Mass Of New Docs Support White House Reasons For Firing AmeriCorps IG

By Zachary Roth - July 3, 2009, 1:42PM

As we noted yesterday, the Washington Post has published the documents turned over by the Corporation for National and Community Service to a Senate committee reviewing the White House's firing of AmeriCorps IG. Conservatives had charged that the IG, Gerald Walpin, was canned for going too hard after an Obama ally.

We've taken a look through the documents, and it's fair to say they offer a pretty clear picture of how and why the CNCS board lost confidence in Walpin. They jibe closely with what the White House and the board have already said -- to us, among others -- about the deterioration of the relationship between the IG and his agency. And they also make clear that this deterioration had begun long before the Obama administration existed.

Tea Parties Kaput?

by AlyoshaKaramazov
Fri Jul 03, 2009 at 10:46:11 AM PD

The poor, poor GOP. Seems to be going the way of Mrs. Nezbitt. And since we've found out that Neo-Nazis may be attending (you know, to talk about taxes) perhaps it's appropriate to see it in German.

Yes, even though Stormfront will be kicking out the jams at the 4th of July Tea Parties..........GOP bigwigs? Not so much.

The Film Big Coal Does Not Want You to See

by Jeff Biggers

As a groundbreaking clean energy counterpart to this summer's extraordinary Food, Inc. documentary on the agribusiness, the long-awaited "Coal Country" film on the cradle-to-grave process of generating our coal-fired electricity will be hitting the theatres next week with the big bang of an ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosive.

And Big Coal ain't happy.

ExxonMobil Continuing to Fund Climate Sceptic Groups, Records Show

by David Adam

The world's largest oil company is continuing to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming, despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change denial, a new analysis shows.

Company records show that ExxonMobil handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to such lobby groups in 2008. These include the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas, which received $75,000 (£45,500), and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which received $50,000.

According to Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics, both the NCPA and the Heritage Foundation have published "misleading and inaccurate information about climate change."

Matt Taibbi: On giving Goldman a chance

After my Rolling Stone piece about Goldman, Sachs hit the newsstands last week (unfortunately the piece is not yet up on the magazine’s web site, so I can’t link to it yet — but it is out in print), I started to get a lot of mail. Most of it was thoughtful and respectful criticism, although there was an amusingly large number of people writing in impassioned defense of their right, under our American system, to be ripped off by large impersonal financial companies. “If my pension fund is buying [crap mortgages] from Goldman, and my pension fund loses lots of value, that’s not Goldman’s fault,” wrote one reader. “No one is forcing anyone to buy anything. The only thing Goldman is guilty of is making profits.”

I’m not even going to go there — the psychology of a human being who would take the time to actually write in a complaint like that is so bizarre that it would take more time than I have today to even begin discussing it. One other complaint that I will address quickly, though, is the notion that I didn’t tell Goldman’s side of the story. “Not exactly a balanced approach,” complained one reader. “You should take an ethics class. You have to give the other side a fair shot.”

FBI Ignored Bush-Hussein Ties

By Robert Parry
July 2, 2009

The FBI has released reports on 20 interviews and five conversations conducted with Iraq’s deposed dictator Saddam Hussein before he was put to death, but none of the disclosed Q and A deals with the role of the Reagan administration in delivering key components for Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons in the 1980s.

Either those questions weren’t asked or they are still being hidden by the U.S. government. The contents of one interview on March 21, 2004, were almost entirely redacted for supposed national security reasons.

As the National Security Archive, a private non-profit group that obtained the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, wrote:

“Not included in these FBI reports are issues of particular interest to students of Iraq’s complicated relationship with the U.S. – the reported role of the CIA in facilitating the Ba’ath party’s rise to power, the uneasy alliance forged between Iraq and the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war, and the precise nature of U.S. views regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons policy during that conflict, given its contemporaneous knowledge of their repeated use against Iranians and the Kurds.”

Cybersecurity Plan to Involve NSA, Telecoms

DHS Officials Debating The Privacy Implications

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 3, 2009

The Obama administration will proceed with a Bush-era plan to use National Security Agency assistance in screening government computer traffic on private-sector networks, with AT&T as the likely test site, according to three current and former government officials.

President Obama said in May that government efforts to protect computer systems from attack would not involve "monitoring private-sector networks or Internet traffic," and Department of Homeland Security officials say the new program will scrutinize only data going to or from government systems.

Bubkes

Filed under:

• Greenhouse gases
• Climate Science

— gavin @ 8:00 AM - ()

Some parts of the blogosphere, headed up by CEI (”CO2: They call it pollution, we call it life!“), are all a-twitter over an apparently “suppressed” document that supposedly undermines the EPA Endangerment finding about human emissions of carbon dioxide and a basket of other greenhouse gases. Well a draft of this “suppressed” document has been released and we can now all read this allegedly devastating critique of the EPA science. Let’s take a look…

First off the authors of the submission; Alan Carlin is an economist and John Davidson is an ex-member of the Carter administration Council of Environmental Quality. Neither are climate scientists. That’s not necessarily a problem - perhaps they have mastered multiple fields? - but it is likely an indication that the analysis is not going to be very technical (and so it will prove). Curiously, while the authors work for the NCEE (National Center for Environmental Economics), part of the EPA, they appear to have rather closely collaborated with one Ken Gregory (his inline comments appear at multiple points in the draft). Ken Gregory if you don’t know is a leading light of the Friends of Science - a astroturf anti-climate science lobbying group based in Alberta. Indeed, parts of the Carlin and Davidson report appear to be lifted directly from Ken’s rambling magnum opus on the FoS site. However, despite this odd pedigree, the scientific points could still be valid.

A Violent Regeneration

A search for American identity after the Civil War led to a surge of machismo and bloodlust.
David Nasaw | June 25, 2009

Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920
by Jackson Lears, Harper, 448 pages, $27.99

History is lived forward but written backward. In October of 1929, no one knew that the Great Depression had begun and would last for over a decade. The soldiers who marched off to fight in the Civil War -- and the families and loved ones who saluted their departure -- had no idea of the carnage that would follow. Historians know better but can't let their knowledge of what came next overdetermine the story they tell. Neither can they make believe that the future of that past was an open book. It wasn't. There were options, openings, possibilities, but only one path was taken. The historian's task is to explain why it was that path and not another.

The best historians strike the right balance between the Scylla and Charybdis of inevitability and randomness. As Jackson Lears demonstrates again in his latest book, Rebirth of a Nation, he is one of the best, certainly of his (and my) generation of historians. His new book is a work of synthesis, an attempt to tell the story of "the making of modern America" in the long half century from the end of the Civil War to the end of the Great War. Although the book's subtitle indicates his narrative begins in 1877 -- the year when the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes as president supposedly marked the end of Reconstruction -- Lears ignores that arbitrary, conventional beginning point. "After the Civil War," he tells us, "the entire country was faced with the task of starting over." In the decades to come, the history of the nation and its peoples would be marked by longings for and attempts at rebirth, regeneration, and revitalization.

Paul Krugman: That ’30s Show

O.K., Thursday’s jobs report settles it. We’re going to need a bigger stimulus. But does the president know that?

Let’s do the math.

Since the recession began, the U.S. economy has lost 6 ½ million jobs — and as that grim employment report confirmed, it’s continuing to lose jobs at a rapid pace. Once you take into account the 100,000-plus new jobs that we need each month just to keep up with a growing population, we’re about 8 ½ million jobs in the hole.

And the deeper the hole gets, the harder it will be to dig ourselves out. The job figures weren’t the only bad news in Thursday’s report, which also showed wages stalling and possibly on the verge of outright decline. That’s a recipe for a descent into Japanese-style deflation, which is very difficult to reverse. Lost decade, anyone?

The Great American Bubble Machine

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression

MATT TAIBBI
Posted Jul 02, 2009 8:38 AM

In Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83, Matt Taibbi takes on "the Wall Street Bubble Mafia" — investment bank Goldman Sachs. The piece has generated controversy, with Goldman Sachs firing back that Taibbi's piece is "an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories" and a spokesman adding, "We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance in being a force for good." Taibbi shot back: "Goldman has its alumni pushing its views from the pulpit of the U.S. Treasury, the NYSE, the World Bank, and numerous other important posts; it also has former players fronting major TV shows. They have the ear of the president if they want it." Here, now, are excerpts from Matt Taibbi's piece and video of Taibbi exploring the key issues.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

Treat killing like a disease to slash shootings

Shootings and killings in deprived areas of Chicago and Baltimore have plummeted by between 41 and 73 per cent thanks to a programme that treats violence as if it is an infectious disease.

Pioneers of the programme, called CeaseFire, say it relies on simultaneously changing attitudes and behaviour and will work anywhere.

Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson, Baseless Expenditures

How to Deal with America's Empire of Bases

A Modest Proposal for Garrisoned Lands
By Chalmers Johnson

The U.S. Empire of Bases -- at $102 billion a year already the world's costliest military enterprise -- just got a good deal more expensive. As a start, on May 27th, we learned that the State Department will build a new "embassy" in Islamabad, Pakistan, which at $736 million will be the second priciest ever constructed, only $4 million less, if cost overruns don't occur, than the Vatican-City-sized one the Bush administration put up in Baghdad. The State Department was also reportedly planning to buy the five-star Pearl Continental Hotel (complete with pool) in Peshawar, near the border with Afghanistan, to use as a consulate and living quarters for its staff there.

Unfortunately for such plans, on June 9th Pakistani militants rammed a truck filled with explosives into the hotel, killing 18 occupants, wounding at least 55, and collapsing one entire wing of the structure. There has been no news since about whether the State Department is still going ahead with the purchase.

Chamber of Commerce Launches $100 Million Campaign to Protect Wall Street's Power at Our Expense

By Zach Carter, AlterNet
Posted on July 2, 2009, Printed on July 2, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141031/

Perhaps the greatest public deception surrounding today's financial meltdown is the notion that it is unique -- a once-in-a-lifetime crisis that reflects bad luck rather than any fundamental problem with the U.S. banking system's sway in global politics.

The truth is that throughout the 1980s, the major money center banks were in much the same situation they find themselves in today.

As economy drops jobs, paychecks drop some weight

By JEANNINE AVERSA, AP Economics Writer
2 hrs 13 mins ago

WASHINGTON – Americans lucky enough to still have a job are noticing something unpleasant in their paychecks: They're making less money.

Employers cut 467,000 jobs in June, far more than expected, and the jobless rate hit a 26-year high of 9.5 percent. Just as worrisome, wages shrank to their lowest in nearly a year.

The bleak news Thursday from the Labor Department underscored one of the big threats to an economic turnaround: Rising joblessness and falling wages for those still working could send Americans back into spending hibernation and short-circuit any recovery.

Banks Own the US Government

There are smart ways to raise money and regulate the market, but Wall Street is working to kill any meaningful financial reform

by Dean Baker

Last month, when the US Congress [1] failed to pass a bankruptcy reform measure that would have allowed home mortgages to be modified [2] in bankruptcy, senator Dick Durbin succinctly commented: "The banks own the place. [3]" That seems pretty clear.

After all, it was the banks' greed that fed the housing bubble with loony loans that were guaranteed to go bad. Of course the finance guys also made a fortune guaranteeing the loans that were guaranteed to go bad (ie AIG [4]), and when everything went bust, the taxpayers got handed the bill. The cost of the bailout will certainly be in the hundreds of billions, if not more than $1tn when it is all over.

More importantly, we are looking at the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. The cumulative lost output over the years 2008-2012 will almost certainly exceed $5tn. That comes to more than $60,000 for an average family of four. This is the price that we are paying for the bankers' greed, coupled with incredible incompetence and/or corruption from our regulators.

Can Iceland Be Saved?

The plan to get an entire country out of debtors’ prison.

By Rob Cox
Monday, June 29, 2009 - 3:55pm

At one end of Laugavegur, Reykjavik’s main shopping (and partying) street, Icelanders jostle in the aisles of a Bonus discount grocery to fill their baskets with ham, dried codfish, and other staples. A mile or so up the road, on the ground floor of a shiny new office tower that also houses the stock market, sits an Apple (AAPL) store that is perhaps the only one of its kind: Save a salesman, it is completely empty.

This neatly illustrates the state of play in Iceland eight months after it essentially went bust. No country embraced the excesses of the credit bubble as zealously as this north Atlantic island nation of about 310,000 people. As a result, it’s hard to find a place that’s suffering the deprivations of the crunch to the same degree. It’s not just that iPods are off the shopping list in favor of processed pork. The nation is massively indebted, consumer spending is in free fall, its big banks have been taken over by the state, and capital controls restrict the flow of money outside the country.

Don't Get Fooled Again

The Fed botched banking regulation once already. So why does Obama want to give it more power?

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Tuesday, June 30, 2009, at 4:22 PM ET

---

The Federal Reserve Bank has managed through most of its history to reside in obscurity—little understood, rarely questioned, viewed as hovering above the political fray, the domain of technocrats and erudite economists. That should all change.

The Fed's power over all things economic is hard to overstate, and it now desires even more, seeking the title of "systemic risk regulator." Some of us have argued that regulators—and the Fed in particular—have had virtually all the power they needed to avert the economic traumas we have been living through: They just failed to use it. Yet the proposed formalization of the Fed's mega-regulator role requires that we lift the veil that has shielded it from scrutiny for too long.

The United States should not lightly put our fate back in the hands of the very entity whose oversight of the economy and financial sector brought us into the abyss. The Fed's lack of accountability and transparency is no longer justified by its record or sound principles or public policy. Granting the power without asking the tough questions would be following the path of least resistance—regulators don't want to answer the tough questions, and legislators would still rather defer to the Fed than grapple seriously with a tough problem.

Pecora Commission II: Super-Sleuths or Keystone Cops?

By Dean Baker2

Created 07/01/2009 - 10:42am

Congress will be appointing a special commission to investigate the causes of the economic crisis and to determine who is to blame. This proposal originated among progressives who wanted to see a replay of the depression era Pecora Commission, which exposed the Wall Street corruption that laid the basis for the 1929 stock market crash and the depression that followed.

At the very least, a similar exposure of the greedheads at Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and the rest could provide an element of justice to this disaster and possibly lay the basis for criminal prosecutions of the worst offenders. Undoubtedly there are many multi-millionaires at these institutions who would make far more appropriate prisoners than some of the 2 million current guests of our criminal justice system.

Unfortunately, there is a real possibility that the commission appointed by Congress may follow a different precedent. Instead of striving to uncover the truth, it may seek to conceal it.

Bush-era judges buck Obama on terror

By: Josh Gerstein
June 30, 2009 04:13 AM EST

President Barack Obama’s claims of broad executive authority to carry out the war on terror are drawing fire from an unexpected source: federal judges nominated by President George W. Bush, who asserted the sweeping powers in the first place.

In recent weeks, three different Bush appointees considering cases relating to war-on-terror detainees have rejected arguments from Obama’s Justice Department, which adopted virtually unchanged the positions the Bush administration had staked out.

In each case, the Bush-appointed judge said the executive branch was overstepping its authority and claiming more powers than the law allowed.

It Came from Wasilla

Despite her disastrous performance in the 2008 election, Sarah Palin is still the sexiest brand in Republican politics, with a lucrative book contract for her story. But what Alaska’s charismatic governor wants the public to know about herself doesn’t always jibe with reality. As John McCain’s top campaign officials talk more candidly than ever before about the meltdown of his vice-presidential pick, the author tracks the signs—political and personal—that Palin was big trouble, and checks the forecast for her future.

By Todd S. Purdum August 2009

The crowds begin streaming into the Evansville Auditorium and Convention Centre a couple of hours before the arrival of the “special guest speaker” at the Vanderburgh County Right to Life dinner on a soft Indiana spring evening—nearly 2,200 people in the banquet hall, 800 more in an adjacent auditorium watching the proceedings on a live video feed. The menu is thick slices of roast pork and red velvet cake, washed down with pitchers of iced tea, and when Sarah Palin finally enters, escorted by a phalanx of sheriff’s deputies and local police, she is mobbed. The organizers of the dinner, billed as “the largest pro-life banquet in the world,” have courted Palin for weeks with care packages of locally made chocolates, doughnuts, barbecue, and pastries, and she has requited by choosing Evansville, a conservative stronghold in southern Indiana, as the site of her first public speech outside Alaska in 2009.

Julian Delasantellis: Cheating still beats real work

A colleague recently relayed a story about her experience as an observer at a faculty/student disciplinary hearing for a pre-law undergraduate charged with cheating.

Apparently, this young man had come around to the belief that, when it came to engaging in conduct that could get him expelled, in for a dime-in for a dollar. Just in the space of a single term, his teachers had found him copying from a test, rifling through the course's graduate assistant notebook looking for a test, and, word for word, punctuation mark by punctuation mark, lifting without attribution a large section of a Wikipedia entry on "jurisprudence" for a research paper.

[...]

"Well", the student said, and locked his eyes on his personal Roland Freisler, the Nazi German judge. "Beats working, doesn't it?"

With that, I would have voted to let him off. For it is so self obvious that, just through a perusal of the business section of any American newspaper in the two-plus years since the financial and economic crisis commenced, the ideology contained in the defense statement was so blindingly accurate as to, indeed, provide its purveyors with a lifetime "get out of jail free" card.

Thomas Frank: How Dysfunction Helps the GOP

The party says its own mistakes prove government can't work.

'Remember the $400 hammer? How 'bout that $600 toilet seat?" asks a Conservatives for Patients' Rights TV commercial criticizing President Barack Obama's health-care plan. "Seems when Congress gets involved, things just cost more."

As it happens, I do remember the incident of the $436 hammer, the one that made headlines back in 1984. And while it may "seem" in hazy retrospect as though it showed how "things just cost more" once those silly liberals in Congress get started, what the hammer episode actually illustrated was a very different sort of ripoff. The institution that paid so very much for that hammer was President Ronald Reagan's Pentagon. A private-sector contractor was the party that was pleased to take the Pentagon's money. And it was a liberal Democrat in the House of Representatives, also known as "Congress," who publicized the pricey hardware to the skies.

Looking In The Rearview Mirror

by digby

... and seeing carnage in your wake.

Today the ACLU and many bloggers who are concerned with the fact that the United States tortured prisoners and apparently has no intention of holding anyone responsible for it are blogging about a little known fact about the issue: the US Government didn't just torture a bunch a prisoners, as bad as that was, and as horrible as it remains for those who survived it. The United States tortured many prisoners to death. This does not seem to be common knowledge, but the evidence is quite clear that this happened. Torture and death by torture was not isolated.

Bishops, Baptists Organizing Against Contraception

It’s precisely because of stances like this that it’s very hard to take the “abortion is murder” crowd seriously when they say abortion is murder. Their revealed behavior indicates that they don’t actually find abortion especially problematic, but just place it on a spectrum containing a general aversion to women controlling their own sexuality:

The Global Warming Lie Detector

by Dean Baker

The House's passage of the Waxman-Markey bill raises the possibility that the United States will finally do something on global warming. This prospect has the industry hacks screaming at top volume about the horrible fate that awaits the economy. Everyone should know not to take them seriously, as I will explain in a moment.

First, we should acknowledge the obvious: The bill is awful. It gives away permits to greenhouse gas emitters that should instead be auctioned. As a result, money that could be rebated to taxpayers or used to fund the development of clean technologies instead goes to the industries that are the source of the problem.

Second, the use of tradable permits rather than a tax is a rather questionable policy. Permits will almost certainly require more government enforcement bureaucracy than a system of taxes and subsidies. And, incidentally, permits will allow Goldman Sachs and our other Wall Street friends to make tens of billions of dollars on trading fees in the coming decades, a high priority for all Americans.

Obama and the Stone Tablets

By E.J. Dionne

Every general studies the mistakes of the last war, and President Obama’s style has been much influenced by the difficulties of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

In particular, Obama has shied away from handing Congress his own plans on “stone tablets,” a phrase much loved by senior adviser David Axelrod, and instead allowed it room to legislate.

The president has won a lot, including a decent stimulus bill and laws on children’s health coverage, tobacco regulation and employment discrimination that, in less exciting times, would have been seen as landmarks. But the stimulus bill was neither as good nor as large as it might have been, and there was a legislative train wreck on Obama’s effort to close Guantanamo prison.

Camp David Chaplain: "First we get the military, then we get the nation"

Bruce Wilson
Mon Jun 29, 2009 at 04:51:21 PM ES

For a few hours today it seemed, according to a new Time Magazine story by Amy Sullivan, released Monday morning, that US President Barack Obama had chosen, as his main place of worship, Camp David's Chapel as his church. The chapel is currently headed by a Navy Chaplain who has publicly advocated for a Christian takeover of the United military, then the United States. [note: story first covered by MRFF Senior Research Director Chris Rodda]

The White House has subsequently issued a statement denying that Obama has chosen the Evergreen Chapel, and heated discussion of the affair is currently raging at the leading Democratic activist forum, the Daily Kos.

Why Does Our Government Still Spy On, Arrest and Persecute Dissidents?

By Emily Spence, Consortium News
Posted on June 30, 2009, Printed on June 30, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141003/

Recently, an American Civil Liberties Union report pointed out, "Anti-terrorism training materials currently being used by the Department of Defense (DoD) teach its personnel that free expression in the form of public protests should be regarded as ‘low level terrorism’.”

Although DoD officials removed the offensive section at the urging of ACLU members, the DoD stance is still troubling since a longstanding practice to designate peaceful, law-abiding activists as dangerous and treasonable still exists in many government departments and agencies.

Bogus Think Tank "Third Way" Pops Up to Thwart Health Care Reform

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet
Posted on June 30, 2009, Printed on June 30, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140998/

A couple of weeks ago, the slippery think tank Third Way came under fire from progressives when a memo surfaced under the group's letterhead arguing against the creation of a public health care plan. In place of a public plan, Third Way proposed a "hybrid" model attached to a ludicrous sunset provision of four years.

Not for the first time, the question was asked aloud: Who are these Third Way people, and why are they calling themselves "progressives"? Why does their goal appear to be to complicate the drive for public health insurance?

How a Loophole Benefits General Electric in Bank Rescue

WASHINGTON – General Electric, the world's largest industrial company, has quietly become the biggest beneficiary of one of the government's key rescue programs for banks.

At the same time, GE has avoided many of the restrictions facing other financial giants getting help from the government.

Bizarre, Almost Comic, Way Ugly

Not sure we've got a good general heading to put this under. But over the weekend Francine Busby was holding a fundraiser in an upper-income neighborhood in San Diego, prepping to run again in the fairly Republican CA-50 district. Remember, that's Duke Cunningham's old district, now represented by Brian Bilbray. So Busby's holding her fundraiser. Some neighbor calls the cops complaining of noise. And before you know it, the sheriff's department is there with eight squad cars and a helicopter, dousing multiple attendees with pepper spray and arresting one of the hostesses. (Click here for our TPMDC interview with Francine Busby discussing the incident.)

Water should be a human right

In this month's PLoS Medicine editorial, the editors argue that -- despite recent international objections -- access to clean water should be recognized as a human right. At the March 2009 United Nations meetings, coinciding with the World Water Forum, Canada, Russia and the United States refused to support a declaration that would recognize water as a basic human right. But this flies in the face of considerable evidence that access to water, which is essential for health, is under threat, argue the editors.

Toxic chemicals affect steroid hormones differently in humans and invertebrates

In a study with important consequences for studies on the effects of chemicals on steroid responses in humans, a team of French and American scientists, including Michael E. Baker, PhD, professor in UC San Diego's department of medicine, division of nephrology-hypertension, have found that -- contrary to earlier assumptions -- enzymes used for the synthesis of steroids in insects, snails, octopuses and corals are unrelated to those used in humans.

Pecora Commission To Be Named This Week?

By Bill Scher

Created 06/29/2009 - 5:01pm

Word is circulating in Washington that members for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission will be named this week.

The commission is supposed to resemble the 1930s Pecora commission that dug into the culprits behind the Great Depression [1] and laid the groundwork for major bank reform. But that will only be true if the commission is run by aggressive seekers of truth, independent of the financial industry, willing to use their subpoena power, knowledgeable enough to have warned us of impeding crisis in the first place despite market cheerleading from the political and media establishments.

Will the maximum sentence given to Bernie Madoff, after he ruined the lives of many, put a renewed spotlight on the need for tough reforms?

Paul Krugman: Betraying the Planet

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

A classic revolutionary dilemma

By Dilip Hiro

By marshalling the regime's coercive instruments, Iran's 70-year-old Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has, for now, succeeded in curbing the popular, peaceful challenge to the authenticity of Iran's fateful June 12 presidential election. But he has paid a heavy political price.

Before his June 19 hardline speech at a Friday prayer congregation, Khamenei had the mystique of a just arbiter of authority, perched on a lofty platform far above the contentiousness of day-to-day politics. In his sermon, he asserted the validity of the re-election of Mahmud Ahmadinejad while the Guardians Council, the constitutional body charged with validating any national election, was still dealing with 646 complaints about possible election misbehavior and fraud. As a result, he damaged his status as a just ruler, a matter of grave importance since justice is a vital element in Islamic values.

Saudis coerced bombing suspects to blame Iran, shield al Qaeda

Posted By Gareth Porter / IPS On June 26, 2009 @ 8:46 pm In

When a truck bomb exploded outside a housing unit in Saudi Arabia in 1996, killing 19 US service members, the Saudis quickly concluded that the plot had been carried out by Hezbollah with the backing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. FBI Director Louis Freeh was prepared to accept the confessions obtained by the Saudis as proof, but the Department of Justice suspected they had been obtained through torture.

Gareth Porter reports that by 2003, it had become apparent that the Saudis routinely tortured terror suspects and coached them into making confessions that would not implicate al Qaeda. By that time, however, Freeh had embarked on a new career as the chief defender of the Saudis’ response to the Khobar plot.

This is the final installment of a five-part series, “Khobar Towers Investigated: How a Saudi Deception Protected Osama bin Laden”. The work on this series was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Known terrorists were allowed to keep aviation licenses

Those who were shocked to discover, after 9/11, how easy it is for persons linked to terrorism to acquire pilots' licenses may be surprised to discover that, nearly eight years after that fateful day, at least six people known to have -- or suspected of -- terrorist links were able to keep their aviation licenses.

Among them, says a story in the New York Times, was a Libyan national convicted for his role in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Walter Cronkite not expected to recover, family says

Legendary CBS newsman Walter Cronkite III, once regarded as the "most trusted man in America," is on his deathbed suffering from a respiratory illness and not expected to recover, his family said in a prepared statement published Saturday.

"In order to dispel false rumors, Walter Cronkite's family want it known that, sadly, he is very ill and is not expected to recuperate; he is resting at home surrounded by family, friends and a wonderful medical team," the statement read. "We thank everyone for their prayers and good wishes."

Slowdown in Once-Booming Organics Troubles Farmers

by Rick Callahan

Westby, Wisc. - The organic dairy industry was thriving when Allen and Jean Moody bought a 200-acre Wisconsin dairy farm in 2006 and joined the ranks of farmers churning out milk raised without growth hormones, pesticides or other chemicals.

Three years later, the good days are gone and the Moodys aren't alone in wanting out.

A growing number of farmers who went all-natural in the years when organic food sales were growing at a double-digit pace are giving up their organic certifications. Organic farming is costly and labor-intensive, and many consumers are no longer willing to pay the price in a recession.

Sales in the U.S. of organic foods sold mostly at supermarkets are expected to drop 1.1 percent to $5.07 billion this year, according to the Chicago-based research firm Mintel. While the drop is small, it is the first in an industry that has seen annual growth of 12 percent to 23 percent since 2003.

MRFF Demands DoD Revoke Authority of Chaplain Endorser Who Suggested Democrats Should Be Executed

by Chris Rodda
Sat Jun 27, 2009 at 04:55:11 PM EST

As I wrote back in May, the antics of disgraced former Navy chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt, and his retaliation against the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, after the two organizations issued a joint letter to the Chief of Naval Operations requesting an investigation of his use of his image in uniform to solicit funds for political causes, led MRFF to take a closer look at Klingenschmitt's endorser, the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches (CFGC) and its leader, retired Army colonel Jim Ammerman. What we found was astounding, and led to a decision by MRFF to formally demand that Ammerman, whose agency provides the ecclesiastical endorsements required by the Department of Defense for over 270 military chaplains and chaplain candidates, be stripped of the authority granted to him and his organization by the DoD to endorse military chaplains.

MRFF's letter to the Secretary of Defense, copied to numerous other government and DoD officials, went out on June 24, accompanied by a 55-page package of enclosures supporting the four separate reasons that Ammerman's authority must be revoked.

Frank Rich: 40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans

LIKE all students caught up in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, I was riveted by the violent confrontations between the police and protestors in Selma, 1965, and Chicago, 1968. But I never heard about the several days of riots that rocked Greenwich Village after the police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in the wee hours of June 28, 1969 — 40 years ago today.

Then again, I didn’t know a single person, student or teacher, male or female, in my entire Ivy League university who was openly identified as gay. And though my friends and I were obsessed with every iteration of the era’s political tumult, we somehow missed the Stonewall story. Not hard to do, really. The Times — which would not even permit the use of the word gay until 1987 — covered the riots in tiny, bowdlerized articles, one of them but three paragraphs long, buried successively on pages 33, 22 and 19.

But if we had read them, would we have cared? It was typical of my generation, like others before and after, that the issue of gay civil rights wasn’t on our radar screen. Not least because gay people, fearful of harassment, violence and arrest, were often forced into the shadows. As David Carter writes in his book “Stonewall,” at the end of the 1960s homosexual sex was still illegal in every state but Illinois. It was a crime punishable by castration in seven states. No laws — federal, state or local — protected gay people from being denied jobs or housing. If a homosexual character appeared in a movie, his life ended with either murder or suicide.