Sunday, February 19th, 2012
STEPHANIE LANDSMAN, - CNBC
Stephan: One of the ways to hide climate change is simply to cut the budget of the weather service so that it doesn't have the satellites and other technical infrastructure installations that it needs to catch the data to report. Surprise! That is exactly what conservatives in the Congress are doing, and Obama is going along with it.
A frigid wind is blowing from Pennsylvania Avenue to National Weather Service offices all over the country.
President Barack Obama is calling to slash $39 million dollars or four percent from National Weather Service, a part of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Under his budget plan, it would get $872.2 million in fiscal year 2013 – down from $911 million.
This is the second year in a row the National Weather Service is in the eye of the federal budget cut storm.
The National Weather Service narrowly escaped getting hit last year after President Barack Obama fought House Republicans to keep the funding. In fact, it got a net increase of three million dollars.
But this time, the downburst is coming from the White House. It’s expected to put 96 jobs on the chopping block.
NOAA Spokesperson Scott Smullen said President Obama’s proposal is an administration-wide effort to find IT efficiencies and savings across all federal agencies.
To comply, NOAA wants to ‘consolidate
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Saturday, February 18th, 2012
JOSH GERSTEIN, - Politico
Stephan: This is very sad news for the people of Montana. The only good news is that, hopefully, it will set up a full bore reconsideration of Citizens United. If Citizens United is upheld, only a Constitutional amendment will save American democracy from legalized bribery.
To create an amendment requires either a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate, or a Constitutional convention called by two-thirds of the States, after which three quarters of the states must ratify the amendment as passed.
The reality of achieving such an amendment, particularly in the face of the unlimited special interest funding that would be permitted throughout the entire process is very small.
Right now 196 people out of our 311,591,917 population are providing 80 per cent of the Super PAC funding that is allowing candidates who would otherwise have dropped out to continue. Given the make-up of the court I would not hold my breath that Citizens United will be overturned.
The U.S. Supreme Court has blocked a Montana Supeme Court ruling upholding the constitutionality of that state’s ban on independent expenditures by corporations in state and local political campaigns.
In a unanimous order issued late Friday afternoon (and posted here), the high court’s justices stayed the Montana court’s decision. The move clears the way for independent expenditures in Montana, at least until the U.S. Supreme Court takes final action in the case.
Critics of the Montana court’s 7-2 decision issued Dec. 30 said it flew directly in the face of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010 that struck down a law banning such spending in federal elections. However, the Montana court’s majority said the state’s unique history made the state ban constitutional.
Two U.S. Supreme Court Justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, used the order Friday to call attention to the proliferation of Super PACs in the presidential race and to suggest that those funding such groups are eager to hold sway over the candidates.
‘Montana’s experience, and experience elsewhere since this Court’s decision in Citizens United…make it exceedingly difficult to maintain that independent expenditures by corporations ‘do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption,” Ginsburg wrote […]
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Saturday, February 18th, 2012
, - Agence France-Presse (France)
Stephan: Here is what the nonsense of teaching to the test, and No Child Left Behind (a singularly inapposite name for a law) have bequeathed to us. In an age when technological skills are the path to a successful society, the U.S.is becoming the junior varsity. All of this arises because we have been making policy on the basis of ideology and theology instead of facts.
The proof of this can be seen in the fact that, as with healthcare, we spend more than any other country yet get stunningly mediocre social outcomes.
Western schoolchildren are up to three years behind those in China’s Shanghai and success in Asian education is not just the product of pushy ‘tiger
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Saturday, February 18th, 2012
HEIDI STEVENSON, - Locals Supporting Locals
Stephan: Here we have yet another failure of the Obama Administration. It seems to me that almost every month we have some kind of failure in the food, pollution- control, or drug sectors arising from a lack of proper regulation. Increasingly, if one wishes to eat healthy food, one is going to have to grow it, or get it from a local supplier whose standards one can know and check.
A Monsanto-created chemical, Neotame is likely more toxic than Aspartame. The FDA has quietly decided that we don’t have the right to know if it’s adulterating our food, not even if the food is labeled USDA Organic.
Aspartame can step aside. There’s a new sweetener in town and it isn’t saddled with the inconvenience of having to be listed on labels, so it can be sneaked into any prepared food, even USDA so-called Organic. So sayeth the FDA. Neotame is a Monsanto-created chemical similar to Aspartame, including its neurotoxic properties.
Monsanto developed Neotame as their Aspartame patent was expiring, and had no trouble in gaining FDA approval in 2002. They added 3-dimethylbutyl, a chemical listed as hazardous by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to Aspartame, making it both sweeter and more toxic.
Toxicity
Both Aspartame and Neotame contain substances that are metabolized into formaldehyde, a highly toxic poison, and an excitotoxic amino acid that agitates, thereby damaging, nerves.
At the time Neotame was originally approved by the FDA, Feingold.org, which battles the addition of many dodgy food additives, stated:
We did a search of MedLine to find studies of adverse effects or side effects of Neotame. Only four studies appeared, two of […]
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Saturday, February 18th, 2012
Tim Dickinson, - Rolling Stone
Stephan: There are many things I don't like about the Obama Administration, and this is high on the list. We have 2.3 million people, disproportionately people of color, in prison -- the largest gulag in the world. America constitutes about 4.5 per cent of the world's population, but it has 25 per cent of the world's total prisoner population.
About 700,000 of them are there because of non-violent drug convictions. it costs on average $35,000 a year to maintain a medium security prisoner. We seem to have no money to educate our children but we seem to have endless money to incarcerate them.
Once again we see ideology and theology trumping scientific research. It is increasingly the hallmark of the United States.
Back when he was running for president in 2008, Barack Obama insisted that medical marijuana was an issue best left to state and local governments. ‘I’m not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue,’ he vowed, promising an end to the Bush administration’s high-profile raids on providers of medical pot, which is legal in 16 states and the District of Columbia.
But over the past year, the Obama administration has quietly unleashed a multiÂagency crackdown on medical cannabis that goes far beyond anything undertaken by George W. Bush. The feds are busting growers who operate in full compliance with state laws, vowing to seize the property of anyone who dares to even rent to legal pot dispensaries, and threatening to imprison state employees responsible for regulating medical marijuana. With more than 100 raids on pot dispensaries during his first three years, Obama is now on pace to exceed Bush’s record for medical-marijuana busts. ‘There’s no question that Obama’s the worst president on medical marijuana,’ says Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project. ‘He’s gone from first to worst.’
The federal crackdown imperils the medical care of the estimated 730,000 patients […]
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