Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
HOPE YEN, - The Associated Press
Stephan: Twenty two per cent of children in the United States live in poverty; the largest percentage of any industrialized nation in the world. How can anybody live with that?
The economic and war policies we have followed in the post-Clinton years, Republican and Democrat alike, have proven a disaster. You have to be in thrall to ideology to want to continue them. They are a nightmare that will never end until we change to rational humane national and international policies and programs. We are suffering from a national bout of insanity, and self-destruction. The election of 2012 is going to determine whether we return to being a country or continue as an asylum.
I cannot get over these figures, and what they say about our national character. I guess I should not be surprised given the cheering the other night when it was noted that Gov. Perry had put to death 234 people. Those cheering I hope to God do not represent America. Because if they do, we're not a society, we're a mob.
WASHINGTON — The ranks of U.S. poor swelled to nearly 1 in 6 people last year, reaching a new high as long-term unemployment woes left millions of Americans struggling and out of work. The number of uninsured edged up to 49.9 million, the biggest in over two decades.
The Census Bureau’s annual report released Tuesday offers a snapshot of the economic well-being of U.S. households for 2010, when joblessness hovered above 9 percent for a second year. It comes at a politically sensitive time for President Barack Obama, who has acknowledged in the midst of his re-election fight that the unemployment rate could persist at high levels through next year.
The overall poverty rate climbed to 15.1 percent, or 46.2 million, up from 14.3 percent in 2009.
Reflecting the lingering impact of the recession, the U.S. poverty rate from 2007-2010 has now risen faster than any three-year period since the early 1980s, when a crippling energy crisis amid government cutbacks contributed to inflation, spiraling interest rates and unemployment.
Measured by total numbers, the 46 million now living in poverty is the largest on record dating back to when the census began tracking poverty in 1959. Based on percentages, it tied the poverty level in […]
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Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
SCOTT ALTHAUS and KALEV LEETARU, - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Stephan: I am an historian, and this sort of thing is really vile. These are the acts of Orwellian cowards who know they have screwed-up in a major way, and want to hide it from history, while self-righteously and piously flaunting around history's stage. There is a constant lack of moral and ethical awareness in these people. You can see a perfect example of it in Dick Cheney's book.
This is not a new document and we now see with better hindsight confirming its findings and expanding on them. This is geopolitics at a psychiatric level.
Scott Althaus is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a faculty affiliate of the Cline Center for Democracy. He is currently writing a book on the relationship between media coverage of war and public support for war.
Kalev Leetaru is Coordinator of Information Technology and Research at the Cline Center for Democracy; Chief Technology Advisor to the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science; Center Affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; and affiliated with the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He has worked extensively with web and data mining and recently completed a book manuscript titled Content Analysis: A Data Mining and Intelligence Approach.
Key Findings
There are at least five documents taking the form of White House press releases that detail the number and names of countries in the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ that publicly supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. At one time, all five of these documents were archived on the White House web site.
Today, only three of these five documents can still be accessed in the White House archives. One of the missing lists was removed from the White House web site at some point in late 2004, and the other was removed between late 2005 and early 2006. These two ‘missing’ lists represent earlier and smaller lists of coalition members.
The text of three of these five documents was altered at some point after their initial release, even though in most cases the documents still retained their original release dates and were presented as unaltered originals. These alterations to the public record changed the apparent number of countries making up the coalition, as well as the names of countries in the coalition. Some of these alterations appear to have been made as long as two years after […]
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Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
Stephan: This is the hard evidence of the increasingly desperate plight of the American middle-class.
College graduates represent the fastest growing demographic of consumers who have filed for bankruptcy over the past five years, according to a new report out Tuesday.
Wait, really? Our high school guidance counselors always told us that a college degree guaranteed financial success down the road.
Not necessarily so, according to the survey by the Institute for Financial Literacy, which found that wealthier, more educated households are driving the recent spike in bankruptcy filings.
‘We’re told that if you do go and get advanced education, you’re going to be almost guaranteed this economic success,
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Tuesday, September 13th, 2011
BRAD PLUMER, - The Washington Post
Stephan: This study reaches quite surprising conclusions, and ones which should have an enormous impact on our energy planning. Whether they will or not will depend on the power of corporate special interests. The proper outcome would be to realize we must get off of any form of fossil fuel energy.
The great hope among energy wonks is that natural gas is the short-term salve for our climate woes. After all, burning natural gas for electricity emits just half the carbon dioxide that burning coal does. Plus, the United States seems to have an abundance of gas, particularly in the Marcellus Shale, and low natural-gas prices are already prodding many electric utilities to retire their coal plants. That’s why liberal groups like the Center for American Progress have dubbed natural gas a ‘bridge fuel,
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Tuesday, September 13th, 2011
JAMES BAMFORD, - Politico
Stephan: Our paranoia has been the justification for the usurpation of most of our civil liberties whenever and wherever it suits the government to suspend them. The War of Terror is a scam, designed to produce billions of dollars of profit for a tiny number of companies and people. The world we grew up in is vanishing.
Somewhere between Sept. 11 and today, the enemy morphed from a handful of terrorists to the American population at large, leaving us nowhere to run and no place to hide.
Within weeks of the attacks, the giant ears of the National Security Agency, always pointed outward toward potential enemies, turned inward on the American public itself. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established 23 years before to ensure that only suspected foreign agents and terrorists were targeted by the NSA, would be bypassed. Telecom companies, required by law to keep the computerized phone records of their customers confidential unless presented with a warrant, would secretly turn them over in bulk to the NSA without ever asking for a warrant.
Around the country, in tall, windowless telecom company buildings known as switches, NSA technicians quietly began installing beam-splitters to redirect duplicate copies of all phone calls and email messages to secret rooms behind electronic cipher locks.
There, NSA software and hardware designed for ‘deep packet inspection
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