<title> 2009 February</title> (5)

Top Military Biolab Suspends Research After Pentagon Finds Trouble With Tracking Pathogens

anthrax

The U.S. Army has suspended research with deadly agents and toxins at the military’s top germ warfare lab, which came under intense scrutiny after the FBI identified it as the source of the anthrax used in the 2001 “Amerithrax” attacks that killed five, injured 17 and kept the nation on knife-edge for weeks. The suspension, [...]

Republicans Begin Devouring Their Own

Richard Mellon Scaife

It didn’t take the GOP long to begin devouring its own. No sooner had the Senate passed The Stim yesterday but notorious right-wing funder-in-chief Richard Mellon Scaife’s front organization, “The National Republican Trust PAC,” sent an urgent e-mail to fellow travellers asking for money to defeat Senators Arlen Specter, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snowe – [...]

Rush Limbaugh: The Lyin’ King’s Reign of Error

rush_limbaugh

He’s a radio commentator who’s an entertainer. An entertainer who is a super-salesman. A salesman who ridicules and promotes hate. Making the front page of the February 8, 2009, Los Angeles Times was the man who is all those things rolled into one larger-than-life personality: Rush Limbaugh. And, he’s gaining even more notoriety. Now he’s [...]

Obama, Pelosi Must Rescue Damaged Stimulus Package

pelosi-obama

Senators Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Susan Collins (R-ME) have produced a Senate stimulus bill that kills jobs, eliminates affordable housing, guts education and gives billions in new tax breaks for the rich. Their hypocrisy is shameful. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put it, the Senate measure will “lead to substantially lower employment and [...]

Why Republicans Won’t Support the Stimulus

sinkorswim

Why are Senate Republicans (all, that is, except the lonely moderates Collins, Snowe, and Specter) nixing the stimulus package, as House Republicans did? Not because Obama failed to compromise — he gave them the tax breaks they wanted, included a whopper for business. Not because Senate Democrats failed to bend — they agreed to trim [...]

The GOP Floats Out To Sea, Alone on a Shrinking Iceberg

repubs

There isn’t much point showing the Republican Party that they’ve lost it completely and are floating out to sea, alone and abandoned on a shrinking iceberg like an aged bull walrus driven from the herd. After all, new party chairman Michael Steele doesn’t know that when you work, you have a job and vice versa, [...]

Abandoning Torture But What About War?

warfare-trench

If we can move beyond torture, do we not have a responsibility also to think for a moment about the obvious fact that torture is not the cruelest thing we do? Torture offends us, in part, because the torturer is not at risk, but neither are most pilots dropping bombs. And how exactly does the [...]

Families of U.S.S. Cole Sailors Unhappy with Delayed Justice Aren’t the Only Sufferers

gitmo

Truer words were rarely spoken than those uttered by Retired Navy Comdr. Kirk Lippold, the defense advisor to Military Families United, when he said the relatives of the sailors killed and wounded in the attack on the destroyer U.S.S. Cole in Yemen have been waiting eight years for the accused to be tried and that [...]

SEIU, UFCW Demand Hilda Solis’ Speedy Confirmation

hilda-solis

SEIU, UCFW, and other worker rights advocates are escalating their campaign against Republican efforts to obstruct the appointment of Congressmember Hilda Solis as the new Labor Secretary. Solis, who has been a hero to working people from her days as a California legislator through her tenure in Congress, is being opposed on the grounds that [...]

Waging a Quiet Revolution Against Fox

Rupert Murdock

The other day I walked into a near by California Pizza Kitchen, pulled up to the counter, ordered a pepperoni pizza and then sat back to sip my iced tea. I then noticed when I looked up from the counter it was Fox News being beamed on every television in the place. My guess is [...]

Eliminate Filibuster and With It the Need to Debate Republicans

monkeywrench

From the pains Democrats take to out-argue and/or to compromise with the fringe minority party called the Republicans you’d think no other course of action was available, specifically you’d have to assume that the filibuster — the power of senators representing 11% of us to block all work by the House and Senate — is [...]

We Are What We Eat

pizza-and-beer

How often have we ordered up a few pizzas and a couple of six packs to sat around, focusing our political positions while expanding our waistlines? Last week, President Obama ate crow as his picks to manage health system restoration and to gain some control over government efficiency fell away under assault for their use [...]

Renaissance in the Republican Party?

The clock is ticking , unemployment is rising, foreclosures are up, and economists say we are at an all time low but the GOP continues to oppose the president on the passage of his stimulus package.

From Davos to Belem: A Take of Two Spirits

thaw_period

This years’ gathering at Davos appears to have been a complete dud. It’s hard for one who wasn’t there to say how complete but if President Obama is reading the reports from the celebrated Swiss mountaintop he has to be glad he didn’t go and that he didn’t send a high powered delegation. And the [...]

A Book Review of Kim Bobo’s “Wage Theft in America”

factory-workers

Do not take advantage of a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether that worker is an Israelite or is a foreigner residing in one of your towns. Pay them their wages each day before sunset, because they are poor and are counting on it. Otherwise they may cry to the Lord against you, [...]

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