Jon Walker: Disaster Legislating -- A Dangerous New Process

Published on Tuesday, July 26, 2011 by FireDogLake

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2011/07/25/disaster-legislating-a-dangerous-new-process/

by Jon Walker

Some people are worried about the potential Constitutional crisis if President Obama uses the 14th Amendment to declare the debt ceiling voting unconstitutional. The reality though is that we are already in the midst of a full blown Constitutional crisis that is will likely only get worse in the coming years.

Whether or not you think it is a good idea, the Constitution was designed such that any major policy change should take the agreement of the House, the Senate, and the President, unless the President’s veto could be overturned by the House and Senate.

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David Korten: Getting Main Street to Call the Shots

Published on Tuesday, July 26, 2011 by OtherWords

http://www.otherwords.org/articles/getting_main_street_to_call_the_shots

America has plenty of cash, but it's in the wrong pockets.

by David Korten

Thanks to massive bailout funding from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury, Wall Street survived the financial crash it created. This year, its titans are enjoying record share prices, corporate profits, and executive bonuses. The financial assets of America's billionaires and the idle cash reserves of the most profitable corporations are at historic highs. Their biggest challenge is figuring out where to park all their cash.

Meanwhile, the Great Recession is still raging on Main Street. The unemployment rate is too high, new jobs aren't appearing despite the supposed economic recovery, and the unprecedented crush of foreclosures isn't letting up. Small businesses are starved for credit. Politicians tell us that the government is broke and debate whether we can afford health care, old age security benefits, and student loans.

America is awash in money. But the cash is in the wrong pockets and it's being used for the wrong purposes.

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IAEA Chief: Japan Crisis Will Not End Nuclear Age

Published on Tuesday, July 26, 2011 by BBC News

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14292167

The UN's top nuclear official says the world's reliance on atomic power will continue to grow, despite the crisis at Japan's Fukushima plant.

Yukiya Amano, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said many countries believed nuclear power was needed to combat global warming.

Mr Amano visited the Fukushima plant on Monday for the first time since it was crippled by the earthquake and tsunami.

He said he supported Tokyo's plan to shut the plant by January.

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Bill McKibben: Tim DeChristopher Is Going to Jail, Now It's Our Turn

Published on Wednesday, July 27, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/27

by Bill McKibben

"The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders." --Ed Abbey

"The Eyes of the Future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time." --Terry Tempest Williams

There's something about the redrock canyons that seems to inspire great writing -- I was lucky enough to know Ed Abbey and to count Terry Tempest Williams as a great friend. Both wrote -- and both fought. They fulfilled the duty they owed that great landscape. They fought to protect great chunks of land.

And they're joined by Tim DeChristopher, sentenced today to 24 months in prison for a creative act of resistance straight out of the Monkey Wrench Gang. He didn't damage anything except the pride of the Bureau of Land Management, when he posed as a bidder and won 14 parcels of land at an oil-and-gas lease auction. They were gorgeous pieces of land that he protected -- but far more, he was acting on behalf of every landscape left on the planet.

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"Paul Joseph Watson" - New Study Finds Direct Link Between Vaccines and Infant Mortality

United States, which administers highest number of vaccines in developed world, also has highest number of infant deaths in developed world

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, June 23, 2011

http://www.prisonplanet.com/new-study-finds-direct-link-between-vaccines-and-infant-mortality.html

A shocking new study published in a prestigious medical journal has found a direct statistical link between higher vaccine doses and infant mortality rates in the developed world, suggesting that the increasing number of inoculations being forced upon children by medical authorities, particularly in the United States which administers the highest number of vaccines and also has the highest number of infant deaths, is in fact having a detrimental impact on health.

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Paul Krugman: 'Centrism' -- The Cult That Is Destroying America

Published on Tuesday, July 26, 2011 by the New York Times

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/the-cult-that-is-destroying-america/

by Paul Krugman

Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system.

And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are.

No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.

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Mike Davis: Crash Club -- What Happens When Three Sputtering Economies Collide

By Mike Davis
Posted on July 26, 2011, Printed on July 27, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175422/

When my old gang and I were 14 or 15 years old, many centuries ago, we yearned for immortality in the fiery wreck of a bitchin' '40 Ford or '57 Chevy.  Our J.K. Rowling was Henry Felsen, the ex-Marine who wrote the bestselling masterpieces Hot Rod (1950), Street Rod (1953), andCrash Club (1958).

Officially, his books -- highly praised by the National Safety Council -- were deterrents, meant to scare my generation straight with huge dollops of teenage gore.  In fact, he was our asphalt Homer, exalting doomed teenage heroes and inviting us to emulate their legend.

One of his books ends with an apocalyptic collision at a crossroads that more or less wipes out the entire graduating class of a small Iowa town.  We loved this passage so much that we used to read it aloud to each other.

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Joshua Holland: Meet Erick Erickson, the Toxic Idiot Guiding House Republicans on the Debt Ceiling Fight

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on July 26, 2011, Printed on July 27, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151793/meet_erick_erickson%2C_the_toxic_idiot_guiding_house_republicans_on_the_debt_ceiling_fight

We're still hurtling toward economic disaster as House Republicans refuse to sign onto a debt ceiling deal that falls well to the right of what even GOP voters say they want. Given the stakes, it's hard to understand why would they walk away from a package of deep cuts without new tax revenues – a deal they could have only dreamed of getting a few short months ago.

The simplest explanation is that they're terrified of their Tea Party base, and aren't eager to be primaried from the right by some deep-pocketed neanderthal. But it's also about beating Obama next year. Donald Trump articulated the prevailing wisdom in GOP circles this week, telling Fox News, "When it comes time to default, they're not going to remember any of the Republicans' names. They are going to remember in history books one name, and that's Obama."

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"Stephanie Mencimer" - The Teen Suicide Epidemic in Michele Bachmann's District

Two years. Nine suicides. Why critics blame the congresswoman's anti-gay allies for contributing to a mental health crisis.

By Stephanie Mencimer | Mon Jul. 25, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

MOTHER JONES

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/07/michele-bachmann-teen-suicide

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The first was TJ [1]. Then came Samantha [2], Aaron, Nick, and Kevin. Over the past two years, a total of nine teenagers have committed suicide in a Minnesota school district represented by Rep. Michele Bachmann—the latest in May—and many more students have attempted to take their lives. State public health officials have labeled the area a "suicide contagion are [3]a" because of the unusually high death rate.

Some of the victims were gay, or perceived to be by their classmates, and many were reportedly bullied. And the anti-gay activists who are some of the congresswoman's closest allies stand accused of blocking an effective response to the crisis and fostering a climate of intolerance that allowed bullying to flourish. Bachmann, meanwhile, has been uncharacteristically silent on the tragic deaths that have roiled her district—including the high school that she attended.

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"Paul Joseph Watson" - Law professors warn that new legislation allows state to seize websites merely for linking to other websites that host copyrighted material

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, July 6, 2011

http://www.prisonplanet.com/protect-ip-act-gives-government-power-to-seize-websites-on-a-whim.html

New legislation that would give the US government the power to seize website domains on a whim with no oversight merely for linking to sites that host copyrighted material has been labeled a hallmark of “repressive regimes” by a group of law professors who warn that the bill allows the state to “break the Internet addressing system”.

The Protect IP bill, currently stalled in the Senate, represents a death blow to Internet freedom of speech. It would turn the entire web into a clone of the YouTube model, whichroutinely censors and deletes material when requested to by governments or corporations ^[1] and shuts down user channels without recourse.

The legislation merely codifies what Homeland Security is already practicing ^[2], seizing and shutting down websites without any form of legal proceedings and in many cases not even notifying the owner.

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