New Promise of a Nuclear-Free World
by Ramesh Jaura
BERLIN - Leading supporters of disarmament see new hope arising from the announcement by the U.S. and Russian presidents that they are willing to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with a new one.Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and U.S. President Barack Obama made that announcement in London Apr. 1 on the eve of the G20 summit. |
Miami commissioners approve site plans for Florida Marlins stadium
by Charles Rabin
Miami commissioners on Thursday unanimously accepted the site plans for a new $634 million ballpark and parking complex for the Florida Marlins in Little Havana.The vote came after a fairly brief presentation by the Marlins on the planned 37,000-seat facility with a retractable roof. |
Torturing detainee may have produced false terror alerts
by Muriel Kane
As the nation struggles to make sense of a wave of new revelations regarding the "harsh interrogation techniques" brought to bear on detainees by the CIA, two very different narratives are shaping up to describe the treatment of captured al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah in April and May of 2002. |
Poll: Most Americans favor ending Cuban embargo
by Stephen C. Webster
According to a Gallup poll published Friday, a 60 percent majority of Americans favor reestablishing diplomatic ties with Cuba. Additionally, Gallup found 51 percent of Americans favor lifting the trade embargo on the country.Interestingly enough, the poll seems to expose a divide among Republicans, with 47 percent opposed to ending the embargo, but 44 percent in favor. Among Democrats, 54 percent favor ending the embargo. |
Pentagon may have up to 2,000 photographs of prisoner abuse
by Stephen C. Webster
The Pentagon will release for the first time 44 photographs depicting prisoner abuse after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) won a court ruling in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed in 2004.A "substantial number of other images" are also being processed for release, the Department of Justice wrote in a letter to a US federal court: according to the Guardian, citing an unnamed official, that "substantial number" could be as many as 2,000 photos. |
Democrats won't try to kill 'Don't Ask, Don't tell' until 2010: Frank
by Raw Story
Speaking on behalf of Congressional Democrats, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) said Thursday that Democrats won't push for a repeal of the Pentagon's anti-gay "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy until at least 2010 and won't include a provision in the current Pentagon budget to drop the policy. |
Bring Our Troops Home from Mideast This Year
by George McGovern
President Barack Obama holds my admiration with high hopes for his message of change in Washington, D.C. It is puzzling, however, that he has adopted most of the previous administration's formula for dragging out the withdrawal of our troops from the mistaken war in Iraq for nearly three more years. Very little "change" here. |
Testicular Politics: Obama and the Big Dogs
by William Greider
The big dogs of banking and finance are playing a rough game of bump-and-run with our president, trying to knock him off balance and demonstrate their dominance. The best names in Wall Street--Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase--pumped out happy talk about quarterly earnings, then announced that they intend to give back the government's money (more than $50 billion, if counted honestly). The crisis, they announce, is over for them. They want to be free of official meddling in their private affairs. The arrogance is breathtaking, even for Wall Street bankers. |
An Unearthed Resource: Gas Drilling in Northeast Raises Health and Environmental Concerns Among Residents
by Byard Duncan
The road leading to Ron Carter’s trailer is made of red clay that melts away a little every time it rains. Truck traffic has created an obstacle course of tall divots that punch at the bottom of cars, rattling spines and scraping mufflers. Some lawns along the way host bathtubs full of garbage or rusty drums belching out dark smoke. Others have drill pads and cranes that stab 200 feet into the air. This is Dimock Township, the speck on Pennsylvania’s map that just became ground zero for America’s energy future. |
Reclaiming America’s Soul
by Paul Krugman
“Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.” So declared President Obama, after his commendable decision to release the legal memos that his predecessor used to justify torture. Some people in the political and media establishments have echoed his position. We need to look forward, not backward, they say. No prosecutions, please; no investigations; we’re just too busy. |
Watch Ellis Henican Beat The Bleep Out of O'Reilly
by Steve Young
If it were a boxing match, it would have been stopped. Bill O’Reilly kept trying to clinch, interrupting nearly every sentence Fox News contributor, Ellis Henican threw that wasn’t going the way Bill wanted - which was pretty much every one of them. Bill O’Reilly was bloodied to the point he had to be bleeped - “torture, my ass.” The only thing that saved Bill was the commercial bell. |
How Bush's Torture Helped al-Qaeda
by Robert Parry
Captured al-Qaeda operatives, facing the threat or reality of torture, appear to have fed the Bush administration’s obsession about Iraq, buying Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders time to rebuild their organization inside nuclear-armed Pakistan. |
Religious Right in a Froth Over Hate Crimes Legislation
by Bill Berkowitz
Teetering between irascibility and irrelevance, spokespersons for a number of conservative Christian outfits are warning that on Wednesday, April 22, Christians will once again be victimized by perpetrators of the gay agenda, and life--as they know it--will change forever. That is the day that the House Judiciary Committee considers hate crimes legislation that would finally confer on sexual orientation the same legal status as race and religion. |
Take Heart and Have Courage
by David Swanson
We've pushed long and hard to put accountability, impeachment, prosecution, and the restoration of congressional power on the American table, and they've all just landed with a thud and splatter of gravy and cranberry dressing. So, eat up, take heart, and prepare to work harder than we have over the past several frustrating years of path breaking and pressure building. |
Tomgram: John Feffer Looks At The Piracy Problem
by Tom Engelhardt
— from TomDispatchSometimes, it seems as if all U.S. global geopolitics boils down to little more than a war for money within the Pentagon. In the best of times, each armed service still has to continually maintain and upgrade its various raisons d'être for the billions of dollars being poured into it; each has to fight -- something far more difficult in economic hard times -- to maintain or increase its share of the budgetary pie. The remarkable thing is that we are now in the worst of economic times and yet, for one more year, the Pentagon can still pretend that it just ain't so. After eight years in which the Bush administration broke the bank militarily, an already vastly bloated Pentagon budget will miraculously rise once more, even if by a relatively modest 4%, in the coming fiscal year. But don't for a second think that the Army, Air Force, Marines, and Navy aren't already scrambling for toeholds suitable for a more precarious future. |
Thievery Under the TARP
by Robert Scheer
— from TruthDigWe are being robbed big-time, but you can't say we haven't been warned. Not after the release Tuesday of a scathing report by the Treasury Department's special inspector general, who charged that the aptly named Troubled Asset Relief Program is rife with mismanagement and potential for fraud. The IG's office already has opened 20 criminal fraud investigations into the $700 billion program, which is now well on its way to a $3 trillion obligation, and the IG predicts many more are coming. |
What if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Had Died?
by Cenk Uygur
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times. We practiced sleep deprivation on him for 11 straight days. I don't know how many times we smashed his head against a wall, slapped him in the face, put him in a stress position in a freezing room and/or put him in a coffin sized box in extreme heat. But the right-wing argues that it doesn't matter because none of this is torture. They are adamant in saying that it is not even open to interpretation. |
The Rift
by William Rivers Pitt
An interesting report popped out of the blogosphere on Tuesday concerning some political upheaval in Arizona. Ben Smith, writing for Politico.com, revealed that long-time Republican Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain was staring down the barrel of a stout primary challenge from his right flank. "Social conservatives tolerated John McCain as the party's nominee," wrote Smith, "but never trusted him, and he now appears to be facing a serious primary from the right in Arizona next year. Chris Simcox, the founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and a prominent figure in the movement to clamp down on illegal immigration, will be announcing tomorrow at an event on the Mexican border that he's resigned from the group to run in the 2010 Senate primary." |
On native ground: The art of abidance and staying home
by Joe Bageant
In gathering material for his next book, Joe Bageant has been traveling the hills of Virginia and West Virginia where he grew up. Below is a short excerpt from his ongoing road journal.Driving Shanghai Road on the way to visit my childhood church in Unger Store, Morgan County, West Virginia, I crest the hill just above our old family farm. And spot something that makes me stop and turn off the truck motor, lest the moment be interrupted. Ahead of me in the Sunday morning sun stands an old farmer I've known all my life, Ray Luttrell, meditating on his hayfield. Standing on the very spot by the road where I've seen his late father Harry stand countless times, he is just looking at that hay field, motionless for many minutes. |
Stupid is as stupid does
by Ed Naha
It was either Forrest Gump or Sarah Palin who once said, "Stupid is as stupid does." For some reason, I get them confused. Oh, yeah. Gump's the one who made sense. Anyhow, for some reason 2009 is shaping up to be a banner year for "Stupid." So, I think it's time we take a moment and congratulate some of those who are trying their best to make mouth-breathing a national pastime. |
Tom Friedman Strikes Again
by Matt Taibbi
April 22, 2009 Swimming Without a Suit By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN "Speaking of financial crises and how they can expose weak companies and weak countries, Warren Buffett once famously quipped that 'only when the tide goes out do you find out who is not wearing a bathing suit.' So true. But what's really unnerving is that America appears to be one of those countries that has been swimming buck naked -- in more ways than one. |
FactCheck's record of errors, corrections
by Doug Thompson
FactCheck.Org, the self-proclaimed purveyor of truth on the Internet, has a checkered history of getting things wrong and often has to correct its own mistakes in reports about the purported false claims of others.A random check of stories published by FactCheck.Org since Jan. 1, 2008 found at least 11 articles where the organization was forced to correct its own errors and admit it either reached a false conclusion or simply got it wrong. |
Fan apathy still a problem for Florida Marlins
by Mike Phillips
The defending World Series champion Phillies will be at Dolphin Stadium for a three-game weekend series. Will they be enough of a draw for Marlins fans?The Phillies are here for a weekend series with the Marlins.That's the World Series-champion Phillies, the team the Marlins consider their biggest rival, and the team they likely will have to unseat to win the National League East. |
Sixty die in deadliest Iraq bombing since June
by Aws Qusay and Waleed Ibrahim
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – In a second day of major bloodshed in Iraq, two female suicide bombers blew themselves up outside a Shi'ite Muslim shrine in Baghdad on Friday, killing 60 people, police said.The attack was the deadliest single incident in Iraq since a truck bomb in Baghdad killed 63 people on June 17 last year. The two-day death toll of at least 150 raises concerns that a recent decline in violence may have been only a temporary lull. |
Olbermann: $1000 for every second Hannity undergoes waterboarding
by Diane Sweet
On Thursday's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, he calls out Fox News anchor Sean Hannity on an offer he made on his show to be waterboarded for charity, and declares that he is willing to pay $1,000 to charity for every second that Hannity undergoes waterboarding. |
