Solar greenhouses: China's winning solution to global energy crisis

20 years of research produces definitive study on benefits of Chinese single-slope greenhouses

BEIJING, CHINA—Solar greenhouses have played a vital role in China's agricultural scene for years. New innovations in greenhouse design are allowing growers to produce more varieties of vegetables, even during long winter months. In a recently published report Chinese scientists called solar greenhouses "the most important type of infrastructures for growing horticultural crops in China." The team of researchers from the College of Agronomy and Biotechnology at China Agricultural University presented an extensive report on single-slope solar greenhouses in a recent issue of HortTechnology. Based on 20 years of systematic studies, the report noted: "Increased proliferation of efficient solar greenhouses in China may contribute to solving worldwide problems such as the energy crisis and global climate change."

Single-slope solar greenhouses are built facing south using support and insulation walls on the north, east, and west sides. A short roof is installed on top of the north wall. The south side is supported by metal or bamboo frames (or a mixture of both materials), and is covered with plastic film and an insulating blanket. These energy-efficient greenhouses use solar energy as the only source of light and heat for winter crop production in the region between latitudes 32°N and 43°N for production of warm season crops such as tomato and cucumber.

Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here)

March 15, 2011

A Study Guide for Those Wishing to Know More

After watching the sudden and impressively well-organized wave of legislation being introduced into state legislatures that all seem to be pursuing parallel goals only tangentially related to current fiscal challenges–ending collective bargaining rights for public employees, requiring photo IDs at the ballot box, rolling back environmental protections, privileging property rights over civil rights, and so on–I’ve found myself wondering where all of this legislation is coming from.

The Walker-Koch Prank Phone Call Reveals A Lot, But Not Nearly Enough

The prank phone call that Governor Scott Walker unhesitatingly accepted from a blogger purporting to be billionaire conservative donor David Koch has received lots of airplay, and it certainly demonstrates that the governor is accustomed to having conversations with deep-pocketed folks who support his cause. If you’ve not actually seen the transcript, it’s worth a careful reading, and is accessible here:
http://host.madison.com/wsj/article_531276b6-3f6a-11e0-b288-001cc4c002e0.html

Can Biochar Help Suppress Greenhouse Gases?

New Zealand study shows biochar to decrease nitrous oxide emissions

MADISON, WI MARCH 17, 2011 – Nitrous oxide is a potent greenhouse gas and a precursor to compounds that contribute to the destruction of the ozone. Intensively managed, grazed pastures are responsible for an increase in nitrous oxide emissions from grazing animals’ excrement. Biochar is potentially a mitigation option for reducing the world’s elevated carbon dioxide emissions, since the embodied carbon can be sequestered in the soil. Biochar also has the potential to beneficially alter soil nitrogen transformations.

Laboratory tests have indicated that adding biochar to the soil could be used to suppress nitrous oxide derived from livestock. Biochar has been used for soil carbon sequestration in the same manner.

Harry Reid: I will not support any change to Social Security for the next 20 years'

by Gaius Publius on 3/17/2011 07:10:00 PM

Thanks goodness someone has political instincts they haven't been finessed out of. Harry Reid could not be more definite in this interview with the "let's tweak Social Security" maven Lawrence O'Donnell.

There's a nuclear power discussion starting at 0:35 (remember that Reid is from Nevada, a state that's been targeted as a recipient of nuclear waste). Following that, a lip-lock love song to Henry Clay and Compromise at 1:40.

Web of nonsense

An older article (2009) with an update on Huffington's 'Move your Money'--Dictynna

Financial crises always spark interest in marginal critics of the system. One that’s attracted interest on the left is Ellen Brown, who’s got a book and a website called Web of Debt. She and her kind should be given wide berth.

Brown is a fine example of a mode of thinking that sees the problems of capitalism—like the polarization of rich and poor and the system’s vulnerability to periodic crises—as primarily financial in origin. She writes on her website:

Our money system is not what we have been led to believe. The creation of money has been "privatized," or taken over by a private money cartel. Except for coins, all of our money is now created as loans advanced by private banking institutions—including the private Federal Reserve. Banks create the principal but not the interest to service their loans. To find the interest, new loans must continually be taken out, expanding the money supply, inflating prices—and robbing you of the value of your money.

How people can spend the time it takes to write a book and still get so much wrong? For much of the 19th century, our money system was largely private. Individual banks issued notes of varying reliability, with limited geographic acceptance. And the national and international monetary system was based on gold, an entirely private and stateless standard.

New Hampshire House Approves Tax Cut On Cancer-Causing Cigarettes, Cuts Health And Education Funding

In a flurry of legislative activity this week, the New Hampshire House approved a tax cut on cigarettes even while cutting funding for education, and health care. The ten cent tax cut bucks a national trend of raising taxes on tobacco since “forever” and, according to multiple studies, could lead to a 6.6 percent increase in respiratory cancer deaths.

Republican lawmakers claim that the tax cut, which the New Hampshire chapter of the Koch-funded front group Americans for Prosperity strongly pushed for, will attract out-of-state smokers and raise revenue in the “long run.” Yet a spokesman for Gov. John Lynch (D) notes that the state already has the second-lowest tax burden in the nation. And with rising gas prices, the odds of smokers driving to New Hampshire for their cigarettes are slim.

NPR: The Saga Continues

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

There’s no more scrupulous or versatile broadcast journalist than NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling. He is one of those reporters who keeps his eye on the sparrow – that is, on small details from individual lives that add up to significant issues of public policy. As he described in a special report this week how the United States Army is clarifying guidelines "that should make it easier for soldiers with traumatic brain injuries from explosions to receive the Purple Heart," it was mind-boggling to think that right wingers in Congress were at that very moment voting to eliminate the modest federal funds that make such essential and authoritative reporting available to anyone in America who cares to tune in.

Warren Christopher, 1925-2011

By James Fallows

Let me break into the sequence of guest voices here to express sadness at news that Warren Christopher has just died, at age 85.

He is best known as the first Secretary of State during the Clinton Administration, and his public image was of a very careful, even colorless person. I had a much more vivid and warmly positive impression of him. Even when I was a child he was a well-known figure in my home town, because he had attended the local college, the University of Redlands, under the Navy's V-12 program, before wartime service and transferring to USC to finish college. He had gone on to Stanford Law School and a Supreme Court clerkship for Justice William O. Douglas, before becoming a prominent California legal and political figure by the mid-1960s. He kept up contacts in our little town, including with my dad, who was an exact contemporary and had become a Navy doctor through the V-12 program in Pennsylvania before moving west.

As the Global Economy Trembles, Our Nation's Capital Fiddles

Why isn’t Washington responding?

The world’s third largest economy suffers a giant earthquake, tsunami, and radiation dangers. A civil war in Libya and tumult in the Middle East cause crude-oil prices to climb. Poor harvests around the world make food prices soar.

All this means higher prices. American consumers, still reeling from job losses and wage cuts, will be hit hard. (Wholesale food prices surged almost 4 percent in February, the largest upward spike in more than a quarter century.)

Congress Opens Investigation Into HBGary Federal Scandal

The U.S. Congress is stepping into the continuing HBGary Federal scandal after global hacktivist group Anonymous exposed proposals by the government-contracted software security firm to damage WikiLeaks and other organizations.

The House Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities on Wednesday asked the Defence Department and National Security Agency (NSA) to hand over all contracts they had signed with HBGary Federal, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies, Wired reports.

Who Gets Hit With the Tab for the Great Recession?

By Robert Borosage

Created 03/18/2011 - 1:13pm

Governor Scott Walker and a gaggle of Republican governors assault the right of workers to bargain collectively in states across the country. Teachers get laid off as school budgets are cut across the country. Colleges hike tuitions and shut down course offerings. Public workers face furloughs, layoff, cuts in health care and pension benefits. Congress is tied in knots about how much and what to cut. And Republican [1] and bipartisan [2] pressure to go after Social Security and Medicare is escalating.

We should be very clear about what unites these stories, for these struggles will say much about what kind of America emerges from the rubble of the Great Recession.

Who Is Bankrolling A Lawsuit To End The Ban On Foreign Money In U.S. Elections?

When President Obama warned that the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision “will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our election,” conservatives began damage control literally before the President could even finish his sentence. Justice Sam Alito infamously mouthed the words “not true” while Obama was speaking. Of course, we subsequently learned the Chamber of Commerce was raising money from foreign corporations and then placed this money in the same account which funds their political attack ads.

Paul Krugman: The Forgotten Millions

More than three years after we entered the worst economic slump since the 1930s, a strange and disturbing thing has happened to our political discourse: Washington has lost interest in the unemployed.

Jobs do get mentioned now and then — and a few political figures, notably Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, are still trying to get some kind of action. But no jobs bills have been introduced in Congress, no job-creation plans have been advanced by the White House and all the policy focus seems to be on spending cuts.

So one-sixth of America’s workers — all those who can’t find any job or are stuck with part-time work when they want a full-time job — have, in effect, been abandoned.

Today's Social Security Propaganda Rebuttal Post

By Dave Johnson

Created 03/17/2011 - 1:02pm

Marketing works. If you put a lot of money into repeating a marketing message over and over and over, eventually people's brains absorb the message. Conservatives have put a lot of money and effort into convincing people that there is something wrong with Social Security, and that effort is paying off.

So maybe it's a good idea to start with some facts. Social Security cannot borrow, so it does not contribute to the deficit. In fact, working people have been paying a large share of their earnings into Social Security to save for their retirement, and because of this the program has been running a huge surplus. The government has been borrowing FROM Social Security to fund tax cuts for the rich. This borrowed money was used to purchase Treasury Notes, just like China does when we borrow from them, and those notes earn interest, just like China's, which also helps fund the program. So all of this money people have been putting aside for their retirement adds up to a huge trust fund, which doesn't get used up until approx 2037 -- if the economy doesn't get better; later if it does. Even then it only runs a bit short.

Wisconsin Judge Temporarily Blocks Gov. Walker's Union-Busting Bill

Various sources are reporting that Dane County, Wisconsin, Judge Maryann Sumi has granted a restraining order temporarily blocking the publication of the union-busting law that was rammed through the Wisconsin state legislature recently.

No Nukes Is Good Nukes: The Intrinsic Problems With Nuclear Power

After the Japanese nuclear disaster, cavalier dismissals of the problems with nuclear power are no longer acceptable.

March 17, 2011 | When it comes to the safety of nuclear power plants, I am biased. And I’ll bet that if President Barack Obama had been with me on that trip to Chernobyl 24 years ago he wouldn’t be as sanguine about the future of nuclear power as he was Tuesday in an interview with a Pittsburgh television station: “Obviously, all energy sources have their downside. I mean, we saw that with the Gulf spill last summer.”

We're Number Two. Why America Is Losing Its Lead In Manufacturing, And How.

By Scott Paul

Created 03/16/2011 - 12:05pm

When IHS Global Insight revealed this week [1]that China has passed the United States to lead the world in manufacturing output, the response from some in government and manufacturing was to quibble with the data. The correct response is to develop a national manufacturing strategy [2], so that we can once again lead the world in manufacturing, which is a position we’ve held for 110 years.

Why a strategy? Well, Germany has one. China has one. South Korea has one. In fact, every other industrialized nation has a network of currency, trade, tax, investment, innovation, and skills policies that promote domestic manufacturing. We stand alone in allowing our jobs to be freely outsourced overseas. Our economic and training policies spur on a service and financial sector economy at the expense of investments in manufacturing.

The Triumph of Taxophobia

Jonathan Chait

The conservative movement’s embrace of taxophobia is probably the most important development in American political life over the last three decades. It is the one quality that most distinguishes American conservative elites from conservative elites in other countries. They’re more likely to question climate science, more sanguine about people dying for lack of health insurance, and less xenophobic (which is rather nice). But above all—far above all—they hate taxes.

Last Chance for Libya

President Obama has hours, not days, to save the revolution in Libya and across the Arab world.

By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Thursday, March 17, 2011, at 10:28 AM ET

Well, we finally got a no-fly zone, but it is over the nuclear plants in Japan, not over Libyan air space.

As of this writing, the forces of Muammar Qaddafi are proceeding in both western and eastern Libya to retake the cities along the Mediterranean that had joined in the uprising that began on Feb. 15. Momentum has shifted dramatically, with Qaddafi's forces in rapid ascent, and the beleaguered troops of the opposition begging for support—a no-fly zone, arms, logistical support, food, humanitarian aid. Anything! An opposition that was at one point on the verge of toppling Qaddafi has been pushed back hard on its heels, limited to a great extent to the city of Benghazi. Just as with Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956, having been called to the cause of freedom and promised help, they are now abandoned. Qaddafi's military, on the other hand, is now emboldened by the failure of any international military support for the opposition.

Chemical-free pest management cuts rice waste

A novel way of bringing sustainable, pesticide-free processes to protect stored rice and other crops from insects and fungi can drastically cut losses of stored crops and help increase food security for up to 3 billion daily rice consumers.

Published on: 2011-03-16

In 2006, Maria Otilia Carvalho, a researcher from the Tropical Research Institute of Portugal had an ambitious goal: to cut the huge losses of rice – a staple food crop for half of humanity – due to pests, without using toxic pesticides that are increasingly shunned by consumers worldwide. She realised she could not do it alone and turned to EUREKA to support an international collaboration to address a looming threat to world’s rice supplies. Harvested rice is constantly under menace from pest insects and fungi - to avoid the pests, farmers and producers treat the rice with chemical pesticides, which leave residue on rice, potentially harming rice workers and consumers. Even the bigger problem is that insects are developing resistance to chemicals, slowly rendering it useless.

Carvalho was one of several scientists scattered around the world who were working on alternative, eco-friendly methods to protect rice in storage. None of the methods on their own could match the effectiveness of chemicals, but Carvalho thought that pulling them all together into one ‘integrated pest management’ system might wean the industry of pesticides and provide a safer, cleaner food product for the world’s market.

Rockefeller Bill Would Gut the EPA

Peter Rothberg | March 16, 2011

This morning the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed the Upton-Inhofe bill [1] (H.R. 910) on a largely party line vote of 34 to 19. The legislation attempts to overturn the EPA’s scientific finding that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases endanger public health and welfare and thus require regulation. The NRDC's Pete Altman live blogged [2] most of the markup. It will go to a full House vote some time in the next few weeks, where it is expected to pass easily. Meanwhile Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered the same bill as an amendment to an unrelated small business bill.

Now Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller has an alternate proposal [3] which would delay EPA regulations for two years.The problem: his bill would have the same result as Inhofe's: it would kill EPA climate rules [4], as the eminent climate blogger Dave Roberts [5] detailed at Grist.

In Proposed Mortgage Fraud Settlement, a Gift to Big Banks

by Jesse Eisinger
ProPublica, March 16, 2011, 3:13 p.m.

Lurking in a proposed mortgage fraud settlement with the state attorneys general is a clause that could be worth billions for the big banks.

Yes, I mean the settlement that might extract the supposedly large sum of $20 billion [1] from the banks to settle foreclosure fraud. The one denounced as a "shakedown" [2] by Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama.

Beyond the crisis of liberalism

There is a groundswell of popular resistance to the forces of reaction, but the left must break out of its defensive posture

The problem of liberalism is that in the US – and this is true of all advanced industrial societies – there has been no significant reform of the existing of economic system for decades. In the United States, since the great era of reform in the 1930s, with the New Deal, the last major reform was the establishment of Medicare in 1966. In the UK and other countries, the main period of reform followed the second world war, with the consolidation of the welfare state.

In the US, Medicare was the last serious political advance; there has been nothing significant since. On education and the environment – which have both been more recent targets of liberal reform – we have gone nowhere, or even regressed. So, given the current configuration of world capitalism, it is apparent that what I define as the liberal reform – that is, reform within the capitalist system – has reached a dead end.

Scary: People Who Watch and Trust Fox News Will Surprise You

By Ilyse Hogue, The Guardian
Posted on March 14, 2011, Printed on March 17, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150251/

In the 7 March issue of the Tribune, Mark Seddon reported on the threat that Glenn Beck, "as a sort of hired gauleiter on Fox News", poses to American democracy. The article hit the nail on the head when it comes to Beck's paranoiac propaganda. Seddon, however, misses the broader danger of the Murdoch-owned Fox News: the media outlet's audience is growing even as its programming veers away from broadcast journalism and shapes instead a rightwing political operation.

Al Franken: ‘They're coming after the Internet’

AUSTIN, Texas — Sen. Al Franken claimed Monday that big corporations are "hoping to destroy" the Internet and issued a call to arms to several hundred tech-savvy South by Southwest attendees to preserve net neutrality.

"I came here to warn you, the party may be over," Franken said. "They're coming after the Internet hoping to destroy the very thing that makes it such an important [medium] for independent artists and entrepreneurs: its openness and freedom.”

Class Warfare, the Final Chapter

Michael Pirsch | Tuesday 15 March 2011

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." -Warren Buffett to The New York Times, November 26, 2006

There is overwhelming evidence that we are entering the final chapter of class warfare in the US. Today, in the "public arena," it is forbidden to say class warfare, and many citizens do not regard themselves as working class. The assault on language comes compliments of the propaganda apparatus, which includes: public relations, marketing, corporate media and the entertainment industry, universities, think tanks and so on. Its purpose is to distract our attention from serious matters so we can focus on trivial matters - usually involving consuming. Edward Bernays, the founder of the modern propaganda industry, described the process:

Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of ... in almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.[1]

In addition to inventing the propaganda model still in use today, Bernays' model created support for World War I, first in England and then in the US, calling the war to save Morgan's billions the war for "making the world safe for democracy."

What "Free Trade" Has Cost The World

By Dave Johnson
March 14, 2011 - 11:55pm ET

If you take a job away from someone who is paid a reasonable wage because they enjoy the protections and prosperity of democratic government, move it across a border, and give it to someone living under a thugocracy, forced to work for pennies with no protections whatsoever, it should be just plain obvious that the worker on our side of the border and the worker on the other side of the border are not going to be better off. And when you do this on a massive scale it just stands to reason that most people on both sides of the border are going to be worse off.

But propaganda being what it is we were somehow convinced to try a worldwide experiment in taking good jobs from democracies and turning them into bad jobs in thugocracies. Now, of course, the experiment has run its course and we can see the results.

Defend Social Security Bill Proposed by Sanders and Weiner

By BuzzFlash

Created 03/15/2011 - 10:45pm

NEWS ALERT FROM SEN. BERNIE SANDERS

WASHINGTON, March 15 - Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today introduced legislation that would safeguard Social Security by requiring extraordinary majorities in Congress to approve any reduction in benefits. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) introduced the same measure in the House.

Senators who joined Sanders and Weiner at a press conference today in support of the legislation were Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

Their legislation would give Social Security the same parliamentary protection that others in Congress want to put in place in order to make it harder for Congress to increase spending, raise taxes or add earmarks to legislation.

Is Your Drugstore Selling Your Private Information to Big Pharma?

— By James Ridgeway | Tue Mar. 15, 2011 9:50 AM PDT

For years, the big drugstore chains have stoutly denied selling prescription information—patient names, contact information, doctors' names, and prescription details—to pharmaceutical companies for marketing use. Now, that charade has come to an end with two class action suits, accusing CVS and Walgreen of doing just that.

The Key to Rebuilding Workers' Power: Unrig the Rules

The battle in Wisconsin over the rights of public-sector workers holds the potential to reawaken workers across the country to demand their fair share of the economic pie. This could be an important turning point. However, if workers are to make real progress they must move to alter the rules of the game. These rules have been deliberately rigged against them over the last three decades.

The most obvious of these rules are those governing the rights to unionize, such as those that Gov. Walker directly attacked in Wisconsin. However, this is just part of the story. Unionization has become almost impossible in the private sector, since companies routinely fire workers engaged in an organizing drive.

Paul Krugman: Another Inside Job

Count me among those who were glad to see the documentary “Inside Job” win an Oscar. The film reminded us that the financial crisis of 2008, whose aftereffects are still blighting the lives of millions of Americans, didn’t just happen — it was made possible by bad behavior on the part of bankers, regulators and, yes, economists.

What the film didn’t point out, however, is that the crisis has spawned a whole new set of abuses, many of them illegal as well as immoral. And leading political figures are, at long last, showing some outrage. Unfortunately, this outrage is directed, not at banking abuses, but at those trying to hold banks accountable for these abuses.

A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables

Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world's energy, eliminating all fossil fuels. Here's how

By Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi | October 26, 2009

In December leaders from around the world will meet in Copenhagen to try to agree on cutting back greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come. The most effective step to implement that goal would be a massive shift away from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy sources. If leaders can have confidence that such a transformation is possible, they might commit to an historic agreement. We think they can.

Michigan’s GOP Gov. Slashes Corporate Tax Rate by 86 Percent, Hikes Taxes for Working Poor

As we’ve been documenting, several conservative governors have proposed placing the brunt of deficit reduction onto the backs of their state’s public employees, students, and middle-class taxpayers, while simultaneously trying to enact corporate tax cuts and giveaways. Govs. Rick Scott (R-FL), Tom Corbett (R-PA), and Jan Brewer (R-AZ) have all gone down this road.

Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand

By Chris Hedges

The liberal class is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute the airways. Let corporations buy up your courts and state and federal legislative bodies. Let the Christian religion be manipulated by charlatans to demonize Muslims, gays and intellectuals, discredit science and become a source of personal enrichment. Let unions wither under corporate assault. Let social services and public education be stripped of funding. Let Wall Street loot the national treasury with impunity. Let sleazy con artists use lies and deception to carry out unethical sting operations on tottering liberal institutions, and you roll out the welcome mat for fascism.

The liberal class has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multiculturalism, identity politics and tolerance—a word Martin Luther King never used—and forgotten about justice. It naively sought to placate ideological and corporate forces bent on the destruction of the democratic state. The liberal class, like the misguided democrats in the former Yugoslavia or the hapless aristocrats in the Weimar Republic, invited the wolf into the henhouse. The liberal class forgot that, as Karl Popper wrote in “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

Republicans' Next Move: Get Rid of Pensions Altogether

Some states, like Wisconsin, are asking state employees to contribute more to their pension plans, but others are just scrapping them.

Robert Hiltonsmith | March 11, 2011

The battle over public-sector unions is, at least in part, a battle over benefits: From Wisconsin to New Jersey, public-sector unions are among the last employees who can expect to retire with defined pension plans. Wisconsin, where a political showdown just resulted in reduced bargaining rights for public employees, is expected to release new estimates on state pensions next week, according to The New York Times. The state will likely ask employees to contribute more money to their plans and make other concessions.

The Coming Obama Wars

As the new GOP House leaders prepare to probe the White House, ex-conservative attack agent David Brock offers lessons from the Clinton era—and why this time will be much worse.

In recent weeks I’ve been asked what President Obama can expect from GOP investigators now that Republicans control the House. I should know. The last time this happened, after the 1994 midterms, I was a right-wing ring-leader of the anti-Clinton movement.

My answer: this go-around will be much worse. The blow of the coming investigations and accompanying vitriol will be faster, harder, and the political devastation more acutely and widely felt in the Democratic Party than the impeachment of President Clinton.

Cartoon

Cold, very cold...but right on target.--Dictynna

Protesters in DC demonstrate against the PATRIOT Act

By Eric W. Dolan
Sunday, March 13th, 2011 -- 12:34 pm

In Washington, DC on Sunday, demonstrators rallied in front of the White House in protest of repressive governments around the world.

Included in the protests were those opposed to extending the USA PATRIOT Act, which gives law enforcement authorities sweeping surveillance powers that have been criticized for endangering innocent American's civil liberties.

Frank Rich: Confessions of a Recovering Op-Ed Columnist

THE first political columnist I ever encountered, after a fashion, was Walter Lippmann. It happened on a snowy afternoon when I was a kid of 11 or 12 growing up in Washington during the J.F.K. years. My wallet had somehow slipped out of my pocket as I trudged past the National Cathedral on my way home from school. Hours later, my mother barged into my bedroom, interrupting my full-scale sulk to announce a miracle. “I just got a call from Walter Lippmann’s maid,” she said, sounding more excited than the circumstances warranted. “They found your wallet on Woodley Road in front of Walter Lippmann’s house!”

The figure no one wants you to see

If Americans were ever presented with the real bill for the total U.S. national security budget, it would actually add up to more than $1.2 trillion a year.

(This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.)

By Chris Hellman
chellman@nationalpriorities.org

What if you went to a restaurant and found it rather pricey? Still, you ordered your meal and, when done, picked up the check only to discover that it was almost twice the menu price.

Welcome to the world of the real U.S. national security budget. Normally, in media accounts, you hear about the Pentagon budget and the war-fighting supplementary funds passed by Congress for our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That already gets you into a startling price range -- close to $700 billion for 2012 -- but that’s barely more than half of it. If Americans were ever presented with the real bill for the total U.S. national security budget, it would actually add up to more than $1.2 trillion a year.