White House is giving away NASA bases, and the SEIU is threatening primary challenges to anyone that votes against the “Senate-plus” health care overhaul—even if that means running kamikaze, third-party candidates. All to counteract the horrible, obstructionist, downright evil efforts of notorious Public Enemy Number One. . . Dennis Kucinich. Uh, yeah. But, whatever—there are mountains to be moved here! And look what they are moving mountains for. It is strikingly educational to note that none of this was done last spring for single-payer. None of this was done last summer for a bill with a robust public option. None of this was done last fall for drug re-importation. None of this was done to stop the health care bill from containing the greatest threat to reproductive rights in a generation.

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The £250bn cost of developing Canada’s controversial tar sands between now and 2025 could be used to decarbonise the western economy by funding ambitious solar power schemes in the Sahara or a European wide shift to electric vehicles, according to a new report released today.

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Adelaide is Australia’s festival city. Its arts festival is currently in swing. Polite debate, aesthetics and high-octane wine are putting the world to rights. With one exception. Adelaide is where Rupert Murdoch began his empire. The voracious trail starts here. No statue stands; his is a spectral presence, controlling the only daily newspaper, even the printing presses. Across Australia, he owns almost 70 percent of the capital city press and the only national newspaper and Sky Television and much else. Welcome to the world’s first murdochracy.

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[Dems are] using what I called the Rotating Villain tactic (it’s now Durbin’s turn), to refuse to pass what they claim they support but are politically afraid to pass, or which they actually oppose (sorry, we’d so love to do this, but gosh darn it, we just can’t get 60 votes). If only 50 votes were required, they’d just find ways to ensure they lacked 50. Both of those are merely theories insusceptible to conclusive proof, but if I had the power to create the most compelling evidence for those theories that I could dream up, it would be hard to surpass what Democrats are doing now with regard to the public option. They’re actually whipping against the public option. Could this sham be any more transparent?

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The House of Representatives is about to vote on a Senate bill without a public option. It looks like the reconciliation amendment will not have a public option. The House bill had a public option, but once the House passes the Senate bill, that’s history. Which is why I introduced H.R. 4789, the Public Option Act. This simple four-page bill lets any American buy into Medicare at cost. You want it, you pay for it, you’re in. It adds nothing to the deficit; you pay what it costs. Let’s face it. Health insurance companies charge as much money as possible, and they provide as little care as possible. The difference is called profit. You can’t blame them for it; that’s what a corporation does. Birds got to fly, fish got to swim, health insurers got to rip you off. And if you get really expensive, they’ve got to pull the plug on you. So for those of us who would like to stay alive, we need a public option

Grayson is the Democratic Congressman from Florida’s 8th congressional district. He’s the guy who layed into the Fed General Counsel Scott Alvarez
when he testified before congress .. we need at least about 300 more clones of Grayson in congress – mab .. read more

So what happens when the stimulus is over and the Fed begins to tighten again? Where will demand come from to get Main Street back, create jobs, raise middle class wages? Not from big businesses. Certainly not from Wall Street. Not from exports. Not from government. So, where? That question is the big unknown hanging over the U.S. economy. Until there’s an answer, an economic “recovery” for anyone other than big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy is a mirage

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With now more than 40 Senators saying they would support the public option in a reconciliation vote, Dick Durbin is trying to put the brakes on the process, saying that liberals may be asked to oppose the amendment now that they’ve said they would support it

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The day after Rachel was killed, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised President George W. Bush a “thorough, credible and transparent investigation.” Yet according to a Human Rights Watch report from 2005, Israel’s “investigations into Corrie’s killing … fell far short of the transparency, impartiality, and thoroughness required by international law.” The civil trial, Craig Corrie says, is not about the monetary damages, but discovering information, and “like [South African Archbishop] Desmond Tutu talks about, of mending the tear in society.”

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It has taken two decades for this corrupting relationship to become the norm among the big green organizations. Imagine this happening in any other sphere, and it becomes clear how surreal it is. It is as though Amnesty International’s human rights reports came sponsored by a coalition of the Burmese junta, Dick Cheney and Robert Mugabe. For environmental groups to take funding from the very people who are destroying the environment is preposterous–yet it is now taken for granted.

corrupt green orgs named in the article include Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, NRDC, The Nature Conservancy and Conservation International – mab .. read more

During the months of his internal exile in the Obama administration, the old lion hadn’t been just licking his wounds. Volcker turned out to be a better organizer than Obama. He organized several other senior eminences to support his call to restore Glass-Steagall, including Nicholas Brady, treasury secretary under Bush I, Bill Donaldson, SEC chair under Bush II, and Roger Altman, Robert Rubin’s former deputy

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“Suddenly there are more people who want to know what it actually is,” said [Louisville resident Fred] Hicks, head of the Committee of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, whose members seek more government regulation of business, health care and wages. Nationwide, the Democratic Socialists of America partly credits the term’s usage with a 64 percent rise in memberships between 2008 and 2009 … A recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that 53 percent of Americans thought capitalism was better than socialism; 20 percent preferred socialism; and 27 percent were uncertain

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The CBO projects that the relatively weak public option-the one limited just to the exchange in the House health care bill-would secure roughly one-fifth of that market, equal to around 6 million people (PDF). The CBO concluded that, as a result of those 6 million customers, the public option will take in $298 billion (PDF) in direct premiums, exchange subsidies, and risk adjustment payments from 2013-2019. However, with the public option removed, but the individual mandate remaining, that $300 billion will instead go straight to the private insurance corporations’ books

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Over the last few years the coal industry has suffered one setback after another. The Sierra Club, which has kept a tally of proposed coal-fired power plants and their fates since 2000, reports that 123 plants have been defeated, with another 51 facing opposition in the courts. Of the 231 plants being tracked, only 25 currently have a chance at gaining the permits necessary to begin construction and eventually come online. Building a coal plant may soon be impossible

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Local businesses are educating communities, changing economic policies, and even outperforming chain competitors… independent retailers in communities with active “Buy Independent” or “Buy Local” campaigns reported an increase in holiday sales three times stronger (up three percent) than those in cities without such campaigns (up one percent)

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Latin America took another historic step forward this week with the creation of a new regional organisation of 32 Latin American and Caribbean countries. The United States and Canada were excluded. The increasing independence of Latin America has been one of the most important geopolitical changes over the last decade, affecting not only the region but the rest of the world as well

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Looking at these numbers, it is mind boggling that the White House decided the path forward on health care reform is to try to basically push the current Senate bill, almost unchanged, while trying to stop the public option from being included. It is an unbelievable act of political malpractice. A five-year-old could do a better job seeing what the right political play should be. Only in our broken “democracy” could the opinion of a handful of lobbyists representing one of the most unpopular industries in American have more sway than the opinion of roughly 65% of Americans

meanwhile corporate media hacks like Dana Milbank still call the public option “unpopular” with a straight face – mab .. read more

The author of the op-ed, Lara M. Dadkhah, is identified by the Times merely as “an intelligence analyst.” In the body of the op-ed, the author identifies herself as “employed by a defense consulting company,” without telling us which company, or what her relationship might be to actors who stand to lose financially if the recognition that killing civilians is bad for the United States were to affect expenditures by the United States military.

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Recall that one year ago, Obama instructed the DEA to follow his campaign pledge and respect local statutes legalizing medicinal marijuana. When the DEA kept raiding pot dispensaries in states that had passed such laws, Attorney General Eric Holder reiterated the cease and desist decree, stating that “What (Obama) said during the campaign is now American policy.” As even more raids nonetheless continued, the Justice Department then issued an explicit memo ordering federal agents to refrain from prosecuting those who are in “compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.” And yet the DEA has recently intensified its crackdown.

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The post-bailout era in which Goldman thrived has turned out to be a chaotic frenzy of high-stakes con-artistry, with taxpayers and clients bilked out of billions using a dizzying array of old-school hustles that, but for their ponderous complexity, would have fit well in slick grifter movies like The Sting and Matchstick Men. There’s even a term in con-man lingo for what some of the banks are doing right now, with all their cosmetic gestures of scaling back bonuses and giving to charities. In the grifter world, calming down a mark so he doesn’t call the cops is known as the “Cool Off.”

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The issue isn’t whether [Austin plane crasher] Stack’s grievances are real or his responses just; it is that the act unquestionably comports with the official definition. But as NBC’s Pete Williams said of the official insistence that this was not an act of Terrorism: there are “a couple of reasons to say that . . . One is he’s an American citizen.” Fox News’ Megan Kelley asked Catherine Herridge about these denials: “I take it that they mean terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to?,” to which Herridge replied: “they mean terrorism in that capital T way.” All of this underscores, yet again, that Terrorism is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon. The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor, especially his or her religious identity. It has really come to mean: “a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies.”

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If the public option with a state opt-out was only a few votes shy of 60, it should clearly have at least 50 votes for passage by a reconciliation measure that can’t be filibustered, right? What Reid’s spokesman now appears to be saying is that the public option doesn’t have even 50 votes in the Senate.

here we go again – mab .. read more