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Monday June 30, 2014
News Articles

Why SCOTUS's Harris v. Quinn Case Has Unions Terrified
HP | Dave Jamieson | 06/29/14

On Sunday night, the leaders of America's public-sector labor unions will sleep fitfully, if they manage to sleep at all. The source of their anxiety -- brewing now for months -- is the Supreme Court's impending decision in Harris v. Quinn, expected to be handed down Monday morning alongside Hobby Lobby, the more high-profile birth control case. In a worst-case scenario for labor and the left, Harris v. Quinn has the potential to cripple public-sector unions.

On its surface, the case deals with home care workers in Illinois who care for the disabled. The plaintiff, Pamela Harris, serves as the caretaker to her son Josh, who suffers from a rare genetic syndrome. The elder Harris receives Medicaid funds to do so and essentially functions as a state employee.

Many state-supported home care workers in Illinois are represented by the union SEIU Healthcare Illinois-Indiana. Under the contract between the union and the state, all home care workers covered under the contract are required to pay a fee to SEIU to cover the expenses associated with bargaining, whether or not they want to be union members. ... Read more

What You Need to Know About the Coming Jellyfish Apocalypse
MotherJones | James West | 06/30/14

More than 50 million Americans swim in the oceans every year (there are actual government surveys of such things). So if your summer plans involves stripping down and bathing in the sun and salt water of your dreams, read on, intrepid beach-goer. There's something gooey and stingy that's loving warm waters every bit as much as you are (maybe even more), turning those dreams...to nightmares: jellyfish.

In some places, yes. One recent University of British Columbia study concluded that "jelly?sh populations appear to be increasing in the majority of the world's coastal ecosystems and seas," and blamed human activity for these blooms. The areas most affected are the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, says Lucas Brotz, a PhD student and jellyfish expert at University of British Columbia's Fisheries Center, and co-author of the report. ... Read more

Doing the Radical Right's Dirty Work: Supreme Court’s Latest Blows Against Women and Unions
AlterNet | Steven Rosenfeld | 06/30/14

On the final day of its term, the Supreme Court’s radical right-wing majority has dealt crippling blows to two causes close to the heart of progressives. It elevated the rights of corporations owned by fundamentalist Christians above the rights of their female employees, saying those businesses don’t have to pay for any contraception in health plans. And it ruled that non-union employees who work at jobs where unions negotiate pay and benefits--for all workers--do not have to pay any union fees akin to union dues.

For religious conservatives, it said that protecting religious freedom was a higher priority than ensuring women received all reproductive health options. It also said that corporations have First Amendment religious rights protected by the First Amendment, a win for Christian fundamentalists and religious business owners. And for the GOP’s union-busting business wing, epitomized by the Koch brothers’ libertarian political network, it said that union fees could not be collected for electioneering purposes--even if non-union employees at the same work site benefitted from union bargaining. ... Read more

DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Monday, June 30 [11:30]
DN | Snowden Asylum in Germany? Support Grows for NSA Whistleblower After Merkel Cancels Verizon Contract (06/30/14) [7:14]
DN | Al Jazeera News Director: Prison Terms for Journalists in Egypt Are Chilling Start to Sisi Era (06/30/14) [5:29]
DN | Egyptian Comedian Bassem Youssef Says His Satire Has Inspired Youth to Reject Military Propaganda (06/30/14) [5:55]
Bill Moyers
*Bill Moyers | Investigative journalist Charles Lewis talks about why facts, logic and reason are often missing in the rush to war.. (06/29/14) [26:46]
Ring of Fire
*Ring of Fire | Papantonio: Republicans Bastardizing Second Amendment (06/30/14) [8:07]
Ring of Fire | Papantonio: Conservative Media Creating Psychopaths (06/28/14) [13:38]
TYT News
*TYT | Government Actually Looking Out For Us? (06/29/14) [5:59]
TYT | The Awkward Moment To End All Awkward Moments. (06/29/14) [5:02]
TYT | TRUTH About Sex, Penis Sizes, Masturbation, & More. (06/29/14) [6:59]
*TYT | California's Historic Vote To Get Money Out Of Politics & Why Your State Is Next (06/29/14) [7:57]
TYT | Michele Bachmann's Latest Insanity Turns Neil Cavuto Reasonable (06/29/14) [11:21]
TYT | North Korea Threatens War Over Dopey Seth Rogen Movie (06/29/14) [6:40]
John Oliver
John Oliver | Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Uganda and Pepe Julian Onziema Pt. 1 (06/29/14) [17:33]

06.30.2014. 08:46

Friday June 27, 2014
News Articles

Iraq: The War Card
publicintegrity.org | author | current

Released in January 2008, this investigation sought to document every public statement made by eight top Bush administration officials from September 11, 2001, to September 11, 2003, regarding: Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and Iraq's links to Al Qaeda.

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses. ... Read more

Not Truly Well Off": Bill Clinton Was Paid $105 Million For 542 Speeches Since 2001
ZeroHedge | author | 06/27/14

In Hillary Clinton's attempt to seem "one of the people", she made the public relations debacle of portraying herself as "dead broke" at the time she and Bill Clinton left the White House. Of course, the reason this attempt at populist pandering backfired is because as is well-known, even the least educated American, the bulk of wealth American president families accrue is not while in office but after, when they hit the speaking/book publishing circuit. This is just what WaPo found when it conducted a review of the Clintons’ federal financial disclosure: it found that Bill was paid $104.9 million for delivering 542 speeches around the world between January 2001 and January 2013, when Hillary left her job as secretary of state. Read more

Rand Paul: Republicans Are "Too Eager for War"
MotherJones | David Corn | 06/27/14

On the Sunday morning television shows this past weekend—against the backdrop of an Iraq in flames—former Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) continued their ongoing feud and the battle for the (national security) soul of the Republican Party. In recent months, as Mother Jones has reported that Paul in 2009 accused Cheney of using 9/11 as an excuse to launch the Iraq invasion to benefit Halliburton (the corporation Cheney once led) and called on the GOP to disassociate itself with the former vice president, Cheney's allies have slammed the senator for expressing reckless positions. During a private speech in March, without mentioning Paul by name, Cheney contended that Paul's skepticism about US intervention abroad would endanger the United States. On ABC News' This Week on Sunday, Cheney explicitly assailed Paul as "basically an isolationist"—a term of profound derision in the neocon wing of the GOP. Meanwhile, on Meet the Press, Paul was asked if Cheney could be considered a credible critic of President Barack Obama's foreign policy, and Paul, without saying Cheney's name, replied, "The same questions could be asked of those who supported the Iraq war. You know, were they right in their predictions? Were there weapons of mass destruction there? That's what the war was sold on. Was democracy easily achievable?...They didn't really, I think, understand the civil war that would break out." This was obviously a jab at the former vice president. ... Read more

DemocracyNow Daily News
TRNN News
TRNN | Robert Pollin: Why Did Economy Shrink So Dramatically During The First Quarter of 2014? (06/27/14) [9:03]
Ring of Fire
Ring of Fire | Papantonio: Boehner's Lawsuit Will Backfire On GOP (06/26/14) [2:27]
Ring of Fire | Papantonio: America Too Stupid For Its Own Good (06/26/14) [11:09]
The average American can barely name a Supreme Court justice. They think Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11. Too many voters still think that they might run into Bigfoot on their way to the polls. Believe it or not, this is actually a major problem for democracy.
Ring of Fire | Papantonio: War Chickenhawks Coming Home To Roost (06/26/14) [8:57]
Dick Cheney has been making the cable news rounds this week, pitching a return to Iraq, but we've heard all of this from Cheney before. Ring of Fire's Mike Papantonio and best-selling author Cliff Schecter discuss why Cheney needs to disappear from public life before he gets us into another war.
Ring of Fire | Papantonio: Billionaires Create The Perfect Keystone Lie (06/26/14) [6:09]
Diane Rehms Show
Diane Rehm Domestic News - Friday (06/27/14) [1hr]
International News - Friday (06/27/14) [1hr]
Chris Hayes - All In
Chris Hayes | Republicans take their show to the courts, after years of railing against frivolous lawsuits (06/26/14) [13:45]
Chris Hayes | Wendy Davis one year later, a year after her star-making filibuster against a restrictive abortion bill, the Democratic candidate for governor of Texas (06/26/14) [7:10]
Jon Stewart - Daily News
Jon Stewart | Republicans eagerly pursue opportunities to send U.S. troops abroad to fight terrorism and build freedom but fail to adopt the same pro-American policies at home. (06/26/14) [7:49]
Jon Stewart | In an ironic bureaucratic twist, the IRS has difficulty finding the proper documentation that it needs to end the government's scrutiny of the organization. (06/24/14) [10:02]

06.27.2014. 09:49

Thursday June 26, 2014
News Articles

The Truth vs. DC's Propaganda Machine
Bill Moyers | author | 06/26/14

As the exploding crisis in Iraq spotlights once again the tragic record of American policy in the Middle East, Bill speaks with investigative journalist Charles Lewis, whose new book, 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America's Moral Integrity details the many government falsehoods that have led us into the current nightmare.

... Lewis tells Bill, "An outrageous thing happened. We lost $2 trillion. More than 100,000 people died. Folks are going to be maimed for life in the tens of thousands… And no one has ever acknowledged that this was a war on a lark. It was a complete war of choice, because a certain little faction wanted to do it and they orchestrated it… Did they make statements that weren't true? The answer is yes." ... Read more
The Truth About 935 Lies

It's the Oil, Stupid! Insurgency and War on a Sea of Oil
TomDispatch | Michael Schwartz | 06/25/14

Events in Iraq are headline news everywhere, and once again, there is no mention of the issue that underlies much of the violence: control of Iraqi oil. Instead, the media is flooded with debate about, horror over and extensive analysis of a not-exactly-brand-new terrorist threat, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). There are, in addition, elaborate discussions about the possibility of a civil war that threatens both a new round of ethnic cleansing and the collapse of the embattled government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Underway are, in fact, "a series of urban revolts against the government," as Middle Eastern expert Juan Cole has called them. They are currently restricted to Sunni areas of the country and have a distinctly sectarian character, which is why groups like ISIS can thrive and even take a leadership role in various locales. These revolts have, however, neither been created nor are they controlled by ISIS and its several thousand fighters. They also involve former Baathists and Saddam Hussein loyalists, tribal militias and many others. And at least in incipient form they may not, in the end, be restricted to Sunni areas. As The New York Times reported last week, the oil industry is "worried that the unrest could spread" to the southern Shia-dominated city of Basra, where "Iraq's main oil fields and export facilities are clustered." ... Read more

Gazprom Ready To Drop Dollar, Settle China Contracts In Yuan Or Rubles. Bad News for the US Dollar Staying the Worlds Reserve Currency.

Please Help Us Find The Q2 "Spending Surge"
ZeroHedge | author | 06/26/14

US services (and thus services spending) account for 68% of US GDP and 4 out of 5 US jobs. Thus, without spending on services the US economy can barely grow. That much is clear. What is also clear is that pundit after pundit has been lining up to explain how the Q1 economic collapse is to be ignored because it was due to, don't laugh, snow. Snow, which somehow wiped out of $100 billion in growth from initial expectations of Q1 GDP rising by 2.5%. What is certainly clear is that without spending on services in the second quarter, it is impossible for US GDP to hit its much desired 4% "bounceback" GDP print. All of that is very clear. ... Read more
Click to zoom - Consumer Spending Spreed Please?

DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Thursday, June 26 [11:46]
DN | Supreme Court Says Warrants Needed to Search Cellphones, But are "Stingrays" a Police Workaround? (06/26/14) [6:17]
DN | Mississippi Burning at 50: Relatives of Civil Rights Workers Look Back at Murders that Shaped an Era. (06/26/14) [10:16]
Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers | The Truth vs. DC's Propaganda Machine (preview) (06/26/14) [0:26]
TRNN News
TRNN | "A Commercially Successful Human Rights Violation" In Detroit (06/26/14) [14:29]
Emily Wurth and Tom Stephens say that the city is turning off residents' water so that they are forced to pay their bills, thereby driving up the commercial value of the public water system in order to sell it to private investors.
TRNN | Robert Pollin: If the Fed was serious about strengthening the basic economy, it would bail out American cities (06/26/14) [12:13]
TRNN | Sabah al-Nasseri discusses: Fate of al-Maliki Depends Not on Sunnis or Kurds, But Shi?ite Political Forces (06/26/14) [16:52]
TYT News
TYT | Russell Brand Rants At Fox News 'Savages' & You'll Totally Agree Why. (06/25/14) [7:33]
TYT | Major Ruling Protects Your Cellphone From The Police... Sort Of (06/25/14) [7:45]
TYT | Syria Hands Overl Chemical Weapons - Thanks Obama! (06/25/14) [10:51]
TYT | Here's The Republican Scandal Machine In 10 Easy Steps. (06/25/14) [10:54]
TYT | ISIS Probably Keeps Better Records Than You Do. (06/25/14) [8:36]
TYT | The Scariest Chart On Foreign Policy You'll Ever See (06/23/14) [8:13]
More Articles

House passes bill to weaken Dodd-Frank and help Wall Street, Koch brothers
Reuters & RT | author | 06/26/14

The House of Representatives voted Tuesday to water down key parts of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, weakening the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's power to regulate derivatives. The resulting bill helps big banks and the Koch brothers.

The bill reauthorizes the CFTC's mandate, which expired in October 2013, for five years. It would also reverse the commission's tough rules on U.S. businesses' swaps with counter-parties abroad, requiring it to draw up a new regime together with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Critics contend that the loosening of regulations could weaken market stability, Reuters reported. ... Read more


06.26.2014. 11:37

Wednesday June 25, 2014
News Articles

Obama's Latest Betrayal of America and Americans in Favor of the Big Banks: TISA
TRNN | William Black | 06/25/14

Wikileaks has done the world a great service again by publishing a leak of an April 2014 (partial) draft of the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA).

The three "de's" -- deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization -- has been critical to the three modern U.S. financial crises. The combination is intensely criminogenic and produces the fraud epidemics that drive our crises. The second, and vastly more destructive, phase of the Savings and Loan (S&L) debacle is a classic example. The criminogenic environment was the product of each of the three "de's" and modern executive and professional compensation. ...

    Three TISA Paradoxes
  1. Financial Deregulation is Criminogenic
  2. The Paradox of Secrecy and "Prudential" Regulation
  3. The Paradox of Withstanding a "Notwithstanding" Clause
Read more

World Bank: Fighting Climate Change Would Boost Global Economy Up To $2.6 Trillion A Year
Climate Progress | Joe Romm | 06/24/14

An important new World Bank report concludes that just a few key policies aimed at cutting carbon pollution would boost the global economy. The study "Climate-Smart Development: Adding Up the Benefits of Actions that Help Build Prosperity, End Poverty and Combat Climate Change," looks at the European Union plus Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and the U.S.

The Bank finds that if all six embrace three sets of policies for clean transportation plus energy efficiency in industry in buildings, "the annual benefits of just these policies in 2030 include an estimated GDP growth of between $1.8 trillion and $2.6 trillion." Furthermore, the report found that "these policies alone would account for 30 percent of the total reduction needed in 2030 to limit global warming to 2°C [3.6°F]." ... Read more

One Quarter Of India Is Turning Into Desert
Think Progress | Joanna M. Foster | 06/25/14

In India, an area about the size of California and Texas combined is degraded and one quarter of the country is facing desertification, according to the country's environment minister, Prakash Javadekar. The overgrazing of land combined with changing rainfall patterns and worsening drought is believed to be behind the dramatic numbers. As more land becomes unusable, the food security of the Indian population -- about 17 percent of the world's population -- is increasingly endangered.

According to Forbes, in 2007, India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research predicted that by 2050 a little less than 10 percent of the country would have desertified beyond use. Javadekar's estimate puts the country ahead of schedule -- in the worst way -- by about 100 to 140 years. ... Read more

How the Iraq War Launched the Modern Era of Political BS
MotherJonese | Chris Mooney | 06/25/14

That queasy sensation of déjà vu you're experiencing is understandable. With Iraq back in the news, and Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol on TV sounding off about the situation, there's every reason to worry that a new wave of misinformation is on the way.

There is no debate that the Iraq War was sold to the American public with a collection of claims that ended up being proved false. Iraq was said to have weapons of mass destruction, but this wasn't the case. Advocates for the war insinuated that Saddam Hussein was colluding with Al Qaeda and was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks. That, too, was false. ... Read more

DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Wednesday, June 25 [8:17]
DN | Al Jazeera Reporter Sentenced in Absentia Decries Egypt's Imprisonment of 3 Colleagues (06/25/14) [7:16]
DN | 50 Years After U.S. Launched Secret War on Laos, Unexploded Bombs Still Killing Civilians (06/25/14) [5:56]
Watch the US Drop 2.5 Million Tons of Bombs on Laos
Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers | Should we really be listening to Washington's "armchair warriors" who were wrong before, during and after the Iraq war -- and never admitted their wrongdoing? (06/14/14) [1:12]
Bill Moyers | Buying the War (2012) [1:23:08]
Rachel Maddow | "Hubris": The Iraq War (full) (2013) [44:10]
Fareed | Who Lost Iraq (06/25/14) [2:30]
BBC | Lost treasures of the Iraq Museum - Dan Cruickshank (2009) [4:00]
Iraq National Museum, looted in 2003, is open for special visitors only (2010) [4:06]
Seven years ago, in the chaos that followed the US invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein, looters ransacked Iraq's National Museum. Donny George Youkhanna, at the time the museum's director general, witnessed the looting and is haunted by the memories. He fled Iraq in 2006 and has been teaching at a university outside New York City.
60 Minutes
60 Minutes | Drones over America (06/22/14) [13:04]
60 Minutes | The Coptic Christians of Egypt (06/22/14) [13:35]
Frontline
Frontline | Battle Zones: Ukraine and Syria (05/27/14) [53:41]
FRONTLINE reports from inside two raging conflicts. In "The Battle for Ukraine," filmmaker James Jones is on the ground with both sides of the conflict, Ukrainian nationalists and Russian separatists. And in "Arming the Rebels," reporter Muhammed Ali uncovers how the U.S. is secretly training Syrian rebels.
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart | Poor Off: As campaign season warms up, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden attempt to appeal to blue-collar voters by sharing their financial woes. (06/24/14) [4:49]

06.25.2014. 12:48

Tuesday June 24, 2014
News Articles

By Rehabilitating Iraq War Boosters, Is the Press Trying to Forgive Itself?
HP | Eric Boehlert | 06/23/14

The bad bout of 2003 déjà vu continued on Sunday when former Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on ABC's This Week to lecture President Obama about how his policies had allegedly made a mess out of Iraq, as violence there continues to grip the country and threatens to completely destabilize the nation.

Cheney's appearance continues a maddening, week-long stroll down Baghdad memory lane as media outlets rush to get commentary from the people who, 11 years ago, got everything wrong about the Iraq War: The stunning cost, the causalities, the war planning, the intelligence, the sectarian violence. All of it.

"The neoconservative program cost the United States several trillion dollars and thousands dead and wounded American soldiers, and it sowed carnage and chaos in Iraq and elsewhere," writes Harvard University professor Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy. Read more

Andrew Bacevich: The Duplicity of the Ideologues
Bill Moyers | Andrew Bacevich | 06/20/14

"Almost 70 years ago, a new world order was born from the rubble of World War II, built by and around the power of the United States." Yet today, Robert Kagan laments, "that world order shows signs of cracking, and perhaps even collapsing." Wherever he looks, Kagan sees evidence that "something is changing, and perhaps more quickly than we may imagine," he writes in the New Republic ("Superpowers Don't Get to Retire"). Indeed, "the signs of the global order breaking down are all around us."

These changes "signal a transition into a different world order," one bearing troubling similarities to the 1930s. The origins of this prospective calamity are plain to see. Don't bother to look for material explanations. "If a breakdown in the world order that America made is occurring," Kagan writes, "it is not because America's power is declining." The United States has power to spare, asserts the author of The World America Made. No, what we have here is "an intellectual problem, a question of identity and purpose." Feckless, silly Americans, with weak-willed Barack Obama their enabler, are abdicating their obligation to lead the planet. The abyss beckons. ... Read more

Thanks to WikiLeaks, public can debate alarming new trade deal
Aljazeera | David Cay Johnston | 06/23/14

WikiLeaks last week again pierced the veil of official secrecy that surrounds global trade negotiations. The peek it gave us should alarm everyone.

Big Business and national governments wanted to conceal the terms of the proposed Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) while keeping consumers, unions, environmentalists and the vast majority of businesses in the dark. Thanks to WikiLeaks, they failed.

The draft agreement WikiLeaks released on June 19 is fresh, written in May. It is a model of secret law, blatant in its disregard for transparency, democratic process and history. Its opening page says the terms are to remain secret for five years after negotiations formally end or the proposed new rules take effect. Talks to refine that agreement were to resume Monday in Geneva. ... Read more, and here

Glenn Greenwald: 'What I Tell People Who Say They Don't Care About Their Privacy'
AlterNet | Alyssa Figueroa | 06/20/14

Since he obtained and published Edward Snowden's leaked National Security Agency documents a little more than a year ago, journalist Glenn Greenwald said people have told him over and over that government surveillance does not concern them.

"Those people don't believe what they're saying," he told a sold-out audience last week at the Nourse Theater in San Francisco.

To illustrate this, every time someone would come up to Greenwald and say they didn't mind people knowing what they were doing because they had nothing to hide, he would proceed with the same two steps: first, by giving them his email address and then by asking them to send him all their email and social media passwords -- just so he could have a look. ... Read more

DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Tuesday, June 24 [11:49]
DN | Can the President Strike an American Anywhere in the World?: Drone Memo Raises Troubling Questions (06/24/14) [7:29]
DN | Water is a Human Right: Detroit Residents Seek U.N. Intervention as City Shuts Off Taps to Thousands (06/24/14) [7:06]

*The Death And Decay Of Detroit, As Seen From The Streets
Using Google Street View Time Machine (pictures)
or
The Death And Decay Of Detroit, As Seen From The Streets (pictures)

TRNN News
*TRNN | Michael Hudson: Why the Tea Party & European Right Are Winning Elections (06/23/14) [7:57]
TRNN | Michael Hudson: Is Thomas Piketty Right About the Causes of Inequality? (older) [10:15]
More News
Sustainability 101: Exponential Growth - Arithmetic, Population and Energy (2011) [59:11]
No End in Sight Iraq's Descent Into Chaos by Charles Ferguson (2006) [1:41:53]
Inside Job by Charles Ferguson (2009) [1:48:38]
Yet Another Dog Rescue
A terrified abandoned dog gets rescued. His transformation will warm your heart. (06/20/14) [6:09]
All I got to say is, everyone needs a second chance.
John Oliver
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Dr. Oz and Nutritional Supplements (06/22/14) [16:25]
Aron kader in Axis of Evil, Part 1 (2009) [6:19], Part 2 [6:16]

Click to zoom - Death in America

Click to zoom - And Amount We Spend

06.24.2014. 12:14

Monday June 23, 2014
News Articles

Who Won Iraq?
TomDispatch.com | Tom Engelhardt | 06/19/14

... As events unfold increasingly chaotically across the region that officials of the Bush years liked to call the Greater Middle East, consider the eerie accuracy of that statement. The president, his vice president Dick Cheney, his defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, among others, were indeed “history’s actors.” They did create “new realities” and, just as Rove suggested, the rest of us are now left to “study” what they did.

And oh, what they did! Their geopolitical dreams couldn’t have been grander or more global. (Let’s avoid the word "megalomaniacal.") They expected to pacify the Greater Middle East, garrison Iraq for generations, make Syria and Iran bow down before American power, "drain" the global "swamp" of terrorists, and create a global Pax Americana based on a military so dominant that no other country or bloc of countries would ever challenge it. ... Read more

Eric Alterman Warns: Pundits and Partisans Are Up to Old Tricks in Iraq
Bill Moyers | Eric Alterman | 06/19/14

In a column entitled “Bush’s toxic legacy in Iraq,” terrorism expert Peter Bergen writes about the origins of ISIS, “the brutal insurgent/terrorist group formerly known as al Qaeda in Iraq.”

Bergen notes that, “One of George W. Bush’s most toxic legacies is the introduction of al Qaeda into Iraq, which is the ISIS mother ship. If this wasn’t so tragic it would be supremely ironic, because before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, top Bush officials were insisting that there was an al Qaeda-Iraq axis of evil. Their claims that Saddam Hussein’s men were training members of al Qaeda how to make weapons of mass destruction seemed to be one of the most compelling rationales for the impending war.”

There was no al Qaeda-Iraq connection until the war; our invasion made it so. We have known this for nearly a decade, well before the murderous ISIS even appeared. In a September 2006 New York Times article headlined “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat,” reporter Mark Mazetti informed readers of a classified National Intelligence Estimate representing the consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ the analysis cited the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology: “The Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,’ said one American intelligence official.”... Read more

Republicans Finally Admit Why They Really Hate Obamacare
NYMagazine | Jonathan Chait | 06/22/14

Conservatives spent years predicting Obamacare would collapse in all manner of gloomy scenarios. But those predictions all occurred in the run-up to the law coming on-line, on the basis of sketchy, preliminary data or pure conjecture. But in the months since the law has come into effect, a steady stream of far more solid data has come in, and the doomsaying predictions are being hunted to extinction. The right’s ideological objections to Obamacare remain, but I can’t think of a single practical analytic claim they made that still looks correct. Just within the last week, numerous predictions of Obamacare skeptics have suffered ignominious deaths. Consider a few: ... Read more

More American women have been murdered by their intimate partners using guns since 2001 (6,410) than U.S. troops have been killed in combat (5,315) in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Center for American Progress reports.

9 Signs of Dangerous Gun Nut Craziness in 2014
AlterNete | Steven Rosenfeld | 06/19/14

The recent news has been filled with anything but acceptable behavior by gun nuts. A Montana man sets a trap for burglars and executes a teenage intruder. A Virginia man strapping on a holster shoots himself in the penis. So-called open-carry activists keep walking into Texas malls and restaurant chains with assault rifles. And federal airport screeners say 2014 will set a record for travelers forgetting they are carrying guns. ...

  1. Women, Not Students, Are The Target Of Most Mass Gun Murder.
  2. States With The Laxest Gun Laws Have The Most Violence.
  3. Absurdly, Gun Nuts Say They Are Threatened.
  4. Gun Nuts Admit They Cannot Control Gun Nuts.
  5. Americans Aren’t Standing For This—Starting With Big Business.
  6. The NRA Is Facing Opposition and Losing.
  7. Women-Centered Gun Control Groups Getting Results.
  8. Gun Nuts React With New Big Lie And CNN Buys It.
  9. Gun Control Groups Are Making Progress, But The Road Is Long. Before Sandy Hook.
Read more

Click to zoom - Major Causes of Death
DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Monday, June 23 [10:13]
DN | "Baghdad is a Frightened City": As ISIS Gains Ground, Iraqi Capital Gripped by Fear & Uncertainty (06/23/14) [7:01]
DN | Pressuring Israel, Presbyterian Church Divests From Firms Tied to Occupation of Palestinian Land (06/23/14) [8:31]
Elizabeth Warren
*Warren on building opportunity in America. Chris Matthews talks with Sen. Elizabeth Warren about her new memoir, “A Fighting Chance,” and the investments needed to help build opportunity for all. (06/19/14) [11:16]
Bill Moyers News
*Bill Moyers | While armchair warriors in Washington cry “back to Iraq,” former combat veteran and military historian Andrew Bacevich says no way. (06/22/14) [24:19]
TRNN News
*TRNN | Ugly Money Politics (06/17/14) [16:52]
TRNN | Ethnocracy: Who Owns the Land of Israel? (06/22/14) [9:06]
More News
Dennis Trainor, Jr.: Legalize Democracy (trailer) (2013) [3:31]
*Legalize Democracy is a documentary film by Dennis Trainor, Jr. about the movement to amend our Constitution... (02/08/14) [29:38]
Noam Chomsky: Interview on the Elites Views of the Poor (trailer) (2013) [3:50]
Noam Chomsky 2014 Speaches
Diane Rehms Show
Diane Rehm The Crisis in Iraq And Its Security Threat To The U.S. (06/23/14) [1hr]
TYT News
NYTimes News
NYTimes | Nicholas Kristof: 21st-Century Concentration Camps (06/16/14) [10:52]

06.23.2014. 14:09

Friday June 20, 2014
News Articles

Ebola In West Africa Is 'Totally Out Of Control,' Medical Group Says
HP & AP | Sarah DiLorenzo | 06/20/14

The Ebola outbreak ravaging West Africa is "totally out of control," according to a senior official for Doctors Without Borders, who says the medical group is stretched to the limit in its capacity to respond.

International organizations and the governments involved need to send in more health experts and to increase the public education messages about how to stop the spread of the disease, Bart Janssens, the director of operations for the group in Brussels, told The Associated Press on Friday.

Ebola has already been linked to more than 330 deaths in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, according to the latest numbers from the World Health Organization.

The reality is clear that the epidemic is now in a second wave," Janssens said. "And, for me, it is totally out of control."

The outbreak, which began in Guinea either late last year or early this year, had appeared to slow before picking up pace again in recent weeks, including spreading to the Liberian capital for the first time. ... Read more

As we know, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the other architects of the war (Neo-Cons) did everything possible to intimidate, and when necessary, discredit those in the intelligence agencies who warned of the predictable consequences of war.

Neocons' Shocking Iraq Revisionism: How They Are Utterly Divorced from Reality
AlterNet | Eric Alterman | 06/20/13

In a column entitled " Bush's toxic legacy in Iraq," terrorism expert Peter Bergen writes about the origins of ISIS, "the brutal insurgent/terrorist group formerly known as al Qaeda in Iraq."

Bergen notes that, "One of George W. Bush's most toxic legacies is the introduction of al Qaeda into Iraq, which is the ISIS mother ship. If this wasn't so tragic it would be supremely ironic, because before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, top Bush officials were insisting that there was an al Qaeda-Iraq axis of evil. Their claims that Saddam Hussein's men were training members of al Qaeda how to make weapons of mass destruction seemed to be one of the most compelling rationales for the impending war." There was no al Qaeda-Iraq connection until the war; our invasion made it so. We have known this for nearly a decade, well before the murderous ISIS even appeared. ... Read more

Dick Cheney Should be Rotting in a Prison Cell, Not Opining About Iraq
AlterNet | Thom Hartmann | 06/20/14

... The Iraq War was the best Al Qaeda propaganda video ever, and whatever Cheney might say about the surge and how successful it was, the truth is that there were no terrorists in Iraq before we invaded.

Remember, Cheney was the guy who almost bankrupted Halliburton by exposing it to asbestos liabilities and then used his position as Vice President of the United States to bail the company out with no-bid contracts during the Iraq War, all while owning millions in Halliburton stock options. ... Read more

Target Remains in Crosshairs of Texas Gun Fight
Mother Jones | Mark Follman | 06/20/14

More images have surfaced of gun rights activists carrying weapons inside Target stores in Texas. On May 31, several women went shopping at a Target in Corpus Christi, toting not just kids but also shotguns and semi-automatic rifles.

"We just kind of feel like our rights are being infringed upon, which is against the constitution," the organizer, Sarah Head, told a local TV station two days before the demonstration. ... Read more

DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Friday, June 20 [9:22]
DN | Rep. Colleen Hanabusa Proposes Ban on U.S. Military Deployment in Iraq Without Congressional Backing (06/20/14) [5:14]
DN | Iraq's Next PM? Ahmed Chalabi, Chief Peddler of False WMDs, Meets U.S. Officials As Malaki Falters (06/20/14) [9:36]
Pressure is mounting on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to form a less sectarian government or to resign. A representative of the influential Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called for the creation of what he described as a new "effective" government. On Thursday, the New York Times revealed the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, Robert Beecroft and the State Department's top official in Iraq, Brett McGurk recently met with the controversial Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi who has been described as a potential candidate to replace al-Malaki. Chalabi is the former head of the Iraqi National Congress, a CIA funded Iraqi exile group that strongly pushed for the 2003 U.S. invasion. The INC helped drum up pre-war claims that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction and had links to al-Qaeda. The group provided bogus intelligence to the Bush administration, U.S. lawmakers and journalists. We are joined by Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor for Harper's magazine.
DN | A Plan Only Banksters Will Love: WikiLeaks Reveals Trade Deal Pushing Global Financial Deregulation (06/20/14) [6:33]
The pro-transparency group WikiLeaks has released the secret draft text for the Trade in Services Agreement, TISA, a trade agreement covering 50 countries and more than 68 percent of world trade in service. Until now, the draft has been classified to keep it clandestine not only during the negotiations but also for five years post-enactment. According to the leaked text, TISA aims to cement the extreme deregulatory model of the 1990s by forbidding countries from improving financial regulation. The draft Financial Services Annex would also establish rules favorable to the expansion of financial multinationals into other nations by preventing regulatory obstacles. The draft text comes from the April 2014 negotiation round. We discuss the leaked text with Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch and author of "The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority."
TRNN News
*TRNN | Jeff Faux: Destroy Their Economic Livelihoods, and They Will Come (06/20/14) [8:52]
Jeff Faux: 95% of immigrants who cross the US-Mexico border are from countries that the US has dominated or controlled during the past century.
DN | A Plan Only Banksters Will Love: WikiLeaks Reveals Trade Deal Pushing Global Financial Deregulation (06/20/14) [6:33]
TRNN | The Contradictions of the U.S. Riding the Jihadist Tiger (06/20/14) [7:42]
*TRNN | Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky, Part 1 (06/17/14) [17:58], Part 2 [17:03], Part 3 [20:56]
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges speaks with Professor Noam Chomsky about working-class resistance during the Industrial Revolution, propaganda, and the historical role played by intellectuals in times of war. The system we have now is radically anti-capitalist, anti- democratic, and pro-elite. Noam Chomsky says Occupy challenges the atomization of society, and also discusses how the media obstructs meaningful action to address climate change.
Obama Critics Invent Absurd New Explanation For Iraq War (06/16/14) [2:24]
Diane Rehms Show
Diane Rehm Domestic News - Friday (06/20/14) [1hr]
International News - Friday (06/20/14) [1hr]

06.20.2014. 15:19

Monday June 16, 2014
News Articles

The Battle for Iraq
HP & AP | Sameer N. Yacoub | 06/13/14

Sheik Abdul-Mahdi al-Karbalaie Calls On Iraqis To Defend Country

Iraq's Shiite clerical leadership Friday called on all Iraqis to defend their country from Sunni militants who have seized large swaths of territory, and a U.N. official expressed "extreme alarm" at reprisal killings in the offensive, citing reports of hundreds of dead and wounded.

U.S. President Barack Obama said he is weighing options for countering the insurgency, but warned Iraqi leaders that he would not take military action unless they moved to address the country's political divisions. ... Read more

America's Dying Factories Are Widening Income Inequality
AP | Michael Rubinkam | 06/15/14

In August 2008, factory workers David and Barbara Ludwig treated themselves to new cars -- David a Dodge pickup, Barbara a sporty Mazda 3. With David making $22 an hour and Barbara $19, they could easily afford the payments.

A month later, Baldwin Hardware, a unit of Stanley Black & Decker Corp., announced layoffs at the Reading plant where they both worked. David was unemployed for 20 months before finding a janitor job that paid $10 an hour, less than half his previous wage. Barbara hung on, but she, too, lost her shipping-dock job of 26 years as Black & Decker shifted production to Mexico. Now she cleans houses for $10 an hour while looking for something permanent. ... Read more

DemocracyNow Daily News
How The Supreme Court Made the U.S. Government Illegitimate (06/12/14) [9:59]
TRNN News
TRNN | Robert Johnson: Has Capitalism Lost the Ability to Reform Itself? Part 7 (06/16/14) [10:30]
Capitalism is not rebalancing; the yearnings and desires of large portions of society are not being responded to.
TRNN | Why The Worst Get on Top in Economics (06/16/14) [4:26]
Bill Black: History has proved Nobel prize winning economist Friedrich von Hayek, the patron saint of plutocrats and libertarians, profoundly wrong.
TRNN | The Cost of Full Spectrum Dominance (old, but good) [13:14]
TYT News
TYT | Viable Alternatives To Democracy? (06/12/14) [15:48]
Tiny House News
Tiny home packs storage stairs, 2 lofts, tub in 136 sq ft (2014) [14:22]
Awesome Micro Houses on Wheels Tiny Homes (2014) [8:30]
Building a Tiny House (2014) [22:38]

06.16.2014. 08:33

Friday June 13, 2014
News Articles

Anat Admati on Seeing Through 'The Banker's New Clothes'
Bill Moyers | Neha Tara Mehta | 06/12/14

This week, Bill speaks with Anat Admati, an economist at Stanford University, about how our banks are actually larger now than they were before the 2008 crash -- and still living dangerously.

In this TEDx Stanford talk she delivered earlier this year, Admati explains how she fell into a "rabbit hole” when she started studying banking around the time of the financial crisis. She likens Wall Street executives and financial analysts to the emperor in the memorable children's fairy tale. "In banking, there are lots of people who say lots of things,” she says, pointing at bankers, policymakers, regulators, experts, academics and politicians. "A disturbing proportion of what they say has as much substance as the emperor's new clothes.” ... Read more

The Fix Isn't In: Eric Cantor and the Death of a Movement
NYTimes | Paul Krugman | 06/12/14

... I don't mean that conservatism in general is dying. But what I and others mean by "movement conservatism,” a term I think I learned from the historian Rick Perlstein, is something more specific: an interlocking set of institutions and alliances that won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda, meanwhile providing a support network for political and ideological loyalists.

By rejecting Mr. Cantor, the Republican base showed that it has gotten wise to the electoral bait and switch, and, by his fall, Mr. Cantor showed that the support network can no longer guarantee job security. For around three decades, the conservative fix was in; but no more. ... Read more

How Republicans Are Creating a Crisis of Competence in Government
Bill Moyers | author | 06/10/14

... In the new issue of The Washington Monthly, Paul Glastris and Haley Sweetland Edwards look at how Republicans have deepened that crisis by gutting congressional staff — the faceless research, oversight and policymaking apparatus that makes the government function. Conservatives, they write, have engineered a “debilitating brain drain” that has “been under way in Congress for the past 25 years.” ... Read more, or here

Six Things Michael Mann Wants You to Know About the Science of Global Warming
Bill Moyers | Joshua Holland | 06/12/14

There is nothing controversial about the work of climatologist Michael Mann, director of Penn State's Earth System Science Center. His innovative research helped recreate the Earth's historical temperature record and separate the noise of natural weather fluctuations from the steady signal of real climate change. As such, Mann has played a significant role in the development of the overwhelming scientific consensus -- the planet is warming and human activities are responsible. ...

  1. Climate Scientists are the Real Skeptics
  2. The Science of Climate Change is Based on Many Sources of Data and Many Different Methodologies
  3. The Models Have Proven Accurate
  4. If Anything, Global Warming is Probably Worse Than Scientists Say
  5. A Scientific Consensus Isn't Like a Popularity Contest
  6. Climatologists are Beginning to Recognize That They Have to Speak Up
Read more

3 "X-Class" Solar Flares Hit Earth; Disrupt Flights, Communications
ZeroHedge | author | 06/12/14

The sun has had three major "X-Class" solar flares on its surface in the past two days that have affected communications on Earth and could send a shockwave through Earth this Friday (the 13th), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As ABC reports, the "solar events” caused brief blackouts in high frequency communications when they struck, twice on Tuesday morning and once this morning.
NASA | SDO Sees Two Solar Flares (06/10/14 to 06/13/14) [0:55]

One of the flares created a "coronal mass ejection” that actually could come into contact with Earth on Friday, according to NOAA. The ejection is essentially a huge cloud of plasma that could hit the Earth and cause a shock wave, affecting communications systems. If an ejection were to hit Earth on Friday, scientists expect it would only cause a minor geo-magnetic storm, according to NOAA. ... Read more



DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Friday, June 13 [11:03]
Report From Iraq: U.S. Invasion in 2003 Helped Set Path For Crisis Pulling Nation Apart (06/13/14) [11:17]
Bill Moyers
*Bill Moyers | Our banks are larger than before the 2008 crash and they're still living dangerously, economist Anat Admati tells Bill. (06/13/14) [24:34]
TEDxStanford | Anat Admati: Seeing Through "The Banker's New Clothes:" (05/20/14) [15:27]
Anat R. Admati holds a bachelor's degree from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a doctorate from Yale University, and is a professor of finance and economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her recent research has focused on corporate governance and banking. She is the co-author of The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It. The book and many commentaries expose the continued failure by policymakers to protect the public and reduce the harm and distortions from a reckless financial system. Admati believes that explaining the issues to a broad audience is essential for bringing about policy change.
TRNN News
*TRNN | Does Eric Cantor's Historic Defeat Signal The Ending of The Republican Party? (06/12/14) [10:07]
Colin Powell's Former Chief of Staff Larry Wilkerson argues that Eric Cantor's defeat has limited national significance.
*TRNN | Robert Johnson: Heads Finance Wins Tails Society Looses, Part 5 (06/13/14) [8:25]
*TRNN | Robert Johnson: How We Broke the Bank of England, Part 4 (06/12/14) [18:33]
TRNN | Ronald Ehrenberg and IPS's Marjorie Wood: Discuss How Do You Fix the Student Debt Crisis? (06/13/14) [14:35]
TRNN | ISIS Fills Power Vacuum In Iraq Fundamentally Created by U.S. Foreign Policy (06/13/14) [17:32]
Ring of Fire
*Ring of Fire | RFK, Jr. and Seder: The Method to Republican Madness (06/05/14) [7:17]
Diane Rehms Show
Diane Rehm Domestic News - Friday (06/13/14) [1hr]
International News - Friday (06/13/14) [1hr]
Jon Stewart - Daily Show
*Jon Stewart | Glass Half Empty: Jason Jones investigates an emerging form of discrimination that is targeting Google Glass "explorers" in San Francisco. (06/12/14) [5:12]
US Iraq Embassy
Click to zoom - US Iraq Embassy


Click to zoom - US Iraq Embassy
In a telling sign of how dangerous and chaotic Iraq remains more than eight years after President George W. Bush launched the war against Saddam Hussein, U.S. diplomats, military advisers and other officials are planning to fall back to the gargantuan embassy in Baghdad -- a heavily fortified, self-contained compound the size of Vatican City.

The embassy compound is by far the largest the world has ever seen, at one and a half square miles, big enough for 94 football fields. It cost three quarters of a billion dollars to build (coming in about $150 million over budget). Inside its high walls, guard towers and machine-gun emplacements lie not just the embassy itself, but more than 20 other buildings, including residential quarters, a gym and swimming pool, commercial facilities, a power station and a water-treatment plant.

Yet the embassy is turning out to be too small for the swelling retinue of gunmen, gardeners and other workers the State Department considers necessary to provide security and "life support" for the sizable group of diplomats, military advisers and other executive branch officials who will be taking shelter there once the troops withdraw from the country.

The number of personnel under the authority of the U.S. ambassador to Iraq will swell from 8,000 to about 16,000 as the troop presence is drawn down, a State Department official told The Huffington Post. "About 10 percent would be core programmatic staff, 10 percent management and aviation, 30 percent life support contractors -- and 50 percent security," he said.

As part of that increase, the State Department will double its complement of security contractors -- fielding a private army of over 5,000 to guard the embassy and other diplomatic outposts and protect personnel as they travel beyond the fortifications, the official said. Another 3,000 armed guards will protect Office of Security Cooperation personnel, who are responsible for sales and training related to an estimated $13 billion in pending U.S. arms sales, including tanks, squadrons of attack helicopters and 36 F-16s. ... Read more

06.13.2014. 10:22

Thursday June 12, 2014
News Articles

By Invading, Occupying And Looting Iraq, Bush And Cheney Brought al-Qaeda Into The Country'...
HP & | Juan Cole | 06/11/14

(or) The Fall of Mosul and the False Promises of Modern History

... It is an indictment of the George W. Bush administration, which falsely said it was going into Iraq because of a connection between al-Qaeda and Baghdad. There was none. Ironically, by invading, occupying, weakening and looting Iraq, Bush and Cheney brought al-Qaeda into the country and so weakened it as to allow it actually to take and hold territory in our own time. They put nothing in place of the system they tore down. They destroyed the socialist economy without succeeding in building private firms or commerce. They put in place an electoral system that emphasizes religious and ethnic divisions. They helped provoke a civil war in 2006-2007, and took credit for its subsiding in 2007-2008, attributing it to a troop escalation of 30,000 men (not very plausible). In fact, the Shiite militias won the civil war on the ground, turning Baghdad into a largely Shiite city and expelling many Sunnis to places like Mosul. There are resentments. ... Read more and Original article

My Life on the Walmart Treadmill
HP | Jamaad Reed | 06/10/14

I work at Walmart #4609 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and it feels like running on a treadmill. I'm constantly giving an effort, expending energy, yet I stay in the same position. For two years I've been jogging on this treadmill trying to materialize all the effort and energy I've been giving into some kind of tangible reward. ... Read more

Too Big to Fail and Getting Bigger
Bill Moyers | author | 06/11/14

In Washington, DC a bi-partisan effort is underway to chip away at the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which is supposed to prevent the type of economic meltdown that brought the world to the brink in 2008.

Wall Street banks are lobbying to de-fang sections of the law related to derivatives -- the complex financial contracts at the core of the meltdown. One deregulation bill, the "London Whale Loophole Act," would allow American banks to skip Dodd-Frank's trading rules on derivatives if they are traded in countries that have similar regulatory structures. ... Read more

74 School Shootings Since Newtown
Click to zoom - 74 shooting since Newtown
HP | Katy Hall | 06/10/14

After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, President Obama promised "meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this." His gun reform push, focused on a background check measure that had overwhelming public support, failed in the Senate last year, and Congress hasn't passed any other gun legislation.

At least 74 school shootings happened during those 18 months, according to a tally by Everytown for Gun Safety, a group fighting to pass gun control laws. That's more than one each week school was in session, with the longest gap between shootings spanning last summer's break, from mid-June to mid-August. ... Read more

DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Thursday, June 12 [10:07]
DN | Iraq Could Fall Into Syria-Like War Warns Journalist Mohammed al Dulaimy in First TV Interview (06/12/14) [13:36]
*DN | Journalists: U.S. Failures in Iraq Helped Fuel Current Sectarian Crisis (06/12/14) [20:15]
Bill Moyers
*Bill Moyers | Preview: Too Big to Fail and Getting Bigger [0:29]
Interesting
Matt Taibbi: Justice System Rigged Against The Poor (04/17/14) [8:08]
Diane Rehms Show
Diane Rehm Two Views On Solving Income Inequality In America. (06/12/14) [1hr]
Inequality for All by Robert Reich
*Robert Reich | Inequality For All Official (trailer) (2013) [1:48]
Robert Reich | Inequality for All (full) [1:30:11]
TYT News
Melissa & Alex's Story - Spent: Looking For Change (trailer) [3:10]
Spent: Looking For Change (trailer) [2:03]
TYT | Spent: Looking For Change (Documentary) (05/04/14) [39:56]
Wealth Inequality - REPEAT (until I'm blue in the face)
*Wealth Inequality in America [6:25]
*Wealth Inequality in the World [3:51]

06.12.2014. 12:36

Wednesday June 11, 2014
News Articles

How Average Americans Pay Dearly for Corporate America's Trillions in Stock Buybacks
Bill Moyers | Sam Pizzigati | 06/09/14

Back in 1979, notes a new Economic Policy Institute report released last week, households in America's statistical middle -- the 20 percent of households making more than the nation's poorest 40 percent and less than the nation's most affluent 40 percent -- averaged $16.72, after inflation, per hour worked. In 2012, households in this same statistical middle averaged $16.26 per hour.

Over roughly that same period, EPI analysts add, America's top one percent of income-earners doubled their share of the nation's income from paychecks, dividends, rent and business earnings, from 7.2 to 14.2 percent. ... Read more

Eric Cantor succumbs to tea party challenger Tuesday
WashingtonPost | Robert Costa | 06/10/14

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.), the chamber's second-ranking Republican, was badly beaten in a primary contest Tuesday by an obscure professor with tea party backing -- a historic electoral surprise that left the GOP in chaos and the House without its heir apparent.

Cantor, who has represented the Richmond suburbs since 2001, lost by 11 percentage points to Dave Brat, an economist at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va. It was an operatic fall from power, swift and deep and utterly surprising. As late as Tuesday morning, Cantor had felt so confident of victory that he spent the morning at a Starbucks on Capitol Hill, holding a fundraising meeting with lobbyists while his constituents went to the polls. ... Read more

Will 2014 Be the Hottest Year on Record?
MotherJones | Chris Mooney | 06/10/14

We're hearing more and more about our pending global El Niño. NOAA now says the odds are 70 percent that we'll have an El Niño event develop by this summer, and even higher after that. Other experts put the odds higher still. What's more, the ocean and atmosphere have recently been behaving in a rather El Niño-like manner: Record-breaking Hurricane Amanda recently formed in the northeastern Pacific basin, which tends to be a very active hurricane region in El Niño years.

El Niño, if it develops, will upend everybody's weather--but it may also have another impact: Driving up global temperatures. El Niño, after all, is a global weather phenomenon whose most notable characteristic is the presence of extra-warm surface water in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific ocean. This tends to unlock greater average global temperatures, notes Joseph Romm of Climate Progress. ... Read more

Walgreen Ponders $4 Billion Tax Dodge
HP | Ben Hallman | 06/11/14

Walgreen, the biggest U.S. retail drugstore chain, is considering decamping to Switzerland in a quest for bigger tax breaks, just two years after reaping a hefty package of Illinois tax credits in exchange for keeping corporate jobs in the state.

Such a move, through a maneuver called an inversion, would cost the U.S. treasury $4 billion in tax revenue over the next five years, according to a new report by Americans For Tax Fairness, a tax reform advocacy group. It also may prompt other U.S. retailers, which typically pay high tax rates compared with large multinationals like Apple and General Electric, to seek foreign acquisitions in order to dramatically lower their bills. ... Read more

DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Tuesday, June 10 [10:06]
*DN | Eric Cantor Suffers Historic GOP Primary Loss in Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Corporate Backlash (06/11/14) [7:00]
DN | Debate: Is Human Rights Watch Too Close to U.S. Gov't to Criticize its Foreign Policy? Part 1 (06/11/14) [32:03], Part 2 [5:56]
TRNN Daily News
The Truth and Consequences of Climate Change Denial (06/11/14) [18:53]
Peter Sinclair discusses how the big tobacco lobby methods are being employed by climate change deniers and the rising sea levels caused by melting glaciers.
*The Truth About Climate Change and Sea Levels Rising (06/10/14) [5:56]
Ring of Fire News
*GOP Attacks Pentagon Climate Assessment (06/10/14) [6:12]
*Papantonio: GOP Rhetoric Inspires Mass Killings (06/10/14) [4:57]
TYT News
TYT | Spent: Looking For Change (Documentary) (05/04/14) [39:56]

06.11.2014. 11:26

Tuesday June 10, 2014
News Articles

5 Doomed, Hilarious Efforts by the Religious Right to Disprove Science
AlterNet | Evan McMurry | 06/06/14

What happens when you're part of a religious and political movement whose ideology is contradicted by well-established science? You've gotta get creative. Here are the five most ridiculous explanations religious conservatives have conjured up to outflank science, from gay armies to magic birds to the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. ...

  1. Climate Change Isn't Happening, but if It Is That's Fine Because It Means Jesus Is Coming.
  2. Creationism, Riding with the Dinosaurs, i.e. Fred Flintstone.
  3. Neil deGrasse Tyson - Neil deGrasse Tyson's new show Cosmos is driving the right bonkers. Episodes ranging from evolution to the Big Bang to climate change to birds are drawing hackles from the right, as he weekly drops time-tested scientific theories.
  4. AIDS Has Been Weaponized to Doom Heterosexual Culture
  5. Gay Parents Are Worse Than Straight Parents (If You Lie)
Read more

Militants Overrun Iraq's Second Largest City
HP & AP | author | 06/10/14

Islamic militants overran much of Iraq's second-largest city of Mosul on Tuesday, seizing the governor's headquarters and rampaging through police stations, military bases and the airport as security forces collapsed and abandoned their posts. Gunmen cruised through neighborhoods, waving black banners while residents fled.

The assault was a heavy defeat for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in the face of a widening insurgency by a breakaway al-Qaida group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The group has been advancing in both Iraq and neighboring Syria, capturing territory in what appears to be a campaign to set up a militant enclave straddling the border. ... Read more

Why Is Cable Television So Afraid of Admitting That Many of America's Terror Attacks Are 'Right Wing?'
AlterNet | CJ Werleman | 06/09/14

In the aftermath of the deadly Las Vegas shooting rampage, which left two police officers, a shopper, and the shooters dead, one can expect all the usual talking points that follow an all too regular and familiar massacre -- mental health, access to guns, the killer's motives, and so forth. But here's another one: the intellectual cowardice of cable news giant CNN, when it comes to reporting right wing terrorism.

A married couple, Jared and Amanda Miller, walked into CiCi's Pizza, shouted, "This is a revolution," and then shot police officers Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo as the two ate lunch. They then ran across an adjacent parking lot to a Walmart store, where they shot a woman before retreating to the back of the store, where the woman fatally shot her husband before killing herself. ... Read more



DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Tuesday, June 10 [10:06]
DN | As Taliban Attacks Karachi Airport Again, Could Pakistan Fall Into Civil War With Militants? (06/10/14) [10:36]
Bill Moyers
*Bill Moyers | Joseph E. Stiglitz: How Tax Reform Can Save the Middle Class (06/09/14) [23:37]
In the second part of his interview with Bill, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz says that such lucrative loopholes are contributing to America's inequality problem and persistent unemployment rate. In fact, corporate greed, combined with a tax code too biased toward the very rich, is hurting our economy and reducing public investment at a time when we really need it.
TRNN News
TRNN | Robert Johnson: Finance is Building the Architecture of their Own Rules, Part 3 (06/10/14) [14:38]
Mr. Johnson says the scale of the political investment of finance, six, seven hundred million dollars, is overwhelming; with the political power of finance, do we still have a democracy?
*TRNN | Human Activity Driving Earth Towards Global Extinction Event (06/09/14) [14:51]
Dr. Terry Root & Dr. Stuart L. Pimm discuss recent research showing human beings are responsible for high extinction rates of species across the globe, and explain how we can prevent a sixth major extinction event.
Jesse Ventura | Greg Palast
Jesse Ventura | Greg Palast On Big Oil & Dark Money (05/21/14) [14:39], Part 2 [12:53]
Jesse Ventura | Larry King Goes #OffTheGrid (06/03/14) [9:23], Part 2 [8:50]
Tiny House News
Couple Builds Own Tiny House on Wheels in 4 Months for $22,744.06 (2014) [28:02]
Jon Stewart - Daily News
Jon Stewart | Jon Stewart: Fox News Doesn't Know What A Conscience Is. (06/10/14) [4:57]
John Oliver | Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO): FIFA and the World Cup (06/08/14) [13:13]
Other Videos and Documentaries I Ran Across
Note: I don't endorse any of the videos in this section.
As I construct My News Pages I constantly run across a lot of NEW videos, and since I find YouTube frustrating trying to re-find videos, I save the links in this section so I can find them again.

06.10.2014. 11:15

Monday June 09, 2014
News Articles

Obama 'Absolutely' Wants To Go Off On Climate Change Deniers In Congress
HP | Ashley Alman | 06/08/14

Obama said there's "no doubt" the planet will see a rise in average temperature if we burn through all of the fossil fuels currently in the ground. His comments came in an interview that will air Monday as part of the final episode of Showtime's "Years of Living Dangerously."

"Over the course of the next several decades, we're going to have to build a ramp from how we currently use energy to where we need to use energy," Obama said, according to interview highlights featured in Thomas L. Friedman's opinion piece published in The New York Times on Sunday. ... Read more

Libertarianism 3.0; Koch And A Smile
Reason.com | Nick Gillespie | 06/06/14

Written by a senior editor for the lefty magazineMother Jones, the book is hugely revelatory, though not in a way that will please or flatter the conspiracy theories of Democrats, liberals, and progressives who vilify the Kansas-raised billionaires Charles and David Koch for fun and profit. Sons of Wichita chronicles the post-World War II transformation of a mid-size oil-and-ranching family business into the second-largest privately held company in the United States. ... Read more

ReasonTV | Nick Gillespie interviews Daniel Schulman for Reason TV (06/06/14) [14:46]

Return to Aleppo: 'We are in hell'
CNN | Nick Paton Walsh | 06/09/14

'There's No People Anymore. No Cats, No Insects. Nothing Left'.

The smell of burnt plastic leaps out at you. Acrid in the throat, omnipresent, extinguishing from the air all the other smells of city life -- because really there is none. The scenes of destruction -- the fact every street is pockmarked by two years of shelling -- you have seen in activist videos online. But the smell is something striking: it notifies you that you are on the edge of humanity.

Aleppo is a dusty, pale skeleton of the city I reported from 22 months ago. Since then, it has seen too much. It has seen the world lose much of its horror at its plight and instead focus on the extremists in rebel ranks who Western officials fear may eventually turn their ire on Europe. ... Read more

The Death And Decay Of Detroit, As Seen From The Streets
ZeroHedge | author | 06/09/14

With the stock market hitting record highs day after day, it is easy to move on and forget that one of American's once premier cities, Detroit, has been bankrupt for nearly a year. But out of mind doesn't mean out of sight, especially now that Google has launched its street view Time Machine, which provides for 7 years worth of street images, showing the time shift of the tumultuous period period starting in 2007. One blogger who decided to take this time lapse data and apply it to the city of Detroit is GooBing Detroit who, as the following time-lapse photos demonstrate, has captured Detoit's unprecedented slow-motion collapse into death and decay in what is the closest we have to "real time."

Perhaps what is most stunning about the following series of photos is not the ultimate fate of the bankrupt city, but how quickly a once vibrant metropolis has succumbed to blight and sheer desperation. ... Read more

DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Monday, June 09 [10:08]
DN | Freed From Prison, Bahraini Activist Nabeel Rajab Urges U.S. to Stop Backing Regime's Crackdown (06/09/14) [11:42]
Climate Change
*DN | "Years of Living Dangerously": James Cameron, Matt Damon, Harrison Ford in TV Climate Change Series (04/11/14) [16:18]
*Showtime | Years of Living Dangerously Premiere (full) (04/06/14) [59:08]
Showtime | Years of Living Dangerously website
TRNN News
*TRNN | Robert Johnson: Growing Up in the Cauldron of 1960's Detroit (06/09/14) [15:13]
Mr. Johnson, who while working with George Soros "broke the Bank of England", talks about growing up in the turmoil of racial tension and the mass movement against the Vietnam War.
TRNN | Robert Johnson: Reaganomics Was Crazy, Part 2 (06/09/14) [14:54]
Mr. Johnson says the idea that you were going to cut taxes massively and this was going to lead to a growth in revenue and close the deficit was silly.
War
CNN | Return to Aleppo: 'We are in hell' (06/09/14) [3:26]
Another type of War
ReasonTV | Is Harrisburg's Nightmare America's Future? (02/16/12) [6:58]
G. Edward Griffin: "Legalized Plunder of the American People" () [12:56]

*The Death And Decay Of Detroit, As Seen From The Streets
Using Google Street View Time Machine (pictures)
or
The Death And Decay Of Detroit, As Seen From The Streets (pictures)

Tiny House
Evan & Gabby's Tiny House Project (2012) [11:45]
Vagavond (formerly Itty Bitty House). Tiny House Tour (2012) [11:18]
Joseph and Aravinda's Tiny House on Wheels (2012) [13:49]
Trailer for Tiny House
Tiny House Trailer (2013) [6:18]

06.09.2014. 10:58

Friday June 06, 2014
News Articles

What America Could Buy With Offshore Tax Money
Bill Moyer | John Light | 06/06/14

The federal government forgoes billions of dollars in revenue each year due to corporate tax write-offs and loopholes enshrined in America's tax code. The Government Accountability Office estimates that we lose out on $181 billion as a result. Some of our tax credits ostensibly serve a social good, such as the credit for low-income housing investment. But other parts of the corporate tax code encourage companies to hide their profits in offshore tax havens. The revenue lost through this loophole is $65 billion a year, according to the National Priorities Project. (Other estimates are much higher.)

Here are some of the ways we could be spending those lost dollars. ... Read more
Citizens for Justice website
Use of Offshore Tax Havens by Fortune 500 Comp.pdf

Climate denial
A recent study has linked the drought to climate change, but some Californians still aren't so sure about the connection. While 78 percent of Democrats said climate change was "very or somewhat responsible" for California's water trouble, only 44 percent of Republicans agreed.

The Results Are In: America Is Dumb and on the Road to Getting Dumber
AlterNet | CJ Werleman | 06/04/14

... This week, Gallup released a poll showing 42 percent of Americans still believe God created human beings in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. Last week, the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire published a study showing only 28 percent of Tea Party Republicans trust scientists.

It gets worse. More than two-thirds of Americans, according to surveys conducted for the National Science Foundation, are unable to identify DNA as the key to heredity. Nine out of 10 don't understand radiation and what it can do the human body, while one in five adult Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth.

A 2008 University of Texas study found that 25 percent of public school biology teachers believe that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously. ... Read more

Navy SEAL Chief Behind bin Laden Raid: Keystone XL Would Be a Terror Target
Click to zoom - Keystone XL Pipeline
AlterNet | Steve Horn | 06/06/14

Cooper's probe included a due diligence trip out to the Sand Hills region of Nebraska, where Phase I of the Keystone Pipeline System is currently operational (the northern leg of Keystone XL is Phase IV). Going out into the field, Cooper came away shocked by his discoveries.

His findings raise a troubling question: have real Keystone XL terrorism threats been ignored, while non-violent activists have been labeled potential eco-terrorists? Cooper offered his take on this question to DeSmogBlog. ... Read more

'America Has a Koch Problem!'-- Activists Rally Outside David Koch's NY Apartment
AlterNet | Jodie Gummow | 06/06/14

... At the demonstration which was crawling with police, handouts of 2014 political candidates who have taken money from the Koch Brothers were distributed along with pamphlets revealing how the Koch funded group, Americans for Prosperity, plan to spend $125 million on this election to benefit conservative candidates and have flooded the airwaves with misleading campaigns in states with key Senate races. ...

... "We're here today to protest against the Koch Brothers and let them know democracy is not for sale. They cannot buy our elections, they cannot buy our elected officials and we're here to protest against that. This is a democracy! We want to educate and inform the people of New York about exactly what is going on for those who are not aware and ensure that our leaders are doing things democratically by stressing the message that our elections cannot be bought," he said. ... Read more
*NEW version | Koch Brothers Exposed: 2014 Edition (05/20/14) [55:56]

DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Friday, June 06 [10:55]
DN | The Inside Story of Bowe Bergdahl: Afghan War Vet Matthew Farwell on "America's Last POW" (06/06/14) [13:33], Part 2 [12:40]
TRNN News
*TRNN | Though Democrats and Republicans are split down party lines on whether to add a constitutional amendment to limit campaign spending, both parties ignore 50 percent of Americans in favor of public financing (06/06/14) [7:00]
*TRNN | Author David Cortright: A Brief History of GI Resistance During The Vietnam War (06/06/14) [13:31]
Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann | The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (06/05/14) [9:21]
Diane Rehms Show
Diane Rehm Domestic News - Friday (06/06/14) [1hr]
International News - Friday (06/06/14) [1hr]
Chris Hayes - All In
Chris Hayes | Kansas is Koch country: While the Koch brothers have spent millions to support their kind of political candidates across the country, they've been dealt defeat in their home state of Kansas. (06/06/14) [10:50]
For the remainder Chris Hayes videos for 06/06/14 go here
Films I really Liked
We are living in exceptional times. Scientists tell us that we have 10 years to change the way we live, avert the depletion of natural resources and the catastrophic evolution of the Earth's climate.

The stakes are high for us and our children. Everyone should take part in the effort, and HOME has been conceived to take a message of mobilization out to every human being.
*Home (2009) [1:33:17]
THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD is a screwball true story about two gonzo political activists who, posing as top executives of giant corporations, lie their way into big business conferences and pull off the world's most outrageous pranks.
The Yes Men Fix The World (2009) [1:35:39]

06.07.2014. 15:36

Thursday June 05, 2014
News Articles

*If You're Born Poor, You'll Probably Stay That Way
MotherJones | Stephanie Mencimer | 06/03/14

In 1997, before The Wire made him a household name, then-Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon published The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, a book about an open-air drug market at West Fayette and Monroe Streets in Baltimore. The book painted a grim portrait of the urban ghetto and the people trapped there. It was hailed as a landmark work of immersion journalism.

But Simon can't hold a candle to Karl Alexander, a Johns Hopkins sociologist who followed nearly 800 people from the neighborhoods surrounding Simon's corner since they started first grade in 1982. Alexander and his Hopkins colleagues are now publishing the final results of that 30-year study, their own version of The Corner, called The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth And the Transition to Adulthood. What they've found isn't quite as grim as what Simon described, but it's not much more encouraging. ... Read more

A Rising Tide Lifts All Yachts
BillMoyers | TomDispatch | 06/04/14

... Just in case you aren't yet rock-bottom certain about the wealth divide, here are some stats: the top 1 percent of Americans hold 35 percent of the nation's net worth; the bottom 80 percent, only 11 percent percent. The United States has such an unequal distribution of wealth that, in global rankings, it falls among the planet's kleptocracies, not the developed nations that were once its peers. The mathematical measure of wealth-inequality is called "Gini," and the higher it is, the more extreme a nation's wealth-inequality. The Gini for the US is 85; for Germany, 77; Canada, 72 and Bangladesh, 64. Nations more unequal than the US include Kazakhstan at 86 and the Ukraine at 90. The African continent tips in at just under 85. Odd company for the self-proclaimed "indispensable nation." ...

Questions to be answered

  1. What does Thomas Piketty have to do with the 99 percent?
  2. So why don't the unemployed/underemployed simply find better jobs?
  3. But aren't there small-scale versions of economic "rebirths" occurring all over America?
  4. Can't people just get off their couches and get back to work?
  5. Why can't former factory workers retrain into new jobs?
  6. Shouldn't we cut public assistance and force people into the job market?
  7. Why are Wal-Mart and other businesses opposed to SNAP cuts?
  8. Should we raise the minimum wage?
  9. Okay, after the minimum wage is raised, what else can we do?
Read more
Click to zoom - Income Inequality

Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created in One of the World's Freest Countries
AlterNet | Noam Chomsky | 06/02/14

In the past several months, we have been provided with instructive lessons on the nature of state power and the forces that drive state policy. And on a closely related matter: the subtle, differentiated concept of transparency.

The source of the instruction, of course, is the trove of documents about the National Security Agency surveillance system released by the courageous fighter for freedom Edward J. Snowden, expertly summarized and analyzed by his collaborator Glenn Greenwald in his new book, " No Place to Hide."

The documents unveil a remarkable project to expose to state scrutiny vital information about every person who falls within the grasp of the colossus - in principle, every person linked to the modern electronic society. ... Read more

DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Thursday, June 05 [8:21]
DN | Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl's Idaho Hometown Cancels "Welcome Home" Celebration as Backlash Grows (06/05/14) [11:07], Part 2 [17:40]
DN | EPA Moves to Cut Coal Pollution, But Critics Say Plan Falls Short on Real Emissions Reduction (06/05/14) [7:11]
TRNN News
*TRNN | Is the U.S. Headed toward Another Recession? (06/05/14) [20:13]
Economists Dean Baker from CEPR and Robert Pollin from PERI say that the U.S. economy remains weak 5 years after the recession despite recent job growth, due to low wages and weakened unions.
TRNN | New Whistleblower Organization Launched on Anniversary of Snowden Revelations (06/05/14) [5:10]
Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann | The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (06/05/14) [9:21]
MSNBC Chris Hayes - All In
*Chris Hayes | Neil deGrasse Tyson: interview with legendary astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson about the rhetoric and reality of climate change (06/02/14) [6:01]
Chris Hayes | Sugar is poison (06/02/14) [7:52]
MSNBC Ed Show
Ed Show | Taking action to cut carbon emissions (06/02/14) [6:51]
*Ed Show | GOP fast-track sending jobs oversea through TPP (05/30/14) [16:01]
Republicans leaders have made it clear that they support fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership, sending U.S. jobs overseas. Ed Schultz, Larry Cohen and Rep. Peter DeFazio discuss.
Duck Dynasty shares "godly" words for GOP (05/30/14) [7:41]
Ed Schultz explains the reasoning behind Republican denial of Climate Change. Plus, Ed shares the progress in stopping the TPP. (05/30/14) [1:54]
Wealth Inequality
*Wealth Inequality in America [6:25]
*Wealth Inequality in the World [3:51]

06.05.2014. 17:40

Wednesday June 04, 2014
News Articles

Where $1 Of QE Goes: The Untold Story
Click to zoom
ZeroHedge | author | 06/03/14

... Other banking practices may also help to explain the argyle effect, but there's only so much we can learn from available data. For example, it's impossible to determine how much banks were front running QE by buying bonds just before the Fed's asset purchases began ...

As the chart shows, there's much the Fed doesn't understand, while at the same time showing that QE may have little purpose beyond providing a massive gift to wealthy traders and investors. With regard the question of where a dollar of QE goes, the answer is "not far." Outside of pushing up asset prices and encouraging an occasional luxury purchase, it doesn't seem to escape the financial sector. Liquidity that might otherwise be offered by private institutions is instead provided by the Fed, and -- as Phil Collins might put it -- that's all. ... Read more

This Amazing Shot Of 10,000 Galaxies May Be The Hubble Telescope's Most Spectacular Photo Ever
Click to zoom - Hubble Ultra Deep Field
HP | David Freeman | 06/03/14

Previous versions of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field captured wavelengths of light from visible and near-infrared as well as the far-ultraviolet (UV), Alan Boyle wrote on the NBC News website. But near-ultraviolet light wasn't covered nearly as well.

When you add the UV light, you get quite a view. And what a view it is! The new image, a false-color compilation of shots taken during the course of 841 orbits of Hubble between 2003 and 2012, contains roughly 10,000 galaxies in a vast variety of shapes and sizes. ... Read more

100 Percent of California Now in Highest Stages of Drought
Click to zoom
Scientific American | Andrea Thompson | 05/18/14

It might not seem possible, but California's drought just got worse. According to Thursday's release of the U.S. Drought Monitor, 100 percent of the state is now in one of the three worst stages of drought.

The drought in California, which has been building for the past few years, really took hold this winter. December-March is supposed to be the region's wet season, but this year turned out to be a bust. At the beginning of April, nearly all of the state was in a drought -- nearly 70 percent was in "extreme" or "exceptional" drought, the two highest stages. By the end of the month, the entire state was experiencing at least some form of drought in what has been the driest start to a year in California on record. ... Read more
Drought Monitor website

The Rise of El Niño in 1 Swell Image
ClimateCentral | Brian Kahn | 05/15/14

On Tuesday, NASA's Earth Observatory released a map showing ocean heights in the tropical Pacific in early May compared to May 1997, the year an El Niño formed against which all other El Niños are measured. That year's El Niño helped fuel extreme weather around the globe and contributed to 1998 being one of the warmest years in recorded history. NASA's image shows that while El Niño conditions haven't yet formed, this year is following a trajectory similar to 1997. ... Read more
Climate Central website

DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Wednesday, June 04 [10:22]
DN | "There Were No Good Options": Bergdahl Should Get Honorable Discharge, Says Lawyer for Deserters (06/04/14) [5:09], Part 2 [10:28]
DN | 5 Years After Dr. George Tiller's Murder, A Doctor Braves Threats to Continue Abortions in Wichita (06/04/14) [6:27]
TRNN News
TRNN | Made in Israel: Arms and Export (06/04/14) [9:23]
TYT News
TYT | Creationist Outrage Over Cosmos With Neil DeGrasse Tyson (03/12/14) [6:33]
Ring of Fire
*Ring of Fire | Papantonio: Corporate Traitors To Democracy (06/02/14) [10:56]
Ring of Fire | America Going Trade Deal Crazy (05/30/14) [6:52]
Ring of Fire | RFK, Jr.: EPA Makes Big Move On Carbon Emissions (06/03/14) [4:21]
Cosmos
*Cosmos | The World Set Free (S01E12) (06/01/14) [40:00]
Stephen Colbert Interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson (12/20/13) [1:24:41]
Diane Rehms Show
Diane Rehm Questions About the Return of Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl (06/04/14) [1hr]
In exchange for the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. agreed to free five Taliban commanders from detention at Guantanamo. Bergdahl was the last U.S. soldier in captivity and was held by the Taliban for nearly five years. The White House touted the deal as proof of its commitment to bring every soldier home. But critics say the exchange may encourage hostage-taking by terrorists, while others say the administration might have broken the law by failing to notify Congress it was releasing detainees. And some of the soldiers who served with Bergdahl now say he deserted the platoon. Diane and guests discuss questions about Bowe Bergdahl's capture and the terms of his release.
Elizabeth Warren
HufPost | Elizabeth Warren & Thomas Piketty Discuss Nature & Income Inequality. (06/02/14) [47:46]
*HufPost | Rolling Stone Reporter Matt Taibbi Endorses Elizabeth Warren (2013) [1:48]
HufPost | A Conversation With Senator Elizabeth Warren (05/23/14) [1:04:38]
CNBC | The Biggest Redistribution Of Wealth From The Poor To The Rich Ever () [2:02]
Disappearing American middle class () [1:53]
Jon Stewart - Daily Show
Jon Stewart | A Magnificent, Wonderful Story (06/03/14) [3:15], Part 2 [4:43]
Jon Stewart | Herman Cain responds to questions about his intention to run for president and indicates that only God knows the answer. (06/03/14) [4:29]
More Videos
Trinity and Beyond () [1:31:39]

06.04.2014. 10:11

Tuesday June 03, 2014
News Articles

Unstoppable $100 Trillion Bond Market Renders Models Useless
Bloomberg | Susanne Walker | 06/02/14

Just last month, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York retooled a gauge of relative yields on Treasuries, casting aside three decades of data that incorporated estimates for market rates from professional forecasters. Priya Misra, the head of U.S. rates strategy at Bank of America Corp., says a risk metric she's relied on hasn't worked since March.

After unprecedented stimulus by the Fed and other central banks made many traditional models useless, investors and analysts alike are having to reshape their understanding of cheap and expensive as the global market for bonds balloons to $100 trillion. With the world's biggest economies struggling to grow and inflation nowhere in sight, catchphrases such as "new neutral" and "no normal" are gaining currency to describe a reality where bonds are rallying the most in a decade. ... Read more

Obama Asks Congress To Back $1 Billion Effort To Boost U.S. Military Presence In Europe
HP | Nedra Pickler | 06/03/14

The United States is preparing to boost its military presence in Europe and at a cost of up to $1 billion, President Barack Obama said Tuesday, as tensions in the region simmer over Russia's aggressive actions in Ukraine.

Standing with Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski, Obama said the U.S. plans to send more military equipment and rotate additional American troops into the region. He called on lawmakers back in Washington to provide the funding to sustain the effort. ... Read more

10 Corporate Tax Dodgers You Should Know About
BillMoyers | author | 06/01/14

This week, Bill speaks to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, who argues that we must reform the tax code and stop subsidizing tax dodgers. A recent report by Americans for Tax Fairness suggests that corporate taxes are near a 60-year low -- and that's partially because corporations have become adept at not paying their share. ...

Bank of America logo Bank of America - runs its business through more than 300 offshore tax-haven subsidiaries. It reported $17.2 billion in accumulated offshore profits in 2012. It would owe $4.3 billion in US taxes if these funds were brought back to the US.
 
Citi logo Citigroup - had $42.6 billion in foreign profits parked offshore in 2012 on which it paid no US taxes. It reported that it would owe $11.5 billion if it brings these funds back to the US. A significant chunk is being held in tax-haven countries.
 
ExxonMobil - had a three-year federal income tax rate of just 15 percent. This gave the company a tax subsidy worth $6.2 billion from 2010-2012. It had $43 billion in offshore profits at the end of 2012, on which it paid no US taxes.
 
Fedex logo FedEx - made $6 billion over the last three years and didn't pay a dime in federal income taxes, in part because the tax code subsidized its purchase of new planes. This gave FedEx a huge tax subsidy worth $2.1 billion.
 
GE Logo General Electric - received a tax subsidy of nearly $29 billion over the last 11 years. While dodging paying its fair share of federal income taxes, GE pocketed $21.8 billion in taxpayer-funded contracts from Uncle Sam between 2006 and 2012.
 
Honeywell logo Honeywell - had profits of $5 billion from 2009 to 2012. Yet it paid only $50 million in federal income taxes for the period. Its tax rate was just 1 percent over the last four years. This gave it a huge tax subsidy worth $1.7 billion.
 
Merck logo Merck - had profits of $13.6 billion and paid $2.5 billion in federal income taxes from 2009 to 2012. While dodging its fair share of federal income taxes, it pocketed $8.7 billion in taxpayer-funded contracts from Uncle Sam between 2006 and 2012.
 
Microsoft logo Microsoft - saved $4.5 billion in federal income taxes from 2009 to 2011 by transferring profits to a subsidiary in the tax haven of Puerto Rico. It had $60.8 billion in profits stashed offshore in 2012 on which it paid no US taxes.
 
Pfizer logo Pfizer - paid no US income taxes from 2010 to 2012 while earning $43 billion worldwide. It did this in part by performing accounting acrobatics to shift its US profits offshore. It received $2.2 billion in federal tax refunds.
 
Verizon logo Verizon - made $19.3 billion in US pretax profits from 2008 to 2012, yet didn't pay any federal income taxes during the period. Instead, it got $535 million in tax rebates. Verizon's effective federal income tax rate was negative 2.8 percent from 2008 to 2012.
Read more

DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Tuesday, June 03 [9:00]
DN | Reporter: Bowe Bergdahl's Fellow Soldiers Questioned Afghan War More Than He Did (06/03/14) [5:22]
DN | Former Guantánamo Chief Prosecutor Defends American POW-Taliban Prisoner Swap (06/03/14) [6:49]
DN | After Supreme Court Rejects Appeal, Will Obama Jail New York Times Reporter James Risen? (06/03/14) [4:13]
TRNN News
*TRNN | Costas Lapavitsas: we must deeply reverse financialization and take on private ownership of banking and other critical sectors, Part 8 (06/01/14) [23:24]
Click to zoom - Fisheries vs Aquaculture
TYT News
TYT | Karl Rove's Latest Dirty Tricks - Are they Working on the American Public? (06/02/14) [3:33]
TYT | Obama Administration Sets New EPA Rules (06/02/14) [5:32]
TYT | Was Edward Snowden Trained As A Spy? NSA Chief Responds (06/02/14) [10:24]
Jon Stewart - Daily News
Jon Stewart | Why do we keep having mass shootings? What can be done about it? (06/03/14) [5:23]
*John Oliver | Last Week Tonight (HBO): Net Neutrality (06/01/14) [13:17]
Send your commet to the FCC
More News

Apple, Called A U.S. Tax Dodger, Says It's Paid 'Every Single Dollar' of Taxes Owed
Forbes |Connie Guglielmo | 05/21/14

Apple CEO Tim Cook, called to testify before a Senate subcommittee that charges it with dodging U.S. taxes, says its paid 'every single dollar' of the taxes it owes and that it supports 'dramatic' changes to the tax system that will likely mean Apple will pay more in taxes.

A U.S. Senate subcommittee today questioned Apple AAPL +0.9% CEO Tim Cook about the company's offshore cash, charging the company with exploiting tax loopholes and setting up offshore subsidiaries to shift "large potions" of its profits offshore as part of a plan to "dodge" paying billions of dollars in U.S. taxes. ... Read more


06.03.2014. 12:43

Monday June 02, 2014
News Articles

Elizabeth Warren On What A Presidential Bid Would Mean
HP | Ryan Grim | 06/02/14

Asked whether she would be running for president in 2016, Elizabeth Warren framed the coming debate as one of defining values at a critical moment. She stopped short of committing to or rejecting a White House bid, and her answer will likely further speculation about a Warren candidacy.

In an interview with The Huffington Post that will air in full on Monday evening at 8:30 on HuffPost Live, Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, was asked about the promise in her book that she was "fiercely determined to do everything I can to help us once again be the America that creates opportunities for anyone who works hard and plays by the rules." She was also questioned about her warning that "we're running out of time." ... Read more

Adam Smith vs. Keynes and Minsky
Bloomberg | Mohamed A. El-Erian | 06/02/14

Once again, it is Adam Smith versus John Maynard Keynes and Hyman Minsky in the financial marketplace. Smith is winning so far, but his further prospects depend less on his theory of self-enlightened individual behavior in the private sector than on the efficacy of guardrails that governments and central banks put in place.

According to Smith, the collective good is best served by the atomized behavior of rational individuals driven by self-interest. In maximizing their own needs, individuals also maximize the collective objective – a process that has self-reinforcing dynamics. ... ... Read more

One More Crack in the Keystone XL Pipeline
BillMoyers | Michael Winship | 05/30/14

... During one week in September, 72 percent, or almost three-quarters, of the welds on the ‘safest pipeline in the world’ required redoing. ...

... Throughout the Keystone XL fight, TransCanada has maintained that the chance of a spill is remote, and that its pipelines are state-of-the-art. But the implications of TransCanada’s inferior welding on its Southern leg are precisely why the Keystone XL has met with such fierce resistance on the ground in Nebraska. It’s there the planned pipe will pass over the Ogallala aquifer, which irrigates much of the Great Plains, and directly and indirectly supports millions of American jobs—and that’s not counting all the drinking water. ... Read more

Photos: Living in the Shadow of the Bhopal Chemical Disaster
MotherJones | Alex Masi | 06/02/14

Before dawn on December 3, 1984, a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, exploded and leaked 45 tons of methyl isocyanate. Half a million people came in contact with the toxic gas and other chemicals, and thousands died within days. As many as 25,000 people are thought to have eventually perished after exposure to the gas, which causes nerve and respiratory damage.

Union Carbide, the American company that owned the plant, initially tried to avoid any liability for the disaster, claiming sabotage by an employee. In 1989, it finally agreed to pay out $470 million -- which worked out to about $550 per victim. ... Read more

also
Worst Industrial Disaster Still Haunts India (06/02/14) (article)

Gun Activists Flaunting Assault Rifles Get Booted From Chili's and Sonic
MotherJones | Mark Follman | 05/27/14

It would be an understatement to say that the tactics of gun rights activists have been backfiring of late. The showdown has taken place foremost in Texas, where in recent months groups such as Open Carry Texas have conducted provocative demonstrations in which armed men exercise their right under state law to carry semi-automatic rifles in public. No fewer than five national food and beverage chains have now told them to get rid of their guns or get lost, including Starbucks, Wendy’s, Applebees, Jack in the Box, and Chipotle. And now Chili's Grill & Bar and Sonic have effectively joined the list. Read more

DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Monday, June 02 [12:04]
*DN | Former Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke: U.S. Drone Program Under Obama "Got Out of Hand" (06/02/14) [7:17]
DN | Ex-Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clarke: Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld Committed War Crimes (06/02/14) [4:15], or click here
Why We Fight
Why We Fight by Eugene Jarecki (2005) [1:39:04]
Why We Fight from Wikipedia
*Rachel Maddow | "Hubris": Selling the Iraq War (full) (02/18/13) [44:10]
TRNN News
*TRNN | Leo Panitch: Despite gains in Greece and Spain, left parties face serious setbacks overall (06/02/14) [12:13]
TRNN | Fast Food Workers' Movement: Union 2.0 (06/02/14) [11:00]
With the support of America's second largest union SEIU, the fast food workers' $15 wage movement has grown, and this unorganized workforce of the past is shaping up to become the face of American organized labo
Bill Moyers
*Bill Moyers | The Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz on why America's future prosperity depends on tax reform today. (05/30/14) [22:10]
Diane Rehms Show
Diane Rehm David Ignatius: "The Director" (06/02/14) [1hr]
*Open Carry Texas visits Sonic Drive-In (06/02/14) [2:35]
11 Mesmerizing 3D Chalk Art Masterpieces That Will Melt Your Brains (05/31/14) (article)

06.02.2014. 12:07



Special Interest Important stuff
GOOD Shorts Videos

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GOOD Short Videos
Newer Documentaries You Might Not Have Seen

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Newer Documentaries
Documentaries You've Never Seen

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Lindsey Graham Mashups
Lindsey Graham

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the quiet part aloud on why he’s still so close to former President Donald Trump: because we can use him for our goals. "President Trump has gotten people who wouldn't give me or Romney or anybody else the time of day. They believe he is on their side," the senator told the America First Agenda Summit crowd on Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

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Environment & Climate Change
Environment

The term "climate change" is often used to refer specifically to anthropogenic climate change (also known as global warming). Anthropogenic climate change is caused by human activity, as opposed to changes in climate that may have resulted as part of Earth's natural processes.

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AI - Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Deep Learning
AI - Artificial Intelligence

AIArtificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans. AI research has been defined as the field of study of intelligent agents, which refers to any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals.

The term "artificial intelligence" had previously been used to describe machines that mimic and display "human" cognitive skills that are associated with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem-solving". This definition has since been rejected by major AI researchers who now describe AI in terms of rationality and acting rationally, which does not limit how intelligence can be articulated.
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Quantum mechanics | AI - Artificial Intelligence
Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.  It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science.
Classical physics, the collection of theories that existed before the advent of quantum mechanics, describes many aspects of nature at an ordinary (macroscopic) scale, but is not sufficient for describing them at small (atomic and subatomic) scales. Most theories in classical physics can be derived from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid at large (macroscopic) scale.
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Economy, Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street is an eight-block-long street running roughly northwest to southeast from Broadway to South Street, at the East River, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial services industry (even if financial firms are not physically located there), or New York-based financial interests.

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Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, and foreign policy objectives. Means of information gathering are both overt and covert and may include espionage, communication interception, cryptanalysis,.

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Daniel Ellsberg | Pentagon Papers
Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg and Paul Jay explore Ellsberg's latest book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. In the introduction to the book, Ellsberg writes: "No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted over a half a century is a chronicle of human madness".

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Nukes
Nukes

Nuclear weapons have come a long way and come in all types of different sizes. Some are relatively small while others are enormous, so big they boggle the mind at what they can be capable of, i.e. the Soviet 'Tsar Bomba' is/was 3,000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb.

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Rana Foroohar and Fall of American Business
Rana Foroohar

Ms. Foroohar says financialization delivers stagnant wages, inequality and economic crisis; the Financial Times columnist and author of "Makers and Takers" says the financial sector represents only 7 percent of the U.S. economy, but takes around 25 percent of all corporate profit while creating only 4 percent of all jobs.

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The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick

The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick | 2014 | 10 Episodes

Oliver Stone and American University historian Peter J. Kuznick began working on the project in 2008. Stone, Kuznick and British screenwriter Matt Graham cowrote the script. It covers "the reasons behind the Cold War with the Soviet Union, U.S. President Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and changes in America's global role since the fall of Communism." Stone is the director and narrator of all ten episodes.

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Kuznick Interviews

Kuznick Interviews

Historian Peter Kuznick says Eisenhower called for decreased militarization, then Dulles reversed the policy; the Soviets tried to end the cold war after the death of Stalin; crazy schemes involving nuclear weapons and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba put the world of the eve of destruction - with host Paul Jay

The Untold History of the United States by Kuznick, Peter.mobi | Book | 6.99 MB

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China Valley of Tunnels

China Valley of Tunnels

A report written by a Georgetown University team led by Phillip Karber conducted a three-year study to map out China’s complex tunnel system, which stretches 5,000 km (3,000 miles). The report determined that the stated Chinese nuclear arsenal is understated and as many as 3,000 nuclear warheads may be stored in the underground tunnel network.

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911
911

On September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists attacked the Unites States. They hijacked four airplanes in mid-flight. The terrorists flew two of the planes into two skyscrapers at the World Trade Center in New York City. The impact caused the buildings to catch fire and collapse. Another plane destroyed part of the Pentagon (the U.S. military headquarters) in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Officials believe that the terrorists on that plane intended to destroy either the White House or the U.S. Capitol. Passengers on the plane fought the terrorists and prevented them from reaching their goal. In all, nearly 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks.

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The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part, 18-hour documentary series, THE VIETNAM WAR, tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history as it has never before been told on film. Visceral and immersive, the series explores the human dimensions of the war through revelatory testimony of nearly 80 witnesses from all sides--Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as combatants and civilians from North and South Vietnam. Ten years in the making, the series includes rarely seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe, photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home movies, and secret audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

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Trump's Mashups
Trump's Mashups

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? VICE News' "Trump Talk" mashup series tries to answer that. And, we're happy to say, it was just nominated for two Webby Awards. Now you can watch all the nominated videos.

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Trump's Sexcapades
Trump's Sexcapades.

Jessica Leeds (1980s)
Kristin Anderson (1990s)
E. Jean Carroll (1995 or 1996)
Lisa Boyne (1996)
Cathy Heller (1997)
Temple Taggart McDowell (1997)
Karena Virginia (1998)
Mindy McGillivray (2003)
Jennifer Murphy (2005)
Rachel Crooks (2005)
Natasha Stoynoff (2005)
Juliet Huddy (2005 or 2006)
Jessica Drake (2006)
Ninni Laaksonen (2006)
Cassandra Searles (2013)
Allegations of pageant dressing room visits(1997)
Mariah Billado,
Victoria Hughes,
and three other Miss Teen USA contestants
Bridget Sullivan (2000)
Tasha Dixon (2001)
Unnamed contestants (2001)
Samantha Holvey (2006)

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Trump's Speeches | Rallys |Interviews
Trump's Speeches | Rallys

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? Watch Trump at some of his rallys and see what you think.

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