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- Democracy Now with Amy Goodman | TV Channel - M-F ^

MSNBC Countdown with Keith Olbermann ^

- America's #1 Populist Jim Hightower On Air ^

- Mark Fiore Animated Political Cartoons - Update each Friday ^

- Documentary - Bilderberg and the Obama Deception ^

Jewish TV Channel ^

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Top Stories in the Editor's In-Tray

Opinion | The BP Speech | Obama Still Refuses to Lead ^
Faced with the worst environmental disaster in history, Obama wants change. He just won't fight for it.
Alternet - Vy Zach Carter - Tuesday, June 15, 2010

There's no getting aroud it: President Barack Obama's speech on the BP oil disaster was an overwhelming disappointment. Despite confirming support for stronger regulation of offshore drilling and the development of a national clean energy agenda, Obama failed to offer any policies to actually prevent the kind of catastrophe currently playing out on the Gulf, and refused to coalesce around any specific measures to wean the United States off of fossil fuels. Faced with the gravest environmental catastrophe in American history, it is clear that Obama believes sweeping change is necessary. It is equally clear that he is unwilling to fight for that change.

Opinion | Obama and the BP Spill - A Command Gap? ^
Mother Jones - By David Corn, Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief - Tuesday, June 15, 2010

During his one press conference regarding the spill, Obama explained more than he led. And on his initial trips to the Gulf, Obama seemed to be listening more than telling—which does have its benefits. But pointing out tar balls on a beach is different than cracking a whip. It isn't very Churchillian.
On Meet the Press on Sunday, top Obama adviser David Axelrod said, "We're at a kind of inflection point in this saga." That seemed to be a not-too-subtle way of saying, we're aiming for a reset. Obama, he added, "wants to lay out the steps that we’re going to take from here to get through this crisis.” But Obama ought to do more than lay out plans. He should make it obvious that he's on top of this task. That could be accomplished just by clearly and forcibly stating tasks and goals he's established for Allen, the federal government, and BP. MSNBC's "First Read" newsletter notes, "If Team Obama can’t convince the public that it has command and control after these next three days, then it probably never will."

That may be too dire a quasi-prediction. But White House strategists do appear to have devised a crash course to ensure that Obama is seen as a commanding figure in this far-from-over crisis. Politicians, including Obama, are fond of telling voters that they are fighting for them. But it's better for a pol to show voters that he or she is doing so. Exhibiting rage, chewing out BP execs, inspecting damage on beaches—all of that is fine. But none of that is a substitute for the hard work of issuing strong and effective orders. And Americans (and even pundits) are entitled to evidence that the president is engaged in this manner. If it were obvious that Obama is in full command, his anger—or Spock-like lack thereof—would not be worth a single newspaper column.

Opinion | Obama Can't Stop the Oil Leak ^
Actng like politicians can solve all our problems just makes us look weak.

Wikileaks to release video of deadly US Afghan Attack ^
By legitgov - Thursday, June 17, 2010

Complete here
WikiLeaks to release video of deadly US Afghan attack 16 Jun 2010 The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks says it plans to release a secret military video of one of the deadliest US air strikes in Afghanistan in which scores of children are believed to have been killed. WikiLeaks said it fears it is under attack after the US authorities said they were searching for the site's founder, Julian Assange, following the arrest of a US soldier accused of leaking the Afghanistan video and another of a US attack in Baghdad in which civilians were killed.

The US War Addiction | Funding Enemies to Maintain Trillion Dollar Racket ^
Four ways to see the true drivers of current wars around the world.
Alternet - By David DeGraw - Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Alternet Editor's Note:
With so many problems in the USA, it's no easy job to single out a handful of the most important, priority issues. But the enormous pile of wasted money spent on wars and the military-industrial complex has to be right at the top. Not only is the money spent an enormous destructive waste, but there's also the question of opportunity cost; just a fraction of war money could make major improvements to health care, schools and universities, and our decaying public infrastructure. The release of the Pentagon's Quadrennal Defense Review indicates that Obama intends to spend even more on war. David DeGraw's article below sheds some light on the madness of war spending and the serious attempts made by the racketeers to make our wars self-perpetuating to keep the cash rolling in; infuriating as it is sickening.
A few recent news items help expose the true drivers of current wars around the world.

Wikileaks to release video of deadly US Afghan Attack ^
By legitgov - Thursday, June 17, 2010

Complete here
WikiLeaks to release video of deadly US Afghan attack 16 Jun 2010 The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks says it plans to release a secret military video of one of the deadliest US air strikes in Afghanistan in which scores of children are believed to have been killed. WikiLeaks said it fears it is under attack after the US authorities said they were searching for the site's founder, Julian Assange, following the arrest of a US soldier accused of leaking the Afghanistan video and another of a US attack in Baghdad in which civilians were killed.

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International News

- Real clear Politics Daily Rundown ^

The Trillion Dollar Afghan Battlefield ^
The New York Post - By Ralph Peters - Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Afghanistan just got its worst news since the Soviet invasion three decades ago: American geologists have charted as much as a trillion dollars' worth of mineral deposits in that tormented landscape.
Up to now, Afghanistan's internal factions and neighbors have been fighting over worthless dirt, Allah and opium. Assigning the battlefield a trillion-dollar value is not a prescription for reconciliation. Expect "The Beverly Hillbillies" scripted by Satan.

Even were Afghanistan at peace, its endemic corruption would generate a grabocracy -- a Nigeria, not a Norway. Throw in inherited hatreds and the appetites of its neighbors, and Afghanistan may end up more like eastern Congo, a playground for state-sanctioned murderers and looters.

Beyond reportedly vast deposits of rare minerals (lithium, etc.) essential to popular technologies, there's copper, cobalt, iron and gold in them thar hills. Afghanistan never before offered so much to fight over.

Instead of making life easier for our troops, the finds will make it harder to disengage. Washington will succumb to arguments that we need to preserve access to these strategic resources, even though it's far cheaper to buy them than to prolong a military protectorate. (US firms won't get the good contracts, anyway.)

Organisers to send more Gaza ships - Group invites media to inspect cargo - Turkish group IHH says next flotilla to sail late-July
Reuters - June 16, 2010

BRUSSELS - A Turkish pro-Palestinian group said on Wednesday it will send another aid flotilla to Gaza next month, again trying to break an Israeli blockade after its last convoy was the target of a deadly Israeli raid in May. The Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Aid (IHH) told members of the European Parliament it had assembled six ships for the next flotilla and put out an appeal for others to join.

Israel Looted Flotilla, Activists say ^
Gaza Freedom Flotilla activists say they were robbed of their cash and equipment by the Israeli military after their ships came under a deadly attack on May 31.
Press TV - Saturday, June 12, 2010

According to Gaza flotilla survivors speaking to Press TV, activists on board the aid convoy were robbed of an estimated 3.5 million dollars in cash and equipment by Israeli commandos. Hundreds of the campaigners have reported missing cash, laptops, phones and clothes after being released by Israel last week.

Turkey set to freeze ties with Israel ^
Alternet / reuters - Wednesday, june 16, 2010

ISTANBUL - A Turkish newspaper reported on Wednesday that Turkey would halt military cooperation with Israel and not send back the ambassador it withdrew after a deadly Israeli commando operation to stop a Gaza aid convoy. The Turkish government has said it is working on a road map for future ties with once close ally Israel and has created a committee to assess the legal dimensions of the May 31 operation in which nine pro-Palestinian Turkish activists were killed.

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United States Government
Obama's Call on Energy Bill Fails to Sway Congress ^

President Obama taps Michael Bromwich as watchdog for offshore oil drilling ^
The man appointed Tuesday by President Obama to oversee offshore oil drilling has no experience with oil and gas issues, but he has a reputation for cleaning up embattled organizations.
The Washington Post - By Juliet Eilperin, Staff Writer - Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Concern on Capitol Hill About Afghan War Grows ^
The Washington Post - By Karen de Young and Greg Jaffe - Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Pentagon decries bleak views on Afghan war ^
Alert.net / Reuters - By Phil Stewart and Adam Entous - Wednesday, June 16, 2010

sWASHINGTON - The Pentagon decried overly negative assessments of the Afghan war on Wednesday, telling Congress the conflict is a "roller coaster" of ups and downs but insisting progress is being made. President Barack Obama and U.S. military planners are on the defensive due to growing anxiety over a six-month-old strategy that lawmakers fear is failing to turn the tide in the costly, unpopular conflict.

Opinion | Robert's Supreme Court Sinks Campaign Reform ^
Consortium News - By Michael Winship - Friday, June 11, 2010

CN Editor’s Note: - U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts testified during his confirmation hearing that he had “no agenda” and viewed his powerful post like the job of a baseball umpire. “It's my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat,” he said. However, Roberts and his court seem to have at least one clear agenda, to enhance the power of money in American politics, and the majority has been eager to get into the game to advance that cause, as Michael Winship notes in this guest essay:

At a dinner party, an ever-so-proper aristocrat who had been at the British evacuation of Dunkirk 60 years ago, remained tight lipped despite intense questioning from the other guests about what he had seen there. Finally, he shuddered at the memory and exclaimed, "The noise, my dear, and the people!"

An apocryphal story, perhaps, but the high-falutin' Supreme Court of the United States has the same attitude toward America - this would be such a great country if it wasn't for all the noise and people.

Bad enough that last week the court narrowly redefined Miranda rights in such a way that seems to say that if one of those afore mentioned people is arrested and remains silent about their right to remain silent, anything you do say, if you say something, can and will be held against you. An interpretation as worthy of Lewis Carroll as it is George Orwell.

But of course such reasoning is not surprising from a court that ruled earlier this year that corporations are people, too - really BIG people - whether you're a major banking entity bilking the little guy for billions or a petrochemical giant obscenely filling the Gulf of Mexico with crude, like Rabelais' Gargantua, relieving himself from the towers of Notre Dame and drowning the city of Paris.

The Supreme Court's infamous Citizens United ruling cited free speech as its reason, giving corporate America the right to pour unlimited money into political and issues campaigns, lavishing cash on whichever candidates run fastest to do their bidding.

Wikileak Case Echoes Pentagon Papers ^
Consortium News - By Coleen Rowley and Robert Parry - Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Almost four decades after Defense Department insider Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers – thus exposing the lies that led the United States into the Vietnam War – another courageous “national security leaker” has stepped forward and now is facing retaliation similar to what the U.S. government tried to inflict on Ellsberg.

Army Intelligence Specialist Bradley Manning is alleged to have turned over a large volume of classified material about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to Wikileaks.org, including the recently posted U.S. military video showing American helicopters gunning down two Reuters journalists and about 10 other Iraqi men in 2007. Two children were also injured.

Opinion | Bailing Out Politicians Now? ^
Real clear Politics - By Pat Buchanan - Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Even lifelong Democratic pol Steny Hoyer, majority leader of the U.S. House, is balking at Barack Obama's latest bailout proposal. "I think there is spending fatigue," said Steny. "It's tough in both houses to get votes."

Hoyer was referring to Obama's weekend letter to Capitol Hill calling for a $50 billion bailout of state and city governments, to spare our elected politicians the pain of balancing their budgets with their own tax revenues. Obama is calling for a taxpayer rescue of the political class to which he belongs, to spare it the painful duty tens of thousands of business executives have had to perform. Private employees -- 25 million of whom are out of work, underemployed or have given up looking for jobs -- may be expendable, but government workers are not.

Army Doctors "Calibrated" Pain for CIA Interrogations ^
World Socialist Web Sites - By Ed Hightower - Saturday, June 12, 2010

First, do no harm. -- Hippocratic Oath
According to a recent report, the CIA’s Office of Medical Services (OMS) utilized doctors to carefully monitor the physical effects of torture techniques on prisoners.

The report, issued by the non-profit organization Physicians for Human Rights, relies on declassified government documents to demonstrate that the CIA and other agencies, including the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, engaged in human experimentation in violation of international law, domestic law and relevant ethical requirements for health care professionals

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Activism at the Ground Level

The only recognizable feature of hope is action.
-- Grace Paley

"The strength of a democracy is, as in nature, in the roots, not in the flamboyant leaves and flowers that wither and die after a couple of terms in public office."
-- Editor, homosapiens.ki

"Video | Arrest me, I'm a terrorist" ^
Maannews -

Bush's Torture Experiments Criticized ^
Consortium News - By Jason Leopold - June 7, 2010

Physicians for Human Rights has accused the Bush administration of using “war on terror” detainees as human “guinea pigs” to gauge the effectiveness of various torture techniques, a practice that has raised troubling comparisons to Nazi-era human experimentation.

PHR, an international doctors’ organization based in Massachusetts, called on President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and the U.S. Congress to launch investigations into the role of physicians and psychiatric experts in the monitoring and assessments of the brutal interrogations.

"Health professionals working for and on behalf of the CIA monitored the interrogations of detainees, collected and analyzed the results of [the] interrogations, and sought to derive generalizable inferences to be applied to subsequent interrogations," said the 27-page report, entitled "Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the 'Enhanced' Interrogation Program."

The report said the research and experimentation on detainees violate medical professional standards, the Geneva Conventions on treatment of detainees, and international law based on the Nuremberg principles that were embraced by the civilized world after it was revealed that the Nazis engaged in medical atrocities on prisoners during World War II.

“The essence of the ethical and legal protections for human subjects is that the subjects, especially vulnerable populations such as prisoners, must be treated with the dignity befitting human beings and not simply as experimental guinea pigs,” the PHR report says.

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Economy and Finance

- Bloomberg Economic News ^

Bloomberg Current Worldwide Financial News

Environment

Ducks Unlimitted | Oil Threatens Millions of Birds ^
CNN News - Staff - Friday, June11, 2010

Washington -- Oil could turn Gulf marshlands into open water and affect millions of migratory birds for generations, Tom Moorman, the senior science official and leader of the oil spill task force for Ducks Unlimited said Friday.

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Media and Journalism

Commentary | How the U.S. Corporate Media Got the Israel Flotilla Catastrophe So Wrong ^
AlterNet / By Arun Gupta - Wednesday, June16, 2010

Israel's official statements about the flotilla were terrible. But our media's treatment of the situation was just as bad.
Amid the continuing fallout over the deadly confrontation aboard the Gaza aid ship, Mavi Marmara, there is a critical historical lesson: There is only one real victim, and that is Israel. Sure, the “small, isolated” nation may appear to have been the aggressor, having surrounded a humanitarian convoy in international waters with naval assault boats and helicopters before storming in with heavily armed elite forces killing and wounding dozens of civilians, but it was acting in self-defense.

Appearances are deceiving because understanding Israel’s eternal victimhood requires the proper mindset. And once you have the proper mindset, there is no need for facts. Atlantic Monthly’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who has been hanging “around a lot of Israeli generals lately,” kindly advises us that there should be “no particular pain felt for the dead on the boat.” On the other hand, “There's real pain in Israel...pain at the humiliation of the flotilla raid, pain on behalf of the injured soldiers, and pain that the geniuses who run this country could not figure out a way to outsmart a bunch of Turkish Islamists and their useful idiot fellow travelers.”

Some might ask if we should feel “no particular pain” for the dead of Sept. 11. Or perhaps we should follow the lead of the White House – which sees no point in condemning Israel’s killing of civilians in the flotilla because “Nothing can bring them back” – and not condemn the architects of Sept. 11 or the Madrid and London bombings because that won’t bring back the dead. But that is the thinking of “idiot fellow travelers.”

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Religion and Philsophy

Analysis | The Troubling Mystery of the Book of "Revelation' ^
Consortium News - By the Rev. Howard Bess - Friday, June 11, 2010

CN Editor’s Note: - A core contradiction of Christianity is that the teachings of Jesus, one of history’s great pacifists, have been transformed into justification for unspeakable violence, much of it celebrated as righteous by those who consider themselves to be the most devoted followers of Jesus.

At the center of this contradiction sits Revelation, the final book of the New Testament, with its image of a vengeful Jesus overseeing a final battle that casts the wicked into a lake of fire, a signal to some Christian fundamentalists that killing “bad guys” is doing God’s work, a conundrum addressed by Rev. Howard Bess in this guest essay:

Every time there is a crisis in the United States or the world, real or imagined, a significant part of the Christian population takes on a renewed interest in the last book of the Bible, Revelation, with its vivid imagery of violent conflict between Good and Evil.

Like it or not, the book called Revelation is in the middle of our 21st century plate. We ignore it to our own peril.

However, in order to make sense of this literary enigma, a series of questions need to be addressed: Who wrote it? When did the author write it? Why did he write it? To whom did he write it?

And there’s perhaps the biggest question of all: how does one reconcile the judgmental and triumphal Jesus of Revelation with the gentle pacifist who preached the Sermon on the Mount and told his followers to love thy enemy?

The Book of Revelation says God will achieve his Kingdom on Earth through slaughter and bloodshed. Jesus taught exactly the opposite. According to Jesus, God’s Kingdom would be established by a servant people with the practice of unfettered love.

So, there is much mystery surrounding Revelation and how Christians should interpret its message. Let us begin. ^

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Violence - Civil and Governmental

Obama's 'Drone Killings Criticised ^
Consortium News - By Sherwood Ross - June 6, 2010

CN Editor’s Note: President Barack Obama has taken some pride in having expanded George W. Bush’s use of “predator drones” to kill suspected terrorists in various countries (even using the phrase as a punch line of a joke at the White House Correspondents Dinner).
But a new United Nations human rights report underscored some of the legal, moral and practical problems from this form of extrajudicial killing, as Sherwood Ross notes in this guest essay:

The United Nations independent investigator on extrajudicial killings wants countries that employ lethal drone attacks to first prove they have attempted to capture or incapacitate suspects.

The investigator, Philip Alston, issued a 29-page report last week that the New York Times termed “highly critical” of such attacks by the United States and, says the Associated Press, “called on countries to lay out rules and safeguards for carrying out the strikes.”

By going after terrorist networks, Alston warned, the U.S. example “could quickly lead to a situation in which dozens of countries carry out ‘competing drone attacks’ outside their borders against people ‘labeled as terrorists by one group or another,’” Charlie Savage reported for the Times.

“I’m particularly concerned that the United States seems oblivious to this fact when it asserts an ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe,” Alston is quoted as saying. “This expansive and open-ended interpretation of the right to self-defense goes a long way towards destroying the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the U.N. Charter.”

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Archive of Miscellany

- Dance Video | MICA | "Blame It On The Girls ^

- Musical Group Video | Neville Brothers - Yellow Moon ^

- Musicians mix Coldplay and Taylor Swift together - Enjoy ^

- Music Video | "Democracy Is Coming to the USA" - Leonard Cohen ^

- usic Video | Leonard Cohen | "First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin ^

- Music Video | Jordan Page - "Listen" | What If This Happened On Your Street? ^

- Music Video | Jordan Page - "Pendulum ^

- Music video - Neville Brothers performing "Fearless ^

- Video - The Arts of Peace vs Violence ^

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