Show 27july10

ACLU:

Dear Friend,

We need you to act immediately to undo a disturbing decision from the Obama administration. Remember all the hard work you and other ACLU activists did to defeat Rep. Stupak's draconian abortion coverage ban during the health care debate?

Well now, the White House has decided to voluntarily impose the ban for all women in the newly-created high risk insurance pools. What is disappointing is that there is nothing in the law that requires the Obama administration to impose this broad and highly restrictive abortion ban. It doesn't allow states to choose to cover abortion and it doesn't even give women the option to buy abortion coverage using their own money.

Ask President Obama WHY his administration is restricting coverage for vulnerable women.

Unless the Administration reverses this decision, some of America's most vulnerable women—those with pre-existing conditions who have been denied health care coverage on the individual market—won't be able to purchase abortion coverage except in the case of rape or incest or to save the pregnant woman's life.

You and I know that every woman should be able to decide what is best for her health and her family. A pro-choice administration should know that too.

It's especially discouraging to impose a ban on women participating in a high-risk insurance pool who are particularly vulnerable and may have a special need for abortion. For example, because of the restriction, a woman with heart disease or diabetes might be compelled to carry a pregnancy to term despite its potentially damaging effect on her future health.

Ask President Obama not to stand in the way of vulnerable women's health care choices.

It's urgent that you send your message to President Obama right now. When you do, we'll also forward a copy to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, whose department is putting this unnecessary and harmful restriction into effect.

Thank you for acting on this urgent matter.

Sincerely,

Laura W. Murphy
Director, Washington Legislative Office

© ACLU, 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10004

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/24/AR2010072401468.html

Medical marijuana to be OK in some VA clinics

WASHINGTON -- The government says patients treated at Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics will be able to use medical marijuana in the 14 states where it's legal.

The directive from the Department of Veterans Affairs is coming out in the week ahead. It's intended to clarify current policy that says veterans can be denied pain medications if they use illegal drugs.

Veterans groups long have complained that such language could bar patients from VA benefits if they were caught using medical marijuana.

The new guidance does not authorize VA doctors to begin prescribing medical marijuana, which is considered an illegal drug under federal law.

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1297361/US-withdraws-pain-ray-Afghan-war-zone.html

U.S. withdraws ‘pain ray’ from Afghan war zone

The Active Denial System (ADS), which cost about £42 million to develop, was on the brink of being deployed to disperse members of the Taliban as they attacked US forces.

The weapon, which causes immense pain to subjects but no lasting physical damage, was pulled from the war zone last week but US army chiefs in Afghanistan have stayed silent about the reason for the U-turn.

The ADS, which has been in development for almost 20 years, works by firing a beam of high-frequency waves at the speed of light.

The beam can cover a person’s entire body, causing agonising pain as it heats water and fat molecules beneath the skin’s surface.

The beam can hit someone up to a third of a mile away, and they are only relieved of the pain when they move out of the way.

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http://www.truth-out.org/the-attack-real-black-helicopter-gang-the-imf-is-coming-your-social-security61291

The Attack of the Real Black Helicopter Gang: The IMF Is Coming for Your Social Security

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Last week, the IMF told the United States that it needs to start getting its budget deficit down. It put cutting Social Security at the top of the steps that the country should take to achieve deficit reduction. This one is more than a bit outrageous for two reasons.

First, the IMF deserves a substantial share of the blame for the economic crisis that gave us big deficits in the first place. The IMF is supposed to oversee the operations of the international financial system. According to standard economic theory, capital is supposed to flow from rich countries like the United States to poor countries to finance their development. In other words, the United States should be having a trade surplus, which would correspond to the money that we are investing in poor countries to finance their development.

Let Truthout send our best stories to your inbox every day, for free.

However, the IMF messed up its management of financial crises so badly in the last 15 years that poor countries decided that they had to accumulate huge amounts of currency reserves in order to avoid ever being forced to deal with the IMF. This meant that capital was flowing in huge amounts in the wrong direction. One result of this reverse flow was that the United States ran a huge trade deficit instead of a trade surplus.

The trade deficit in the United States was a big part of the story of the housing bubble. The trade deficit cost millions of workers their jobs. This was one of
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Social Security. The vast majority of middle-income retirees have most of their wealth in their home equity. This home equity largely disappeared when the bubble burst. Maybe the IMF doesn't have access to house price series and data on wealth, because if they did, it's hard to believe that they would advocate further harm to some of the main victims of their policy failure.

The other reason that the IMF's call for cutting Social Security benefits is infuriating is the incredible hypocrisy involved. The average Social Security benefit is just under $1,200 a month. No one can collect benefits until they reach the age of 62. By contrast, many IMF economists first qualify for benefits in their early 50s. They can begin drawing pensions at age 51 or 52 of more than $100,000 a year.

This means that we have IMF economists, who failed disastrously at their jobs, who can draw six-figure pensions at age 52, telling ordinary workers that they have to take a cut in their $14,000 a year Social Security benefits that they can't start getting until age 62. Now that is real black helicopter material.

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http://www.AmericanWisdom.org

Show 20Jul10

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George Carlin on Religion in 2 minutes

derived from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSSwKffj9o



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St. Pete Radical Cheerleaders on Afghanistan (with DJ Frankie Karma [me])


http://www.AmericanWisdom.org
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Sage Francis Makeshift Patriot





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http://www.popjolly.com/the-truth-about-the-war-on-drugs-1081


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http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20010533-1.html?tag=TOCmoreStories.0

July 14, 2010 12:42 PM PDT

Korean machine-gun robots start DMZ duty

South Korea's military has deployed machine-gun-toting robots along the heavily fortified border with North Korea, and a related promo video delivers more shock and awe than Kim Jong-Il singing the blues.

Samsung Techwin and other firms developed the SGR-1 robots, and they have been installed on a trial basis at a post in the central part of the Demilitarized Zone, Yonhap News quoted military officials as saying.

The $200,000 SGR-1s are remote-operated sentry bots that work in tandem with cameras and radar systems. They can detect intruders with heat and motion sensors, and challenge them through audio and video communications. The bots can also fire on targets with 5.5-millimeter machine guns and 40-millimeter automatic grenade launchers.

The officials didn't say how many bots were set up, but they will be installed throughout the 160-mile DMZ if the trial, which runs through the end of this year, is successful. Tensions along the DMZ are already high following the sinking of the South's warship Cheonan in March.

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Huh said the robots cannot automatically fire on targets, and require human permission to attack, adding, "The SGR-1 can and will prevent wars."
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERhoNYj9_fg

Building 7

Show 13jul10

Finkelstein on the Gaza massacre

From
http://blip.tv/file/3833270



http://www.AmericanWisdom.org

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http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/jul/10/spills-toll-felt-every-breath/

Every time Linda Young takes her dog out for a walk, morning or evening, she can smell it. Young, an environmental activist who lives near the beach in Navarre, next door to Pensacola Beach, said the odor of oil is now a constant part of her life.

If the wind is blowing in from the Gulf of Mexico, she said, "the oil smell is often very strong, too strong to be outside."

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Some of the changes are easy to spot. On Pensacola's television station, the daily weather report now includes an oil forecast. Boats that in past years spent the summer z
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taking them to public pools or the zoo. Buyers have walked away from closing on pricey homes at Perdido Key, saying they wanted to wait and see how bad the spill would be. B
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''The trust of the people in the institutions they've come to rely on, like the government and business, if it was damaged in the past, it's in a terminal phase now," said Kirby,
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Even building sand castles is a hazardous activity now, because oil has been found as deep as a foot below a clean-looking surface. Children scooping out moats around their sandy turrets have discovered what looks like lumps of brown Play-Doh.

Despite the warning signs, as of this week 27 people have reported they've become ill after coming in contact with oil at Pensacola Beach, according to the Escambia County Health Department. They were nauseous, coughing, short of breath, their skin was irritated — not the kind of beach visit memories the Chamber of Commerce would
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scoop up oil-tainted sand. In Escambia County, about 400 cleanup workers spent the last Sunday in June picking up 88,000 pounds of tar balls and stringy mousse spread across the beach. Then the tide came in and they had to go back and clean the beach again. And then again.

The ripples from the disaster have spread far inland. Gas stations and convenience stores in rural Gadsden County, near Tallahassee, have long counted on tourists from Atlanta stopping by on their way down to the Panhandle beaches. This summer, the road through Gadsden County is quiet.

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http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0710/acorn-employee-sues-okeefe-giles/

Former ACORN employee sues O’Keefe and Giles

A former ACORN employee in San Diego who lost his job after being filmed giving advice to "ACORN pimp" James O'Keefe is suing the amateur videographer and his partner, Hannah Giles, San Diego CityBeat's Dave Maass reported Friday.

Juan Carlos Vera was one of a number of ACORN employees who in the summer of 2009 was secretly filmed giving advice to O'Keefe and Giles, who told media they were posing as a pimp and prostitute with plans to bring underage prostitutes to the US from Latin America.

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California Attorney General Jerry Brown cleared Vera of wrongdoing in a report earlier this year. Brown found that, though Vera appeared sympathetic to the "pimp and prostitute" during the taped meeting, he immediately notified the police of the conversation. Brown's investigation also found that the O'Keefe videos were "significantly edited."

The shocking prospect of ACORN employees aiding in human trafficking prompted Congress to de-fund the group last year, a move that was later ruled unconstitutional. And a report from the Government Accountability Office, released earlier this year, found no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of ACORN, which received some $40 million in federal funding from 2005 to 2009.

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In February, Hannah Giles admitted that the flamboyant pimp and prostitutes costumes in which she and O'Keefe were seen in some of the videos were never worn inside ACORN offices, contrary to most news reports. "In truth, O'Keefe represented himself to low-level ACORN
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Last month, former ACORN president Bertha Lewis told RAW STORY she believes the political campaign against ACORN "was a McCarthy-era style war against the poor and minorities."

Lewis said the ACORN controversy "proves the right will resort to anything to maintain power to continue the war on poor black and brown people. ... Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh can call me a racist all they want to, but there is no way there was not a racial element and class element to this whole attack."

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BirdBrain by Allen Ginsberg (sp?) and the Gluons

Link to my Youtubes

http://www.youtube.com/markfrankenberg

Show 6jul10

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0704/spy-tech-monitors-conversations-europe/

Spy tech that ‘monitors conversations’ being launched in Europe: report

Europe are raising the alarm about a new surveillance system that monitors conversations in public.The surveillance system, dubbed Sigard, has been installed in Dutch city centers, government offices and prisons, and a recent test-run of the technology in

The system's manufacturer, Sound Intelligence, says it works by detecting aggression in speech patterns.

"Ninety percent of all incidents involving physical aggression are preceded by verbal aggression,"

According to the UK's Sunday Telegraph, the city of Coventry recently finished a six-month test run of the system, which involved the installation of seven microphones around a crime-prone nightlife district. A spokesperson for the city said the system is "no longer in use."

"In Hackney in London, the system detected up to six crimes a night, including fights and guns being fired," the paper reported.

Sigard's use is more widespread in the Netherlands, where the system's manufacturer is located. According to the Sound Intelligence Web site, the system has been installed in Amsterdam's train station, as well as police headquarters, and has also been installed inside a number of prisons and the city centers of Dordrecht and Groningen.

Sound Intelligence says that the technology focuses principally on tone of voice, and is not designed to listen to the content of conversations. But opponents say the technology is open to abuse.

"There can be no justification for giving councils or the police the capability to listen in on private conversations," Dylan Sharpe of the UK's Big Brother Watch told the Sunday Telegraph. "There is enormous potential for abuse, or a misheard word, causing unnecessary harm with this sort of intrusive and overbearing surveillance."

In a sarcastic editorial, the Herald argued that crime could be eliminated altogether if the government were to install Sigard technology in all homes and offices.

http://www.AmericanWisdom.org