thursday reads

Right-wing advocate for domestic terrorism arrested (Hartford Courant):

Internet radio host Hal Turner — accused of inciting Catholics to "take up arms" and singling out two Connecticut lawmakers and a state ethics official on a website — was taken into custody in New Jersey late Wednesday after state Capitol police in Connecticut obtained a warrant for his arrest.

Turner, who has been identified as a white supremacist and anti-Semite by several anti-racism groups, hosts an Internet radio program with an associated blog. On Tuesday, the blog included a post that promised to release the home addresses of state Rep. Michael Lawlor, state Sen. Andrew McDonald and Thomas Jones of the State Ethics Office.

"Mr. Turner's comments are above and beyond the threshold of free speech," Capitol Police Chief Michael J. Fallon said in an e-mail announcing the warrant. "He is inciting others through his website to commit acts of violence and has created fear and alarm. He should be held accountable for his conduct."

The Rachel Maddow Show: Red Alert


E.J. Dionne Jr. gets it:

A media environment that tilts to the right is obscuring what President Obama stands for and closing off political options that should be part of the public discussion.

Yes, you read that correctly: If you doubt that there is a conservative inclination in the media, consider which arguments you hear regularly and which you don't. When Rush Limbaugh sneezes or Newt Gingrich tweets, their views ricochet from the Internet to cable television and into the traditional media. It is remarkable how successful they are in setting what passes for the news agenda.

The power of the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis means that Obama is regularly cast as somewhere on the far left end of a truncated political spectrum. He's the guy who nominates a "racist" to the Supreme Court (though Gingrich retreated from the word yesterday), wants to weaken America's defenses against terrorism and is proposing a massive government takeover of the private economy. Steve Forbes, writing for his magazine, recently went so far as to compare Obama's economic policies to those of Juan Peron's Argentina.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Welcome to a Dying Industry, J-School Grads


America's Best Christian takes time to explain to less informed Christians the curious details of the Lord's concept of marriage.

wednesday reads

Emptywheel: Why Did CIA Hide Dick Cheney's Role in Briefing?


Alaska, Missouri, South Carolina and Texas opt-out of national academic standards.


Tom Engelhardt: To the Graduating Class of American Empire, 2009


New Zealand is ranked at number one, the United States is 83^rd and Iraq remains at the bottom of the ne Global Peace Index.


John Cole: The Genius of Zero Tolerance

tuesday reads

Greg Palast: Grand Theft Auto


Pratap Chatterjee: Is Halliburton Forgiven and Forgotten? Or How to Stay Out of Sight While Profiting From the War in Iraq


BLDGBLOG: Saddam's Palaces: An Interview with Richard Mosse


Bernard Chazelle: From the Oubliettes of History: the Negligibles

monday reads

Domestic terrorist assassinates Dr. George Tiller.

Jesus's Jihadis

McClatchy takes a look at the domestic right wing terrorist suspected in the assassination of Dr. Tiller.


Michael Moore: Goodbye, GM

saturday reads

Amnesty International called Saturday for an independent probe into the number of civilians killed in the final weeks of Sri Lanka's civil war and also urged the UN to reveal its own estimates. (AFP)


One Pissed Off Liberal: GBCW


Violet Blue: Don't Marry Me, Bro


Man who tracked Che for CIA awarded $1 billion in lawsuit (McClatchy)


Car-driven society poses health risk for Americans (Reuters)


Lucky duckies and perverted pandas

friday reads

Scott Horton on the torture photos coverup.


The commander of Fort Campbell army base in Kentucky has ordered a three-day suspension of regular duties to focus on a spike in suicides among his troops amid concern over a wider trend across the armed services. (AFP)


Dispatch from Mogadishu: One week in hell


Foreclosures, mortgage delinquencies climb at record rate.


Tomgram: William Astore, Educating Ourselves to Oblivion

wednesday reads

Sibel Edmonds: Two Sides of the Same Coin


Recently declassified documents obtained by investigators Jeremy Bigwood and Eva Golinger reveal that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has invested more than $97 million in “decentralization” and “regional autonomy” projects and opposition political parties in Bolivia since 2002. (Bolivia Rising)


Andy Kroll: The Greatest Swindle Ever Sold


Scott Horton: Cheney Prepares the Twinkie Defense


Robert Reich: Sotomayor and the Republicans


'Western Germany Wants Stasi's Influence to Remain Hidden' (Spiegel Online)

The revelation that the policeman who shot Berlin student Benno Ohnesorg in 1967 was a spy for the Stasi East German intelligence service has led to an intense historical debate in Germany. Ohnesorg's death radicalized many students and is seen as one of the factors that lead to the 1968 student protest movement and the emergence of the far-left Baader-Meinhof terrorist group.

Now Germany is asking itself what would have happened if people had known that Karl-Heinz Kurras, the policeman who fired the fatal shot and became the epitome of what students saw as an authoritarian West German establishment, was a communist and a Stasi informant? Would 1968 have happened? Would the country have been terrorized by left-wing urban guerrillas for over a decade?

wednesday reads

Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, Unexceptional Americans


Emptywheel: The CIA's Comedy of Briefing List Errors


America's poor are its most generous givers (McClatchy)

The generosity of poor people isn't so much rare as rarely noticed, however. In fact, America's poor donate more, in percentage terms, than higher-income groups do, surveys of charitable giving show. What's more, their generosity declines less in hard times than the generosity of richer givers does.

"The lowest-income fifth (of the population) always give at more than their capacity," said Virginia Hodgkinson, former vice president for research at Independent Sector, a Washington-based association of major nonprofit agencies. "The next two-fifths give at capacity, and those above that are capable of giving two or three times more than they give."

Indeed, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest survey of consumer expenditure found that the poorest fifth of America's households contributed an average of 4.3 percent of their incomes to charitable organizations in 2007. The richest fifth gave at less than half that rate, 2.1 percent.

Darwinius masillae

monday reads

Chris Hedges: The Disease of Permanent War

A record number of suicides has prompted Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli to launch a massive house-cleaning plan with orders to garrison, installation and medical commanders to revive lapsed health and welfare programs, and restore discipline in the barracks.


Glenn Greenwald: The myth of the parasitical bloggers


Torture News Roundup


Unpaid wage claims on the rise in Austin.


Will Patrick Roy return to the Avs as head coach?

friday reads

The Luis Ramirez Murder: A Logical Step in the Process of Establishing a Subhuman Class


Glenn Greenwald: Obama's kinder, gentler military commissions

What makes military commission so pernicious is that they signal that anytime the government wants to imprison people but can't obtain convictions under our normal system of justice, we'll just create a brand new system that diminishes due process just enough to ensure that the government wins. It tells the world that we don't trust our own justice system, that we're willing to use sham trials to imprison people for life or even execute them, and that what Bush did in perverting American justice was not fundamentally or radically wrong, but just was in need of a little tweaking. Like warrantless eavesdropping, extreme secrecy doctrines, concealment of torture evidence, blocking judicial review of executive lawbreaking, one can now add Bush's military commission system, albeit in modified form, to the growing list of despised Bush Terrorism policies that are now policies of Barack Obama.

Training a new generation of brown shirts.

The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence — an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters.

“This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl,” said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run. “It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boy Scouts.”

The training, which leaders say is not intended to be applied outside the simulated Explorer setting, can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out “active shooters,” like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses. In a simulation here of a raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout.

The Cure for Layoffs: Fire the Boss!


Paul Krugman: "I have seen the future, and it won't work."


The MPAA is a 'price-fixing cartel'.

wednesday reads

Tamil war zone hospital hit again.


Glenn Greenwald on Jesse Ventura and the massive expansion of America's "Hard Left.


Conservatives Leading the World Headlong into the 18th Century


Pepe Escobar: Pipeline-Istan


More Than Nuremberg: Thaousands Prosecuted For War Crimes After World War II


Matt Taibbi: Being anti-torture doesn’t make you pro-terrorist

friday reads

Scott Horton: The Bush Era Torture-Homicides


Pentagon’s Black Budget Grows to More Than $50 Billion


Paul Krugman senses that prospects for fundamental financial reform are fading.


Naomi Klein on the bank bailouts.

thursday reads

Dan Froomkin: Complicity -- and Accountability -- on Torture


Scott Horton: Bolton's Spanish Delusions


Glenn Greenwald: What 'Oversight' Means in Washington


The "Churchill gene"

wednesday reads

Jane Hamsher: Bailout Recipients Spent $13 Million Lobbying Against Consumers, For Their Own Bonuses in 1Q 2009


Clear Channel implodes.


U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan kill over 100 civilians.

Taliban takes control of Pakistan's Swat valley.

Spencer Ackerman: Send Warlords, Guns and Money

friday reads

Supreme Court Justice David Souter to retire.


May Day riots start a day early in Berlin.


Orcinus - The Far Right's First 100 Days: Shifting Into Overdrive


The Rude One: Arlen Specter, Tuesday Morning, First Light


Violet Blue: Why the SF Weekly should be 'whipped and gagged'


Rock Paper Scissors Spock Lizard

thursday reads

In a ruling in Madrid today, Judge Baltasar Garzón has announced that an inquiry into the Bush administration’s torture policymakers now will proceed to a formal criminal investigation.


'Probable' case of swine flu closes Austin school. Flu panic sweeps Texas.


Condi Rice pulls a Nixon

monday reads

Could the swine-flu outbreak be linked to a factory farm?


Europeans urged to avoid Mexico and US as swine flu death toll exceeds 100


Scott Horton: Broder for the Defense


Nick Turse: A Tsunami of Hunger


Jürgen Klinsmann sacked.

thursday reads

War Criminals

A newly declassified narrative of the Bush administration's advice to the CIA on harsh interrogations shows that the small group of Justice Department lawyers who wrote memos authorizing harsh interrogation techniques were operating not on their own but with direction from top administration officials, including then-Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Ray McGovern: Obama Plays Hamlet; Shredders Hum

Terry Jones:If Dick Cheney can trumpet the 'success' of his torture policies without fear of retribution, why can't us ordinary criminals?


Lukery: First Merchant Bank exposed

wednesday reads

McClatchy - Report: Abusive tactics used in effort to find Iraq-al Qaida link

The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

Spencer Ackerman: Senate Armed Services Document Outlines How Pentagon Used Torture Resistance Training in Interrogations

A wealth of new details emerged Tuesday about how techniques designed to help captured U.S. troops resist torture formed the basis for the post-9/11 interrogation policies of the Bush-era Pentagon.

Instructors of those techniques proved to be eager in 2002 and 2003 to disseminate them to an emerging crop of inexperienced military interrogators facing the prospect of wresting information out of new captives. “I believe our niche lies in the fact that we can provide the ability to exploit personnel based on how our enemies have done this type of thing over the last five decades,” said Joseph Witsch, an instructor for the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), a component of U.S. Joint Forces Command that oversees the so-called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Evasion (SERE) program for U.S. special forces, during a 2002 training session for U.S. military interrogators, according to a newly released report.

Emptywheel: Did Cheney Order Up Abu Zubaydah’s 83rd Waterboarding?

Moon of Alabama: The Sadism Report

friday reads

Glenn Greenwald on Obama's release of the OLC torture memos.

Didgby on "professional" courtesy.

Christy Hardin Smith asks: Which language is from Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's seminal work The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 and which is from US Department of Justice OLC memoranda issued in the last few years.

Spencer Ackerman on OCL's medieval documents.

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$40M fuel theft prompts global manhunt