God Bless CorpMerikka,
Brand that I love,
Stand Behind Her,
and Bribe Her,
Through our Plight
Money's Might
Stands Above.
From the Wall Street
to the Walmart
to the Big Banks
Lined with Greed.
God Bless CorpMerrikka.
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Look at it this way: we dodged that bullet for 72 years. But it's all over now.
Like many left-wing commentators, Robert Reich hasn't yet learned that an Obama promise is One Thing, an Obama action is Something Else. Like, lots of one and none of the other. A list of the promises Obama has made and then ignored or quotes from rousing speeches he's made which he has simply turned around and either ignored or actually violated would be tedious. Pretty much everything he said during the campaign and after his election has been the opposite of what he's done when the time came. Yet Reich seems to have accepted without question that because of Scvott brown, Obama will now be forced to go after the banks and that therefore his recent populist-style speeches are a genuine sign of what we can expect.
Sure they are.
More than 40 sites across Iraq are contaminated with high levels or radiation and dioxins, with three decades of war and neglect having left environmental ruin in large parts of the country, an official Iraqi study has found.
Areas in and near Iraq's largest towns and cities, including Najaf, Basra and Falluja, account for around 25% of the contaminated sites, which appear to coincide with communities that have seen increased rates of cancer and birth defects over the past five years. The joint study by the environment, health and science ministries found that scrap metal yards in and around Baghdad and Basra contain high levels of ionising radiation, which is thought to be a legacy of depleted uranium used in munitions during the first Gulf war and since the 2003 invasion. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/22/iraq-nuclear-contaminated-sites
Imagine how Americans would feel if our country was invaded and devastated by ecological and environmental disasters and people would suffer and die slowly...painfully. Why should Iraqi's feel any differently?
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Introducing This Week in Crazy "In his remarkably undistinguished 20-year stint as a Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas has rarely called attention to himself for original jurisprudential thinking. But if Thomas had had his way with Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, in which the court decided this week to remove critically important limits on campaign financing, an already horrible decision would have been made far, far worse. Crazy worse. ... Thomas went along with the majority in agreeing that corporations and unions can once more be permitted to spend freely on political issues, thus driving a stake through the heart of the democratic process in the United States. But he dissented in part, because he didn't think the ruling went far enough. Specifically, he argued that the court was wrong to continue requiring that the sponsors of political advertising disclose who paid for them. ... That's right. Thomas came out against the principle of transparency, and for the right of corporations to spend millions of dollars to influence public policy without having to tell anyone what they were up to. It's hard to imagine a less democratic stance. ... Thomas did have his reasons, however. He blamed the gays."
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What a week to be a major corporation, huh? But few made out like AT&T, which not only gained personhood from the SCOTUS, it was absolved of all legal responsibility in a particularly egregious case of warrantless wiretapping on Americans, courtesy the Obama administration OLC.
The Justice Department's IG internal audit released this week "harshly criticized how the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Communications Analysis Unit — a counterterrorism section founded after 9/11 — relied on so-called 'exigent' letters to get carriers to turn over phone records immediately." Those letters were used by the FBI in "emergency" cases, promises to the telcos that subpoenas were in the works to make the requests for records legal.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/1/23/829330/-ATT-Always-Wins
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Utah wants to criminalize getting into car accidents -- and skiing -- while pregnant. No, really.
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White House adviser Plouffe fails to mention most of Obama's pre-existing conditions right after NYT & CBS report it might be dropped.
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As always, Frank Rich is disturbingly spot on.
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h/t Pat
Please, save me from my cynicism: http://zackhayhurst.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/please-save-me-from-my-cynicism/
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Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 2011 Senate of the Corporate States of America. Photo courtesy of Mr. Eric B.
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Senate Dems to seek 10 month extension of unemployment benefits.
That's just great. Thanks for thinking of the SELF employed again!
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So you thought that the "Blue Angels" were hot shit?
What the hell is wrong with South Carolina? Their governor isn't the only elected official in the state that lacks compassion, human decency or common sense. The Lt. Governor equates people who have fallen on hard times and need a little help getting over the rough patches with stray animals, and intimated that the children of poor people (the consequence of 'breeding') should just be starved to death and aren't worth saving. "My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better," Bauer said. ... Later in his speech, Bauer said, "I can show you a bar graph where free and reduced lunch has the worst test scores in the state of South Carolina," adding, "You show me the school that has the highest free and reduced lunch, and I'll show you the worst test scores, folks. It's there, period." His grandma may not have been very educated, but her grandson, in spite of an education, isn't very smart.
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Two vessels collide off Texas coast, causes massive oil spill No injuries were reported, but up to 450,000 gallons of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico off Port Arthur, Texas when a tanker and another vessel collided.
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4,374 soldiers killed in Iraq; 973 in Afghanistan.
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Haitian man rescued from rubble after 11 days.
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Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for the underwear bomber's attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas in a new audio message released Sunday threatening more attacks on the United States.
