(This article is dedicated to the former Libertarian in our software development team who just retired and has provided the seed for other postings.)

To what extent should the government protect its citizens?

Conservatives without Conscience (CWCs), including Libertarians, want citizen protection by the government limited to national defense. CWCs even start wars on false pretenses and empower their enemies – anyone not like them – by exaggerating their capabilities and intensions. They also can’t say “9/11,” weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), or “war on terror” enough times in any given discussion about national security.

Beyond protection from foreign invaders, CWCs leave protection up to each individual citizen – “you’re on your own” and you deserve the consequences of ‘your’ failures not to get protection.

To give them some credit, however, the CWCs are very willing to provide a free enterprise solution for many forms of self protection. Insurance is one example. In fact, once in a while they even allow a government form of insurance. This is only for special situations where free enterprise can’t charge enough to make a profit – like flood insurance.

However, even here CWCs are more interesting in protecting free enterprise over the best interests of the citizen. They have allowed limited government-backed flood insurance. However, it’s a unanimous “NO” to limited government backed health insurance.

Leaving protection up to the individual also explains why CWCs are against gun control. Individuals must provide for their own defense. Remember, “you’re on your own.” Combine gun ownership with their desire to protect citizens from international terrorists and you get: Weapons are great but WMD’s are not. (This reminds me of a quote from comedian George Carlin back when ‘the enemy’ was communism, “Gabby Hayes had whiskers! Lenin had a beard!” Whiskers are good, a beard is bad.)

Progressives, on the other hand, know that there are factors in every individuals life that are beyond their control. Because progressives understand systemic causation, they realize that citizen protection by the government is much broader than national defense. Citizens not only need protection from actual – not imaginary – enemies of the state, they need protection from other forms of abuse that can grow out of concentrated power.

These abuses can exist in any manmade institution where no checks and balances exist to prevent them. Checks and balances are necessary to protect citizens from: any of our three branches of government, an abusive spouse, an abusive employer, an abusive preacher, an abusive producer or manufacturer that puts profit before the health and safety of citizens, banks too big to fail, or health insurance companies that deny coverage and drop citizens to maintain profit.

Despite popular dogma, progressives know that profit is necessary and vital to the success of the nation. That’s why the government must protect that ability by providing a court system. Combine the protection of profit with profit that abuses citizens and you get: Profits are great but PMDs, profits of mass destruction, are not.

And now with the recent decision by our activist United States Supreme Court and its five CWCs to eliminate the checks and balances on corporate political contributions, we also need protection from laws of mass destruction (LMDs). Add this decision to the actions of the GWB’s unitary presidency like wire tapping citizens, excessive signing statements that ignored Congressional law and the torture memos of John Yoo, and citizens have lost many of their hard won progressive protections.

Because of this broader view of protection of the citizenry, progressives not only want to protect citizens from WMDs, they want to protect citizens from PMDs, LMDs and many other elements of mass destruction.

Poll Shows That Americans Are Pretty Clueless About Politics – In the latest installment of the Pew Research Center’s News IQ Quiz, just 32% know that the Senate passed its version of the legislation without a single Republican vote. And, in what proved to be the most difficult question on the quiz, only about a quarter (26%) knows that it takes 60 votes to break a filibuster in the Senate and force a vote on a bill.

In response to questions about terrorism and national security, half (50%) correctly identify Yemen as the country where intelligence officials believe the suspect in an attempted Christmas Day airline bombing received training and bomb materials. A slightly smaller percentage (43%) knows that during all of 2009 there were more American military fatalities in Afghanistan than in Iraq; 32% said more U.S. troops were killed in Iraq.

Only about four-in-ten (39%) know that Nevada Democrat Harry Reid is the majority leader of the U.S. Senate. About a third (32%) correctly pick Michael Steele as the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Interestingly, nearly half of Republicans (48%) are able to identify Reid as Senate majority leader compared with just a third (33%) of Democrats. More Republicans can identify Reid as majority leader than can identify Steel as chairman of the RNC (37%).

(Summary: Don’t expect people to vote intelligently if they are not knowledgeable. We need to educate. – JLV) [Education must be affordable and that requires funding the common wealth for the common good.]

Big Falsehoods: A Guide to Andrew Breitbart’s Lies, Smears, and Distortions – Andrew Breitbart’s “Big” websites — Big Hollywood, Big Government, and Big Journalism — as well as his breitbart.tv website, have in recent months laid claim to many “exclusives,” touting controversial and sensationalist storylines that have been picked up by other conservative media outlets, from Fox News on down. However, a closer examination reveals that many of Breitbart’s “scoops” have been based on speculation, gross distortions, and outright falsehoods. Many, many details at the link. [Also - Neocon Noble Lies]

Inequality Is Literally Killing Us – Over 200 studies since the early 1980s have now documented that people living in societies where wealth has concentrated at the top of the economic ladder live significantly shorter, less healthy lives than people who live in societies that spread their wealth more evenly.

And we’re not talking just poor folks here. All people in unequal societies do worse. Middle-income people in the United States, the world’s most unequal developed nation, have shorter lifespans than middle-income people in Japan, Sweden and a host of other more equal nations.

This same dynamic, Wilkinson and Pickett show in their new book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, is operating on all our most basic yardsticks of social decency. On everything from homicides and teen pregnancies to drug addiction and levels of trust, people living in more equal nations do better — from three to 10 times better — than people in societies where treasure tilts to the top.

And that treasure, in the United States, is tilting top-bound as rapidly as ever. Seldom — if ever — have so few profited so profusely in the midst of a general economic collapse.

Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists Eye Tea Party for Recruiting – Tea parties are proving very attractive to both white supremacists and the militia movement. At 11:15 on Friday, in an online Patriot Caucus discussion forum, David E. Parsons wrote a post called “Militia Training Videos,” with links to videos by Mark Koernke, a leading figure in the American militia movement, and his followers.

But militants are not the only ones infiltrating the Tea Party movement. The white power movement views Tea Parties as opportunities to recruit as well as incite violence, as is evidenced by postings on the white power website Stormfront:

Whites Forward: “Go where our people are starting to stand up around symptoms of the problem, and INTERVENE to guide them. Just because these started as an anti-tax protest doesn’t mean that they must be limited and can’t be developed upward toward an explicitly racial mass struggle.”

Scottish: “I think the “tea party” is a good way to meet people with potential. Most people at this event will be white people who are fed up with the direction of things and they are ready to hear how we got into this mess.”

In the recent documentary, “White Power USA”, neo-Nazi J.T. Ready describes the Tea Party movement as “the beginning of a really good awakening.” White supremacists believe that they are only the tip of an iceberg, the visible aspect of a more universal hatred. The documentary suggests that white supremacists sees Tea Parties as “the best chance in decades to cross over into mainstream American politics.”

Regards,

Jim

Retired CIA Agent Made Up Waterboarding Details – Arguing that waterboarding — or simulated drowning — is actually effective in forcing prisoners to share secret information, retired CIA agent John Kiriakou told ABC News’ Nightline in April, “The next day [after his first time being waterboarded], he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate.”

“From that day on, he answered every question,” he said, according to ABC. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

“Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story,” Stein noted in Foreign Policy. “On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.”

“But after his one-paragraph confession, Kiriakou adds that he didn’t have any firsthand knowledge of anything relating to CIA torture routines, and still doesn’t,” Stein continued. “And he claims that the disinformation he helped spread was a CIA dirty trick: “In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own.”

Conservative Paid ACORN Video Maker Who Tried to Bug Democratic Senator – James O’Keefe, the guy who made the ACORN pimp videos, was arrested Monday after allegedly attempting to wiretap the Louisiana offices of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA). After his interdiction by federal marshals, O’Keefe admitted to planning the operation.

In a statement, conservative heavyweight Andrew Breitbart — who helped O’Keefe become famous after posting videos of him posing as a pimp and chatting with ACORN employees and served as an editor for The Drudge Report and contributor to the Huffington Post — said he had “no knowledge about or connection to” any of the alleged buggers.

And yet, on a radio interview the same day, Breitbart told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that O’Keefe was all but an employee.

HH: Last question, in terms of his relationship with you not connected to this event, are you still, is he in your employ in any way?
AB…What he does for the site exclusively is he tells his life rights, basically. So when he puts a story out there, it’s on the Brietbart sites, the Big sites, that he can tell people what transpired. So…
HH: Do you pay him for that?
AB: Yes.
HH: And are you free to tell me how much you pay him?
AB: I’ll…perhaps at another date, but he’s paid a fair salary.

BTW, Congressman Pete Olson introduced a resolution to honor O’Keefe. Just like Conservatives honor Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy. Wow!

Bill O’Reilly Remarks: Kidnap Top Democrats, Waterboard Speaker Pelosi – During a recent stop of the Bold & Fresh Tour with fellow Fox News personality Glenn Beck, right-wing talker Bill O’Reilly said that if President Obama hired him as a presidential adviser, the first thing O’Reilly would do is lavishly decorate his office. Item two would be having the CIA director kidnap top Democrats and waterboard Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Poll Finds Americans Trust Fox News More Than Any Other Network – A look back at previous issues of the Bad Deeds shows that Fox News consistently misrepresents facts and quite often just flat-out lies. There’s also a list here.

However, a poll of 1,151 registered American voters, who were asked whether they trust each of the major television news networks ranked Fox News Channel number one. “49% of Americans say they trust Fox News to 37% who disagree,” the poll’s authors wrote. “Predictably there is a large party split on this with 74% of Republicans but only 30% of Democrats saying they trust the right leaning network.”

The summary of the poll states, “A generation ago you would have expected Americans to place their trust in the most neutral and unbiased conveyors of news,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “But the media landscape has really changed and now they’re turning more toward the outlets that tell them what they want to hear.”

(Did you notice that 30% of Democrats trust Fox News most? Huh? We have some stupid (or very uninformed) Democrats. – JLV) [Their also referred to as "biconceptuals."]

Why Are We Donating $2,000 Per Family to Wall Street Bonuses? – During the worst year since the Great Depression, with 30 million people out of work or forced into part-time jobs, Wall Street is awarding itself $150 billion in bonus money … and it comes from us!

That’s $500 for every man, women and child in the country — $2,000 for a family of four.

Regards,

Jim

Republican Party Sends Fundraising Letter Disguised as ‘Census’ Form – The Republican Party is seeking input and money from GOP voters — seemingly under the guise of the U.S. Census Bureau.

“Strengthening our Party for the 2010 elections is going to take a massive grass-roots effort all across America. That is why I have authorized a Census to be conducted of every Congressional District in the country,” GOP Chairman Michael Steele says in a letter mailed nationwide.

The letter was sent in plain white envelopes marked “Do Not Destroy, Official Document.” Labeled “2010 Congressional District Census,” the letter uses a capital “C,” the same as the Census Bureau. It also includes a “Census Tracking Code.”

The letter makes a plea for money and accompanies a form asking voters to identify their political leanings and issues important to them. There are no disclaimers that participation in the GOP effort is voluntary; participation in the government census is required by law. Failure to participate carries a $5,000 fine, though it is rarely enforced.

Fox News Leaves False Report on Haiti Uncorrected – Fox News is staying silent after bloggers and commentators criticized the news network for a January 13 report on its Web site that stated Cuba was “absent” from global aid efforts in Haiti. In an online news story entitled “US Spearheads Global Response to Haiti Earthquake,” Fox reported that “one geographically close country is conspicuously absent from the roster of helping hands. Cuba, which had evacuated some of its residents as a precaution in case the earthquake triggered a tsunami, has so far not offered any assistance publicly to its devastated island neighbor.”

Observers note that the communist country was, in fact, one of the first to arrive after the earthquake that is now estimated to have taken the lives of 200,000 people. That has led some bloggers to accuse Fox of using the devastation in Haiti to propagandize against Cuba.

Republican State Rep. Says New Hampshire Selling Children To Gay Couples For $10,000 – New Hampshire State Rep. Alfred Baldasaro (R) said that the state “sold” children for $10,000 each when “they said that homosexual couples, not married, can adopt.” Baldasaro is one of the main sponsors of HB 1590, which aims to repeal a New Hampshire law allowing same-sex couples to marry. He also said, “What about the Muslims now?,” he asked.”Everyone’s praising the Muslims. They’re killing us. What about them, they want three, four wives. We’re discriminating against them.”

Regards,

Jim

Lt. Gov. of South Carolina Says “Don’t feed the poor. They’ll ‘breed.’” – A Republican vying to replace Mark Sanford as the next governor of South Carolina let one slip a couple of days ago, further embarrassing his state. During a town hall meeting Friday, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer said:

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed,” Bauer said, according to the Greenville News. “You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

Blanche Lincoln Cosponsors Murkowski’s Dirty Air Act – Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) announced today she is co-sponsoring Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) resolution of disapproval to block regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Like Murkowski and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Lincoln is demonstrating a shocking disregard for her state’s interests, the health of her constituents, and a misunderstanding of why America has been losing jobs to China and India. Her support for the Dirty Air Act is an act of allegiance to polluters. Lincoln has taken nearly a million dollars in polluter cash, including $10,000 from the right-wing extremists at Koch Industries.

Regards,

Jim

Corporations can’t got to prison for illegal actions. We the people can.

We the people are left with PACs and what we can contribute to them to influence our elected representatives. Corporations are now their own PACs with their own funding and will now solidify their ownership of our representatives who will in turn outlaw our PACs.

Imagine the giddiness at the next board of directors meeting for the banks that are too big to fail. Now they can get as big as they want, take bigger risks, and they will make sure we pay for their irrational and unbounded exuberance.

Our Constitution goes to great lengths to protect the power of we the people over our government. The Supreme Court has now nullified all of them.

Support the Peace Team by signing their FAX petition to reconstitute the powers of we the people:

Corporations Are NOT The People

I call on Congress to confront and reverse, by means of whatever legislation is possible, the lawless Supreme Court decision granting full personhood rights to corporations to corrupt our elections.
In their haste to overturn all well-settled precedent, they deliberately left the United States of America exposed and vulnerable to the influence of any foreign interests with a corporate presence here. This decision by a rogue majority of the Supreme Court therefore represents nothing less than an act of TREASON against the people of the United States.

There are many actions Congress can take to ameliorate this judicial crime, up to and including a Constitutional amendment to affirmatively repudiate the outlaw interpretation of five right wing ideologues, recognizing in the first instance that any such interpretation was unfounded on its face. Representative Grayson has already propounded a number of creative ideas, to which we should add bringing back The Fairness Doctrine with real teeth, aggressive public financing of elections, and of course directly forbidding corporations with any foreign ownership interest from exercising this outrageous new privilege. Another idea would be for Congress to exercise its Constitutional power to increase the number of seats on the Supreme Court, to install corrective votes. Any action that can be taken to keep wealthy corporate interests from further drowning out the voice of the people MUST be taken.

We remind the Congress that under 1 U.S.C. §1 they have the right to determine what “persons”, to include corporations or not, are covered by particular acts of Congress. Any claim to the contrary now represents a Constitutional CRISIS of historic proportions whether we like it or not. And we expect our representatives in Congress to stand up and like it NOT, and to act accordingly.

Stop the prostitution of our democracy. Stop the authoritarians of our Supreme Court.

The following was sent to leaders of the Democrat Party:

————————–
Why are Democrats so afraid of the Republicans?

Why are Democrats so afraid of standing up for their progressive values?

Why are Democrats so afraid of a Republican filibuster? What have you got to lose that you haven’t already lost and are now ready to back down on? The filibuster will only delay the process. Well, it’s been delayed anyway. Their goal is to kill it – little by little and they keep succeeding. Stop playing their game. Make them filibuster.

Democrats are losing on health care and lost in Mass because they keep backing down. This is backed up by the only exit poll taken in Mass.:

“Generally speaking, do you think Democrats in Washington, DC are fighting hard enough to challenge the Republican policies of the Bush years, aren’t fighting hard enough to change those policies, or are fighting about right?”

• NOT ENOUGH 37%
• TOO HARD 15%
• ABOUT RIGHT 21%
• NOT SURE 27%

When will Democrats learn how to win consistently? When will Democrats learn from the success of last November instead of repeating the mistakes of that got us to this low point one year after the election for hope and change?

George Lakoff said in The Policyspeak Disaster for Health Care,

“The first rule of effective communication is stating the positive in your own terms, not quoting the other side’s language with a negation.”

When will Democrats stop paving the way for a major Republican victory in November? When will Democrats call their bluff?

Let them filibuster while you and the other Democrat leaders come up with a new plan to keep hope and change alive.

Weak Actions on Wall Street and Weak Health Care Policies Make People Upset – Massachusetts voters who backed Barack Obama in the presidential election a year ago and either switched support to Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown or simply stayed home, said in a poll conducted after the election Tuesday night that if Democrats enact tougher policies on Wall Street, they’ll be more likely to come back to the party in the next election.

A majority of Obama voters who switched to Brown said that “Democratic policies were doing more to help Wall Street than Main Street.” A full 95 percent said the economy was important or very important when it came to deciding their vote.

In a somewhat (completely) paradoxical finding, a plurality of voters who switched to the Republican — 37 percent — said that Democrats were not being “hard enough” in challenging Republican policies.
It would be hard to find a clearer indication, it seems, that Tuesday’s vote was cast in protest.

The poll also upends the conventional understanding of health care’s role in the election. A plurality of people who switched — 48 — or didn’t vote — 43 — said that they opposed the Senate health care bill. But the poll dug deeper and asked people why they opposed it. Among those Brown voters, 23 percent thought it went “too far” — but 36 percent thought it didn’t go far enough and 41 percent said they weren’t sure why they opposed it.

Among voters who stayed home and opposed health care, a full 53 percent said they opposed the Senate bill because it didn’t go far enough; 39 percent weren’t sure and only eight percent thought it went too far.

The firm Research 2000 conducted the post-election survey Tuesday night on behalf of three progressive organizations — the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America and MoveOn.org.

Taken from interviews of 500 Obama backers who voted in the Senate election and 500 Obama backers who sat out the election, the firm discovered that 18 percent of Obama backers who voted in the Senate race ended up casting ballots for Brown.

Of that group, 82 percent said they favored a public option for insurance coverage, with 14 percent opposed. Of those who sat out the election, 86 percent favored the public option, while only seven percent opposed it. The findings suggests that progressive arguments that disappointed Obama supporters deserted have serious merit.

UPDATE: With little, if any, historical precedent for the current situation in Congress, anything is possible on Capitol Hill over the next few weeks. Progressives have seized on the chaos and the polling numbers above to argue that the message voters sent was that Democrats haven’t been bold enough. So far, more than 100,000 people have signed a petition calling for the Senate to put the public option back into the health care bill and pass it using the parliamentary maneuver known as reconciliation, which only requires 50 votes plus the vice president. Meanwhile, top Democrats are taking the idea seriously.

“Congressional Democrats have now been given fair warning by voters about what they expect in 2010: faster change, bolder change, and a willingness to fight big corporations on behalf of the little guy,” said Adam Green, whose organization is leading the petition effort. “The Lieberman-Nelson strategy lost Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. Now it’s time to push the public option through reconciliation — and then, on to strong Wall Street accountability.”

Tea Party Bloc Leader Arrested for Child Rape; Police Find Stolen Grenade Launcher In His House – Marine Sgt. Charles Dyer, aka “July4Patriot,” is a leader of the “Oath Keepers” bloc of the Tea Party movement — an organization devoted to recruiting military and police-force veterans into a Patriot-movement belief system predicated on a series of paranoid conspiracy theories, especially the notion that the federal government intends to begin rounding up citizens and putting them in concentration camps.

Dyer played a prominent role in connecting the Oath Keepers to the Tea Party movement, speaking at a July 4 Tea Party rally in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. And he’s been involved in organizing militia “maneuvers” in Oklahoma.

Dyer cropped up again in the news — this time in the police blotter for allegedly raping a 7-year-old girl:

An ex-military man has been arrested on charges of rape of a child and forcible sodomy.
Charles Alan Dyer, 29, of Marlow, was arrested Tuesday afternoon by Stephens County Sheriff’s deputies, said Sheriff Wayne McKinney. Dyer served in the United States Marines in Iraq.

Oh, and guess what police found when they searched his home:

During the search the sheriff’s deputies noted several firearms and a device believed to be a Colt M-203, 40-millimeter grenade launcher, a complaint filed in the United States District Court of Western Oklahoma by Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco Special Agent Brett Williams said.

As the story from KAUZ-TV notes, Dyer had a history of making bizarre claims in his videos — as well as violent fears of being arrested.

“We come home and those bastards want to talk about how we’re domestic terrorists and a threat to this country. It makes me so angry,” said Charles Dyer, who has been accused of committing rape.
… More incriminating evidence against Dyer has surfaced in a YouTube video. The video shows Dyer, a former U.S. Marine, talking proudly about domestic terrorism. “Join the military?”, said Dyer. “Depends on what you want to do with it. Me? I’m going to use my training and become one of those domestic terrorists that you’re so afraid of from the DHS reports.”

(Question: As both a Tea Party guy and a confessed terrorist, does he believe he should be water boarded and sent to Gitmo? – JLV)

Inhofe: “I Believe In Racial And Ethnic Profiling” – Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) knows he’s not politically correct, but he doesn’t care: “I believe in racial and ethnic profiling,” the GOP senator announced at a Senate Armed Services Committee review of Fort Hood shootings on Thursday.

And now some random thoughts I spotted: – Congressional Republicans are huddling behind closed doors to decide who gets to shout down President Obama during his State of the Union speech next week. Their main criteria: who needs his or her campaign coffers filled the most by jubilant fist-pumping teabaggers, and who has the sweetest vibrato.

If reincarnation really happens, I want to come back as a Washington, D.C. pigeon with superior divebombing skills and overactive bowels. I have some scores to settle.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others?” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Regards,

Jim

Whites-Only Basketball League: All-American Basketball Alliance Bans Blacks, Foreigners – A whites-only basketball league aims to launch in twelve cities this summer, according to a report in the Augusta Chronicle. The All-American Basketball Alliance would also ban players born outside the United States.

The league’s commissioner, Don “Moose” Lewis, claims that he doesn’t “hate anyone of color. But people of white, American-born citizens are in the minority now.” Thus, he says, the All-American Basketball Alliance would be “a league for white players to play fundamental basketball, which they like.”

The report includes additional shocking quotes from the commissioner:

Lewis said he wants to emphasize fundamental basketball instead of “street-ball” played by “people of color.” …

“Would you want to go to the game and worry about a player flipping you off or attacking you in the stands or grabbing their crotch?” he said.

(Yea, that just can’t happen with a white Americans only policy, ya think? – JLV)

Pastor Calls for a Boycott of Houston – A new Web site is urging people to “Boycott Houston.” Why? Because the site’s owner thinks the city is becoming “a Texas version of San Francisco” and “the abortion capital of America.” Translation: David Grisham of Amarillo doesn’t like Houston electing a gay mayor or Planned Parenthood’s plans to open a big facility here.

Grisham is also behind repentamarillo.com, which calls on Christians to enter spiritual warfare to save Amarillo’s soul. (Spiritual warfare, you know, like Jihad, but whiter. – JLV)

Exxon Valdez Oil Still Trapped on Beaches – Oil remains trapped along miles of gravel beaches more than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Prince William Sound. An estimated 20,000 gallons of crude remain in Prince William Sound, even though oil remaining after the nearly 11-million-gallon spill had been expected to biodegrade and wash away within a few years.

Boufadel said the study points out the susceptibility of beaches worldwide to long-term oil contamination, especially at higher latitudes where beaches tend to be gravel or a mixture of sand and gravel.

“As global warming is melting the ice cover and exposing the Arctic to oil exploitation and shipping through sea routes such as the Northwest Passage, the risk of oil spills on gravel beaches in high-latitude regions will be increased,” the study says.

2000s are the Warmest Decade on Record – Contrary to what you may have heard from conservative propaganda sources, the 2000-2009 decade was the warmest on record, easily surpassing the previous hottest decade — the 1990s — researchers said Tuesday in a report providing fresh evidence that the planet may be warming at a potentially disastrous rate.

Regards,

Jim

U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With ‘Jesus’ Bible Codes – Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company. The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.

U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious “Crusade” in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.

The company also sponsors God’s Great Outdoors, a radio ministry for Christian hunters on which the company’s sales director, Tom Munson, has been interviewed. Trijicon’s wordmark is listed as a “featured sponsor” on the radio show’s Web site.

“It’s wrong, it violates the Constitution, it violates a number of federal laws,” Michael Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation told ABC. “It allows the Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists to claim they’re being shot by Jesus rifles.”

Trijicon’s Munson dismissed the concerns of Weinstein’s group by saying it comes from a group that is “not Christian.”

“We believe that America is great when its people are good,” the company states on its “about us” page. “This goodness has been based on biblical standards throughout our history and we will strive to follow those morals.”

Many commenters on the Accurate Shooter blog took the company’s side on the issue.

“I always consider whether my optics are manufactured by Christians or heathens,” writes commenter Brandon. “Christians have a much better track record when it comes understanding and promoting the quality scientific research necessary to give us an edge on the battlefield than companies run by atheists.”

FBI Broke Law for Years in Phone Record Searches – The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions.

A Justice Department inspector general’s report due out this month is expected to conclude that the FBI frequently violated the law with its emergency requests, bureau officials confirmed. FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni said in an interview Monday that the FBI technically violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act when agents invoked nonexistent emergencies to collect records.

Fox News Falsely Claims That Coakley Rally Has Plenty of Empty Seats – According to Fox’s veteran propagandist reporter Carl Cameron, the rally Sunday with President Obama for Senate candidate Martha Coakley was ill-attended, with plenty of empty seats. That bit of “news” would no doubt surprise the several thousand who could not get in to the full to capacity event. Or the 500 who had to sit in the overflow room. The line, running around several blocks all the way down Huntington Ave.

Regards,

Jim