Friday, January 18th, 2013
MAC MCCLELLAND, Human Rights Reporter - Mother Jones
Stephan: Our response to these people who stood up for us by the family when our government said, we need you, is appalling, miserly, and deeply unethical. Of a piece with the consciousness that led us to this catastrophe in the first place.
Brannan Vines has never been to war. But she’s got a warrior’s skills: hyperawareness, hypervigilance, adrenaline-sharp quick-scanning for danger, for triggers. Super stimuli-sensitive. Skills on the battlefield, crazy-person behavior in a drug store, where she was recently standing behind a sweet old lady counting out change when she suddenly became so furious her ears literally started ringing. Being too cognizant of every sound-every coin dropping an echo-she explodes inwardly, fury flash-incinerating any normal tolerance for a fellow patron with a couple of dollars in quarters and dimes. Her nose starts running she’s so pissed, and there she is standing in a CVS, snotty and deaf with rage, like some kind of maniac, because a tiny elderly woman needs an extra minute to pay for her dish soap or whatever.
Brannan Vines has never been to war, but her husband, Caleb, was sent to Iraq twice, where he served in the infantry as a designated marksman. He’s one of 103,200, or 228,875, or 336,000 Americans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and came back with PTSD, depending on whom you ask, and one of 115,000 to 456,000 with traumatic brain injury. It’s hard to say, with the lack of definitive tests for […]
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Friday, January 18th, 2013
GLENN THRUSH, REID J. EPSTEIN and BYRON TAU , - Politico
Stephan: No much attention is being paid to this story, but I think it is a big deal. Essentially this is the story of a President creating a special private corps whose task is to motivate the electorate to support him by bringing pressure on the Congress. It is an unintended consequence of Citizens United.
President Barack Obama’s remaining campaign apparatus will relaunch Sunday as a tax-exempt group to support his second term agenda, a senior Democrat familiar with the plans confirms to POLITICO.
The new organization will be separate from the Democratic National Committee, with Obama’s 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina the national chair of the group.
Action will begin the day the president is formally sworn in to his second term, when Obama campaign staff and volunteers will meet at the Washington Hilton at an event dubbed the Obama Legacy Conference.
Since he won re-election, Obama’s campaign has emailed supporters to drum up support for the president’s positions during the fiscal cliff stand-off and, on Thursday, on Obama’s proposed gun violence reforms. The vast majority of its employees are gone, though Messina and spokeswoman Katie Hogan remain on board.
While Obama has not spoken publicly about the future fate of his campaign apparatus, Vice President Joe Biden has twice this week hinted at it playing a role in the administration’s second term.
During a Monday meeting to discuss gun violence with Democratic members of Congress, Biden told the small group that he and Obama have the campaign’s organizations at its disposal as it seeks to influence public opinion […]
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Friday, January 18th, 2013
OLGA PIERCE, JUSTIN ELLIOTT and THEODORIC MEYER, - ProPublica
Stephan: It is yet further proof, if such were needed about how the Extreme Right of the Republican Party has been gnawing away at the foundations of American democracy. They aren't really even trying to hide it.
Wednesday the Republican State Leadership Committee issued a report saying:
'President Obama won reelection in 2012 by nearly 3 points nationally, and banked 126 more electoral votes than Governor Mitt Romney. Democratic candidates for the U.S. House won 1.1 million more votes than their Republican opponents. But the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives is a Republican and presides over a 33-seat House Republican majority during the 113th Congress. How? One needs to look no farther than four states that voted Democratic on a statewide level in 2012, yet elected a strong Republican delegation to represent them in Congress: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
[T]he Republican firewall at the state legislative and congressional level held.'
Here is the story of how this happened.
Click through to see the chart.
In the November election, a million more Americans voted for Democrats seeking election to the U.S. House of Representatives than Republicans. But that popular vote advantage did not result in control of the chamber. Instead, despite getting fewer votes, Republicans have maintained a commanding control of the House. Such a disparity has happened only three times in the last century.
(Here’s a chart comparing 2010 and 2012.)
Analysts and others have identified redistricting as a key to the disparity. Republicans had a years-long strategy of winning state houses in order to control each state’s once-a-decade redistricting process. (Confused about redistricting? Check out our song.)
Republican strategist Karl Rove laid out the approach in a Wall Street Journal column in early 2010 headlined ‘He who controls redistricting can control Congress.’
The approach paid off. In 2010 state races, Republicans picked up 675 legislative seats, gaining complete control of 12 state legislatures. As a result, the GOP oversaw redrawing of lines for four times as many congressional districts as Democrats.
How did they dominate redistricting? A ProPublica investigation has found that the GOP relied on opaque nonprofits funded by dark money, supposedly nonpartisan campaign outfits, and millions in corporate donations to achieve Republican-friendly maps throughout the country. […]
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Thursday, January 17th, 2013
BRIAN MOCKENHAUPT, - Esquire
Stephan: This is a searingly honest account. It's hard to get through, but I encourage you to do so. We are putting tens of thousands of men and women through this experience -- in the service of what exactly? And these people, and their families, about one per cent of our population, are going to have a huge impact on our future. Just as the Viet Nam War, both vets, like Sen. Kerry, those marked by working the system to stay out, Dick Cheney; as well as the dead, the maimed physically and psychologically, and their families, have affected the present day. We will be shaped for two generations at least by these wars.
A few months ago, I found a Web site loaded with pictures and videos from Iraq, the sort that usually aren’t seen on the news. I watched insurgent snipers shoot American soldiers and car bombs disintegrate markets, accompanied by tinny music and loud, rhythmic chanting, the soundtrack of the propaganda campaigns. Video cameras focused on empty stretches of road, building anticipation. Humvees rolled into view and the explosions brought mushroom clouds of dirt and smoke and chunks of metal spinning through the air. Other videos and pictures showed insurgents shot dead while planting roadside bombs or killed in firefights and the remains of suicide bombers, people how they’re not meant to be seen, no longer whole. The images sickened me, but their familiarity pulled me in, giving comfort, and I couldn’t stop. I clicked through more frames, hungry for it. This must be what a shot of dope feels like after a long stretch of sobriety. Soothing and nauseating and colored by everything that has come before. My body tingled and my stomach ached, hollow. I stood on weak legs and walked into the kitchen to make dinner. I sliced half an onion before putting the knife down and watching […]
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Thursday, January 17th, 2013
ANTHONY GUCCIARDI, - Natural Society
Stephan: Is it any wonder we have an obesity problem?
Click through to see the illustrations.
It’s ‘McRib season’, and thousands across the nation are scrambling to use online websites like the ‘McRib locator’ to stuff the McDonald’s McRib sandwich down their throats. A sandwich that is not only full of genetically modified ingredients, a medley of toxic fillers and preservatives, but also some ingredients that are actually banned in other nations around the world. But honestly, are you surprised?
The McRib is the result of intensive marketing by McDonald’s. Utilizing the basics of supply and demand through creating scarcity over the McRib by only unleashing the culinary abomination for a fraction of the year that is only known once it is released, McDonald’s fans have been known to ‘hoard’ McRib sandwiches and eat them in extreme excess. It’s even a topic of the popular documentary Super Size Me, where filmmaker Morgan Spurlock (who gorges himself with McDonald’s for 30 days only to find serious health consequences) encounters ‘McRib hunters’ who actually travel the country eating McRib sandwiches.
Related: 3 Fast Food Secret Ingredients
McDonald’s even made McRib fans sign a petition to ‘save the McRib’ online, bringing out a conglomerate of fans to bring back their favorite franken sandwich.
What’s Inside a McDonald’s McRib Sandwich?
But what’s really inside the […]
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