side note: I wish the MSM would start covering this story a bit more….it’s scary to think that Murdoch could own the WSJ….I guess the reason it’s not being covered is Murdoch already owns most of the MSM already!

By PAUL KRUGMAN
The New York Times

In October 2003, the nonpartisan Program on International Policy Attitudes published a study titled “Misperceptions, the media and the Iraq war.” It found that 60 percent of Americans believed at least one of the following: clear evidence had been found of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda; W.M.D. had been found in Iraq; world public opinion favored the U.S. going to war with Iraq.

The prevalence of these misperceptions, however, depended crucially on where people got their news. Only 23 percent of those who got their information mainly from PBS or NPR believed any of these untrue things, but the number was 80 percent among those relying primarily on Fox News. In particular, two-thirds of Fox devotees believed that the U.S. had “found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the Al Qaeda terrorist organization.”

So, does anyone think it’s O.K. if Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox News, buys The Wall Street Journal? (more…)

LAUREN FRAYER | AP
HUFFINGTONPOST.COM

Insurgents launched a deadly coordinated attack on an American combat patrol, detonating a roadside bomb, then firing guns and rocket-propelled grenades at the soldiers, the U.S. military said Friday. Five troops were killed.

Seven soldiers were wounded in the attack on Thursday in southern Baghdad and were evacuated to a military hospital; one has since returned to duty, the military said.

“It was a very violent attack and we thought it did show a level of sophistication that we have not often seen so far in this campaign,” Army Maj. Gen. Joseph F. Fil Jr., commanding general of Multi-National Division Baghdad and First Cavalry Division, said Friday.

As U.S. troops have gone through Baghdad in areas previously overrun by militants, “they are starting to fight very hard and that’s what we saw yesterday.”

The deaths brought to 99 the number of U.S. troops to die in Iraq this month, according to an Associated Press count. The toll for the past three months _ 329 _ made it the deadliest quarter for U.S. troops in Iraq since the war began in March 2003. (more…)

By Elana Schor
http://thehill.com

As the Supreme Court’s term winds to a close this week, lawmakers are mulling the future of a thriving breed of bill: the high court “fix.”

Members of both parties are pressing or planning at least six bills to clarify recent Supreme Court rulings, signaling what may become a new era of congressional sensitivity to court decisions that can be remedied with legislation.

“What the court’s saying to us is, you have to write down every single little thing you want done,” Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said. Congress should not have to step in often to address the court’s interpretation of statutes, he added, “but I’m afraid we may be moving in that direction.” (more…)

side note: Received this in an email and thought that reposting it would be a good idea. The NT editors have tried to do our part, but everyone can do more

Many of us are way too busy to do our share to help the environment — or at least, that’s how it feels much of the time. We’d like to join the fight against global warming, but who has the time? Helping the environment isn’t just good for the earth… it’s good for your pocketbook too. You can do it in small ways, at home and when you drive, and those ways will add up to major changes worldwide, and big changes that you’ll see in your budget. Continue reading for 10 tips on how to save money saving the planet.

1. CFLs. Replace regular light bulbs with compact fluorescent light blulbs (CFLs), which are slightly more expensive but will last much longer and burn less energy when they’re on. This is a small change but it adds up to big savings over time.

2. Energy-efficient appliances. There are many new energy-efficient water heaters, washers, dryers — any electrical appliance in your house, in fact. This can save tons on your power bill. Other alternatives: don’t use hot water for everything, and dry your clothes using a clothes line.

3. Buy used if possible. Before buying something new, ask friends or relatives, look at garage sales or thrift shops, look on eBay or other similar sites where used stuff is sold. You’re helping a product live longer, thus reducing the impact on the environment, and at the same time getting it much cheaper (and sometimes just like new).

4. Make your own coffee. If you buy coffee from a trendy coffee shop, this can save you tons every year. At $4 a pop, Starbucks (or similar) coffee can add up to nearly $1,500 a year if purchased once a day. Twice a day, and you can double that figure. Making coffee at home costs only cents, and if you buy Fair Trade coffee, you’re helping poor farmers and the environment. Buy in bulk to save more.

5. Eat in more. Instead of eating at fast food joints (which are horrible damagers of the environment) or expensive sit-down restaurants, save huge amounts of money by creating a simple menu, buying the groceries, and cooking at home. You can create very easy dinners in 15 minutes or less, and the cost will be a fraction of what it costs to eat out. You can avoid the excessive packaging of fast food (not to mention their ravaging of the rain forests) to help the environment.

6. Ride a bike, walk, carpool. Driving contributes to global warming and the depletion of our natural resources, not to mention pollution. So the less you drive, the better. Even if you only replace a few trips a week with a bike or walking or carpooling, you’re doing your part to help stop global warming and save on gas money at the same time. Walk your kid to school, bike to the corner store, carpool or commute by bike to work.

7. Gas-saving driving. If you must drive, at least ensure that you’re using less gas by doing so. Some common recommendations to do so: ease up on the gas pedal and brake pedal, be sure your tires are inflated and your engine is running smoothly, don’t have your car on idle for too long, and get a fuel-efficient car.

8. Less waste. The excessive packaging of most products today, and the use of paper and plastic disposable products, is a huge contributor to the destruction of the environment. Look for products that use less packaging, or buy in bulk (or at co-ops where you bring your own containers), and use real plates and silverware instead of paper or plastic ones. Bring cloth grocery bags when you go shopping instead of using paper or plastic.

9. Insulation. Be sure your house is properly insulated to save on heating and cooling costs. Many people allow their house to lose a ton of energy a year by neglecting this important step.

10. Push mower. If you’ve got a relatively flat yard, and you keep your grass fairly short, today’s motorless push mowers are easy to use and consume zero gas. They’re not the old fashioned mowers of your grandpa’s generation — they actually run very smoothly.

side note: Blumenthal just has this way with words where you find yourself shaking your head yes after each line!

By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com
New details about his secret mission to expand the power of the president show that Cheney, at the end of his career, refuses to loosen his grip.

Jun. 28, 2007 | When Huey P. Long left the governorship of Louisiana in 1932 to become a U.S. senator, he filled the position with a childhood friend named Oscar Kelly Allen, known as O.K., who gave the OK to whatever the Kingfish wished. The story is still told, perhaps apocryphal, that one day a leaf wafted through an open window and landed on O.K.’s desk and, without hesitation, he signed it.

Two months after 9/11, on the day of the fall of Kabul, Afghanistan, Nov. 13, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared in the Oval Office with a four-page executive order designating terrorism suspects as enemy combatants to be held indefinitely, with no right to have their detention reviewed by any court except newly created military commissions, where they would not be permitted to learn the accusations or evidence against them, or be represented by counsel, or even know that their case had been heard and decided.

The secretary of state and the national security advisor were deliberately kept uninformed as the White House staff secretary prepared the order for signature. According to a four-part series published this week in the Washington Post on the extraordinary power of the vice president, “When it [the order] returned to the Oval Office, in a blue portfolio embossed with the presidential seal, Bush pulled a felt-tip pen from his pocket and signed without sitting down. Almost no one else had seen the text.” Colin Powell was stunned when he learned of the fait accompli. “What the hell just happened?” he asked. Condoleezza Rice was described as “incensed.” But neither of them, then or later, effectively challenged Cheney’s usurpation of executive authority. And, as can be gathered inferentially, Bush never bothered to ask Cheney about their opinions on the executive order or to call them; nor did he seem to care. (more…)

side note: Hmmm….Surge=more dead headless bodies…..Maybe this is progress in dubya’s world…

By AP/SINAN SALAHEDDIN
Time Magazine (Time.com)

(BAGHDAD) — Twenty beheaded bodies were discovered Thursday on the banks of the Tigris River southeast of Baghdad, while a parked car bomb killed another 20 people in one of the capital’s busy outdoor bus stations, police said.

The beheaded remains were found in the Sunni Muslim village of Um al-Abeed, near the city of Salman Pak, which lies 14 miles southeast of Baghdad.

The bodies — all men aged 20 to 40 years old — had their hands and legs bound, and some of the heads were found next to the bodies, two officers said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

Meanwhile, a parked car bomb ripped through a crowded transport hub in southwest Baghdad’s Baiyaa neighborhood at morning rush hour, killing at least 20 people and wounding more than 50, another officer said on the same condition. (more…)

side note: i would say this is big news, but they aren’t going to comply, so i’m more interested in what happens next. Who’s got the balls to stand up to these guys. I can’t tell people how pissed we are here at NT. I really hope people got to read the 4 part series from the Washington Post, heck, just read one of them, and you’ll understand. The VP is claiming he doesn’t fall under the executive branch or the legislative branch. Well, do the math, he either belongs to the 4th branch of government, and i most have missed that day at school, or he’s a floater.
LAURIE KELLMAN | AP
Huffingtonpost.com

The Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office Wednesday for documents relating to President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

Also named in subpoenas signed by committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., were the Justice Department and the National Security Council. The four parties have until July 18 to comply, according to a statement by Leahy’s office.

The committee wants documents that might shed light on internal disputes within the administration over the legality of the program.

“Our attempts to obtain information through testimony of administration witnesses have been met with a consistent pattern of evasion and misdirection,” Leahy said in his cover letters for the subpoenas. “There is no legitimate argument for withholding the requested materials from this committee.” (more…)

Carla Marinucci, Lance Williams, Chronicle Staff Writers

California Republican Party officials might have violated federal immigration law by hiring an Australian immigrant for a top finance post without ever demanding to see his proof of legal residence, immigration officials said Tuesday.

Ron Nehring, who heads the California Republican Party, admitted Tuesday that he — and as far as he knows, any party officials — never saw the green card that would prove that Michael Kamburowski, an Australian citizen hired as the state GOP’s chief operations officer, was a legal resident.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement Division said Tuesday the law is clear that “it is the responsibility of the employers to check and see that someone is legally in the country and eligible to work.” (more…)

Submitted by Bill Scher
http://commonsense.ourfuture.org

Way too many folks rolled over when John Roberts and Sam Alito were nominated for the Supreme Court. And now we’re seeing the consequences.

In my recent book, I characterized the conservative judicial activist agenda as “elitist government, no longer representative of and responsive to the people, handcuffed from insisting upon responsible corporate behavior, but free to subject all Americans to one group’s version of morality.”

And today, we’re seeing that vision in all its glory.

The conservative activists on the Supreme Court decreed in a series of 5-4 decisions:

* Individuals, who believe their tax dollars are being unconstitutionally misused by the White House to promote religious beliefs, aren’t allowed to enter a courthouse to make their case.

* The Environmental Protection Agency can avoid its responsibilities under the Endangered Species Act, even though it’s a law reflecting the public will as passed by the democratically-elected Congress.

* Corporations can once again use their checkbooks to flood the public airwaves with political ads during election season, again overruling Congress. (more…)

side note: This is part 4 of a 4 part series by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker of the Washington Post that examines Dick’s role in the White House. He has his hand in every cookie jar, from the war on terror, to the environment, to our energy policy…etc.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

By Jo Becker and Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writers

Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message awaited her.

“This is Dick Cheney,” said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an interview. “I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation. Please call me at — hmm, I guess I don’t know my own number. I’m over at the White House.”

Wooldridge wrote off the message as a prank. It was not. Cheney had reached far down the chain of command, on so unexpected a point of vice presidential concern, because he had spotted a political threat arriving on Wooldridge’s desk.

In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.

Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in.

First Cheney looked for a way around the law, aides said. Next he set in motion a process to challenge the science protecting the fish, according to a former Oregon congressman who lobbied for the farmers.

Because of Cheney’s intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.

Characteristically, Cheney left no tracks. (more…)

via NYTimes.com

Scott Nelson/World Picture Network, for the New York Times
Moving through the streets of Baquba on Sunday, American soldiers in a tank had to be wary of bombs buried in the roads, but troops moving house to house on foot encountered buildings rigged to explode by retreating insurgents.

Scott Nelson/World Picture Network, for the New York Times
American soldiers were forced to move out of a house they had secured, after they discovered the building next door was rigged with explosives.

Scott Nelson/World Picture Network, for the New York Times
Leaving the area of what the troops call an “H-BIED” – or house-born improvised explosive device – soldiers had to look for thin copper wires outside, which are used as trip wires.

Scott Nelson/World Picture Network, for the New York Times
To make it difficult for insurgents to follow their movements, American soldiers used smoke to cover their withdrawal.

Scott Nelson/World Picture Network, for the New York Times
To destroy a house rigged with explosives, an air strike was called in and a 500-pound bomb was dropped on the building.

Scott Nelson/World Picture Network, for the New York Times
The soldiers call the routine procedure of exploding the bombs they discover in houses, or beside or beneath roads “controlled dets.”

original

side note: This is part 3 of a 4 part series by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker of the Washington Post that examines Dick’s role in the White House. He has his hand in every cookie jar, from the war on terror, to the environment, to our energy policy…etc.

Part 1
Part 2

By Jo Becker and Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writers

Air Force Two touched down at the Greenbrier Valley Airport in West Virginia on Feb. 6, 2003, carrying Vice President Cheney to the annual retreat of Republican House and Senate leaders. He had come to sell them on the economic centerpiece of President Bush’s first term: a $674 billion tax cut.

The president had accepted Cheney’s diagnosis that the sluggish economy needed a jolt, overruling senior economic advisers who forecast dangerous budget deficits. But Bush rejected one of Cheney’s remedies: deep reductions in the capital gains tax on investments.

The vice president “was just hot on that,” said Cesar Conda, then Cheney’s domestic policy adviser. “It goes to show you: He wins and he loses, and he lost on that one.”

Not for long.

As the Republican lawmakers debated in a closed-door session at the Greenbrier resort, the vice president revived the argument, touting his idea as a way to energize a stock market battered by scandals such as Enron. House allies inserted Cheney’s cut into their package. But that came at the expense of one of Bush’s priorities: abolishing the tax on stock dividends. (more…)

side note: This is one of the first detailed looks on how the Dark Lord operates in the White House. This is first in a 4 part series by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker of the Washington Post.

CLICK HERE FOR PART 2
By Barton Gellman and Jo Becker
The Washington Post

Just past the Oval Office, in the private dining room overlooking the South Lawn, Vice President Cheney joined President Bush at a round parquet table they shared once a week. Cheney brought a four-page text, written in strict secrecy by his lawyer. He carried it back out with him after lunch.

In less than an hour, the document traversed a West Wing circuit that gave its words the power of command. It changed hands four times, according to witnesses, with emphatic instructions to bypass staff review. When it returned to the Oval Office, in a blue portfolio embossed with the presidential seal, Bush pulled a felt-tip pen from his pocket and signed without sitting down. Almost no one else had seen the text.

Cheney’s proposal had become a military order from the commander in chief. Foreign terrorism suspects held by the United States were stripped of access to any court – civilian or military, domestic or foreign. They could be confined indefinitely without charges and would be tried, if at all, in closed “military commissions.” (more…)

side note: this is just sad and really pathetic. I mean, just look at the poster below from the 1930’s. I’m not sure why the dude is injecting something into her, when they are referring to marijuana. But, we know it scared the hell out of people. Man, i love it when our tax dollars go to such wonderful causes. I mean, lets kill the plant that grows naturally, and that has been proven to help people who have a variety of health issues, not to mention all of its other uses. But why take something that is natural, when you can take one of the thousands of pills our pharmy buddies are making. hmmmm, man made chemicals!
By Marsha Rosenbaum and Paul Armentano, AlterNet.

More than 70 years in the making, the long-awaited sequel to the notorious 1936 film, Reefer Madness has arrived. It’s called The Purple Brain, and just like its unintentionally campy predecessor, its purpose is to frighten Americans about marijuana.

The particular target audience for the Feds’ new production is the millions of parents who may have, without incident, experimented with marijuana in the 1970s, when they were about the same age as their children are today.

The plot is as follows: Sure, the pot you and your 40-something peers once enjoyed may have been innocuous, but that’s only because it bears no resemblance to the super-potent weed of today– strains with such foreboding names as “Train wreck,” “AK-47,” and “The Purple.” As proclaimed by Drug Czar John Walters recently, “[W]e are no longer talking about the drug of the 1960s and 1970s — this is [in computer parlance] Pot 2.0.”

To top off this frightening message, unsubstantiated claims of “brain damage” resulting from the use of this super-pot are new buzzwords in today’s Prevention circles.

If ever there was an attention-getting script for scaring the hell out of parents, this is it.

Fortunately, while the headlines are grabbing, the story lacks credibility.

Growers in the business of selling marijuana have always attached pet names to selected strains of pot. In the 1970s, popular varieties included “Acapulco Gold” and “Maui Wowie.” Today, as in the past, most of these labels are little more than clever marketing gimmicks devised by producers and sellers to distinguish their particular product in a highly competitive marketplace. (more…)

side note: again, this is why the Dept. of Justice issue is so important. All of these independent government agencies are working in lock step of each other, and taking their direct orders from the President and Vice President. This is extremely nerve racking for me.
Newsweek
Michael Isikoff

A new battle has erupted over Vice President Dick Cheney’s refusal to submit to an executive order requiring a government review of his handling of classified documents. But the dispute could also raise questions for embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. For the past four years, Cheney’s office has failed to comply with an executive order requiring all federal offices—including those in the White House—to annually report to the National Archives on how they safeguard classified documents. Cheney’s hard-line chief of staff, David Addington, has made the novel argument that the veep doesn’t have to comply on the ground that, because the vice president also serves as president of the Senate, his office is not really part of the executive branch.

Cheney’s position so frustrated J. William Leonard, the chief of the Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office, which enforces the order, that he complained in January to Gonzales. In a letter, Leonard wrote that Cheney’s position was inconsistent with the “plain text reading” of the executive order and asked the attorney general for an official ruling. But Gonzales never responded, thereby permitting Cheney to continue blocking Leonard from conducting even a routine inspection of how the veep’s office was handling classified documents, according to correspondence released by House Government Reform Committee chair Rep. Henry Waxman. (more…)