european politicos protest doj wikileaks-twitter probe

CNET | On Friday, Twitter notified a handful of its subscribers with ties to Wikileaks that the U.S. Justice Department had obtained a court order for their "subscriber account information." The order covers accounts linked to Wikileaks including those of Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private accused of leaking classified documents; Seattle-based Wikileaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum; Dutch hacker and XS4ALL Internet provider co-founder Rop Gonggrijp; and Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament.

The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe hosted Assange and Jónsdóttir at an event in July 2010 devoted to protecting free speech. (Iceland enjoys close economic ties with the EU and has applied for full membership.)

We defend "the right to offend which is an essential part of freedom of expression, and we will stand with those who come under pressure to freely express their views," Alexander Lambsdorff, a member of the European Parliament from Germany, said at the event.

Around the same time, the U.S. government began a criminal investigation of Wikileaks and Assange after the Web site began releasing what would become a deluge of confidential military and State Department files. In November, Attorney General Eric Holder said that the probe is "ongoing," and a few weeks later an attorney for Assange said he had been told that a grand jury had been empaneled in Alexandria, Va.

The court order to Twitter (PDF), signed by U.S. Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan in Alexandria, Va., is the first public evidence of this investigation. The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, CNET previously reported, will represent Jónsdóttir (but not the other account holders) and oppose the court order sought by prosecutors.

"It sort of feels to me as if they've become quite desperate," Jónsdóttir said at an conference in Canada today, referring to the Justice Department. She said prosecutors shouldn't expect to obtain much from accounts used by such a security-conscious, encryption-savvy cadre of activists: "None of us would ever use Twitter messaging to say anything sensitive."

Prosecutors send subpoenas to and serve other legal process on Web sites and Internet service providers every day. But because Jónsdóttir is one of 63 members of Iceland's national parliament who serves on the foreign affairs committee, the order appears to have caused an international diplomatic incident outside of Europe as well: last weekend, the Icelandic government summoned U.S. ambassador Luis Arreaga to a meeting.

Earlier today, P.J. Crowley, the U.S. State Department's spokesman, gave a speech in Washington, D.C. that defended the Obama administration's legal pursuit of Wikileaks:

WikiLeaks is about the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. It is not an exercise in Internet freedom. It is about the legitimate investigation of a crime. It is about the need to continue to protect sensitive information while enabling the free flow of public information...

We remain arguably the most transparent society in the world. The American people, through innovations including C-SPAN, are a well-informed citizenry, which is crucial to a functioning democracy. We can have a discussion about how well our democracy is functioning, and whether political figures are spending more time pandering or posturing on television than actually governing.

We are a nation of laws, and the laws of our country have been violated. Since we function under the rule of law, it is appropriate and necessary that we investigate and prosecute those who have violated U.S law. Some have suggested that the ongoing investigation marks a retreat from our commitment to freedom of expression, freedom of the press and Internet freedom. Nonsense. These are universal principles and our commitment is unwavering.

A preliminary legal brief (PDF) that Assange's lawyers filed with the London court today takes issue with that characterization of the U.S. legal system, arguing: "If Mr. Assange were rendered to the USA, without assurances that the death penalty would not be carried out, there is a real risk that he could be made subject to the death penalty. It is well-known that prominent figures have implied, if not stated outright, that Mr. Assange should be executed."

have wikileaks msm "collaborators" edited cable contents?

IsraelShamir | Although the net tightens around Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the contents of the US embassy cables have been doled out to us in spoonfuls. Worse, The Guardian edits and distorts the cables in order to protect their readers from unflattering remarks about how their corporations behave overseas. This is not a conjecture but a fact: The Guardian has deliberately excised portions of published cables to hide evidence of corruption.

A year ago, on the 25th of January, 2010, the US Embassy in Astana, Kazakhstan sent out the secret cable ASTANA 000072, entitled KAZAKHSTAN: MONEY AND POWER. The cable chronicled the US Ambassador’s private dinner with a senior Kazakh government official named Maksat Idenov. At the time, Idenov headed the Kazakh state oil and gas company and represented the state in its dealings with foreign oil companies, including British Gas and ENI. A redacted version of the cable has been published, and so we have been given the rare privilege of viewing The Guardian’s editing process in action. It looks like nothing so much as political self-censorship.

Here is the relevant portion of the Astana cable; the words removed by The Guardian are printed in bold:

“… market economy means capitalism, which means big money, which means large bribes for the best connected.”

Why does The Guardian wish to conceal evidence of corruption in Kazakhstan? Are there Blairites ensconced in The Guardian’s editing room? It does seem like someone at The Guardian wants to save us from becoming disillusioned about free markets. Is the free market incompatible with free speech? The Guardian is not shy about revealing to their readers that capitalism means “big money”, but a discussion of what big money can do to a foreign government is strictly verboten. Idenov is not some discontented outsider; he is a power player in the heart of the machine. He knows of which he speaks. The readers of The Guardian may never get to hear it, but the “big money” of capitalism does in reality result in “large bribes for the best connected”.

Just before dinner, Idenov was overheard “barking into his cell phone” at British Gas (BG) Country Director Mark Rawlings “who is ‘still playing games with Mercator's James Giffin,’ the notorious AmCit fixer indicted for large-scale bribery on oil deals in the 1990s, whose case drags on in the Southern District Court of New York. Idenov tells him: ‘Mark, stop being an idiot! Stop tempting fate! Stop communicating with an indicted criminal!’ ”

Again, the bold and very relevant information of the Astana cable has been removed from publication so that British taxpayers might not learn that the regional director of a prominent British company insists on dealing with an indicted grafter. The readers of The Guardian may never know that the case of American citizen (“AmCit”) James Giffen (spelled incorrectly in the cable) was dismissed by US District Judge William H. Pauley III because the bribes he gave to the Kazakh officials were authorized by the CIA. The judge publicly lauded the “notorious fixer” as a Cold War warrior who helped the Jewish cause (always an exonerating feature within the US justice system) and stated for the record that “his business dealings were CIA-authorized operations”.

“Mr. Giffen was a significant source of information for the U.S. government and a conduit for secret communications to the Soviet Union and its leadership during the Cold War,” Pauley said. In Kazakhstan, Giffen was advancing US interests, including corporate interests. “He acted as a conduit for communications on issues vital to America’s national interest in the region,” the judge said.

“Oil industry middleman James H. Giffen, once accused of funneling $84 million in bribes to the president of Kazakhstan and other officials” walked away a free and rich man. Perhaps our man Rawlings knew a little more about Giffen’s CIA connections than did the Ambassador and Mr. Idenov.

The Guardian’s final cut takes the proverbial cake. Idenov goes on to say that both BG and Italy's ENI are corrupt, and that bribe-hungry Kazakh officials are itching to work with them. This portion of the cable was completely excised.

The only portion of the cable that The Guardian felt worthy of highlight was that the currently favoured presidential son-in-law was “on the Forbes 500 list of billionaires (as is his wife separately)”. Furthermore, the redacted cable was dropped onto the pages of The Guardian without any background information or further comment. Kazakhstan is not next-door, and Guardian readers deserve better. Here is what they left out of the story: Idenov left the state’s service in May 2010 and in July he re-emerged as –surprise, surprise - the Senior Vice President for Strategic Planning of ENI. Yes, none other than that selfsame “corrupt” ENI he dealt with from his ministerial desk.

The Astana cable is a microcosm of the robbery of the ex-Soviet space by Western corporations. From it we learn that bribes are authorized by the CIA and that the grafters are exonerated by the US courts. We learn that Harvard-trained lawyers like Mr. Idenov take full advantage of the revolving door between positions of state and the Western corporations that rob it. In short, we learn that “capitalism means large bribes for the best connected.” The readers of The Guardian, of course, missed out on all this.

is free will simply a myth?

Independent | The uncomfortable truth about mind control. In the Sixties, a groundbreaking series of experiments found that 65 per cent of us would kill if ordered to do so. We have vain brains; we see ourselves as better than we really are. We like to think that we exercise free will, that put into a situation where we were challenged to do something we thought unacceptable then we'd refuse. But, if you believe that, then you are probably deluded.

I make this claim, based partly on the work of psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram devised and carried out ingenious experiments that exposed the frailty and self-delusion that are central to our lives. He showed how easy it is to make ordinary people do terrible things, that "evil" often happens for the most mundane of reasons.

I first read about Milgram's work when I was a banker in the Seventies, working in the City. I was so fascinated by his ideas that I re-trained as a doctor, with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist. Instead I became a science journalist. Recently I got the chance to make The Brain: A Secret History
, a television series which reveals how much we have learnt about ourselves through the work of some of the 20th century's most influential, and deeply flawed, psychologists.

In the course of making the series we found rare archive and first-hand accounts of the many inventive and sometimes sinister ways in which experimental psychology has been used to probe, tease, control and manipulate human behaviour. High on the list of psychologists I wanted to learn more about was Stanley Milgram.

Milgram once wrote that we are "puppets controlled by the strings of society". Yet what is also true is that not all puppets jump when their strings are pulled. Many of the fast-food managers who were rung up the "policeman" refused to follow his orders. In Milgram's own experiment, although 65 per cent of the volunteers were prepared to give apparently lethal electric shocks, that still left 35 per cent who would not.

What no experimenter has yet been able to predict are the characteristics that mark out those who will rebel from the rest. The only way you will ever know how you measure up is when you find yourself tested. You have a one in three chance of passing.

they can't get away from themselves fast enough now...,

hate encoded in conservative cultural DNA...,

Guardian | In the US, where hate rules at the ballot box, this tragedy has been coming for a long time. The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords may lead to the temporary hibernation of rightwing rage, but it is encoded in conservative DNA.

It was instructive to read elected Republicans' official statements in response to the Gabrielle Giffords shooting for what they did not say. The House Speaker, John Boehner, said: "An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve. Acts and threats of violence against public officials have no place in our society. Our prayers are with congresswoman Giffords, her staff, all who were injured and their families. This is a sad day for our country." Arizona Senator John McCain issued the following: "I am horrified by the violent attack on representative Gabrielle Giffords and many other innocent people by a wicked person who has no sense of justice or compassion. I pray for Gabby and the other victims, and for the repose of the souls of the dead and comfort for their families. Whoever did this, whatever their reason, they are a disgrace to Arizona, this country and the human race."

All well and good, and I have no doubt every word is sincere. But you'll note that they are silent on the question of the violent rhetoric that emanates from the rightwing of American society. You don't have to believe that alleged shooter, Jared Loughner, is a card-carrying Tea Party member (he evidently is not) to see some kind of connection between that violent rhetoric and what happened in Arizona on Saturday.

Is he a nut? Of course he's a nut. By definition, anyone who shoots innocent people like that has a screw loose. But nuts come in many varieties. There are some who think Dick Cheney planned 9/11, others who believe the CIA has installed eavesdropping devices in their fillings, and still others who insist they're the reincarnation of Mary Queen of Scots. So what particular type of nut is Loughner? We don't have a full picture yet. But we have enough of one. His coherent ravings included the conviction that the constitution assured him that "you don't have to accept the federalist laws". He called a female classmate who had an abortion a "terrorist".

In sum, he had political ideas, which not everyone does. Many of them (not all, but most) were right wing. He went to considerable expense and trouble to shoot a high-profile Democrat, at point-blank range right through the brain. What else does one need to know? For anyone to attempt to insist that the violent rhetoric so regularly heard in this country had no likely effect on this young man is to enshroud oneself in dishonesty and denial.

the rightwing's murky landscape...,

NYTimes | When John F. Kennedy visited Dallas in November of 1963, Texas was awash in right-wing anger — over perceived cold-war betrayals, over desegregation, over the perfidies of liberalism in general. Adlai Stevenson, then ambassador to the U.N., had been spit on during his visit to the city earlier that fall. The week of Kennedy’s arrival, leaflets circulated in Dallas bearing the president’s photograph and the words “Wanted For Treason.”

But Lee Harvey Oswald was not a right-winger, not a John Bircher, not a segregationist. Instead, he was a Marxist of sorts (albeit one disillusioned by his experiences in Soviet Russia), an activist on behalf of Castro’s Cuba, and a man whose previous plot had been aimed at a far-right ex-general named Edwin Walker. The anti-Kennedy excesses of Texas conservatives were real enough, but the president’s assassin acted on a far more obscure set of motivations.

Nine years after Kennedy was killed, George Wallace embarked on his second campaign for the presidency. This was the early 1970s, the high tide of far-left violence — the era of the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army — and Wallace’s race-baiting politics made him an obvious target for protests. On his final, fateful day of campaigning, he faced a barrage of coins, oranges, rocks and tomatoes, amid shouts of “remember Selma!” and “Hitler for vice president!”

But Arthur Bremer, who shot Wallace that afternoon, paralyzing him from the waist down, had only a tenuous connection to left-wing politics. He didn’t care much about Wallace’s views on race: he just wanted to assassinate somebody (Richard Nixon had been his original target), as “a statement of my manhood for the world to see.”

It’s possible that Jared Lee Loughner, the young man behind Saturday’s rampage in Tucson, will have a more direct connection to partisan politics than an earlier generation’s gunmen did. Indeed, many observers seem to be taking a kind of comfort from that possibility: there’s been a rush to declare this tragedy a teachable moment — an opportunity for people to cool their rhetoric, abandon their anger, and renounce the kind of martial imagery that inspired Sarah Palin’s PAC to place a target over Gabrielle Giffords’s district just months before Loughner gunned down the Arizona congresswoman.

But chances are that Loughner’s motives will prove as irreducibly complex as those of most of his predecessors in assassination. Violence in American politics tends to bubble up from a world that’s far stranger than any Glenn Beck monologue — a murky landscape where worldviews get cobbled together from a host of baroque conspiracy theories, and where the line between ideological extremism and mental illness gets blurry fast.

the iron heel

Video - Excerpt from Jack London's 1908 Classic The Iron Heel

Wikipedia | The Iron Heel is a dystopian novel by American writer Jack London, first published in 1907.

Generally considered to be "the earliest of the modern Dystopian," it chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States. It is arguably the novel in which Jack London's socialist views are most explicitly on display. A forerunner of soft science fiction novels and stories of the 1960s and 1970s, the book stresses future changes in society and politics while paying much less attention to technological changes.[citation needed]

The book is uncommon among London's writings (and in the literature of the time in general) in being a first-person narrative of a woman protagonist written by a man.

Video - Books of 1908.

capital's war against wikileaks

Video - What is the Matrix?

Al-Jazeera | As a political theorist, Assange leaves something to be desired. "Neocorporatism" describes a system in which capital and labour are enmeshed in an integrated but ultimately dependent relationship with a powerful and autonomous state apparatus - an update of the triangular relationship that enabled unprecedented economic growth and gains for the working class in the West in the decades after World War II.

Ideologically, this kind of close working relationship between government, big business and organised labour is the antithesis of the neoliberal system WikiLeaks seeks to combat.

But Assange is right that there is something "neo", if not exactly new, in the way the corporate sector is behaving today and its relationship with government. It lies in the embrace - or better, re-embrace - of finance capitalism and militaristic empire and the military industrial complex that sustains it.

Whether preying on unwitting consumers in middle America or preying on suspected insurgents in the Middle East, these are two of the most secretive sectors of the American economy. They depend on the public knowing as little as possible about their inner workings to secure the greatest possible freedom of action, power and profits.

The power of secrecy
Assage's abandonment by the Swiss banking system and its American corporate cousins is thus not surprising. Few industries have used secrecy and lack of disclosure more effectively than the banking, financial services and credit card industries.

Indeed, their secretive business practises are central to their constant ability to rake in enormous profits at the expense of working and middle class Americans through monopolising trading systems, charging morally usurious interest rates and fees, and engaging in other practises that would make even the most cold-hearted lone shark blush.

If the grand bargain between workers, capitalists and governments enabled the first two post-World War II generations to move from high school right into the middle class, this road was irreparably damaged by the 1980s, when the neoliberal Right first came to power.

As the United States entered its long and painful era of deindustrialization American foreign policy became more aggressively militaristic; and so joining the military as opposed to GM or Ford became one of the few routes to secure any kind of stable economic future (as long as you stayed in the military).

Not surprisingly, profits from the financial sector surpassed that of manufacturing in the early 1990s and haven't dropped since. But these profits and the economic growth they generated have relied disproportionately on government and consumer debt and a hollowing out of the manufacturing sector, which together helped make the US the "sick man of the globe", as one senior corporate economist.

For their part, GM, Ford and Chrysler simultaneously focused most of their energies on producing comparatively profitable gas-guzzlers like SUVs while establishing financial services arms that quickly became responsible for a substantial share of their profits (in some years upwards of 90 percent of profits are so derived).

Their lending practises, it's worth noting, included the kinds of "liar" home loans, given out with little concern over the ability of borrowers to pay them, that precipitated the global economic crisis of 2007 till today.

Financialisation and history
None of these practises would have withstood the light of public scrutiny, and it was only the corporatisation - in good measure, financialization - of American politics that allowed them to flourish in the last thirty years. Few enterprises threaten that secrecy as much as WikiLeaks and its laser-like focus on openness, which is why its actions are viewed in Washington as "striking at the very heart of the global economy".

The "financialisation" of the economy represents the increasing dominance of the financial industries in the overall economy, taking over "the dominant economic, cultural, and political role in a national economy".

Crucially, this process isn't unique to the United States; it also happened to previous empires, like the Hapsburg's, Dutch and British empires, at precisely the eras they lost their dominant global position. In all cases, financialism and militarism went hand in hand, as first pointed out by the British historian John Hobson's famous 1902 book Imperialism: A Study.

In it, Hobson argued that the monopolisation of the financial sector created a new oligarchy that linked together the large banks and industrial firms together with "war mongers and speculators" which encouraged imperialism to secure markets for the surplus products produced by corporations.

naked capitalism

Video - Old commercial for the The Lodge.

NYTimes | Dallas clubs run the gamut, from parolee and sailors-on-leave sorts of dives where a mild-mannered writer has no business being, to the high-end establishments with their slathers of French Quarter swank, heavy on gilt and red-velvet. At the Lodge, Dallas’s most upscale club, alcohol sales are up more than 11 percent from last year. “We’re doing better than real estate,” is how Michael Precker, the co-manager, put it.

Even in a market as competitive as Dallas, which is home to upward of 40 topless clubs, neither Mr. Precker nor Dawn Rizos, the chief executive of the Lodge, could think of a single club that’s closed its doors during the past two years. But what, a neophyte might wonder, made Dallas a mecca for strip clubs?

“Because we’re in the Bible Belt,” said Ms. Rizos. “There’s a church on every block, and men just like to sneak around. Most of our customers are married men. They get a little bored with their wives, they can come in here and get some flirtation, our girls make them feel good and special, then they go home and feel so guilty about it that they treat their wives really nicely.”

“It’s very Baptist,” she continued. “If you’re going to give up sin, you got to sin.”

We were having this conversation in the Champagne Room, which with its oak barrels, jeroboams and country-manor décor could pass for the tasting room of a Napa winery. The Library Room features dark wood paneling, club chairs and shelves lined with books-by-the-foot; think of the Harvard Club, except with lots of beautiful, naked women. Ms. Rizos, the daughter of two doctors and sister to three more, opened the Lodge in 1996, in part with money invested from her mother and siblings. (“No bank was going to lend me money to build this place,” she snorted.)

Ms. Rizos was determined to offer the best food, the prettiest women, the most luxurious setting. She was equally determined that the Lodge would be a good place to work, and so the club has an on-site spa and salon for employees, an on-site wardrobe service, a full-time house mother and a points system for bonuses. Dancers can get tax and investment advice, as well as tuition money for college.

“This is a club that’s structured for the girls to make money,” one dancer told me, a young woman from Milwaukee who traveled to Dallas solely to work at the Lodge. “Most clubs want their cut of pretty much anything that runs through your hands, and this club isn’t like that.”

Be smart, Ms. Rizos and Mr. Precker tell their dancers. Save your money, get educated, buy property. Plan for life after dancing. Some of the waitresses make over $100,000 a year, the top dancers well in excess of that. Ms. Rizos’s business model makes a strong case for small-scale capitalism, a model where the focus is long-term, your people are taken care of, and the pay scale is such that everyone is making money.

arizona the mecca for prejudice and bigotry?

Video - Sheriff Clarence Dupnik of Pima AZ calls out rightwing hate.

CNN | In the wake of the shooting of a congresswoman and 19 other people, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik told the news media Saturday that he blamed "the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business."

"The bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous," he said. "And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

Bingo. Take it from me. I lived in Phoenix in the late 1990s while writing for The Arizona Republic. Dupnik got it exactly right.

Raise your hand if you have had it with the drama capital of America, which seems to spend more time on the front page than the other 49 states combined. Or if you think the Grand Canyon State has become, in recent years, more trouble than it's worth. Or if you feel like saying, to paraphrase what folk singer Phil Ochs said about Mississippi in the 1960s: "Here's to the people you've torn out the heart of. Arizona, find yourself another country to be part of."

The latest heartbreak comes from Saturday's horrific shooting rampage in Tucson. What authorities believe started as the attempted assassination of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at an outdoor constituent meeting turned into a mass shooting that killed six people and wounded more than a dozen, including Giffords.

The deceased include U.S. District Court Judge John Roll, Gifford's Community Outreach Director Gabriel Zimmerman and 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green of Tucson.

The alleged shooter, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, used a 9mm Glock holding a magazine with more than 30 rounds. A lot more people might have been killed if heroic bystanders had not tackled Loughner to the ground and wrestled the gun away.

The shooting comes in a state that has been malfunctioning for years.

Just ask Arizona's large and embattled Latino population, which has had to fight off everything from attempts to do away with ethnic studies to a notorious immigration law that all but mandates racial profiling by local and state police. The next battle, expected to start in a few weeks, will be trying to stop state lawmakers from seeking to undermine the 14th Amendment by denying birth certificates to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants.

In 1990, state lawmakers stubbornly refused to honor Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with a state holiday. That cost the state an estimated $100 million when the NFL pulled the Super Bowl from the Phoenix area in protest. Two years later, Arizona voters finally gave in and approved a ballot initiative creating a holiday.

Before that, in 1988, Arizona became one of the first states in the country to declare English its "official language" when voters approved Proposition 106, an unnecessary and divisive ballot initiative that required all state and local government business be conducted in English. Ten years later, the Arizona Supreme Court struck down the law as unconstitutional.

Throughout the 20th century, Arizona was a Southwestern bastion of unbridled racism and discrimination. Restaurants had signs in windows that read: "No dogs or Mexicans allowed."

Now, Dupnik and other Arizonans warn that sort of intolerance and meanness is back with a vengeance. This is where Arizona is headed now that it has removed the stigma from extremism and sanctioned narrow-mindedness.

was tuscon shooter tied to amren?

CSMonitor | On Sunday, Fox News quoted a Department of Homeland Security memo that states Mr. Loughner is "possibly linked" to American Renaissance, which DHS says promotes views that are "anti-government, anti-immigration, anti-ZOG [Zionist Occupational Government], anti-Semitic." Both Giffords and Mr. Zimmerman are Jewish.

American Renaissance is the publication of the The New Century Foundation, described by the Anti-Defamation League as a "self-styled think tank." The ADL, on its website, calls American Renaissance a "white supremacist journal and companion Website" that "promotes pseudoscientific studies that attempt to demonstrate the intellectual and cultural superiority of whites and publishes articles on the supposed decline of American society because of integrationist social policies."

The DHS memo quoted on Fox goes on to say: "Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the target of Loughner’s firing frenzy, is the first Jewish female elected to such a high position in the US government. She was also opposite this group’s ideology when it came to immigration debate."

"When you look at Loughner's web posts, he puts himself out as half fantasy seeker and dreamer and half political philosopher, and American Renaissance, while a hate group, markets itself as a political philosophy organization," says Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, at San Bernardino.

Mark Pitcavage, director of investigative research at the Anti-Defamation League, is skeptical about any hard connection between Loughner and American Renaissance.

"The fans of American Renaissance tend to be older and they tend to be intellectuals or pseudo-intellectuals," says Mr. Pitcavage. "Based on the limited nature of [Loughner's] internet footprint suggesting his thoughts and beliefs, there's nothing to lead one to think he would lean that way. It's perplexing to us that there is a notion of a substantial connection."

In Arizona, particularly, immigration issues, including the passage of a tough anti-immigration law last year, overlapped with parts of the broader tea party agenda. Giffords narrowly defeated a tea party candidate in November's election. She supported the federal health-care reform law and spoke out against Arizona's tough anti-immigration law, both counter to her tea party opponent. American Renaissance's website carries what appears to be a paid tea party advertisement featuring the "Don't Tread on Me" flag that's become synonymous with many of the movement's protests.

After the shooting, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, a Democrat in a largely Republican state, condemned "the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government." But the potential link to American Renaissance frames the shooting in a different, and possibly more complex, light.

The New Century Foundation was founded by Yale University graduate Jared Taylor, the author of several books on race and policy who has has written that diversity is "dangerous" because it is "one of the most divisive forces on the planet."

Mr. Taylor has become a well-known and oftentimes mainstream commentator on race and immigration issues, having appeared on networks like CNN as well as hard-right radio shows. The ADL describes his bailiwick as "intellectualized white supremacy."

uh..uhn..., teabagger talk, threats, and hate didn't cause this!!!!

NYTimes | Ms. Giffords is a centrist Democrat who won re-election in part by stressing her strong support for gun rights and for tougher immigration controls, including tighter border security, even though she opposed the controversial Arizona law.

Last March, after the final approval of the Democrats’ health care law, which Ms. Giffords supported, the windows of her office in Tucson were broken or shot out in an act of vandalism. Similar acts were reported by other members of Congress.

In August 2009, when there were demonstrations against the health care measure across the nation, a protester who showed up to meet Ms. Giffords at a supermarket event similar to Saturday’s was removed by the police when the pistol he had holstered under his armpit fell and bounced on the floor.

In an interview at the Capitol this week, Ms. Giffords said she was excited to count herself among the Democrats who joined the new Republican majority in reading the Constitution aloud from the House floor. She said she was particularly pleased with being assigned the reading of the First Amendment.

“I wanted to be here,” she said. “I think it’s important. Reflecting on the Constitution in a bipartisan way is a good way to start the year.”

As a Democrat, Ms. Giffords is something of anomaly in Arizona and in her district, which has traditionally tilted Republican. Last year, she barely squeaked to victory over a Republican challenger, Jesse Kelly. But she had clearly heard the message that constituents were dissatisfied with Democratic leaders in Washington.

At the Capitol last week, Ms. Giffords refused to support the outgoing Democratic House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, in her symbolic contest with the Republican, Mr. Boehner of Ohio. Instead, she cast her vote for Representative John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and hero of the civil rights movement.

did the CIA funnel drugs into poor US neighborhoods?

Video - Russia Times CIA funnels drugs into poor US neighborhoods

Russia Times | There is a long and expanding history of American tax payer dollars being used to help certain people get rich off of illicit drug sales.

Gang violence has been a part of some Los Angeles neighborhoods for decades, but it wasn’t until the 1980’s that gang members saw their biggest money making opportunity with crack cocaine. Little did they know that the CIA was using them as pawns in a larger scheme by allowing the more affordable drug to come into their neighborhood.

Freeway Ricky Ross, one of America’s biggest drug dealers, unwittingly became a main player in the Central American drug connection, which sent millions of American dollars in drug money to Nicaragua.The CIA’s plan was to promote and finance the Contra revolutionary group, which was trying to depose the Socialist Sandinista government in the Central American country.

“Russia had given the Sandinistas a hundred million dollars to fight with. Congress had cut off all the money from the contras, so now, the Sandinistas had the advantage,” said Ricky Ross.

President Ronald Reagan and then Vice President George H. W. Bush fretted over Soviet influence in Nicaragua.

“They would be in our backyard.I believe that they felt it was more valuable to sacrifice a particular sector of America, and a race of people in America in order to save the whole country,” said Ross.

Former LAPD detective and author Michael Ruppert has written extensively about the government’s involvement in drug trafficking around the world.He says politics isn’t the only motive.

“The control of the cash from the drug trade is of vital importance to wall street, because drug profits are laundered under corporations and banks net profits,” said Ruppert.

The CIA’s policy of looking the other way wasn’t just for the benefit of big business or crushing revolutionary movements abroad.Domestically, drugs and drug lords were used to quell black activist movements that challenged the status quo.

just another day of barbarism in the empire...,

Video - Univision coverage of the arrest of child assassin El Ponchis and his sister.

aljazeera | Police found the bodies of 15 slain men, 14 of them decapitated, on a street outside a shopping centre in the Pacific coast resort of Acapulco.

Police in the southern state of Guerrero, where Acapulco is located, said on Saturday that handwritten signs were left with the bodies, a common calling card of Mexico's cartels.

Acapulco has seen bloody turf battles between drug gangs in recent years.

"On the sidewalk of the Plaza Senderos shopping centre were the decapitated bodies of 15 males, between 25 and 30 years of age," said the police report.

"The heads were found in one single place, with the exception of one that was half severed from the body and with an impact of a projectile from a firearm."

It was the largest single group of decapitation victims found in recent years. In 2008, a group of 12 decapitated bodies were piled outside the Yucatan state capital of Merida. The same year, nine headless men were found in the Guerrero state capital of Chilpancingo.

In keeping with a policy designed not to give the cartels publicity, state police did not release the text of the messages found with the bodies.

But Reforma newspaper reported that they referred to the Sinaloa cartel, headed by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

Reforma said they apparently indicated the victims were killed by the Sinaloa cartel for trying to intrude on the gang's turf and extort residents.

Bloody turf war

Several Mexican states have become the focal point of turf wars between drug cartels who seem to take pride in the mounting body count their battles leave behind, sometimes displaying bodies, other times posting Youtube videos of their kills.

Guerrero, the southwestern state where Acapulco is located, is a stronghold of the notoriously bloody La Familia drug cartel, which is waging a war with the equally dangerous Zetas and its ally the Pacifico Sur.

The Pacifico Sur cartel has been blamed for the September 30 kidnapping of 20 Mexican tourists who are believed to have been mistaken for La Familia rivals. The tourists' bodies were unearthed a month later in a mass grave near Acapulco.

In November, one Mexican hitman boasted to Al Jazeera that he had lost track of how many people he'd killed as he travelled from city to city, carrying out hits for his boss.

And in December, the Mexican army arrested a 14-year-old US citizen nicknamed "El Ponchis" (or, "The Cloak") who allegedly worked as an assassin for the South Pacific Cartel, in the state of Morelos.

More than 600 people have been killed in the past year in the northern state of Nuevo Leon, where traffickers set up roadblocks in October, terrorising the general public.

And the state of Chihuahua is home the the city of Ciudad Juarez, known as a the country's murder capital, where over 2,000 people were murdered in 2010.

america: your last memory in a terrorist country

Video - Jared Lee Loughner's favorite

WaPo | In one video, titled "America: Your last memory in a terrorist country!," a figure in dark clothing and a smiley-face mask burns an American flag in the desert. The soundtrack is a 2001 song by the band Drowning Pool, in which the singer repeatedly shrieks "Let the bodies hit the floor!"

Another, posted Dec. 15, begins with a line of text reading "My Final Thoughts: Jared Lee Loughner!" What follows on the screen are seemingly unconnected thoughts about currency and dreams, and the words "I can't trust the current government because of the ratifications: the government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar."

The videos also say that Loughner applied to join the U.S. Army. The Army issued a statement Saturday saying that he attempted to enlist but was rejected for reasons that officials would not disclose.

Another video attacks the police at Tucson's Pima Community College, where he had been a student.

School officials said in a statement late Saturday that Loughner attended the community college from 2005 until last fall, when he withdrew after disciplinary problems.

The statement said that between February and September last year, campus police were called five times to deal with disruptions Loughner caused in classrooms and libraries. On Sept. 29, the college said, it discovered that Loughner had posted a YouTube video he had made on the campus.

"In the video, he claims that the College is illegal according to the U.S. Constitution, and makes other claims," the college's statement said.

That day, two police officers delivered a letter of suspension to Loughner at his parents' house in a Tucson suburb.

On Oct. 4, during a meeting with Loughner, his parents and college administrators, he agreed to withdraw, the college said. School officials told him he could return only if he obtained a clearance certifying that "in the opinion of a mental health professional, his presence at the College does not present a danger to himself or others."

of course not....,

WaPo | When asked by The New York Post on Saturday if his daughter had any enemies, Giffords's father, Spencer Giffords responded, "Yeah...The whole tea party."

Trent Humphries was headed to the local Safeway for some milk when he was stopped by a police barricade. It wasn't until later that he would find out that a congresswoman with whom he had often clashed politically had been shot there, along with more than a dozen others. A neighbor was among the dead.

"We were sickened," recalled Humphries, an organizer with the Tucson Tea Party. "Obviously, we do not condone violence. We've had dozens and dozens of events and we've never had violence. Whoever did this, they're not grounded in political thought. I would be very surprised if it was someone who had ever come to our meetings."

After the suspected shooter's name was released, Humphries said he checked the 4,000-person Tucson Tea Party contact list and found no one by the name of Jared Loughner.

Across Arizona, conservative and tea party activists expressed shock and dismay at the events that unfolded in the grocery store parking lot in Tucson. Though little was known about the alleged shooter Saturday afternoon, questions inevitably arose about his politics.

Some Arizona tea party activists, like Humphries, said it was unfair to connect the politics of a large and mostly peaceful movement to the actions of a single criminal. The day's events led others to question the environment fostered by some of the more confrontational members of their movement.

"You have to be very careful what you say. We live in a very polarized environment here in the United States, and while I do believe in the second amendment, no one should be referring to second amendment solutions," said Patrick Beck, president of the Mohave County Tea Party in the northern part of the state.

"I've given many speeches to my group and at different events in my area, and in doing so I'm very conscious of who's listening," he said. "When I look out at the crowd, 99 percent of the people I see are just like me -- average every day Americans who want constitutional government, fiscal responsibility, things of that nature. Every once in a while, though, I see someone -- how should I put it? -- who is getting too excited, who seems a little farther on the fringe...I realized I had to tone down my comments a little bit, less yelling and screaming and more educational."

When asked about the Palin target map, Beck said: "I don't know. It's really easy in the context of what happened this morning to look back and say, I don't know if this was such a bright idea. At the same time, there are other politicians from the other side of the political spectrum who have said similar military-style sayings. Do I really believe they are intending harm on people? No."

getting the narrative ready

The Atlantic | There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the U.S. economy. Workers are earning more, consumers are spending more, banks are lending more, and companies are ready to hire more. But if there's one number that could derail the recovery, it's the price of a barrel of oil.

Economists and watchdog groups are nervously monitoring the rising price of crude, now hovering around $90 -- down from a 2008 high of nearly $150. "Oil prices are entering a dangerous zone for the global economy," warns Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency. "High oil prices threaten to derail the fragile economic recovery," echoes Sylvia Pfeiffer at the Financial Times. Meanwhile, other economists say there's very little reason to think oil should spook the fragile recovery.

Who should we believe, and why should we care in the first place?

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?
The short answer is that expensive oil is poisonous to an oil-driven economy. Every severe oil spike in the last 50 years has been followed by a deep recession.

Here's the more complicated answer. The United States imported $400 billion of oil in 2008, nearly 3 percent of GDP -- or more than half the total cost of Social Security. Unlike Social Security, those hundreds of billions of dollars leave the country and don't get recycled into our economy. They're empty calories.

"If oil prices went back to the $140 dollar range, it would be a disaster"

When gas prices rise, American consumers can buy the same amount of gas for more money, which makes us poorer; or they can buy less gas, which makes the economy weaker. In the last decade, the price of crude increased from $1.50 to $3.50, and Americans kept filling up their SUVs. Only at $4.00 did Americans recoil, reducing their total miles driven fell for the first time in 30 years by 100 billion miles.

Some economists say the oil spike helped cause the Great Recession. By making it more expensive to commute, they argue, high oil prices both made Americans poorer and reduced the demand for suburban homes, thus hastening the housing collapse. A less dramatic interpretation would say that the Great Recession was caused by the credit crunch on Wall Street, but exacerbated by the historic rise in oil prices.

global oil demand.pngIn the Great Recession, the price of a barrel of oil fell by almost 70 percent. But now oil prices are climbing, for at least three reasons. First, higher global demand raises the price of oil if global supply cannot keep up. Second, as capital becomes more available throughout the world, investors might return to bidding up the price of oil. In 2008, experts estimate that up to a third of the $150 price of a barrel of oil was pure speculation rather than natural supply and demand factors. Third, in the U.S., a weak dollar makes oil, like most imports, more expensive for consumers. So what happens now?

THE CASE FOR FEAR
If you thought $4 gasoline was bad, wait a year. Americans will pay $5 for a gallon of gasoline by 2012 as global demand grows faster than oil producers' supply, predicted John Hofmeister, the former president of Shell Oil and current head of Citizens for Affordable Energy. Without a significant investment in alternative energy sources, we're on a collision course with "blackouts, brownouts, gas lines, [and] rationing."

Hofmeister's math can be summed up in one graph, from the Center for American Progress, which shows projected oil consumption for the U.S., China and India. As China and India join the global middle class, global demand for oil will skyrocket past its 2008 levels, when a barrel cost $147.

peak oilers on the history channel via ron paul

Video - History Channel Prophets of Doom on Ron Paul's youtube channel

jimi hendrix and dick cavett

Video - Dick Cavett interviews Jimi Hendrix Part 1.


Video - Dick Cavett interviews Jimi Hendrix Part 2.


Video - Dick Cavett interviews Jimi Hendrix Part 3.


Video - Dick Cavett interviews Jimi Hendrix Part 4.


Video - Dick Cavett interviews Jimi Hendrix Part 5.


Video - Dick Cavett interviews Jimi Hendrix Part 6.

janis joplin and dick cavett

Video - Dick Cavett interviews Janis Joplin (her last interview in 1970) Fist tap Big Brother BT.