side note: I’m not always the biggest Matthews fan…but this time he made me proud. I am sick and tired of the church (u can pick from the 10,000 different religions out there, this time it happens to be the Catholics) wanting to stick their belief system into our laws. When the 10,000+ kids were getting abused by 100+ priests out there, they didn’t want to be apart of our judicial system….b/c if they were, those scumbags would be in jail, where they belong! Instead, they just decided to cover it up and move the child abusing priests to different cities, so they could prey on other young children…some as young as 8 years old! Where’s the “moral clarity” from the Catholic Church? Oh ya…..hypocrisy screams loud and clear on this one!

side note: A few things as I just wrapped up watching this video…..first and foremost, well done to the folks at New Left Media. Second, for those fuckin twits out there, FOX news in the #1 news source on TV…..they are the main stream media people! That’s why we have so many fuckin idiots in this country. Third…..speaking of FOX news…..watch an evening of that garbage, and then watch this video…..these people, like robots, repeat the talking points they here on such shows as Beck, Hannity and O’Reilly. They are like little talking FOX parrots…….except this time around, Polly needs a friggin brain!

side note: This is scary……and this is how Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and a host of other war criminals got around Congressional oversight. Hire a private company to do your dirty work! You watch, this is going to come back and haunt the United States when this truly becomes public….maybe in one year, maybe in 20………and unfortunately, President Obama is continuing these war crimes. You’re supposed to be a Constitutional scholar…WTF?!?!

by JEREMY SCAHILL
The Nation

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help run a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.

The source, who has worked on covert US military programs for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of Blackwater’s involvement. He spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. The source said that the program is so “compartmentalized” that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence.
The White House did not return calls or email messages seeking comment for this story. Capt. John Kirby, the spokesperson for Adm. Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Nation, “We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature.” A defense official, on background, specifically denied that Blackwater performs work on drone strikes or intelligence for JSOC in Pakistan. “We don’t have any contracts to do that work for us. We don’t contract that kind of work out, period,” the official said. “There has not been, and is not now, contracts between JSOC and that organization for these types of services.” The previously unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program that the agency’s director, Leon Panetta, announced he had canceled in June 2009. “This is a parallel operation to the CIA,” said the source. “They are two separate beasts.” The program puts Blackwater at the epicenter of a US military operation within the borders of a nation against which the United States has not declared war–knowledge that could further strain the already tense relations between the United States and Pakistan. In 2006, the United States and Pakistan struck a deal that authorized JSOC to enter Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden with the understanding that Pakistan would deny it had given permission. Officially, the United States is not supposed to have any active military operations in the country. Blackwater, which recently changed its name to Xe Services and US Training Center, denies the company is operating in Pakistan. “Xe Services has only one employee in Pakistan performing construction oversight for the U.S. Government,” Blackwater spokesperson Mark Corallo said in a statement to The Nation, adding that the company has “no other operations of any kind in Pakistan.”
A former senior executive at Blackwater confirmed the military intelligence source’s claim that the company is working in Pakistan for the CIA and JSOC, the premier counterterrorism and covert operations force within the military. He said that Blackwater is also working for the Pakistani government on a subcontract with an Islamabad-based security firm that puts US Blackwater operatives on the ground with Pakistani forces in counter-terrorism operations, including house raids and border interdictions, in the North-West Frontier Province and elsewhere in Pakistan. This arrangement, the former executive said, allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country. He also confirmed that Blackwater has a facility in Karachi and has personnel deployed elsewhere in Pakistan. The former executive spoke on condition of anonymity. (more…)

via sloshspot.com

Love it or hate it, people smoke marijuana – lots of it. In some states marijuana consumption and posession have been decriminalized, and even legalized for medicinal purposes. But, have you ever wondered how large the economics of Marijuana were? Us too. As a result ,have decided to put together this graphic, which illustrates the popularity of marijuana consumption, the federal tax dollars spent to keep marijuana illegal, and the possible tax revenues that could be generated if marijuana production were legalized and taxed like any other agricultural product. It is especially interesting, with regards to the Great Recession:

original article

side note: I think the decision has already been made. I’m from the camp that believes that our politicians make their decisions, then leak it to the press, to prepare the public for the announcement of that leaked info. I’m really disappointed in President Obama….not one country, ever, in the history of man-kind has had luck in Afghanistan. What worries me about this country is that we like to think we’re “special” and “unique”. These beliefs stem from the fact that Americans don’t travel outside our country…..which in turn de-humanizes other people in other countries……we then think we’re better. Get out and travel people!! You’ll see that at the end of the day…..people all over the world are doing the same thing: trying to survive the daily BS, trying to put food on the table for their family, and trying to give their kids a better life. We’re all on this world together……
UPDATE: Maybe and Hopefully I’m wrong….

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton are coalescing around a proposal to send 30,000 or more additional American troops to Afghanistan, but President Obama remains unsatisfied with answers he has gotten about how vigorously the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan would help execute a new strategy, administration officials said Tuesday.

Mr. Obama is to consider four final options in a meeting with his national security team on Wednesday, his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, told reporters. The options outline different troop levels, other officials said, but they also assume different goals — including how much of Afghanistan the troops would seek to control — and different time frames and expectations for the training of Afghan security forces.

Three of the options call for specific levels of additional troops. The low-end option would add 20,000 to 25,000 troops, a middle option calls for about 30,000, and another embraces Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for roughly 40,000 more troops. Administration officials said that a fourth option was added only in the past few days. They declined to identify any troop level attached to it.

Mr. Gates, a Republican who served as President George W. Bush’s last defense secretary, and who commands considerable respect from the president, is expected to be pivotal in Mr. Obama’s decision. But administration officials cautioned that Mr. Obama had not yet made up his mind, and that other top advisers, among them Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, remained skeptical of the value of a buildup. (more…)

side note: For the past 2 years, we have been buying our pork from a local farmer, who is related to a good friend, this farmer raises only a small number of cows and pigs, but does it on small scale and really focuses on the conditions of his animals. Let me just say that I’ve never eaten pork so tasty….I know it sound hard to believe, but I can now tell the difference between quality and the shit that factory farms produce. This year, we decided that we’d buy beef from that farmer as well……we’ve just started consuming it, but god damn, it’s tasty as well!!!! With the obesity problems in this country…we need to start educating people on where their food comes from. Once again, the corporate culture of factory farms have invaded DC, and our politicians care more about their relection chests then their constituents!

HuffingtonPost.com
Nicolette Hahn Niman
Livestock Rancher, Lawyer, and Author, Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms

Most people share at least the following traits: they want to be healthy; they like animals; and they value clean air and water. Yet relatively few Americans connect those concerns with their food. As more people start making the link (especially if they’ve seen graphic video footage of industrial animal operations), many decide it’s time to stop eating foods from factory farms. This is a guide for doing just that.

I’ve been a vegetarian for more than twenty years. Unlike the fits and starts described in Jonathan Safran Foer’s autobiographical book Eating Animals, the day I decided to quit eating meat was the last time I ever did. I remember that dinner well. It was my mother’s tuna fish casserole, and actually quite tasty. But while I chose to stop eating meat, I never adopted the view that it was morally wrong, and, consequently, didn’t become one of those vegetarians who spends her spare time plumbing the depths of meat industry literature looking for bits of information to shock my friends and family into giving up meat.

Nine years ago, I had just started working as an environmental lawyer for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. when he approached me about leading a national campaign to reform the livestock and poultry sector. He said that industrialized animal production had become one of the nation’s worst polluters of water and air, and he wanted to aggressively attack the problem.

Initially, realizing that Bobby was asking me to work full-time on poop, I hesitated. It was not the glamorous job I’d envisioned when moving to New York to work for him. But then I visited towns in Missouri and North Carolina that had been overrun by factory-style production of hogs, chickens and turkeys. I witnessed biblical-scale plagues of pollution and stench; I spoke with people whose lives had been ruined when an industrial hog or poultry operation was erected next door; and I heard the details of how the animals were raised. My reticence vanished and I jumped at the chance to work on cleansing the earth of the animal factory menace.

I loved the job and threw myself into it, body and soul. But there was one problem: I could no longer deny the shady past of my own food. Every day, I was putting stuff into my mouth that undeniably came from factory farms. I was a vegetarian, yes, but consumed plenty of eggs, milk, yogurt, butter and cheese. And much of the factory farm data and stories I was gathering from all over the country was about egg and dairy operations. My unease grew with each passing day.

To avoid the products of factory farms, I became something of a food detective. My groceries were the subjects of my investigations. Where were they coming from and how they were produced? I roamed grocery store aisles carefully reading product labels, but there was little to no information about the conditions in which the animals were raised. I wrote letters to food companies with questions about what they fed their animals, but the letters went unanswered. The food system’s lack of transparency was frustrating. Eventually, I mostly gave up on supermarkets and began exploring new ways to get at the good food I was seeking. Although the task was daunting, my goal was simple: I wanted all my food to come from places I would enjoy visiting. (more…)

side note: It’s always nice to read someone who doesn’t have an agenda……I mean, it’s very rare these days to come across an article that spews commonsense like this. I know it’s Friday and we usually like to have a post a more “fun” stories…but this is a MUST READ!

Andrew J. Bacevich
Commonweal
Afghanistan & the Limits of American Power

History deals rudely with the pretensions of those who presume to determine its course. In an American context, this describes the fate of those falling prey to the Wilsonian Conceit. Yet the damage done by that conceit outlives its perpetrators.

From time to time, in some moment of peril or anxiety, a statesman appears on the scene promising to eliminate tyranny, ensure the triumph of liberty, and achieve permanent peace. For a moment, the statesman achieves the status of prophet, one who in his own person seemingly embodies the essence of the American purpose. Then reality intrudes, exposing the promises as costly fantasies. The prophet’s followers abandon him. Mocked and reviled, he is eventually banished—perhaps to some gated community in Dallas.

Yet however brief his ascendancy, the discredited prophet leaves behind a legacy. Most obvious are the problems created and left unresolved, commitments made and left unfulfilled, debts accrued and left unpaid. Less obvious, but for that reason more important, are the changes in perception.

The prophet recasts our image of reality. Long after his departure, remnants of that image linger and retain their capacity to beguile: consider how the Wilsonian vision of the United States as crusader state called upon to redeem the world in World War I has periodically resurfaced despite Woodrow Wilson’s own manifest failure to make good on that expectation. The prophet declaims and departs. Yet traces of his testimony, however at odds with the facts, remain lodged in our consciousness.

So it is today with Afghanistan, the conflict that George W. Bush began, then ignored, and finally bequeathed to his successor. Barack Obama has embraced that conflict as “the war we must win.” Those who celebrated Bush’s militancy back in the intoxicating days when he was promising to rid the world of evil see Obama’s enthusiasm for pressing on in Afghanistan as a vindication of sorts. They are right to do so.

The misguided and mismanaged global war on terror reduced Bush’s presidency to ruin. The candidate whose run for high office derived its energy from an implicit promise to repudiate all that Bush had wrought now seems intent on salvaging something useful from that failed enterprise—even if that means putting his own presidency at risk. When it comes to Afghanistan, Obama may be singing in a different key, but to anyone with an ear for music—especially for military marches—the melody remains intact.

Candidate Obama once derided the notion that the United States is called upon to determine the fate of Iraq. President Obama expresses a willingness to expend untold billions—not to mention who knows how many lives—in order to determine the fate of Afghanistan. Liberals may have interpreted Obama’s campaign pledge to ramp up the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan as calculated to insulate himself from the charge of being a national-security wimp. Events have exposed that interpretation as incorrect. It turns out—apparently—that the president genuinely views this remote, landlocked, primitive Central Asian country as a vital U.S. national-security interest.

What is it about Afghanistan, possessing next to nothing that the United States requires, that justifies such lavish attention? In Washington, this question goes not only unanswered but unasked. Among Democrats and Republicans alike, with few exceptions, Afghanistan’s importance is simply assumed—much the way fifty years ago otherwise intelligent people simply assumed that the United States had a vital interest in ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. As then, so today, the assumption does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.

Tune in to the Sunday talk shows or consult the op-ed pages and you might conclude otherwise. Those who profess to be in the know insist that the fight in Afghanistan is essential to keeping America safe. The events of September 11, 2001, ostensibly occurred because we ignored Afghanistan. Preventing the recurrence of those events, therefore, requires that we fix the place.

Yet this widely accepted line of reasoning overlooks the primary reason why the 9/11 conspiracy succeeded: federal, state, and local agencies responsible for basic security fell down on the job, failing to install even minimally adequate security measures in the nation’s airports. The national-security apparatus wasn’t paying attention—indeed, it ignored or downplayed all sorts of warning signs, not least of all Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war against the United States. Consumed with its ABC agenda—“anything but Clinton” was the Bush administration’s watchword in those days—the people at the top didn’t have their eye on the ball. So we let ourselves get sucker-punched. Averting a recurrence of that awful day does not require the semipermanent occupation and pacification of distant countries like Afghanistan. Rather, it requires that the United States erect and maintain robust defenses. (more…)

side note: Another win for our cause! Not only is it important for the sick to have access to marijuana, but it could also become a major player in helping to revive our economy. Marijuana is the #1 cash crop in America…yes, it crushes corn, wheat….etc!

by Ryan Grim
Huffington Post

Maine voters became the first to license nonprofit organizations to sell medical marijuana on Tuesday, with the state’s Question 5 cruising to a landslide victory. With roughly half of the precincts reporting, six in ten Maine voters had tallied in favor of allowing state-licensed nonprofits to distribute pot to approved patients.

Two other states — Rhode Island and New Mexico — have approved such nonprofits, but Maine is the first to do so through the ballot box. In California and Colorado, the dispensaries are not specifically regulated as pot shops, but rather as businesses in compliance with state laws.

Rhode Island, New Mexico and Maine, by more tightly regulating distribution, present a model counter to California’s. As more states approve licensed dispensaries, the debate will shift from whether medical marijuana should be legal to how it should be produced and distributed – a resounding victory for advocates and patients.

Thirteen states permit the medical use of marijuana.

Maine’s election result can be partially credited to President Obama’s announcement that he would not raid or prosecute patients or dispensaries in compliance with state laws. The decision was first announced in February and codified in a memo on October 19. (more…)

side note: My girlfriend and I couldn’t stop laughing last night…WTF is this!?!?!

THE PRIVACY SCARF
Thanks Huffington Post!

HuffPost Description: Could also be called the “I’m watching porn in public scarf” or the “I’m required to stay out of schools, parks and other places children congregate scarf”

Check out the other 14 over at the Huffington Post

side note: Still think we’re the best country in the world? Only if you’re fuckin rich! The crazy thing about this is that tons of these kids will come from areas that are heavy Republican controlled….where people literally vote against not only their interests….but their childrens’ interests as well. This is one of the saddest things I’ve read in a long time…….

BY LINDSEY TANNER
Chicago Sun Times
AP

If she didn’t get food stamps, Angie Minix and her two boys would have had to survive on the peanut butter-and-jelly diet.

The Sauk Village mom isn’t alone.

In fact, nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood, and fallout from the current recession could push those numbers even higher, researchers say.

The estimate comes from an analysis of 30 years of national data, and it bolsters other recent evidence on the pervasiveness of youngsters at economic risk. It suggests that almost everyone knows a family who has received food stamps, or will in the future, said lead author Mark Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis. (more…)