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"Scum always rises to the top, but instead of scraping it off and discarding it, most people follow it!?!"
--Sherlyn Meinz, 2008
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 | The News: Religious Freedom In America |
 By Howard Bess
Muslins are planning to build a mosque and community center in lower Manhattan near Ground Zero of the 9/11 attac[k] on the World Trade Center. In order to begin construction, the Muslim organization that is building the center has passed through every procedure required by the City of New York. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Jew, has spoken out strongly in defense of the project. Commentators have pointed out (I believe accurately) that were the 13 story building being built as a Jewish synagogue or a Christian church, not a peep of protest would be heard. No one would be protesting that the building was insensitive to those who died in the 9/11 attack.
We all need to be reminded that the people who died on 9/11 respresented a broad spectrum of religious persuasions. American Catholics, American Protestant Christians of many varieties, American Jews and, yes, American Muslims died. Included in the victims were atheists and agnostics. Sprinkled in were probably a few Hindus, Buddhists, and Taoists. Anyone who knows a bit about New York City is fully aware of the splendid diversity of people who live and work there. The people who were working in the twin towers and died on 9/11 most certainly reflected a cross section of the New York City population. People of every religious persuasion were big losers on 9/11. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, August 24 @ 17:44:39 EDT (45 reads)
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| The News: Rights Groups File Lawsuit To Allow Challenge To Targeted Killing |
 CCR And ACLU Charge It's Illegal For Government To Deny Counsel To Targets On Kill List
NEW YORK – The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the American Civil LibertiesUnion today filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to challenge their refusal to grant a license that would allow the groups to file a lawsuit challenging the government's asserted authority to use lethal force against U.S. citizens located far from any battlefield without charge, trial or judicial process of any kind.
In early July, CCR and the ACLU were retained by Nasser al-Aulaqi to bring a lawsuit in connection with the government's decision to authorize the targeted killing of his son, U.S. citizen Anwar al-Aulaqi, whom the CIA and Defense Department have targeted for death. On July 16, however, the Secretary of the Treasury labeled Anwar al-Aulaqi a "specially designated global terrorist," which makes it a crime for lawyers to provide representation for his benefit without first seeking a license from OFAC. CCR and the ACLU have sought a license, but the government has not yet issued one despite the urgency created by an outstanding execution order. CCR and the ACLU have not had contact with Anwar al-Aulaqi.
"The government is targeting an American citizen for death without any legal process whatsoever, while at the same time impeding lawyers from challenging that death sentence and the government's sweeping claim of authority to issue it. This is a dual blow to some of our most precious liberties, and such an alarming denial of rights in any one case endangers the rights of all Americans," said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. "Attorneys shouldn't have to ask the government for permission in order to challenge the constitutionality of the government's conduct." ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, August 03 @ 22:16:24 EDT (68 reads)
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| The News: Danger Of Establishing "New Normal" With Worst Bush-Era Policies |
 Group Releases 18-Month Review Of President's National Security Policies And Civil Liberties
From: aclu.org
NEW YORK – The Obama administration has repudiated some of the Bush administration's most egregious national security policies but is in danger of institutionalizing others permanently into law, thereby creating a troubling "new normal," according to a new report released today by the American Civil Liberties Union.
"Establishing a New Normal: National Security, Civil Liberties, and Human Rights Under the Obama Administration," an 18-month review of the Obama administration's record on national security issues affecting civil liberties, concludes that the current administration's record on issues of national security and civil liberties is decidedly mixed: President Obama has made great strides in some areas, such as his auspicious first steps to categorically prohibit torture, outlaw the CIA's use of secret overseas detention sites and release the Bush administration's torture memos, but he has failed to eliminate some of the worst policies put in place by President Bush, such as military commissions and indefinite detention. He has also expanded the Bush administration's "targeted killing" program. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, July 30 @ 20:08:14 EDT (80 reads)
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| The News: Military Was Concerned About Vets' Exposure to Depleted Uranium |
by: Mike Ludwig, t r u t h o u t | Report
For years, the government has denied that depleted uranium (DU), a radioactive toxic waste left over from nuclear fission and added to munitions used in the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars, poisoned Iraqi civilians and veterans.
But a little-known 1993 Defense Department document written by then-Brigadier Gen. Eric Shinseki, now the secretary for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), shows that the Pentagon was concerned about DU contamination and the agency had ordered medical testing on all personnel that were exposed to the toxic substance.
Shinseki's memo, under the subject line, "Review of Draft to Congress - Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium in the U.S. Army -- Action Memorandum," makes some small revisions to the details of these three orders from the DoD:
1. Provide adequate training for personnel who may come in contact with DU contaminated equipment.
2. Complete medical testing of all personnel exposed to DU in the Persian Gulf War.
3. Develop a plan for DU contaminated equipment recovery during future operations.
The VA, however, never conducted the medical tests, which may have deprived hundreds of thousands of veterans from receiving medical care to treat cancer and other diseases that result from exposure to DU. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Wednesday, July 28 @ 18:20:54 EDT (85 reads)
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| The News: Experts: Health Hazards in Gulf Warrant Evacuations |
 by: Rose Aguilar, t r u t h o u t | Report
When Louisiana residents ask marine toxicologist and community activist Riki Ott what she would do if she lived in the Gulf with children, she tells them she would leave immediately. "It's that bad. We need to start talking about who's going to pay for evacuations."
In 1989, Ott, who lives in Cordova, Alaska, experienced firsthand the devastating effects of the Exxon Valdex oil disaster. For the past two months, she's been traveling back and forth between Louisiana and Florida to gather information about what's really happening and share the lessons she learned about long-term illnesses and deaths of cleanup workers and residents. In late May, she began meeting people in the Gulf with symptoms like headaches, dizziness, sore throats, burning eyes, rashes and blisters that are so deep, they're leaving scars. People are asking, "What's happening to me?"
She says the culprit is almost two million gallons of Corexit, the dispersant BP is using to break up and hide the oil below the ocean's surface. "It's an industrial solvent. It's a degreaser. It's chewing up boat engines off-shore. It's chewing up dive gear on-shore. Of course it's chewing up people's skin. The doctors are saying the solvents are making the oil worse."
In a widely watched YouTube video, from Project Gulf Impact, a project that aims to give Gulf residents a voice, Chris Pincetich, a marine biologist and campaigner with the Sea Turtle Restoration Project, said Coast Guard planes are flying overhead at night spraying Corexit on the water and on land. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, July 23 @ 20:50:56 EDT (81 reads)
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| The News: EPA Suspends Coal Ash Promotion Program |
 Abrupt Removal of Own Website While Ash Re-Use Effort Is "Re-Evaluated"
From: Peer.org
Washington, DC - Without public announcement, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has yanked its own website promoting the re-use of coal ash while this highly-touted partnership with the coal industry "is being re-evaluated," according to the lonely disclaimer on now-blank agency web pages. Today, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) wrote to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson urging her agency to rethink the full range of risks in putting highly toxic coal combustion wastes into an array of consumer, agricultural and commercial products - which is the object of the suspended EPA/coal industry joint venture called the Coal Combustion Products Partnership or C2P2.
Coal ash and other combustion wastes represent the second biggest waste stream in the nation, second only to wastes generated by coal mining itself. Re-use of coal ash has, with active support of EPA, turned into a multi-billion dollar business that provides a huge subsidy to coal-fired power-plants. Following the disastrous Kentucky coal sludge spill in December 2008, EPA has belatedly undertaken an effort to possibly regulate coal ash as a hazardous waste. The main industry concern about regulating coal sludge ponds as hazardous is the "stigmatizing effect" that would have on the growing coal ash market. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Wednesday, July 07 @ 22:24:11 EDT (90 reads)
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| The News: The Anti-Empire Report - July 2010 |
by William Blum, killinghope.org
Some thoughts on "patriotism" written on July 4
Most important thought: I'm sick and tired of this thing called "patriotism".
The Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor were being patriotic. The German people who supported Hitler and his conquests were being patriotic, fighting for the Fatherland. All the Latin American military dictators who overthrew democratically-elected governments and routinely tortured people were being patriotic — saving their beloved country from "communism".
General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, mass murderer and torturer: "I would like to be remembered as a man who served his country." [1]
P.W. Botha, former president of apartheid South Africa: "I am not going to repent. I am not going to ask for favours. What I did, I did for my country." [2]
Pol Pot, mass murderer of Cambodia: "I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country." [3]
Tony Blair, former British prime minister, defending his role in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis: "I did what I thought was right for our country." [4] ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, July 06 @ 20:42:17 EDT (127 reads)
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| The News: Leaving Granny Behind |
Will the Fiscal Commission vote to impoverish older women?
By Martha Burk
President Obama's Fiscal Commission--a group of lawmakers, former officials, and other experts charged with developing a bipartisan plan to stabilize our soaring national debt--is primarily holding closed-door hearings. The commission's co-chairman Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, recently became an instant YouTube star with his rant against seniors as he exited one of the panel's sessions. That put Social Security defenders on high alert about what's going on in these meetings.
Simpson, who is nearly 80, has maintained that the founders of the program never expected anyone to actually live to 65 and collect. "People just died," he has said. "Social Security was never [for] retirement."
The program has always been an easy target for deficit hawks and budget cutters because it's so big--the government's largest expenditure, just ahead of the Pentagon. But setting up a target isn't as easy as actually hitting it. George W. Bush found that out when he proposed privatizing the system so we could all invest in the likes of Enron, Lehman Brothers, General Motors, and Goldman Sachs. Thanks to a massive campaign by progressive interest groups, that proposal was shot down. But like Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street, the nightmare of cutting Social Security never dies --it just returns in a new form every few years. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, June 29 @ 22:07:38 EDT (99 reads)
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| The News: ACLU Submits Testimony For Hearing On Cell Phone Privacy |
 From ACLU. org
WASHINGTON -- The American Civil Liberties today submitted written testimony to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties for a hearing on updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) and the need for reform in the use of location tracking information. ECPA became law in 1986 and has not been properly updated to reflect the vast technological advances that have occurred since its passage, including the use of cell phone information by law enforcement to track Americans' movements. The ACLU is asking Congress to require government officials to obtain a warrant based on probable cause before allowing access to any of those electronic records, just as they have always had to do for similarly sensitive personal information.
"Tracking our citizens' locations and movements without warrants or probable cause constitutes a massive privacy violation," said Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "The overwhelming majority of Americans carry cell phones and inadvertently transmit their location information every minute of every day. Whether they visit a therapist, liquor store, church or gun range, these movements are often available to law enforcement in real time or even months later. Clearly, these kinds of sensitive records should be fiercely protected and law enforcement should be required to obtain a warrant before getting near them." ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, June 24 @ 20:18:33 EDT (106 reads)
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| The News: Respect Immigrants, Deport BP |
 by: Randall Amster J.D., Ph.D., t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
My family and I joined tens of thousands in the streets of Phoenix this weekend to march against SB 1070 and for the human rights of immigrants in America. The crowd was ethnically diverse, filled with righteous indignation, creatively colorful and utterly without the fear that has plagued them for years. It was a remarkable demonstration at a critical time and I am more convinced than ever of the basic decency and common humanity of those being demonized by some factions as criminals and undesirables.
The signs and chants were telling in their essential tragicomedy. "Undocumented and Unafraid." "We've read the law and it sucks." "Don't separate my family" (held by a small child). "Somos Arizona, No Nazizona." "1070 = 1984." And of course, "Si se puede." Politics aside, this rally served as a powerful reminder that, behind the abstractions of debate, there are real people struggling for dignity, survival and respect. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, June 04 @ 21:50:32 EDT (110 reads)
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| The News: The Texas Textbook Massacre |
 By Rosemarie Jackowski
The missing part of the news report about the Texas textbook fiasco is that this is not new news. History textbooks used in most US schools have been suspect for decades. Enlightened teachers have been quietly using alternative texts for years. Many use A People's History of the United States authored by Howard Zinn. Those enlightened teachers who sometimes put their jobs on the line are to be applauded - and protected from misinformed citizens on some School Boards.
The biased view expressed in many textbooks has been an issue as way back as the 1950s - but in the 50s too few questioned what was being taught. The US never was the way it was portrayed in textbooks. Standard US Social Studies textbooks are based on mythology. Propaganda sells books.
Remember those good old days in the 50s. The school day began with the reading of the Bible, the Lord's Prayer, and the Pledge to the flag. Those were the days of pretty girls in poodle skirts and cute boys with buzz cuts. The really cool ones always carried their pack of Camels rolled up in the sleeve of their sparkling white T-shirts.
Everyone was happy back then — well not exactly everyone. Lynching continued in the south but things like that were never discussed. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Monday, May 24 @ 17:26:17 EDT (109 reads)
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| The News: Researchers make gesture-based computing interfaces more accessible |
 New system uses single piece of inexpensive hardware and multicolored glove
written by: Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Academic and industry labs have developed a host of prototype gesture interfaces, ranging from room-sized systems with multiple cameras to detectors built into laptops’ screens. But MIT researchers have developed a system that could make gestural interfaces much more practical. Aside from a standard webcam, like those found in many new computers, the system uses only a single piece of hardware: a multicolored Lycra glove that could be manufactured for about a dollar.
The hardware for a new gesture-based computing system consists of nothing more than an ordinary webcam and a pair of brightly colored lycra gloves.
Photo: Jason Dorfman/CSAIL
Other prototypes of low-cost gestural interfaces have used reflective or colored tape attached to the fingertips, but “that’s 2-D information,” says Robert Wang, a graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory who developed the new system together with Jovan Popović, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “You’re only getting the fingertips; you don’t even know which fingertip [the tape] is corresponding to.” ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Friday, May 21 @ 17:22:33 EDT (124 reads)
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| The News: Itching to Fight Another Muslim Enemy |
By Robert Parry
If you read the major American newspapers or watch the propaganda on cable TV, it’s pretty clear that the U.S. foreign policy Establishment is again spoiling for a fight, this time in Iran.
Just as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was the designated target of American hate in 2002 and 2003, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is playing that role now. Back then, any event in Iraq was cast in the harshest possible light; today, the same is done with Iran.
Anyone who dares suggest that the situation on the ground might not be as black and white as the Washington Post's editors claim it is must be an “apologist” for the enemy regime. It’s also not very smart for one’s reputation to question the certainty of the reporting in the New York Times, whether about Iraq’s “aluminum tubes” for nuclear centrifuges in 2002 or regarding Iran’s “rigged” election in 2009.
It’s much better for one’s career to clamber onto the confrontation bandwagon. Nobody in the major U.S. media or in politics will ever be hurt by talking tough and flexing muscles regarding some Muslim “enemy.” And, if the posturing leads to war, it will fall mostly to working-class kids to do the fighting and dying while the bills can be passed along to future generations. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Thursday, May 20 @ 21:22:24 EDT (117 reads)
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| The News: What Happens In Arizona Stops In Arizona |
 From: ACLU.org
A lot of people are outraged about Arizona's new racial profiling, "show me your papers" law. And today, the ACLU is taking action.
Just a few hours ago, we went to federal court to block this discriminatory law from taking effect.
In the coming days and weeks, ACLU legal teams and advocates will go all-out to stop this poisonous policy from taking hold in Arizona. But right now, we need to know: will you stand with us?
Racial profiling is a deeply-offensive affront to the American values of justice and fairness. And using race to demand that people produce "papers" to prove who they are is a police-state tactic that is completely unacceptable in America. If we don't stop this law now, similar ones could spread across the nation. Already, state lawmakers in at least 10 other states have promised to bring similar bills to their legislatures. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Tuesday, May 18 @ 21:14:07 EDT (130 reads)
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| The News: Mystery Disease Linked to Missing Israeli Scientist |
by: H.P. Albarelli Jr., t r u t h o u t | Report
Media outlets across the Northwest United States began reporting on April 24 that a strange, previously unknown strain of virulent airborne fungi that has already killed at least six people in Oregon, Washington and Idaho is spreading throughout the region. The fungus, according to expert microbiologists, who have expressed alarm about the emergence of the strain, is a new genotype of Cryptococcus gatti fungi. Cryptococcus gatti is normally found in tropical and subtropical locations in India, South America, Africa and Australia. Microbiologists in the United States are reporting that the strain found here, for reasons not yet fully understood, is far deadlier than any found overseas.
Physicians in the Pacific Northwest are reporting that an undetermined number of people in the region are ill from the effects of the strange strain. Physicians also say that the virulent strain can infect domestic animals as well as humans, and symptoms do not appear until anywhere from two to four months after exposure. Symptoms in humans include a lingering cough, sharp chest pains, fever, night-sweats, weight-loss, headaches and shortness of breath. The strain can be treated successfully, if detected early enough, with oral doses of antifungal medication, but it cannot be prevented, and there is no preventative vaccine. Undiagnosed, the fungus works its way into the spinal fluid and central nervous system and causes fatal meningitis. ...
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Posted by Blue1moon on Saturday, May 08 @ 17:58:00 EDT (124 reads)
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