Statements in the congressional record by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies (subsidiary of Swiss company, Roche). E-mail messages show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans. The lobbyists, employed by Genentech and by two Washington law firms, were remarkably successful in getting the statements printed in the Congressional Record under the names of different members of Congress.

Following a five-month deadlock, the Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced on Monday the formation of a national unity government after a marathon of consultations with domestic and regional players. While Mr. Hariri gave major concessions to the opposition bloc including Hizballah, the new cabinet enjoys broad public support and a moderate base that could be a strong asset for Washington and its policy goals in Lebanon

Uruguay's story, the Frente Amplio's story and Mujica's story, together, comprise a lesson in perseverance of the idea of socialism, a fire that engulfed Latin America with the force of Argentina's own iconic Che Guevara, but which was snuffed out when the movement became most dangerous to the world's most powerful ruling class, that is, when it tried to become a legitimate political movement, and its influence was feared by capitalists, Christians and Conservatives of the West who saw themselves as individualists and socialism as state tyranny over individual rights.

America is a democracy – perhaps a little less democratic these days – but a democracy nonetheless. Many people complain about the government without seeing the irony that, in democracies, the government is us.

The US government is now so totally under the thumbs of organized interest groups that “our” government can no longer respond to the concerns of the American people who elect the president and the members of the House and Senate. Voters will vent their frustrations over their impotence on the president, which implies a future of one-term presidents. Soon our presidents will be as ineffective as Roman emperors in the final days of that empire.Republicans and Democrats saw opportunities to create new sources of campaign contributions by privatizing as many military functions as possible. There are now a large number of private companies that have never made a dollar in the market, feeding instead at the public trough that drains taxpayers of dollars while loading Americans with debt service obligations.

A Global Elite Has Taken the Reigns. A Global Elite Has the Desire to Rip Down the Governments That Are in Place.

That’s right, for those of you who lined up last week for 6 hours on average, you suffered their stupidity, all in the name of optic’s. Yep, they wanted to look like they knew what they were doing, and they wanted to look good doing it.

"The home secretary faces mass resignations from the government's drug advisory body over his decision to force out its chairman, who accused ministers of distorting scientific evidence on cannabis.~~~~~But the home secretary found himself under fire from members of the scientific community. Lord Winston, the Labour peer and professor of science and society at Imperial College London, said he was "very surprised and disappointed" by Johnson's actions. "I think that if governments appoint expert advice they shouldn't dismiss it so lightly," he said."

News of the Swine-Flu started drifting into the media back in April of 2009. It very soon began to seem like it was much noise about not much. Then it returned to the airwaves and started hitting all of us hard in early October...

The White House argues that the actual job number is actually larger than 640,000 -- closer to 1 million jobs when one factors in stimulus jobs added in October and, more importantly, jobs created indirectly, such as "the waitress who's still on the job," Vice President Biden said today. So let's see. Assuming their number is right -- 160 billion divided by 1 million. Does that mean the stimulus costs taxpayers $160,000 per job?

Montana Rep. Denny Rehberg was no fan of the $58 billion federal rescue of General Motors Co., saying he worried taxpayer money would be wasted and the restructuring process would be vulnerable to "political pressure." Now the lawmaker says it's his "patriotic duty" to wade into GM's affairs.

If Medicare were a bank, federal regulators would be closing its doors, selling its operations and sacking its managers. Thanks to soaring costs, the program is fast running out of money -- even though it pays such low fees that many doctors refuse to take Medicare patients. Meanwhile, Medicare fraud costs taxpayers some $60 billion a year, according to a report by CBS' "60 Minutes," making it among the most profitable fields for felons. That's our experience with government-run health insurance for the elderly. So what do congressional Democrats propose to do? Offer government-run health insurance to everyone else.

"Think about that for a minute: A whopping majority of Americans (62%) would rather risk illness than believe in their government's urgings of necessity and safety." I believe the majority of people in this country, after the bailout, the Auto bailout, the pork-laden stimulus, the rising unemployment, etc., are becoming more suspicious of the all-knowing,all-caring,benevelent Obama and his administration...and after the announcement on Friday, October 23rd of a National Emergency regarding the H1N1 pandemic, the percentage of those refusing the H1N1 vaccine will probably go even higher.

...the man designated to be foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, is pushing for the U.S. to remove its remaining nuclear weapons from German soil. "We want the last nuclear weapons that are stationed in Germany to be taken away," Westerwelle said at the conclusion of the coalition talks on Saturday. The U.S. doesn't disclose the exact number of nuclear warheads it still keeps in Germany, a legacy of its Cold War policy that dates back to the 1950s, and which made western Germany the frontline of its Soviet containment strategy. But German sources estimate there could be as many as 20 nukes still in the country.

Last week, Mr. Crocker addressed an audience at the Harvard Kennedy School and indicated that our failure to understanding a region in its historical and geographical context is impacting our foreign policy in a negative manner. You can hear the address on the Harvard website here. The speech runs about 75 minutes. In his speech, Crocker takes us back to the Middle East to the end of the eighteenth century, where a dynamic began to form between that area (which he defines as the region from Morocco in the west to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east) and the Western world. The dynamic takes into account that the West's political strength is military, while its weakness stems from its political will (or the lack of same), and has shaped the policies of the countries in the area for nearly two centuries.

"The most revealing political quote of the last year came, in my view, from the second-highest ranking Democratic Senator, Dick Durbin, who told a local radio station in April: "And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." (snip) Earnest, substantive debates over this or that policy are so often purely illusory, as the only factor that really drives that outcomes is the question of who owns and thus controls the political system."

Healthcare, global warming, Wall Street, jobs -- none of the government's proposed solutions add up to much

I mean aside from the obvious - we know they are not investigating or prosecuting torture, bribery, contracts inappropriately given to political supporters, launching illegal wars, political manipulation of the government, etc. that occurred under Bush. No, I mean simple day-to-day regulations like age discrimination in Silicon Valley, stopping companies from polluting, etc. Is the country at least back to enforcing those laws?

Antonin Scalia gave an interview to a right wing religious newspaper. You can read it here. The major part of the interview is Scalia's view on how it is WRONG for the American government to remain neutral in issues involving religion. He believes that religion should be PREFERRED.A few of the gems:"I have been here for a long time now - 23 years. In that time, I think the Court has become more receptive to the needs of religious practice. [T]he court [...] adopted the so-called principle of neutrality - which states that the government cannot favor religion over non-religion. This is not an accurate representation of what Americans believe. It has not been our American constitutional tradition, nor our social or legal tradition, to exclude religion from the public sphere. Whatever the Establishment Clause means, it certainly does not mean that government cannot accommodate religion, and indeed favor religion."

The overextended federal government is now starting to bail itself out.