Brick TeeVee CISPA and the Bitches!

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CISPA and the Bitches We begin this week with a FUKUSHIMA UPDATE from theintelhub.com Fukushima is Falling Apart: Are You Ready? By Christina Consolo – the host of “Nuked Radio” Tuesdays & Thursdays from 12-1:00 pm EST on the Orion Talk Radio Network. Thirteen months have passed since the Fukushima reactors exploded, and a U.S. Senator finally got off his ass and went to Japan to see what is going on over there. What he saw was horrific. And now he is saying that we are in big trouble. See the letter he sent to U.S. Ambassador to Japan Ichiro Fujisaki, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and NRC’s Chairman Gregory Jaczko here.But what is so ironic about this is that we have been in this heap of trouble since March of 2011. March 17th, to be exact, when the plume of radioactive materials began bombarding the west coast of California. And Oregon. And Washington. And British Columbia. And later Maine, Europe, and everywhere in between. Independent researchers, nuke experts, and scientists, from oceanography to entomology and everywhere in between, having been trying to sound the alarm ever since. The scientists most upset are those who have studied the effects of radiation on health. I’ll say it again, so its really clear: we are in big trouble. ...... But back to the research: reports in the past week indicate the pollen in southern California is radioactive now too, and it is flying around, and if you live there and go outside, you are breathing it in. And so are your children. Along with fission products blowing over from Japan. And radiation in your drinking water. And in your rain. And in the fish you are eating. And your vegetables. And the milk supply. And its happening every second, of every day. For 13 months. Are you starting to see a problem here? Problem is, that’s not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is what Senator Wyden is all bent out of shape about, even though independent researchers and nuke experts have been warning about this for a year. And that is that the Reactor #4 building is on the verge of collapsing. Seismicity standards rate the building at a zero, meaning even a small earthquake could send it into a heap of rubble. And sitting at the top of the building, in a pool that is cracked, leaking, and precarious even without an earthquake, are 1565 fuel rods (give or take a few), some of them “fresh fuel” that was ready to go into the reactor on the morning of March 11th when the earthquake and tsunami hit. If they are MOX fuel, containing 6% plutonium, one fuel rod has the potential to kill 2.89 billion people. If this pool collapses, as Senator Wyden is now saying too, we would face a mass extinction event from the release of radiation in those rods. That is, if we aren’t in one already. Nuke experts like Arnie Gundersen and Helen Caldicott are prepared to evacuate their families to the southern hemisphere if that happens. It is that serious. ..... Iodine pills, anyone? Over at eonEMFblog.net they've put together a great resource Tracking Fukushima Fallout – Maps & Sources so spend some time over there digging through the links. Next Tyler Durden at Zerohedge notices Russia And Mexico Both Buy Nearly $1 Billion Worth of Gold in March While gold demand from the western investors and store of wealth buyers has fallen in recent months, central bank demand continues to be very robust and this is providing strong support to gold above the $1,600/oz level. IMF data released overnight shows that Mexico added 16.8 metric tons of gold valued at about $906.4 million to its reserves in March. Russia continued to diversify its foreign exchange reserves and increased its gold reserves by about 16.5 tons according to a statement by its central bank on April 20. .... Central banks are expanding reserves due to concerns about the dollar, euro, sterling and all fiat currencies. There is an increasing realisation amongst central bankers that gold is a less risky alternative to most paper currencies and a recent survey showed that that majority of central bank reserves managers were favourable towards gold. Signifying the mood of caution among the world’s central bankers, 71% of those polled said gold was a more attractive investment than it had been at the start of last year. Central banks added 439.7 tons last year, the most in almost five decades, and may buy a similar amount if not more in 2012, the World Gold Council and many analysts believe. Also at Zerohedge we have a good long read Guest Post: What Happens When All The Money Vanishes Into Thin Air? by Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds. A snip: "Here is the primary point: issuing debt and printing money do not create wealth. All they can create is a temporary illusion of wealth." Matt Taibbi in RS explains how Jon Corzine Is the Original George Zimmerman ....To make an obvious comparison: Much like the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case, the outrage here goes beyond the fact of the horrific crime. An equally profound insult in both cases lay in the fact that that serious crime obviously had been committed, and yet authorities refused to act for months. This situation with former Goldman chief and U.S. Senator Jon Corzine and the officials of MF Global involves a less physically savage offense, but the authorities' refusal to act is every bit as incredible. Nobody disputes the fact that MF Global officials dipped into customer accounts and took over $1.6 billion of customer money. We not only know that company officials reached into customer accounts, we know they brazenly lied to bondholders , ratings agencies and investors about the firm's financial condition ("MF Global's capital and liquidity has never been stronger," wrote the CFO of MF Global’s holding company, on the same day Moody’s downgraded it to junk status). We even know that eighteen days before the firm went bust, company officers discussed how quickly to return money to customers, and even contemplated, in writing, the possibility of not returning the money right away. This is from a risk-assessment document prepared by company officers entitled "Break the Glass".... Nonetheless, there’s been an intense effort at trying to convince the public that no crime has been committed. Whoever is handling MF Global’s P.R. (according to Pam Martens in this excellent piece, it’s APCO worldwide, a former Big Tobacco spin factory) appears to have convinced the company’s officers to emphasize the word “chaos” in describing the last days of the firm – as though $1.2 billion wasn’t intentionally stolen, per se, but simply lost in a kind of uncontrolled whirlwind of transactions that magically carried the money out of accounts off to worlds unknown. I call this the “Wizard of Oz” defense: a Big Twister hit the firm’s customer accounts, chaos ensued, and when the dust settled, no one knew where the heck little Dorothy and her money had gone. ..... It’s incredible that people are offering as a defense the idea that a financial company could be so overwhelmed by transactions that it could just lose track of $1.6 billion. If you’re so terrible at managing money that you can honestly lose a billion dollars – especially after swearing up and down to the whole world that you were the right choice to manage the cherished millions and billions of scads of farmers, ranchers, and other investors – you should go to jail just for that, just on general principle. But most pundits aren’t saying that. Instead, it seems like like every financial reporter both in this city and in Washington is talking to the same five or six defense lawyers, buying their weak arguments, and offering the same lame excuses for the missing money, which should tell you a lot about how the Wall Street press corps managed to miss the warning signs for 2008 and other disasters. Somebody from MF Global has to be arrested soon. The message otherwise to middle America is so galling that it boggles the mind. .... Incredible! Now go WATCH C-SPAN for yourself CFTC Chief & Regulators Testify on MF Global Collapse where the company’s bankruptcy trustee, Louis Freeh, will testify for the first time, no doubt using the "Wizard of Oz" defense! You might be interested in this at nakedcapitalism.com Frontline’s Astonishing Whitewash of the Crisis The first two parts of the four part series have been released, and it’s probably safe to say that this program is far enough along to be beyond redemption. It’s a recitation of conventional wisdom, with just enough focus on some of the numerous things the banks and the authorities did wrong so as to make it seem daring for mainstream TV. But anyone who has been on this beat will find the first two segments cringe-making (one advantage I had was that of reading the transcripts, which makes it much easier to parse the construction). Despite the obligatory shots of Occupy Wall Street protestors, displaced homeowners, and stymied officials, much of the story line is remarkably bank-friendly. Sad but true PBS tries hard but also must toe their corporate-line to keep all that grant money flowing. In Europe the only country so far to give the international banksters The Finger has been Iceland. Now we find out Iceland ex-PM Geir Haarde cleared of bank negligence Geir Haarde, the former prime minister of Iceland and the only politician in the world to face prosecution for his role in the 2008 financial crisis, has been found guilty of failing to hold emergency cabinet meetings in the runup to the crisis. But he was cleared of three more serious charges, which could have jailed him for two years. Haarde, who served as prime minister between 2006 and 2009, had pleaded not guilty to all the charges, including gross negligence over the government's failure to prepare for the impending disaster. Haarde attacked the guilty verdict as "absurd", and accused the judges of bowing to political pressure. "It is obvious that the majority of the judges have found themselves pressed to come up with a guilty verdict on one point, however minor, to save the neck of the parliamentarians who instigated this," he said outside the country's specially convened Landsdómur criminal court in Reykjavik. Haarde was the first person in history to stand trial at the 15-judge court, which was created in 1905 to hear any charges brought against ministers. .... Haarde, 61, was also cleared of charges related to his failure to prevent the contagion from spreading to the UK by not insisting that Icelandic banks ringfence their overseas operations. The crisis sparked a diplomatic row with the UK as the demise of Landsbanki brought down its British internet banking arm, Icesave, leaving British councils, universities and hospitals more than £1bn out of pocket. AUDIO! From last Sunday we have Michael Hudson’s presentation at the Italian MMT Summit, which was also recorded by Bonnie Faulkner of Pacifica Radio’s Guns and Butter show at Naked Capitalism Michael Hudson: Productivity, The Miracle of Compound Interest, and Poverty Paying off a debt is not the same as building up liquid savings in a bank. It reflects something that only a very few economists have worried about over the past century: the prospect of debts rising faster than income, leading to financial crashes that transfer property from debtors to creditors, and indeed polarize society between what the Occupy Wall Street movement calls the 1% and the 99%. ...... After World War II many women stayed home and raised families. But since the 1950s they have been forced increasingly into the labour force for what are called two-job families – and now, three-job families (with only two family members). If you project labor participation rates, by the year 2020 every woman will have to work 18 hours a day or economic trends will falter. What was applauded as a post-industrial economy has turned into a financialized economy. The reason you have to work so much harder than before, even when wages rise, is to carry your debt overhead. You’re unable to buy the goods you produce because you need to pay your bankers. And the only way that you can barely maintain your living standards is to borrow even more. This means having to pay back even more in years to come. That is the Eurozone plan in a nutshell for its economic future. It is a financial plan that is replacing industrial capitalism – with finance capitalism. ..... And to make matters worse, it is not the fat that is cut. The fat is the financial sector. What is cut is the bone: the industrial sector. So when writers refer to a post-industrial economy led by the banks, they imply deindustrialization. And for you it means unemployment and lower wages. So much more in this post to read! You can lsiten to the mp3 HERE. Speaking of cutting, over at the New York Times International Herald Tribune's Global Opinion page we find this editorial Callous Choices in the House For months, House Republicans have been trying to wriggle out of the agreement they made in August that will force deep cuts in military spending. Now we know how they propose to do it: They will take tens of billions out of programs for the poorest Americans, particularly food stamps, along with health care for the middle class. The House Agriculture Committee voted on Wednesday to cut $33 billion over the next decade out of food stamps. That would immediately end benefits for two million people, and reduce benefits for the remaining 44 million people who use the program. A family of four would find their benefits lowered by $57 a month beginning in September, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The committee trimmed job training for food-stamp recipients by 72 percent; 280,000 students would no longer be eligible for free meals. To understand how callous this vote was, consider the choices the committee and the full House could have made. The budget deal reached last August — the one Republicans triggered with their disastrous debt-ceiling crisis — calls for a painful sequester of $600 billion to both military and domestic spending over a decade. The Republicans could have accepted the military cuts they had agreed to or they could have joined with Democrats in reducing the cuts by raising taxes on the rich. Instead, the 2013 budget, written by Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, put all the cuts on the domestic side. .... The extremists who run the House budget process seem willing to force a shutdown later this year to get their way, but they may find themselves isolated. From the "do as we say not as we do" department Obama invokes Holocaust to ratchet up war threats on Iran, Syria By Bill Van Auken at wsws.org President Barack Obama used a visit to Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum Monday to unveil a set of new sanctions against Iran and Syria and to promote the administration’s use of “human rights” as a pretext for aggressive war and regime change. The new sanctions target Syrian and Iranian intelligence agencies as well as telecommunications and Internet providers for use of information technology to monitor and repress political opposition. They have been rolled out under conditions in which the United Nations is deploying its monitors in Syria to oversee a ceasefire and as Iran prepares for a second round of negotiations next month in Baghdad with the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany) over its nuclear program. The timing of this latest round of sanctions, coming on top of a whole series of unilateral US and European Union measures aimed at crippling the Syrian and Iranian economies, strongly indicates that Washington is merely using negotiations with both countries as a cover for preparing war and regime change. Obama’s executive order calls for Washington to impose sanctions on Syrian and Iranian officials for using information technology, including software to track cellphones and monitor Internet use and to spy upon and repress dissidents. It also would punish what the US president refers to as the “digital guns for hire,” i.e., information technology companies that sell software and equipment to targeted regimes.

“These technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to repress them,” Obama declared.

Among those named in the order are the Syrian General Intelligence Directorate, the Syriatel phone company as well as Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, its Ministry of Intelligence and Security, and Datak Telekom, an Iranian Internet provider. Left unscathed by the order are dictatorial regimes that are US allies in the region. Virtually all of them have contracted with the so-called “digital guns for hire” of Silicon Valley to carry out the same kind of operations in their countries. As the Wall Street Journal reported last month, “McAfee Inc., acquired last month by Intel Corp., has provided content-filtering software used by Internet-service providers in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait,” while Websense Inc. of San Diego, California “has sold its Web-filtering technology in Yemen, where it has been used to block online tools that let people disguise their identities from government monitors.” The dictatorial monarchy in Bahrain, which hosts the US 5th Fleet, has installed a string of “monitoring centers” using sophisticated technology to track and eavesdrop on oppositionists, who have been rounded up, imprisoned and tortured. For that matter the US government and the military’s National Security Agency (NSA) employ a spying apparatus that makes surveillance operations in Syria and Iran look amateurish by comparison. Congress, meanwhile, is preparing to act upon new legislation, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011, that would promote the government’s ability to monitor and block Internet use. Obama’s supposed concern that the Internet be utilized to “empower citizens, not to repress them,” is belied by his administration’s ruthless repression of WikiLeaks, whose founder Julian Assange faces the threat of extradition to the US to face espionage charges, punishable by death, and of Private Bradley Manning, who is being prosecuted by the military for allegedly exposing US war crimes via WikiLeaks. .... The invocation of the Holocaust to justify wars of aggression is not merely hypocritical, but morally obscene. But this is precisely what Obama did. ...... In exploiting the Holocaust to justify a buildup to a war against Iran that could well lead to millions more deaths, Obama was merely echoing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who last week delivered a speech on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day declaring Iran an “existential threat” to nuclear-armed Israel and equating Iran’s nuclear power program to the Holocaust..... The bill Van Auken is referencing is The Rodgers Bill H.R.3523 - Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act passed in The House April 26, 2012 by a vote of 248-168 including 42 Democrats. It now goes to the Senate where it's known as The Lieberman Bill S. 2105. See Organizations Supporting and Opposing H.R.3523 & see the MONEY TRAIL behind this bill for more info on how campaign contributions may be influencing senators' and representatives' votes. Over at TechDirt.com from the time-to-speak-up dept CISPA Is A Really Bad Bill, And Here's Why READ ALL OF THIS! Here's the short of it: ... So we've got the government collecting this data, potentially full of identifying information of users in the U.S. and elsewhere, and they are free to use it for any of those broadly defined cybersecurity or national security purposes. But, it gets worse: the government is also allowed to affirmatively search the information for those same reasons—meaning they are by no means limited to examining the data in relation to a specific threat. If, for example, a company were to provide logs of a major attack on their network, the government could then search that information for pretty much anything else they want. Can CISPA be fixed? Most of the new provisions currently being considered for CISPA have to do with adding oversight and liability to prevent the government from violating any of the terms—but that doesn't address the problems in the bill at all, since the terms are already so broad. CISPA would require significant new restrictions to come anywhere close to being a good bill—a fact that points to Congress' inability to effectively design internet regulation. Moreover, there isn't even clear evidence that new cybersecurity laws are necessary. This is a bill that needs to die. The EFF has a TOOL to help you contact your representative about CISPA and the broader issue of cybersecurity legislation. .... As with SOPA, this is not an issue that solely effects Americans: the data may come from U.S. companies, but it will involve people from all over the world—and, indeed, foreign entities are one of the bill's prime targets. It's once again time for the internet to speak up and send a clear message to Congress: don't mess with something you don't understand. Jacob Applebaum developer and advocate for the Tor Project says "We have to stop this legislation from passing. It is an incredible threat to our privacy, and it is a militarization of cyberspace." Read all of this and visit EFF.org to get on board to fight this. The ACLU also has an ACTION PAGE Oppose CISPA and Unfettered Access to Americans' Internet Activity CISPA is Worse Than SOPA. Sign the Official Petition and Stop it Now! Good Item! Here are a few things you can do to minimize your on-line exposure. You can block lots of things with a HOSTS file. See this web page someonewhocares.org/hosts/ and follow the instructions at the top of the page to install on your computer. If you use firefox try these add-ons trackmenot.org & noscript.net. Lottirj from the Head On Radio chatroom says "Time for everyone to use PGP, TOR is good too, Firefox has a DeSOPA pluggin." See What is PGP? at WiseGeek.com and download Freeware PGP versions from The International PGP Home Page. Also visit the TOR Project homepage and read about Firefox Add-On Bypasses SOPA DNS Blocking. Download it HERE. Be sure to watch/hear/read Targeted Hacker Jacob Appelbaum on CISPA, Surveillance and the "Militarization of Cyberspace" at DN! along with an earlier interview "We Don’t Live in a Free Country": Jacob Appelbaum on Being Target of Widespread Gov’t Surveillance. More interviews below in the BTV Alerts section, too. Applebaum mentions IXmaps.ca "an interactive tool that permits internet users to see the route(s) their data packets take across North America, with 'interesting' sites highlighted along the way." Applebaum describes it this way "IXmaps is the name of it, and it’s a Canadian site. And they actually show when your internet traffic goes through potential NSA interception points, so you can actually test your internet connection. And that’s the Internet Exchange Maps project." MORE HYPOCRACY Obama gave an interview to Jann Wenner Editor of Rolling Stone. In it Obama Lies About Federal Marijuana Law to Rolling Stone observes Jon Walker at firedoglake.com Apparently unable to find a legitimate or honest defense for his administration’s behavior regarding medical marijuana, President Obama instead resorted to a lie to Rolling Stone about what the law actually says. From his recent interview with Jann S. Wenner in Rolling Stone:

[Wenner] Let me ask you about the War on Drugs. You vowed in 2008, when you were running for election, that you would not “use Justice Department resources to try and circumvent state laws about medical marijuana.” Yet we just ran a story that shows your administration is launching more raids on medical pot than the Bush administration did. What’s up with that?
[Obama] Here’s what’s up: What I specifically said was that we were not going to prioritize prosecutions of persons who are using medical marijuana. I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana – and the reason is, because it’s against federal law. I can’t nullify congressional law. I can’t ask the Justice Department to say, “Ignore completely a federal law that’s on the books.” What I can say is, “Use your prosecutorial discretion and properly prioritize your resources to go after things that are really doing folks damage.” As a consequence, there haven’t been prosecutions of users of marijuana for medical purposes.
(emphasis mine)

This is an outright lie by Obama about federal law regarding medical marijuana. Drugs are governed under the Controlled Substance Act, and the important thing is that this law explicitly gives the executive branch the power to unilaterally change the legal status of particular drugs. Obama wouldn’t need to “nullify congressional law,” because he currently has the legal power to change marijuana’s classification. Marijuana is categorized as schedule I, which means it legally has no accepted medical use. This is why medical marijuana, while legal under some state laws, is illegal under federal law. However, the law explicitly gives the executive branch the power to change the scheduling of particular drugs without needing Congressional action . Obama can instruct the relevant agencies under him to take an honest look at the research and reschedule marijuana so it qualifies as having legitimate medical uses. The Obama administration could easily and justifiably move marijuana to, say, schedule III, which happens to be the same schedule that synthetic THC is in, making medical marijuana legal under federal law. .... Obama is not some hapless victim whose actions on this issue are constrained by congressional law. The truth is pretty much the exact opposite..... What about the criminals on Wall Street who STOLE TRILLIONS? Any resources for THAT Mister President? We digress. How did HEMP become illegal in the first place? As usual we follow the money. In 1936. We go to THC Ministry CANNABIS/HEMP WAS LEGAL, WHY WAS IT BANNED?

.... Shortly before marijuana was banned by The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, new technologies were developed that made hemp a potential competitor with the newly-founded synthetic fiber and plastics industries. Hemp's potential for producing paper also posed a threat to the timber industry (see New Billion-Dollar Crop). Evidence suggests that commercial interests having much to lose from hemp competition helped propagate reefer madness hysteria, and used their influence to lobby for Marijuana Prohibition. It is not known for certain if special interests conspired to destroy the hemp industry via Marijuana Prohibition, but enough evidence exists to raise the possibility.

So, the Timber and Oil (Plastics) Industry allegedly bought Congress and SHUT DOWN and DEMONIZED the HEMP Industry back then, a hemp market that was composed of largely many small growers. Like Oaksterdam now. Read all about it at HuffPoAOL Obama Administration's War On Pot: Oaksterdam Founder Richard Lee's Exclusive Interview After Raid DEA and IRS agents hauled away computers, files and pot plants, leaving behind little more than office furniture. They did not disclose the reason for the raid and have not charged Lee with any crime as of yet. In an exclusive interview with The Huffington Post, his first since the raid, Lee, 49, blasted the federal crackdown as a senseless act of intimidation. "This is one battle of a big war," said Lee, "and there's thousands of battles going on all over." "Before he was elected, [President Barack Obama] promised to support medical marijuana and not waste federal resources on this," Lee said. "About a year and a half ago, the policy seemed to change. They've been attacking many states, threatening governors of states to prevent them from signing legislation to allow medical marijuana. They've been attacking on many fronts." .... WAR ON WOMEN The "Violence Against Women Act" passed its Senate committee with NOT ONE GOPher voting for it yet the Senate Passes Reauthorization of Domestic Violence Law reports Johnathan Weisman the the NYT's "The Caucus" blog. The Senate voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act and expand its reach to American Indians and gay, bisexual and transgender domestic abuse victims, after Republicans opted to sidestep an expected partisan brawl. But a political fight still looms when the House takes up a version of the legislation next month that is shorn of the hot-button issues added in the Senate. ... But it ran into a wall of Republican opposition in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and cleared the committee in February without a Republican vote. Amid partisan clashes over abortion and contraception, some Democrats saw the Violence Against Women Act as the next battle in what they framed as a Republican “war on women.” But Senate Republicans did not rise to the bait. .... If there are to be fireworks, it will have to come when the Senate version comes up against the House. House Republican women this week announced they would introduce a version of the violence act when they return from next week’s recess, with a final House vote expected by mid-May. The House bill is likely to be stripped of three provisions that have incensed some conservatives. One would subject non-American Indian suspects of domestic violence to prosecution before American Indian tribal courts for crimes allegedly committed on reservations. Another would expand the number of temporary visas for victims of domestic violence who are illegal immigrants. The last would expand Violence Against Women Act protections to gay, bisexual or transgender victims of domestic abuse. .... so stay tuned for that battle! GOPher WAR ON VOTING WOMEN 90-Year Old Grandmother of PA Borough President Can't Vote Under New GOP Photo ID Law from the YOU CANNOT MAKE THIS UP desk Brad Friedman "Absurd"? Yes. But, as far as the Republicans who are passing these laws are concerned, it's more like "Mission Accomplished". Unfortunately, Pennsylvania is not one of the state jurisdictions with a history of discrimination covered by Section 5 of the federal Voting Rights Act. If so, it's likely the U.S. Dept. of Justice would be challenging the law as discriminatory, as they have so far done successfully in states that are covered, such as South Carolina and Texas. The BRAD BLOG's legal analyst Ernest Canning, however, has persuasively argued that the DoJ can and should challenge such laws under Section 2 of that same act. Read on! Then listen to Brad interview 90-year old Joyce Block from Pennsylvania on KPFK/Pacifica Radio now posted here also featured below on Brad subbing for Malloy on Friday!
Our LAST WORD goes to Charles Pierce at Esquire's "The Politics Blog" The Liberation of Willard Romney: A Game Plan I keep hearing on the teevee that Willard Romney, putative Republican frontrunner, "needs a new message." Apparently, his current one, which can be fairly summarized as "I will drag my balls a mile over some ground glass on live television if it'll get me 1,000 votes from you snake-handling dimwits," is not resonating with the snake-handling dimwits in question. Because I once was one of Willard's constituents in Massachusetts, I feel it is my duty to help him in this difficult task. So here's my notion: "I'm Willard Romney — and I'm all you got, bitches.
"I'm the only one with the money and I'm the only one with the organization, and I'm the only one with the actual campaign. Oh, I know there are people who are not running that you like better than me — Christie and Daniels and even that zombie-eyed granny-starver, Paul Ryan. But, guess what,bitches? There's a reason why they're not running. They're pissing down their legs that they might lose. Me? You think I care if I lose? I lose, and I go live in the mansion on the beach that I'm building in California. I've got $250 million, bitches, and I know how to use them. My great-grandchildren aren't going to have to work for a living. I'm bulletproof for four generations. Do you know who I am? I'm Clinton in 1990. Remember? Poppy Bush had an 80-percent approval rating and none of the Democratic superstars — not Mario Cuomo or any of them — had the balls to take him on. Clinton did, and he didn't have $250 million to fall back on if he lost. That's me, bitches, I'm Clinton with dough. .......
"It's not my fault that the rest of you let the party turn into a monkeyhouse over this issue just because it was a Democratic president pushing the plan. It's not my fault that longtime Republican solutions have been recast in the fetid reaches of The Base's hive-mind as creeping socialism. It's not my fault you turned ignorant poo-flinging into a national strategy. I've got enough money to bribe even this party into regaining its sanity. I can buy anything, bitches, because I'm Mitt Romney and I've got enough fuck-you money for 150 Newt Gingriches.
"I mean, really, people. Gingrich? Santorum? You people want to lose 45 states? You want the entire campaign to be about either Gingrich's grandiose daydreams, or about Rick Santorum's pursuit of the unauthorized use of the penis? One guy wants to be Caesar Augustus and the other one wants to be Pius IX. Is that really what you want? I've decided that I just want to be Mitt Romney again, bitches, because that's an awfully nice thing to be. Ever seen the sunset over the Pacific? I'm owning one of those bad boys now.
"So, yeah, I'm not going to be what the Bible-bangers want. You know why? Because there aren't enough of them to win the election, and I'm sick of throwing good money after bad trying to win the hearts and the not-entirely-functioning minds of a bunch of people who see Jesus in their cereal bowls every morning. They can come along if they want to, but I'm not doing this born-again shuck-and-jive for their amusement any more. Why?
"Because I'm Mitt Romney, bitches, and I'm all you got left." When you stop laughing check out some of these stories at OpEdnews

• Podcast: Major Occupy/OWS Court Victory-- 31 Occupy Philly Protesters Acquitted on All Charges; Exclusive Interview
• Washington Post's Kaplan and Other For-Profit Colleges Joined ALEC, Controversial Special Interest Lobby
• Five Pennsylvania Legislators Leave ALEC
• E.J. Dionne Jr -- Romney's principled, radical view for America
• Rob Kall: NSA Whistleblower Thomas Drake: The US Is Becoming more and more a Security State like E. Germany
• Much more at OpEdNews.com!

As usual the corporopress navel-gazers will miss most of these stories. The WH Limo drops off White House Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan at This Snufagopolis and FAKE SNOOZE who also go with brick targets and famous snake-oil sellers The OSTEENS. Nobel Laureate PAUL KRUGMAN takes on CARLY FIORINA and ERIC SCHMIDT on Snuffy's Roundtable while Face the Bob gets brick target HALEY BARBOUR and Cal guv JERRY "MOONBEAM" BROWN. Save some bricks for regressive bitches DARRELL ISSA and PETER KING on Meet the David and State of the Candy gets a grudge-match battle between ED GILLESPIE and ROBERT GIBBS. Never mind the teevee corporominders! Check out Ring of Fire Radio with ARI BERMAN, Max has Zeus Yiamouyiannis ON THE EDGE, Sam Seder interviews JAMES GALBRAITH and News Dissector CLIFF SCHECTER, and look for GARETH PORTER on AntiWar Radio and The PBC Show! Lots more STUFF below so click on anything and be INSTANTLY SMARTER! As the NBA Playoffs begin we put to rest the Cavs terrible 21-45 lockout-shortened season and laugh at Da Browns terrible draft picks. A 28-year-old rookie? REALLY? Go Browns! And take the Cavs with ya! On the brighter side our seasonal Saturday Farmers Market opens next Saturday! We're looking for some fresh good eats that isn't incredibly marked up by the Big Box Food Retailers. Frost predicted tonight for these areas so we're getting close to getting some of the garden in as we continue to prep. Stay safe and occupy somewhere! As JACOB APPELBAUM suggests about the potential domestic NSA interception points posted at IXmaps.ca "It would be great if people actually went and photographed these buildings and talked to the employees there and see if they’re NSA people going in and out. They’re not confirmed. This is something where people now have something that they can do." So there's yer homework! Have a great week! BRICK TEEVEE ALERTS!_©
Monday, April 23, 2012

• Abrahm Lustgarten & Dahr Jamail @ Democracy NOW! Gulf Oil Spill: BP Execs Escape Punishment as Fallout from Disaster Continues to Impact Sea Life
  
• William Binney & Jacob Appelbaum @ Democracy NOW! More Secrets on Growing State Surveillance: Exclusive with NSA Whistleblower, Targeted Hacker
  

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

• John Carlos Frey, documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist at the Nation Institute @ Democracy NOW! Death on the Border: Shocking Video Shows Mexican Immigrant Beaten and Tased by Border Patrol Agents
  
• Smiley & West @ Democracy NOW! "War is the Enemy of the Poor": Cornel West and Tavis Smiley on Poverty, MLK, Election 2012
  

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

• Mumia Abu-Jamal @ Democracy NOW! Exclusive: Mumia Abu-Jamal Speaks from Prison on Life After Death Row and His Quest for Freedom
  
• MORE Mumia Abu-Jamal @ Democracy NOW! Exclusive: Mumia Abu-Jamal and Danny Glover Speak to Each Other for First Time Ever on Democracy Now
  

Thursday, April 26, 2012

• ACLU's Michelle Richardson @ Democracy NOW! CISPA Critics Warn Cybersecurity Bill Will Increase Domestic Surveillance and Violate Privacy Rights
  
• Jacob Appelbaum @ Democracy NOW! Targeted Hacker Jacob Appelbaum on CISPA, Surveillance and the "Militarization of Cyberspace"
  
• ColorLine's Seth Freed Wessler & Randy Parraz, president of Citizens for a Better Arizona @ Democracy NOW! Obama Admin Challenges Arizona Anti-Immigrant Law While Overseeing Unprecedented Mass Deportations
  

Friday, April 27, 2012

• Shahzad Akbar & Medea Benjamin @ Democracy NOW! As Obama Expands Drone War, Activists & Victims’ Advocates Join D.C. Summit on Growing Civilian Toll
  
• Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of NETWORK @ Democracy NOW! U.S. Nuns Face Vatican Rebuke for "Radical Feminism" in Stances on Church Teachings, Social Justice
  
• Katie Burgess & Rai'vyn Cross, close friend of CeCe McDonald @ Democracy NOW! "CeCe" McDonald: Black, Transgender Woman Faces Murder Trial for What Supporters Call Self-Defense
  

»»» GRITtv @ www.grittv.org with Laura Flanders
»»» FEATURED SHOW Can 'Caring Across Generations' Change the World? Ask anyone. We all have our “care stories.” What we don’t tend to have is a plan for what we’ll do when someone we love needs care, or when we ourselves turn out not to be invincible. We don’t have a plan, and neither does our government, and yet a crisis looms »»» Jeffrey Sachs: Population Controller? In a March 1 op-ed in the Washington Post Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs made his pitch to be the next president of the World Bank promising to “lead the bank into a new era of problem-solving.” John Cavanaugh and Robin Broad have laid out a raft of righteous concerns about Sachs’s candidacy. The “solutions” Sachs proposes to poverty, they point out, can be summed up in the not very-new words: “aid” and “trade.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s Sachs’s other favorite problem solver: population control. That’s taking us to a new era, alright: right back to the nineteenth century of Thomas Malthus. Read the full article at The Nation.
BRICK TEEVEE SPORT!_©
»»» MLB Sunday TBS Tigers @ Yankees 1:05 pm et
»»» MLB Sunday Night ESPN Rays @ Rangers 8 pm et
»»» NBA PLAYOFFS on TNT First Round coverage on Sunday double-header Celtics @ Hawks 7 pm et then Clippers @ Grizzlies 9:30 pm et. Check your local listings for more games all week!
BRICK TEEVEE ACTION!_©
The 1st Amendment is Our Permit Our permit to occupy is The First Amendment. Quickly sign the following statement which will be delivered to mayors, police chiefs and major media across the country:

Our permit to occupy public squares and parks is in The First Amendment, which affirms "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." When people across the Middle East occupied public squares, leaders in Washington mostly cheered those protesters and warned Middle Eastern governments not to use force to clear them. Those other societies don’t have a First Amendment. Yet Washington affirmed the universal right to assembly and protest. We do have a First Amendment. The force being used to clear nonviolent protesters from public squares in our country is unacceptable. It must stop.

October2011.org Sign the Petition to Get the 99% Deficit Proposal Heard in Congress

Please SIGN THE PETITION in support of the "99%'s Deficit Proposal" and plan direct actions to tell the Super Committee that the 99% have better solutions to our nation's crises. You can plan your own action at your Congressmember's office or join us in Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC for marches to Capitol Hill. Check our calendar for announcements.

VotersForJustice.org OUR GOAL: TO EMPOWER voters with facts and perspectives necessary to decipher the spin, obtain the truth, and support candidates that best represent their interests and values.
NET NEUTRALITY! SaveTheInternet.org A Push for Privacy in the Wake of the Carrier IQ Controversy Remember Carrier IQ, the company that makes the secret spying software that’s installed on more than 140 million phones? You know, the software that can record our most sensitive personal data? ... Thanks in part to the 22,000 people who joined Free Press’ call for a congressional investigation, some of those questions are closer to being answered and mobile users are closer to being protected. The protection comes in the form of a bill from Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey. Markey released a draft of a bill called the "Mobile Device Privacy Act" that would require phone companies to disclose to users just what is being done with all of their data. If the bill passes, an opt-out provision would go into effect a year later and would require companies to allow users to opt out of data-collection schemes like the one developed by Carrier IQ........
CAMPAIGN FOR AMERICA'S FUTURE American Majority Rejects Washington Austerity Consensus – And We Demand Media Coverage by Roger Hickey, President, Campaign for America's Future: No more silent majority. The Campaign for America’s Future is joining with the Center for Economic and Policy Research (whose Co-Director, Dean Baker blogs regularly about economic bias in the media) and with FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) to monitor the media’s coverage and representation of the American Majority views as they go into covering the big deficit fight. But we want to enlist YOU too. Send us accounts of unbalanced coverage in the national media and in your local newspapers and television. Call up reporters, editors, assignment people and tell them when they are under-representing the views of the American Majority. We should have at least half the experts, pundits, quotes and real people represented in their coverage. In a debate as important as the one we are going into, we can’t allow the media to ignore the American Majority. Much more at www.ourfuture.org
MOVE TO AMEND! www.movetoamend.org SIGN HERE NOW! Also visit Rep Alan Grayson's site www.savedemocracy.net And Alan Grayson is running again in FL-8! Help out at CongressmanWithGuts.com
SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT See CourageToResist.org and Bradley Manning Support Network UPDATE! Kevin Zeese on ANTIWAR RADIO Kevin Zeese March 22, 2012: Kevin Zeese, Executive Director of VotersForPeace and Co-Chair of Come Home America, discusses his article "Dismissal Is the Only Option in Bradley Manning Case;" the prosecution’s withholding of government damage-assessment reports, which could help disprove Manning’s "aiding the enemy" charge; statements from President Obama and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey (last paragraph) that bolster an "unlawful command influence" defense; and whether Judge Col. Denise Lind will rule fairly, resisting the government pressure and bribes that accompany cases of this magnitude. Kevin Zeese is the Executive Director and co-founder of VotersForPeace . He also served as the Executive Director of Democracy Rising, is an attorney, and a long term peace advocate. He took a leave from VotersForPeace for most of 2006 while he was running for the U.S. Senate in Maryland. Zeese was a founding member of the Montgomery County Coalition Against the War in Maryland and has worked with various non-profit organizations on peace, justice, and democracy issues since 1978.
DONATE YOUR OLD CELL PHONES TO T.J. MARTELL FOUNDATIONHelp save lives. Donate your old & used iPhone, Blackberries, Droid and other phones to help the T.J. Martell Foundations fund life-saving cancer & AIDS research. For more information, go to www.tjmartellfoundation.org
CELLULAR PHONE TASK FORCE EDUCATION, ADVOCACY, SUPPORT at CellPhoneTaskForce.org The Cellular Phone Task Force is dedicated to halting the expansion of wireless technology because it cannot be made safe. We provide: education to the public concerning electromagnetic pollution (electrosmog); advocacy for an electromagnetically cleaner environment; support for individuals disabled by radiation from wireless technology and other sources.

B R I C K T E E V E E

_{image ©2006 arkysue}
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The essential guide for watching government propaganda
IRAQ: 4,486 US Military Dead as of April 21, 2012
AFGHANISTAN: 1,943 US Military Dead as of April 21, 2012
The Obameter: Tracking Obama's Campaign Promises
Considering Democracy: 8 Things to ask your Representative

• This Week (ABC) anchor George Stephanopoulos
  • Fact Checking ABC's "This Week" at NPR "On the Media" - Jake Tapper, interim host of ABC's "This Week," liked the idea of fact-checking his guests' comments, so he set up a partnership with Politifact, a non-partisan fact-checking organization. See Politifact Statements ABC News 'This Week'
  • White House Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan
  • ROUNDTABLE: Carly Fiorina, Jennifer Granholm, Paul Krugman, Eric Schmidt, David Walker, George Will
  

• Face The Nation (CBS) Host Bob Schiefer
  • former Chairman of the Republican Party Haley Barbour
  • Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (who is a National Co-Chairman for the Obama Campaign)
  • California Gov. Jerry Brown
  • ROUNDTABLE: TIME Magazine contributor Graham Allison, Peter Bergen, Washington Post's David Ignatius
  

• 60 Minutes (CBS)
  • Hard Measures - The former head of the CIA's Clandestine Service, Jose Rodriguez, talks to Lesley Stahl about the "enhanced interrogation techniques," including waterboarding, used on high-level al Qaeda detainees. The ex-spy was the man behind those techniques that some would consider torture and he defends their use for the first time. Richard Bonin is the producer.
  • Hooked - Dr. Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, uses the brain scans of addicts to show how difficult it is to just say no to drugs and other addictive behaviors, including eating. Morley Safer reports. David Browning is the producer.
  

• Meet the Press (NBC) Host David Gregory
  • Meet the Facts at NPR "On the Media" - Last December, NYU professor Jay Rosen proposed something simple yet revolutionary: why don't the Sunday morning chat shows fact check their guests? After "Meet the Press" host David Gregory declined, two college students launched a website to do it for him. One of them, Chas Danner, explains what they're trying to accomplish. See their website MeetTheFacts.com updating soon!
  • Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA)
  • Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Peter King (R-NY)
  • Obama re-election strategist David Axelrod
  • ROUNDTABLE: Washington Post’s EJ Dionne; the New York Times’ David Brooks and Helene Cooper; and NBC’s Chuck Todd.
  

• State of the Union With Candy Crowley (CNN) At 9 AM ET, Candy talks to the power players: politicians, business leaders and international newsmakers who will make Monday morning's headlines. At NOON ET, Candy wraps it all up with fresh interviews and the best of the earlier hours.
  • Robert Gibbs from team Obama
  • Ed Gillespie from the Romney campaign
  • ROUNDTABLE: Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen, Vice Chair of the House Republican Conference Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, and Republican strategist Alex Castellanos.
  

• HEAD ON RADIO with Bob Kincaid
  
  Headon Radio with Bob Kincaid 6 PM Eastern, 3 PM Pacific, 2300 GMT. Duration: 3 hrs. To be part of Conversation Radio on Head-on Radio, call toll-free (877) 443-2366, or use our Liberal community line at 304-658-3333. Email bob [at] headonradio [dot] com during the show!
  • PRAYER MEETIN' WEDNESDAY!!!!! Uber Pope/Imam/Rabbi Bob lets the religious wrong have it!! From the Cathedral of Common Sense! (Bob's been under the weather so this is his rant on the Sunday Talkies on Easter Sunday.) Plus all the regulars chime in! Listen HERE (mp3) NOW! Amen to the White Rose Society! Donate to Head On HERE! And join Coal River Mountain Watch at www.crmw.net!
  

• YOUR GREEN NEWS REPORT
  
  The Green News Report with Brad Friedman & Desi Doyen: 6 minutes of green news, politics, analysis & snarky comment! BOOKMARK greennews.bradblog.com NOW!
  • 'Green News Report' - April 26, 2012 IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Just a flesh wound? UK smacked by extreme weather whiplash; Sec. Chu talks sexy, sexy energy efficiency; 'Agent Orange Corn'? Dow Chemical says 'Yes, please!'; PLUS: Slow-jamming the news? How about slow-walking climate change? .... All that and more in today's Green News Report!
  • IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see link): ExxonMobil profits: $109M a day on America's pocketbook; Wind Tax Credit Stalls in Congress despite bipartisan support; U.S. mad cow find: lucky break or triumph of science?; Cheap, stable, printable liquid solar cells developed; Warm Spring May Mean Drought, Wildfires in West; Warm Ocean Currents Eroding Antarctic Ice Shelves; Coal's Future Is Rocky at Best; On Chernobyl's anniversary, Ukraine warns against nuclear power... PLUS: Donald Trump on 'Monstrous Wind' ... and much, MUCH more! ...
  • BRADCAST! KPFK's 'BradCast': Intvw w/ 90-Year Old PA Woman Denied 'Free' ID Under New GOP Vote Suppress Law
  • BRADCAST! Guest Hosting 'Malloy Show' Friday! TONIGHT: Big Govt Cyber Spying with CISPA; The Fight to Vote; Secret Money Wins 2012; What 'Divided Nation?'; MUCH MORE!... Now UPDATED with audio archives from tonight's show below! Scheduled tonight:
  
  • DAN AUERBACH of Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on the effort to stop the bi-partisan Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) bill passed today in the U.S. House and its companion bill soon to be debated in the U.S. Senate.
    
  • JOYCE BLOCK, the 90-year old Doylestown, PA voter who has voted, without fail or problem, for 70 years, on her fight to vote now that the GOP has passed a polling place Photo ID restriction law, and since she was denied a so-called "free" ID to vote by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Transportation.
    
  • PLUS! Much much more as usual!
  • BRADBLOG UPDATE: Guest Editorial Series by Ernest A. Canning - Disturbing Questions About Our Government and the So-Called 'War on Drugs' Blocking the Competition: Does Legalization Threaten Covert Funding for the CIA? - [PART 1 of 3] Protecting the Corporations: Saving the Prison Industrial Complex' Slave Labor Pool? - [PART 2 of 3] Failure is Success: The Disastrous 'War on Drugs' Working Just as Planned? - [PART 3 of 3] • Visit BradBlog.com to see who counts yer votes! Now up to 9,200+ Election Protection posts! Reference yer background/research at Who's Counting? too.

• The Peter B. Collins Show PODCAST!
  
  Listen at PeterBCollins.com!
  The Peter B. Collins Show covers American news and politics from the Left Coast. Veteran talk radio personality Peter B. Collins, based in San Francisco, delivers fresh interviews, commentary and analysis on a range of important topics, with views and voices you don’t often find in the corporate media.
  • Holiday Break and Website Changes
  
  To my valued listeners: We are making some changes to the website and our terms, effective in January. We will continue to offer free podcasts–my new daily news and commentary. Our in-depth interviews will be available for $1 per episode, or to subscribers who pay $5 per month or more. Loyal listeners who simply can’t afford it should send an email to peter@peterbcollins.com, as we will be offering a limited number of scholarships to our friends who are hurting during these tough times. More information will be posted as we complete the revisions. I’m grateful to each of you for listening and supporting this work, and hope that the new model will enable us to keep it going well into the future. All the best, -pbc
  • PBC Podcast April 25, 2012 Boiling Frogs: Historian/Journalist William Engdahl on Iran, Syria, Oil Prices and More In this Boiling Frogs interview, Sibel Edmonds co-hosts as we speak with BoilingFrogsPost contributor William Engdahl.
  • PBC Standard Podcast April 26, 2012 Journalist/Historian Gareth Porter on Iran Nuke Talks and Afghanistan; Rebecca Griffin of Peace Action West on Their PAC for Peace Gareth Porter returns to talk about the recent talks with Iran in Istanbul, and the latest from Afghanistan; Rebecca Griffin of Peace Action West on their PAC for peace
  

• Ring of Fire Radio
  
  Find us at http://ringoffireradio.com and http://goleft.tv/ hosted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mike Papantonio and Sam Seder
  Ring of Fire Radio - GoLeft TV - Robert F. Kennedy, Mike Papantonio, Sam Seder - Politics, Commentary, and News.
  This Week on Ring of Fire! April 27, 2012
  • Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Wood will be here to tell us about how his reporting on the Middle East for the Huffington Post earned him such a prestigious honor.
  • We’ll hear from attorney Mark Proctor about the latest developments in the BP oil spill case – including the criminal charges filed against a BP engineer.
  • Huffington Post contributor Ben Hallman will be here to tell us about the bribery charges that have been leveled against Wal-Mart in Mexico.
  • And author Ari Berman will tell us why Americans need to start paying attention to the right wing takeover of our judicial system.
  • VIDEO! Papantonio: Justice Department Has Long Way To Go In BP Investigation This week, the Justice Department announced the first criminal charges in the BP oil spill probe, involving a BP engineer who destroyed evidence relating to the flow rate of oil from the broken wellhead. These charges are a great start, but as Mike Papantonio points out to Ed Schultz, there is still much more work to be done by the Department of Justice.
  • VIDEO! Papantonio: The Anti-Government Crowd Trying To Dismantle Public Schools Mike Papantonio dissects the Republican argument that corporations and CEOs can do a better job handling issues like public education, environmental protections, and mail service better than the federal government. When you look at the facts, it becomes clear that corporations can’t hold a candle to what the government is able to accomplish.
  • Support Those Who Support Progressive Media! 2011 has certainly been a great year for Ring of Fire, and we’ve had some great sponsors that have helped support the show throughout the year. We wanted to take the time to personally thank each and every one of them, and we encourage all of our listeners to take the time to support those who have support us.
  • Join our blog at www.ringoffireradio.com. You can now SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST by clicking on the "Podcast" tab at the top of the Ring of Fire blog. Please help support progressive radio by signing up!
  Ring of Fire Radio Ring of Fire, hosted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mike Papantonio and Sam Seder: Saturdays at 3 o’clock Eastern, rebroadcasts 8-11 et Sunday evenings on Chicago's Progressive Talk WCPT AM & FM and 4 pm et on Sirius/XM 167 featuring The PAP Attack! "We’ll bring you the stories that the mainstream media didn’t feel like reporting this week."
  

• Majority Report with Sam Seder Streaming LIVE weekdays 11:30 am et @ Majority.fm!
  
  • James K. Galbraith, Instability of Inequality
  • Myths & Truths: the Social Security Trust Account
  • Michael E. Mann, Climate Wars
  • Ari Berman on SCOTUS & Sam in Vegas
  • Mike Sacks, SCOTUS on Arizona Immigration & Katrina vanden Heuvel, UniteWomen
  • Cliff Schecter, News of the Week & Film Guy Matthew Weiss
  • MORE Podcast Interviews at majorityreport.official.fm!
  

• On the Edge with Max Keiser Podcasts and more @ MaxKeiser.com!
  
  "HI Y'ALL! Tell the people! Tell the people!"
  WHO IS MAX KEISER? Max Keiser is a financial expert, Prediction Markets analyst, inventor and filmmaker. He is the creator of the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX) the first Prediction Market. Max Keiser co-hosts "The Truth About Markets" on ResonanceFM 104.4 in London. He also produces and presents documentary films covering markets and finance for Al Jazeera’s "People & Power" series. Max Keiser started his career on Wall Street in 1983. He is the creator of KarmaBanque a site that enables activists to challenge corporate power.
  • VISIT PirateMyFilm.com!!! Crowd Funding for Pirates!
  • NEW! MaxKeiserTV on YouTube! MaxKeiserTV PLUS here is Max Keiser’s official Facebook page And here is the official Keiser Report page
  • Jamie wants more heroin (or he’ll throw a hissy fit and crash the system again). by maxkeiser - The largest U.S. banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), told the Federal Reserve that a limit on their credit exposure is unnecessary and “fundamentally flawed.” READ Largest U.S. Banks Resist Federal Reserve’s Credit Limits bloomberg.com
  • CISPA has just lost a powerful backer, with Microsoft withdrawing its support for the controversial cyber security bill by maxkeiser - READ Microsoft does about face on CISPA at RT
  • KEISER REPORT [KR279] Keiser Report: Beggars Without Borders
  • KEISER REPORT [KR280] Keiser Report: Tainted Sinkholes Of Fraud We discuss the fact that the economy is naked with tainted stinkholes of fraud and ex-Citigroup board member, Richard Parsons, is blaming Glass Steagall. In the second half of the show Max talks to activist Reverend Billy about living in public, taking action and casting out Blythe’s demons.
  • KEISER REPORT [KR281] Keiser Report: Oh My Gun! We discuss how shouting ‘fire!’ in a crowded economy may be the only thing left to save us from our unpayable debts and, failing that, Barack Obama’s ‘revolving door’ could be another GDP booster. In the second half of the show Max talks to David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5000 Years, about weaponized debt and the origins of May Day.
  • ON THE EDGE On the Edge with Zeus Yiamouyiannis We interview Zeus Yiamouyiannis.
  • THE TRUTH ABOUT MARKETS [TaM-359] Truth About Debtflation Download show HERE (mp3)
  • Donate to ResonanceFM here!
  

• ANTIWAR RADIO with Scott Horton
  LIVE (9-11am Pacific, 12pm - 2pm Eastern) Plenty of archives too!
  Listen at antiwar.com/radio
  • Carol Moore April 20, 2012: Carol Moore, author of The Davidian Massacre, discusses the 19th anniversary of the final siege against the Branch Davidians in Waco, TX; evidence that several Delta Force members were “pulling triggers” at Waco; Independent counsel John Danforth’s investigation and coverup; the FLIR cameras that captured FBI automatic weapons being fired to prevent the Davidians from surrendering; and how the current NDAA makes future Waco-type massacres and coverups even easier for the government.
  • Jesse Trentadue April 20, 2012: Jesse Trentadue, attorney and brother of Kenneth Trentadue (who was probably tortured and killed by FBI agents mistaking him for Richard Lee Guthrie – a.k.a. John Doe No. 2 – in the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing), discusses the new book Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed-and Why It Still Matters by Andrew Gumbel and Roger Charles; the June 15th court deadline for the FBI to explain why the Murrah Building surveillance tapes are missing; allegations that FBI agents tried to sell the tapes in 1995 – which is why LA Times reporters were able to see two men, Timothy McVeigh and John Doe 2, exit the Ryder truck; the FBI’s PATCON program of infiltrating and probably provoking the radical right; how the FBI’s media informants help kill stories and manage the news cycle; and the lack of Congressional hearings on the single largest terrorist attack in US history (in 1995).
  • Oleg Novinkov April 22, 2012: Oleg Novinkov, former Soviet officer and author of Afghan Boomerang, discusses the propaganda-filled book Charlie Wilson’s War about the CIA operation to arm mujaheddin in their fight against the Soviet army in Afghanistan; the Western media’s re-labeling of Afghan “freedom fighters” as “terrorists” once the US invaded; why Afghans would rather be occupied by the Soviets than the US/NATO; how a new Cold War with China will eventually displace the War on Terror as the top US priority; and why Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and perestroika are much more respected in the West than in Russia.
  • Joshua B. Freeman April 24, 2012: Joshua B. Freeman, History Professor and author of American Empire , discusses his TomDispatch article on the “prison-corporate complex;” the late 19th century chain gangs in the South and industrial prison labor in the North; the return of involuntary servitude, i.e. slavery, in American prisons; how low-paid prisoners keep pressure on labor unions and generate profits for Fortune 500 companies; America’s huge prison population relative to the rest of the world; and why it’s time to revamp the criminal justice system.
  • Jesse Trentadue April 24, 2012: Gareth Porter, investigative historian and journalist specializing in U.S. national security policy, discusses Washington Post writer David Ignatius’s claim that a a deal has already been made on Iran’s nuclear program and that ongoing talks are scripted; why the US and Iran can’t just “make a deal and shut up already;” how Benjamin Netanyahu’s bluff about attacking Iran is influencing US policy and helping the GOP win election; why it’s still unlikely NATO will drag the US into war in Syria, like Libya before; and the US-Afghan Strategic Partnership Agreement that envisions US involvement through 2024.
  • Many more interviews at Antiwar Radio!
  

• fauxnews
  • President Obama’s top Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan.
  • Joel and Victoria Osteen
  

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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Brick TeeVee and ALEC, ISSA and the War on Women!

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ALEC, ISSA and the War on Women We begin with our MEDIA WATCHDOG DESK and Gavin Aronsen at MoJo Are Campaign Ads Coming to PBS? Last Thursday, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco struck down a seven-decade-old ban on political ads on noncommercial TV and radio stations. Not surprisingly, the prospect that Elmo and the Dowager Countess now might have to share the airwaves with attack ads prompted a mild freakout.
Former PBS board member and American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Norman Ornstein told Reuters that the decision might "fundamentally change the character of public television and radio." The court's one dissenting judge similarly warned that the ruling could "jeopardize the future of public broadcasting." Craig Aaron, president and chief executive of Free Press, told the Los Angeles Times, "Viewers don't want to see Sesame Street being brought to them by shadowy Super PACs." But such concerns may be premature. .... The decision, which only affects the 9th Circuit's nine-state jurisdiction, prevents the government from prohibiting PBS or other noncommercial stations from broadcasting political ads, but it does not force the stations to do it. Noncommercial stations remain exempt from the "reasonable access" rules spelled out by the Communications Act of 1934, which threaten to revoke commercial stations' licenses if they reject ads from candidates for federal office. (Antiaborton foe and presidential candidate Randall Terry has been testing these access rules with his gory campaign ads.) Yet in the case of public TV stations, the decision whether to air a candidate's ad appears to be up to them. Any PBS station that did air a campaign ad could be opening up the floodgates for more ads, since competing candidates could then request equal ad time at the same price as their opponent. What about the specter of third-party attack ads running during Sesame Street? According to an FCC spokeswoman, the court's ruling does not open the door for ads from super-PACs, which the commission views as commercial advertisers. That interpretation, however, appears to run counter to Judge Carlos Bea's majority opinion, which did not distinguish between ads from candidates or advocacy groups. So that may remain a matter for the courts. If an appeal is rejected, the FCC could turn to the Supreme Court. If it doesn't, or if no appeal is filed, the 9th Circuit will soon issue a mandate enforcing the decision—at which point public TV stations in Western states and Alaska could begin airing dueling campaign ads—assuming there are candidates who think that spots during Antiques Roadshow are the best bang for their advertising bucks. We assume that NPR stations fall under the umbrella of PBS and per this ruling MAY begin airing paid political ads as well. It's bad enough huge corporations *underwrite* NPR but on top of that the only SANE radio outlet in MANY markets all across Amerika is an NPR affiliate (the rest of radio talk are dominated by Hard Right & "Christian" demagogues) but listeners are already subjected to airing many political ads during Morning Edition and All Things Considered ostensibly as "news" aka *free* ads. So put up your most outrageous ad you can imagine, even on the internets! ME and ATC will cover it and play it, maybe for the "titilate" factor or the "outrage" factor, but always as "context". Free advertising! Read more on this ruling over at WhoWhatWhy.com and Russ Baker Will Political Ads Destroy Public Broadcasting’s “Uniqueness”? ... But here’s the sad truth: With a few notable exceptions, big public broadcasting (let us distinguish the national PBS/NPR from community-based entities) is a lot less educational than it would like us to believe. True, it contains “thought-provoking” material delivered by dulcet-toned broadcasters and a charming, southern-inflected host with lightly tousled hair, and people seemingly disagreeing in the politest of manners. But the content of these broadcasters is just about as influenced by commercial interests and dominant cliques as the more “vulgar” commercial broadcasters. .... Public broadcasting regularly pulls its punches—and has gotten steadily worse in recent years. You can blame attacks from the Right, which periodically threaten to eliminate government support of PBS and NPR. But, in fact, public broadcasting has always been, to some extent, an arm of the establishment. By creating an aura of thoughtfulness, it has essentially lulled the public into complacency. .....
From the WaPo GSA scandal: Jeff Neely declines to testify at start of first House hearing “Mr. Chairman, on the advice of my counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my Fifth Amendment constitutional privileges,” Jeff Neely said in response to several questions about his role with GSA and whether he was involved in planning the October 2010 conference. .... Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) briefly recessed the hearing after Neely declined to testify and ordered the Neely and his attorney to a side office. When the hearing resumed, Issa said it was the first time in his congressional career that a witness had declined to testify..... Let's step back a bit and put this in perspective. COST OF WAR vs. the GSA "scandal": By round numbers the cost of war in Iraq is over $8,000,000 every HOUR; in Afghanistan it's over $5,000,000 every HOUR and counting. (Source CostOfWar.com.) Back in 2011 there was a Commission: Up to $60B wasted, lost in Iraq and Afghanistan As much as $60 billion in war support and rebuilding contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan has been lost to waste and fraud, according to a congressionally appointed commission investigating wartime spending since 2008. "As much or more waste may develop as U.S. projects turn out to be unsustainable by Iraq and Afghanistan governments," said Mike Thibault, a co-chair of the Commission on Wartime Contracting and former deputy director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency. .... Rep. John Tierney (D-MA6), ranking member of the National Security, Homeland Defense, and Foreign Operations Oversight Subcommittee, said he plans to introduce legislation next week based on the commission's recommendation to create a permanent inspector general for contingency operations. The special inspectors general for Iraq and Afghanistan are temporary positions. That bill H.R. 2880: Contingency Operation and Emergency Oversight Act of 2011 was introduced on September 9, 2011 and now sits as "Referred to the Subcommittee on Government Organization, Efficiency, and Financial Management" whose "Ex Officio" is none other than the Richest Congressman Evah DARRELL ISSA who may know a thing or three about stealing things. Why the big to-do about a mere $800,000 by the GSA which amounts to pocket change for military contractors' fraud, graft and waste of upwards of $60,000,000,000? Contact ISSA HERE and ask him why the GSA "scandal" is so important when he's had over SIX MONTHS to move H.R 2880 out of committee! (Be creative when filling out the form, heh). You might want to reference Issa's Open Secrets page CAREER PROFILE (SINCE 1989) - Top Contributors for some background, too. NPR's Peter Overby reports on ALEC Conservative Group's Charity Status Draws Questions Yum Brands, the company that owns Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, says it's the latest corporation to break ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council — a group that brings state lawmakers and corporate lobbyists together to write legislation. Liberal groups are pressuring corporations to abandon ALEC, and a dozen companies have now dropped out. This week, ALEC did some damage control. It said it is shutting down its task force on public safety and elections, which wrote controversial measures on voter ID, "stand your ground" and immigration reform. But another issue remains. ALEC is a 501(c)(3)charity under the tax code. That means it's not supposed to do any "substantial" lobbying — and its donors get a tax write-off for their contributions. As a 501(c)(3)charity — similar to the Red Cross or a religious congregation — ALEC is allowed to do some lobbying. The rule of thumb is up to about 20 percent of the budget. But on ALEC's annual tax returns, where it asks if the organization engaged in any lobbying activities, ALEC officers check "no." Marcus Owens, a tax attorney and the former head of the Internal Revenue Service division on tax-exempt organizations, says it seems that "what ALEC does is either lobbying, or it isn't. And it appears to be all of what ALEC does. So it's kind of ... a zero-sum game here." Owens says there's a precedent for this case from the 1990s, when he was at the IRS, and it isn't one that would be good for ALEC. In 1995, congressional Republicans asked former Rep. Jack Kemp, R-N.Y., to lead a commission on fixing the tax law. At the rollout, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas said the mission was a complete overhaul of the tax code. "That's why we have asked Jack to re-examine the over 9,000-page federal tax code, to start with a blank piece of paper and design a system that is flatter, fairer and simpler," he said at the time. The commission had a financing problem of its own. The Republicans wanted the private sector to pay for it. Potential donors wanted the tax deduction — something they'd get only if the commission were a 501(c)(3) charity. The commission applied to the IRS, which said no. The commission went to court and lost, then went to appeals court and lost again. Owens says the commission couldn't get 501(c)(3)status because it fell into the IRS definition of an "action organization." "An action organization does not qualify for tax-exempt status," Owens says. "The regulations define an action organization as one whose purposes can only be achieved by legislation." That's the argument that the good-government group Common Cause made when it asked the IRS to investigate ALEC last summer.... Audio at the link! Next Tiffany Hsu at the LA Times follows up with ALEC dismantles controversial task force after exodus of members Pressure from critics of "stand your ground" gun laws caused many ALEC members to abandon the group, pushing it to shutter its Public Safety and Elections task force Tuesday. The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, said it is shutting down a task force that helped draft voter ID and “stand your ground” gun legislation after major firms such as Coca Cola and Kraft cut ties with the conservative group. In eliminating the ALEC Public Safety and Elections task force, organization leaders said they would be “redoubling our efforts on the economic front” and taking its eye off issues unrelated to jobs, markets and competitiveness. “While we recognize there are other critical, non-economic issues that are vitally important to millions of Americans, we believe we must concentrate on initiatives that spur competitiveness and innovation and put more Americans back to work,” the group said in a statement Tuesday. .... Lobbying group and major ALEC foe Common Cause called the task force closure “an important victory” and said that major companies such as McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Mars had recently also backed away from ALEC. But Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, said ALEC’s announcement was a “PR maneuver to try to distance itself from its record of extremism.” ALEC, which supports ideals of free markets and limited government, slammed critics for their “bullying, intimidation and threats.” Last week, Executive Director Ron Scheberle said that calls for ALEC members to jump ship amounted to an “intimidation campaign” by “the liberal attack machine.” STOP. Here is yet another example of a hard-right group "playing the victim" even voicing irrational concern for one of their imaginary conspiratorial foes. ALEC's own website even brags "Unique. Unparalleled. Unmatched." Really? John Nichols chimes in with ALEC Disbands Task Force Responsible for Voter ID, 'Stand Your Ground' Laws ...The decision to disband the task force appears to get ALEC out of the business of promoting Voter ID and “Stand Your Ground” laws. That’s a dramatic turn of events, with significant implications for state-based struggles over voting rights an elections, as well as criminal justice policy. But it does not mean that ALEC will stop promoting one-size-fits-all “model legislation” at the state level. Indeed, the disbanding of the “Public Safety and Elections” task force looks in every sense to be a desperate attempt to slow an exodus of high-profile corporations from the group’s membership roll. ..... In many cases, the corporations that have quit ALEC have suggested that—while they were comfortable working with the right-wing group in order to advocate on behalf of tax and regulatory policies that are favorable to their business interests—they are ill at ease being drawn into debates about issues such as voting rights and gun control. ALEC’s decision to disband the Public Safety and Elections task force—which worked on those issues—cannot be seen as anything other than a response to the pressure the group has felt as high-profile corporate members have been quitting it on an almost daily basis. While the group is not acknowledging as much, its statement on the disbanding of the task force speaks volumes. ..... While this is a dramatic development in the struggle to expose and challenge ALEC’s one-size-fits all assault on local and state democracy, it should be remembered that ALEC remains a prime proponent—via task forces working in other areas—of state-based assaults on labor rights, environmental protections and public education. “Dozens of corporations are investing millions of dollars a year to write business-friendly legislation that is being made into law in statehouses coast to coast, with no regard for the public interest,” explains Bob Edgar of Common Cause. “This is proof positive of the depth and scope of the corporate reach into our democratic processes.” ColorOfChange Executive Director Rashad Robinson promised that the group's advocacy would continue. .... "Now that these companies are aware of what they've supported, what will they do about it? If ALEC's corporate supporters will not hold the institution accountable for the damage it has caused nationwide, then the ColorOfChange community will hold them accountable." MORE JOHN NICHOLS! Not Just Labor Rights; Scott Walker Is Also Dismantling Women's Rights ... The list of reasons for voting Walker out of office is so long that it is hard to imagine what more could be added to it. But there is the matter of what the governor’s critics refer to as “Scott Walker’s War on Women .” Because Walker signed anti-choice laws enacted by legislative Republicans who do not believe women can or should make decisions regarding their own bodies, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin has decided to suspend providing certain basic health services to women. Among other things, Planned Parenthood will stop providing drugs to women for abortions in the first nine weeks of pregnancy—a method the provider says are used in about a quarter of the abortions it provides in Wisconsin. Why? The law signed by Walker criminalizes a physician’s failure to follow specific protocols laid out by the the anti-choice legislators—and interest groups—that drafted the legislation. “In just one year, we have seen how women can lose ground in their health care options as a result of who holds power,” explains NARAL Pro-Choice Wisconsin executive director Lisa Subeck. Specifically, Subeck is referring to Act 217—a law that, she correctly notes, adds unnecessary and intrusive restrictions for abortion providers and subjects physicians to felony criminal penalties. “It is unacceptable that women in Wisconsin are losing health care options because Governor Walker has enacted a law that is hostile to abortion providers, and that means women in Wisconsin will suffer,” says Subeck. “This is what happens when out of control politicians like Scott Walker practice medicine without a license and interfere in the relationship between doctors and their patients. In the end, it is women who lose out.” She’s right. So, too, is state Representative Chris Taylor, when she argues that “this is indicative of what is to come from Scott Walker and legislative Republicans. They will stop at nothing to make abortion and birth control illegal in every circumstance.” And in Ohio State Rep Nina Turner is correct also when she said "Memo to Republicans: The war on women is real," Sen. Nina Turner (D., Cleveland) said. "... Since they declared war, we are going to make sure that we are on the battlefield. …" reports Jim Provance at the Toldeo Blade in Ohio GOP acts to cut Planned Parenthood funding level Ohio House Republicans have enlisted in the national GOP's "war against women" by moving to severely cut -- if not eliminate -- funding for Planned Parenthood, Democrats charged on Wednesday. ... Democrats adopted the "war against women" narrative being used by supporters of President Obama. GOP members of the Ohio House Finance and Appropriations Committee on Tuesday amended one of Gov. John Kasich's midbudget review bills to place Planned Parenthood and other independent health clinics at the bottom of the priority list when it comes to distributing $9.7 million in federal family planning money. ... It's unknown how much those clinics would receive under the proposed bill after public health departments, federally approved community health clinics, and private community health clinics are funded in that order. "These extreme attacks on women are not going to be tolerated in this state," Rep. Teresa Fedor (D., Toledo) said. "We're standing with our sisters to say that government has no business in reproductive health in Ohio." .... There's more from Laura Bassett at HuffPo Planned Parenthood In Ohio, Wisconsin Loses Battles ... Defunding Planned Parenthood through Ohio's budget bill is a way for GOP lawmakers to pass the measure without having to vote on a separate bill, which would likely cause controversy. The Planned Parenthood amendment, introduced by Republicans in the House Finance Committee on Tuesday, puts family planning clinics that provide abortions in the bottom tier of priority for Title X funds, making it more likely that the state will run out of money before it can provide any funding to Planned Parenthood. The amendment further prohibits federal funds from the Minority HIV/AIDS Initiative, the Violence Against Women Act, the Breast and Cervical Cancer Mortality Prevention Act and the Infertility Prevention Project from going to Planned Parenthood or any other family planning clinic that provides abortions. The GOP-controlled House is expected to vote on the budget bill next week and pass it, with the amendment attached. "This House seems to stop at nothing to attack women and their reproductive rights, and in this case, their access to basic health care and cancer screenings," State Rep. Kathleen Clyde (D-Kent), a member of the House Finance Committee, told HuffPost. "It's just a very tough legislature to be a part of." Planned Parenthood Affiliates of Ohio said that of its 37 health centers, only three perform abortions, and none of the $1.7 million it receives in federal funding annually is used to pay for abortions. .... Guess who else is getting back in on The War on Women? Laurie Goodstein at NYT tells us how the Vatican Reprimands a Group of U.S. Nuns and Plans Changes The Vatican’s assessment, issued on Wednesday, said that members of the group, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, had challenged church teaching on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood, and promoted “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.” The sisters were also reprimanded for making public statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” During the debate over the health care overhaul in 2010, American bishops came out in opposition to the health plan, but dozens of sisters, many of whom belong to the Leadership Conference, signed a statement supporting it — support that provided crucial cover for the Obama administration in the battle over health care. The conference is an umbrella organization of women’s religious communities, and claims 1,500 members who represent 80 percent of the Catholic sisters in the United States. It was formed in 1956 at the Vatican’s request, and answers to the Vatican, said Sister Annmarie Sanders, the group’s communications director. Word of the Vatican’s action took the group completely by surprise, Sister Sanders said. .... “I’m stunned,” said Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, a Catholic social justice lobby founded by sisters. Her group was also cited in the Vatican document, along with the Leadership Conference, for focusing its work too much on poverty and economic injustice, while keeping “silent” on abortion and same-sex marriage. “I would imagine that it was our health care letter that made them mad,” Sister Campbell said. “We haven’t violated any teaching, we have just been raising questions and interpreting politics.” ... Over at CrooksAndLiars.com karoli picks it up Updated: Vatican Smacks Down Catholic Nuns For Daring To Care About Poor People ... Oh my, perish the thought. Focusing on helping the poor and needy. [cue sarcasm] How could church leaders possibly justify helping the poor and needy when there are abortions to be stopped and gays to hate? [end sarcasm] Fear not, nuns. The Bishops will save you. They have a plan. It looks like this: [....] Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle may have some difficulty whipping the nuns into shape, since he can't even seem to get the churches in his diocese to bow to his edicts. Here's what feels so deeply hypocritical to me about the Vatican's smackdown, and make no mistake, it was a hard smackdown. Just yesterday, those very same bishops criticized the Ryan budget (and the House of Representatives for passing it), saying:

“Major reductions at this time of economic turmoil and rising poverty will hurt hungry, poor and vulnerable people in our nation and around the world,” the Rev. Stephen Blaire, bishop of Stockton, Calif., and the Rev. Richard E. Pates, bishop of Des Moines, wrote for the conference. “A just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to the poor and vulnerable persons; it requires shared sacrifice by all.”

Dang it. There they go caring about the poor and stuff. I don't see a word in there about same sex marriage or abortion or birth control. Just poor folks. I guess that means it's totally all right for bishops to care about poverty and the downtrodden, but God forbid that women should do it? Well, Pope forbid, anyway. ... Because raising taxes a teeny smidge in order to sustain these programs is simply out of the question! Pope-in-waiting Grover Norquist has said it, and therefore it's so. .... Update: Oh, those bishops were busy boys Wednesday. Right after I finished this post, I heard they actually compared President Obama to Hitler! Is that a case of "I'm rubber, you're glue" or what? Daily KOS

"The Church will survive the entrenched corruption and sheer incompetence of our Illinois state government, and even the calculated disdain of the President of the United States, his appointed bureaucrats in HHS, and of the current majority of the federal Senate. . . . Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care. In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama – with his radical, pro abortion and extreme secularist agenda, now seems intent on following a similar path."

What did they put in the bishops' Communion wine, anyway? Go to the CBC for "As It Happens" The Friday Edition for an interview with Sister Simone Campbell. And Stephanie Mencimer talks about Sex and the Vatican City in the May/June issue "We haven't posted this article on MotherJones.com yet. But you don't have to wait to read it! We'd like to give you the opportunity to view—right now. When you sign up for Mother Jones' email updates, you'll be given free, instant access to this article (as well as every other story from our current issue)." David Zucchino and the Los Angeles Times report U.S. troops posed with body parts of Afghan bombers An American soldier says he released the photos to the Los Angeles Times to draw attention to the safety risk of a breakdown in leadership and discipline. The Army has started a criminal investigation. .... The 82nd Airborne Division soldiers arrived at the police station in Afghanistan's Zabol province in February 2010. They inspected the body parts. Then the mission turned macabre: The paratroopers posed for photos next to Afghan police, grinning while some held — and others squatted beside — the corpse's severed legs. A few months later, the same platoon was dispatched to investigate the remains of three insurgents who Afghan police said had accidentally blown themselves up. After obtaining a few fingerprints, they posed next to the remains, again grinning and mugging for photographs. Two soldiers posed holding a dead man's hand with the middle finger raised. A soldier leaned over the bearded corpse while clutching the man's hand. Someone placed an unofficial platoon patch reading "Zombie Hunter" next to other remains and took a picture. The Army launched a criminal investigation after the Los Angeles Times showed officials copies of the photos, which recently were given to the paper by a soldier from the division. "It is a violation of Army standards to pose with corpses for photographs outside of officially sanctioned purposes," said George Wright, an Army spokesman. "Such actions fall short of what we expect of our uniformed service members in deployed areas." .... The soldier who provided The Times with a series of 18 photos of soldiers posing with corpses did so on condition of anonymity. He served in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne's 4th Brigade Combat Team from Ft. Bragg, N.C. He said the photos point to a breakdown in leadership and discipline that he believed compromised the safety of the troops. He expressed the hope that publication would help ensure that alleged security shortcomings at two U.S. bases in Afghanistan in 2010 were not repeated. The brigade, under new command but with some of the same paratroopers who served in 2010, began another tour in Afghanistan in February. .... Times Editor Davan Maharaj said, "After careful consideration, we decided that publishing a small but representative selection of the photos would fulfill our obligation to readers to report vigorously and impartially on all aspects of the American mission in Afghanistan, including the allegation that the images reflect a breakdown in unit discipline that was endangering U.S. troops.".... Read the rest and see the pictures. One wonders if the LA Times will now be scorned like wikileaks or come under fire from the DOJ as Obama targets journalists in the War on Journalists (read this item at Salon by By Jesselyn Radack filling in for Glenn Greenwald). The National Journal reports on the Obomber Administration's reaction to the LA Times pictures Panetta: Graphic Photos 'Absolutely' Violate Military Regulations, Core Values Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Wednesday that the conduct of U.S. soldiers posing with the dismembered bodies of Afghan suicide bombers in photos published earlier that day "absolutely" violates the military's regulations and core values. He pledged to continue an investigation into the troops' alleged misconduct. ... "This is not who we are. ... This is war. And it's ugly and violent. ... [The photos] will be used by The Enemy to incite violence. ... We regret that they were published." STOP. Anybody remember Lynndie England? Uh-huh. What did Powell say at the time? We go to the BTV Wayback Machine! MSNBC 5/17/2004 Abuse scandal ‘terrible’ for U.S., Powell concedes In a commencement address at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., Powell said the furor over U.S. abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib detention facility was a recurring theme at an international economic conference he attended in Jordan over the weekend. He said he told the foreign leaders: “Watch America. Watch how we deal with this. Watch how America will do the right thing.” Yes do watch! From Pete Yost, Associated Press via HeraldNet.com 9/26/10 Supreme Court to rule on Abu Ghraib amends Fending off demands that he resign over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress he had found a legal way to compensate Iraqi detainees who suffered “grievous and brutal abuse and cruelty at the hands of a few members of the United States armed forces.” “It’s the right thing to do,” Rumsfeld declared in 2004. “And it is my intention to see that we do.” Six years later, the U.S. Army is unable to document any payments for prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Nor can the more than 250 Iraqis or their lawyers now seeking redress in U.S. courts. ... The Army added that U.S. Forces-Iraq looked at its records and could not find any payments to former detainees. The Army also cannot verify whether any such payments were made informally through Iraqi leaders. Well wouldn't ya know NINE MONTHS LATER 6/27/11 Human Rights First announced Abu Ghraib Torture Victims Denied Their Day in Court In a decision that runs contrary to the United States’ treaty obligations and moral standing, the U.S. Supreme Court, with the support of the U.S. government, told 250 alleged victims of torture inflicted by U.S. private military contractors at Abu Ghraib and other sites that they cannot seek a remedy against the perpetrators in U.S. courts. Today, the Court declined to hear the case of Saleh, et al. v. Titan Corporation, et al. a civil suit brought by Iraqi detainees alleging torture, abuse, and sexual violence by U.S. private contractors CACI and Titan (now L-3 Services) who provided interrogation and translation services at the notorious Iraqi prison. .... “This decision, which was supported by the Obama administration, informs the world that the United States of America has no intention of obeying its moral and legal obligation to provide enforceable remedies to victims of sadistic acts of torture alleged to have been committed by military contractors,” said Human Rights First’s International Legal Director Gabor Rona. .... Rona concluded, “Last week on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, President Obama proclaimed that the United States ‘will remain a leader in the effort to end torture around the world and to address the needs of torture victims.’ Nothing undermines the credibility of the United States as a voice for human rights and for respect for the rule of law more than its hypocritical dismissal of the suffering of torture victims at the hands of the U.S. government and its agents.” To recap, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell says "Watch how America will do the right thing" and his buddy then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld proclaims "It’s the right thing to do" the whole affair winds up thrown out in court by a brutal activist SCOTUS who blantantly ignore International Treaties the U.S. has signed and must obey per the U.S. Constitution's Article VI, paragraph 2: "...all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land". So when White House Press Secretary Jay Carney says “The president certainly shares in the defense secretary's opinion that this should be investigated and those held responsible will be held accountable” remember the recent U.S. history on cases like these. Here are two articles that we didn't get to include in BTV last week. Killing the competition: How the new monopolies are destroying open markets by Barry C. Lynn at Harpers and Matt Taibbi Why Obama's JOBS Act Couldn't Suck Worse and his follow-up Yes, Virginia, This Is Obama’s JOBS Act A number of people, many of them enthusiastic supporters of President Obama, wrote in to complain about my last piece about the JOBS Act. The gist of many of these letters was that the new deregulatory law could in no way be described as "Obama's JOBS Act." "This was a Republican bill, birthed by Eric Cantor in the House, and driven by overwhelming Republican support," wrote in one emailer. "All Obama did was sign it. It’s totally dishonest to call it an Obama bill." Okay, let’s talk about that. But first, a quick note on the bill itself, since I think some people misunderstand the objection to the bill.... Also read this long piece Free $10 Million Loans For All! and Other Wall Street Notes and a MUST-WATCH Talking Gangster Banks with Max Keiser! Good Item! Every now and then the GOPhers just blurt out the craziest nonsense like Mitt Headroom did last week while addressing the NRA. We go to Bob Parry at ConsortiumNews.com for the latest GOPher CANARD Romney’s Upside-Down Constitution! Mitt Romney’s “liberty speech” to the National Rifle Association on Friday demonstrates how central the Right’s false narrative of the nation’s founding will be in the November elections, as Republicans depict Barack Obama as alien to the nation’s First Principles. Essentially, the Right’s narrative holds that the Framers of the Constitution were hostile to a strong central government (for anything but national defense), rejected a federal role in addressing the nation’s economic problems (leaving that to the private sector), and supported a system in which the states were very powerful. None of these points are true, of course, at least not for the Constitution. .... Washington’s view on the need for a vibrant central government was not universally held by the Founders, but it clearly represented their dominant sentiment since Madison’s Commerce Clause did become part of the Constitution, which was ratified by the states. Ratification consigned the Articles of Confederation, with their “independent” states and weak central government, to the dustbin of history. But Mitt Romney and today’s American Right would have you believe that a different history occurred, that somehow the Articles of Confederation are the Constitution and that the Founders were not the practical men that history shows us they were but rather anti-government zealots. Romney’s NRA speech showed how the Right’s false narrative will be repeated again and again, making it the equivalent of truth for the ill-informed and weak-minded. ... Do read all that we skipped for Parry's excellent discussion on why the Founding Founders designed a strong central government and replaced the Articles of Confederation with The Constitution. After reading this you will be able to explain to your wingnut friends and family members how wrong they are about "States Rights". This may lead them to question more about what they thought they knew according to other teabagger memes! (Or they may just wallow in their cognitive dissonance, heh.) And as the GOPhers seem to have coalesced around Mitt "Max Headroom" Romney read The Dark Side of Mitt Romney - The Meaning of Mitt by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman at Vanity Fair Mitt Romney has long been a front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination—even if no one really knows who he is. Digging into the candidate’s record as a Mormon leader, his business deals at Bain Capital, and that infamous car trip with the family dog strapped to the roof, Michael Kranish and Scott Helman pierce the Mitt bubble in an adaptation from their new book, The Real Romney, to find that the contradictions, question marks, and ambivalence go deeper than his politics. Of course it's been TWO YEARS since the explosion on the oil rig Deepwater Horizon which drilled on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect. WashingtonsBlog has a very good item you need to read 2 Years After the BP Oil Spill, Is the Gulf Ecosystem Collapsing? Way too much to snip and also includes a video with Dahr Jamail who has been covering this from the get-go. We close with Prairie2 and The good, the bad and... well, you know ... Major corporations are talking openly about the new Hour Glass Market with product development and marketing strategies aimed at the rich at the top and the vast bulk of the population at the bottom. The tiny center of the glass is the soon to be non-existent middle-class. Of course in this plan, the flow of wealth defies gravity and moves steadily upward. Don't let the right-wingers tell you that this is all "natural and unavoidable" or that nothing can be done. The Revolutionary War was all about throwing the corporations off this continent. The Progressive Movement and the New Deal were all about taking power away from the people who are screwing you now. None of this is happening by accident. The billionaires have spent billions over the last 60 years to re-write history, invent new economic theory and create public policy. They used to be treated like cranks, that crazy Reagan with his Voo Doo economics. Now they are treated as the "serious people" in the room and given great deference, of course they pay the people very well who show them this deference in the media. They also pay people with guns and badges to enforce this doctrine if proper deference is not shown to them in the streets. I'm not even going to get into the "well, you know" aspects of all this. Of course the navel-gazers on the Sunday Talkies will glaze over all this while they discuss the $800,0000 chump change. Who else but DARRELL ISSA with fellow cro-magnon PETER KING on Meet the David to bray on about the GSA? Wait! KIETH OLBERMANN will be on This Snufagopolis as part of The Roundtable! The Smiley & West Show are on Face the Bob (see DN! for a great interview, below). Throw bricks at JOEMENTUM on Fake Snooze and Face the Bob and MARCO POLO RUBIO on State of the Candy while DAVID AXELROD gets the WH limo to State of the Candy and Meet the David to tell us how scary the GOPhers are (don't get us wrong: the GOPhers are mostly bat-shit crazy psychopathic neo-fascists bent on destroying American democracy so Axelrod's alternative looks a wee bit better, yet nearly as damaging). Leave all that behind and check out Ring of Fire with more ALEC coverage with MoJo's ANDY KROLL, ROBERT GREENWALD and his new film "KOCH BROTHERS EXPOSED" and on their website an interview with THOMAS FRANK, MATT TAIBBI and GONZALO LIRA on MAX, ERIC MONGOLIS on AntiWar Radio plus the PBC SHOW with JOHN STAUBER with more on ALEC and JAMES BAMFORD on another Boiling Frogs episode with SIBEL EDMONDS. Watch all of DN!'s Friday show all about the "growing state surveillance" in the U.S. and so much more! The Brick TeeVee Crew will be occupying the garden on Sunday, more accurately prepping the garden and cleaning out last year's flotsam and jetsam. If we get enough cleared out we may even plant some things like BEANS! And The Crew has been loving the late-nite Tribe West-Coast swing where they're 7-1 tying a team record from 1988 for "best first road trip of the season"! Nice! The Crew gives huge a tip-of-the-hat to the White Sox's Phil Humber who threw baseball's 21st perfect game against the Seattle Mariners on Saturday. And on the Venerable Fenway Park's 100th Birthday the Yankees spoiled the party with a 6-2 win and then followed that up to come from NINE RUNS DOWN to beat the Red Sox again on Saturday 15-9! Catch Sunday Night Baseball for C.C. Sabathia vs. Dan Bard for a possible Yanks Sweep! Enjoy your Sunday and occupy somewhere! (psssst - check the job jar)




BRICK TEEVEE ALERTS!_©

Monday, April 16, 2012

• Historian Greg Grandin @ Democracy NOW! Latin America v. Obama: U.S. Policy on Cuba, Drug War, Economy Under Fire at Colombian Summit
  
• Ethan Nadelmann, Drug Policy Alliance @ Democracy NOW! Obama Refuses to Back Growing Call for Drug Legalization to Stem Spreading Violence in Latin America
  
• Selma James @ Democracy NOW! Housework as Work: Selma James on Unwaged Labor and Decades-Long Struggle to Pay Housewives
  

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

• AP's Matt Apuzzo @ Democracy NOW! AP Wins Pulitzer for Exposing NYPD’s CIA-Linked Intel Program, Leading Widespread Spying on Muslims
  
• Johan Galtung @ Democracy NOW! Norway’s Johan Galtung, Peace & Conflict Pioneer, Reflects on Norwegian Massacre, Afghan War
  

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

• Lisa Graves @ Democracy NOW! ALEC Drops Push for Voter ID, Stand Your Ground Laws After Public Outcry Sparks Corporate Exodus
  
• Milton Allimadi & Victor Ochen @ Democracy NOW! Kony 2012: Ugandans Criticize Popular Video for Backing U.S. Military Intervention in Central Africa
  

Thursday, April 19, 2012

• Journalist Anand Gopal @ Democracy NOW! Photos of Soldiers Posing with Afghan Corpses the Latest Outrage of U.S. Occupation of Afghanistan AND Back from Syria, Journalist Anand Gopal Warns Protesters "Face Slaughter" by Assad Regime
  
• Smiley & West @ Democracy NOW! Tavis Smiley & Cornel West on "The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto"
  

Friday, April 20, 2012

• William Binney @ Democracy NOW! Exclusive: National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney on Growing State Surveillance
  
• Filmmaker Laura Poitras @ Democracy NOW! Detained in the U.S.: Filmmaker Laura Poitras Held, Questioned Some 40 Times at U.S. Airports
  
• Jacob Appelbaum @ Democracy NOW! "We Don’t Live in a Free Country": Jacob Appelbaum on Being Target of Widespread Gov’t Surveillance
  
• More William Binney @ Democracy NOW! Whistleblower: The NSA is Lying–U.S. Government Has Copies of Most of Your Emails
  

»»» GRITtv @ www.grittv.org with Laura Flanders »»» FEATURED SHOW Can 'Caring Across Generations' Change the World? Ask anyone. We all have our “care stories.” What we don’t tend to have is a plan for what we’ll do when someone we love needs care, or when we ourselves turn out not to be invincible. We don’t have a plan, and neither does our government, and yet a crisis looms »»» Jeffrey Sachs: Population Controller? In a March 1 op-ed in the Washington Post Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs made his pitch to be the next president of the World Bank promising to “lead the bank into a new era of problem-solving.” John Cavanaugh and Robin Broad have laid out a raft of righteous concerns about Sachs’s candidacy. The “solutions” Sachs proposes to poverty, they point out, can be summed up in the not very-new words: “aid” and “trade.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s Sachs’s other favorite problem solver: population control. That’s taking us to a new era, alright: right back to the nineteenth century of Thomas Malthus. Read the full article at The Nation.
BRICK TEEVEE SPORT!_©
»»» MLB Sunday TBS Rangers @ Tigers 1:05 pm et
»»» MLB Sunday Night ESPN Yankees @ Red Sox 8 pm et
»»» NASCAR on FOX Live from the Kansas Speedway! Coverage begins at 1 pm et
»»» NBA on TNT Thursday double-header Knicks @ Hornets 8 pm et then Spurs @ Warriors 10:30 pm et
BRICK TEEVEE ACTION!_© The 1st Amendment is Our Permit Our permit to occupy is The First Amendment. Quickly sign the following statement which will be delivered to mayors, police chiefs and major media across the country:

Our permit to occupy public squares and parks is in The First Amendment, which affirms "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." When people across the Middle East occupied public squares, leaders in Washington mostly cheered those protesters and warned Middle Eastern governments not to use force to clear them. Those other societies don’t have a First Amendment. Yet Washington affirmed the universal right to assembly and protest. We do have a First Amendment. The force being used to clear nonviolent protesters from public squares in our country is unacceptable. It must stop.

October2011.org Sign the Petition to Get the 99% Deficit Proposal Heard in Congress

Please SIGN THE PETITION in support of the "99%'s Deficit Proposal" and plan direct actions to tell the Super Committee that the 99% have better solutions to our nation's crises. You can plan your own action at your Congressmember's office or join us in Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC for marches to Capitol Hill. Check our calendar for announcements.

VotersForJustice.org OUR GOAL: TO EMPOWER voters with facts and perspectives necessary to decipher the spin, obtain the truth, and support candidates that best represent their interests and values.
NET NEUTRALITY! SaveTheInternet.org A Push for Privacy in the Wake of the Carrier IQ Controversy Remember Carrier IQ, the company that makes the secret spying software that’s installed on more than 140 million phones? You know, the software that can record our most sensitive personal data? ... Thanks in part to the 22,000 people who joined Free Press’ call for a congressional investigation, some of those questions are closer to being answered and mobile users are closer to being protected. The protection comes in the form of a bill from Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey. Markey released a draft of a bill called the "Mobile Device Privacy Act" that would require phone companies to disclose to users just what is being done with all of their data. If the bill passes, an opt-out provision would go into effect a year later and would require companies to allow users to opt out of data-collection schemes like the one developed by Carrier IQ........
CAMPAIGN FOR AMERICA'S FUTURE American Majority Rejects Washington Austerity Consensus – And We Demand Media Coverage by Roger Hickey, President, Campaign for America's Future: No more silent majority. The Campaign for America’s Future is joining with the Center for Economic and Policy Research (whose Co-Director, Dean Baker blogs regularly about economic bias in the media) and with FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) to monitor the media’s coverage and representation of the American Majority views as they go into covering the big deficit fight. But we want to enlist YOU too. Send us accounts of unbalanced coverage in the national media and in your local newspapers and television. Call up reporters, editors, assignment people and tell them when they are under-representing the views of the American Majority. We should have at least half the experts, pundits, quotes and real people represented in their coverage. In a debate as important as the one we are going into, we can’t allow the media to ignore the American Majority. Much more at www.ourfuture.org
MOVE TO AMEND! www.movetoamend.org SIGN HERE NOW! Also visit Rep Alan Grayson's site www.savedemocracy.net And Alan Grayson is running again in FL-8! Help out at CongressmanWithGuts.com
SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT See CourageToResist.org and Bradley Manning Support Network UPDATE! Kevin Zeese on ANTIWAR RADIO Kevin Zeese March 22, 2012: Kevin Zeese, Executive Director of VotersForPeace and Co-Chair of Come Home America, discusses his article "Dismissal Is the Only Option in Bradley Manning Case;" the prosecution’s withholding of government damage-assessment reports, which could help disprove Manning’s "aiding the enemy" charge; statements from President Obama and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey (last paragraph) that bolster an "unlawful command influence" defense; and whether Judge Col. Denise Lind will rule fairly, resisting the government pressure and bribes that accompany cases of this magnitude. Kevin Zeese is the Executive Director and co-founder of VotersForPeace . He also served as the Executive Director of Democracy Rising, is an attorney, and a long term peace advocate. He took a leave from VotersForPeace for most of 2006 while he was running for the U.S. Senate in Maryland. Zeese was a founding member of the Montgomery County Coalition Against the War in Maryland and has worked with various non-profit organizations on peace, justice, and democracy issues since 1978.
DONATE YOUR OLD CELL PHONES TO T.J. MARTELL FOUNDATIONHelp save lives. Donate your old & used iPhone, Blackberries, Droid and other phones to help the T.J. Martell Foundations fund life-saving cancer & AIDS research. For more information, go to www.tjmartellfoundation.org
CELLULAR PHONE TASK FORCE EDUCATION, ADVOCACY, SUPPORT at CellPhoneTaskForce.org The Cellular Phone Task Force is dedicated to halting the expansion of wireless technology because it cannot be made safe. We provide: education to the public concerning electromagnetic pollution (electrosmog); advocacy for an electromagnetically cleaner environment; support for individuals disabled by radiation from wireless technology and other sources.

B R I C K T E E V E E

_{image ©2006 arkysue}
THEY report. YOU throw bricks. ©
Get your Foam Bricks at ThrowThings.com HERE!
The essential guide for watching government propaganda
IRAQ: 4,486 US Military Dead as of April 21, 2012
AFGHANISTAN: 1,943 US Military Dead as of April 21, 2012
The Obameter: Tracking Obama's Campaign Promises
Considering Democracy: 8 Things to ask your Representative

• This Week (ABC) anchor George Stephanopoulos
  • Fact Checking ABC's "This Week" at NPR "On the Media" - Jake Tapper, interim host of ABC's "This Week," liked the idea of fact-checking his guests' comments, so he set up a partnership with Politifact, a non-partisan fact-checking organization. See Politifact Statements ABC News 'This Week'
  • Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine
  • Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-NY
  • ROUNDTABLE: Keith Olbermann, ABC News' George Will, political strategist and ABC News contributor Donna Brazile, political strategist and ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd, and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan.
  

• Face The Nation (CBS) Host Bob Schiefer
  • Sen. Joe Lieberman
  • ROUNDTABLE: Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., Sen. Tom Comburn, R-Okla., CBS News Chief White House Correspondent Norah O'Donnell
  • Cornel West and Tavis Smiley
  

• 60 Minutes (CBS)
  • The Case Against Lehman - Steve Kroft talks to the bank examiner whose investigation reveals the how and why of the spectacular financial collapse of Lehman Brothers, the bankruptcy that triggered the world financial crisis. James Jacoby and Michael Karzis are the producers.
  • Christians of the Holy Land - Bob Simon reports on the slow exodus from the Holy Land of Palestinian Christians, who say life in the middle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become too difficult. Harry Radliffe is the producer.
  

• Meet the Press (NBC) Host David Gregory
  • Meet the Facts at NPR "On the Media" - Last December, NYU professor Jay Rosen proposed something simple yet revolutionary: why don't the Sunday morning chat shows fact check their guests? After "Meet the Press" host David Gregory declined, two college students launched a website to do it for him. One of them, Chas Danner, explains what they're trying to accomplish. See their website MeetTheFacts.com updating soon!
  • Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA)
  • Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Peter King (R-NY)
  • Obama re-election strategist David Axelrod
  • ROUNDTABLE: Washington Post’s EJ Dionne; the New York Times’ David Brooks and Helene Cooper; and NBC’s Chuck Todd.
  

• State of the Union With Candy Crowley (CNN) At 9 AM ET, Candy talks to the power players: politicians, business leaders and international newsmakers who will make Monday morning's headlines. At NOON ET, Candy wraps it all up with fresh interviews and the best of the earlier hours.
  • David Axelrod
  • Florida’s Republican Senator Marco Rubio
  • Rep. Elijah Cummings
  • Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA)
  • CNN’s Senior Congressional Reporter Dana Bash and Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times
  

• HEAD ON RADIO with Bob Kincaid
  
  Headon Radio with Bob Kincaid 6 PM Eastern, 3 PM Pacific, 2300 GMT. Duration: 3 hrs. To be part of Conversation Radio on Head-on Radio, call toll-free (877) 443-2366, or use our Liberal community line at 304-658-3333. Email bob [at] headonradio [dot] com during the show!
  • FRONT PORCH FRIDAY!!!!! Kick back on the front porch with Bob! Plus all the regulars chime in! Listen HERE (mp3) NOW! Amen to the White Rose Society! Donate to Head On HERE! And join Coal River Mountain Watch at www.crmw.net!
  

• YOUR GREEN NEWS REPORT
  
  The Green News Report with Brad Friedman & Desi Doyen: 6 minutes of green news, politics, analysis & snarky comment! BOOKMARK greennews.bradblog.com NOW!
  • 'Green News Report' - April 17, 2012 IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Obama calls for crackdown on Wall St. oil speculators --- cue rightwing freakout in 3..2..1..; Taxpayers save lives in latest tornado outbreaks; New rules for frackers; PLUS: Good news for millions who depend on water from the Himalayas.... All that and more in today's Green News Report!
  • IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see link): Surprise! Extra CO2 not good for plants after all; Solar energy breakthrough mimics photosynthesis to generate electricity; Los Angeles hailed as 'model of sustainaiblity'?; Grow your own biofuel from a cement kiln; No damage to bird populations from wind farms; Restoring Louisiana coast a national priority; Military conflict over Arctic resources?; Internal docs show dangers from new TX radioactive waste dump ... PLUS: Titanic director James Cameron: "We can see that iceberg ahead of us right now, but we can't turn" ... and much, MUCH more! ...
  • BRADCAST! 'The BradCast' on KPFK/Pacifica: 'What's the Problem With ALEC?' Today, The BRAD BLOG's legal analyst Ernie Canning joined me on KPFK/Pacifica Radio's The BradCast to respond to my question: "What's the problem with ALEC?"
  • BRADBLOG UPDATE: Guest Editorial Series by Ernest A. Canning - Disturbing Questions About Our Government and the So-Called 'War on Drugs' Blocking the Competition: Does Legalization Threaten Covert Funding for the CIA? - [PART 1 of 3] Protecting the Corporations: Saving the Prison Industrial Complex' Slave Labor Pool? - [PART 2 of 3] Failure is Success: The Disastrous 'War on Drugs' Working Just as Planned? - [PART 3 of 3]
  • Visit BradBlog.com to see who counts yer votes! Now up to 9,200+ Election Protection posts! Reference yer background/research at Who's Counting? too.
  

• The Peter B. Collins Show PODCAST!
  
  Listen at PeterBCollins.com!
  The Peter B. Collins Show covers American news and politics from the Left Coast. Veteran talk radio personality Peter B. Collins, based in San Francisco, delivers fresh interviews, commentary and analysis on a range of important topics, with views and voices you don’t often find in the corporate media.
  • Holiday Break and Website Changes
  
  To my valued listeners: We are making some changes to the website and our terms, effective in January. We will continue to offer free podcasts–my new daily news and commentary. Our in-depth interviews will be available for $1 per episode, or to subscribers who pay $5 per month or more. Loyal listeners who simply can’t afford it should send an email to peter@peterbcollins.com, as we will be offering a limited number of scholarships to our friends who are hurting during these tough times. More information will be posted as we complete the revisions. I’m grateful to each of you for listening and supporting this work, and hope that the new model will enable us to keep it going well into the future. All the best, -pbc
  • PBC Podcast 435 Boiling Frogs: Journalist Pepe Escobar on the Complex Layers and Players in Syria, Iran Preview Clip The inimitable Pepe Escobar of Asia Times returns with a fascinating report on Syria in this Boiling Frogs interview, co-hosted with Sibel Edmonds.
  • PBC Standard Podcast April 16, 2012 Boiling Frogs: James Bamford on NSA’s Massive New Server and Decryption Farm in Utah James Bamford, author of The Shadow Factory and top expert on the NSA, returns in this Boiling Frogs interview, co-hosted with Sibel Edmonds.
  • PBC Standard Podcast April 19, 2012 John Stauber on ALEC’s Pro-Gun, Pro-Corporate Legislative Mill; Anarchist scott crow’s Response to Sentencing of Killer Cops in New OrleansJohn Stauber, retired co-founder of Center for Media and Democracy, on ALEC’s role in fostering right-wing laws; Anarchist scott crow on his FBI harassment, New Orleans after Katrina, and more. From a live bradcast 4/18/12 on KPFK/Los Angeles.
  

• Ring of Fire Radio
  
  Find us at http://ringoffireradio.com and http://goleft.tv/ hosted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mike Papantonio and Sam Seder
  Ring of Fire Radio - GoLeft TV - Robert F. Kennedy, Mike Papantonio, Sam Seder - Politics, Commentary, and News.
  This Week on Ring of Fire! April 20, 2012
  • Documentary film director Robert Greenwald will be here to tell us about his new project – Koch Brothers Exposed.
  • Author Chris Mooney will take us on a spooky journey into the brain of the average Republican.
  • Attorney James Kauffman will tell us why the new JOBS Act could lead to massive amounts of financial fraud.
  • Andy Kroll from Mother Jones will talk to us about the companies that have had enough sense to ditch ALEC.
  • Attorney Henry Garrard will be joining us to talk about a faulty medical device that is ruining the lives of women across America, all because the FDA failed to do their job.
  • Syndicated columnist Karl Frisch joins us for a discussion on the Republican primary season.
  • And Nation contributing writer Ben Adler will tell us what Mitt Romney is doing to erase the extremism that has characterized this year’s Republican candidates.
  • VIDEO! Papantonio: The Billionaire GOP Puppeteers The Republican primary season has seen some pretty intense ups and downs for all of the candidates. At some point throughout the last year, almost every individual candidate has appeared to be a shoe-in for the nomination, only to see their leads erased after a few weeks. What’s causing this constant flux? The answer is simple – Money. Billionaires like Foster Freiss and Sheldon Adelson, and even the Koch Brothers keep doubling down their dollars on their candidate du jour, which results in the wild swings in popularity. And at the end of the day, these billionaires will have the final say in who gets the Republican nomination. Mike Papantonio talks about the billionaires who are pulling the GOP strings with best-selling author Thomas Frank.
  • VIDEO! Papantonio: The ALEC Exodus Mike Papantonio talks with Mother Jones’ reporter Andy Kroll about the continuing ALEC exodus, where brave companies are finally telling the secretive, right wing organization that they have had enough.
  • Support Those Who Support Progressive Media! 2011 has certainly been a great year for Ring of Fire, and we’ve had some great sponsors that have helped support the show throughout the year. We wanted to take the time to personally thank each and every one of them, and we encourage all of our listeners to take the time to support those who have support us.
  • Join our blog at www.ringoffireradio.com. You can now SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST by clicking on the "Podcast" tab at the top of the Ring of Fire blog. Please help support progressive radio by signing up!
  Ring of Fire Radio Ring of Fire, hosted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mike Papantonio and Sam Seder: Saturdays at 3 o’clock Eastern, rebroadcasts 8-11 et Sunday evenings on Chicago's Progressive Talk WCPT AM & FM and 4 pm et on Sirius/XM 167 featuring The PAP Attack! "We’ll bring you the stories that the mainstream media didn’t feel like reporting this week."
  

• Majority Report with Sam Seder Streaming LIVE weekdays 11:30 am et @ Majority.fm!
  
  • Cliff Schecter on SCOTUS v Obamacare, the Trayvon Martin smear campaign + more [03•30•12]
  • Chris Hayes, Our Failed Elites
  • Allison Kilkenny, Occupy Wall Street Preps May Day & Ed Wytkind, Transportation Bill
  • Ari Berman on SCOTUS & Sam in Vegas
  • 4/20 Cliff Schecter & A Vegas Casual Friday
  • MORE Podcast Interviews at majorityreport.official.fm!
  

• On the Edge with Max Keiser Podcasts and more @ MaxKeiser.com!
  
  "HI Y'ALL! Tell the people! Tell the people!"
  WHO IS MAX KEISER? Max Keiser is a financial expert, Prediction Markets analyst, inventor and filmmaker. He is the creator of the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX) the first Prediction Market. Max Keiser co-hosts "The Truth About Markets" on ResonanceFM 104.4 in London. He also produces and presents documentary films covering markets and finance for Al Jazeera’s "People & Power" series. Max Keiser started his career on Wall Street in 1983. He is the creator of KarmaBanque a site that enables activists to challenge corporate power.
  • VISIT PirateMyFilm.com!!! Crowd Funding for Pirates!
  • NEW! MaxKeiserTV on YouTube! MaxKeiserTV PLUS here is Max Keiser’s official Facebook page And here is the official Keiser Report page
  • Winner takes all: RT Arabic now crushing Al Jazeera with high ratings. “I think that this is part of the post-Aljazeera era that we have entered.” by maxkeiser - I think this explains the recent hit pieces by Al Jazeera and the New York Times against RT. They simply can’t compete anymore so they’ve resorted to slimeball tactics. Our show, “Keiser Report” is probably the most viewed business and finance show in the world with over 10 million viewers per week. Take that CNBC you ponce! READ The Angry Arab News Service: RT is gaining more viewership in the Arab world
  • Audio: The Financial Crisis and Who Rules America with Max Keiser, Stacy Herbert and Andy Stapanian Max & Stacy interviewed by Danny Schechter on his radio show today in NYC by maxkeiser - READ When the Abuse of Insider Information and Control Grows So Large as to Become the Market BTV jessescrossroadscafe
  • KEISER REPORT [KR276] Keiser Report – Eating Kamikaze Blowfish with Mrs. Watanabe and Peter Schiff!
  • KEISER REPORT [KR277] Keiser Report: Vicious Circle of Bankster Huddles We discuss huddles and cuddles with the Goombahs of Wall Street and the technical violations that cannot be called by name. In the second half of the show Max talks to Rolling Stone journalist, Matt Taibbi, about the Wall Street mafia, their small and big time rackets and the process of writing these crime stories for a wide audience.
  • KEISER REPORT [KR278] Keiser Report: Corpse of Economy & Interview with Alec Empire We discuss Dr Bernanke’s hologram and his real tsunami of money. In the second half of the show Max talks to Alec Empire of Atari Teenage Riot about copyright, Anonymous and free speech and the armed government goons sent to shakedown grannies.
  • ON THE EDGE On the Edge with Gonzalo Lira We interview Gonzalo Lira of the Strategic Planning Group.
  • THE TRUTH ABOUT MARKETS [TaM-359] Truth About Debtflation Download show HERE (mp3)
  • Donate to ResonanceFM here!
  

• ANTIWAR RADIO with Scott Horton
  LIVE (9-11am Pacific, 12pm - 2pm Eastern) Plenty of archives too!
  Listen at antiwar.com/radio
  • Eric Margolis April 18, 2012: Eric Margolis, internationally syndicated columnist and author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, discusses his article “Cuba Starts to Come Alive ;” hanging out with Ernest Hemingway in pre-revolutionary Cuba; why meaningful reform will be delayed until the “old fossil” hardliners die off; how to liberalize the Cuban economy and property rights while preventing US domination; Midwest agricultural exports not subject to the embargo; how Venezuela filled the Soviet void and saved Cuba from regressing to the pre-industrial age; the outsized political influence of Florida’s anti-Castro lobby; and Cuba’s institutionalized police state.
  • Arash Norouzi April 18, 2012: Arash Norouzi, artist and co-founder of The Mossadegh Project, discusses the Washington Post’s much-delayed admission that Iranian President Ahmadinejad didn’t say Israel should be “wiped off the map;” the context of Ahmadinejad’s speech and the origin of the quote – which compared Israel’s potential collapse to the fall of the USSR, the Shah’s regime and Saddam Hussein; putting an end to the seven year old anti-Iran talking point; and why we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for other media outlets to admit their mistake.
  • John Feffer April 20, 2012: John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, discusses his article “North Korea’s Failed Fireworks ;” the UN Security Council’s condemnation of their dual-use missiles (even Iran is able to launch satellites without comment); North Korea’s commitment to spending a big chunk of their meager GDP on a single failed satellite launch; the known unknowns about Kim Jong Un (except he likes basketball); how an increasingly worldly and foreign-educated North Korean elite could open up the “hermit kingdom;” and their blossoming IT and animation industries – aside from the usual mineral and energy extraction.
  • Many more interviews at Antiwar Radio!
  

• fauxnews
  • Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT)
  • Governor Mitch Daniels (R-IN)
  

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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