What No One Wants to Know About Marijuana.

From The Natural Mind by Dr. Andrew Weil
(last half of chapter four pg. 86-97)

Because marijuana is such an unimpressive pharmacological agent, it is not a very interesting drug to study in a laboratory. Pharmacologists cannot get a handle on it with their methods, and because they cannot see the reality of the non-material state of consciousness that users experience, they are forced to design experimental situations very far removed from the real world in order to get measurable effects. There are three conditions under which marijuana can be shown to impair general psychological performance in laboratory subjects. They are:

1. by giving it to people who have never had it before;
2. by giving people very high doses that they are not used to
   (or giving it orally to people used to smoking it); and
3. by giving people very hard things to do, especially things that they have never had a chance to practice while under the influence of the drug.

Under any of these three conditions, pharmacologists can demonstrate that marijuana impairs performance. And if we look at the work being done by NIMH-funded researchers, all of it fulfills one or more of these conditions. In addition, the tests being used by these scientists are designed to look for impairments of functions that have nothing to do with why marijuana users put themselves in an altered state of consciousness. People who get high on marijuana do not spontaneously try to do arithmetic problems or test their fine coordination.

What pharmacologists cannot make sense of is that people who are high on marijuana cannot be shown, in objective terms, to be different from people who are not high. That is, if a marijuana user is allowed to smoke his usual doses and then to do things he has had a chance to practice while high, he does not appear to perform any differently from someone who is not high. Now, this pattern of users performing better than nonusers is a general phenomenon associated with all psychoactive drugs. For example, an alcoholic will vastly outperform a nondrinker on any test if the two are equally intoxicated; he has learned to compensate for the effects of the drug on his nervous system. But compensation can proceed only so far until it runs up against a ceiling imposed by the pharmacological action of the drug on lower brain centers. Again, since marijuana has no clinically significant action on lower brain centers, compensation can reach 100 percent with practice.

These considerations mean that there are no answers to questions like, What does marijuana do to driving ability? The only possible answer is, It depends. It depends on the person – whether he is a marijuana user, whether he has practiced driving while under the influence of marijuana. In speaking to legislative and medical groups, I have stated a personal reaction to this question in the form of the decision I would make if I were given the choice of riding with one of the following four drivers:

1. a person who had never smoked marijuana before and just had;
2. a marijuana smoker who had never driven while high and was just about to;
3. a high marijuana smoker who had practiced driving while high; and
4. a person with any amount of alcohol in him.

I would unhesitatingly take driver number three as the best possible risk.

My Acid Trip with Squeaky Fromme

by Paul Krassner

This month, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a member of the Charles Manson family, is scheduled to be released on parole from a federal prison in Texas after serving 34 years behind bars for the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford in 1975. Squeaky did not participate in the Tate/LaBianca killings, which I began investigating in 1971.

Manson was on Death Row -- before capital punishment was repealed (and later reinstated, but not retroactively) in California -- so I was unable to meet with him. Reporters had to settle for an interview with any prisoner awaiting the gas chamber, and it was unlikely that Charlie would be selected at random for me.

In the course of our correspondence, there was a letter from Manson consisting of a few pages of gibberish about Christ and the Devil, but at one point, right in the middle, he wrote in tiny letters, "Call Squeaky," with her phone number. I called, and we arranged to meet at her apartment in Los Angeles. On an impulse, I brought several tabs of acid with me on the plane.

Squeaky resembled a typical redheaded, freckle-faced waitress who sneaks a few tokes of pot in the lavatory, a regular girl-next-door except perhaps for the unusually challenging nature of her personality, plus the scar of an X that she had gouged and burned into her forehead as a visual reminder of her commitment to Charlie. That same symbol also covered the third eyes of her roommates, Manson family members Sandra Good and Brenda McCann.

"We've crossed ourselves out of this entire system," Squeaky explained.

They all had short hairstyles growing in now, after having completely shaved their heads. They continued to sit on the sidewalk near the Hall of Justice every day, like a coven of faithful nuns bearing witness to Manson's martyrdom.

Sandy Good had seen me perform at The Committee Theater in San Francisco a few years previously. Now she told me that when she first met Charlie and people asked her what he was like, she had compared him to Lenny Bruce and me. It was the weirdest compliment I ever got, but I began to understand Manson's peculiar charisma.

With his sardonic rap, mixed with psychedelic drugs and real-life theater games such as "creepy-crawling" and stealing, he had deprogrammed his family from the values of mainstream society, but reprogrammed them with his own perverted philosophy, a cosmic version of the racism perpetuated by the prison system that had served as his family.

Manson had stepped on Sandy's eyeglasses, thrown away her birth control pills, and inculcated her with racist insensibility. Although she had once been a civil rights activist, she was now asking me to tell John Lennon that he should get rid of Yoko Ono and stay with "his own kind."

"But," I said, "they really love each other."

"If Yoko really loved the Japanese people," Sandy replied, "she would not want to mix their blood."

The four of us ingested those little white tablets containing 300 micrograms of LSD, then took a walk to the office of Laurence Merrick, who had been associated with schlock biker exploitation movies as the prerequisite to directing a sensationalist documentary, Manson.

Squeaky's basic vulnerability emerged as she kept pacing around and telling Merrick that she was afraid of him. He didn't know we were tripping, but he must have sensed the vibes. He may even have gotten a touch of contact high. I engaged him in conversation about movies. We discussed the fascistic implications of The French Connection.

He said, "You're pretty articulate--"

"For a bum," I finished his sentence, and we laughed.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-krassner/my-acid-trip-with-squeaky_b_252681.html

The media circus

Swine flu outbreak suspected in military prison

 

Soldiers at IDF's Prison Four say 15 sick inmates held in isolation, army fails to provide proper treatment. IDF denied claims

by Daniel Edelson

In recent days Ynet has received dozens of reports from soldiers and their parents about a swine flu outbreak in the IDF's Confinement Base 394, more commonly know as Prison Four.

 

According to the reports, 15 of the soldiers held at the prison have been isolated from the rest of the inmates due to suspicion they have contracted the H1N1 virus.

 

A phone conversation with one of the inmates revealed a grim picture. "What goes on here is a catastrophe," he said. "People are vomiting, are suffering from diarrhea, can't sleep, can barely walk, and the prison guards just tell them to take a rest."

 

The soldier said that "at least one soldier on average falls ill every day. They put you through hell before they let you see a doctor. We just want to be tested."

 

Another inmate said he has been at the prison for 47 days and have yet to undergo a medical examination.

 

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3758714,00.html

End Dangerous ID

Dear Friend of Liberty,

Unbelievably, Congress and the Obama administration are currently trying to resurrect the failed REAL ID Act, more accurately named "Dangerous ID."

Dangerous ID, which passed in 2005, establishes a de facto National Identification System, and opens the doors for Federal biometric tracking of every American citizen.

Fortunately, no state currently complies with the burdensome mandates of the 2005 bill, and twenty-three have passed legislation refusing compliance.

So what does the Obama Administration want to do?

You guessed it: "Fix it," and ram it down states' throats.

Well, I say "Repeal it."  What do you say?

You see, as Obama Administration Surveillance Czar Janet Napolitano pushes for a revamp of the system to get the invasive federal program up and running, there has never been a better time to for us to push back, and fight for an outright repeal of the original legislation.

And although Dangerous ID is a clear attempt to establish a National ID System, the reality might be much worse -- an INTERNATIONAL Identification System.  That's why it is so critical we get that law off the books.

You see, Dangerous ID actually requires that driver's license photographs meet United Nation's biometric format standards.  At this level of sophistication, government software can analyze facial characteristics and generate a unique identification number.

Think about that for a moment -- your identity will be reduced to a single number in an international database that can be tracked globally by one-world government surveillance cameras and facial recognition software.

Last month, Senator Daniel Akaka introduced The PASS ID Act to tweak the 2005 Dangerous ID legislation and ram this program into action over state opposition.

Supporters claim this REAL ID Redux bill softens requirements on states, supposedly making the breach of federalism a little more palatable.  But it is merely a transparent attempt to get the Dangerous ID system implemented in any form, only to be augmented later to meet government's needs.

In fact, there is evidence that this reincarnated Dangerous ID bill could wind up being worse than the original.

Chief among the bill's supporters is Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, who stands to wield expansive and virtually unchecked power to set standards.

Under Dangerous ID, Napolitano can unilaterally expand required information on driver's licenses, potentially to include biometric information such as retinal scans, fingerprints, DNA information, and even Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) radio tracking technology.

If international databases, RFID and biometric identification cards, and constant government surveillance are as alarming to you as they are to me, I hope you'll click here to sign Campaign for Liberty's petition to stop REAL ID Redux and repeal Dangerous ID.

In Liberty,

John F. Tate
President

http://echo4.bluehornet.com/hostedemail/email.htm?h=2a2da7016b8c74763bdbdce11b5f2632&CID=6099583415&ch=6D05EC0691202918CEFEB55CDA934040

Where did that bank bailout go? Watchdogs aren't sure

By Chris Adams

WASHINGTON — Although hundreds of well-trained eyes are watching over the $700 billion that Congress last year decided to spend bailing out the nation's financial sector, it's still difficult to answer some of the most basic questions about where the money went.

Despite a new oversight panel, a new special inspector general, the existing Government Accountability Office and eight other inspectors general, those charged with minding the store say they don't have all the weapons they need. Ten months into the Troubled Asset Relief Program, some members of Congress say that some oversight of bailout dollars has been so lacking that it's essentially worthless.

"TARP has become a program in which taxpayers are not being told what most of the TARP recipients are doing with their money, have still not been told how much their substantial investments are worth, and will not be told the full details of how their money is being invested," a special inspector general over the program reported last month. The "very credibility" of the program is at stake, it said.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/73212.html

Health care's big money wasters

More than $1.2 trillion spent on health care each year is a waste of money. Members of the medical community identify the leading causes.

By Parija B. Kavilanz

Down the drain: $1.2 trillion.

That's half of the $2.2 trillion the United States spends on health care each year, according to the most recent data from accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers' Health Research Institute.

What counts as waste? The report identified 16 different areas in which health care dollars are squandered. But in talking to doctors, nurses, hospital groups and patient advocacy groups, six areas totaling nearly $500 billion stood out as issues to be dealt with in the health care reform debate.

Too many tests

Doctors ordering tests or procedures not based on need but concern over liability or increasing their income is the biggest waste of health care dollars, costing the system at least $210 billion a year, according to the report. The problem is called "defensive medicine."

"Sometimes the motivation is to avoid malpractice suits, or to make more money because they are compensated more for doing more," said Dr. Arthur Garson, provost of the University of Virginia and former dean of its medical school. "Many are also convinced that doing more tests is the right thing to do."

"But any money that is spent on a patient that doesn't improve the outcome is a waste," said Garson.

Some conservatives have suggested that capping malpractice awards would help solve the problem.

President Obama doesn't agree; instead, his reform proposal encourages doctors to practice "evidence-based" guidelines as a way to scale back on unnecessary tests.

Those annoying claim forms

Inefficient claims processing is the second-biggest area of wasteful expenditure, costing as much as $210 billion annually, the PricewaterhouseCoopers report said.

"We spend a lot of time and money trying to get paid by insurers," said Dr. Terry McGenney, a Kansas City, Mo.-based family physician.

"Every insurance company has its own forms," McGenney said. "Some practices spend 40% of their revenue filling out paperwork that has nothing to do with patient care. So much of this could be automated."

Dr. Jason Dees, a family doctor in a private practice based in New Albany, Miss., said his office often resubmits claims that have been "magically denied."

"That adds to our administrative fees, extends the payment cycle and hurts our cash flow," he said.

Dees also spends a lot of time getting "pre-certification" from insurers to approve higher-priced procedures such as MRIs. "We're already operating on paper-thin margins and this takes times away from our patients," he said.

Susan Pisano, spokeswoman for America's Health Insurance Plans, said "hundreds of billions" of dollars can be saved by standardizing procedures and using technology -- something the White House has mentioned as a key to health care reform.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/10/news/economy/healthcare_money_wasters/index.htm?postversion=2009081009

The Wrong Diagnosis

by Dr. Andrew Weil

Founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine

I'm worried -- and if I'm worried, you should be, too.

The reason I'm worried is that the wrong diagnosis is being made.

As any doctor can tell you, the most crucial step toward healing is having the right diagnosis. If the disease is precisely identified, a good resolution is far more likely. Conversely, a bad diagnosis usually means a bad outcome, no matter how skilled the physician.

And, what's true in personal health care is just as true in national health care reform: Healing begins with the correct diagnosis of the problem.

Washington is working on reform initiatives that focus on one problem: the fact that the system is too expensive (and consequently too exclusive.) Reform proposals, such as the "public option" for government insurance or calls for drug makers to drop prices, are aimed mostly at boosting affordability and access. Make it cheap enough, the thinking goes, and the 46 million Americans who can't afford coverage will finally get their fair share.

But what's missing, tragically, is a diagnosis of the real, far more fundamental problem, which is that what's even worse than its stratospheric cost is the fact that American health care doesn't fulfill its prime directive -- it does not help people become or stay healthy. It's not a health care system at all; it's a disease management system, and making the current system cheaper and more accessible will just spread the dysfunction more broadly.

It's impossible to make our drug-intensive, technology-centric, and corrupt system affordable. Consider that Americans spent $8.4 billion on medicine in 1950, vs. an astonishing 2.3 trillion in 2007. That's $30,000 annually for a family of four. The bloated structure of endless, marginal-return tests; patent-protected drugs and "heroic" surgical interventions for virtually every health problem simply can't be made much cheaper due to its very nature. Costs can only be shifted in various unpalatable ways.

So, a far more salient question that must be addressed is: Are we getting good health for our trillions? Unfortunately, the answer is a resounding, "No." The U.S. ranked near the very bottom of the top 40 nations -- below Columbia, Chile, Costa Rica and Dominica -- in a rating of health systems by the World Health Organization in 2000. In short, we pay about twice as much per capita for our health care as does the rest of the developed world, and we have almost nothing to show for it.

I'm not against high-tech medicine. It has a secure place in the diagnosis and treatment of serious disease. But our health care professionals are currently using it for everything, and the cost is going to break us.

In the future, this kind of medicine must be limited to those cases in which it is clearly indicated: trauma, acute and critical conditions, disease involving vital organs, etc. It should be viewed as a specialized form of medicine, perhaps offered only in major centers serving large populations.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/the-wrong-diagnosis_b_254227.html

The Republican response

Orly Taitz - Ace Investigator

Quote 5 Words From the Associated Press? That’ll Be $12.50

We've known that the Associated Press has some odd policies in regards to social media and the web for a while. The AP social media policy says that employees need to control not only what they said on Facebook, but what their friends said as well. We also got wind last week of the AP's plan to find where anyone uses AP material online in an attempt to stop what it considers unauthorized use of its content. To say it's causing controversy would be an understatement.

Part of the AP's plan is to charge for use of its articles if you quote 5 words or more. They signed a deal with iCopyright in April last year to accomplish this goal. iCopyright is a widget that handles not only print and email, but republishing as well. Well the widget's starting to get some attention, if only for the jaw-dropping starting price the AP is charging for quoting its stories: $2.50 per word.

The process goes like this: you copy and paste the excerpt or article you want to reprint. Next you pick your price, ranging from $12.50 for five words to $100 for 251 words or more. Here's the price list, if you are not an educational or non-profit organization (they get a discount):

While this isn't particularly shocking, it's still part of a series of disturbing statements and actions the AP has taken in terms of web content.

This plan's going in the wrong direction

Let's first be fair to the AP before we heap on the criticism. They're the source of a lot of our news and a valuable journalistic asset. They are also trying to protect their content from what they see as illegitimate copying and unfair use.

Still, the entire policy is a battle against the direction of progress, and the price point is way off. Social media helps spread information faster and to more people, which is the point of a wired service like the AP. The company's complaint is that blogs and news aggregators (i.e. Google News) are taking its content and making all the advertising revenue. What they forget is that they provide a great deal of traffic and attention to content creators in the process.

We don't know the answer to this conundrum. But we do know that the AP's current plan is riddled with holes. Laws protecting fair use come into play and are essential to freedom of the press. The AP really needs to define their policy on fair use vs. reprinting. It also seems obvious that no small-scale publisher is going to pay $12.50 to quote a line from an article. when quoting and linking on the web are common practice.

http://waronyou.com/topics/quote-5-words-from-the-associated-press-that%E2%80%99ll-be-1250/

The end of discrimination in America

Piracy verdicts may violate U.S. Constitution

 

By Ben Sheffner

LOS ANGELES (Billboard) – It's been a good summer for the major labels' litigators in their battle against individuals charged with copyright infringement.

In June, a Minnesota jury awarded the four majors $1.9 million in damages, finding that single mom Jammie Thomas-Rasset had used the peer-to-peer file-sharing network Kazaa to illegally download and share 24 songs.

And at the end of July, a federal jury in Boston ordered college student Joel Tenenbaum to pay the majors $675,000 for sharing 30 songs, after hearing evidence that he used at least six different P2P networks for nearly a decade, continuing to infringe even after receiving multiple warnings.

But with the defendants challenging the damage awards and likely appealing the verdicts, these cases are far from over. And the courts will now have to confront a difficult and unresolved question in copyright law: Can awards in cases like this be so big that they violate the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of due process?

First, some background. Copyright owners have two options as to the type of damages they may seek at trial: actual or statutory. Actual damages compensate copyright owners for their losses stemming from, say, an unearned license fee or royalty, a diminishment in the value of their work or profits earned by an infringer. But actual copyright damages are often difficult or impossible to prove. Exactly how much financial harm did Tenenbaum cause the labels? As they admit, no one knows; not even a $500-an-hour economist testifying on behalf of the majors was willing to swear to a specific number on the witness stand.

Thankfully for copyright owners like record labels, the law provides another option: statutory damages. Assuming a copyright owner has registered its works, it can avoid the sometimes arduous task of proving actual damages and instead seek statutory damages. Under the U.S. Copyright Act, statutory damages can range from $750 to $30,000 per work in the case of "regular" infringement. The upper limit soars to $150,000 in the case of "willful" infringement -- committed "with knowledge of or reckless disregard for the plaintiff's copyrights."

Jurors have wide discretion in determining where within the statutory range an award should fall. They may consider factors including the nature of the infringement, the defendant's purpose and intent, and the value of the copyright. Statutory damages do compensate the copyright owner for its losses, but they're also intended to punish the infringer and to deter future infringement by the defendant and others. As the Thomas-Rasset and Tenenbaum verdicts demonstrate, awards of statutory damages involving multiple works can reach astronomical heights.

Those huge numbers have sent industry critics crying foul and arguing to the courts that such large verdicts violate the Constitution's guarantee of due process of the law, and even the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on "excessive fines." Just as the Constitution imposes limits on punitive damages -- in a landmark 1999 case, the Supreme Court tossed a $2 million award over a $4,000 botched car paint job -- they say it should also limit awards of copyright statutory damages, which may include a punitive element.

No court has yet accepted the argument that the Constitution limits awards of copyright statutory damages.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090808/music_nm/us_verdicts

Furor Over an Obama Puff Piece

It was only a matter of time before someone combined a certain memorable image of a young future president with a jokey twist on his campaign slogan ... to come up with a message that Barack Obama definitely did not approve.

The folks at the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws got there first. For their annual conference poster, they took an old photo of cool-dude college freshman Obama puffing away -- on a regular cigarette, mind you -- and tweaked it just ever so slightly to fit their message: "Yes We Cannabis."

The official poster for the 2009 NORML Conference, designed by artist Sonia Sanchez. (Courtesy of NORML)

Think it might be a problem for the president (who opposes legalization)? It's really a problem for the photographer. Lisa Jack, an Obama classmate at Occidental College, snapped the image in 1980, one in a series of photos that never saw the light of day until she debuted them in Time's 2008 Person of the Year issue. She had no idea her photo had been appropriated by NORML until we told her Tuesday.

"They do not have my permission," said Jack, a psychology professor in Minnesota. These photos "are absolutely not to be used in this way. ... I really made a grand effort to do this properly, and I'm very irritated. If I'd wanted these to be used for political purposes, I'd have sold them to Hillary years ago."

NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre cheerfully acknowledged the lift by artist Sonia Sanchez, who summoned the psychedelic aesthetic of '60s rock posters. "With very little adulteration, she placed what appears to be a cannabis cigarette" in the president's hand, St. Pierre said. But she made few other changes: Obama "almost made the photograph for us."

Everyone who attends the September conference in San Francisco will get a poster; NORML is also selling them on the Web ($25 for an 18-by-24-inch with St. Pierre's autograph, $15 without). Can they do that? St. Pierre admits they didn't get permission, but "our lawyers thought it was adulterated enough to comply with the fair use laws."

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/reliable-source/2009/08/rs-norml5.html

DR. ON THE MANY BENEFITS OF MARIJUANA!

Hubba Bubba! Just One More Reason To Love Bill Clinton

The Ostroy Report

The Ostroy Report is a fresh, aggressive voice for Democrats and a watchdog of the Republican Party. While our mission is to support our new President Barack Obama and help build a greater Democratic majority in Congress, we're not afraid to criticize our own when warranted.

by Andy Ostroy

Republicans are downright miserable this week. Why? Because the man they hate so much, their arch-nemesis, the president they once tried to take down even through impeachment and still failed, Bill Clinton, has rubbed his mojo in their collective faces yet again. Riding into N. Korea on his white horse to rescue imprisoned journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, His Royal Bubbaness could not have looked anymore like the uber-rock star that he is.

During a brief press conference after her and Lee's arrival back in the United States, Ling recounted how incredible it was to walk through a door and see the former president standing there, clearly indicating that they would finally be going home after three months in captivity.

Watching the clip of Ling's comments, MSNBC's Hardball host Chris Matthews expressed what I believe most Americans feel about Bill Clinton: "Wow..I was caught up in that emotionally. I mean, 'I walk into a room and there he is.' I guess, ya know, Regis Philbin coulda been there and she might have been just as happy, but I don't think so. I mean this seriously, there's something iconic about Big Bill Clinton....The guy is bigger than life." Amen.

 

http://ostroyreport.blogspot.com/2009/08/hubba-bubba-just-one-more-reason-to.html

Expelled from the Creation “Museum”

by PZ Myers

There is lots of video on the web from our visit to Ken Ham's Palace of Lies, but here's one of one of the rare incidents to mar the trip. This is the student who was kicked out; I was with him when he was pulled aside, and can verify that he was doing nothing but engaging in quiet conversation with a small group of us godless atheists when Mark Looy arbitrarily singled him out and took him aside to tell him stories about how unruly he had been. It was genuinely bizarre. As you can see in the clip made as we were standing outside, there was no shouting, no disruption, no rudeness at all going on — they simply plucked Derek out of the group and told him he was a bad boy.

 

Not shown is the other stuff that went on at the same time. While Looy had Derek off to the side, their head of security hovered about and tried to interpose himself between Looy and all the cameras aimed at him…an impossibility, since there was a whole arc of watchful atheists around them. At one point he gestured to one of the uniformed guards and sent him to escort one attendee with a large, high-quality video camera off the premises — this happened to be a fellow who was there making a documentary about atheists, who had been careful to not directly participate and who was certainly not wearing any godless apparel. The creationists are certainly brilliant at PR, aren't they?

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/08/expelled_from_the_creation_mus.php

The wicked Republican of the West

Health care opponent calls for town hall violence via Twitter

 

By Muriel Kane

Update: SEIU gets phone call "threatening to teach union officials a thing or two about 'the Second Amendment'"

Brian Beutler reported at Talking Points Memo on Friday that a health care protester in New Mexico had been encouraging those following him on Twitter to bring their guns to town hall meetings — and use them if provoked.

"If ACORN/SEIU attends these meetings for disruptive purposes, and you have a license to carry….carry," Scott Oskay wrote in one tweet. In another, he suggested, "Stop being peaceful, and hurt them. Badly."

The Service Employees Industrial Union (SEIU) appears to be the latest bogeyman for the anti-health care protesters. Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, for example, claimed on Friday that "SEIU thugs rolled up their sleeves and attacked a black conservative protester in St. Louis."

As described by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, however, the facts of the incident cited by Malkin were far less clearcut. Out of the half a dozen people arrested following a town hall held by a Democratic Congressman, at least three do not appear to have been involved in violence of any kind. One supporter of a public option for health care told the paper that he and his companion had been arrested for interference after his companion tried to take pictures of a man who seemed to have been assaulted. A Post-Dispatch reporter was arrested on the same charge.

A poster at Daily Kos elaborated on this incident, writing angrily, "St. Louis cops arrested Democrats… people supporting reform and reporters… and not the GOP thugs mobbing the healthcare townhall. A video clearly shows a SEIU man down on the ground, injured, after he had been attacked. Another SEIU man comes to his aid and gives him a hand up. A woman who had been on the sidelines photographing this attack on the injured SEIU man appears to be the 51-year old woman who was arrested for 'interference' with police. She was peppersprayed after she was subdued."

http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/08/07/health-care-opponent-calls-for-town-hall-violence-via-twitter/

Right-Wing Turncoat Gives the Inside Scoop on Why Conservatives Are Rampaging Town Halls

by Francis Schaeffer

The Republican Old Guard are in the fix an atheist would be in if Jesus showed up and raised his mother from the dead: Their world view has just been shattered. Obama's election has driven them over the edge. Consider Former Congressman Dick Armey. Several far right foundations and the multitrillion dollar health-insurance industry have teamed up with him  to organize the far right foot soldiers of the Republican Party to  intimidate people speaking on behalf of health-care reform.  They are using my old shock troops -- given many of these folks were first energized by the Evangelical pro-life movement that my late father and I started in the 1970s. What we did to clinics they are now doing to congressmen and others speaking out for health care reform.

Having failed at the ballot box, having watched their Fox News-organized "tea parties" fizzle the intimidation tactics which the Republicans have embraced are being used in a well-financed, top-down orchestrated fake grass roots campaign by corporate interests to try and protect  the profits of the insurance business. Armey's FreedomWorks is  organizing against health care reform. Armey's lobbying firm represents pharmaceutical companies including Bristol-Myers Squibb. Armey's lobbying firm also represents the trade group for the life insurance industry.  FreedomWorks is supporting the status quo at all costs. (They are also fans of fossil fuels. Armey's lobbying firm represents Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Prime Minister of the UAE, on energy related issues.)

Last year, the Wall Street Journal exposed FreedomWorks for building "amateur-looking" websites to promote far right interests of Armey. FreedomWorks represents a top-down, corporate-friendly approach that's been the norm for conservative organizations for years. How do I know this is the norm? Because I used to have strategy meetings with the late Jack Kemp and Dick Army and the rest of the Republican gang about using their business ties to help finance the pro-life movement to defeat Democrats. I know this script. I helped write it.

http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/141833/right-wing_turncoat_gives_the_inside_scoop_on_why_conservatives_are_rampaging_town_halls/?page=entire

We're the birthers

Ken Doctor: Publishers Have a Respite

By paulgillin

Ken Doctor is one of those rare breed of editors who understands the business side of newspapering. After spending nearly 25 years as an editor at papers ranging from alternative weeklies to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, he moved to Knight Ridder corporate to help lead the company's push into new media. Doctor ultimately worked on editorial, strategy and content services for Knight Ridder Digital, a position that had him scouting out new sources of revenue. He's currently an Affiliate Analyst With Outsell, a research and advisory firm focused on the publishing, information, and education industries.

Doctor is fundamentally optimistic about the reinvention of the industry to come, but he worries about the estimated 800,000 stories that Americans won't read this year because reporters around to write them. In this interview, he assesses the various rescue strategies that have been floated, the struggles publishers are having with reinvention and the silver lining behind the nearly 15,00 newspaper layoffs of the last two years.

Paul Gillin spoke to Ken Doctor on August 5th. Here are highlights of the 33-minute conversation.

Time	Summary
1:45	The current respite in the newspaper industry's freefall and how publishers should take advantage of the situation
3:20	The growth and transformation of local markets
4:15	The outlook for paid content strategies
5:30	Why local newspapers can't easily monetize content
6:15	The outlook for an "all access pass" subscription model
8:20	Will people be paying for news five years from now? Probably not.
10:20	The Schenectady experiment: in small cities, subscription walls may slow declines but they won't solve the bigger problems.
12:30	The value of an online vs. print reader: 12 minutes per month versus four hours per month
14:30	"Newspapers missed the search market and are still paying the price."
16:30	"Fair use has never been adjudicated at a high court level." Perhaps it's time for the news companies to press Google on the fairness issue.
19:30	Why most newspaper executives are not prepared to reinvent their organizations
21:30	The partnerships and skills needed to run today's business just don't exist in many newspaper organizations.
22:40	Journalism innovation is thriving but who's going to pay the bills?
23:10	800,000 fewer stories will be written this year than before the industry meltdown began.
26:10	We'll see true multimedia companies at the local level.
27:30	The opportunity of a valueless market is to look up at possibilities without worrying too much about the downside.
29:40	We're at the bottom of the news chasm.

 Listen to the interview (33:23) (right click to download)

 

http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/ken-doctor-publishers-have-a-respite.html

GM gets to dump its polluted sites

BY TIM HIGGINS

When General Motors Co. emerged from bankruptcy, it was freed of obligations for polluted properties at discarded plant sites that will require millions of dollars to clean up.

GM's unusual, government-engineered bankruptcy allowed the Detroit automaker to emerge as a new company — and to shed billions in liabilities, including claims that governments had against GM for polluting.

 

Environmental liabilities estimated at $530 million were left with the old GM, which has only $1.2 billion to wind down.

 

Administrative fees and other claims will soak up that money, and state and local officials told the Free Press they fear the cleanups will be shortchanged.

In Flint, uncertainty over cleaning up Buick City threatens a three-year redevelopment effort. "We can't lose this opportunity to create more jobs," said Tim Herman, chief executive officer of the Genesee Regional Chamber of Commerce.

The State of New York is concerned about 12 GM sites, including a 270-acre site along the St. Lawrence River that possesses a "significant threat to human health." Sites in Ohio, Delaware, Indiana and Colorado also have raised concerns.

GM said the issue rested with Motors Liquidation Co. — what's left of the old GM — which declined to comment

Companies have gone bankrupt before, leaving behind expensive messes, but the size of the environmental liabilities shed by GM is extraordinary, said John Pottow, an expert in bankruptcy law at the University of Michigan.

 

http://www.freep.com/article/20090807/BUSINESS01/908070382

The Jokenator

The House of Fear

Will YouTube be the Craigslist of TV News?

By Adam Clayton Powell III

 

BOSTON -- Watch that space: YouTube video news is here, tailored just for you, featuring news of your microlocal neighborhood, just for you.

If you haven't seen it, YouTube News Near You is an automated microlocal news service, with software detecting a your location and matching it with video news stories from that neighborhood. Turn on, tune in, and drop out of the six o'clock local TV news.

So far the story selection is pretty limited. Think of YouTube's new local news service as 2009's version of the "Camel News Caravan," NBC's 15-minute nightly newscast of the early 1950's, hop scotching your neighborhood for headlines. But five decades ago, John Cameron Swayze soon gave way to Huntley and Brinkley, and modern NBC television news was born. YouTube news could evolve really quickly in the next few years, or the next few months, especially as YouTube signs up local television and newspaper newsrooms around the country as video-providing partners.

And please note YouTube news is launched by Google, which dominates search advertising. YouTube news will drill down and let Google deliver ads tuned to microlocal neighborhoods, because viewers are already tagged by their location. It's easy to imagine Google adding viewer self-selection to enable specifying which neighborhood (or neighborhoods) you want delivered to your computer: self-identification by nine-digit zip code. Now microlocal online ads start to really make sense, because advertisers can pinpoint exactly where viewers are. Coming soon to your computer: ads for momandpopstore.com

Viewers will also be able to self-select in other ways. Embedded in the very structure of YouTube is self-selection driven by choices you make. You clicked on three stories about traffic? Here's another – and a local political candidate's ad touting his proposals to ease traffic congestion. You liked that clip on the fire down the street? People who liked that story also liked this one, too... and by the way Amazon has a sale on fire extinguishers if you order on line in the next five minutes.

Sound farfetched? Not at all: News Near You went mainstream in The New York Times this week. But last month there were reports in the blogosphere noting YouTube's approach to publishers asking to become a "YouTube news partner." One blog included the text of the pitch from YouTube, complete with five benefits, from larger audiences and increased revenue to detailed demographic analyses, for free, of the people who play their videos. News Near You is snuggling much closer to you than you may have expected.

http://communicationleadershipblog.uscannenberg.org/2009/08/will-youtube-be-the-craigslist.html

Protesters in Ybor City drown out health care summit on Obama's proposal

By Adam C. Smith

TAMPA — Bitter divisions over reforming America's health care system exploded Thursday night in Tampa amid cat calls, jeering and shoving at a town hall meeting.

"Tyranny! Tyranny! Tyranny!" dozens of people shouted as U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Tampa, struggled to talk about health insurance reforms under consideration in Washington, D.C.

"There is more consensus than there is disagreement when you get right down to it,'' Castor offered, immediately drowned out by groans and boos.

She pressed on, mostly unheard among screams from the audience estimated by Tampa police to be about 1,500.

"Tell the truth! Tell the truth!" "Read the bill!" "Forty-million illegals! Forty million illegals!"

The spectacle at the Children's Board in Ybor City sounded more like a wrestling cage match than a panel discussion on national policy, and it was just the latest example of a health care meeting disrupted by livid protesters. Similar scenes are likely to be repeated across the country as lawmakers head to their home districts for the summer recess.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/article1025529.ece

A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush

by JAMES A. HAUGHT

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible's satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn't a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their "common faith" (Christianity) and told him: "Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins."

This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its "coalition of the willing" to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush's call and "wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs."

After the 2003 call, the puzzled French leader didn't comply with Bush's request. Instead, his staff asked Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne, to analyze the weird appeal. Dr. Romer explained that the Old Testament book of Ezekiel contains two chapters (38 and 39) in which God rages against Gog and Magog, sinister and mysterious forces menacing Israel. Jehovah vows to smite them savagely, to "turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws," and slaughter them ruthlessly. In the New Testament, the mystical book of Revelation envisions Gog and Magog gathering nations for battle, "and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them."

In 2007, Dr. Romer recounted Bush's strange behavior in Lausanne University's review, Allez Savoir. A French-language Swiss newspaper, Le Matin Dimanche, printed a sarcastic account titled: "When President George W. Bush Saw the Prophesies of the Bible Coming to Pass." France's La Liberte likewise spoofed it under the headline "A Small Scoop on Bush, Chirac, God, Gog and Magog." But other news media missed the amazing report.

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=haught_29_5

Sincerely, John Hughes

by alisonbf

I was babysitting for my mom's friend Kathleen's daughter the night I wrote that first fan letter to John Hughes. I can literally remember the yellow grid paper, the blue ball point pen and sitting alone in the dim light in the living room, the baby having gone to bed.

I poured my heart out to John, told him about how much the movie mattered to me, how it made me feel like he got what it was like to be a teenager and to feel misunderstood.

(I felt misunderstood.)

I sent the letter and a month or so later I received a package in the mail with a form letter welcoming me as an "official" member of The Breakfast Club, my reward a strip of stickers with the cast in the now famous pose.

I was irate.

I wrote back to John, explaining in no uncertain terms that, excuse me, I just poured my fucking heart out to you and YOU SENT ME A FORM LETTER.

That was just not going to fly.

He wrote back.

"This is not a form letter. The other one was. Sorry. Lots of requests. You know what I mean. I did sign it."

He wrote back and told me that he was sorry, that he liked my letter and that it meant a great deal to him. He loved knowing that his words and images resonated with me and people my age. He told me he would say hi to everyone on my behalf.

"No, I really will. Judd will be pleased you think he's sexy. I don't."

I asked him if he would be my pen pal.

He said yes.

"I'd be honored to be your pen pal. You must understand at times I won't be able to get back to you as quickly as I might want to. If you'll agree to be patient, I'll be your pen pal."


For two years (1985-1987), John Hughes and I wrote letters back and forth. He told me - in long hand black felt tip pen on yellow legal paper - about life on a film set and about his family. I told him about boys, my relationship with my parents and things that happened to me in school. He laughed at my teenage slang and shared the 129 question Breakfast Club trivia test I wrote (with the help of my sister) with the cast, Ned Tanen (the film's producer) and DeDe Allen (the editor). He cheered me on when I found a way around the school administration's refusal to publish a "controversial" article I wrote for the school paper. And he consoled me when I complained that Mrs. Garstka didn't appreciate my writing.

"As for your English teacher…Do you like the way you write? Please yourself. I'm rather fond of writing. I actually regard it as fun. Do it frequently and see if you can't find the fun in it that I do."

He made me feel like what I said mattered.

http://wellknowwhenwegetthere.blogspot.com/2009/08/sincerely-john-hughes.html

EVERYONE HATES THE COPS

by Ted Rall

After Professor Gates, Why Pretend?

NEW YORK--The current national conversation about race and the police reminded me about an incident that occurred when I was in Uzbekistan. As I walked into an apartment complex for an appointment I noticed the decomposing body of a man lying on the side of the road.

"How long as he been there?" I asked my host.

"Three, maybe four days," he said.

"What happened to him?"

"Shot, maybe," he shrugged. "Or maybe hit by a car. Something."

I didn't bother to ask why no one had called the police. I knew. Calling the Uzbek militsia amounts to a request to be beaten, robbed or worse. So desperate to avoid interaction with the police was another man I met that, when his mother died of old age at their home in Tashkent, he drove her body to the outskirts of town and deposited her in a field.

With the exception of New Orleans after Katrina, it's not that bad here in the United States. Consider Professor Henry Louis Gates: he shouldn't have been arrested by that Cambridge, Massachusetts police officer, but he came out of the experience physically unscathed.

Nevertheless, the Gates incident has illuminated some basic, strange assumptions about our society. Cops think they have a constitutional right to be treated deferentially. And black people think cops are nice to white people.

Yeah, well, take it from a white guy: we don't like cops either.

http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/

Hmmm....Looks Familiar

by Drew Friedman

 

I've been trying to avoid this all week, aside from addressing it on Facebook, but it doesn't seem to be going away. The image of Obama as The Joker has been popping up on posters in Los Angeles and has managed to get a lot of media attention, including today's LA Times:  http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/08/obama-bush-and-the-joker-cultural-double-standard.html

Most of the articles and blogs have also mentioned that I did an image of George W. Bush as the joker last year for Vanity Fair Online. Some of the news outlets, (Fox News, etc), have asked me for my feelings about it all, why the left never made a peep about the Bush image being over the top, but are now complaining that the Obama image is "racist", and insensitive.  I've basically dismissed it by quoting the standard, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", and "Great minds think alike", but I finally decided to bring it up here. My image was done the week the Batman movie came out, and I think works well using the analogy of the Joker, an agent of chaos, destruction and death, all the while  laughing through it all, as Bush, seemingly laughing and unmoved through the destruction reaped by his war in Iraq. The Obama/Joker image just doesn't work as satire, humor or anything else. You can put the white face Joker makeup on any celebrity or politician and you'd have a provocative, negative image, but beyond that, what's the actual point? What does being a supposed Socialist have to do with The Joker?


The best thing that came out of all this is that I got a great quote for the back cover of my upcoming anthology from Rush Limbaugh, who called my illustration of Bush, "of low artistic quality".

Such an honor!

http://drawger.com/drewfriedman/?article_id=8462

Age in which letters are old-fashioned takes toll on Postal Service

Residents of retirement home remember a different day

 

By Joe Burris

 

As the U.S. Postal Service considers closing hundreds of post offices nationwide to save money, one question looms, especially for those 25 and younger: Who'd notice?

During her freshman year at the University of Virginia, Kaitlyn McDowell enjoyed receiving the occasional letter with a care package from younger cousins.

Beyond that, though, the 19-year-old from Ellicott City mostly corresponds by e-mail, text messaging and social networking, like many of her generation.

"It's easier. You don't have to go through the trouble of getting stamps, writing the letter, sealing it and taking it to the post office," said McDowell.

The paperless preferences of McDowell and her peers reflect a generational shift from a time when letter writing was a preferred form of communication. It's one of the reasons the U.S. Postal Service, which has projected a net loss of more than $7 billion at the end of this fiscal year, is considering closing hundreds of post offices.

The postal service says that third-quarter mail volume is down 7 billion pieces, or 14 percent, compared with a year ago - the largest consecutive third-quarter drop in total volume since 1971. To offset the resulting budget crunch, officials are also considering discontinuing Saturday deliveries and eliminating some classes of stamps. They say that some collection boxes are already being removed from city streets, in part because they contain just 25 or fewer pieces of mail within a given period.

Yet for many twentysomethings and teens who have grown up on digital media, post offices and collection boxes are about as vital as pay phones.

 

http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/bal-md.pa.lettersaug07,0,5960461.story

Part 7 of 10 Psychiatry - Making a Killing with Dr. Rima Laibow & G. Edward Griffen By CCHR

Hey, Amazon: Keep your ads out of our books!

By Danny Westneat

Recently Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was asked whether he still reads books on paper, what the techies call "physical books."

"I kind of am grumpy when I am forced to read a physical book," Bezos replied. "Because it's

not as convenient ... You can't turn the page with one hand. The book is always flopping itself shut at the wrong moment.

"It's had a great 500-year run ... but it's time to change."

Uh oh. I like Amazon — the ease and price of its service, and, at least in the past, its corporate principles. Like the time in 2006 it fought the U.S. government's subpoena to sift through the book-buying records of 24,000 of its customers.

But lately I've got to say: Jeff, you're making me grumpy.

I am one of those annoying book junkies. I've been in the same book club for 15 years. Paper or pixel, it doesn't make much difference to us. I tried to describe what does matter to me when Amazon put out its e-book reader, the Kindle, in 2007:

"Books are our last private refuge," I wrote. "They're analog. Stand-alone. Other than talking with my wife late at night, reading a book is about the last form of communication I do that doesn't involve logging on to some collective network."

Which is why U.S. Patent Application No. 20090171750 is so irksome.

It was filed last month by three Amazon technologists. It's a system for embedding ads in books. Both in special-run print books and in what is said to be the future of all reading, e-books on devices such as the Kindle.

There could be full-page ads. Ads in the book's margins. Ads that open when you click on them. Ads individualized to you the reader. And ads pinned to what the book is about.

"For instance, if the requested content includes a novel taking place in Europe, the advertisements may include information about European hotels, resorts, etc.," the Amazon patent application reads.

Or: "If a paragraph ... describes a sports competition, the content manager may place a sports equipment advertisement, such as an ad for a sports shoe, on the left or right margin closest to the paragraph describing the sports event."

This idea has launched a cottage industry of jokes pairing ads with your favorite books. "Catcher in the Rye," brought to you by Clearasil. "Lord of the Flies," sponsored by Parenting Magazine. "

The Grapes of Wrath," made possible by the La Leche League.

We laugh as a way of saying: Amazon, what are you thinking?

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/article/109393-hey-amazon-keep-your-ads-out-of-our-books/

The hidden truth behind drug company profits

Ring-fencing medical knowledge is one of the great grotesqueries of our age

by Johann Hari

This is the story of one of the great unspoken scandals of our times. Today, the people across the world who most need life-saving medicine are being prevented from producing it. Here's the latest example: factories across the poor world are desperate to start producing their own cheaper Tamiflu to protect their populations – but they are being sternly told not to. Why? So rich drug companies can protect their patents – and profits. There is an alternative to this sick system, but we are choosing to ignore it.

To understand this tale, we have to start with an apparent mystery. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has been correctly warning for months that if swine flu spreads to the poorest parts of the world, it could cull hundreds of thousands of people – or more. Yet they have also been telling the governments of the poor world not to go ahead and produce as much Tamiflu – the only drug we have to reduce the symptoms, and potentially save lives – as they possibly can.

In the answer to this whodunnit, there lies a much bigger story about how our world works today.

Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist – and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels – is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes.

Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive, but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the resulting medicine for years. Nobody else can make it.

Although it's not the goal of the individuals working within the system, the outcome is often deadly. The drug companies who owned the patent for Aids drugs went to court to stop the post-Apartheid government of South Africa producing generic copies of it – which are just as effective – for $100 a year to save their dying citizens. They wanted them to pay the full $10,000 a year to buy the branded version – or nothing. In the poor world, the patenting system every day puts medicines beyond the reach of sick people.

This is where the solution to the swine flu mystery comes in. Ordinary democratic citizens were so disgusted by the attempt to deprive South Africa of life-saving medicine that public pressure won a small concession in the global trading rules. It was agreed that, in an overwhelming public health emergency, poor countries would be allowed to produce generic drugs. They are the exact same product, but without the brand name – or the fat patent payments to drug companies in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands.

So under the new rules, the countries of the poor world should be entitled to start making as much generic Tamiflu as they want. There are companies across India and China who say they are raring to go. But Roche – the drug company that owns the patent – doesn't want the poor world making cheaper copies for themselves. They want people to buy the branded version, from which they receive profits. Although not obliged to, they have licensed a handful of companies in the developing world to make the treatment – but they have to pay for license, and they can't possibly meet the demand.

And the WHO seems to be backing Roche – against the rest of us. They are the ones best qualified to judge what constitutes an overwhelming emergency, justifying a breaching of the patent rules. And their message is: Don't use the loophole.

Professor Brook Baker, an expert on drug patenting, says: "Why do they behave like this? Because of direct or indirect pressure from the pharmaceutical companies. It's shocking."

What will be the end-result? James Love, director of Knowledge Economy International, which campaigns against the current patenting system, says: "Poor countries are not as prepared as they could have been. If there's a pandemic, the number of people who die will be much greater than it had to be. Much greater. It's horrible."

The argument in defence of this system offered by Big Pharma is simple, and sounds reasonable at first: we need to charge large sums for "our" drugs so we can develop more life-saving medicines. We want to develop as many treatments as we can, and we can only do that if we have revenue. A lot of the research we back doesn't result in a marketable drug, so it's an expensive process.

But a detailed study by Dr Marcia Angell, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, says that only 14 per cent of their budgets go on developing drugs – usually at the uncreative final part of the drug-trail. The rest goes on marketing and profits. And even with that puny 14 per cent, drug companies squander a fortune developing "me-too" drugs – medicines that do exactly the same job as a drug that already exists, but has one molecule different, so they can take out a new patent, and receive another avalanche of profits.

As a result, the US Government Accountability Office says that far from being a font of innovation, the drug market has become "stagnant". They spend virtually nothing on the diseases that kill the most human beings, like malaria, because the victims are poor, so there's hardly any profit to be sucked out.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-hidden-truth-behind-drug-company-profits-1767257.html

Remembering Woodstock

Bryan Thomas's Photos - Woodstock 1969

Liberals' birther obsession: It's the left-wing, not the GOP, that's pumping up the story

By James Kirchick

You could be forgiven for thinking that a serious campaign is afoot - aided and abetted by the national Republican Party - to question Barack Obama's citizenship. Over the past two weeks, an inordinate amount of news coverage has been afforded to "birthers," conspiracy theorists who claim that the President was not born in Hawaii, as his birth records indicate, but in Kenya.

It is not Obama's right-wing opponents, however, who are devoting the most attention to this obscure, Internet-driven "movement," if one can even use that label to describe such a paranoid groupuscule. Rather, it's liberals, bent on portraying their conservative opponents as extremists - and changing the subject to help a President under increasing scrutiny for the substance of his policies - who are driving this story.

Making the rounds in the propagation of this meme is a deceptively edited video produced by far-left Web site FireDogLake, in which an interviewer chases Republican congressmen around the Capitol asking if they believe Obama is a natural-born citizen. Some respond in the affirmative while others ignore the questioner, and it is this latter handful that liberals have proffered as evidence that the GOP is "fearful" of disparaging its "birther base."

But the refusal of Republican congressmen to answer questions from a Michael Moore wanna-be is understandable; public figures are frequently accosted on the street by crazy people and amateur propagandists wielding cameras. In fact, it was later revealed that one of the supposedly fearful Republicans running from the camera's glare was a Democrat late for a vote.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/08/05/2009-08-05_liberals_birther_obsession.html#ixzz0NVfB8ZIv

Judge clears way for dinosaur park to be seized

by Kris Wernowsky

A federal judge has cleared the way for the government's seizure of a creationism theme park in Pensacola owned by a couple convicted of tax fraud.

A ruling by U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers states that the nine properties that make up Dinosaur Adventure Land as well as two bank accounts associated with the park will be used to satisfy $430,400 owed to the federal government.

Kent Hovind, who founded the park and a ministry, Creation Science Evangelism, is serving 10 years in federal prison for failing to pay the Internal Revenue Service more than $470,000 in employee taxes.

He was found guilty in November 2006 on 58 counts, including failure to pay employee taxes and making threats against investigators.

The conviction culminated 17 years of Hovind sparring with the IRS. Saying he was employed by God and his ministers were not subject to payroll taxes, he claimed no income or property.

Hovind is incarcerated at the Edgefield Federal Correction Institution in South Carolina.

His wife, Jo, also was sentenced to a year in federal prison for her role in the tax fraud. She's currently jailed at the Federal Correctional Institution in Marianna.

Rodgers' 16-page order released late Thursday gives the government the green light to divide up the nine properties in and around the 5800 block of North Palafox Street and begin to sell them until the $430,400 forfeiture amount is satisfied.

http://www.pnj.com/article/20090801/NEWS01/908010317

Crazy ex-girlfriend