From Paul Krugman, N.Y. Times

---

October 9, 2011

Panic of the Plutocrats

By PAUL KRUGMAN

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.
And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.
Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.
Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.
Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.
And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”
The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it."

so here's what she said:  " There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.  Nobody.  You built a factory out there - good for you.   But I want to be clear.  You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.   You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.  You were safe in your factory because of  police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.  You didn't  have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory. . .  Now look.  You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God Bless!  Keep a big hunk of it.   But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."  

There's more to the column, too, to be summed up with my voice:  The banksters caused this mess, they continue to get paid mega mils,  and NO ONE has gone to jail! 

Elizabeth Warren

"I hear all this, you know, 'Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,'" Warren said. "No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own -- nobody.
"You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory -- and hire someone to protect against this -- because of the work the rest of us did.
"Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless -- keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."^{1Elizabeth Warren}

Malaria

http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

Checking the Rosetta At Home website today (no new data supplied recently !)  and I got to reading. . . my very own version of the 'time sink'. . . .   and I got to thinking:   Malaria and it's pesky mosquito link are so ubiquitous. . .   there MUST be a purpose in nature for this disease.  The active attacks of malaria - do they heat the body to repel some other threat?  Are the painful joints telling you something about your body you should be addressing/amending?  And of course,  somewhere in the biosphere/living planet/Gaia there is a cure for this and associated trail of body imbalances.


May 18, 2011
Journal post from David Baker

A recent issue of Nature describes an exciting approach we are taking with collaborators to fight Malaria. The title of the paper is "A synthetic homing endonuclease-based gene drive system in the human malaria mosquito" and the PDF is available at my lab web site. The idea is to use enzymes which cut within critical genes in mosquitos to greatly reduce the number of malaria parasite infected mosquitos. There are still many issues that must be overcome for this strategy to be used against malaria in the real world, but this paper is an important first proof of concept of the strategy.

Just when I'd like to rant...

about a bunch of things - along comes another Truth Out e-mail that covers it all and more. . .if I can only figure out how I pasted it all in last time :)  . . .  wow that was easy

Wednesday 07 September 2011 The Price of 9/11 Joseph E. Stiglitz, Project Syndicate: "The September 11, 2001, terror attacks by Al Qaeda were meant to harm the United States, and they did, but in ways that Osama bin Laden probably never imagined. President George W. Bush's response to the attacks compromised America's basic principles, undermined its economy, and weakened its security. The attack on Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks was understandable, but the subsequent invasion of Iraq was entirely unconnected to Al Qaeda - as much as Bush tried to establish a link. That war of choice quickly became very expensive - orders of magnitude beyond the $60 billion claimed at the beginning - as colossal incompetence met dishonest misrepresentation." Read the Article Obama Transition Team Member Explains Why Administration Chose Not to Prosecute Torture David Swanson, War Is a Crime: "If you can think back all the way to January 2009, back when wars were ending, Guantanamo was closing, the Pentagon was getting oversight, employees were going to have free choice, the rich would start paying taxes, the air would be getting cleaner, and so forth, you'll recall that the Obama transition team was acting super populist and high-tech. They had questions from ordinary people for the President Elect submitted on their website and voted up or down. The top question at the end of the voting had come from Bob Fertik of Democrats.com and it was this: 'Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor - ideally Patrick Fitzgerald - to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?' (Bob Fertik, New York City) Not only was the answer no, but it had to be inferred because President Change U. Wish refused to answer the question.... However, we now have an account from someone involved in the decision process way back when." Read the Article Qaddafi Loyalists Fled to Niger by Convoy, US Affirms Patrick J. McDonnell and Paul Richter, The Los Angeles Times: "More than a dozen high-ranking loyalists of Moammar Kadafi made a desert getaway into neighboring Niger, US officials said Tuesday, but there was no indication that the former Libyan leader or his sons had escaped. 'We're confident that Kadafi didn't get out,' said Jalal Gallal, a spokesman for Libya's transitional government. News that as many as 250 vehicles carrying members of Kadafi's inner circle, including his security chief, had crossed Monday into Niger added a dramatic twist to the manhunt for the strongman who ruled Libya for more than four decades. However, the Associated Press reported late Tuesday that a spokesman for Niger's president said that only three cars had crossed into Niger, ferrying one member of Kadafi's inner circle. There was no immediate explanation for the contradictory versions." Read the Article Defense Spending: The Worst Way to Make Jobs Dina Rasor, Truthout: "I see it coming. As President Obama gives his speech on how important it is for the government and the country to produce more jobs, and as the budget noose starts to tighten on all government programs, including the Department of Defense (DoD) this time, the DoD will flood the Congress with charts and statistics on how cutting the DoD will also cut important defense manufacturing jobs across the US. Each member of Congress will be notified about how many jobs will be cut for any given weapon system, and this is especially effective because the DoD has become the master of spreading weapon production contractor and subcontractor jobs across as many districts and states as possible to get the weapons funded in the first place.... As we drawdown troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the defenders of the DoD budget, which unfortunately includes the new Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, will want to transfer any money saved back into their favorite endeavor: weapons production." Read the Article Obama Jobs Plan to Include $300 Billion in Tax Credits, Spending Peter Nicholas, The Los Angeles Times: "President Obama on Thursday will roll out a jobs package that strives to lift the ailing economy through $300 billion worth of tax credits, school renovation projects, job training for the unemployed and a program to prevent teacher layoffs, according to a person familiar with the administration's plans. In his speech before a joint session of Congress, Obama also will ask lawmakers to renew the 2% payroll tax cut that was approved in December and to extend jobless benefits, said the person, who requested anonymity to talk more freely about White House internal deliberations.... Obama is under pressure from his Democratic base to submit a bold package that would put a real dent in the jobless rate - and revive his reelection prospects. To the extent he follows this advice, though, he risks alienating Republicans and even conservative Democrats who want to avoid anything that smacks of another expensive stimulus package." Read the Article Project "Censored 2012": Moving Beyond Media Reform Mickey Huff, Seven Stories Press: "That there is a crisis in journalism seems to be understood by many scholars and independent journalists, while many in the corporate media don't seem to notice, or at least don't mention it much. Further, they do not divulge much in terms of the challenges we face in the twenty-first century as the corporate media flood the airwaves with celebrity tales and misinformation. The overall so-called 'mainstream' reporting in the United States is the equivalent to fiddling while Rome burns. And make no mistake, the US is an empire, and we are in decay. We the People of these United States already stand at a very real precipice - the potential end of what has been deemed the Great American Experiment, the institutional embodiment of human freedom protected by government of, by, and for the people. Meanwhile, the corporate media fill so-called news time with faux-angst, Astroturf platforms, cult-of-personality disorders, and one manufactured irrelevant crisis after another in what appears to be a Herculean effort to avoid telling the public what is really going on at home and abroad...." Read the Article Toward Total Information Awareness Nancy Murray and Kade Crockford, Truthout and ACLU Massachusetts: "It is no secret that the CIA, FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) bungled a multitude of opportunities to foil the 9/11 plot. There were no fewer than 12 intelligence reports in the three years preceding 9/11 that Osama bin Laden planned to use aircraft as weapons and crash them into buildings in Washington and New York City, information that was included in the president's daily intelligence brief. In addition to the 2004 report by the 9/11 Commission, the often astonishing list of intelligence failings that contributed to the success of the attacks has been exhaustively documented.... In his minority report to the Joint Intelligence Committee, Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby urged agency leaders to be held accountable for the litany of failures. This was never done. Instead, well before the public was alerted to the extent of the multiple intelligence failures, the government embarked on a 'fix' that bore little relation to the actual shortcomings outlined in the reports...." Read the Article On the News With Thom Hartmann: Before Wildfires, Texas Gov. Rick Perry Cut Firefighter Program by 75 Percent, and More In today's On the News segment: President's job plan will cost $300 billion; Gov. Rick Perry cut state's volunteer firefighter program by 75 percent, cutting critical program to prevent wildfires; United States slips to No. 5 in world's top economies; new Pew reports that one in three Americans who grew up middle class have fallen out of that economic class today; and more. Watch the Video and Read the Transcript Did a Top GOP Staffer for Senator Grassley Cover Up Evidence of News Corp. Hacking in the US? Lee Fang, ThinkProgress: "A top investigator for the Senate Finance Committee, working under Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), may have had smoking gun evidence of News Corp's hacking activity. While News Corp's British subsidiaries have received the most media attention for systematically hacking the cell phone and personal records of private citizens, the public still has heard little of allegations relating to similar conduct perpetrated by News Corp against its American competitors. ThinkProgress has learned that not only did a sensitive tip come to Grassley's office about News Corp's cyber attacks against other American companies, but authorities may have failed to look into the matter partially because a staffer named Nick Podsiadly allegedly never followed through on his promise to the whistleblower." Read the Article Jim Hightower | Perry Tales: Rick Is Not Who He Says He Is Jim Hightower, Truthout: "Presidential wannabe Rick Perry is flitting all around the country - hither, thither and yon - spreading little 'Perry Tales' about himself and the many wonders he has worked as governor of Texas. His top Perry Tale is a creationist story about what he has modestly branded 'The Texas Miracle.' While the rest of the country is mired in joblessness, says the miracle worker, his state has added 1.2 million jobs during his 10-year tenure. I've built 'a job-creating machine,' the governor gushed during one of his recent flits across Iowa, and a Perry PR aide smugly added, 'The governor's job creation record speaks for itself.' Actually, it doesn't." Read the Article Is the Keystone Tar Sands Pipeline in America's Best "National Interest"? Elizabeth McGowan, InsideClimate News: "Barely two weeks ago, pro-pipeline contingents were claiming victory and anti-pipeline forces were fuming after the State Department declared that the project would cause minimal environmental harm. But now both sides are girding for the federal government's next step. It requires the State Department to take the lead in determining if Keystone XL is in the national interest. The $7 billion pipeline, a project of Alberta-based TransCanada, would travel 1,702 miles through six states.... The State Department has scheduled a series of eight September and October public meetings in the half-dozen states along Keystone XL's proposed route-Montana, South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas-plus a final one Oct. 7 in Washington, DC. The department also will accept written comments through Oct. 9.... 'The State Department has committed to this national interest conversation being serious and we are going to take them at their word,' Danielle Droitsch of the Natural Resources Defense Council's international program told InsideClimate News. 'That means not taking a narrow view of what is in the national interest.'" Read the Article Plan Would Keep Small Force in Iraq Past Deadline Eric Schmitt and Steven Lee Myers, The New York Times News Service: "Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta is supporting a plan that would keep 3,000 to 4,000 American troops in Iraq after a deadline for their withdrawal at year's end, but only to continue training security forces there, a senior military official said on Tuesday. The recommendation would break a longstanding pledge by President Obama to withdraw all American forces from Iraq by the deadline. But it would still involve significantly fewer forces than proposals presented at the Pentagon in recent weeks by the senior American commander in Iraq, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, to keep as many as 14,000 to 18,000 troops there. The proposal for a smaller force - if approved by the White House and the Iraqi government, which is not yet certain - reflected the shifting political realities in both countries. It also reflected the tension between Mr. Obama's promise to bring all American forces home and the widely held view among commanders that Iraq is not yet able to provide for its own security." Read the Article Profit Motive Underlies Outbreak of Immigration Bills Brendan Fischer, Center for Media and Democracy: "While it has been reported that more immigrants behind bars means more income for ALEC member Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), less discussed has been how immigrant detention benefits commercial bail-bond agencies, an industry represented in ALEC through the American Bail Coalition.... An immigrant facing removal may remain incarcerated, benefiting the for-profit prison industry, or released on bond, often paying a commercial bail bondsman for their release. The for-profit bail bond industry's trade association, the American Bail Coalition (ABC), is an ALEC member and helped pass the ALEC anti-immigrant laws." Read the Article Nepal's Women Farmers Discard Imported Hybrid Seeds and Husband Local Varieties in Co-Op Seed Banks Sudeshna Sarkar, Inter Press Service: "Learning a lesson from crop failures attributed to climate change, Nepal's women farmers are discarding imported hybrid seeds and husbanding hardier local varieties in cooperative seed banks. 'I had a crop failure two years ago,' says Shobha Devkota, 32, from Jibjibe village in Rasuwa, a hilly district in central Nepal which is part of the Langtang National Park, a protected area encompassing two more districts, Nuwakot and Sindhupalchowk. 'The maize was attacked by pests, the paddy had no grain and the soil grew hard. I had a tough time trying to feed my three daughters and sending them to school.' Since her marriage 17 years ago, Shobha had been sharing farming chores with her husband Ram Krishna. However, when he left for Dubai four years ago to work as a security guard, farming became her responsibility entirely. Though she has never been to school and can only scrawl her name, Shobha and other women in the village who share similar backgrounds, are keenly aware of changing climate and its adverse impact on livelihoods." Read the Article Click here for more Truthout articles BUZZFLASH DAILY HEADLINES If you want to make crime a growth industry to create more jobs, just privatize prisons. It's happening across the nation. Heck, crime has been an institutional engine for a huge work force even in the public sector. Think of the hundreds of thousands of lawyers, judges, clerks, prison guards, police, parole officers, social workers etc. depending upon keeping people incarcerated. And then there's the construction industry that is hot footin' it to build new maximum security facilities. And the small towns now depleted of jobs that compete to "host" prisons to bring jobs to the community. But the real institutionalization of crime as a job creator is emerging full force with the privatization of jails. A corporation can't make a profit - let alone the issue of their accountability for how they treat prisoners - unless they have sufficient volume. In short, a privatized criminal incarceration system de facto creates the need for an ongoing source of criminals to meet the need for generating a profit based on economies of scale. It's no surprise that Rick Perry, then, has jumped on the prison privatization bandwagon, as detailed in a Mother Jones article, "Flush With Prison Industry Dollars, Rick Perry Pushed Privatized Prisoner Care." Of course, a lot of crime is based on multi-generational poverty, a condition which is exacerbated by our current severe economic downturn. That is why the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. It would be interesting to see what would result if we offered more jobs in the highest crime rate areas. But that's not bound to happen now or anytime soon. There's a lot of money to be made in crime by the many professions that depend upon the revolving door of "offenders" continuing at a nice pace, and much of that profit is increasingly being made by the growing for-profit prison industry. Mark Karlin Editor, BuzzFlash at Truthout The Koch Brother Tapes: Gov. Chris Christie Lets the Plutocracy Know That He's One of Them Read the Article at Mother Jones Whichever Party Runs the Government in the UK, Murdoch and BP Pull the Strings Read the Article at BuzzFlash Will Bunch: Ten Real Questions About 9/11 Read the Article at The Philadelphia Daily News McConnell Once Again Proves GOP Leadership Has Become a Cult Read the Article at Talking Points Memo For Rick Perry, It's Bush "Deja Vu All Over Again" Read the Article at BuzzFlash Arrests at Paul Ryan's "Town Hall" Event Read the Article at Politico Tea Party Michigan Governor Signs 48-Month Welfare Limit Read the Article at The Associated Press Click here for more BuzzFlash headlines ---------- Support Truthout with a tax-deductible donation by clicking here. To ensure you receive our messages please add the following address to your email address book: messenger@truthout.org Click here to Subscribe Our Privacy Policy Click here to Unsubscribe Truthout is a proud member of the Newspaper Guild/CWA, Local 36047

Well, I really don't want to see the movie, but. . .

"Blogging is not writing, it's graffiti with punctuation."  lmao   it's a quote from the preview of "Contagion" which is looking just scary enough so I would never watch it.  heh heh - life is scary enough.

S & P downgrade

Oh wait -  aren't those the very same people who rated  A++ all those toxic, bundled,  should never-have-had- a-mortgage- mortgage backed securities that  (nearly) BROUGHT DOWN OUR ECONOMY in the first frelling place ??  IAFAYCCI    (new acronym - "it's all fixed and you can't change it")

And just a side funny:  Wells Fargo paid some billion (BILLION) dollar settlement because of (Wacovia's) their falsely favorable rating of some toxic securities.   Paid to some Hedge fund people - also to blame in said economic break down-  who were foolish enough to believe them, even though they were doing the same frelling thing out the other side of their mouths - .  Not to any small guys on Main street, whose wealth (house values, 401k's, college funds) was REALLY  looted. 

The Economic Collapse

The Economic Collapse

Just thought I'd share.

Happening now, in future coming to you fast

 thanks to TruthOut for the regular news letter.  this is today's edition.

Tuesday 26 July 2011 William Rivers Pitt | So This Is Despair William Rivers Pitt, Truthout: "It is difficult to describe this emotion. I'm used to disappointment, fairly comfortable with heartbreak, and am well acquainted with rage. Over the course of my lifetime, my presidents have been Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and now Obama ... and each, in his own way, has been worse than the last." Read the Article Chris Hedges | Fundamentalism Kills Chris Hedges, Truthdig: "The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Our religious and secular fundamentalists all peddle the same racist filth and intolerance that infected Breivik." Read the Article Coercive Religion Misplaced in US Armed Forces Mike Farrell, Truthout: "Raised in the Catholic Church, I was a pretty confused kid. Father O'Reilly, one of the priests at St. Peter's, the church our family attended most of the time, spoke with such a pronounced brogue that I couldn't follow him. But I didn't understand the Mass either, so I smiled and pretended he made sense, just accepted him on faith along with the rest of it." Read the Article On the News With Thom Hartmann: If Boehner's Plan Passed, Standard and Poor's Will Immediately Downgrade US Credit Rating, and More In today's On the News segment: Standard and Poor's warned that if Boehner's plan is passed to avoid an immediate default next week - the agency will STILL downgrade our debt because the Boehner plan is nothing more than a gimmick; Wisconsin Governor Walker closing DMV offices in Democratic areas, making it harder to get photos IDs required to vote; rich Americans paying fewer taxes than at any time in last 50 years; with austerity measures, the British economy has tanked; and more. Watch the Video and Read the Transcript Speaker Boehner's Disgrace Robert Borosage, Campaign for America's Future: "Seldom have we witnessed a more dishonest speech in prime time than that delivered by House Speaker John Boehner last night on the debt ceiling crisis." Read the Article FAA in Partial Shutdown; Air Traffic Unaffected Christine Mai-Duc, The Los Angeles Times: "The Federal Aviation Administration was forced into a partial shutdown Monday after Congress failed to temporarily extend its funding. The agency was ordered to furlough thousands of employees and freeze $2.5 billion in airport construction money." Read the Article In Court, Suggestions of Hacking Beyond the News of the World Jo Becker and Ravi Somaiya, The New York Times: "Front pages across Britain featured pictures of Rupert Murdoch apologizing for phone hacking at The News of the World. But further suggestions that the practice spread beyond his newspaper emerged in a small, nondescript courtroom on Wednesday, even as Prime Minister David Cameron broadened an inquiry into the conduct of the British press." Read the Article Paul Krugman | A Prognosis for Greece Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co.: "Someday, one way or another, Greece will exit from its current state of indentured servitude. But what will it do for a living? I often hear assertions that the answer is 'nothing.' 'What can the Greeks export?' the critics ask. In general, my response to such claims is that those commentators suffer from the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: An economy, even that of a small nation, is a very complex thing, with more possibilities than a casual top-down overview can reveal." Read the Article Unequal Protection: Protecting Corporate Liars Thom Hartmann, Berrett-Koehler Publishers: "The first direct shot across the bow of the doctrine of a corporation's 'right to lie' by using its 'personhood' to claim First Amendment 'free speech' rights came in April 1998, when Mark Kasky, a California political activist, noticed that Nike was engaged in what he considered to be a deceptive greenwashing campaign." Read the Article Republican Mike Lee: I Want America's "House to Come Down" Unless Congress Votes to Rewrite Constitution Ian Millhiser, ThinkProgress: "In an interview on MSNBC's Hardball Monday evening, tenther Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) admitted that he is using the threat of a catastrophic default to extort the nation into rewriting the Constitution to force a permanent era of conservative governance." Read the Article Crash Club: What Happens When Three Sputtering Economies Collide? Mike Davis, TomDispatch: "Even if debt-limit doomsday is averted, Obama has already hocked the farm and sold the kids. With breathtaking contempt for the liberal wing of his own party, he's offered to put the sacrosanct remnant of the New Deal safety net on the auction bloc to appease a hypothetical 'center' and win reelection at any price. (Dick Nixon, old socialist, where are you now that we need you?)" Read the Article Detroit: A New American Frontier Aaron M. Renn, YES! Magazine: "Detroit has become a byword for extreme urban contraction. Yet as the population, industry, and built environment of the city of Detroit have collapsed, Detroit's urban footprint has continued to expand. In Detroit, even the dead are sprawling, as families disinter bodies from urban cemeteries to rebury them in the suburbs. Is there any greater sign of both the physical and psychological abandonment of the city?" Read the Article Glenn Greenwald: Norway Attacks Expose US Media's Double Standard on "Terrorism" Amy Goodman, Democracy NOW!: "Numerous news outlets and commentators initially blamed the attacks in Norway on Islamic militants. Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper, The Sun, ran a front-page headline that read, 'Al-Qaeda Massacre: Norway's 9/11.' In the United States, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal also initially blamed 'jihadists,' reporting that 'Norway is targeted for being true to Western norms.' Meanwhile, on the Washington Post's website, Jennifer Rubin wrote, 'This is a sobering reminder for those who think it's too expensive to wage a war against jihadists.' To discuss the media coverage of the attacks, we're joined by Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger who has written about the media coverage of the attacks in Norway for Salon.com." Read the Article Click here for more Truthout articles TRUTHOUT'S BUZZFLASH DAILY HEADLINES There's a simple reason that President Obama will not invoke the 14th Amendment to resolve the debt-ceiling crisis: the Supreme Court. Yes, there is speculation that Obama is too risk averse to assert that the Constitution gives him the power to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling - and that may be true. But Obama and his advisers know that if he bypasses Congress by using the 14th Amendment, it will immediately be challenged in the federal courts - which are loaded with partisan Republican judges - and fast tracked to the Supreme Court. With Scalia having led a partisan majority time and time again - including his stopping of the State Supreme Court-ordered presidential recount in Florida in 2004 so as not to harm the reputation of the presumed winner, George W. Bush, (Scalia wrote in justification of his infamous opinion) - it is a given that five members of the Supreme Court have no compunction about leaving the Constitution in the dust. As BuzzFlash has argued before, despite calling themselves "strict constructionists," the five majority votes on the Supreme Court are anything but. In fact, they often interpret the Constitution to justify their political outlook as they did in Bush v. Gore and Citizens United, and a host of other rulings that have dramatically affected the direction of this nation. Thom Hartmann views the 5-4 majority record as being so significant that they have become a de facto arm of the Republicans in Congress. Hartmann calls the GOP majority on the court the "Five Kings." The 14th Amendment is pretty clear when it comes to the debt ceiling: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." That's about as strict constructionist as you can get in prohibiting Congress from limiting the debt ceiling, even though it has been their tradition to vote on increasing it - as they frequently have done under Republican and Democratic presidents alike. But the "Supreme Court Five" aren't going to really enforce the Constitution as it is written, should Obama invoke the 14th Amendment. They will rule against presidential authority and side with the Republicans in Congress. Because their motivation in high-stakes partisan issues like this is not the law as it is written; it is scoring a victory for their political beliefs and sponsors. That is why President Obama will ultimately not assert the 14th Amendment to resolve the debt-ceiling crisis. The "Five Kings" won't allow him, in the end, to do so. Mark Karlin Editor, BuzzFlash at Truthout Wealth Gaps Widens Between Whites and Minorities Read the Article at The Associated Press The Damage Done to America by Global Warming Would Be Cause for War if Done by Terrorists Read the Article at BuzzFlash Debt-Lock at the DC Corral Read the Article at MSNBC How Boehner's Debt Plan Produces "the Greatest Increase in Poverty and Hardship" in American History Read the Article at ThinkProgress More Loss of American Jobs: GE Moving X-Ray Leadership Team From US to China Read the Article at the Associated Press IMF's Chief Urges Quick US Resolution of Debt Crisis Read the Article at the Voice of America Hoyer: After Default Crisis, Look Forward to Another Government Shutdown Fight Read the Article at Talking Points Memo Click here for more BuzzFlash headlines ---------- Support Truthout with a tax-deductible donation by clicking here. To ensure you receive our messages please add the following address to your email address book: messenger@truthout.org Truthout is a proud member of the Newspaper Guild/CWA, Local 36047 Click here to Subscribe Our Privacy Policy Click here to Unsubscribe

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