consensus scorns as radical and irresponsible the notion of accountability for its own war criminals -- is hardly in a position to persuasively posture as righteous avengers of civilian deaths. The claims being made about why the killing of bin Laden is grounded in such noble principles would be much more compelling if those same principles were applied to ourselves as well as our enemies. And the imperative to do so, more than anything, was the prime mandate of Nuremberg."

Bits and Pieces for the Week of May 8 - 14

The noose tightens on Sheriff Joe Arpaio. "...Chief Financial Officer Loretta Barkell concerning the $100 million Arpaio and his upper echelon pilfered from two protected funds. The money paid for witch-hunts of Arpaio's enemies and the MCSO's Hispanic-hunting, racial-profiling sweeps." (with video) "I, in fact, sat with the former chief deputy and the sheriff and informed them of how many positions were out of place, and what needed to be done to correct it... And prior to last summer, they had been told every single year for the last ten years." (7 of 6)

Do you plank? (Mike)
Sad news about an incredible Hall-of-Fame slugger, Harmon Killebrew. (Mike)
These new Chromebooks, due for release in June, look awesome. (Mike)
Good ol' Fox News: Creating bullshit "Exclusive Breaking News" about vaccines, using data already recently debunked by prominent scientists and government (Mike)
Risk of another U.S. recession is increasing. (Mike)
Taliban fighters fleeing regions of Afghanistan. (Mike)
NRA vs. Pittsburgh: Guess who's winning. (Mike)
Oddity: Woman develops British accent after visit to dentist. (Mike)

Budget Mix-Up Provides Nation's Schools With Enough Money To Properly Educate Students. OMG... what will America do!! LOL! *the Onion, of course* (7 of 6)

Sick fish in Gulf are alarming scientists. Really? (7 of 6)

"...ugly spat between a huge corporation, organized labor, the White House... a Tea Party governor... in this year's ongoing war on unions... The dispute centers around a planned Boeing airplane production line for its 787 Dreamliner in South Carolina using nonunion labor." (7 of 6)

Dan Adler Gets Sh*t Done

Usually you can count on Republican nutjobs running for office to supply us with entertaining campaign ads. Not in this case:


The weightlifter with the potty mouth is Patty Duke.

Bits and Pieces for the Week of May 1 - 7

Regarding Pakistan's boldly false claim that no one knew Osama was living there: "Pakistani security forces have arrested 40 people in Abbottabad suspected of having connections to Usama bin Laden." (Mike)
10 Email Tips For Preventing Problems And Avoiding Aggravation (Mike)
This is hilarious! (Mike)
No problem covering up massive child abuse, but god help us if women are allowed any sort of influence in the church. (Mike)
Free legal information online (Mike)

Osama bin Laden dead. (7 of 6)

TORTURE

Matthew Alexander, a former senior military interrogator in Iraq, gave a revealing interview on Democracy Now! about the efficacy and ethics of the use of torture by the U.S. military and intelligence agencies (emphasis added):

"....My argument is pretty simple, Amy. I don’t torture because it doesn’t work. I don’t torture, because it’s immoral, and it’s against the law, and it’s inconsistent with my oath of office, in which I swore to defend the Constitution of the United States. And it’s also inconsistent with American principles. So, my primary argument against torture is one of morality, not one of efficacy.

"You know, if torture did work and we could say it worked 100 percent of the time, I still wouldn’t use it. The U.S. Army Infantry, when it goes out into battle and it faces resistance, it doesn’t come back and ask for the permission to use chemical weapons. I mean, chemical weapons are extremely effective—we could say almost 100 percent effective. And yet, we don’t use them. But we make this—carve out this special space for interrogators and say that, well, they’re different, so they can violate the laws of war if they face obstacles.

"And that’s an insult to American interrogators, who are more than capable of defeating our enemies and al-Qaeda in the battle of wits in the interrogation room. And American interrogators have proven this time and time again, from World War II through Vietnam, through Panama, through the First Gulf War. And let’s go back to the successes of American interrogators. You know, American interrogators found Saddam Hussein without using torture. We found and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda Iraq, which helped turn the Iraq war, without using torture. And numerous other leaders that we have found and captured—another guy named Zafar, that I describe in my book—all these successes have come without the use of torture...."

"....When I was in Iraq, I oversaw the interrogations of foreign fighters. And those foreign fighters, the majority of them, said, time and time again, the reason they had come to Iraq to fight was because of the torture and abuse of detainees at both Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. And this is not my opinion. The Department of Defense tracked these statistics. And they were briefed, every interrogator who arrived there, that torture and abuse was al-Qaeda’s number one recruiting tool.

"And remember, these foreign fighters that came to Iraq, they made up 90 percent of the suicide bombers. They killed hundreds, if not thousands, of American soldiers. And so, this policy of torture and abuse did not make America safer. What it did was it caused the deaths of hundreds or thousands of American soldiers who are now buried at Arlington National Cemetery. So, this policy has been counterproductive in so many ways.

"And one thing you’ll never hear the torture supporters talk about, Amy, is the long-term negative consequences of torture. They won’t talk about the fact that al-Qaeda uses it to recruit. They won’t talk about the fact that future Americans are going to be subjected to the same techniques by future enemies using our own actions as justification. They’re not going to talk about the fact that it makes detainees more resistant to interrogations as soon as they walked in the interrogation room, because they see us all as torturers. So they’re not going to talk about all these long-term negative consequences...."

Takeaway: torture is bad.

Floating Australians

Here's my plan for May 21st. I'm going to get up in the morning, strip off my clothes, stand outside (all day if I have to) and wait until I float up to the sky. I'm sure I'll be chosen, because I've lived a clean life and am an optimist, and god likes clean-living optimists because somewhere in one of the bibles there surely is something that suggests or implies that clean-living optimists are the chosen ones.

I'm also going to keep a close eye on Australia May 20th, since they're a day ahead. If there are no reports of floating Australians I'm going to either be extremely disappointed , or else assume that ALL Australians are evil assholes who don't deserve to be saved.

6th century Help Desk
This new Push Pop Press tablet software is amazing. Check out what happens at 2:40.
If you are familiar with this NBA player then you'll be amazed at his receiving this award.
White men can't dance.
Medicare is NOT the problem, but rather the solution.

We are poisoning and killing ourselves with "industrial food":

"The industrial food revolution turned food into a product. Like all consumer products, food now had to constantly evolve into something "better," cheaper and faster. This evolution involved gradual changes in the actual biochemistry of what we're putting in our mouths. But while the food keeps changing, our bodies don't. With each passing year, the food supply becomes less compatible with human biology.

"We define industrial food as food modified for factory farming, factory processing, mass distribution or mass marketing. Industrial foods are those that have been changed to satisfy the demands of the consumer marketplace.

"One of the many false assumptions about industrial food is that, well, food is food, and it doesn't matter if a computer-controlled machine mixes the raw ingredients together in a factory or a cook does in a kitchen. What's the difference? The difference is not the mixing, but the myriad changes made to the food to optimize it for the overall industrial process.

"Most foods are "modified" or "processed" at some point. The question that separates industrial from traditional foods is the purpose of those modifications. Traditional modifications tend to improve the taste, health qualities, digestibility and long-term storage of foods. Grains are modified to make bread, for example. Olives are processed into olive oil. The food is altered to make it more edible, nutritious and desirable, as well as storable.

"The highest purpose of industrial processing is to lower the cost of food. Consumers favor cheaper food, so food companies compete to find new ways to lower costs. Just like computer software or cars or any other industrial product sold in the competitive marketplace, there has been constant innovation in industrial food processing to drive down costs. Low cost is achieved by optimizing absolutely every aspect of food manufacturing, including seeds, soil, farm equipment, harvest schedules, trucks, factories, additives, processes, packaging and more. Another strategy for lowering costs is to offshore the production and processing of foods to China or other countries with low production costs and lax food-safety regulations, or simply buy the ingredients from Chinese companies....."

Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq

Plans to exploit Iraq's oil reserves were discussed by government ministers and the world's largest oil companies the year before Britain took a leading role in invading Iraq, government documents show. Graphic: Iraq's burgeoning oil industry The papers, revealed here for the first time, raise new questions over Britain's involvement in the war, which had divided Tony Blair's cabinet and was voted through only after his claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The minutes of a series of meetings between ministers and senior oil executives are at odds with the public denials of self-interest from oil companies and Western governments at the time. The documents were not offered as evidence in the ongoing Chilcot Inquiry into the UK's involvement in the Iraq war. In March 2003, just before Britain went to war, Shell denounced reports that it had held talks with Downing Street about Iraqi oil as "highly inaccurate". BP denied that it had any "strategic interest" in Iraq, while Tony Blair described "the oil conspiracy theory" as "the most absurd". But documents from October and November the previous year paint a very different picture. Five months before the March 2003 invasion, Baroness Symons, then the Trade Minister, told BP that the Government believed British energy firms should be given a share of Iraq's enormous oil and gas reserves as a reward for Tony Blair's military commitment to US plans for regime change. The papers show that Lady Symons agreed to lobby the Bush administration on BP's behalf because the oil giant feared it was being "locked out" of deals that Washington was quietly striking with US, French and Russian governments and their energy firms. Minutes of a meeting with BP, Shell and BG (formerly British Gas) on 31 October 2002 read: "Baroness Symons agreed that it would be difficult to justify British companies losing out in Iraq in that way if the UK had itself been a conspicuous supporter of the US government throughout the crisis." The minister then promised to "report back to the companies before Christmas" on her lobbying efforts. The Foreign Office invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq "post regime change". Its minutes state: "Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity." After another meeting, this one in October 2002, the Foreign Office's Middle East director at the time, Edward Chaplin, noted: "Shell and BP could not afford not to have a stake in [Iraq] for the sake of their long-term future... We were determined to get a fair slice of the action for UK companies in a post-Saddam Iraq." Whereas BP was insisting in public that it had "no strategic interest" in Iraq, in private it told the Foreign Office that Iraq was "more important than anything we've seen for a long time". BP was concerned that if Washington allowed TotalFinaElf's existing contact with Saddam Hussein to stand after the invasion it would make the French conglomerate the world's leading oil company. BP told the Government it was willing to take "big risks" to get a share of the Iraqi reserves, the second largest in the world. Over 1,000 documents were obtained under Freedom of Information over five years by the oil campaigner Greg Muttitt. They reveal that at least five meetings were held between civil servants, ministers and BP and Shell in late 2002. The 20-year contracts signed in the wake of the invasion were the largest in the history of the oil industry. They covered half of Iraq's reserves – 60 billion barrels of oil, bought up by companies such as BP and CNPC (China National Petroleum Company), whose joint consortium alone stands to make £403m ($658m) profit per year from the Rumaila field in southern Iraq. Last week, Iraq raised its oil output to the highest level for almost decade, 2.7 million barrels a day – seen as especially important at the moment given the regional volatility and loss of Libyan output. Many opponents of the war suspected that one of Washington's main ambitions in invading Iraq was to secure a cheap and plentiful source of oil. Mr Muttitt, whose book Fuel on the Fire is published next week, said: "Before the war, the Government went to great lengths to insist it had no interest in Iraq's oil. These documents provide the evidence that give the lie to those claims. "We see that oil was in fact one of the Government's most important strategic considerations, and it secretly colluded with oil companies to give them access to that huge prize." Lady Symons, 59, later took up an advisory post with a UK merchant bank that cashed in on post-war Iraq reconstruction contracts. Last month she severed links as an unpaid adviser to Libya's National Economic Development Board after Colonel Gaddafi started firing on protesters. Last night, BP and Shell declined to comment. Not about oil? what they said before the invasion * Foreign Office memorandum, 13 November 2002, following meeting with BP: "Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP are desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity to compete. The long-term potential is enormous..." * Tony Blair, 6 February 2003: "Let me just deal with the oil thing because... the oil conspiracy theory is honestly one of the most absurd when you analyse it. The fact is that, if the oil that Iraq has were our concern, I mean we could probably cut a deal with Saddam tomorrow in relation to the oil. It's not the oil that is the issue, it is the weapons..." * BP, 12 March 2003: "We have no strategic interest in Iraq. If whoever comes to power wants Western involvement post the war, if there is a war, all we have ever said is that it should be on a level playing field. We are certainly not pushing for involvement." * Lord Browne, the then-BP chief executive, 12 March 2003: "It is not in my or BP's opinion, a war about oil. Iraq is an important producer, but it must decide what to do with its patrimony and oil." * Shell, 12 March 2003, said reports that it had discussed oil opportunities with Downing Street were 'highly inaccurate', adding: "We have neither sought nor attended meetings with officials in the UK Government on the subject of Iraq. The subject has only come up during conversations during normal meetings we attend from time to time with officials... We have never asked for 'contracts'."

Bits and Pieces for the Week of April 17 - 23

I know that the young 'uns think this is no big deal, but if you were around during the early days of Jethro Tull and space shuttles, then this is still amazing. (Mike)

No, it's not a conspiracy... ALEC is a true boogeymen pushing conservative agendas. If you're a Progressive/Liberal or a Democrat it's time to pay attention to them and make every one of your friends aware of them. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). (7 of 6)

From joelgp:

"Folks, the tea party is, has been and will always be a complete fraud.

"They don’t care about deficits, Medicare, the wars, the budget, or Obamacare. They don’t care about Trump, Beck or even Sarah Palin. They came together because these media folks touched their deeply held emotions and ministered to their feelings of displacement. Fox gave voice to their seething resentment and amplified their lamentations over their difficulty in sharing space with those unlike themselves.

"The 50s era Dixiecrats, the Ross Perot brigade of the 90s and the present day tea partiers are all the same folks. They are the enemies of progress which is how Beck makes such a good a living fighting against "progress." These are the folks driving the Arizona laws, the Wisconsin’s anti-union laws and the return of the Jim Crow laws in Florida. These are the folks who hates Eric Holder, Sonya Sotomayor and Barack Obama. They are not moved by the particulars of policies but by fear, anxiety and the changing of America."

Bits and Pieces for the Week of April 10 - 16

Tough talk by Obama rarely translates into tough action. (Mike)

Now that you've done your taxes and the figures are fresh in your head, go see exactly how the feds are spending YOUR income tax. (Mike)

Antibiotic-resistant super bug breakthrough... manuka honey may reverse antibiotic resistance. (7 of 6)

Time to bring criminal charges against Sheriff Joe. "An examination in Arizona’s Maricopa County has found that the sheriff’s office, widely known for efforts against illegal immigrants, inappropriately spent $99 million from two jail funds over the last eight years to pay for other law enforcement operations — including immigration patrols." (7 of 6)

I think that moviegoers are going to go bananas over this release. (Mike)

Infographic:What If Congress Looked Like America? (7 of 6)

Sarah Palin May Not Have Been Born In The USA (Mike)

The death of capitalism? "Support in the U.S. for the free market is now lower than in China." After we have been lied to for over 30 years that trickle down economics work, is it any wonder!! “America is the last place we would have expected to see such a sharp drop in trust in the free enterprise system," Globescan chairman Doug Miller said in a statement announcing the results. "This is not good news for business.” (7 of 6)

When Republicans discuss how serious they are at reducing the national debt, just show them this revealing chart:

Bits and Pieces for the Week of April 3 - 9

The America we don't know: "Hunter-Killers" deployed as assassins by U.S. in Afghanistan. (Mike)
I strongly recommend that you read this article and check the list at the bottom for companies that just experienced a security breach of customer data. (Mike)
Idaho really hates Idaho women (Mike)
IAEA's latest updates of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant meltdown (Mike)
How germs actually keep you healthy (Mike)
Finally! Transocean, "owners" of the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill, penalizes it's top administrators with severe salary adjustments. (Mike)

"Here’s the truth: The only way America can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich. Even if we got rid of corporate welfare subsidies for big oil, big agriculture, and big Pharma – even if we cut back on our bloated defense budget – it wouldn’t be nearly enough. The vast majority of Americans can’t afford to pay more." (7 of 6)

A Contrasting Look At 10 Of The Republican Party’s Top Priorities (7 of 6)

Greed is Not a Virtue

David Korten: Profit-centered market fundamentalism has become a national religion. We humans are living out an epic morality play. For millennia humanity’s most celebrated spiritual teachers have taught that society works best and we all enjoy our greatest joy and fulfillment when we share, cooperate, and are honest in our dealings with one another. But for the past few decades, this truth has been aggressively challenged by a faith called market fundamentalism—an immoral and counter-factual economic ideology that has assumed the status of a modern state religion. Its believers worship the God of money. Stock exchanges and global banks are their temples. They proclaim that everyone does best when we each seek to maximize our individual financial gain without regard to the consequences for others. In the eyes of a market fundamentalist, to sacrifice profit for some presumed social or environmental good is immoral. The result is a public culture that proclaims greed is a virtue and sharing is a sin. Having established control of the institutions of the economy, media, education, government, and even religion, market fundamentalists initiated a global social experiment to test their theory. The results are now in. The prophets of the older faith traditions were right. Our common future depends on rediscovering their truth and redefining our public culture and governing institutions accordingly. The following are some of the more visible elements of Wall Street’s global campaign of moral perversion. * It uses control of media outlets, advertising, and politicians to shape and spread a global culture of individualistic greed, material self-indulgence, ruthless competition, and moral irresponsibility. * Through the pursuit and celebration of financial gain at any cost, it provides role models for immoral behavior. * It undermines democracy and the legitimacy of government by buying politicians to do its bidding. * It uses student loan programs to get the best and brightest youth mired in debts they can repay only by selling themselves to jobs that serve Wall Street interests. * It buys up and monopolizes control of the world’s land and water resources in anticipation of extracting monopoly profits by charging what the market will bear as scarcity increases. * It uses its financial power and creative accounting skills to manipulate markets and obscure market signals, as when helping governments hide their debt or helping corporate CEOs hide their insider bets against the future of their own companies. * It buys the deeply discounted debt obligations of hapless underwater homeowners and countries on the open market and then demands full value payment from governments or philanthropists who step in to lend a helping hand to the afflicted. * It puts in place global rules requiring that if a government introduces regulations that prevent a foreign corporation from harming or killing people with its toxic products or discharges, the country’s government must compensate the corporation for the profits it estimates it will lose. By capitalism’s perverse moral logic, if a person sells toxic assets by knowingly misrepresenting them as sound, the fault lies not with the misrepresentation of the seller, but rather with the lack of due diligence on the part of the overly trusting borrower. When the assets prove worthless and threaten both the solvency of both the seller and the borrower, the logic says the party responsible for the misrepresentation has a moral obligation to demand redress from the government, “Buy my toxic assets at face value and make me whole so that I return to my trade in toxic assets, or I will be forced to stop lending and crash the economy.” Step back to take in the big picture, and it turns out Wall Street market fundamentalists have proclaimed the seven deadly sins of pride, greed, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, and sloth to be virtues. In turn they have proclaimed the seven life-serving virtues of humility, sharing, love, compassion, self-control, moderation, and passion to be sins against the market. There is a widespread sense that with Wall Street’s apparent recovery, the window of opportunity for serious structural change has passed. Such a judgment, however, is premature. Far from closing, the window of opportunity for serious change continues to widen as public awareness of Wall Street corruption grows and true and appropriate moral outrage builds. Most psychologically healthy adults recognize in their heart of hearts the moral perversion of the old economy, but may fear to speak up because so many experts—including even some religious leaders—continuously assure us in so many words that greed is good, even that God wants us to be financially rich and financial wealth is a mark of God’s favor. If all who share a mature moral consciousness find the courage to speak the simple truth that greed is driving us to collective self-destruction and cooperation is essential to our common salvation, we can put the perversion behind us and secure the future of our children.

Palin's Squirmish

Bits and Pieces for the Week of March 27 - April 2

Gmail Motion dramatically improves the email experience. (Mike)
I guess you have to be there to truly appreciate the horrendous mess this region is in. (Mike)

Senator Bernie Sanders shares the real problem facing America. Tax Time? Not for Giant Corporations. While the rich are trying to divide the working class, and the media is ignoring the problem... these corporations are stealing everything not tied down and forcing the lower and middle class to pick up the tab. Just pay your fair share of taxes corporations!(7 of 6)