March 1, 2012

Lady Gaga, bane of conservative parents everywhere

Dozens of kids in baggy pink t-shirts emblazoned with the word "acceptance" bob up and down to Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" in a flash-mob style video, but a civic group from British Columbia called Burnaby Parents' Voice isn't buying the message. According to the Burnaby News Leader, they are challenging the "legality and the educational purpose of posting students' images on the Internet, as well as the appropriateness of Lady Gaga as a learning resource in public schools." Parents' Voice was in the news last spring for its opposition to a school policy that was enacted to protect gay, lesbian, and transgendered students from bullying.

The video was produced for Canada's Pink Shirt Day, an annual event conceived in 2007 in response to a bullying incident in a rural Nova Scotia high school. When some students harassed a ninth grade boy and called him a "homosexual" for wearing a pink polo shirt, two seniors distributed 50 pink t-shirts for their classmates to wear the following day. The idea spread over the Internet and, in 2009, the province of British Columbia even named the last Wednesday in February Anti-Bullying Day.

......(snip)......

Parent's Choice has asked Minister of Education George Abbott to ban Burnaby schools' Pink Shirt Day project and remove it from the Internet. As of March 1, the video is still up and school board chair Larry Hayes said in interview with Vancouver's straight.com, "I think sometimes parents are the ones that are hiding in their caves, and the kids are the ones out there in the schools, where there are lots of colors, lots of languages, and lots of orientations, and for the most part, (the kids) get along with everybody." .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://shine.yahoo.com/parenting/lady-gaga-video-made-kids-protested-anti-bullying-140600808.html

March 1, 2012

Bankster of America mulls another shakedown attempt

(Reuters) - Bank of America Corp is planning to introduce a monthly fee for its customers holding checking accounts unless they agree to bank online, buy more products or maintain certain balances, the Wall Street Journal said.

The report on the new fee initiative at the nation's second-largest bank comes after it had faced a major consumer backlash last year when it disclosed plans for a $5-per-month debit card fee, forcing the bank to drop the plan.

Bank of America pilot programs in Arizona, Georgia and Massachusetts now are experimenting with charging $6 to $9 a month for an "Essentials" account, the paper said.

The options being tested include monthly charges of $9, $12, $15 and $25 but give customers opportunities to avoid the payments by maintaining minimum balances, using a credit card or taking a mortgage with the bank, the Journal said, citing a memo distributed to employees. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-bankofamericatre8200cs-20120229,0,4485213.story

March 1, 2012

Freeper: Breitbart death is part of the socialist takeover of the country

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2853107/posts


To: Regulator

There has never been a communist takeover that DID NOT involve manuy many deaths, has there?

And socialism always least to Communism

USSR = United Soviet SOCIALIST Republic

PRC = Peoples REPUBLIC of China

33 posted on Thursday, March 01, 2012 1:06:20 PM by Mr. K (Were the Soviet-Era propogandists as gleefully willing as our Lame-stream Media?)
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To: Progov

Sure.....if they can beat the L.A. coroner to the contamination of evidence : )

34 posted on Thursday, March 01, 2012 1:06:38 PM by stephenjohnbanker (God, family, country, mom, apple pie, the girl next door and a Ford F250 to pull my boat.)
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To: Beaten Valve

Didn’t he have a known heart condition? I’m already finding the insinuations that it was foul play somewhat tacky at best.

35 posted on Thursday, March 01, 2012 1:07:27 PM by Melas (u)
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To: Pharmboy

“someone saw him fall down...”

I wonder what part of Chicago “someone” is from. Things that make you go “hmmmm”.

March 1, 2012

Sheriff Joe's rancid brain continues its rot

PHOENIX -- America's self-proclaimed toughest sheriff finds himself entangled these days in his own thorny legal troubles: a federal grand jury probe over alleged abuse of power, Justice Department accusations of racial profiling and revelations that his department didn't adequately investigate hundreds of Arizona sex-crime cases.

Rather than seek cover, though, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is seeking to grab the spotlight in the same unorthodox fashion that has helped boost his career as a nationally known lawman.

Arpaio scheduled a news conference Thursday to unveil preliminary results of an investigation, conducted by members of his volunteer cold-case posse, into the authenticity of President Barack Obama's birth certificate, a controversy that has been widely debunked but which remains alive in the eyes of some conservatives. Last year, Donald Trump most prominently revived the issue while entertaining a possible bid for the presidency.

The 79-year-old Republican sheriff has declined to offer clues to what the probe may have found - but defends his need to spearhead such an investigation after nearly 250 people connected to an Arizona tea party group requested one last summer. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/01/sheriff-joe-arpaio-investigates-obama_n_1312802.html

March 1, 2012

Brazil Takes the Lead In Trying to Prevent Another Senseless War

Published on Thursday, March 1, 2012 by Folha de São Paulo
Brazil Takes the Lead In Trying to Prevent Another Senseless War

by Mark Weisbrot


Brazil’s foreign minister, Antonio Patriota, made a courageous and very important statement last week about the rising threat of a military attack on Iran. He asked UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to weigh in on the legality of a threatened military strike against Iran.

"One sometimes hears the expression, 'all options are on the table.' But some actions are contrary to international law," said Patriota.

The people who keep saying “all options are on the table,” with respect to Iran, include various U.S. and Israeli officials, and most importantly President Obama himself.

And everyone knows what they mean when they say “all options are on the table”: they reserve the “right” to bomb Iran if they don’t get what they want through non-military means, including economic sanctions. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/01-5

March 1, 2012

Ship's anchor cuts Internet access to six East African countries

A ship dropped anchor off Mombasa, Kenya, and cut the Internet to six African countries earlier this week.

It will take three weeks to repair the damage. In the meantime, the Internet in Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Juba, the capital of South Sudan, is functioning at a reduced speed. It will impede the normal flow by about 20 percent, according to the BBC's Nairobi correspondent, Noel Mwakugu.

The Indian Ocean East Africa Marine Systems (TEAMS) cable, which connects East Africa to the United Arab Emirates, was severed when a ship dropped anchor in a restricted area – restricted because of the presence of the sea cabling. (See here for an interactive cable map.) The Teams cable was carrying redirected traffic from the earlier cutting of three other cables in the Red Sea, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The outage comes at a time when Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, has assumed a much greater profile as a center of technological innovation and entrepreneurship, largely due to the recent availability of fast, reliable broadband connections. These undersea fiber-optic cables, laid in 2009 and which connect Africa to the world, have kicked off Kenya's high-tech industry and prompted an increase in Kenyan Internet users from 1.8 million to 3.1 million in the first year. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://news.yahoo.com/ships-anchor-cuts-internet-access-six-east-african-150000191.html

March 1, 2012

Phil Rockstroh: Regaining a Spirit of Defiance

from Consortium News:



Regaining a Spirit of Defiance
February 29, 2012

When kids scramble to buy the latest Nike running shoe, they’re mocked for their consumerism; yet, when Mitt Romney mentions his wife’s Cadillacs and other one-percenters tool around in their luxury autos, they’re admired for their success — a commentary on America’s crisis, writes Phil Rockstroh.

By Phil Rockstroh


The course of action taken by the present-day U.S. political class in addressing the era’s rising tide of economic hardship and ecological peril has proven as helpful as tossing an anvil to a drowning man.

The following two, axiomatic headlines reveal much about the dovetailing mindsets manifested by members of both the drowning class and the moral compass-bereft captains of the ship of state:



Inadvertently, Mr. Romney’s declaration, stated in his own blandly deranged way, captures the As Above/So Below nature of consumer-state psychology. By means of incessant, womb to tomb, commercial propaganda, the corporate class has promoted the idea that an individual’s identity is based solely on the sum total of his worldly possessions.

Yet, when young people, denied a decent education and stranded in circumstances where they have been deprived of a means to gain a sense of identity by acquiring the skills and the development of the talents necessary for the pursuit of their individual aspirations, have the temerity to reflect the societal values they have internalized — for example, by acting in an aggressive manner in a mindless pursuit of material items that they have been conditioned to believe will bestow a sense of self worth — then media elites and bamboozled bourgeois should not, as they can be counted on to do, react with consternation, carrying on as if these acts of desperation on the part of the young are wholly devoid of any cultural context. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2012/02/29/regaining-a-spirit-of-defiance/

March 1, 2012

Naomi Klein: Throw Out the Free Market Playbook

from Solutions journal:



In your cover story for the Nation last year, you say that modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the political Left, including redistribution of wealth, higher and more progressive taxes, and greater government intervention and regulation. Please explain.

The piece came out of my interest and my shock at the fact that belief in climate change in the United States has plummeted. If you really drill into the polling data, what you see is that the drop in belief in climate change is really concentrated on the right of the political spectrum. It’s been an extraordinary and unusual shift in belief in a short time. In 2007, 71 percent of Americans believed in climate change and in 2009 only 51 percent believed—and now we’re at 41 percent. So I started researching the denial movement and going to conferences and reading the books, and what’s clear is that, on the right, climate change is seen as a threat to the Right’s worldview, and to the neoliberal economic worldview. It’s seen as a Marxist plot. They accuse climate scientists of being watermelons—green on the outside and red on the inside.

It seems exaggerated, but your piece was about how the Right is in fact correct.

I don’t think climate change necessitates a social revolution. This idea is coming from the right-wing think tanks and not scientific organizations. They’re ideological organizations. Their core reason for being is to defend what they call free-market ideology. They feel that any government intervention leads us to serfdom and brings about a socialist world, so that’s what they have to fight off: a socialist world. Increase the power of the private sector and decrease the public sphere is their ideology.

You can set up carbon markets, consumer markets, and just pretend, but if you want to get serious about climate change, really serious, in line with the science, and you want to meet targets like 80 percent emissions cuts by midcentury in the developed world, then you need to be intervening strongly in the economy, and you can’t do it all with carbon markets and offsetting. You have to really seriously regulate corporations and invest in the public sector. And we need to build public transport systems and light rail and affordable housing along transit lines to lower emissions. The market is not going to step up to this challenge. We must do more: rebuild levees and bridges and the public sphere, because we saw in Katrina what happens when weak infrastructure clashes with heavy weather—it’s catastrophe. These climate deniers aren’t crazy—their worldview is under threat. If you take climate change seriously, you do have to throw out the free-market playbook. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/1053

March 1, 2012

Phil Rockstroh: Regaining a Spirit of Defiance

from Consortium News:



Regaining a Spirit of Defiance
February 29, 2012

When kids scramble to buy the latest Nike running shoe, they’re mocked for their consumerism; yet, when Mitt Romney mentions his wife’s Cadillacs and other one-percenters tool around in their luxury autos, they’re admired for their success — a commentary on America’s crisis, writes Phil Rockstroh.

By Phil Rockstroh


The course of action taken by the present-day U.S. political class in addressing the era’s rising tide of economic hardship and ecological peril has proven as helpful as tossing an anvil to a drowning man.

The following two, axiomatic headlines reveal much about the dovetailing mindsets manifested by members of both the drowning class and the moral compass-bereft captains of the ship of state:



Inadvertently, Mr. Romney’s declaration, stated in his own blandly deranged way, captures the As Above/So Below nature of consumer-state psychology. By means of incessant, womb to tomb, commercial propaganda, the corporate class has promoted the idea that an individual’s identity is based solely on the sum total of his worldly possessions.

Yet, when young people, denied a decent education and stranded in circumstances where they have been deprived of a means to gain a sense of identity by acquiring the skills and the development of the talents necessary for the pursuit of their individual aspirations, have the temerity to reflect the societal values they have internalized — for example, by acting in an aggressive manner in a mindless pursuit of material items that they have been conditioned to believe will bestow a sense of self worth — then media elites and bamboozled bourgeois should not, as they can be counted on to do, react with consternation, carrying on as if these acts of desperation on the part of the young are wholly devoid of any cultural context. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2012/02/29/regaining-a-spirit-of-defiance/

March 1, 2012

The ‘Winners’ Take Everything

from Consortium News:



The ‘Winners’ Take Everything
February 29, 2012

Exclusive: Many Americans still wonder how it happened, how did a country admired for its Great Middle Class, which sustained strong democratic institutions, end up with Third-World-style wealth inequality and a democracy to match? In reviewing Winner-Take-All Politics, James DiEugenio seeks an answer.

By James DiEugenio


In the last year or so, I have been contemplating writing a book about President Barack Obama and how he reacted to the economic blowout of 2007-08, compared to how President Franklin Roosevelt grappled with the Great Depression.

In that comparison, I thought, one could gauge not only the character and politics of the two men, but also how the Democratic Party had lost its way and why. After all, Obama said on 60 Minutes that — prior to taking office but after being elected — he had read several books about FDR and the Depression in preparation for handling a similar collapse.

Winner-Take-All Politics, the book under discussion in this review, strictly speaking, does not fit under the rubric of the Wall Street collapse at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency. But it takes pains to describe why Obama and the Democratic Party could not mount the kind of program necessary to revive the economy.

And consequently, why, in 2012, five years after the first phase of the collapse, many Americans still find themselves in the throes of this recession, an economic disaster which, unlike any since the Great Depression, has impacted almost every aspect of American public life: cutbacks in municipal and state services and employment, teacher layoffs which have raised some student class sizes to well over 40, a collapse in real-estate prices in many states, leading to a foreclosure and bankruptcy rate that has been unprecedented. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2012/02/29/the-winners-take-everything/