More than 50 papers join in front-page (editorial) on climate change

Antarctic Treaty: Lessons for Copenhagen

Source: The Guardian
The Guardian has teamed up with more 50 papers worldwide to run the same front-page leader article calling for action at the climate summit in Copenhagen, which begins tomorrow.

This unprecedented project is the result of months of negotiations between the papers to agree on a final text, in a process that mirrors the kind of diplomatic wrangling among the world's governments that is likely to precede any potential deal on climate change.

Fifty-six papers in 45 countries published in 20 different languages have joined the initiative, and will feature the leader in some form on their front pages.

... Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, said: "Newspapers have never done anything like this before but they have never had to cover a story like this before. No individual newspaper editorial could hope to influence the outcome of Copenhagen but I hope the combined voice of 56 major papers speaking in 20 languages will remind the politicians and negotiators gathering there what is at stake – and persuade them to rise above the rivalries and inflexibility that have stood in the way of a deal." LinkHere

In the USA, only ONE English-language newspaper is part of this: The Miami Herald. Kudos to them, shame on the rest.
Full list of participating newspapers: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/06/paper...

IGNORE the science, go nuclear, think about working families - Australians have voiced their concerns about climate change and want their Prime Minister to listen up.
After two weeks of calling for comment, www.news.com.au has pulled together its Open Letter to Kevin Rudd from the People of Australia from hundreds of suggestions as to what we really want out of the two-week Copenhagen climate change summit which opens tonight in Denmark.

See the final draft of the Letter to Copenhagen from the People of Australia

There's even a request for some Copenhagen cheese among the final 50 selected, which are on their way to his office and will hopefully give the Prime Minister some food for thought in Copenhagen.
Greenpeace have also planned a special message for Mr Rudd, giving him a shock preview of how he'll look in 2020 at Copenhagen International Airport.

It's commissioned a series of billboards featuring the world's leaders apologising in 2020 for their inaction on climate change in 2009.

Mr Rudd joins an aged US President Barack Obama, Germany's Angela Merkel and Brtain's Gordon Brown, looking mournful and claiming: "I'm sorry. We could have stopped catastrophic climate chage ... we didn't." LinkHere
See the billboards here - Kevin Rudd's at No 10

Threats Against Obama Spiked Early

WASHINGTON — The young Marine’s rogue mission, laid out with maps and photographs, was as straightforward as it was chilling. He called it Operation Patriot.

The Marine, Kody Brittingham, a 20-year-old lance corporal, wrote that he had taken an oath to “protect against all enemies, both foreign and domestic.” In a signed “letter of intent,” tucked away in his barracks at Camp Lejeune, he identified a “domestic enemy” he planned to eliminate last winter: President Obama.

The details of this threat, which were revealed at his arraignment hearing in North Carolina, have not previously been reported. Mr. Brittingham pleaded guilty in August and awaits sentencing on charges of threatening to kill the president and attempted armed robbery.

It is one of the cases in a spike of threats against Mr. Obama before his inauguration and in the early months of his presidency, raising deep concerns inside the Secret Service and at the White House.

The threats have leveled off in recent months, officials said, and Mr. Obama now receives about the same as his two most recent predecessors. But several officials said they took no solace that the volume of reports had receded because it was the nature of the threats that concern them and because the factors behind the increase remain — Mr. Obama’s race prime among them.

While the story of the Virginia couple who crashed a state dinner last month has drawn much attention to the security around Mr. Obama, it is threats from far beyond the White House gates that have most turned up the pressure on the Secret Service.
LinkHere

Nicolas Cage wins United Nations humanitarian award

Source: BBC News

Hollywood film star Nicolas Cage has been given an award for his humanitarian work by the United Nations in New York.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon presented the 45-year-old Oscar winner with the Global Citizen of the Year award for humanitarian endeavours.
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The star said his role would be "to shine a spotlight on the need for global justice".
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Cage, an Amnesty International advocate, has already donated $2 million (£1.2m) to establish a fund to help former child soldiers and also led a campaign around his film, Lord of War, to raise awareness about international arms control.
LinkHere

How is health reform faring in the senate?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Olbermann Names "Fox & Friends" 'Worst Persons In The World'

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Sue the B****** ass of, When did that piece of work become Judge and Jury?

Nancy Grace Interview Contributed To Melinda Duckett Suicide, Professor Says

OCALA, Fla. — A Harvard professor says CNN Headline News host Nancy Grace's relentless questioning of a Florida mother three years ago contributed to her suicide, according to a filing in the family's wrongful death case.

Grace launched aggressive nightly coverage of 2-year-old Trenton Duckett's case shortly after he disappeared in 2006, usually with a collection of analysts. When the boy's mother, Melinda Duckett, appeared by telephone two weeks into the case, speculation was beginning to narrow on her possible involvement.

Dr. Harold J. Bursztajn, a clinical professor of psychiatry, wrote in a filing this week. that Grace "struck a highly accusatory tone."

The professor saw "a distraught young woman who is subject to repeated and increasingly sharp questioning by a hostile interviewer who displays increasing suspicion and anger towards Ms. Duckett."

The next day, the 21-year-old Duckett shot herself in the head.

"Her apparently unanticipated public humiliation on the nationally televised program in question was a substantial contributing cause of her suicide," Bursztajn wrote.

The family claims Grace's questioning, along with the network's decision to air the pre-taped interview the day Duckett committed suicide, inflicted severe emotional distress.

Grace and the network have denied any involvement in the suicide, and a CNN spokeswoman declined comment on the filing.

Trenton has still not been found, and Duckett is the only suspect.
LinkHere

Obama’s Logic Is No Match for Afghanistan

We want to believe that Obama’s marvelous powers of reason can check a ruthless enemy and reverse decades of tragic history in one of the world’s most treacherous backwaters.

Obama’s speech struck me as the sincere product of serious deliberations, an earnest attempt to apply his formidable intelligence to one of the most daunting Rubik’s Cubes of foreign policy America has ever known. But some circles of hell can’t be squared. What he’s ended up with is a too-clever-by-half pushmi-pullyu holding action that lacks both a credible exit strategy and the commitment of its two most essential partners, a legitimate Afghan government and the American people. Obama’s failure illuminated the limits of even his great powers of reason.

The state dinner crashers delineated those limits too. This was the second time in a month — after the infinitely more alarming bloodbath at Fort Hood — that a supposedly impregnable bastion of post-9/11 American security was easily breached. Yes, the crashers are laughable celebrity wannabes, but there was nothing funny about what they accomplished on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Their ruse wasn’t “reality” television — it was reality, period, with no quotation marks. It was a symbolic indication (and, luckily, only symbolic) of how unbridled irrationality harnessed to sheer will, whether ludicrous in the crashers’ case or homicidal in the instance of the Fort Hood gunman, can penetrate even our most secure fortifications. Both incidents stand as a haunting reproach to the elegant powers of logic with which Obama tried to sell his exquisitely calibrated plan to vanquish Al Qaeda and its mad brethren.
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Americans want our country to be secure. Most want Obama to succeed. And so we hope that we won’t get bogged down in Afghanistan while our adversaries regroup elsewhere, that the casualties and costs can be contained, that the small, primitive Afghan Army (ravaged by opium, illiteracy, incompetence and a 25 percent attrition rate) will miraculously stand up so we can stand down. We want to believe that Obama’s marvelous powers of reason can check a ruthless enemy and reverse decades of tragic history in one of the world’s most treacherous backwaters.

That’s the bet Obama made. As long as our wars remain sacrifice-free, safely buried in the back pages behind Tiger Woods and reality television stunts, he’ll be able to pursue it. But I keep returning to the crashers at the gates, who have no respect for our president’s orderliness of mind and action. All it takes is a few of them at the wrong time and wrong place, whether in Afghanistan or Pakistan or America or sites unknown, and all bets will be off LinkHere

JUST A REMINDER
The Crushing Legacy of Bush and Cheney

By Joe Conason
From now on, the headlines about Afghanistan will be slugged “Obama’s War,” and perhaps that is fair enough given the president’s many endorsements of what he has called a war of necessity. It would be much less fair, however, to ignore the events that led us to this moment, when any choice offers no great guarantee of progress and no small prospect of trouble.

Those events began with the inexplicable decision by officials of the previous administration to allow Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other ranking leaders of al-Qaida to escape from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001. At the time, as a new Senate report on the battle of Tora Bora recalls, Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, and Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, decided not to augment the tiny contingent of special operations troops on the ground with sufficient force to capture or kill b in Laden and his deputies. They later claimed to be worried that “too many American troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency,” a rationale that can only evoke bitter laughter now.

None of the reasons offered back then for inaction at Tora Bora made sense after the outrage of Sept. 11, when the entire world, including the Afghan people, were cheering the U.S. invasion. The pattern of deception that later led to war in Iraq began with expressions of doubt by both Franks and Vice President Dick Cheney about bin Laden’s presence in Tora Bora—a doubt that none of the commanders on the ground shared and that always sounded more like an excuse than an explanation. If there was any chance that the perpetrators of Sept. 11 could be found in those mountains, then maximum force should have been deployed as rapidly as possible.

What we know now, of course, is that Cheney, Rumsfeld and President Bush himself were distracted from the vital necessity of victory in Afghanistan—which meant not only driving out the Taliban but installing a real government in their place—by their obsession with Iraq. Not only did the al-Qaida leadership escape, but so did Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, who returned to mount a threatening insurgency two years later, just as the Bush White House and the Pentagon were declaring “mission accomplished” in Baghdad.

The resulting neglect of Afghanistan—with all the corruption, disillusionment and anger that have ensued—had reached a critical stage when the Bush administration finally departed. Its own commanders were left behind to warn the new president that after eight years of war, the enemy had gained the upper hand.
LinkHere

Al Franken fallout has GOP fuming

Source: Politico

Republican senators feel burned by Al Franken — and not by his old jokes.

The Republicans are steamed at Franken because partisans on the left are using a measure he sponsored to paint them as rapist sympathizers — and because Franken isn’t doing much to stop them.

“Trying to tap into the natural sympathy that we have for this victim of this rape —and use that as a justification to frankly misrepresent and embarrass his colleagues, I don’t think it’s a very constructive thing,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said in an interview.
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In a chamber where relationship-building is seen as critical, some GOP senators question whether Franken’s handling of the amendment could damage his ability to work across the aisle. Soon after Tennessee GOP Sens. Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander co-wrote an op-ed in a local newspaper defending their votes against the Franken measure, the Minnesota Democrat confronted each senator separately to dispute their column — and grew particularly angry in a tense exchange with Corker.
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At issue is an amendment to the Pentagon spending bill that would bar “future and existing” federal contracts to defense contractors and subcontractors “at any tier” who mandate employees go through a company’s arbitration process for workplace discrimination claims — including claims of sexual assault. The measure passed 68-30, with 10 Republicans voting yes and 30 voting no.
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“I don’t know what his motivation was for taking us on, but I would hope that we won’t see a lot of Daily Kos-inspired amendments in the future coming from him,” said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, No. 4 in the Senate Republican leadership. “I think hopefully he’ll settle down and do kind of the serious work of legislating that’s important to Minnesota.”

LinkHere

BREAKING: Sanders Puts Official Senate Hold on Bernanke Nomination

Source: Open Left
by: David Sirota
Wed Dec 02, 2009 at 18:50

Per Chris's whip count on the Bernanke nomination, this is pretty huge news from my old boss:

WASHINGTON, December 2 - Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today placed a hold on the nomination of Ben Bernanke for a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve.

"The American people overwhelmingly voted last year for a change in our national priorities to put the interests of ordinary people ahead of the greed of Wall Street and the wealthy few," Sanders said. "What the American people did not bargain for was another four years for one of the key architects of the Bush economy."

Ya know, with Republicans and corporate Democrats happily using the Senate power of obstruction so much to stop progressive priorities, it's about time progressive Senators start using that same power of obstruction for progressive ends.
LinkHere

Andrew Sullivan: I'm Breaking From The Right

I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.

Reacting to prominent conservative blogger Charles Johnson's announcement that he would not follow the right wing off a cliff, Andrew Sullivan is offering his own reasons for parting with the movement.

Johnson, who blogs at Little Green Footballs, wrote on Monday that fanatic politicians, racism, sexism, anti-Islamism, hate speech, conspiracy theories and other troubling trends on the right wing have led him to make a formal break.

"The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff," he concluded. "I won't be going over the cliff with them."

Andrew Sullivan, though not as consistent a conservative as Johnson, felt compelled to emphasize his own separation from the right wing. Among other things, he writes:

I cannot support a movement that holds that purely religious doctrine should govern civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.

I cannot support a movement that is deeply homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.

I cannot support a movement which has no real respect for the institutions of government and is prepared to use any tactic and any means to fight political warfare rather than conduct a political conversation.
LinkHere

MSNBC reports about Sarah Palin's bus tour hoax and mentions "Palingates"!

MSNBC mentions "Palingates"!

Citizen-bloggers can make it into the mainstream media - here is more proof for it. This is good news for EVERY blogger!

MSNBC: Can you now please start to report about Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy with Trig ("babygate")?

It's about time that the mainstream media finally does its job and reports this huge scandal!
LinkHere

America without a strong middle class? Unthinkable, but the once-solid foundation is shaking.

Can you imagine an America without a strong middle class? If you can, would it still be America as we know it?

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.

Families have survived the ups and downs of economic booms and busts for a long time, but the fall-behind during the busts has gotten worse while the surge-ahead during the booms has stalled out. In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family. While Wall Street executives and others who owned lots of stock celebrated how good the recovery was for them, middle class families were left empty-handed.

The crisis facing the middle class started more than a generation ago. Even as productivity rose, the wages of the average fully-employed male have been flat since the 1970s.
LinkHere

Documents reveal new information about destruction of torture tapes (& Bush WH Role

Source: The Hill
Documents reveal new information about destruction of torture tapes
By Alex Abdo, legal fellow, ACLU National Security Project - 12/01/09 04:47 PM ET

Records obtained late last month by the American Civil Liberties Union reveal new information about the CIA's destruction of videotapes depicting the brutal interrogation of prisoners at CIA black sites, including the precise date the tapes were destroyed and evidence that the White House was involved in early discussions about the proposed destruction.

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The new index also lists the earliest known record of White House participation in discussions about destroying the tapes – an e-mail dated February 22, 2003 revealing that CIA officials met with Bush administration officials to discuss how the agency should respond to a letter from Representative Jane Harman (D-CA) advising the agency not to destroy the tapes. While it was known previously that the White House participated in discussions about the disposition of the tapes, this is the earliest record to date of any such discussions and provides a damning timeline that sheds even more light on the extent of the Bush administration's micromanagement of the CIA's torture program.

Serious questions remain about the extent to which the Bush White House and other government agencies were complicit in the CIA’s destruction of the tapes, and releasing these and other documents in full is essential to fully understanding the responsibility of high-level officials for torture.

LinkHere

France, Germany reject US appeals to boost Afghan force

Source: AFP
(AFP) – 3 hours ago

PARIS — France and Germany refused US requests to immediately promise extra combat troops for Afghanistan, frustrating President Barack Obama's hopes that more allies would bolster his troop surge.

Britain has already offered an extra 500 troops and Italy has said it will send an unspecified number, while Poland is considering deploying several hundred more soldiers.

US officials say Obama is about to announce a surge of 30,000 troops and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown this week predicted other nations would provide another 10,000.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy's special envoy to the region said late Tuesday France will not deploy extra combat troops to Afghanistan but may send more military trainers for Afghan forces.
LinkHere

Desertions undermine Afghan army

An exclusive Al Jazeera investigation has found that the number of existing security forces in Afghanistan has been greatly exaggerated with widespread desertions by members of the army and police.

Senior officials in the Obama administration say US troops will start to return home from July of 2011.

That is when Afghan forces are supposed to be ready to take over.

But an investigation by Al Jazeera's James Bays shows that may not be feasible
LinkHere

Blackwater founder cutting ties with company(Erik Prince)

Source: San Francisco Chronicle/AP

The man who built Blackwater USA into one of the world's most respected and reviled defense contractors will no longer be involved in the company's operations.

A spokeswoman for the company, now called Xe (zee), said Wednesday that Erik Prince will relinquish involvement in its day-to-day operations and give up some of his ownership rights. Prince had appointed a new president and chief operating officer in a management shake-up earlier this year.

Spokeswoman Stacy DeLuke says Prince felt he was "constantly being thrown under the bus" after serving the country for years. Prince's company did years of work for the government but has been dogged by a series of federal investigations into its work.

Vanity Fair magazine was first to report Prince's feelings about his treatment.
LinkHere

Australian Senate defeats carbon trading bill

Source: The Guardian

Defeat of carbon trading bill delivers blow to government that had hoped to set an example at international climate change talks in Copenhagen

Toni O'Loughlin in Sydney guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 December 2009 09.35 GMT

Australia has dumped its plan to cut the nation's carbon emissions for the second time this year after climate sceptics seized control of the conservative opposition.

The Senate, where the government of the prime minister, Kevin Rudd, does not hold a majority, rejected 41-33 his administration's proposal for Australia to become one of the first countries to install a so-called cap-and-trade system to slash the amount of heat-trapping pollution that industries pump into the air.

...But parliamentarians from the Australian Greens party welcomed the demise of the Labor government's carbon emissions trading scheme, calling it "a dirty deal, an exercise in double think, and a deceipt on the Australian people". LinkHere

Tom Friedman: 'After 9/11, I Overreacted'

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Thomas Friedman
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Thomas Friedman Sums Up the Iraq War: "Suck. On. This."

LinkHere

Lou Dobbs: 'Who The Hell Does This President Think He Is?'

Why, he was voted in a landslide your President, and Leader of the free world WANKER, and by the way, who the hell do you think you are, to ask that question?

GoDems2012

President Obama is going to cause these people to go into full frontal meltdown by his second term. I'm talking straight jackets, people.

LMAO

CNN host Lou Dobbs lashed out at President Obama on Tuesday for working on an international climate change treaty, suggesting it was a step toward monarchy and demanding, "Who the hell does this president think he is?"

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), a long-time climate change denier, said the president was planning to commit the U.S. to emissions standards set by House legislation that is stalled in the Senate.

"Senator, this begs the question, if I may put it forward right now: Who the hell does this president think he is?" Dobbs said angrily.

"I don't know, because you can't do that," Inhofe responded. "And I think it's certainly disingenuous to mislead countries into thinking that a president is -- you know, this is not a kingdom, He's not able to do that."

"Not yet!" Dobbs cut in. LinkHere

Obama Adviser Calls Out Cheney: You Walked Away From Afghanistan

Vice President Dick Cheney said he "basically" didn't think he or his old boss held any responsibility for the current state of affairs in Afghanistan. On MSNBC today, National Security Council Chief of Staff Denis McDonough pointed out that not only does Cheney bear some responsibility for ignoring Afghanistan for the past eight years -- he also "walked away" from the country when he was Secretary of Defense in the 1990s. LinkHere

Obama's Afghanistan speech

Jon Stewart Takes On White House Party Crashers

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