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Another good one is MSF (Doctors Without Borders).

http://www.doctorswithoutborde...

Yes, and as the original Pro Publica article said, MSF collected money for Haitian operations, and then told people not to send any more money because they had enough money. They don't need money. Their main need is for competent personnel. When a crisis hits, MSF is swamped with volunteers, and they have to separate the competent volunteers with experience in crisis work, from the well-meaning inexperienced volunteers who will just create more problems.

When's the last time you heard a charity say they had enough money?

The Red Cross OTOH had meetings where the executives referred to it as a great fund-raising opportunity.

The Red Cross is a parking lot for incompetent, ideologically biased political appointees, like Elizabeth Dole, who among other things edited the AIDS education manuals to eliminate anything that would offend the Christian right, like homosexuality. http://www.thenation.com/artic... http://www.nytimes.com/1996/05...

OTOH, the staff below them includes a lot of dedicated, competent people, which is why they're always blowing the whistle to the press.

Sarbanes–Oxley Act

is a United States federal law that set new or enhanced standards for all U.S. public company boards, management and public accounting firms. There are also a number of provisions of the Act that also apply to privately held companies, for example the willful destruction of evidence to impede a Federal investigation.

You Can Be Prosecuted for Clearing Your Browser History

This past February the Supreme Court somewhat narrowed the scope of Sarbanes-Oxley in the case of Yates v. United States. The feds had charged a commercial fishing captain under the same record-destruction law for throwing a batch of undersized fish overboard after a federal agent had instructed him not to. The Court ruled that applying Sarbanes-Oxley to the dumping of fish was too far afield from the law’s original corporate-crime purpose. Another Tsarnaev associate, Azamat Tazhayakov, who helped throw Tsarnaev’s backpack full of fireworks into a dumpster, may see his conviction overturned because of the Yates decision.

Link.

In case anyone says RTFA, here it is for your enjoyment: http://www.thenation.com/artic...

By making drugs illegal, they become expensive and create a pool of dark money which can then be rerouted to:

1) Banks ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... )
2) Federal agencies and lobbyists ( http://www.thenation.com/artic... )
3) Three letter agencies ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... )
4) Local police ( http://my.chicagotribune.com/#... ) where traffic stops are now an entrepreneurial opportunity, as in "I had a thought about drugs, so give me all of your money."

that no one expected: http://www.homestead.afrc.af.m...
"For the individuals laying eyes on the base for the first time since the storm, reconciling what they were seeing seemed impossible.
"Those things that have been a part of your life for so long, I guess you take for granted that they're always going to be there," said Mr. Tom Miller, currently with the 482nd Maintenance Squadron and during Hurricane Andrew was the electrical shop chief with the 482nd Maintenance Squadron as an Air Reserve Technician. Mr. Miller was living in Cutler Bay at the time of the hurricane and weathered the storm in St. Petersburg. He's been a member of the base since 1968.
"The most vivid memories I have are when I first went back to where I lived and when I first went back to the base because that was where I lived and worked," he said. "Those are the things that you get some strength from, and then to come back and see that area was completely devastated, that really hits you. The devastation seemed insurmountable." ...
For those who've seen both the before and after of the storm, 20 years means different things to different people. "Sometimes it feels like it was 200 years ago and then other times it feels like it was last week," said Miller. "When I came back on base after the storm, a place where I had worked for 20 years, I just thought, 'what's the answer for this?'; 'where do we even start?' We learned a big lesson: these things can change people's lives overnight. The base has come back, and I'm glad it did.""

For another example, one week my mother was living in a nice house and was a smiling teenager. The next week, her home town looked like this due to WWII fighting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Or, as Howard Zinn said:
http://www.thenation.com/artic...
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?
I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.
There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. ..."

See also my other comment to a different story here on different sorts of existential societal risks and possible solutions: http://news.slashdot.org/comme...

Humans these days have been so blessed with so much including a relatively mild climate the past few centuries compared to the past. It is only because of that blessing that our thoughts can focus on internal conflicts of human vs. human instead of the greater eternal conflict of human vs. a capricious environment. We need to invest more in dealing with such environmental existential risks.

It is just foolish, even laughable, that the USA can, say, spend US$1 trillion a year or more on the US military including incurred future costs related to human political conflicts (many of which the USA helped create) while our infrastructure falls apart and we don't invest in, say, protecting our power grid from solar flares, or that we don't scale our medical systems to deal with possible pandemics, or we don't move to indoor or even underground agriculture faster to get it

Well the message is all the same, legalities or not: we are the NFL, a massive, mega-billion dollar, tax-exempt corporation with the government deep and firm in our pockets. If we say you've done something wrong and bring out our army of lawyers to intimidate you, you will be intimidated, make no mistake about that. You may therefore split hairs all you like; we can chop heads and get away with it.

On balance, anyway, I will join Zirin in rooting for Seattle because of what they can make socially of another victory. But I won't be watching.

It was no big secret. A lot of the Republican loudmouths were bragging about it.

Some of the Republican leadership even apologized for it: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com...

Clinton's welfare reform was a disaster for the poor, and indirectly for the rest of the country.

http://billmoyers.com/2014/05/...

http://www.thenation.com/blog/...

I remember the Reagan presidency. Reagan made a deal with the Soviets to let the Soviet "Jews" emigrate. I knew a lot of Soviet Jews. They had to claim that they had suffered anti-Semitism and were victims in order to immigrate here as refugees. They had lawyers and fixers who would copy the identical stories of anti-Semitism for new immigrants and hand them into the INS. They would fabricate their stories. It was a scam. A lot of them weren't even Jewish; they forged documents. They immediately got welfare, housing, health care, jobs, vocational training programs, and free college tuition. They were getting more benefits than I could get. It's no wonder they liked capitalism so much. For them, capitalism was a series of handouts that they didn't have to work for. That's welfare, Reagan style.

I know a black woman who worked for the welfare department, and she was annoyed at the way the Soviet Jews would come in and act as if they were entitled to welfare. It was easier for them to get welfare than native Americans. A lot of them turned out to be criminals, and you can still read stories in the New York Times and Daily News about Russian Jews from that immigration who got caught in all kinds of illegal schemes, particularly welfare and Medicaid/Medicare fraud.

The Russian immigrants had several magazines, the most popular of which was Metropol. I once talked to the editor of Metropol. He said that as soon as they became citizens, the Russian immigrants registered Republican and voted for Ronald Reagan. He said once in the while he would get a letter saying, "Why don't we vote for Democrats," but no more than 1 in 100. It was the most brazen quid pro quo. Reagan gave them handouts, and in return they voted solid Republican. Giuliani did the same thing. This is what the Republicans accuse Obama of doing. https://danieljmitchell.files....

The same thing happened to the Cubans in Miami. And all the other favored minority immigrants.

Generally, the ACLU does in meat-space what the EFF does in cyberspace.

BS. Once, a decade ago, I donated enough to ACLU to warrant sending me a membership card. Still have it somewhere. Guess what? 2 weeks later an invitation to subscribe to a disgusting far-left magazine showed up, sent to the same "tagged" address as what I gave the ACLU. It had a picture of the then-President in shackles on it — showing today's President that way would've been a national scandal.

Do you suppose, the USSR or Cuba, that American Left love some much, were any better on LGBT rights, than the US is today?

Having aligned themselves so solidly with the Left — and outright communists among them — indeed, having concentrated on the nonsense like "LGBT rights", they've lost the hearts and minds of the rest of us...

Generally, the ACLU does in meat-space what the EFF does in cyberspace.

BS. Once, a decade ago, I donated enough to ACLU to warrant sending me a membership card. Still have it somewhere. Guess what? 2 weeks later an invitation to subscribe to a disgusting far-left magazine showed up, sent to the same "tagged" address as what I gave the ACLU. It had a picture of the then-President in shackles on it — showing today's President that way would've been a national scandal.

Do you suppose, the USSR or Cuba, that American Left love some much, were any better on LGBT rights, than the US is today?

Having aligned themselves so solidly with the Left — and outright communists among them — indeed, having concentrated on the nonsense like "LGBT rights", they've lost the hearts and minds of the rest of us...

It is easy enough to get a big public outcry for any new nuclear plant, irrespective of its safety.

Yes including pro bono activists who will provide materials, come to your town and help organize opposition. It was not always this way.

First an interesting side trip. Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring introduced Americans to the vision of a dead planet, but it was actually Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb that really set the stage for doomsday thinking. This bestseller (200 million copies) was not for everyone, but the predictions were vivid and awful. In hindsight, it grossly underestimated our ability to scale agriculture and feed more people over time, and (foolishly) exaggerated the scenario where so-called '3rd world' women living in poverty and hunger will persist in having 5+ children. Hans Rosling demonstrates nicely that it is excess child mortality (not family beliefs) that contributes to this, and once health improves women desire (on average 2-3.5) children.

But if you're an American intellectual in 1968, you would have gotten a sense of foreboding that people would soon overrun the Earth. Mostly dem Indiaafricachina people

In 1972 the UN Club of Rome commissioned a report from MIT, "Limits to Growth" (full text). It sold 12 million copies in 37 languages. This is an amazing piece of work, one of the first uses of computerized models. In it some of the doomsday assumptions made in Population Bomb was deftly woven with projections of food and energy resources to create projections. It also was the first popularized presentation that CO2 would directly increase global temperature.

The Internet has a lot of tinfoil crap floating around about Club of Rome (and yes they are creepy) but it helps rationally not think of Limits to Growth as some secret Illuminati document. It was merely a widely bestselling book at the time. It even "recommended" the adoption of nuclear energy.

I put recommended in scare-quotes because that's exactly what they did. Let's all turn to page 73. Nuclear will solve CO2... that's great. But then they launch into a warning about waste heat from nuclear plants disrupting aquatic life, which is a purely local and manageable phenomenon, why nuclear plants are sited on rivers not lakes. Swans love it. They then go full frontal thermodynamics on cities themselves as emitters of heat, as if we're living in a Dyson Sphere and this is something we should be worrying about today Interspersed with graphs of ever-escalating nuclear waste. Which --- according to a propaganda rule I call "The Frightened Animals of Bambi's Forest Flee In Terror" -- could never be somehow contained, burned completely, or managed properly (by default!). A bit on industrial and municipal pollution, lead is mentioned, glad that shit was stopped, then... we're off into a evisceration of DDT. Yes, even modern agriculture ills.

It's easy to imagine a young ~35 Jane Fonda scared to death by all this. You have to realize that the popular doomsday bestseller with its Malthusian warnings is a relatively recent phenomenon. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries industrial progress yielded direct and awe-inspiring improvements to life. Go ahead, flick a light on and run water from the tap, flush the toilet. I'll wait. By 1970 in the US this blessed infrastructure had become all but transparent.

Leaving us the time and luxury to live in the present. And develop new ideas such as the ugly brand of environmentalis

Once again I have the "obsessed with false accusations of rape" reality denier. Because you are a person who believes in an a world where women are serial liars, and you're inured to observational evidence about it by some mental block I don't get.

But here. Here's how wrong you are about false rape accusations.

False accusations do exist but those 2-5% of cases are for our justice system to handle, and not a widespread systemic issue(and there's all sorts of clues as to when an accusation is made up).

If "peak oil" was in 2008 you better tell the Lefties at The Nation, they apparently didn't get the memo

Peak Oil Is Dead. Long Live Peak Oil!

A note to the Guardian might be helpful as well.

We were wrong on peak oil. There's enough to fry us all

Some of us made vague predictions, others were more specific. In all cases we were wrong. In 1975 MK Hubbert, a geoscientist working for Shell who had correctly predicted the decline in US oil production, suggested that global supplies could peak in 1995. In 1997 the petroleum geologist Colin Campbell estimated that it would happen before 2010. In 2003 the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes said he was "99% confident" that peak oil would occur in 2004. In 2004, the Texas tycoon T Boone Pickens predicted that "never again will we pump more than 82m barrels" per day of liquid fuels. (Average daily supply in May 2012 was 91m.) In 2005 the investment banker Matthew Simmons maintained that "Saudi Arabia cannot materially grow its oil production". (Since then its output has risen from 9m barrels a day to 10m, and it has another 1.5m in spare capacity.)

Peak oil hasn't happened, and it's unlikely to happen for a very long time.

The latest recession was never called the mancession.

How is this rated informative? It is plain wrong.

You could find the same few examples (among many others) with a simple Google search, but since that is obviously too much work ...

Mancession Definition
The Mancession
Thanks to the “mancession,” metrosexuals have become “manfluencers”
One Mancession Later, Are Women Really Victors in the New Economy?
Economy: The Man-cession and the He-covery
It's Not Just a Recession. It's a Mancession!

Israel claims that it is merely exercising its right to self-defense and that Gaza is no longer occupied. Here’s what you need to know about these talking points and more.

Israel has killed almost 800 Palestinians in the past twenty-one days in the Gaza Strip alone; its onslaught continues. The UN estimates that more than 74 percent of those killed are civilians. That is to be expected in a population of 1.8 million where the number of Hamas members is approximately 15,000. Israel does not deny that it killed those Palestinians using modern aerial technology and precise weaponry courtesy of the world’s only superpower. In fact, it does not even deny that they are civilians.

Israel’s propaganda machine, however, insists that these Palestinians wanted to die (“culture of martyrdom”), staged their own death (“telegenically dead”) or were the tragic victims of Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes (“human shielding”). In all instances, the military power is blaming the victims for their own deaths, accusing them of devaluing life and attributing this disregard to cultural bankruptcy. In effect, Israel—along with uncritical mainstream media that unquestionably accept this discourse—dehumanizes Palestinians, deprives them even of their victimhood and legitimizes egregious human rights and legal violations.

This is not the first time. The gruesome images of decapitated children’s bodies and stolen innocence on Gaza’s shores are a dreadful repeat of Israel’s assault on Gaza in November 2012 and winter 2008–09. Not only are the military tactics the same but so too are the public relations efforts and the faulty legal arguments that underpin the attacks. Mainstream media news anchors are inexplicably accepting these arguments as fact.

Below I address five of Israel’s recurring talking points. I hope this proves useful to newsmakers.

1) Israel is exercising its right to self-defense.

As the occupying power of the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Territories more broadly, Israel has an obligation and a duty to protect the civilians under its occupation. It governs by military and law enforcement authority to maintain order, protect itself and protect the civilian population under its occupation. It cannot simultaneously occupy the territory, thus usurping the self-governing powers that would otherwise belong to Palestinians, and declare war upon them. These contradictory policies (occupying a land and then declaring war on it) make the Palestinian population doubly vulnerable.

The precarious and unstable conditions in the Gaza Strip from which Palestinians suffer are Israel’s responsibility. Israel argues that it can invoke the right to self-defense under international law as defined in Article 51 of the UN Charter. The International Court of Justice, however, rejected this faulty legal interpretation in its 2004 Advisory Opinion. The ICJ explained that an armed attack that would trigger Article 51 must be attributable to a sovereign state, but the armed attacks by Palestinians emerge from within Israel’s jurisdictional control. Israel

Israel claims that it is merely exercising its right to self-defense and that Gaza is no longer occupied. Here’s what you need to know about these talking points and more.

Israel has killed almost 800 Palestinians in the past twenty-one days in the Gaza Strip alone; its onslaught continues. The UN estimates that more than 74 percent of those killed are civilians. That is to be expected in a population of 1.8 million where the number of Hamas members is approximately 15,000. Israel does not deny that it killed those Palestinians using modern aerial technology and precise weaponry courtesy of the world’s only superpower. In fact, it does not even deny that they are civilians.

Israel’s propaganda machine, however, insists that these Palestinians wanted to die (“culture of martyrdom”), staged their own death (“telegenically dead”) or were the tragic victims of Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes (“human shielding”). In all instances, the military power is blaming the victims for their own deaths, accusing them of devaluing life and attributing this disregard to cultural bankruptcy. In effect, Israel—along with uncritical mainstream media that unquestionably accept this discourse—dehumanizes Palestinians, deprives them even of their victimhood and legitimizes egregious human rights and legal violations.

This is not the first time. The gruesome images of decapitated children’s bodies and stolen innocence on Gaza’s shores are a dreadful repeat of Israel’s assault on Gaza in November 2012 and winter 2008–09. Not only are the military tactics the same but so too are the public relations efforts and the faulty legal arguments that underpin the attacks. Mainstream media news anchors are inexplicably accepting these arguments as fact.

Below I address five of Israel’s recurring talking points. I hope this proves useful to newsmakers.

1) Israel is exercising its right to self-defense.

As the occupying power of the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Territories more broadly, Israel has an obligation and a duty to protect the civilians under its occupation. It governs by military and law enforcement authority to maintain order, protect itself and protect the civilian population under its occupation. It cannot simultaneously occupy the territory, thus usurping the self-governing powers that would otherwise belong to Palestinians, and declare war upon them. These contradictory policies (occupying a land and then declaring war on it) make the Palestinian population doubly vulnerable.

The precarious and unstable conditions in the Gaza Strip from which Palestinians suffer are Israel’s responsibility. Israel argues that it can invoke the right to self-defense under international law as defined in Article 51 of the UN Charter. The International Court of Justice, however, rejected this faulty legal interpretation in its 2004 Advisory Opinion. The ICJ explained that an armed attack that would trigger Article 51 must be attributable to a sovereign state, but the armed attacks by Palestinians emerge from within Israel’s jurisdictional control. Israel does have the right to

Why did Obama personally intervene to keep a Yemeni journalist brutalized and imprisoned for daring to report on U.S. bombings that kill innocent people? Why was an Al Jazeera office bombed by Bush? Why does anyone think that the U.S. would hesitate to take out Snowden if it's willing to murder 16 year olds based on who the kids father was?

You're an idiot. There was a recent article on how Columbia fired two of its eminent public intellectuals. Why? For not bringing in enough grant money. Not because they didn't publish, or not because they weren't any good. No, because they weren't politically savvy enough to bring in grant money.

Both Vance and Hopper had 30 and 26 years at Columbia respectively, and highly respected in their fields. They were let go because the expectation was that they bring in ~80% of their income from outside grants. Not doing research, not publishing, but bringing in *money*. No wonder people like Grigori Perelman hate the current academia.

You aren't doing science then, you are rewarding those that can *market* their subjects well.

But in reality, this should be welcomed.

Really? If you'd read the piece, you will notice that subjects with seemingly little application are the ones that get little to not attention. Because they are neither utilitarian nor do they make them feel good.

Take the Fourier transform for instance -- once upon a time, it would have been considered pure math, but today, DSP wouldn't exist without it. To focus only on those that *we* think are utilitarian can be extremely myopic, not to mention downright arrogant.

This is how science got funded during its first centuries as a discipline when many of the giants of science did their work.

That is downright silly. Just because something was done a certain way is not an argument for not using a better way. Using patrons has always been problematic, because patrons always favored things that they liked, with a vested interest.

If we still did things the way they were done, democracy wouldn't exist. As a concept, it is downright radical and new - giving power to the people?! Imagine that!

Similarly, the idea that people would fund science for the common good is just as radical, and going back to having patrons is pushing us back to the dark ages. We should be moving forward, not backward.

"The data dump from the HBGary hack was so vast that no one person could sort through it alone. So Brown decided to crowdsource the effort. He created a wiki page, called it ProjectPM, and invited other investigative journalists to join in" ..

"Today, Brown is in prison and ProjectPM is under increased scrutiny by the DOJ, even as its work has ground to a halt. In March, the DOJ served the domain hosting service CloudFlare with a subpoena for all records on the ProjectPM website, and in particular asked for the IP addresses of everyone who had accessed and contributed to ProjectPM, describing it as a “forum” through which Brown and others would “engage in, encourage, or facilitate the commission of criminal conduct online.” The message was clear: Anyone else who looks into this matter does so at their grave peril." thenation.com

Thanks for confirming, I figured as much :-)

I'll take a look, just as soon as I'm not supposed to be working. If you like this kind of demolishing you might find Naomi's Klein piece here worthwhile. (I have been bashed before for linking to the Nation, but nevermind).

Global warming *isn't* a good term, which is why climate change is better. Paradoxically, climate change is "softer" on the ears, which is why Frank Luntz selected this weasal-phrase for his AGW misinformation manifesto which was spread around the GOP leadership and Fox. Luntz, today, believes that AGW is real, and has a head-ache. But as smart as the guy is, he still wants to blame Obama squarely for the partisan madness we see today. A luntz is the protege of Gingrich, so that goes to show how far the mind lawyers information so that we can make ourselves out to be the good guy. My prognosis is that Luntz' head-ache will start to clear when he leaves politics behind, or comes clean with himself over his particular role in polticla silly-buggers we see today.

I suspect the those pesky real journalists probably don't enough about the tech side of things to ask the questions they really need to be asking in order to debunk this.

The 60 Minutes piece has already been trashed by multiple outlets:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/12/60-minutes-hearts-the-nsa.html

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/16/nsa-surveillance-60-minutes-cbs-facts

http://www.thewire.com/national/2013/12/60-minutes-nsa-good-snowden-bad/356174/

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/why-did-em-60-minutes-em-let-the-head-of-the-nsa-fool-its-audience/282377/

http://www.thenation.com/blog/177598/sad-decline-60-minutes-continues-weeks-nsa-whitewash

1. Can you sight a case of right-wingers cutting social services, causing mentally ill people to be loose on the streets?

http://www.thenation.com/blog/176745/suicide-rate-climbs-30-percent-kansas-government-slashes-mental-health-budgets#

In Kansas, the government is the Republicans.
There's no one else the blame can be shifted to.

In the two cases you bring up, how did you (and everyone else) realize that the reported government claims weren't facts?

Foreign press. Until the POTUS calls up the friendly neighborhood dictator and has the reporter imprisoned, anyway. You also seem to think this is all-or-nothing. Would you say that the existence of microblogs in China and privately owned (but still self-censoring) media outlets mean that China doesn't have a lapdog media? I'm guessing not.

There has been various accusations that Snowden leaked the documents to Russia, willingly or unwillingly. This should (in a perfect world) make those accusations less valid. Also, this shows against that Snowden is damn brave and clever - it must have been very tempting to hold on to the documents, which he paid so dearly for.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/174983/did-russia-china-harvest-snowdens-secrets#

The reasons I want to eliminate the electoral college are:

1. Past history of Presidents elected despite not having a plurality of votes.
2. Proposal by Rance Priebus describing a method to corrupt the election process by tying electoral college votes to gerrymandered congressional districts.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/172191/rncs-priebus-proposes-rig-electoral-college-so-losing-republicans-can-win#

There are huge problems with the current gerrymandering system. For example, we have a Republican majority in Congress despite the fact that 55% of the votes for Congressmen in the last election were for Democrats. In large part the current shutdown and threats on not raising the debt limit devolve to one thing - the current system of gerrymandering.

It makes a complete mockery of the idea of one man, one vote.

I'll just leave this here.

Thats the real world equivalent to the xkcd strip. The problem is, knowing the trend, going in the streets with something like that will surely put you in jail, for years. If they put in jail, for a decade, for scribbling anti-bank messages in sidewalks with washable chalks this will be harder. In fact, is a hack attempt, you could get a century in prison for that kind of things. Meanwhile, you keep the money and walk free, even if caught screwing the entire world's economy. In their view, law needs justice like a fish needs a bicycle.

Can you read Russia Today with a straight face?
Piss is washable. If you piss on a sidewalk, that's vandalism, period.

You can't piss your thoughts out in giant letters on a sidewalk and call it freedom of speech.

Thats the real world equivalent to the xkcd strip. The problem is, knowing the trend, going in the streets with something like that will surely put you in jail, for years. If they put in jail, for a decade, for scribbling anti-bank messages in sidewalks with washable chalks this will be harder. In fact, is a hack attempt, you could get a century in prison for that kind of things. Meanwhile, you keep the money and walk free, even if caught screwing the entire world's economy. In their view, law needs justice like a fish needs a bicycle.

Many Wal Mart employees make less than $10 an hour. They're on strike for a reason.

Stop blaming Obama for everything.

He inherited this mess and is doing the best he can, with Congress tying his hands.

Obama doesn't personally OK everything the Department of Justice does, he doesn't have the time to do that!

His time is spend trying to fix this country despite a Congress which is trying to block him for almost everything he is trying to accomplish, often due to hateful reasons that have no place in civilized society.

Obama has done a LOT to make gov't more accessible (White House Android app, We The People petitions, etc). Stop bashing Obama, remember Clinton signed the DMCA and Bush the 2nd signed the Patriot Act, etc, etc.

So many hours of rebuttal required there, Frank. Let's choose just one.

President Obama, Congress passes bill to extend Patriot Act despite Sen. Rand Paul delay

Obama Signs Last-Minute Patriot Act Extension

Obama Takes Wrong Turn on Civil Liberties, Adopting Worse Patriot Act Stance Than GOP

But in the administration's defense, I'm sure you got your Obama phone, Frank.

Chavez has done a lot of good for his country and for getting Latin America out from under the thumb of US domination, he was loved by many, but yes embalming seems a bit over the top, I can see no reason to do this. Keep the spirit of what he was trying to achieve alive, this will be a much better way to honor his memory than by putting his body on display.

Oh and for anyone interested in an in-depth and more balanced story about Chavez than the sound-byte propaganda put out by the mainstream media, read this excellent article. You may also be interested in watching this with Amy Goodman and Democracy Now!

That one favors the GOP so it's evil. No really, the wonkish left has been in a panic recently over a proposal to do just that in a few of the swing states (Pennsylvania and Ohio, I think).

The National Popular Vote is assumed to favor the Democrats so it's all sweetness and light. Unless you're a Republican, where it's an obvious abrogation of the Founder's federalism.

Oh yes .... Africa! http://www.thenation.com/article/why-africa-doesnt-want-foreign-aid#

The Gingrich congress doubled earmarks and perfected obstrucionism.

Given that this is a national election, it's politic to pander to the undecided voters, not the base. Didn't you get the memo?

The alternate theory is that the election turns on getting your base to show up and vote while actively discouraging the other guy's base from voting. So in that kind of environment, you'd pander to the frothing morons in your party, and disenfranchise the other party's voters by:
- passing laws requiring them to travel hundreds of miles and pay a fee to get an ID needed to vote,
- putting up billboards in neighborhoods that tend to vote for the other guy reminding them that attempted voter fraud will result in 3 years of jail time, or
- organizing groups of volunteers to stand around the precincts where these voters (who all seem to be a particular color, for some reason) are likely to be and challenge anyone they think is fraudulent.

Of course, to actually do any of those things would be un-American, so I'm sure no major political group would do that.

Do you really believe that the US is falling apart?

Yes. A fundamental part of what has made American society great has changed over the last 40 years - upward mobility. Rates of upward mobility have plummetted. Our system of meritocracy has become just another form of aristocracy where the rich are able to give their kids the skills to compete on merit but the children of the poor are left out - no SAT prep, no AP courses, no extra-curricular activities, etc.

What has followed is a false equivalence that success on the narrow scales of our meritocracy (such as standardized testing, high GPAs and ultimately the accumulation of wealth) makes people good decision makers in more broader, complicated areas -- that the expertise which has served a person well enough to make millions on wall-street is also going to make their opionions on things like social policy wise and considered.

Our current president hasn't invaded anyone that I know of.

Maybe you didn't hear of Yemen? He also stepped up military operations in Pakistan, and increased CIA involvement in Somalia

Libya we did help but it was more with logistics.

From wikipedia

The United States has deployed a naval force of 11 ships, including the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge, the amphibious transport dock USS Ponce, the guided-missile destroyers USS Barry and USS Stout, the nuclear attack submarines USS Providence and USS Scranton, the cruise missile submarine USS Florida and the amphibious command ship USS Mount Whitney. Additionally, A-10 ground-attack aircraft, B-2 stealth bombers, AV-8B Harrier II jump-jets, EA-18 electronic warfare aircraft, and both F-15 and F-16 fighters have been involved in action over Libya. U-2 reconnaissance aircraft are stationed on Cyprus. On 18 March, two AC-130Us arrived at RAF Mildenhall as well as additional tanker aircraft. On 24 March 2 E-8Cs operated from Naval Station Rota Spain, which indicates an increase of ground attacks. An undisclosed number of CIA operatives are said to be in Libya to gather intelligence for airstrikes and make contacts with rebels. The US also began using MQ-1 Predator UAVs to strike targets in Libya on 23 April.

A bit more than just logistics.

The last president did invade a country with no reason (Iraq) but he was promptly removed from office

You do remember that we invaded Iraq before Bush's second term right?

Thank the drug war and the war on terror for the militarization of the police.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/164695/former-seattle-police-chief-ows-reveals-militarization-our-police-forces

How is this self-defeating? Because they're willing to black-out the 114th most popular website, according to Alexa international rankings, probably losing plenty of advert revenue, and probably against the wishes of their parent company, they are "ineffectual." Seriously? Sorry if I don't find the words of some Slashdot goon armchair reporting on something he knows nothing about to be entirely credible. And there's a difference between Slashdot goons and Slashdot members - you all know who you are. I don't like to defend Reddit, and I understand a lot of the criticism they receive for various annoying qualities that any popular community seems to attract, but operations they put together seem to have a real effect on the real world. Take the moderately successful recent GoDaddy boycott for example, or $500,000 raised to for the anti-SOPA candidate Rob Zerban against the highest ranking incumbent congressman that can be defeated this year, or their assistance in organizing the Occupy movement, or many other examples. Just go to /r/politics and sort by top stories in the last year or month or whatever. Anyway, I would definitely not call them "ineffectual," nor would I say that a blackout measure is "self-defeating," nor would I personally use contrarian editorial language in what is supposed to be an article summary.

Good timing, just came across this piece today:

Nuclear Dead End: It's the Economics, Stupid | The Nation

It outlines how expensive nuclear is - it's not cheap. From the building of the plant, to the insurance (no private options, they won't touch it, always costs the public), and of course waste disposal and storage - when you add up the total costs, the $/kw is pretty pitiful, even compared to emerging technologies.

This doesn't factor in that uranium is a limited resource (and pretty harmful for those in the industry), and that all this time, energy and money directed towards researching, developing and building nuclear plants also directs money, time and energy away from sustainable, safe and economical alternatives.

When you really dig into the matter, nuclear really doesn't make much sense from any angle.

Whoops screwed up the link: here it is

Sorry, you still screwed it up :)

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here it is

I mean, when exactly did campus police start dressing like extras from an S&M production of The Empire Strikes Back, anyway?

Here's an interesting article by Norm Stamper, Seattle Police Chief during the WTO protests in 1999 ("Battle in Seattle"). Since then, he has professed great regret for his reaction and has unequivocally apologized for his orders and the actions of the police force. Anyway, he addresses the increasing militarization of the police in the US and explains why it is such a bad idea to stop being part of the community and start being the "them", as in oppressors, at least with respect to solving day to day crimes that actually harm citizens.

http://www.thenation.com/article/164501/paramilitary-policing-seattle-occupy-wall-street

How come my posts are supported by actual facts and your posts are only supported by your vivid fantasies?

http://www.thenation.com/article/159997/nuclear-dead-end-its-economics-stupid

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/radioactive-corporate-welfare/

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/nuclear-renaissance-is-short-on-largess/

http://www.economist.com/node/14859289

http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv15n1/reg15n1-rothwell.html

Terrestrial nuclear fission plants cannot compete in the marketplace. They are a handout of government money to favored corporations.

Oh, you're right. They don't object to people being allowed to say anything, just to them being heard. Not the the democrats are any better.

People get turned away. http://www.thenation.com/article/counting-census

Yea, I know: http://www.thenation.com/article/162104/harvard-business-school-nitin-nohria-pushes-reforms-bankrupt-culture

This is very interesting because it means that S&P is making a purely political assessment rather than measuring the outcomes. While their observations are correct they are effectively stating that how we got to an outcome is more important than the outcome itself. The moralist in me agrees that the process is important, but the economist in me is completely indifferent.

I can't help but to think that this might more to do with S&P flexing its muscle with the government and staking a position in the court of public opinion. There have been much back and forth between S&P and the government since the 2008 ratings debacle.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/162555/it-time-downgrade-rating-agencies