Update: Tim DeChristopher Is No Longer in Solitary Confinement

Kevin Gosztola is following this closely on Firedoglake ..

Environmental activist Tim DeChristopher, who was given a two-year sentence in prison for making fake bids in a Utah public land auction that was later found to be corrupt, has been moved out of solitary confinement. He has been put back in the minimum security camp where he was being held before a member of Congress had him moved .. Apparently, a member of Congress saw an email where DeChristopher expressed interest in giving money back that had been given to his legal defense fund. That member then had DeChristopher moved on March 9. The identity of this member is still unknown, but what is pretty clear is that the order to put DeChristopher in solitary was inhumane. It was like something that would happen to a political prisoner being held in a fascist country

i hope they find out the name of the guy who put him in solitary and roast his ass - mab .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, March 30, 2012

Paul Krugman: It’s Always Time For Austerity

from his blog ..

when the rating agencies upgraded the UK outlook, the Cameron government hailed this as proof that austerity was working; when they downgraded it due to poor economic performance, the Cameron government declared that this showed the need for even more austerity .. US austerity — which mainly takes the form of layoffs at the state and local level — is largely concentrated in states where Republicans took control in 2010, plus Texas. So that’s why our recovery, though better than Britain’s, isn’t stronger

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Nathan Schneider: What does leaderless look like?

Schneider at Waging Nonviolence ..

For those closely involved in Occupy Wall Street, it seems fitting that the words “take me to your leader” are conventionally said by an alien; they’re about that hard to process, and that weird. Yet one hears this sort of thing a lot. It remains a common refrain among sympathetic well-wishers outside the movement that leaders in the traditional King-Gandhi-Chavez mold are necessary for civil resistance movements, or even that they’re inevitable. But within OWS, leaderlessness — or horizontality, or, as it is sometimes said, being “leader-full” — is non-negotiable. It’s at the very core of why many people in Occupy find the movement so revolutionary, and so empowering, and so right. This doesn’t mean, however, that it’s clear how exactly one is expected to behave in a leaderless movement. What does truly leaderless leadership look like?

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, March 26, 2012

Mayor-for-Life Bloomberg’s NYPD arrests French bagpipe players at OWS six-month celebration in Zuccotti Park. Also, police violence against the non-violent

New York Observer via Naked Capitalism ..

The N.Y.P.D. was holding back regarding Occupy Wall Street protest actions on Saturday night until they put the smackdown on a band of European bagpipe players in nothing flat. The pipers showed around 11 p.m. and began playing for the assembly, but within 5 to 10 minutes they had been arrested, resulting in a sharp rise in tension in the crowd

NYPD/Bloomberg: "those damn bagpipes were the last straw" - mab .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Sunday, March 18, 2012

FDL: Steny Hoyer Finally Admits the Obvious – Health Care Bill Killed the Dems in 2010

Phoenix Woman at Firedoglake ..

Finally, over two years after [Firedoglake's independent polling warned them] and a year and a half after the Democrats lost the House in large part because of it, Steny Hoyer says, in the wake of a new study proving it, what everyone in Official Washington circles knows to be true but most of the time won’t admit — the health care bill was frigging kryptonite to the Democrats in 2009 and 2010 .. Dear Reader – What caused the members of Official Washington’s institutions, particularly those part of or linked to the institutional Democratic Party, to go after Jane Hamsher hammer and tongs? Answer: Her insistence on pushing for at least a public option in the health care bill — and her warnings that without a public option (which poll after poll showed was the most popular part of the health care reform proposal as originally conceived, but which Obama and the Dems dumped in order to please industry lobbyists), the bill would become a deadly stinky rotting albatross of a millstone around the Democrats’ collective necks in November of 2010. She was right, she was proved right, and now Steny Hoyer’s finally admitted it

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, March 10, 2012

Glenn Greenwald: Attorney General Holder defends execution without charges

Glenzilla ..

When Obama officials (like Bush officials before them) refer to someone “who is a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces,” what they mean is this: someone the President has accused and then decreed in secret to be a Terrorist without ever proving it with evidence .. the ACLU is challenging progressive defenders of the President to do what none will ever do: explain why they would trust not only Barack Obama, but also Sarah Palin, or Newt Gingrich, or Michele Bachmann, with the power to target U.S. citizens for assassination in secret and with no judicial oversight

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Markos Moulitsas: The Very Narrow Conservative Definition of Freedom

Kos ..

liberals and conservatives have two very different views of freedom. Liberals want freedom for all Americans. Conservatives want freedom just for employers (read: those with power) .. I, like all liberals, believe that what my 19 employees at Daily Kos do with their health care coverage is their business, not mine. In other words, they have the freedom to seek whatever health care services they deem appropriate, and I don't have the right to abridge that freedom (nor would I want to)

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Jane Hamsher on the Wikileaks/Stratfor Email Dump

Jane's been closely following the Wikileaks/Stratfor release and its worth checking in with her over the next week or so as all the emails gradually come out .. highlights so far: from Stratfor analyst Marco Papic, "I want to see [Assange] try to take on the Russians. He’d be going bald in an Iceland hospital within days"; Stratfor had an FBI source, James Casey, who said the US Gov has a sealed indictment for Assange; and an Obama donor, "Mrs P", who Jane figures out is Penny Pritzker (heiress to the Hyatt Hotel fortune) called Obama a "wimp" for not meeting with the Dalai Lama and being tougher on China re Tibet - mab
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Sunday, March 4, 2012

Glenn Greenwald: The Causes of the Protests in Afghanistan

Glenzilla ..

The U.S. has violently occupied their country for more than a decade. It has, as Gen. Stanley McChrystal himself explained, killed what he called an “amazing number” of innocent Afghans in checkpoint shootings. It has repeatedly — as in, over and over — killed young Afghan children in air strikes. It continues to imprison their citizens for years at Bagram and other American bases without charges of any kind and with credible reports of torture and other serious abuses. Soldiers deliberately shot Afghan civilians for fun and urinated on their corpses and displayed them as trophies .. It’s comforting to believe that these violent protests and the obviously intense anti-American rage driving them is primarily about anger over the inadvertent burning of some religious books: that way, we can dismiss the rage as primitive and irrational .. But the Afghans themselves are making clear that this latest episode is but the trigger for — the latest symbol of — a pile of long-standing, underlying grievances about a decade-old, extremely violent foreign military presence in their country. It’s much more difficult to dismiss those grievances as the by-product of primitive religious fanaticism, so — as usual — they just get ignored

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, February 27, 2012

Map of US Interventions in the World since WW II

c/o Glenn Greenwald, Juan Cole gives us a visual aid on US imperialism .. also worth reading the comments, such as "As a Latin American, My experience of US troops or US interferenece is vastly different from [previous East German commenter's] experience as a German and European. The first country the USA invaded was Cuba in 1898. The first foreign government ever toppled by the State Department was that of Cipriano Castro in Venezuela, in 1908. As you can see, Nazi Germany didn´t even exist. Or the Soviet Union, for that matter." and "[actually] The first country the US invaded was Canada during the War of 1812. But the first Latin American nation that suffered an US war of agression was Mexico in 1845. Mexico lost half of its territory as a result of that intervention." - mab .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, February 23, 2012

Current Observations – Karl Sanda

Posted by Michael Butler, Friday, February 17, 2012

Markos Moulitsas: Announcing Operation Hilarity – Let’s keep the GOP clown show going!

Kos is having a lot of fun with the GOP primaries ..

It's time for us to take an active role in the GOP nomination process. That's right, it's time for those of us who live in open primary and caucus states—Michigan, North Dakota, Vermont and Tennessee in the next three weeks—to head out and cast a vote for Rick Santorum .. The longer this thing drags out, the more unpopular the Republican presidential pretenders become. Just look at Mitt Romney's trajectory .. just remember what's at stake—not just the White House, but Nancy Pelosi's gavel and a Senate run by Mitch McConnell. The weaker the GOP standard bearer, the better our chances in November. Rush Limbaugh and his ilk have had no problem meddling in our own contests. And if there's one thing Daily Kos is about, it's about fighting fire with fire. And in any case, it's freaking hilarious. I mean, Rick Santorum? Really? The Republicans have offered up this big, slow, juicy softball. Let's have fun whacking the heck out of it

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, February 17, 2012

Jane Hamsher: Schneiderman Victims, Share Your Thoughts on the Settlement

Jane-zilla ..

As former Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Cynthia Kouril said on FDL this morning, “The court system will be permanently corrupted by forged and perjurious documents…This settlement is an incredible breach of the social contract between the government and the governed.” We are especially disappointed in the “Justice Democrats” — particularly Attorney Generals Eric Schneiderman and Kamala Harris — whose complicity proves that any faith in their moral fiber or independence was misplaced. When Timothy Geither and the Obama White House pressed them to fold, they did so. At a time when America needs leaders to fight for justice and accountability, they chose to advance their own careers by protecting the corporations and bankers of the oligarch class — hoping that a few press releases filled with platitudes echoed through an expensive propaganda machine will fool a credulous public. It won’t.

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, February 9, 2012

Obama’s Guiding Principle: Leave No One Accountable

Scarecrow at Firedoglake on the bank settlement ..

The Obama Administration has followed a predictable pattern we now recognize. It has consistently functioned like criminal defense counsel, whose mission is to get their criminal clients, the major corporations and executives who fund their elections, off with no admission of guilt, no forced resignations, and as little harm to their reputation, or that of the counsel, as possible. To do this, they neutralize anyone with an ounce of public purpose in their veins. Its role is then to convince the public that whatever you thought or feared was going on in America, and whoever you believed had caused the collapse of America’s economy, caused millions to lose their jobs, their homes and their retirements and continued to loot the country, it’s time to look forward. Because everyone who matters — and that’s not you — now agrees, they say, to function in the public interest, even though it’s a bald face lie, since nothing has changed and the looters and their complicit overseers are still in charge

plus Marcy Wheeler is calling today "Bank Bailout Day" - mab .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, February 9, 2012

Marcy Wheeler: I Always Hated Pink, Anyway

Wheeler ..

Komen just pretended to reverse its decision defund Planned Parenthood’s cancer screening services (it promises only to consider Planned Parenthood applications in the future, not to fund them) .. But now that everyone has become aware of Komen’s sleaziness, it’s time to look at what they – and the cancer industry – do more generally. They fund efforts to diagnose and find a cure but they work against things like prevention. They also tend to push back against research that shows we’ve been over-diagnosing and over-treating breast cancer .. We ought to use this scandal to examine more closely where cancer money gets spent – on treatment, turning cancer patients into customers – and rarely on prevention. While I appreciate the gesture, pink ribbons to me have come to symbolize cancer patients as profit centers, both for consumer goods capitalizing on an association with the goodwill (and Komen), as well as for ungodly expensive drugs that don’t always provide better outcomes

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, February 4, 2012

Marijuana Again Dominates President Obama’s Online Forum

Jon Walker at Firedoglake ..

So far every attempt by Obama to directly reach out to young voters through some form of online question and answer system has resulted in young adults overwhelming voting to confront the President with questions about our government’s marijuana policies. It happened with his transitional website Change.gov, his first Youtube townhall and with the White House’s new “we the people” petition site. Marijuana reform is an issue young voters across the ideological spectrum care deeply about. While marijuana legalization is rarely talked about in our mainstream political discourse, at every opportunity regular Americans use the internet to try to make legalization an issue Obama can’t ignore.

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, January 30, 2012

Matt Stoller: Lanny Breuer, Task Force Leader, Doesn’t Bother Showing Up For Mortgage Fraud Press Conference

Stoller in nakedcapitalism ..

.. the FBI has assigned 10 agents and analysts to work with the group immediately. In the coming weeks, another 30 attorneys, investigators, and support staff from U.S. Attorneys’ Offices will join the Group’s work. So that’s a total of 55 people, 10 of whom are FBI agents. Let’s do a few comparisons. During the Savings and Loan crisis, Bill Black reminds us that there were about a thousand FBI agents working on the various cases. That’s one hundred times the number of people working on a scandal that is about forty times larger and far more complex

in a related story, Matt Taibbi asks "Is Obama's 'Economic Populism' for Real?" - short answer: No - mab .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, January 28, 2012

Adbusters Tactical Briefing #25: In the Tradition of the Chicago 8 | #OCCUPYCHICAGO | May 1 – Bring Tent

Adbusters ..

Against the backdrop of a global uprising that is simmering in dozens of countries and thousands of cities and towns, the G8 and NATO will hold a rare simultaneous summit in Chicago this May. The world’s military and political elites, heads of state, 7,500 officials from 80 nations, and more than 2,500 journalists will be there.

And so will we.

On May 1, 50,000 people from all over the world will flock to Chicago, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and #OCCUPYCHICAGO for a month. With a bit of luck, we’ll pull off the biggest multinational occupation of a summit meeting the world has ever seen

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, January 27, 2012

Markos Moulitsas: Occupy owns the Republican nominating contest

Kos ..

Iowa and New Hampshire were disasters for Newt Gingrich, relegated to also-ran status. At that moment, he made a decision .. It was a populist call to arms by someone claiming to represent the 99 percent, against the 1 percent. Rush Limbaugh and the Club for Growth, among others, got the vapors. How dare Newt criticize the free market system? It was an attack on capitalism itself! Heck, much of what Gingrich was saying could've been heard at any Occupy encampment around the country! .. It's a stunning turn of events. Last summer, all the Beltway press wanted to talk about was deficits and the Catfood Commission. Today, even the Republican nomination contest is revolving around Occupy's themes of rogue capitalism and income inequality. That's why Gingrich has stayed on the attack over Bain despite a mass GOP establishment backlash. Because, quite clearly, it's working

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Wikipedia blackout: Why even supporters question anti-SOPA move

Posted by Harry Sifton, Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Nathan Schneider: Occupy Wall Street’s new-year resolve

Schneider on Waging Nonviolence ..

Whenever there was a break, someone would jump up on a chair and start telling radical jokes. Why do anarchists only drink coffee? How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Somebody else would already know the punchline and shout it out, while others burst into laughter until they could hardly breathe. This was not the mood one would expect to find in a bygone movement. Nor would one expect the litany of upcoming actions reeled off by a woman named Tammy, who, as part of the Interoccupy project, was helping to coordinate occupations nationwide .. On January 20, Move to Amend would be organizing actions throughout the country against corporate personhood. There was Occupy Education on March 1, a global day of action on May 12 and actions against the G8 and NATO summits in Chicago later that month. Other people added more: an Egypt solidarity march on January 21, a day recognizing violence against women on February 14 and a mobilization in DC marking King’s assassination on April 4.

Nathan also has a great article in Harpers about the lead up to OWS (no link, you have to go buy the mag .. its the Feb issue) - and OWS is Occupying Congress today! - mab .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, January 17, 2012

FDL: Colbert SuperPAC Goes on the Air in South Carolina

David Dayen @ Firedoglake (w video of Colbert and Stewart making the announcement) ..

This caps off one of the most brilliant pieces of performance art in quite some time. Colbert is “running” for President now as an evolution of his show-don’t-tell critique of the Citizens United decision and what it has meant for campaign finance in America. His SuperPAC has run ads in Iowa, used candidate Buddy Roemer in spots that technically didn’t “coordinate” with the candidate because they were considered issue ads, and tried to purchase naming rights to the South Carolina primary, adding a referendum to the ballot asking voters whether corporations are people or “only people are people.” .. As satire, this goes light years beyond the March to Restore Sanity. Colbert is displaying every single problem with the Citizens United decision, and the mess of our campaign finance laws, by showing the practical application of them in the real world

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Sunday, January 15, 2012

Glenn Greenwald: NYT’s Arthur Brisbane and selective stenography

Glenzilla ..

The New York Times‘ Public Editor Arthur Brisbane unwittingly sparked an intense and likely enduring controversy yesterday when he pondered — as though it were some agonizing, complex dilemma — whether news reporters “should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.” .. While reporters typically react with fury over the suggestion that they are stenographers, Brisbane was essentially posting that this is all they are, and then earnestly wondering aloud whether they should be anything more than that, as though it was some sort of exotic or edgy suggestion

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, January 14, 2012

Hamilton Nolan: Piss on War

Nolan in Gawker (of all places) ..

Do you know what is worse than having your dead body urinated upon? Being killed. Being shot. Being bombed. Having your limbs blown off. Having your house incinerated by a drone-fired missile that you don't see until it explodes. Having your children blown up in their beds. Having your spouse killed. Having your hometown destroyed. Being displaced. Becoming a refugee. Having your entire life destroyed as a consequence of political forces far, far beyond your control.

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, January 13, 2012

125 Year Old Woman Claimed Smoking Pot Everyday Was Her Secret to Long Life

from Cafe Vale Tudo ..

A 125-year-old woman, said to be one of the oldest women in India, died at her home in Orissa, her family said Sunday. Fulla Nayak claimed that smoking cannabis every day was her secret to long life .. Fulla was known for her love of smoking ganja and cigars and palm juice. She also loved steaming hot tea. She had never suffered any debilitating ailment throughout her life

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, January 5, 2012