Citi the Latest to Join the Bailout (But we still aren't forcing these banks to loan!)

We must start demanding more from this bailout...It should not be just a blank check to these CEOs for their bonuses.

CITIGROUP BAILS OUT ON EMPLOYEES
from Jim Hightower's Common-Sense Commentaries

“We are a bank,” Vikram Pandit recently told employees of Citigroup, the Wall Street banking conglomerate that Pandit heads.

Perhaps he thought it would be comforting for employees to hear the CEO say that at least he knows what business they’re in. But then he asked, “What does a bank do?” That definitely was not a comforting question.

Indeed, Pandit’s utterances were a bizarre prelude to the real, totally-discomforting purpose of the meeting, which was to announce that 53,000 Citigroup employees were being booted out the door – the largest mass firing in American corporate history. This is on top of 23,000 Citigroupers who had already gotten pink slips this year.

Citigroup, once the most valuable financial company in the nation, became a sprawling giant through the loosy-goosy deregulation policies of the past decade, and its top executives bet heavily on the speculative racket built on risky subprime mortgages. It was an awful bet. Citigroup has lost billions of dollars in the past year, and its stock price has plummeted.

So, now, Pandit says the employees have to take the hit. He brags that such wholesale downsizing is a sign of his executive boldness, referring to it as corporate “shock therapy.” As you might expect, however, Mr. Bold himself is not going to share in the shock. He is taking no cut in his $216 million pay, nor has he even been modest enough to say that he’ll forgo any bonus this year for presiding over Citigroup’s collapse.

Perhaps Pandit feels he deserves a bonus because of his chief achievement this year: getting $25 billion in bailout money from you and me.

Despite taking public money, Citigroup still has not increased its lending to help our economy. Excuse me, but if they’re not making loans and are slashing jobs, why are we bailing them out?

Quote of the Week

"We [Democrats] believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound one to another, that the problems of a retired school teacher in Duluth are our problems; that the future of the child -- that the future of the child in Buffalo is our future; that the struggle of a disabled man in Boston to survive and live decently is our struggle; that the hunger of a woman in Little Rock is our hunger; that the failure anywhere to provide what reasonably we might, to avoid pain, is our failure."

-Mario Cuomo
DNC Keynote Address delivered 7/16/1984 in San Francisco

Wind Turbines for the Home

Got Wind? Turbines for the Green Home
Saverio Truglia for TIME

Doug Morrell had already installed solar panels on his house in Coopersville, Mich., but he was eager to get a little bit greener. So the 52-year-old Navy veteran bought something that might seem more at home in the Dutch countryside than in a small town in western Michigan: a personal wind turbine. The 33-ft.-high (10 m) machine, whose blades span 7 ft. (2 m) in diameter, sits next to the pole barn 100 yd. (90 m) from Morrell's home. (Turbines like Morrell's convert the energy of the wind to electricity, while old windmills are geared for mechanical power, like pulling water from a well.) On days with decent wind — which occur frequently enough, since he can feel the breeze from Lake Michigan — the $16,000 Swift wind turbine can generate 1.5 kilowatts (kW) an hour, i.e., enough to power the average lightbulb for 15 hours. Together with his solar array, that's enough to take care of much of his electricity bill. "It's clean energy we don't have to dig for. It just comes right to us," says Morrell. And best of all, he says, "it's fun watching our meter run backward instead of forward."

Thanks in part to a new tax credit put into place by Congress in October, owning your own wind turbine could be the next green trend. While it's true that wind power has taken off in the U.S. — adding more in new capacity to the electrical grid last year than any other power source — most of that increase comes from utility wind farms, vast fields of turbines more than 300 ft. (90 m) tall. For homeowners seeking renewable-energy sources, however, better-known solar power has always dominated. Home solar power currently generates 12 times as much energy as small wind power, which is defined as turbines that have a capacity of 100 kW or less (though most household turbines will produce 10 kW at most). That's partly because residential wind turbines require space and sky — at least half an acre of open land — to get access to consistent winds. Still, according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), some 15 million homes in the U.S. fit that definition — and small turbines, unlike large wind farms, can be productive in weaker breezes, which puts more of the country into play, though the best areas are still windy spots like the Midwest or West Texas.

What's really held back residential wind power has been the lack of federal subsidies, which have fed the growth of other renewables like solar and large-scale wind. "We've had zero federal assistance," says Ron Stimmel, AWEA's small-wind expert.

But when Congress passed the bailout bill this fall, it added a 30% tax credit for small-wind projects, which Stimmel believes will enable the industry to grow 40% next year, even in a down market.

In other words, small wind may not be small potatoes for much longer. And that could be a boost for domestic green businesses as well: U.S. firms control 98% of the small-wind market, in contrast to large-scale wind and solar, in which foreign manufacturers dominate. "Since the tax credit, our phone has been ringing off the hook," says Andy Kruse, a co-founder of Southwest Windpower, a major small-scale-turbine producer in Flagstaff, Ariz. "It's really exciting to see the market coming to us."

More than 20 states offer separate subsidies, including ever green California and Vermont. "The federal and state subsidies can make it feasible to get a quicker payback," says Mike Bergey, president of Bergey Windpower, a small-wind producer in Norman, Okla.

Even so, buying your own windmill isn't cheap. A turbine that could produce most of your family's electricity might cost as much as $80,000 and take as long as two decades to pay back, depending on wind strength and state subsidies. (The 30% federal tax credit is currently capped at $4,000.)...

Success Story of the Week

Last week the OCA alerted us (and posted here) that President-elect Obama was considering former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack for USDA Secretary of Agriculture. Vilsack has been an ardent supporter of Monsanto, genetically engineered crops, and corn and soy-based biofuels. Thanks to vocal opposition from thousands of you in the OCA network, Vilksack's nomination has now been withdrawn. Although Vilsack told the Des Moines Register he didn't want to comment on why he had been sacked, sources at the Obama transition headquarters reported "a flood of calls and emails" from organic consumers opposing Vilsack's nomination. Thanks to your participation, the OCA office in Washington, DC is submitting a petition with 8,000 signatures to Obama's transition team this week, urging Obama to take a strong stand in support of organic food and farming.

Ten Reasons Why Gay Marriage is Wrong

A Funny List grabbed from a Facebook Group

1) Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.

2) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

3) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

4) Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can't marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.

5) Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britney Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.

6) Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.

7) Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

8) Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.

9) Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.

10) Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms, just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

Gen-We

Numbering 95 million, Generation We or "Millennials" were born between 1978 and 2000 and are emerging as a social, political and philosophical force. In 2016 the youngest of us will reach voting age and we'll be the largest voting block in the history of the country.



Join the movement...The 'We Declaration'

Gen-We plans to release a site in 2009 that will allow us to connect, organize, develop campaigns, and launch actions that influence the political process, enable collective voices to be heard and heeded, and encourage a movement of globally responsible citizens.

An Open Letter To Joe Lieberman

Dear Senator Lieberman,

Congratulations! You got away with it! So despite having supported and endorsed the Republican candidate for president -- and going so far as to question the patriotism of the Democratic nominee -- you've managed to keep your chairmanship. By rights, you should've been summarily ejector-seated from your committees, bonked on the head with your gavels -- cartoon-style -- and hauled from the Democratic caucus naked and on a rail whilst being pelted with wadded-up copies of your RNC address.

The aforementioned reasons for this still-lenient serving of justice fails to include the syllabus of other trespasses against you, including, first and foremost, your unwavering support for the Bush administration's unforgivable foreign policy -- a policy which has all but bankrupted our treasury and besmirched America's reputation abroad. Heckuva job, Senator!

One might be inclined to consider your conduct to date as somehow principled -- even mavericky, had it not been so transparently self-serving. Your behavior has been that of a man guided by nothing more than petty vengeance and retribution -- attention-starved opportunism not unlike grade-school instigators and gossip-mongers whose only path to relevance is to play two friends against each other. Worming your way from side to side depending on which kid or clique likes you more.

Now, I completely understand the political reasons for why President-elect Obama and the caucus ultimately chose to keep you around. Unfortunately, the Democrats need your stinky vote -- such as it is -- in order to theoretically break any future Republican filibusters. And there will be many of those to be sure. However, the closer we get to 60 votes in the caucus the better our chances of reversing the craptastical policies and legislation of your favorite Bush administration and the formerly Republican Congress.

Sure, there's no guarantee that you'll vote with the caucus, but you made it clear that you would have pitched a spasmodic, petulant fit and changed your affiliation to the Republican Party from the "Lieberman Loves Lieberman" party or whatever the hell it's called, had you been stripped of your chairmanship. Consequently, the Democratic caucus would've definitely lost your vote. It's an unenviable "possibly" versus "definitely" proposition. And with the caucus being this close to 60 against what will surely be an obstructionist Republican caucus, we have no other choice but to roll the dice with "possibly."

That is until 2010 when the Democrats will hopefully attain enough members, and thus votes, that they won't need your support anymore. Then you can storm off and mind-screw the Republicans for a couple of years until -- and it's probably not good strategy to tip our hand like this, but you know it's coming -- until you lose in 2012.

Nevertheless, you got what you wanted yesterday. Circumstances allowed you to keep your chairmanship irrespective of your weasely and contemptible maneuvering. And more than a few of us on the left actually agree with you for once: you managed to abscond off without adequate punishment.

You got away with it, despite those meddling kids, right?

Not so fast.

I submit to you, Senator Lieberman, that you were punished yesterday more than you realize. Stick with me on this. I'll explain.

I've been a supporter of the president-elect for the better part of a year now, and while I've always recognized a deep intellectualism and multilayered thoughtfulness in the man, it never fully occurred to me how he would use these strengths in a position of leadership. Until this week.

In sharp contrast to your behavior, President-elect Obama hasn't shown any predilection for pettiness or disloyalty, nor has he undermined his allies for the sake of political expedience. He's proved himself to be a man of great character. Of values. I don't need to remind anyone how he stood by Jeremiah Wright, for example, and at his own political peril when most would've tossed him overboard like political chum.

You, on the other hand, have shown an unapologetic contempt for the party that once nominated you for the vice presidency -- the party that welcomed you back to the fold even though you slipped through the system and defeated the fairly elected Democratic nominee, Ned Lamont, in 2006. You've betrayed your fellow liberals to settle a political score, Senator -- in order to exact some kind of ignoble payback against your former party, against your caucus and against the netroots for merely calling you out on your literal and figurative smooching of the president.

This is behavior President-elect Obama doesn't appear to be capable of. Because he's clearly better than you. In fact, it's not difficult to hypothesize that had you possessed a fraction of his political instincts or any small measure of his morality, you would absolutely not be in this position, Senator.

See, by allowing you to keep your precious chairmanship -- by letting you off the hook -- President-elect Obama, through his political bigness, punished you without punishing you. He beat you yesterday, Senator. He beat you because he let you be you, and underscored it with his demonstrably better angels and strength of character.

In the final analysis, the hard reality is that by not choosing retribution, he made you look...

...small.

And that, Senator, is good enough for me.

Cheers!
Bob Cesca
The Huffington Post

Quote of the Week

"The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God."
-Thomas Jefferson

Monsanto Peddling More GMO's

MONSANTO'S LATEST BIOTECH MIRICLE
from Jim Hightower's Common-Sense Commentaries

Once again, here comes the Monsanto Medicine Show! The corporate flimflammer is hawking yet another brand of pricey biotech snake oil, guaranteed to work miracles.

Monsanto promises that its latest high-tech hocus-pocus will allow farmers to grow crops without water. Amazing! Well, at least not much water. “More crop per drop” is the PR slogan, and the corporation is exploiting public fears about global warming and food shortages as its marketing leverage. The white-smock food manipulators in Monsanto's labs claim to have added some powerful mystery genes to the DNA of corn, forcing the plant to reconfigure its make-up so it survives in a drought.

It’s a miracle plant, bark the corporate flimflammers – a drought-tolerant crop that even Momma Nature hasn’t been able to produce in millions of years of evolution! But– shazaam – we made it in our handy gene-splicing machine in no time at all! It’s just what those poor people of Africa need, say the hucksters, so step right up and buy a ton of our magic corn seed!

Not so fast. What are these mystery genes? Monsanto won’t say. From what species of plants or animals did you take the genes? Trade secret, says Monsanto. If the pollen of this frankencorn gets loose in nature, it can have unimaginable negative impacts on our entire food supply, so what are you doing to prevent that? Trust us, says Monsanto. Why not just push for better water management practices, which is easier, more effective, less costly, and won't endanger our health? We can’t profit from that, says Monsanto. Well what about labeling this corn? No way, says Monsanto, because consumers wouldn't buy it if they know it's been genetically altered.

Like other biotech “miracles,” this one amounts to a kernel of corporate greed suspended in unexamined dangers, coated with secrecy, and tainted with deceit.

Michael Pollan for U.S. Secretary of Agriculture

Just saw this petition going around...http://www.petitiononline.com/MPoll4Ag/petition.html
If you don't know who Michael Pollan is(author of Omivore's Dilemma and many other books) below is a link to his CV

This is a real chance for us to have someone in the cabinet that has our best interests at heart not another corporate lobbyist for the large GMO and pesticide companies..please sign the petition and pass it along to others.

What is Section 382, you ask?

It seems the Treasury Dept is going behind our backs yet again...

A Quiet Windfall For U.S. Banks: With Attention on Bailout Debate, Treasury Made Change to Tax Policy
By Amit R. Paley for the Washington Post

In just a couple months, I must have read well more than 100 newspaper articles on the financial collapse and the federal response to it. But none is more remarkable than Amit Paley's story in the Washington Post...The story concerns an obscure change in the U.S. Tax Code that was forced through by the U.S. Treasury Department without any public review or Congressional involvement, a change that will grant an estimated $25 billion in tax savings to Wells Fargo and deprive the federal government of somewhere between $105 and $140 billion in revenue...The change was announced with no fanfare within 24 hours after the House voted down the first bailout bill. Treasury acted without clear legal authority. "I've been in tax law for 20 years, and I've never seen anything like this," says one lawyer quoted in the article. (Summary for TIME.com by Michael Scherer)

Newt Gingrich Concerned About Gays

When did protesting for your rights become radical and fascist?



And for a little irony on the situation we always have Wonkette...
Newt Gingrich Very Concerned About, What Now, The Gays

Here’s what Newt Gingrich tells Bill O’Reilly in response to the latest Homosexual-Mormon War battles: “I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion.” Dude… they’re just Mormons.

Newt loves “traditional religion” and its values so very much. You know, Ten Commandments and the like! Such as, say, leaving your wife for a mistress while impeaching someone who got a BJ.

You can tell he really enjoys pretending that he has any convictions whatsoever. Also: near the end of this video he is credentialed as, “Co-Host Of The DVD, ‘We Have The Power.’” Which “they” don’t.

Restore the Rule of Law

Huzzah!!!

Democratic Pressure on Obama to Restore the Rule of Law
By ADAM COHEN for the NY Times

In a Senate hearing room in September, weeks before Barack Obama won the election, a series of law professors, lawyers and civil libertarians outlined one of the biggest challenges that will be facing the next president: bringing the United States government back under the rule of law.

Over the past eight years, they testified, American legal traditions have been degraded in areas ranging from domestic spying to government secrecy. The damage that has been done by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and others is so grave that just assessing it will be an enormous task. Repairing it will be even more enormous.

This was not a new complaint. Civil liberties advocates have been sounding the alarm for years. The difference now is that a Democrat is about to assume the presidency, and one of the most ardent defenders of civil liberties in his party — Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin — is dedicated to putting the restoration of the rule of law on the agenda of the incoming government, with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups.

Mr. Feingold, who is chairman the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the Constitution, already has left his imprint on campaign finance, with the McCain-Feingold law, and has been a leading critic of pork-barrel spending and corporate welfare.

Now he has a new cause. Before the election, Mr. Feingold argued that whoever won should make a priority of rolling back Bush administration policies that eroded constitutional rights and disrupted the careful system of checks and balances. Now that Mr. Obama — a onetime constitutional law professor who made this issue a cause early in the campaign — has won the election, there is both reason for optimism and increased pressure on the president-elect to keep his promises.

Mr. Feingold has been compiling a list of areas for the next president to focus on, which he intends to present to Mr. Obama. It includes amending the Patriot Act, giving detainees greater legal protections and banning torture, cruelty and degrading treatment. He wants to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to restore limits on domestic spying. And he wants to roll back the Bush administration’s dedication to classifying government documents.

Many reforms could be implemented directly by the next president. Mr. Obama could renounce Mr. Bush’s extreme views of executive power, including the notion that in many areas, the president can act as he wants without restraint by Congress or the judiciary. Mr. Obama also could declare his intention not to use presidential signing statements as Mr. Bush did in record numbers to reject parts of bills signed into law.

Congress also has work to do. Many of the excesses of the last eight years have been the result of Mr. Feingold’s colleagues’ capitulation as much as presidential overreaching. He expects Congress to do more than just fix laws like the Patriot Act. He wants the Senate to question presidential nominees closely at their confirmation hearings about their commitment to the rule of law. And he hopes Congress will do its duty to impose the rigorous supervision it rarely imposed in the Bush years.

Restoring the rule of law will not be easy, Mr. Feingold concedes. Part of the problem is that it is hard to know how much damage has been done. Many programs, like domestic spying and extraordinary rendition — the secret transfer of detainees to foreign countries where they are harshly interrogated — have operated in the shadows.

And it would be a mistake to overlook Congress’s role. Members from both parties voted for laws like the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which stripped detainees of habeas corpus rights, and looked the other way while the rule of law was diminished.

Still, Mr. Feingold is convinced that this is a critical moment. If the next president does not reverse the Bush administration’s doctrines, he fears that they will no longer simply be the policies of one extremist president. The danger is that they will be the nation’s new understanding of the Constitution.

Space Portals

Magnetic Portals Connect Sun and Earth
Dr. Tony Phillips for NASA

During the time it takes you to read this, something will happen high overhead that until recently many scientists didn't believe in. A magnetic portal will open, linking Earth to the sun 93 million miles away. Tons of high-energy particles may flow through the opening before it closes again, around the time you reach the end of the page.
"It's called a flux transfer event or 'FTE,'" says space physicist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn't exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible."

Researchers have long known that the Earth and sun must be connected. Earth's magnetosphere (the magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet) is filled with particles from the sun that arrive via the solar wind and penetrate the planet's magnetic defenses. They enter by following magnetic field lines that can be traced from terra firma all the way back to the sun's atmosphere.

Several speakers at the Workshop have outlined how FTEs form: On the dayside of Earth (the side closest to the sun), Earth's magnetic field presses against the sun's magnetic field. Approximately every eight minutes, the two fields briefly merge or "reconnect," forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth. The European Space Agency's fleet of four Cluster spacecraft and NASA's five THEMIS probes have flown through and surrounded these cylinders, measuring their dimensions and sensing the particles that shoot through. "They're real," says Sibeck.

The Destruction of our Mountains

HELP STOP MOUNTAINTOP MINING MADNESS
from Jim Hightower's Common-Sense Commentaries

Industrial polluters are very skilled at perverting our language when they want to eliminate regulations that protect us and our environment from their rampant destruction. Rather than saying honestly that they’re out to kill anti-pollution regulations – they speak soothingly of “easing,” “modifying,” and “relaxing” the rules. This sounds like a mattress ad.

They're at it again. Pushed by Appalachia’s coal barons, George W’s office of surface mining is trying to rush through a rule change that would be one of the most destructive imaginable. It involves a horrendous, ruinous mining method called mountaintop removal. “Removal” is another Orwellian euphemism, disguising the industry’s brutal practice of simply blowing up the tops of ancient Appalachian mountains, then callously shoving the massive piles of rubble down the mountainside, burying everything below.

The one deterrent – often ignored by coal corporations – is a rule prohibiting this rubble from being dumped within 100 feet of valley streams. Rather than enforce this clear regulation, however, Bush & Company have recently proposed to “clarify” the meaning of “Don’t Do That.” The new language says the coal giants can dump their waste right into streams, so long as they try to minimize the damage “to the extent possible.”

In other words: Free for all – blast away! This is a grotesque departing gift from the Bushites to corporations that have been loyal campaign funders. It would encourage more mindless decimation of our mountains and the burying of hundreds of miles of streams beneath tons of coal waste.

Still, there is hope for sanity. The EPA must okay the rule change, there are moves in Congress to stop it, and both Barack Obama and John McCain say they oppose it. To join this fight, connect with this grassroots group: www.ilovemountains.org.

Bill Ayers Gets a Chance to Speak

Bill Ayers finally gets to speak, share his side of the story, and explain his relationship with Obama...even though through the entire interview they are attacking him and coercing him to say something damning.

Here's the link to the Bill Ayers interview by 'Good Morning America's' Chris Cuomo and below is a section from the accompanying article to the interview.

Campaign Bogeyman William Ayers Talks to 'GMA'
By MARK MOONEY

William Ayers, the 1960s radical whose violent history became a focal point in the 2008 presidential election, said today that the Republicans unfairly "demonized" him in an attempt to damage the campaign of President-elect Barack Obama...

The Weather Underground bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon and the New York City Police Department to protest the Vietnam War. Breaking his silence, Ayers told Cuomo that the GOP attack was a "dishonest narrative...to demonize me."

He added, "I don't buy the idea that guilt by association should have any part of our politics," he said.

Ayers scoffed at the Republican effort to make his ties to Obama appear suspicious.

"This idea that we need to know more, like there's some dark, hidden secret, some secret link," Ayers said. "It's a myth thrown up by people who want to exploit the politics of fear."

But he was unapologetic about his militant actions during the Vietnam War.

"What you call the violent past, that was a time when thousands of people were being murdered every month by our own government... We were on the right side," he told "GMA."

"The content of the Vietnam protest is that there were despicable acts going on, but the despicable acts were being done by our government... I never hurt or killed anyone," Ayers said.

Update: 11/17/08

Just came across another recent article with an Ayer's interview. It gives a very clear picture of the Orwellian echoes of the McCain campaign.

SHAPIRO: During the campaign, how many clips did you see of people like Sarah Palin denouncing Bill Ayers, "the terrorist pal" of Barack Obama?

AYERS: I'm not a big consumer of television, so I didn't see a lot. I also felt from the beginning that this is a cartoon character that's been cast up on the screen and I didn't feel personally implicated in that character. One of the delicious ironies of a campaign filled with ironies was that the McCain campaign tried to use me to bring Obama down -- and every time that he mentioned my name his poll numbers dropped. Again, I think that's a big credit to the American people. But I did see a few clips. I saw the clip where she [Palin] first talked about Barack Obama palling around with terrorists and the crowd shouted, "Kill him, kill him." That was sent to me by my kids. I don't know if you remember the Two Minutes Hate in George Orwell's "1984"? In Two Minutes Hate, the party faithful gather in front of a television screen and the image of Emmanuel Goldstein is cast up on the screen and they work themselves into a frenzy of hatred and they begin to chant, "Kill him." That's how I felt. I felt a little bit like I was this character cast on the screen. It bore no relation to me. And yet it had a serious purpose and potentially serious consequences. I was in New York when this was shown and my alderman from Chicago called -- worried -- and wanted to know how I was taking care of my safety. I was touched that she would do that. . . .

SHAPIRO: In [your] book you also state that a phone call was made to the Pentagon a half-hour in advance warning them to evacuate that part of the building [before the Weather Underground's 1972 bombing]. But reading this entire passage -- and remembering the era -- what baffles me is how could you possibly ever believe that doing things like this would be an effective way to getting what you wanted?

AYERS: What we thought we were doing was to raise a screaming alarm -- to try to wake up anybody who was still sleepwalking to the reality of what was going on in our name. Frankly, I look back at it, and I don't claim or claim in the book, any particular heroism or status as leaders in any sense. What I do try to point out is that 1968 comes and the war is massively unpopular and our democracy can't grapple with that. It can't end the war somehow. And those of us who are committed to ending the war did many, many different things. Some went to Europe and Africa to get away from the madness. Some went to the communes of Vermont and California to start an alternative life. Some went into the factories of the Northeast to organize the workers. My younger brother actually enlisted in the Army and tried to build a serviceman's union. You talk about nuts. Was that nuts? It was admirable and a little unrealistic.

And a small group of us decided that we wanted to survive what we thought was an impending American fascism. We saw this in the murders of black leaders close to us. The murder of Fred Hampton [of the Black Panthers] had a huge impact on us. We wanted to survive that -- and make the making of the war painful for the war makers. So, looking back, it was hard for me to say that anybody had a purchase on the right thing to do. . . . History is always lived looking forward not backward. What are we doing now to end two unpopular wars? Two wars without end. What are we doing? And I would argue that we're not doing enough, those of us who see the war as illegal, immoral, unwinnable. What are we doing to stop it?

The Paper from the Future - NY Times 7/4/09 Edition

What's crazy about this whole thing is that from just reading the articles as if they have happened makes me feel we really have a chance right now to accomplish everything we've been seeking.


New York Times Special Edition Video News Release - Nov. 12, 2008 from H Schweppes on Vimeo.

Liberal Pranksters Hand Out Times Spoof
By Sewell Chan for The New York Times

In an elaborate hoax, pranksters distributed thousands of free copies of a spoof edition of The New York Times on Wednesday morning at busy subway stations around the city, including Grand Central Terminal, Washington and Union Squares, the 14th and 23rd Street stations along Eighth Avenue, and Pacific Street in Brooklyn, among others.

The spurious 14-page papers — with a headline “IRAQ WAR ENDS” — surprised commuters, many of whom took the free copies thinking they were legitimate.

The paper is dated July 4, 2009, and imagines a liberal utopia of national health care, a rebuilt economy, progressive taxation, a national oil fund to study climate change, and other goals of progressive politics.

The hoax was accompanied by a Web site that mimics the look of The Times’s real Web site. A page of the spoof site contained links to dozens of progressive organizations, which were also listed in the print edition.

(A headline in the fake business section declares: “Public Relations Industry Forecasts a Series of Massive Layoffs.” Uh, sure.)

The Associated Press reported that copies of the spoof paper were also handed out in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, and that the pranksters — who included a film promoter, three unnamed Times employees and Steven Lambert, an art professor — financed the paper with small online contributions and created the paper to urge President-elect Barack Obama to keep his campaign promises.

According to The A.P., software and Internet support were provided by the Yes Men, who were the subject of a 2004 documentary film.

On Wednesday, the Yes Men issued a statement about the prank, stating, in part:

In an elaborate operation six months in the planning, 1.2 million papers were printed at six different presses and driven to prearranged pickup locations, where thousands of volunteers stood ready to pass them out on the street.

Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a co-author of “The Trust,” a history of the family that controls The Times, said in a telephone interview that the paper should be flattered by the spoof.

“I would say if you’ve got one, hold on to it,” Mr. Jones, a former Times reporter, said of the fake issue. “It will probably be a collector’s item. I’m just glad someone thinks The New York Times print edition is worthy of an elaborate hoax. A Web spoof would have been infinitely easier. But creating a print newspaper and handing it out at subway stations? That takes a lot of effort.”

Who will be the verrry 1st CTO (Chief Technology Officer)

This is very cool...democracy in action. I just got through looking at this and voted for my fav ideas!

Micah Sifry writes:

While much of the tech industry and blogosphere is pondering who President-elect Barack Obama might appoint as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer--Eric Schmidt? Jeff Bezos? Larry Lessig?--a bunch of heavy-hitting public interest groups in Washington and a couple of civic-minded techies out in Seattle have each launched promising interventions in the discussion.

The first one, out yesterday, is a new site called ObamaCTO.org. The site is basically a feedback forum centered on one question: What should be the CTO's top priorities?

ObamaCTO is built on Uservoice, which enables anyone to create an account, post their own idea, comment on any idea, and distribute up to 10 votes to help rank all the ideas posted.

Who will be the next Secretary of Agriculture?

A likely turning point in history took place on November 4th with the election of Barack Obama, a politician who has consistently voiced his support for family farms and organic agriculture, among other progressive positions. Organic consumers and farmers now have an incredible opportunity to shape the future of federal farm and food policy. President-Elect Obama is in the process of formulating policy, assembling his transition team, and considering nominees for Secretary of Agriculture, among other important positions. The Secretary of Agriculture is responsible for directing the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its $90 billion annual budget, including the National Organic Program, food stamp and nutrition programs, and agriculture subsidies.

Obama throughout his campaign, and since his election, has stressed that he wants to hear from the public in order to formulate his policies. Let's all take him up on his invitation. Please sign the Organic Consumer Association's petition letter to President-Elect Barack Obama today and urge him to take a stand in support of organic food and farming. After you sign this petition, please forward it to everyone you know. We need to raise our common organic voice on a massive scale, if we are to move the new Administration and the nation in a healthy, just, sustainable, and organic direction.

Quote of the Week

Socrates put on trial, for undermining state religion and corrupting young people, offered this speech in his own defense, as reported in Plato's Apology. And this is after he had been convicted by the jury, where he refused to accept his penalty, exile from Athens or a commitment to silence, even though he knew the next sentence would be death.

"Perhaps someone might say, "Socrates, can you not go away from us and live quietly, without talking?" Now this is the hardest thing to make some of you believe. For if I say that such conduct would be disobedience to the god and that therefore I cannot keep quiet, you will think I am jesting and will not believe me; and if again I say that to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you will believe me still less. This is as I say, gentlemen, but it is not easy to convince you."

How to Close Guantánamo

How to Close Guantánamo
By Mark Kukis for Time

...Obama has vowed to close Guantánamo and reject the Military Commissions Act, the 2006 law underpinning the ongoing Guantánamo tribunals. But major hurdles stand in the way of doing so, even for a new President with a clear mandate....

First, what do you do with the roughly 255 people currently imprisoned at Guantánamo — a group of whom only 23 have been charged? If Obama wanted to move as swiftly as possible to close Guantánamo, the strongest step he could take as President would be to simply shutter the camp by Executive Order and transfer all of the detainees to prison sites inside the U.S. At that point, in theory, the detainees would face four possible fates: being charged with offenses that could be tried in federal courts; court-marshaled according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice; turned over to the governments of their native countries; or simply released...

There are no good options for trying the roughly 14 others the government appears intent on prosecuting, because the Bush Administration has held them for so many years by Executive Orders in contravention of regular U.S. criminal and military law...

Obama may consider working to create so-called national-security courts, which would essentially be a hybrid tribunal system blending military and civilian criminal law. Those who support the creation of national-security courts say that only a new, carefully constructed system can effectively deal with issues like classified evidence and other matters that sometimes snarl proceedings in regular criminal and military courts...

The emerging Obama transition team has yet to spell out its plans for closing Guantánamo officially...But there's little doubt that the Guantánamo problem Bush leaves behind for Obama will be one of the hardest the President-elect will face when he finally sits in the Oval Office.

Exit Polls

A little late on posting this info....but it's def worth a gander (goes back all the way to 1980's for a comparison)

Election Results for 2008

A Word of Difference

In the past 500 years, thousands of languages have disappeared, becoming extinct, similar to that of plant diversity. A Word of Difference examines the relationship between the decline of the world’s endemic languages and that of the planet’s biodiversity.

Harmon writes

“It is perfectly conceivable that life on Earth could have evolved so as to present us with conditions much closer to those that, say, a prisoner feels in solitary confinement. Rather than a world supplied with millions of species, thousands of languages and other cultural distinctions, and a tremendously varied landscape, we might have drawn one far more barren. We could have been born into a world populated by starlings and weeds, where every person spoke and dressed and ate and behaved more or less the same, where every field and town looked pretty much like any other… But we were lucky. We got the world that we have. The one we have inherited is truly, even yet, a world of difference. At its heart is a paradox: human beings need sameness, but being human means we first need genuinely rich stores of biocultural diversity to distill it from. If we continue to act in ways that destroy diversity, life of a sort will go on, but our aliveness – our uniquely human feeling of what life is supposed to be about – will have become extinct.”

Change Depends On Us....And the Job Begins Now

REAL CHANGE DEPENDS ON US
from Jim Hightower's Common-Sense Commentaries

Obama elected! Job done, right?

Uh… not quite. If last week’s sweeping vote for change is to mean anything substantive, We The People have stay alert and on the move. And the job begins now.

Like fresh-poured concrete, the shape of Obama’s presidency is going to set up quickly, and we can’t be lulled into thinking that casting a ballot is all that democracy requires of us. Now is not the time to crank back in our La-Z-Boys, trusting Obama to do the heavy lifting for us. Wall Street, the war machine, Republican Congress critters, weak-kneed Democrats, and other powerful forces of business-as-usual policies will be all over him. These insiders intend to shape him in their mold.

We have to be the counter force – an aggressive and vociferous Loyal Opposition pushing insistently and persistently from the outside. We must stand up and speak out on every move the insiders make; we must propose and propel progressive ideas and ideals; and we certainly must expose and vigorously oppose any capitulations that he’ll be pressured to make to the corporate powers. If his presidency is to be worthy of the deep potential of this political moment in our history, you and I have to step up.

It’s real change we’re after, a fundamental shift in national direction and policy: Get our troops and our national reputation out of Iraq, provide good health care for all, end “tinkle down” economics, reign in corporate greedheads, reinvest in America’s infrastructure, deal with global warming, no more torture, get serious about green energy, restore our stolen liberties – and generally reinstate the Common Good as our nation’s governing ethic.

Obama himself has often said that he is not the change, we are. Through him, we opened the White House door to the possibility of change last Tuesday. Now, we must see it through.

The Brain in Love

Why do we crave love so much, even to the point that we would die for it? Why do we have a very real, very physical need for romantic love? "Love is an urge, a need, like hunger or thirst". This Ted Talk with Helen Fisher goes through the science and chemistry behind love, and explains what happens in your brain when you are in love.

Change.gov

Wow! This is what I'm talking about...When has an administration ever been so proactive in listening to the people??...I mean it could all be a sham to make us hope and feel better. But I honestly think that Obama is trying to be the best leader our country has ever had!

Obama's Presidential Transition Team just launched this new website Change.gov which will document the Obama administration's transition into power and solicit ideas and stories from the public. I will definitely be taking an opportunity to write to our new president and share my ideas for the future...and I hope you will do the same. Let our voices finally be heard!

Obama

I finally realized today what an Obama presidency really means to the world...Not only does it mean an era of calm and peace. But it gives a sense of hope to countries all over the world that democracy does work! And that people can rise up and overcome any tyrant. To the Jews 'Barack' means blessed, to the Shi'ite Muslims 'Hussein' is the ultimate symbol of an underdog fighting against injustice, and to the world 'Obama' means believing in the American Dream once again.

Now is the time for the neoconservatives of all cultures and nations to be pushed back and a new era emerge out of the ashes of hate that has been building for the last 8 years.

I'm reposting a Thank You letter by Jamie Lee Curtis because I too want to give my thanks to Obama.

Thank you Barack Obama.

Thank you for four years ago making me say out-loud " Why can't he be our candidate?"

Thank you for blowing away the ether of complacency.

Thank you for beating that maver-"ICK" and his running date.

Thank you for being patient with this insane process we call Democracy.

Thank you for your ambition and your drive, your mind and your gravitas.

Thank you for recognizing the needle and the damage done, the needle, our addiction to more, better, faster, greasier, dirtier, celebrity lifestyles and prescription poisons and the damage done, the Economic Crisis, the Health Care debacle, the State of Education. This is AMERICA. Health and Education should be #1.

Thank you for understanding World History, Geography, countries and cultures, religions, customs and America's tarnished reputation in those very countries.

Thank you for voting against the War and for continuing to voice that opposition.

Thank you for your brilliant campaign and campaign managers and your staff.

Thank you for choosing Joe Biden.

Thank you for leading and inspiring me.

You didn't do this alone. You knew it was going to take the three generations of black women in Ypsilanti, Michigan as well as Jose, the latino plumber in Miami or Ron Howard putting on Opie's toupee or my daughter, Annie and her friends at an Ohio college who are voting for the first time in their lives or my local friends, the busy multitasking hordes who called and knocked and walked your walk or Wendy Riva, the mother and activist in Santa Monica, who grabbed me on the street and within hours had me, t-shirted and bumper-stickered and hooked up to the Obama campaign. Me, this middle aged, privileged, white woman whose own mother was once such an ardent Democratic ( Kennedy ) supporter, that she was offered an ambassadorship in the Johnson administration. Me, who prior to this election did shit. Oh, I gave some money to Gore and Kerry and except for my husband's trip to Florida to canvas for Kerry, we just bitched and complained and did nothing.

Thank you for making me, after another dinner of political bitching by left leaning, well meaning, show off business types, say...well, what are you doing to change this?

Thank you for getting me to Michigan to see places I never would have seen and meeting people I would have never met and getting me to see the abandoned factories and businesses that can be re-tooled and retrofitted to a green technology and a green industry.

Thank you for getting us all, both sides of the Divided States of America to pay attention to our civic duty and moral responsibility.

Thank you for reminding us that this next period of time will be hard. That there are no easy answers. That there will be sacrifice. There will be blood. There will be sweat. There will be tears.

Thank you for marrying Michelle Obama and being the kind of father you are to your daughters.

Thank you for your grace.

Thank you for your leadership.

Hillary Clinton, who I supported and whom I believe you should bring in to your cabinet (see Team of Rivals) wrote: it takes a village to raise a child. I say it takes a leader to raise the village.

The village needs one leader and you, thank God and your hard work and the grass rooted folks who helped you, are that leader.

So lead us Barack Obama...We will follow you...

Thank you Barack Obama for making me believe again in the American Dream.

Quote of the Week

"And now -- now we must look to the future. Let us heed the voice of the people and recognize their common sense. If we do not, we not only blaspheme our political heritage, we ignore the common ties that bind all Americans. Many fear the future. Many are distrustful of their leaders, and believe that their voices are never heard. Many seek only to satisfy their private work -- wants; to satisfy their private interests. But this is the great danger America faces -- that we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual; each seeking to satisfy private wants. If that happens, who then will speak for America? Who then will speak for the common good?

This is the question which must be answered in 1976: Are we to be one people bound together by common spirit, sharing in a common endeavor; or will we become a divided nation? For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future. We must not become the "New Puritans" and reject our society. We must address and master the future together. It can be done if we restore the belief that we share a sense of national community, that we share a common national endeavor. It can be done.

There is no executive order; there is no law that can require the American people to form a national community. This we must do as individuals, and if we do it as individuals, there is no President of the United States who can veto that decision."
-Barbara Jordan, 1976 DNC Keynote Address

Change Has Come to America

Obama's Victory Speech...

Why Bolivia Quit the U.S.

Why Bolivia Quit the U.S. War on Drugs
By Jean Friedman-Rudovsky for Time

Some may see Bolivia's decision last weekend to opt out of Washington's war on drugs as the inevitable consequence of electing a president who was not only a leftist opponent of U.S. influence in the region, but also a coca farmer himself. But President Evo Morales, elected in 2005, cast his decision on Saturday to suspend the activities of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in his country as a matter of national security. "We have the obligation to defend the dignity and the sovereignty of the Bolivian people," said Morales. "There have been DEA agents who, carrying out espionage, financed rogue groups with the intention of taking the lives of [Bolivian government] officials, though not the President's."

Morales' government has accused a DEA agent of delivering money to opposition groups in the Amazon region during the wave of antigovernment violence that peaked on September 11, claiming the lives of more than 25 indigenous peasants and wounding hundreds more. Over the past year, Bolivia's eastern lowlands have been racked with conflict as opposition groups have sought to wrest control from the central government over vast natural gas reserves and laws governing the ownership of land. The Bolivian government has continually blamed the U.S. for fomenting the violence, but Washington routinely denies any malicious meddling...

...Morales' government, in fact, was acknowledged by the U.S. earlier this year to have successfully brought coca cultivation under control, and increased Bolivia's rate of interdiction of coca destined for cocaine production. But Washington has been skeptical of Morales' talk of expanding the production of coca for non-narcotic uses such as teas and other products. Morales, for his part, was elected in part because of his strident opposition to the decades-long U.S. war on coca cultivation in his country. The leaf has traditionally been brewed in tea for centuries to stave off hunger and fatigue, and combat altitude sickness, and the U.S. led campaign to militarily eradicate the crop had claimed over 70 lives and wounded more than 1,000 people in Bolivia since the late '80s...

...But Morales points to his track record over the past three years in containing coca cultivation and improving interdiction numbers. He says Bolivia is capable of fighting drug trafficking without U.S. intervention, and has called on the Union of South American Nations to begin playing the international coordination role that the U.S. DEA has been playing...

..Bolivians are hoping that Tuesday's U.S. election produces a government with which La Paz can make a fresh start. "I don't want this to be taken as me campaigning for anyone, but let's hope the U.S. goes blue too," said Morales on Saturday — his own party's colors are the same as those of Senator Barack Obama. The Bolivian President made clear he envisages repairing the relationship once President Bush has gone. More than once, he referred to his own victory in Bolivia as having brought "the change we need".

I'm posting Evo Morales' interview on the Daily Show from about a year ago...I'll let you decide what type of person he is.

Bush Lies About Closing Guantanamo Bay

A New Vision for Refrigeration

This is amazing...Adam Grosser talks about a project where by tweaking some old technology, he has built a refrigerator that works without electricity. Think of all the uses this will have and what a vital tool to villages and clinics worldwide this will be.