Because of this assumption, members of the Tea Party right, like the members of the New Left, spend a lot of time worrying about being co-opted. They worry that the corrupt forces of the establishment are perpetually trying to infiltrate the purity of their ranks. – David Brooks New York Times Columnist

First of all I want to apologize to all of those people from the peace movement, civil rights movement, and the other groups from the sixties who fought and died for long denied social change in America for this article from David Brooks. Obviously while so many Americans were actually trying to grapple with a social system that they felt no longer represented who they were Mr. Brooks was too young to know what was going on. I have a real hard time taking anyone seriously who writes about a period of history that they did not actually participate in. To me most post-history is either conjecture or an attempt at a mulligan for those who are promoting their own agendas.

Peter Henderson | SAN FRANCISCO | March 4, 2010

Reuters - Students and faculty at California's public universities rallied across the state on Thursday to protest steep fee hikes they say have damaged a system of higher education long the envy of the nation.

More than 100 such events in over 30 states were scheduled for a "Day of Action" in support of public education across the country, prompted by tuition hikes and program cuts that reflect financial problems affecting nearly every U.S. state.

Weakening of the education system is considered particularly severe in California, one of the states hardest-hit by the recession.

Several hundred students, faculty and staff rallied at the University of California at Berkeley, the 1960s hub of Vietnam war protests. Yoga students there held classes outside to avoid crossing picket lines.

Washington | March 4

BBC - A US Congressional committee is debating a resolution to label as genocide the killing of Armenians by Turkish forces during World War I.

The non-binding resolution is fiercely opposed by Turkey, a key US ally.

Deborah Blum

Slate - Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination."

Note, if you are not "insane enough to believe that the US government could or would kill 3000 10,000 innocent citizens for whatever reason", then please dont click the link below

Link ~ link fixed

RH Reality Check, By Rachel Larris, February 20

A bill passed by the Utah House and Senate this week and waiting for the governor's signature, will make it a crime for a woman to have a miscarriage, and make induced abortion a crime in some instances.

According Lynn M. Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, what makes Utah's proposed law unique is that it is specifically designed to be punitive toward pregnant women, not those who might assist or cause an illegal abortion or unintended miscarriage.

San Juan, PR | February 26

AP - Health officials in Puerto Rico have declared an epidemic of dengue fever.

Health Secretary Lorenzo Gonzalez says 210 cases have been confirmed for January, more than triple the number in the same month of 2007. That year proved the worst for the U.S. Caribbean territory in nearly a decade, with 11,000 cases.

Rachel Sanderson & Michael MacKenzie | Washington | February 24

FT - US regulators have tried to steer a middle ground on the controversial issue of short selling by voting to adopt a rule that will impose restrictions only when a stock’s price is in free fall.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission shied away from reinstating the full “uptick rule”, which prevented stocks from being shorted unless the last tick in their price was up, but it recognised there needed to be some control when a stock loses more than 10 per cent.

Eric Dash | Washington | February 23

NYT - After weathering the nation’s worst run of bank failures in nearly two decades, the Federal Insurance Deposit Corporation announced Tuesday that it had added 450 institutions to its list of challenged lenders in 2009 and warned that the industry was likely to remain under stress.

The number of so-called problem banks rose to 702 at the end of 2009, compared to 252 at the beginning of the year. Both the number of troubled institutions and their total assets are at the highest level since 1993, putting enormous strain on the government-administered insurance fund that protects customer deposits.

Luke Air Force Base | February 23

msnbc.com - One man was killed and another injured after they drove a stolen car through the entrance to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona and security forces opened fire, police said.

The car went through the entrance without stopping as required and security forces then used a vehicle to set up a roadblock on a bridge leading to the operational side of the base, near Glendale, Capt. Jerry Gonzalez, a spokesman for the base, told msnbc.com.

Police said the car drove directly at a security officer who feared for his life and opened fire.

Andrew Graham | Washington | February 22

Green Technology Daily - Federal regulators gave Internet search giant Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) the go-ahead to make the seemingly odd move into the energy market as a power reseller and energy trader, aspirations some say could run contrary to the company's “Do No Evil” philosophy.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued the approval (.pdf) late Thursday, which goes into effect Feb. 23. It noted that Google Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary of the company, met criteria for a “Category 1 seller in all regions.”

Tim Weiner | February 20

NYT - Alexander M. Haig Jr., the four-star general who served as a confrontational secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan and a commanding White House chief of staff as the Nixon administration crumbled, died Saturday at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, according to a hospital spokesman. He was 85.

Mr. Haig was a rare American breed: a political general. His bids for the presidency quickly came undone. But his ambition to be president was thinly veiled, and that was his undoing. He knew, Reagan’s aide Lyn Nofziger once said, that “the third paragraph of his obit” would detail his conduct in the hours after President Reagan was shot, on March 30, 1981.

That day, Secretary of State Haig wrongly declared himself the acting president. “The helm is right here,” he told members of the Reagan cabinet in the White House Situation Room, “and that means right in this chair for now, constitutionally, until the vice president gets here.” His words were taped by Richard V. Allen, then the national security adviser.

Austin | February 18

Star-Telegram - A small single-engine airplane has crashed into an office complex in North Austin, an Austin police spokeswoman said Thursday.

The seven-story office building, described as the Echelon building, is in the 9400 block of Research Boulevard, according to Austin fire officials. The site is near U.S. 183 and MoPac. The crash happened about 10 a.m.

Spokeswoman Helena Wright said officials do not yet know whether the aircraft was private or commercial, and they had no immediate word on casualties.

A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said there is no reason to believe that terrorism or criminal activity is involved

Sharon Begley | Brookhaven National Lab, Long Island, NY | February 16

Newsweek - While the Large Hadron Collider gets all the attention (it never hurts a physics experiment's street cred when rumors spread that it might create a mini black hole and swallow up the Earth), a lesser-known particle collider has been quietly making soup—quark soup. For the field of experimental particle physics, in which progress has been at a near-standstill since the glory days of the 1970s (yes, the top quark was discovered in an experiment at Fermilab in 1995, but really, everyone knew this last of the six quarks existed), this counts as the most notable achievement in years: a discovery that doesn't merely confirm what theory has long held, but points the way to new revelations about the creation and evolution of the universe.

The reason for that accolade is that quark soup was last seen when the universe was 1 microsecond old, physicists reported at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society. It was created at the 2.4-mile-around Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab on New York's Long Island, which smashes together gold ions traveling at nearly the speed of light. The result of the collisions is a tiny region of space so hot—4 trillion degrees Celsius—that protons and neutrons melt into a plasma of their constituent quarks and gluons, as Brookhaven describes here. The soup is 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, 40 times hotter than a typical supernova, and the hottest temperature in the universe today. Right there on Long Island. (For anyone wondering what kind of thermometer is used to measure a 4-trillion-degree soup, it is color: by analyzing the energy distribution (color) of light emitted from the soup, scientists can infer its temperature much as they infer the temperatures of stars or even of a glowing andiron.) In one of the truly helpful advances since the golden age of particle physics, several cool simulations of the RHIC collisions and resulting quark soup are on YouTube.

The last time such a quark-gluon plasma existed was 13.7 billion years ago, when the universe burst into existence in the big bang. By creating it in a lab for the first time, the RHIC teams have given scientists a chance to study how the cosmos came to evolve into the riot of galaxies and nebulae that we see today. And although the quark soup created at RHIC lasts not even 1 billionth of a trillionth of a second, there are already surprises. The quarks and gluons in the soup were expected to behave independently, for instance, but instead they behave cooperatively, almost like synchronized swimmers—or, in the spirit of the moment, like Olympic pairs skaters.

Rob Hotakainen | Washington | February 12

McClatchy - Megan's Law soon could go international.

The law, named after Megan Kanka, a 7-year-old New Jersey girl who was raped and killed by a neighbor in 1994, requires convicted sex offenders to be registered with the government, making it easier to track their whereabouts. Their names can then be put into databases, allowing the public to do a quick online check to determine where offenders reside.

I guess I can no longer say I've never paid for sex. Actually, no American tax-payer can make that claim anymore.

The troubled American private ­security company Blackwater faced fresh ­controversy today when two former employees accused it of defrauding the US government for years, including ­billing for a Filipina prostitute on its payroll in Afghanistan.

According to Melan Davis, a former employee, Blackwater listed the woman for payment under the "morale welfare recreation" category.

The company, which allegedly employed her in Kabul, billed the ­government for her plane tickets and monthly salary, Davis said.

One question: can we finally start calling these guys what they really are now? They may not fit the technical, legal definition under international treaty law, but historically, everything about these firms spells 'mercenary.' Please? Kthxbai.

Four and a half months into our 12 month lease and we get a call from the owner that they need to move back into the house we rented. Of course he would like us to break the lease for him. WTF? So we look up the house we rented in the county records and find that he bought it for $365K and he owes $292K. Based on income generation the 1400 sq ft house is worth around $100K so he's in a little over his head on the place but wait! He has a sale pending on a 1600 sq ft residence that he paid $449K for in 2007 and he has to move out. He was asking $389K for it originally but we don't know what he got for it. A short sale? Pending? Yeah right! We can't be sure but he is loosing money on that one. This guy is on the short road to bankruptcy.

Craig Torres and Christopher Condon | Feb. 11

Bloomberg - The Federal Reserve is in talks with money-market mutual funds on agreements to help drain as much as $1 trillion from the financial system as policy makers prepare for the first interest-rate increase since June 2006, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

The central bank is looking to the $3.2 trillion money- market mutual-fund industry because the 18 so-called primary dealers that trade directly with the Fed have a capacity limited to about $100 billion, estimates Joseph Abate, a money-market strategist at Barclays Capital in New York.

Joaquin February 11, 2010 - 3:32pm

I don't buy all parts of Kunstler's 'collapse thesis.' I've seen nations that have endured collapses firsthand, for example, the Soviet Union, and while many of the issues he brings up will undoubtedly be affected, in toto, it's won't be as apocalyptic as he makes it out to if and when it does come to pass. (This is not to say that the worst case scenario cannot happen.) One thing Kunstler mentioned lately did concern me, and it's something the New York Times blog The Opinionator glanced over recently too:

In a decade, they saw real property defy reality in real time in these insta-neighborhoods that sprouted in what had been some of the world’s most productive farmland.

We're a net food importer now--and this is surely one of the reasons. And should give us all pause.

Lance, as usual, says it better than I ever could:

By the way, this is where Libertarianism falls on its keister or I should say bottoms out---nobody’s going to pay out of his pocket every time a pothole on his street needs fixing. (Dear Libertarian readers, I’m using potholes as a metaphor for all public services, so don’t try to use the minimal government argument on me. Use it on the guy with the pothole at the end of his driveway. Again, that’s a metaphor.) Actually, I’ve never met a self-styled Libertarian who wasn’t a version of those disgruntled taxpayers. They don’t really want the government to cut back on services. They just want somebody else to pay for them.

Read it all. You'll not be disappointed.

James Kantor | Brussels | February 11

NYT - The European Parliament on Thursday broadly rejected an agreement with the United States on sharing information on bank transfers that was aimed at tracking suspected terrorists through their finances.

The vote in Strasbourg, France, underlined differences between the United States and the European Union over how to balance guarantees of personal privacy with concerns about national and international security.

February 10

CNN - (CNN) -- Capt. Phil Harris of the Discovery Channel show "The Deadliest Catch" died Tuesday of complications from a stroke suffered late last month. He was 53.

Harris, the tattooed and gruff captain of the Cornelia Marie, was a fan favorite in the reality show about crab fishing off Alaska.

Salynn Boyles | New York | February 7

WebMD - Study Shows Experimental Drug May Build New Bone by Decreasing Serotonin Levels in the Gut

The hormone serotonin may hold the key to new treatments for reversing osteoporosis-related bone loss, new research finds.

When investigators at Columbia University Medical Center treated mice and rats with an experimental drug that stopped the gut from synthesizing serotonin, they were able to reverse severe bone loss and essentially cure osteoporosis in the animals.

Back in the good ol' days of the Cold War we were treated to arguments by Milton Friedman like

In his view, voluntary character of all transactions in a free market economy and wide diversity that it permits are fundamental threats to repressive political leaders and greatly diminish power to coerce. Through elimination of centralized control of economic activities, economic power is separated from political power, and the one can serve as counterbalance to the other. Friedman feels that competitive capitalism is especially important to minority groups, since impersonal market forces protect people from discrimination in their economic activities for reasons unrelated to their productivity.

Timothy R. Homan | Feb. 5yh

Bloomberg - The unemployment rate in the U.S. unexpectedly declined in January to 9.7 percent, the lowest level since August, while payrolls dropped as companies boosted worker hours and overtime instead of taking on new hires.

Employment fell by 20,000 last month, reflecting a plunge in construction jobs and a drop in state and local government hiring, figures from the Labor Department in Washington showed. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News forecast a gain. Manufacturing employment, factory hours and overtime increased.

...

Louise Story | New York | February 4

NYT - Bank of America settled a regulatory complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday even as the New York’s Attorney General accused the bank, its former chief executive and chief financial officer of securities fraud.

In a lawsuit filed on Thursday, the attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, claimed the bank and the two officers — Kenneth D. Lewis, the chief executive, and Joe L. Price, the chief financial officer — misled shareholders and the government about the merger with Merrill Lynch.