Dave LeFcourt - Lunacy Wrapped in the Mantle of Sanity

Didn't the cold war end with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991?

Apparently not to Mitt Romney who just the other day referred to Russia as "our No.1 geopolitical foe". Hmm?

I guess some things just don't die or maybe Romney has been "Rip Van Winkle" like these past 20 odd years and didn't get the memo.

So Obama let slip a remark to Russian President Medvedev that was inadvertently picked up by an open mike that after the November elections he'd have more "flexibility" in considering Russian concerns about the U.S. missile defense system to be deployed in Eastern Europe. Obama was heard to say, "This is my last election. After my election I'll have more flexibility", to which Medvedev commented, "I'll pass that on to Vladimir", (Russia's new president taking office in May).

Of course the Republicans went ballistic over Obama's off hand remark regurgitating their old mantra that Obama and the Democrats would be "soft on defense".

Read More:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Lunacy-Wrapped-in-the-Mant-by-Dave-Lefcourt-120329-952.html

Robert Scheer - Five Hypocrites and One Bad Plan

The Supreme Court is so full of it. The entire institution, as well as its sanctimonious judges themselves, reeks of a time-honored hypocrisy steeped in the arrogance that justice is served by unaccountable elitism.

My problem is not with the Republicans who dominate the court questioning the obviously flawed individual mandate for the purchasing of private-sector health insurance but rather with their zeal to limit federal power only when it threatens to help the most vulnerable. The laughter noted in the court transcription that greeted the prospect of millions of the uninsured suddenly being deprived of already extended protection under the now threatened law was unconscionable. The Republican justices seem determined to strike down not only the mandate but also the entire package of accompanying health care rights because of the likelihood that, without an individual mandate, tax revenue will be needed to extend insurance coverage to those who cannot afford it.

Read More:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/five_hypocrites_and_one_bad_plan_20120329/

Spanish Workers, Students Mass in General Strike

With near-empty railway stations, shut factories, mass marches and occasional outbreaks of violence during a general strike on Thursday, Spaniards showed the first signs of rebellion against the reformist, austerity-preaching conservative government they voted in four months ago.

Police and pickets clashed in a handful of places, but it was a largely peaceful general strike in a country whose sinking economy, with 23% unemployment, has become the focus of worry about the future of the whole eurozone area.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/29

Lisa Graves - “Social Security is Broke”—and Other Corporate Scare Tactics

Winston Churchill reportedly said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.” That was before corporations had perfected the art of public relations, investing millions of dollars in PR campaigns to advance their commercial and political interests.

The fact is, there are a number of things most people know are true—except they’re not. That’s the result of well-planned, well-funded, long-term propaganda campaigns designed to make people believe things that are against their own best interests.

One relatively new example is the climate denial industry, which is funded by some of the richest corporations and CEOs on the planet to protect their profits from regulations that would address climate change. Although it’s one of the biggest threats we have ever faced, an increasing number of Americans believe there is widespread disagreement in the scientific community about climate change.

Read More:

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/9-strategies-to-end-corporate-rule/3-things-everybody-knows2014and-why-theyre-wrong?utm_source=marapr12&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=titleSocialSecurityBroke

Tim McCoy - World Bank Nominee Tied to Monsanto Shareholder Bill Gates, Soros

Obama nominated Dartmouth University president Jim Yong Kim, M.D. to head the United Nations World Bank. Most people think that UN agencies benefit poor people, but this is far from the truth.

The UN World Bank claims to fight poverty in developing nations by financing infrastructure projects. But the UN World Bank is really a tool used to acquire Third World natural resources through conditions on loans that are extremely difficult to repay. The raw resources are then privatized by insider multi-national corporations. The World Bank actually creates more poverty.

The nomination of Jim Yong Kim indicates that the World Bank may shift away from focusing on infrastructure and will instead turn toward providing health care in Third World countries. Jim Yong Kim’s areas of interest include vaccines for tuberculosis as well as drugs for HIV and AIDS.

Read More:

http://www.nationofchange.org/world-bank-nominee-tied-monsanto-shareholder-bill-gates-soros-1332948861

Michael A. Smith - What’s Bankrupting Our Healthcare System?

Healthcare corruption is bankrupting our country. In this post, we’ll expose three forms of corruption that, if addressed immediately, could actually save us billions of dollars a year. We know how to fix the problem.

The question is will we fix the problem?

Healthcare Corruption #1: Skyrocketing Drug Prices

Prescription drugs cost too much. Now there’s many reasons for this, but our founder William Faloon believes one major reason is Big Pharma’s attack on generic drugs. These billion dollar companies use disgusting methods to inflate drug prices by filing frivolous lawsuits against generic drug makers. 

What this ultimately accomplishes is the delay of cheaper, yet safe and effective generic versions of drugs from reaching the market. Each day a court delays the approval of a lower-cost generic, which can enable a pharmaceutical company to earn millions of dollars in illicit revenue.

Read More:

http://blog.lef.org/2012/03/whats-bankrupting-our-healthcare-system.html

Study: Conservatives' trust in science has fallen dramatically since mid-1970s

While trust in science remained stable among people who self-identified as moderates and liberals in the United States between 1974 and 2010, trust in science fell among self-identified conservatives by more than 25 percent during the same period, according to new research from Gordon Gauchat, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research.

"You can see this distrust in science among conservatives reflected in the current Republican primary campaign," said Gauchat, whose study appears in the April issue of the American Sociological Review. "When people want to define themselves as conservatives relative to moderates and liberals, you often hear them raising questions about the validity of global warming and evolution and talking about how 'intellectual elites' and scientists don't necessarily have the whole truth."

Relying on data from the 1974-2010 waves of the nationally representative General Social Survey, the study found that people who self-identified as conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to self-identified moderates and liberals, and ended the period with the lowest.

Read More:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-03/asa-sct032612.php

Meditation Improves Emotional Behaviors in Teachers

Schoolteachers who underwent a short but intensive program of meditation were less depressed, anxious or stressed -- and more compassionate and aware of others' feelings, according to a UCSF-led study that blended ancient meditation practices with the most current scientific methods for regulating emotions.

A core feature of many religions, meditation is practiced by tens of millions around the world as part of their spiritual beliefs as well as to alleviate psychological problems, improve self-awareness and to clear the mind. Previous research has linked meditation to positive changes in blood pressure, metabolism and pain, but less is known about the specific emotional changes that result from the practice.

The new study was designed to create new techniques to reduce destructive emotions while improving social and emotional behavior.

The study will be published in the April issue of the journal Emotion.

Read More:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120328142852.htm

James Bamford - The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as “the principle,” marriage to multiple wives.

Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.

But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.

Read More:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

Danny Schechter - The Final Four Or More?

March seems to be leaving us like a lamb, although “March Madness” is still in effect, as college basketball marched into “The Final Four”

It is safe to predict that more Americans are paying attention to the action on the courts than the tired rhetoric and electoral mash-up where another final four bid for our attention, over-hyped in confrontational terms by political commentators who, like their sports counterparts, are just there to keep score:

They are in the endless update business focused on who is up, who’s down, and who is out-- in the cold.

Read More:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/danny-schechter/the-final-four-or-more_b_1381447.html?ref=elections-2012