ConnecticutMan1 emailed me an unlikely and highly entertaining article posted by Warranted Wiretaps. They have obtained an exclusive mp3 file of a conference call put together by "the national liberty movement" to improve the quality of right wing blogs. Unfortunately for them, their call was crashed by a group of twittering humorists.

Residents of the C Street Christian fellowship house will no longer benefit from a loophole that had allowed the house's owners to avoid paying property taxes.

Today’s Washington Times nicely encapsulates the wingnut circlejerk over Obama’s bow to the Emperor of Japan: This is not the way an American president impresses evildoers that he’s strong, tough and decisive, that America is not to be trifled with. [...] "Can anyone imagine George Washington, John Adams or Thomas Jefferson making a similar gesture of servile submission? Or Harry Truman? Or FDR, who famously served the lowly hot dog, with ballpark mustard, to the king and queen of England?" Can anyone imagine a Republican president making a gesture of servile submission to a communist dictator responsible for the deaths of 70 million people? Why yes, yes one can. [Note: Right-wing nutjobs at their specialty--disinformation.]

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel triggered a fresh rift with Washington over settlement building on Tuesday by approving the building of 900 homes for Jews on West Bank land it occupied in a 1967 war and annexed to its Jerusalem municipality. The Israeli decision drew an unusually sharply worded rebuke from the White House, which said it was "dismayed" and accused Israel of undermining Obama's efforts to resume peace talks with Palestinians stalled since December. In his statement, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs also said the United States objected to continued evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem.

An analysis of why Fox News should not be allowed to call itself "news". It is false advertising.

Business sections across the country are all abuzz this week over the expected announcement that Comcast Corp. will acquire a controlling share of NBC Universal. But should MSNBC viewers be particularly concerned about the nation's largest cable provider and second largest Internet service provider obtaining one fourth of the media content available to U.S. audiences?

"A top Republican political fund-raising and outreach firm gives convicted felons access to political donors' credit-card information, according to three former employees. Minnesota-based FLS Connect uses low-wage workers to make fund-raising calls for a bevy of prominent GOP clients. And many of those workers -- including those responsible for processing credit-card transactions -- have felony convictions, the former employees said. ... Last month, the founder of a different Republican outreach firm, Bonner & Associates, was hauled before Congress after his company sent forged letters to lawmakers on a key legislative issue."

It appears that besides being two of the most selfish of the greediest and least patriotic among us Mitch McConnell and Rush Limbaugh have a lot in common. They both share the same hypocritical, lying talking points. They both hate working Americans and try to brainwash them into opposing their own interests and in some cases succeed. They both seek to insure that the American economy is ripped apart, as long as their greedy enablers get to pick it clean and get bailed out while the average American suffers. They both seek to blame Democrats for the huge mess they are cleaning up that was made by Republicans.

Some 57 senators voted to defeat a Republican proposal that would have prohibited the use of funds to construct or modify prison facilities to hold individuals currently being detained at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"It is the problem of an imperialist military built solely to serve the profit system. Contractor industrial complex All U.S. aid, both military and what is labeled “civilian,” is funneled through thousands and thousands of contractors, subcontractors and sub-subcontractors. None of these U.S. corporate middlemen are even slightly interested in the development of Afghanistan or Iraq. Their only immediate aim is to turn a hefty superprofit as quickly as possible, with as much skim and double billing as possible. For a fee they will provide everything from hired guns, such as Blackwater mercenaries, to food service workers, mechanics, maintenance workers and long-distance truck drivers."

Speaking to the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Clark said American leaders should strengthen the national partnership with Pakistan -- including sharing intelligence regarding al Qaeda operations -- and promote economic development in Afghanistan to undercut the drug trade fueled by growing poppies. Gen. Clark, a former Democratic presidential candidate, praised President Barack Obama for taking his time in developing an Afghanistan strategy and said that any troop increase should wait until a firm endgame has been establsihed for U.S. Involvement in the country.

"When it comes to paying for health overhaul, Americans see just one way to go: Tax the rich. ... Lawmakers also are looking at levying new taxes on insurance companies, drug companies and medical device makers. But the only approach that got majority support in the AP poll was a tax on upper-income Americans."

As most of us are preparing for the holidays a small clique in the Senate, with their collaborators in the Washington punditry, are planning for a dramatic hostage-taking event. Their target of opportunity is a bill to increase the nation's debt limit. The hostage-takers propose to obstruct the bill's passage unless the rest of the country gives into their demands to cut Social Security and Medicare and takes other steps to meet their warped sense of fiscal responsibility. The debt limit must be increased at regular intervals in order to allow the government to function normally because the government is currently operating at a deficit. If the debt limit is not passed, then at some point the government will not be able to pay workers and contractors. It won't be able to send out Social Security checks or make payments for Medicaid and unemployment insurance to state governments. And, it will not be able to make interest payments on government bonds, effectively defaulting on the national debt.---The Wall Street gang may have suckered us with getting the TARP bailout money last year, but we don't have to let them get away with the same trick again. If they want to threaten to crash the financial system with their irresponsible hostage-taking, then we should steal a line from a former president: "bring it on!"

President Obama says he wants to "rebalance" the economic relationship between China and the U.S. as part of his plan to restart the American jobs machine. "We cannot go back," he said in September, "to an era where the Chinese . . . just are selling everything to us, we're taking out a bunch of credit-card debt or home equity loans, but we're not selling anything to them." He hopes that hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers will make up for the inability of American consumers to return to debt-binge spending. This is wishful thinking. True, the Chinese market is huge and growing fast. By 2009, China was second only to the U.S. in computer sales, with a larger proportion of first-time buyers. It already had more cell-phone users. And excluding SUVs, last year Chinese consumers bought as many cars as Americans (as recently as 2006, Americans bought twice as many). Even as the U.S. government was bailing out General Motors and Chrysler, the two firms' sales in China were soaring; GM's sales there are almost 50% higher this year than last. Proctor & Gamble is so well-established in China that many Chinese think its products (such as green-tea-flavored Crest toothpaste) are Chinese brands.

With just over two months to go until President Obama's deadline for the closure of Guantanamo, the administration has finally woken up to the necessity of actually doing something to facilitate the prison's closure by announcing on Friday that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other prisoners accused of involvement in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, will be brought to New York to face federal court trials. Despite the fact that the "war on terror" was launched over eight years ago to pursue those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and despite the fact that Attorney General Eric Holder noted, in a statement announcing the trial, that the opportunity for the relatives of the 9/11 victims "to see the alleged plotters of those attacks held accountable in court" had been "too long delayed," Republican critics immediately leapt on the announcement, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell describing it as "a step backwards for the security of our country" that "puts Americans unnecessarily at risk."

On Veterans Day the Brave New Foundation released this video to place pressure on President Barack Obama not to deploy more troops to Afghanistan. The proposed escalation, which Obama is expected to decide on in the next few weeks, means sending up to 40,000 more troops to the region. In this video, US Marine Corps Veteran, Sgt. Devon Read, said that: "Further troops in Afghanistan is going to escalate the violence, it's going to escalate the Taliban recruiting effort and its certainly not going to create a better situation."

""Water levels have fallen 88 cm (nearly 3 feet) this year, far exceeding normal lows," Andrade said. "This is the biggest loss in decades, and it is definitely attributable to global warming," he added. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ Lake Titicaca is fed by rain and meltwater from the mountains, but much of the water is being lost at an increased rate due to a rise in solar radiation in the thin Andean atmosphere. Climate disruptions from global warming have also reduced the rainy season from six to three months, said Félix Trujillo, chief of Bolivia's National Meteorological and Hydrological Service."

According to a soldiers' advocacy group at Fort Hood, the U.S. base where an army psychiatrist has been charged with killing 13 people and wounding 30 in a Nov. 5 rampage, the official suicide figures provided by the Army are "definitely" too low. Chuck Luther served 12 years in the military and is a veteran of two deployments to Iraq, where he was a reconnaissance scout in the 1st Cavalry Division. The former sergeant was based at Fort Hood, where he lives today. "I see the ugly," Luther told IPS. "I see soldiers beating their wives and trying to kill themselves all the time, and most folks don't want to look at this, including the military." Luther, who in 2007 became the founder and director of the Soldier's Advocacy Group of Disposable Warriors, knows about these types of internal problems in the military because he has been through many of them himself.

The U.S. is losing $725 Billion per year to foreign countries through trade losses. This money does not come back to buy our goods and services.

Shouldn't the government pledge allegiance to the people rather than the other way around?