Undernews

Resources for a worldwide general strike

2012-02-23T13:17:00.002-05:00

Another reason Santorum would have made a lousy founding father

2012-02-23T11:54:00.002-05:00

Harpers Index - Number of America's nine "Founding Fathers" who denied the divinity of Jesus: 7

America has already lost a decade of economic progress

2012-02-23T11:42:00.000-05:00

Economist - The Economist has crunched the numbers and on the basis of seven indicators covering economic output, wealth and labour markets, the United States has already gone back in time some ten years. Its GDP per person, for example, was at a higher level than today back in 2005 and its main stockmarket index was higher in 1999. Of the countries considered, Greece has fared the worst. In economic terms, it is just entering the new millennium again. As a whole the rich world has been hardest hit by the financial crisis. Just six of the 34 "advanced" economies categorized by the IMF have GDP per person higher in 2011 than in 2007. Notable among them are Germany and Australia.

Obamadmin torrturing Manning

2012-02-23T11:37:00.000-05:00

Bill Quigley, Counterpunch - Today US Army Private Bradley Manning is to be formally charged with numerous crimes at Fort Meade, Maryland. Manning, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by members of the Icelandic Parliament, is charged with releasing hundreds of thousands of documents exposing secrets of the US government to the whistleblower website Wikileaks. These documents exposed lies, corruption and crimes by the US and other countries. The Bradley Manning defense team points out accurately that much of what was published by Wikileaks was either not actually secret or should not have been secret.

The Manning prosecution is a tragic miscarriage of justice. US officials are highly embarrassed by what Manning exposed and are shooting the messenger. As Glen Greenwald, the terrific Salon writer, has observed, President Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers for espionage than all other presidents combined.

One of the most outrageous parts of the treatment of Bradley Manning is that the US kept him in illegal and torturous solitary confinement conditions for months at the Quantico Marine base in Virginia. Keeping Manning in solitary confinement sparked challenges from many groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU and the New York Times.

Human rights’ advocates rightly point out that solitary confinement is designed to break down people mentally. Because of that, prolonged solitary confinement is internationally recognized as a form of torture. The conditions and practices of isolation are in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Convention against Torture, and the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination.

Medical experts say that after 60 days in solitary peoples’ mental state begins to break down. That means a person will start to experience panic, anxiety, confusion, headaches, heart palpitations, sleep problems, withdrawal, anger, depression, despair, and over-sensitivity. Over time this can lead to severe psychiatric trauma and harms like psychosis, distortion of reality, hallucinations, mass anxiety and acute confusion. Essentially, the mind disintegrates.

That is why the United Nations special rapporteur on torture sought to investigate Manning’s solitary confinement and reprimanded the US when the Army would not let him have an unmonitored visit.

History will likely judge Manning as heroic as it has Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

It is important to realize that tens of thousands of other people besides Manning are held in solitary confinement in the US today and every day. Experts estimate a minimum of 20,000 people are held in solitary in supermax prisons alone, not counting thousands of others in state and local prisons who are also held in solitary confinement. And solitary confinement is often forced on Muslim prisoners, even pre-trial people who are...

Social media engaged in censorship

2012-02-23T11:07:00.000-05:00

Washingtons Blog - Facebook pays low-wage foreign workers to delete certain content based upon a censorship list. For example, Facebook deletes accounts created by Palestinian resistance groups.

Digg was caught censoring stories which were controversial or too critical of the government. See this and this.

Now, even social media site Reddit – which helped launch the anti-Sopa Internet blackout and publicize GoDaddy’s slimy Sopa support – is doing the same thing.
As just one example, posts from this website are being censored by Reddit. Specifically, a friend of this site who has submitted stories to Reddit has received the following messages of rejection from a Reddit moderator named davidreiss666:

from davidreiss666 via /r/worldnews/

WashingtonBlog is not something we consider a good source for r/Worldnews.

from davidreiss666 via /r/worldnews/
Please submit that story from an alternate domain. Thank you.

And another moderator named Maxion:

from Maxion via /r/worldnews/
I am sorry but this submission is not appropriate for this subreddit.

There are certainly also more open-minded moderators at Reddit. But a couple of censors can squash discussion on entire topics.

Why are they censoring?

Well, censorship is rampant in America … and social media has grown so big that it has become a target as well.

Wired reported:

The Pentagon is looking to build a tool to sniff out social media propaganda campaigns and spit some counter-spin right back at it.
On Thursday, Defense Department extreme technology arm Darpa unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself.

This is more than just checking the trending topics on Twitter. The Defense Department wants to deeply grok social media dynamics. So SMISC algorithms will be aimed at discovering and tracking the “formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes)” on social media, according to Darpa’s announcement.

Virginia decides not to legalize rape by ultrasound

2012-02-23T10:55:00.002-05:00

After an understandable uproar over a mandatory procedure that federal law would consider rape, Virginia legislators have opted to forgo the invasive and most definitely uncomfortable procedure for women seeking abortions. On top of a big invasion of privacy for all women, the legislation could have re-traumatized women who sought abortions because of rapes. A meeting last night led legislators to reconsider the vagina wand provision, reaching a compromise that would make the procedure voluntary, but not mandatory, reports The Washington Post. We're not sure what woman might choose to have an ultrasound used in this way, but, now they get a choice. And with that, the never-ending reproduction debates continue.

Scientists think they've found oldest living mammal

2012-02-23T10:47:00.000-05:00

Daily Mail, UK - A giant bowhead whale caught off the coast of Alaska had a harpoon point embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt more than a century ago.

Biologists claim the find helps prove the bowhead is the oldest living mammal on earth.

They say the 13-centimetre arrow-shaped fragment dates back to around 1880, meaning the 50-ton whale had been coasting around the freezing arctic waters since Victorian times.

Wikileaks: Swedish foreign minister said to be U.S. spy

2012-02-23T10:31:00.000-05:00

Business Insider - WikiLeaks is said to be preparing a release that will allege Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt has been a US informant since the 1970s.

The news was broken by Swedish newspaper Expressen, who have access to an internal Wikileaks memo. The memo says that the allegations are supposedly based on a US diplomat's report, and will be politically explosive. "He will be forced to resign", one source told the paper.

Bildt is alleged to have reported to Karl Rove, the former advisor to George W. Bush, in the document — Bildt has publicly admitted he meets with Rove but in an informal manner. However, the document reportedly reveals he has acted as an "informer" to the US government since 1973.

"There are secret documents that reveal that Bildt cooperated with the U.S. administration in a manner contrary to Swedish law", one source told Expressen.

Pocket paradigms

2012-02-23T10:05:00.001-05:00

The irony is that Barack Obama is none of the things the right claims. He is not a socialist, a radical, Satan or a Muslim. His only secret agenda is to be as much as possible like the people who are accusing him of these things. Obama is a closet muddled myopic conservative trying to make as few changes to the system as possible. The right should stop criticizing him and embrace him. - Sam Smith

Polls

2012-02-22T23:49:00.000-05:00

Percentage of Americans who believed in anthropogenic global warming in 2001: 75

Percentage of Americans who believe in anthropogenic global warming today: 44

Harpers Magazine

Washington state marijuana legalization leads by 8 points in poll

2012-02-22T23:38:00.002-05:00

Save a dead Mormon

2012-02-22T23:35:00.002-05:00

Sadly, many Mormons throughout history have died without having known the joys of homosexuality. With your help, these poor souls can be saved.

Debate notes

2012-02-22T23:33:00.000-05:00

CNN should be forced to register as a Republican Super PAC. Real journalists don't start a debate with the Star Spangle Banner and "partner" with the Arizona Republican Committee
If the Republicans win, pregnant women will be able to drive in high occupancy freeway lanes.
One of the biggest surprises of this campaign is that it has revealed what a big liar Mitt Romney is.
Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum seem unaware that Congress gets to vote on legislation. All three used the first person - "I will defund" or "I will ban" as if they were running for president of Syria.
Given all the things they're going to ban, it looks like we're not going to get the government off our backs after all.
Republicans seem unaware that government workers, evil as they are, are still counted in the employment statistics. Thus cutting government jobs adds to unemployment unless the laid off workers get jobs that would otherwise be filled by honest free market employees.
The real growth as industry if the Republicans will win will be funeral homes. Unless they just plan to let the folks who die as a result of their policies rot on the street.

Sam Smith

From our overstocked archives: Where did all the cool preachers go?

2012-02-22T20:42:00.000-05:00

Sam Smith
2006

The death of the activist minister, William Sloane Coffin, propels a troubling question to the front of my mind: where have all the cool preachers gone?

It may seem an odd query for a Seventh Day Agnostic but I have always tried to separate cause and character and have enjoyed a happy if inconsistent relationship with those of the cloth. Besides, we are all members of what Weber called the pariah intelligentsia, including teachers, ministers, writers, intellectuals and activists. In other words, moral outsiders of supposed integrity, passion, and faith providing guidance to a market, politics, and culture that would often just as soon do without it.

These days, however, religionists - as least as they appear in the media - seem dominated by people-slaying dogmatists, thought-slaying propagandists, morality-slaying hustlers and hypocrites, not to mention those whose supposed spiritual concerns are merely tools to strengthen their growing role as political insiders.

There are Islamic jihadists, Judaism indentured to cynical and cruel Israeli governments, a Pope more concerned with punishing the views of American politicians than dealing with the personal habits of some of his own priests, and Christian evangelists delivering to right wing politicians an economically endangered flock that has been sold the absurd apostasy that abortion and gay weddings are more important than pensions or healthcare.

Although I was raised in solemn and smug Episcopalism and educated in solemn and stolid Quakerism, I soon discovered the alternatives. For example, my father was involved in politics and so I quickly learned the three major branches of Judaism: your orthodox, reform and liberal Democratic, of which the latter was apparently far the strongest. I picked up a book by a preacher named Martin Luther King and learned that one could be both peaceful and political at the same time. And, when I went to my friend Larry's house, an occasional visitor for drinks or dinner would be Father Patrini, hardly distinguishable, except for collar, from all the garrulous seculars in the room.

In 1960s Washington, the preachers were everywhere. We had Father Drinin in Congress, Father Baroni at HUD, and Father Kemp on the DC school board; all three were as good company as you could hope to find. Episcopal Reverend Jesse Anderson helped to kick off the DC statehood movement. When I covered an anti-poverty meeting, there would often be the Baptist Rev. Frank Milner, part preacher and part cab driver, imploring the crowd with a white collar on his shirt and a change maker on his belt. And there was the Presbyterian, Rev. Tom Torosian, handcuffed at a protest and giving me a grin as I slipped a twenty for bail into his coat pocket.

My lawyer is an ex-priest who keeps telling me to go easier on the Pope. I once got an unrequested grant from the Lutheran church for my community newspaper. I even was invited to become Washington correspondent of the National Catholic Reporter, although that journal - apparently remembering that it was then the 1990s and not the 1960s - withdrew the offer without a word of explanation. And when I was a member of the DC Humanities Council, we happily funded a film on liberation theology right under William Bennett's nose.

And I hardly thought about it all; I only enjoyed it. Regardless of one's own beliefs, if you were active in any cause you expected to find preachers, priests, and rabbis among your friends and allies. And they were fun to eat and drink with, in part because they only witnessed and never proselytized.

Part of it, perhaps, was the different role of the church in a majority black town. In our community paper's two and a half square mile circulation area, for example, we had over 100 churches including the Revolutionary Church of What's Happening Now. I was reminded of this while attending a performance of "Where Eagles Fly," a tribute to Washington's Shaw neighborhood, once host to the nation's black Broadway, U Street. The performers in the play by Carole Mumin were better than five years worth of 'American Idol,' but the other thing that caught me was how long it had been since I had seen that once bandied word 'ecumenism' being so enthusiastically practiced. There were, of course, the Baptists, but Abdul Majeed Muhammad sang a song in praise of Islam, and Catholics, Episcopalians, and Jews all got their props. A high point was the appearance of one of the great brass bands of the House of Prayer for All People.

Here was religion in the hood rather than on cable TV. It's harder to condemn someone to everlasting damnation when you see them a couple of times a week or when your daughters play together.

On the other hand, the dominant religions we find on cable TV are killing us, making us nastier, and erecting walls between alternative meanings as rigid as those real barriers in Gaza.

So where have all the cool preachers gone?

About a decade ago, Jesuit Peter Collins described one manifestation:

"IN 1944 the first worker-priest missions were set up in Paris, and then in Lyons and Marseille. Sharing the grime and toil of an often oppressed social class was a frustrating mission, but gradually the barriers between priests and workers broke down. This sometimes happened in surprising ways. One priest, sacked in front of the workers, had a fellow worker come up to him and say: 'You can stay with me. Now you are one of us'.

"In 1944, Father Henri Perrin and other volunteers met, and with the support of Cardinal Suhard of Paris, began working anonymously in factories. There they emulated their previous life in the wartime camps. By sharing in the labor and suffering of the workers, they hoped first to gain interest in the Gospel by lives of credible witness, and then (and only then) to draw people back to the Church. . .

"They began to see that the absence of the poor from the Church signaled not simply a gap to be filled by 'bringing them back', but a radical rethinking of the whole mission of the Church . . . Sharpest of all, they discovered first-hand the complicity of the Church in injustice. . .

"Catholic industrialists and factory owners, traditionally reliant on the Church for support, complained bitterly to the French Bishops, and then to Rome, accusing the priests of being partisan and divisive, of being 'political' and Marxist because they belonged to the pro-Communist unions. . .

"By 1953, the position of the worker-priests had become untenable. In November, the Papal Nuncio in Paris passed on the Vatican's demand that superiors of religious orders recall their priest-workers. Despite protests from some French bishops, the priest-workers were instructed to leave temporal responsibility to lay people. This meant leaving the unions and their work."

In 1980 another worker priest got the axe. Pope John Paul II told all priests to get out of electoral politics. The most visible example, Rep. & Rev. Robert Drinin, a progressive congressmember from Massachusetts. Liberation theology got an equally hostile reaction from the Vatican.

Clearly, churches of many stripes have pulled away from the spirit of such things as worker priests and liberation theology. The preacher has been put back in the pulpit where it is easier for words to replace witness and propagation to supplant practice. And the industrialists who make big contributions like it better that way.

This is not, however, unique to churches. For example, my own trade, journalism, has erected huge barriers between itself and its own parishioners both in who gets selected to write (post-grads being favored) and what they get to write (filtered through the myth that major corporations can truly practice objectivity). The worker priests of journalism have disappeared as well.

Even secular non-profits have lost street cred as they have become increasingly formal institutions based on a corporate model rather than activist associations driven by the energy of those involved. A primary characteristic of both the religious and secular groups is that their programs have been increasingly dumped in a red wagon waiting to be pulled by fundraising. Empathy, moral missions and integrity all come later.

Oh, I know you're out there, Reverend Dude. That's not my point. My point is that the system and its media only cares these days about religionists who are out to kill, control, or defeat someone. The worker priests, the cool preachers, the progressive rabbis are still there but struggling in a wilderness of silence and indifference.

It's not my beat to tell you how to change this. I've got enough problems of my own to worry about. But I just wanted to let you know that I miss you badly.

Santorum was on board of hospital chain accused of offenses

2012-02-22T13:07:00.001-05:00

Huffington Post - Despite his advocacy for patients' rights and his stake in providing care for severely vulnerable children, Santorum has avoided discussing another personal experience with the health care industry. From 2007 through the first half of 2011, Santorum served on the board of directors of Universal Health Services, Inc., one of the country's largest hospital chains.

The Department of Justice is close to settling with UHS over allegations that it committed medicaid fraud in one of its RTCs. The DOJ settled a case with the company in 2009 for $27.5 million over allegations that it bribed doctors to get them to refer patients to hospitals in Texas. Various state authorities have penalized UHS facilities with serious sanctions, suspending their licenses and barring them from receiving Medicaid reimbursements. In several incidents, staff and patients have been implicated in criminal activity ranging from rape to homicide.

How Obama is still covering up bank fraud

2012-02-22T13:01:00.000-05:00

From an interview by Paul Jay of Real News Network with William K. Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, who teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri Kansas City. He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. Black developed the concept of "control fraud" - frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined.

JAY -In President Obama's recent State of the Union speech, he appeared to come out swinging against Wall Street and financial institutions that committed abuses and fraud that led to the crisis in 2008 and continue. Here's a little bit of what he had to say.

OBAMA: And tonight I'm asking my attorney general to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans
.
JAY: So, Bill, isn't this what you've been asking for?

BLACK: No. It doesn't do any of those three things. And, again, seriously, after three years in office, you're going to finally create a working group, something you could have done on day one?

So let's see what they said about the working group. The working group isn't staffed up, but when it's staffed up fully, it will have 55 personnel. Just in terms of investigative agents in the savings and loan crisis, which had losses less than one-seventieth as large as this crisis, we had 1,000 agents. That gives you an idea of scope.

JAY: And just for people who don't know, you were part of that process, were you not?

BLACK: Yes. I helped design that process. I helped train the FBI agents, the regulatory personnel, the assistant U.S. attorneys who prosecuted. I served as an expert witness. I worked on the criminal referral process. I worked on the process by which we detailed dozens of our examiners to work for the FBI so they could serve as their in-house experts. None of those things have been done in this crisis. And the number of investigative personnel is going to be somewhere between 25 and 30 versus 1,000. And this one is 70 times bigger....

Robosigning may sound like, well, they were just doing it mechanically and quickly, and that was impersonal, maybe, but certainly not criminal. No. It was axiomatic that what they were doing was—involved multiple crimes. Robosigning primarily involved signing—knowingly signing false affidavits that said, I have checked the following things and the facts are as follow. And not due to investigations by the United States government, or even by the states, but due to competent depositions by, frequently, small firm, even sometimes solo practitioner firms, they finally took the testimony under oath of these people, and they admitted that they systematically, as a matter of policy, filed false affidavits, which is a felony.

And they didn't do this a little bit. The large servicers did it over 10,000 times a month, over 100,000 times a year, and they did not stop it through any internal process. In other words, it was speeding up until private counsel found these felonies. No one—and this stuff is all done under the management of senior lawyers. No senior lawyer, to my knowledge, involved in this massive filing of false affidavits has been sanctioned in any way by state ethics boards for attorneys, either.

A robotic soution to sock sorting

2012-02-22T12:38:00.000-05:00

Improbable Research - The ubiquitous ‘Stray Sock Syndrome’ can be a considerable headache for human sock-owners and sock-sorters. But help is afoot courtesy of the Computer Science Division at the University of California at Berkeley, US, and the Max Planck Institut Informatik, Germany. Where a team of computer scientists and robotics experts have “… considered the problem of equipping a robot with the perceptual tools for reliable sock manipulation.”

Their robot has not only been programmed to identify ‘stray’ socks from a sample of pair-able and non-pair-able socks – but also to physically sort them into pairs – with accuracies approaching 98%.

The stray-sock algorithm can be outlined thus:

“To handle stray socks we start with the lowest scoring (best) pairs and work our way up until the cost exceeds the maximum cost in which the algorithm considers indicative of a proper match. In case of an odd number of socks in the set, we introduce a ‘fake sock’ which has equal similarity with all socks. The true sock matched to the fake sock is considered a stray sock.”

The academic paper: Perception for the Manipulation of Socks, (by Ping Chuan Wang, Stephen Miller, Mario Fritz, Trevor Darrell, and Pieter Abbbeel) was presented at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2011.

Billionaire says he might give $100 million Gingrich campaign

2012-02-22T12:34:00.000-05:00

Haaretz, Israel - Billionaire businessman Sheldon Adelson told Forbes magazine in an interview that his financial backing of Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is based on more than just Gingrich's staunch support for Israel.

.“What scares me is the continuation of the socialist-style economy we’ve been experiencing for almost four years," Adelson was quoted as saying, referring to the administration of current U.S. President Barack Obama. "That scares me because the redistribution of wealth is the path to more socialism, and to more of the government controlling people’s lives. What scares me is the lack of accountability that people would prefer to experience, just let the government take care of everything and I’ll go fish or I won’t work, etc.”

Adelson is a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and is the owner of the Israeli daily Israel Hayom.

Adelson has reportedly given $11 million to Gingrich's super PAC, Winning Our Future, and is expected to donate $10 million more.

Responding to his critics, Adelson told Forbes, "Those people are either jealous or professional critics. They like to trash other people. It's unfair that I've been treated unfair - but it doesn''t stop me. I might give $10 million or $100 million to Gingrich."

Adelson said he has not yet decided whether he would throw his support behind a Republican nominee that is not Gingrich.

Santorum claims there is no such thing as a liberal Christian

2012-02-22T10:46:00.000-05:00

Right Wing Watch - [In a 2008 speech], said Santorum, there really is no such thing as a "liberal Christian" at all and anyone who doesn't share his right-wing views doesn't really have any right to claim to be a Christian:

Is there such thing as a sincere liberal Christian, which says that we basically take this document and re-write it ourselves? Is that really Christian? That’s a bigger question for me. And the answer is, no, it’s not. I don’t think there is such a thing. To take what is plainly written and say that I don’t agree with that, therefore, I don’t have to pay attention to it, means you’re not what you say you are. You’re a liberal something, but you’re not a Christian. That’s sort of how I look at it. When you go so far afield of that and take what is a salvation story and turn it into a liberation theology story, which is done in the Catholic world as well as in the evangelical world, you have abandoned Christendom, in my opinion. And you don’t have a right to claim it.

How religious bullies infiltrate public schools

2012-02-22T10:34:00.002-05:00

American Airlines fires 13,000 on advice of Romney's old firm

2012-02-22T10:22:00.000-05:00

Addicting Info -On Wednesday, February 1st, American Airlines announced that it will take the advice of Mitt Romney’s firm, Bain Capital, and lay off 13,000 workers -15 percent of its workforce- replacing their pension plans with 401(k) plans and ending company-paid retiree healthcare.

The lay off announcement came only seven days after American Airlines hired Bain Capital to guide it through a bankruptcy procedure for which the airline had filed last November.

American Airlines spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal, the cost of hiring Bain – hourly fees of up to $1,100- as “a usual and necessary part of the Chapter 11 process. We will be reviewing these costs carefully to ensure that they are monitored and managed appropriately.”

Bain Capital is a private equity firm, which was founded by a group of Bain & Co. partners including current Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney. Romney formally retired from Bain Capital in 1999 but still continues to receive a portion of Bain Capital profits as Romney’s 2010 tax returns show an “obligation to continue to provide services to Bain.”

GOP health notice

2012-02-22T10:14:00.000-05:00

VIA JOHN ALLISON

Morning line

2012-02-21T22:12:00.000-05:00

Based on our moving average of polls:

Obama in virtual tie with Santorum, Romney
Santorum over Romney by 8
Romney leads Santorum by 51 delegates
Electoral count: Obama 196-94

Although the consensus among Democrats is that Santorum would be easy to beat and although he is benefiting from a disproportionate primary turnout of grouchy old white guys who think hate is a Christian virtue, his rapid rise and proximity in the popular vote is more than a little troublesome.

If you forget about the fact that much of what Santorum says is untrue, he says it in a style that is much more comfortable to the average American than Obama’s didactic and sententious approach. And since Santorum wouldn’t be where he is if facts matter, there is no guarantee that Obama would win in a debate.

Even the purported bright side – in which Santorum loses badly to Obama – would have a serious downside, namely the assumption by Obama that he could now due precisely what he and his major campaign donors want, moving even further to the right than he is now.

Finally, bear in mind that the level of political corruption in both parties is greater than at any time in our history. We are not choosing leader; we are choosing battlefields.

Santorum abuses Christianity again

2012-02-21T16:16:00.000-05:00

Drudge Report - "Satan has his sights on the United States of America!" Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has declared.

"Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition."

The former senator from Pennsylvania warned in 2008 how politics and government are falling to Satan.

"This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country - the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age?"

"He attacks all of us and he attacks all of our institutions."

Santorum made the provocative comments to students at Ave Maria University in Florida.

The White House contender described how Satan is even taking hold of some religions.

"We look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it."

Reader comment

2012-02-21T13:27:00.003-05:00

Downgrading music

An example of the excessive zeal and protection in music is the Irving Berlin Estate.They have worked so hard in protecting his music, demanding high fees for any performance or hint of a tune that it is no longer known, no longer played and his name is forgotten. It is a triumph of the industry: Irving Berlin has been protected into oblivion. - Grant Schreiber, Chicago, IL

The results are in: austerity is a flop

2012-02-21T13:13:00.000-05:00

Paul Krugman, NY Times - Early 2010 austerity economics — the insistence that governments should slash spending even in the face of high unemployment — became all the rage in European capitals. The doctrine asserted that the direct negative effects of spending cuts on employment would be offset by changes in “confidence,” that savage spending cuts would lead to a surge in consumer and business spending, while nations failing to make such cuts would see capital flight and soaring interest rates. If this sounds to you like something Herbert Hoover might have said, you’re right: It does and he did.

Now the results are in — and they’re exactly what three generations’ worth of economic analysis and all the lessons of history should have told you would happen. The confidence fairy has failed to show up: none of the countries slashing spending have seen the predicted private-sector surge. Instead, the depressing effects of fiscal austerity have been reinforced by falling private spending.

Furthermore, bond markets keep refusing to cooperate. Even austerity’s star pupils, countries that, like Portugal and Ireland, have done everything that was demanded of them, still face sky-high borrowing costs. Why? Because spending cuts have deeply depressed their economies, undermining their tax bases to such an extent that the ratio of debt to G.D.P., the standard indicator of fiscal progress, is getting worse rather than better.

Meanwhile, countries that didn’t jump on the austerity train — most notably, Japan and the United States — continue to have very low borrowing costs, defying the dire predictions of fiscal hawks....

Some of the corporations backing major climat change denier, Heartland Institue

2012-02-21T13:03:00.000-05:00

Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc.: $5,000
AT&T: $100,000
BB&T: $16,105
Comcast Corporation: $35,000
General Motors Foundation: $30,000
GlaxoSmithKline: $50,000
Microsoft Corporation: $59,908
Nucor Corporation: $502,000
PepsiCo, Inc.: $5,000
Pfizer: $130,000
Reynolds American Inc.: $110,000
Time Warner Cable: $20,000

Insaneatorum of the day

2012-02-21T13:01:00.000-05:00

WTEE, Steubenville, OH - Republican candidate Rick Santorum says President Barack Obama is pushing a radical environmental agenda that unwisely limits energy production and turns its back on science.

The former senator from Pennsylvania told voters in eastern Ohio on Monday that science is on the side of those who want to aggressively produce more oil and natural gas in America. He said the notion of global warming is not climate science but "political science."

Campaigning at Froehlich's Classic Corner restaurant, Santorum said that Obama and his allies want to frighten people about new oil-exploration technologies so they can get your dollars and turn it over to politicians to win elections "so they can control your lives."

Comparing maps: Steinbeck's Travels With Charlie & Kerouac's On the Road

2012-02-21T12:43:00.003-05:00

Recording fading languages

2012-02-21T12:42:00.000-05:00