Pat Robertson is to the left of Democrats on marijuana

“We’re locking up people that take a couple of puffs of marijuana and the next thing you know they’ve got ten years – they’ve got mandatory sentences and these judges, they throw up their hand and say ‘What can we do, it’s mandatory sentences.’ We’ve got to take a look at what we’re considering crimes, and that’s one of them. I mean, I’m not exactly for the use of drugs, don’t get me wrong, but I just believe criminalizing marijuana, criminalizing the possession of just a few ounces of pot, and that kind of thing, I mean it’s costing us a fortune, and it’s ruining young people. The young people go into prisons, they go in as youths, and they come out as hardened criminals.”

-Rev. Pat Robertson

one graph explains the difference between Obama and Bush

 

And the right-wingers call him a peacenik Kenyan anti-imperialist?

quote of the day: WikiLeaks vs. Facebook

"What are the differences between [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg and Julian Assange?  Let's take a look: Assange gives you private information on corporations for free, and he's a villian.  Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and Time magazine declares him 'Man of the Year.'  Thanks to WikiLeaks, you can see how corrupt governments operate in the shadows and then lie to those who elect them.  Thanks to Facebook, you can finally figure out which 'Sex & The City' character you are."


-NBC's Saturday Night Live

a drone attack every 1.8 days

Obama supporters still drive cars with "World Peace" bumper stickers right next to "Obama/Biden '08."

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War on Drugs quote of the day

"As drugs minister in the Home Office I saw how prohibition fails to reduce the harm that drugs cause in the UK, fuelling burglaries, gifting the trade to gangsters and increasing HIV infections. My experience as Defence Secretary, with specific responsibilities in Afghanistan, showed to me that the War on Drugs creates the very conditions that perpetuate the illegal trade, while undermining international development and security. My departure from the front benches gives me the freedom to express my long held view that, whilst it was put in place with the best of intentions, the War on Drugs has been nothing short of a disaster." - Bob Ainsworth, Britain's former drugs minister.

final words of Richard Holbrooke, 1941-2010

"You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan."

-U.S. foreign diplomat Richard Holbrooke's final words to his surgeon before being sedated for heart surgery.

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MasterCard/Visa double standard: Israeli settlements & WikiLeaks

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quote of the day (Ralph Nader edition)

"He has no fixed principles. He's opportunistic -- he goes for expedience, like Clinton. Some call him temperamentally conflict-averse. If you want to be harsher, you say he has no principles and he's opportunistic. He's a con man. I have no use for him."

-Ralph Nader's view of President Obama

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a right-wing defense of WikiLeaks

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Obama's secret war in Yemen

WikiLeaks exposed Obama's role in Yemen bombings. At the time of the December '09 bombings, the administration was telling reporters, "We do not have a military role in this conflict."

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quote of the day

"WikiLeaks is what happens when the entire US government is forced to go through a full-body scanner."

-Evgeny Morozov

Facebook has more integrity than Amazon?

 Does this mean Sarah Palin will boycott her own Facebook page?


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Obama at his worst

tweet of the day (Ron Paul editon)

"Re: Wikileaks - In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble."

-Rep. Ron Paul

ok, but Dianne Feinstein is 99.9% evil

Glenn Greenwald:

"Speaking of authoritarianism, the loathsome Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) -- the National-Security-State-venerating Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who lives off her defense contractor-husband's vast wealth --announced that she supports re-writing and expanding the Espionage Act of 1917 to make it easier to prosecute WikiLeaks and those like them; as always, Feinstein abuses her role as Chair of the 'oversight' Committee not to scrutinize and limit the abuses of the intelligence community but to protect them at all costs, as that's where her source of wealth and power lie.  She was responding to yesterday's announcement that Joe Lieberman -- joined by GOP Senators Scott Brown and John Ensign -- introduced a bill intended to make it easier to prosecute Assange.  Exactly as Dowd says, when it comes to authoritarian punishments for those who dare to expose what the U.S. Government does, the mindset is entirely bipartisan."

Dianne Feinstein isn't 100% evil

Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein is a hawk with a long legacy of supporting corporate elites, but to her credit, she has been trying to get Bisphenol A banned.  Bisphenol A is already banned in Europe and Canada.  It's a plastic used in canned foods and baby bottles.  It's VERY toxic.  (Yes, it's in baby bottles!) Tuesday the Senate passed a food safety bill-- but before they passed it, they removed Feinstein's amendment to ban Bisphenol A.

-Andy K. 

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moral relativism

Amazon vs. WikiLeaks

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Glenn Beck quote of the day (Sarah Palin edition)

"Now, you refer to yourself in the book as a feminist, which ‑‑ well, I'll just ask you straight: I believe you are a feminist. I believe you are a strong woman and you're like, get out of my way but not to the denigration of men. You just, you're kind of like a ‑‑ you're kind of like Texas, where Texas is proud of their state and they think it's better than everything else but not to ‑‑ they don't hate other states. You don't have to hate men to be a feminist. Did you just put this in the book just to piss the left off?" 

-Glenn Beck, while interviewing Sarah Palin

WikiLeaks does it again

Revelation highlights:

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How WikiLeaks did it:

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More on Hillary Clinton's spies at the UN:

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quote of the day

"I cannot prove it, so I'll have to estimate here, and if I'm proved wrong, I'll happily correct it.  But my intuition tells me that I criticized President Obama more in the last week than Fox News' primetime hosts criticized Bush in 8 years."

-Keith Olbermann, November 15, 2010

Obama tours Asia

The Democrats squandered their majority and deserved to lose big in the midterms. In defense of the party, their lack of vision is largely due to the fact that the banking industry is running the show. Make no mistake of course, new speaker Boehner and the Republicans are committed to these very same interests, so it's business as usual in the Beltway. The pressing question now is how much further to the right can Obama possibly go? Will he listen to Netanyahu and attack Iran? During the '08 campaign, candidate Obama stressed that all options were "on the table."

This week Obama embarked on a tour of Asia. In India, with a couple hundred U.S. corporate executives in tow, the Nobel laureate addressed a special session of parliament and had the audacity to claim to have been inspired by Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence. This was met with cheers from the Indian parliament, one of the world's largest importers of conventional weaponry. Meanwhile, in nearby Pakistan his predator drones were exploding. So much for satyagraha, Gandhi's form of resistance.

Next stop for our leader was his former home of Indonesia where he recently reinstated military aid to the country's red berets known as Kopassus. The aid had been cut years ago due to a litany of human rights abuses. The Obama administration insists Kopassus has reformed, a claim countered by journalist Allan Nairn. Nairn has long reported on the Indonesian military's murderous ways and on the same day as Obama's visit, Nairn posted leaked documents on his website exposing Kopassus as far from reformed. These U.S.-backed red berets are apparently targeting churches and referring to civilian dissidents as "enemy."

Ever since former President Ford greenlighted Indonesia's genocidal invasion of East Timor, one U.S. administration after another has provided aid and training to the Indonesian military in violation of international and domestic laws. This is just one more example of Obama's presidential continuity.

Nairn's site:
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graph of the day

Each pixel represents a death in Iraq: 

U.S. soldiers blue, 

Iraqi troops green, 

enemies grey, 

and civilians orange

quote of the day

"I'd like to ask a simple question: Why isn't Julian Assange dead? . . . WikiLeaks is easily among the most significant and well-publicized breaches of American national security since the Rosenbergs gave the Soviets the bomb. . . .

So again, I ask: Why wasn't Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?

It's a serious question." - Jonah Goldberg, Chicago Tribune

quote of the day

"In 1788, when there were 4 million people in America, only 39,000 of them, (the rich white men) could vote."

-Bill Maher

WikiLeaks Iraq war logs

WikiLeaks set the record for the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history by releasing close to 400,000 U.S. documents on the Iraq war.

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every death mapped:
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quote of the day

"Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous." - NPR's Juan Williams.

Obama's secret prison that the right-wingers ignore

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Former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders

Elders has come out in support of a sane drug policy.

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Wicked Witch supports Obama's wars

It turns out the witch running for Senate in Delaware is a fan of Obama's foreign policy. If O'Donnell pulls off an upset, at least the Democrats will have another team player to support the Empire's endless warfare. You hear that CNBC, she's not that scary.

top 10 anti-Israel groups in America

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why do they hate us?

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and

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Lou Dobbs hates illegals (except the ones working for him)

The former CNN hate-monger is exposed in The Nation:
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police state continuity

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Dems plan to exploit marijuana ballot initiatives

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quote of the day

"Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney... has a capacity for intellectual dishonesty that can take your breath away... If he thought there was some political advantage in asserting that two plus two is five, Romney would be out there within minutes with a speech about how business had taught him a thing or two that these government bureaucrats will never understand and promising that in his administration two plus two will equal six."
-Michael Kinsley

Furkan Dogan

On May 31st Israeli paratroopers shot and killed an American citizen aboard a flotilla carrying aid for Palestine. Furkan Dogan was 19 at the time of his death. He was born in Turkey and held duel Turkish and American citizenship. He was one of 6 activists killed during the strike. The US press dutifully reported Israel's account of the event and Congressional Democrats expressed mild concern while stressing their support of Israel. The White House's Secretary Clinton merely assured that they were talking to the Israeli government about the incident.

The UN recently released a report stating that Dogan was first shot in the head, leg and foot and finally after "lying on the deck in a conscious or semi-conscious, state for some time" an Israeli soldier shot him at point blank range in the face.

The report also states that Ibrahim Bilgen was executed as well. He was from Turkey and 60-years-old at the time of his death.

UN reports critical of US military operations and those of its allies tend to be mentioned swiftly by mainstream American media outlets or just not covered at all. In this case the US press has been silent.

And where's the Tea Party on this issue? After all, the weapon used to execute this American citizen was paid for by US taxes. Their revolt really should address our Empire's unsustainable addiction to military spending.

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Scott Horton on assassinating U.S. citizens: "another power grab for the imperial president"

One of Horton's points is that Obama could have kept this a secret, but he didn't. Why not keep it confidential? The only answer is that Obama wants it publicized for political purposes, so he can look tough on terror. -Andy K.

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is Obama worse than Bush?

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gory war crime details

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right-wingers ignoring Obama's real tyranny

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Obama's arrogance

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Hollywood hires Sen Patrick Leahy (D-VT) to destroy the internet

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Obama's justification for assassinating Anwar al-Awlaki

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Bill Clinton's closest advisor: Dick Morris

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silencing Guantanamo's victims (literally)

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He's Back From His Gambling Binge in Atlantic City!

"Then there's the death toll. Nearly 40,000 Americans are killed each year by drug overdoses -- not drug-related car accidents, not drug-related gang violence or homicide; those are an entirely different and eye-popping set of numbers. By overdose alone, we lose the equivalent of more than one 9/11 a month and almost eight times as many Americans as have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 (deaths the national media reports on weekly, if not daily)...."

"In the meantime, the state of California has certified a proposition for November's ballot that would legalize the individual possession of dozens of joints of marijuana, even as more and more studies come out revealing the connection between marijuana use, psychosis and psychotic symptoms, among other ill-health effects... Legalization, however, is a siren song that truly will shipwreck more of our youth. Even with marijuana as prevalent and accessible as it is to young people, there is a reason the numbers for alcohol and tobacco use are higher than illicit drug abuse. When one talks to children, they give the answer: It is found in the word "illegal." Legalization removes stigma, is the handmaiden of availability and, as Joe Califano has pointed out, 'availability is the mother of use.'"

-William Bennett

I have only one question for Mr. Bennett: of the 40,000 Americans who died from overdose, the CDC says that 26,000 overdosed on prescription drugs. So how many overdosed on marijuana?

CNN censors war crime footage

Reporter Michael Ware claims to have witnessed and documented the shooting and agonizing death of an Iraqi teenager by an American soldier. CNN owns the video of this 2007 event and decided to sit on it. Disturbing footage like this most certainly make wars harder to cheerlead for. I imagine this same line of reasoning was at work when Obama chose to suppress the most recent batch of torture photos.

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pop quiz: how many wars in Iraq?

CNN REPORTER MICHAEL WARE: There was just not the one war in Iraq. You had the American war versus the insurgency, who are nationalists fighting to free their country and who were purely politically motivated. Then there's the American war with al Qaida in Iraq. Then there's the Sunni and Shia war amongst the Iraqis themselves. There was the Arab versus Kurdish on again off again little conflict. And then there was the Iranian war versus most of those named above.

Tariq Ali on Democracy Now!

Tariq Ali's latest book is The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad. Glenn Greenwald was also on yesterday's exceptional show:

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Obama on all those f-ing retards

At a DNC fundraiser last week, the President who's kept the torture chambers open in Afghanistan and at the secret sites abroad, sided with Bush/Cheney on every warfare measure you can think of and kept the banks in charge of this unsustainable economy, lectured his critics from the left.

He's killing more civilians in Pakistan than Bush could ever dream of and we're the pessimists?

Greenwald has a great piece on this:
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Obama is now in the minority on gay marriage

the latest AP poll found that 52 percent now favor full civil marriage rights for gay couples, and 58 percent support the same rights in every respect as heterosexual couples. President Obama, and those Democrats who do not have the balls to repeal DOMA, let alone the GOP base, are now in a minority in opposing marriage equality.

quote of the day

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: "This is no ordinary Democratic administration. It is highly ideological and ambitious."

ANDREW SULLIVAN:"I think the notion that this administration is ideological is bizarre. Did it nationalize the banks when it could have? Nope. Did it withdraw troops immediately from Iraq and Afghanistan? Nope. It followed Bush's timetable on Iraq and has massively - and foolishly - doubled down on counter-insurgency in Afghanistan. Did it prosecute the war criminals of the last administration? Nope; it has covered for them. Has it raised taxes on anyone? Nope. It merely wants the already-sunsetted Bush tax cuts on the wealthy to expire on schedule. Did it provide a Krugman-style stimulus? Ask Krugman. Is Obama a peacenik? I suppose we have forgotten that he used the Nobel ceremony to defend Reinhold Niebuhr, has retained extraordinary rendition, and ramped up the troop-levels in Afghanistan to far beyond anything Bush ever contemplated. Has the president publicly backed marriage equality or pot-decriminalization? Au contraire. Has he even risked an iota of political capital to end the ban on gays in the military? No. In fact, it is now more likely than not that gays will still be persecuted by their own country by the end of Obama's first term. On energy, Obama's positions are now close to identical to McCain's in the campaign (his one radical move was to the right on deep-sea oil exploration), and cap-and-trade is dead and will surely be buried in November. On education, Obama's support for teacher accountability is further to the right than Bush - and it tackles one of his own party's interest groups. On immigration, Obama's position is identical to Bush's and on his watch, illegal immigration has fallen sharply and border enforcement is up. The Supreme Court? Does Krauthammer think the modest Sotomayor and the careerist defender of executive power, Kagan, are in any way, shape or form as radical as Roberts or Alito? Does he think in the wake of Citizens United and the Second Amendment ruling that we are in danger of having a Supreme Court permanently shifted to the left? Again: what is Krauthammer smoking? And can I get some?"

Obama's continuity praised

“For example, the American policies on renditions — the same. The American policies of taking the fight to the enemy, taking the leadership off the battlefield, continues. Indefinite detention of detainees continues. Military commissions continue to be in effect.

“State secrets has been invoked as much by President Obama’s administration as by President Bush’s administration in order to protect those things that are legitimately secret," Hayden said. "He’s pushed back on extending the right of habeas corpus to prisoners that we hold at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. These are all good things, all continuity."

- Ex-CIA Director General Michael Hayden

Here's the interview the Hayden quote was taken from:

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How Zuckerberg really feels about you

Wait, are we all "dumb fucks" for trusting Facebook?

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while we're on the subject of the Drug War...

his father was murdered, so the high school suspended him for crying.

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guess who's spending money to stop legalization...

California Beer & Beverage Distributors: $10,000 to defeat Prop 19
California Police Chiefs Association: $30,000 to defeat Prop 19
California Narcotics Officers' Association: $20,500 to defeat Prop 19

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don't call it high fructose corn syrup

in related news, it's not TV, it's HBO...

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pop quiz: which network is #1? CBS, NBC, ABC, or FOX?

For the first time in American history, the number one TV network is Univision, (Spanish language TV).

NBC News anchor Brian Williams

"[The Daily Show with Jon Stewart] has chronicled the death of shame in politics and journalism. Many of us on this side of the journalism tracks often wish we were on Jon’s side. I envy his platform to shout from the mountaintop. He’s a necessary branch of government.”

-Brian Williams, the anchor of the NBC Nightly News.

(To paraphrase: Brian Williams is complaining that a comedian with a talk show on basic cable can tell the truth but a network news anchor with 8 million viewers doesn't have the "platform" to tell the truth).

the real reason Obama won't let torture victims sue

"The dilemma faced by the Justice Department was rather that evidence presented in the suit would likely be used in the future (not in the United States, obviously) to prosecute those who participated in the extraordinary renditions process." -Scott Horton, Harper's

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Glenn Beck's fondness for Martin Luther King, Jr.

Obama's big state secrets win!

The recent U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling shows the five foreigners who were victimized by our government's extraordinary rendition program that the CIA and assisting companies can kidnap, incarcerate and torture without any consequence. The lawsuit against Boeing has been thrown out in the name of securing state secrets. This is a big victory for President Obama justifying his "power to protect wartime actions from judicial scrutiny."

When one looks at our Empire's approach to warfare and the spying on and imprisoning of citizens without due process, seamless continuity links the Bush approach with Obama's.

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Glenn Greenwald considers this Times editorial to be "quite good."

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Jane Mayer on State Secrets:

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ACLU challenges Obama's right to assassinate US citizens overseas

Obama's right to assassinate an American citizen abroad is being challenged by the ACLU. I wonder what percentage of Hope-n-Change supporters agree that the US should legally be able to assassinate ANYONE?

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Meanwhile, a majority of Republicans polled believe Obama plans to one day implement Islamic law in the US.

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quote of the day

"For me, the strangest and most off-putting element of the [Glenn Beck event] was the disjuncture between the anti-authority dimension of the rally - our leaders have disappointed us and must be called to account! - and the whole-hog deference to militarism - we need to thank our soldiers for following orders so honorably and self-sacrificingly. While there were plenty of wounded soldiers on the stage, there was absolutely zero discussion of why these guys were being sent overseas and whether we should expect the same politicians who lie to us on domestic policy to be any better on foreign policy." -Nick Gillespie

Fox News coverage of Bush's gay campaign manager

Ken Mehlman served as the campaign manager for the 2004 re-election campaign of George W. Bush and Chairman of the Republican National Committee from 2005 to 2007. On August 26, 2010, Mehlman came out as gay, making him one of the most prominent openly gay figures in the Republican Party.

In the last 24 hours:
CNN has mentioned Mehlman 19 times
MSNBC has mentioned Mehlman 12 times
Fox News has mentioned Mehlman 0 times

Fox News hasn't mentioned Dr. Laura Schlessinger's "nigger" tirade at all.

quote of the day

"Rather than emphatically stand up to the bankers and other oligarchical thieves, [the Obama administration] coddled and served them, and thus became the face of the elite interests oppressing ordinary Americans rather than their foes. How can an administration represented by Tim Geithner and Larry Summers -- and which specializes in an endless stream of secret deals with corporate lobbyists and sustains itself with Wall Street funding -- possibly maintain any pretense of populist support or changing how Washington works? It can't.

There are few more bitter ironies than watching the Republican Party -- controlled at its core by the very business interests responsible for the country's economic collapse -- now become the beneficiaries of middle-class and lower-middle-class economic insecurity. But the Democratic Party's failure/refusal/inability to be anything other than the Party of Tim Geithner renders them unable to offer answers to angry, anxious, resentful Americans. As has happened countless times in countless places, those answers are now being provided instead by a group of self-serving, hateful extremist leaders eager to exploit that anger for their own twisted financial and political ends. And it seems to be working."

-Glenn Greenwald

graph of the day

Real Estate.

Facebook vs. democracy

This fall California voters get to vote on a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana and apparently Facebook has deemed this unacceptable discourse, unceremoniously taking down the supporters' page.

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Congressman Ron Paul at his best

Ron Paul on the NYC Mosque:

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quote of the day

"I am reticent to characterize myself politically on occasions when I'm really being asked, 'Whose side are you on?' The answer to that question should never be 'the liberal side' or 'the conservative side,' unless the person being questioned is naive enough to think that one ideology or the other has a monopoly on truth."
- Conor Friedersdorf

Howard Dean comes out against Mosque

at least Russ Feingold hasn't caved...


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Right-wingers ignoring Obama's actual tyranny

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Citibank

I love this image. This graph depicts the price for a share of Citibank stock between 1988 and 2010. When Bill Clinton took office in January 1993, Citibank stock traded for about $4.10 per share. The lie of Clinton/Bush free market neoliberalism is that the stock market will go up forever, and the economy will grow forever. So long as the politicians remove regulations & taxes, the market will be a wealth-creating machine. On paper, Citibank's profits were big, but the profits themselves were a lie. In reality, the bank was making all its money selling worthless mortgages. Sure, in the short term, the price peaked at $53 in 2007. But in the long run, it's only worth about $4 per share.
-Andy K.

Obama making Bush's extreme policies "new normal"

ACLU 18-Month Review of Obama's civil liberties and national security record:

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Obama and tortured evidence

Candidate Obama claimed to be opposed to the use of statements from detainees obtained through the use of torture. There's no way around it, President Obama's approach has sadly been a continuation of the Bush years.


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quote of the day

"The notion that when we are fighting two wars, we're not supposed to consider raising taxes on [the wealthiest 1 percent] is one sign of a country that's no longer serious. Why do so few military hawks acknowledge that if they lack the gumption to ask taxpayers to finance the projection of American military power, we won't be able to project it in the long run?"

- E.J. Dionne on the unsustainable Empire

and now for the Obama quote

18 days before the BP Gulf of Mexico oil rig disaster, Obama seemed to be reading from a Big Oil talking points memo.

President Obama on April 2, 2010: "I don’t agree with the notion that we shouldn’t do anything. It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore."

Sarah Palin quote of the day

"After inheriting a good pro-development GOP plan that opened up both coasts for drilling, the Obama administration halted development ... and now we're gonna study, more study of the South Atlantic and parts of the Gulf of Mexico ... my goodness, folks, these areas have been studied to death ... I have seen so many, many studies! I say, let's send the White House this message: that, you know, we can save taxpayer time, save money and announce: there is oil and gas down there, and we can produce it safely and responsibly! We don't need more studies, we need more action! Because energy produced in America is security for America, and it is jobs for American workers, jobs that can't be outsourced. Let's drill baby, drill, not stall, baby, stall!"

-Sarah Palin on March 31, 2010. (Three weeks before the BP oil spill.)

Obama and BP oil

Oil giant BP has given more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.


Congress' Top Recipients of BP Oil Money:

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) $77,051
Rep. Don Young (R-AK) $73,000
Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) $41,400
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) $44,899
Sen. Mary Landreiu (D-LA) $28,000


In 2000, BP gave 39 percent more to Republican candidates, but by 2008, Democrats had nearly pulled even with Republicans in BP donations.