Independent Light

Saturday, April 11, 2009

WH Responds To Cheney's Criticism: 'I Guess Rush Limbaugh Was Busy.'

Cheney is about as ciminal as they come, not to mention crazy as hell.

more about "WH Responds To Cheney's Criticism: 'I...", posted with vodpod

Tell Obama To Stop Protecting the Bushies!

Subject: Tell Obama: Stop blocking court review of illegal wiretapping.

Dear Friend,

We have an opportunity to bring the Bush administration to justice for illegal wiretapping. But President Obama is blocking the way.

On April 2, President's Obama's lawyers invoked Bush's radical theory of executive power -- and the 'state secrets' defense -- to argue for the dismissal of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping of countless Americans.

MSNBC host Keith Olbermann has said "The Obama administration is just flat out dead wrong about this." You can watch Olbermann and Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley discuss Obama's use of the "state secrets" privilege to protect the Bush administration on illegal wiretapping in this YouTube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9MxVen7j7s

If EFF's case against the NSA is dismissed, we may never know the extent of the Bush administration's illegal spying on Americans.

Please join me and take action to support the Constitution.
http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/obama_wiretapping/?r_by=3421-1852929-62A7Z.x&rc=confemail

Let The Sun Shine In......

CBO: Ethanol production hiked food prices

Does this surprise anyone?

We are being taken for fools!

Using human food for energy for vehicles is insane!


Jim Snyder
Increased use of ethanol was responsible for about 10 to 15 percent of the rise in food prices from 2007 to 2008, but reduced greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector by less than 1 percent, according to a Congressional Budget Office report released this week. Proponents of ethanol production have argued that greater ethanol usage would reduce dependence on foreign oil, support rural economies and lower greenhouse gas emissions from gasoline. But the new CBO report could give critics of corn-based ethanol more ammunition to argue that wider production raises food prices — which in turn increases the money the government spends on childhood nutrition programs — and provides little environmental benefit. “This study is yet another in a long list of studies confirming the limitations of corn ethanol as a solution to either fossil fuels use or greenhouse gas emissions goals,” said Craig Cox, Midwest vice president for the Environmental Working Group. “There is clearly an impact on food prices. It has just been a question of how much.”“The results speak for themselves and they add to the continually mounting evidence that there is an impact of ethanol on food prices,” said Scott Openshaw, a spokesman for the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which has led a campaign against wider corn-based ethanol production. Ethanol supporters, however, focused on other factors that contributed even more to the run-up in food prices, such as rising energy costs. The CBO report shows that “ethanol’s role in food price increase is minimal,” the Renewable Fuels Association said. “The impact on food prices of our nation’s push to find renewable alternatives to imported oil is dwarfed by the widespread negative economic impacts of oil itself,” said Bob Dineen, RFA president, in a statement. RFA spokesman Matt Hartwig said the CBO study represented a “snapshot” in time and didn’t explain why food prices remained high after corn prices fell back. But Cox said the CBO report confirmed that corn ethanol is a “dead end,” and that Congress should reconsider its biofuels policies. As the CBO report notes, the federal government has supported ethanol production since the late 1970s, through subsidies, tariff protections and production mandates. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 called for the production of 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022. Of that total, not more than 15 billion gallons can come from corn-based ethanol. In 2008, oil refiners blended a record 9 billion gallons ethanol from nearly 3 billion bushels of corn, a billion bushels more than were used for the purpose the previous year. The ethanol displaced around 6 billion gallons of gasoline. It isn’t a one-to-one ratio because gasoline has a higher energy content than ethanol.

Let The Sun Shine In......

A Look At The Right VIA Rush

The questions becomes, can we really live together?

Friday, April 10, 2009

Let The Sun Shine In......

A Warning To Israel

Thank Be To God!!!

Our foreign policy can no longer be controlled by Israel or any other nation!!!

Why do we support any nation that considers itself a religious state? It is against our founding principles. No one would support attacking religious states/nations but nor should we support them.

Biden warns Israel off any attack on Iran

Vice President Joe Biden issued a high-level admonishment to Israel's new government Tuesday that it would be "ill advised" to launch a military strike against Iran. Biden said in a CNN interview that he does not believe newly installed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would take such a step. Even so, his comment underscored a gap between the conservative new Israeli government and the Obama White House on a series of questions, including the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and Iran. While the Obama administration has made a series of recent overtures to Tehran, the Israelis have grown more confrontational out of concern that the Islamic Republic's increasing nuclear know-how could one day become an existential threat.

Let The Sun Shine In......

What's Up With The Dems?

This author is asking a fair question. Can we help him with an answer, speculation or two? Maybe it's as simple as this: The best defense is offense.

Maybe not quite that simple. Who all was spied on, not only by the federal governement, but by citizen volunteers in networks of spying cells, whose activites had no real connection with terrrorism.

Were all political opposition, both D.C. Dems, State Dems, peace activists and others considered enemies of the Bush administration for various reasons, data-mined?

Are the Dems, and even some Republicans, aware they have been a target of domestic spying.

We know that Pentagon Intel. has spied on Quakers. They call it force protection. Has anyone ever heard of a Quaker (other than Nixon) put any one of our military men and women in harms way, let alone attack them? Makes no sense, does it? I guess it does when it comes time to blame someone for our loss in Iraq.

Here's the thing with us: We don't care who spies on us. We aren't angels, but we are certainly not a threat to our troops or to our founding national principles.

We can, however, be a huge threat to any kind of tyranny. That's a big part what being an American means.

Bipartinship is not worth refusing to defending those principles. We cannot be all that forward looking when our history shames so many of us. The last administration have to be held fully accountable under the law. If we let this slide, we are through, as a super-power, if not as a nation.

We simply cannot go on without seeing our moral failings as a nation, confessing those failings and making amends.

If we do not take stock now, our country will descend into darkness....as by the laws of karma....it should.

April 9, 2009
More Real than Realpolitik: A Conversation Opener
By Josh Mitteldorf

The Realistic view of American politics is that democracy has been eclipsed by a cynical electoral calculation. The media have a stranglehold on America’s thought process. TV advertising is essential to winning an election, and money is essential to TV advertising. Therefore, all American politicians above a purely local level are in hock to the deep pockets that support their campaigns. They will pay lip service to democracy, but they realize that money is more important to getting re-elected than the constituency’s goodwill.

This picture explains everything. Well, it explains a lot, but not everything, and I’m interested in what it doesn’t explain. First, because I’m curious: it’s always interesting to understand the way the world works; and second, because the Realistic view doesn’t offer much hope for change, or point the way to highly-leveraged interventions. Is there a perspective that is both “more real” and more hopeful?

Here’s the big clue that has piqued my curiosity: Republicans are stealing elections, and Democrats don’t seem to mind. If this game were all about getting re-elected, you’d think the Dems would be all over the issue of vote count by secret software, not to mention disenfranchisement by arcane registration requirements, and the hundreds of (mostly illegal) dirty tricks that the Republicans used to suppress the vote in the last several elections. Here’s a case where idealistic democratic and selfish Democratic interests are well-aligned, yet the response to this outrage has been tepid in the case of vote suppression, and top-to-bottom denial in the case of software-based vote theft.

Why are the Democrats so oblivious to their own self-interest?

The voting mess is probably the clearest case of Democrats shooting themselves in the foot, but there are lots of other areas where the appearance has been one of Democratic incompetence in the game of politics. I don’t believe they’re dumb. I’m looking for a better explanation.

On the issue of health care, the Democrats are way to the right of the People. 57% of Americans want single-payer health care, despite the fact this option has been frozen out of the public dialog. On the issue of war, the people are disgusted and broke and want out of the Middle East. The main reason Obama was elected is that he was the most Dovish of the mainstream candidates; and yet, in office he is dragging his feet on withdrawal, packing more young men and women off to Afghanistan, redefining the end of the war as 50,000 permanent troops in Iraq!

This can’t be a political calculation – something else is going on. Both free, universal health care and an end to the war would be wildly popular, way beyond what might be lost in campaign contributions!

The War on Terror is a sham and a fraud. Many, many Americans have figured this out, despite the fact that every newspaper and every TV station legitimizes the WoT every day, explicitly in their reporting, and implicitly in the unspoken context behind the news. I suspect that a lot of Democrats in Congress must know what’s going on, and know that speaking the truth would be a powerful political thing to do. The R’s would, of course, respond with outrage, name-calling and fear-mongering if isolated Dems came out one-at-a-time to tell the truth. But the party might gain the upper hand and win the political advantage if they pulled together and united behind the truth.

Easier yet would be to educate the public gradually in a series of Congressional hearings. No one needs to have the courage to stand up and say the Emperor has no clothes – all they would have to do is ask questions. Put middle-level Bush functionaries under oath, and the whole lurid story would come out – trumped up intelligence, authorization for torture, the realization by the Project for a New American Century that with Communism defunct, the leaders needed a new enemy in order to keep progressives from gaining the upper hand. Whether you believe 9/11 was planned and executed by Cheney and Rumsfeld or merely condoned when the Air Defense was grounded for the day – either way, the outrages that would emerge from such hearings would destroy the Republican party, at least for a generation to come, and possibly forever. If Washington is so cynically political, why don’t the Dems play the strongest card in their hand?

Dick Cheney had his own personal assassination service, reporting directly to him. Don’t we want to know who they killed? Whoever their targets were, they were people even the CIA would not pursue. My guess is that some of them were purely political targets, enemies of the Republicans without a hint of connection to terrorism.

Cheney personally shot a man in the face from point blank range, in a ‘hunting accident’ that has never been investigated. Surely there is more political hay to be made by getting the details of that adventure out to the public than by tattling on the patrons of a $4,000-a-night DC escort service.

So here’s the essence of the curious situation in political communications, Washington style: The Republicans are cynically throwing insults at the Democrats, with no regard to the truth, and shaming them, running them out of town for behaviors that we know are commonplace: Eliot Spitzer’s vice was the common indulgence of pent-up politicians on both sides of the aisle. The ‘crime’ that put Don Siegelman in jail was to solicit donations for a charity where he served on the board.

But while the Republicans wax indignant at the Dems’ peccadilloes, the Dems never engage in personal attacks, even as there are so many potential targets who richly deserve it. Are we to believe that Dems are just too fundamentally decent to tell the truth? Is it part of the Realist view that the Democrats are above name-calling, so suffused with Christian charity that they can always be counted upon to turn the other cheek? I don’t think so.

(Excuse me, but when did "not telling the truth become decent human behavior? Yes, as Dr. House says, everybody lies, especially about things they have done about which they are ashamed or things they have done that are illegal. Any politician who knows about huge crimes committed by the wealthy and powerful, be they corporate High Hoohahs or official Grand-poobahs, are complicit if they don't tell the truth. There is no decency protecting the criminals)

There are some hardscrabble Democratic pols in Washington, not least Mr Bipartisan of the White House, who wants to look forward not backward.

(Yes and this concerns virtually every pelican independent. Of course, the president is not tasked with investigating anyone. That task would fall to Congress and/or the DOJ, in the form of a special prosecutor. I believe that Obama is caught in a trap; one which keeps him from dropping the H-bomb of justice on the heads of numerous members of the last administration, not to mention their knowing enablers in Congress.)

Another mystery concerns the economy. The Realist view is that Big Business has control of American politics. The Realist view explains the Clinton years, NAFTA, slashing the Federal safety net, environmental sell-outs, burgeoning bottom lines and stagnating wages. The Clinton presidency was a dream come true for American business; but the Bush reign was something else again.

There were eight years of disappointment for the tycoons, culminating in economic free-fall (we’re still a long way from the bottom). Are we to believe that Business interests are so ignorant of basic economics that they just stumbled into an ideological mistake? With Bush in the White House, why weren’t America’s Blue Chips able to order up a better deal for themselves?

And why did the Dems go along with the Bush tax cuts? - tax policies that were transparently theft from the working people to feed the Fat Cats, and not just theft but also a disaster for the economy, sowing the seeds of the present economic collapse?

And if the Democrats are the party of Big Business, who then are the Republicans?

I have some suggested directions, possible clues to these mysteries, and I’ll post them next week. But for now, I’m interested in your answers, and eager to get a discussion started in the Comments section...

Why are the Dems oblivious to elections that are stolen from them?

Why is there no will to conduct Congressional hearings into the Bush crimes – hearings that would discredit the Republicans and put them out of business for many years to come?

Why are there so many Republican attack dogs, while Democrats are politely pulling their punches?

Why is there no one seizing the political hay to be made from peace? From single-payer health insurance?

Why has Big Business permitted the economy to stagnate for 8 years, with trillions in forgone profits? Who does the current collapse serve?

Author's Bio: Josh Mitteldorf, a senior editor at OpEdNews, was educated to be an astrophysicist, and has branched out from there to mathematical modeling in a variety of areas. He has taught mathematics, statistics, and physics at several universities. He is an avid amateur pianist, and father of two adopted Chinese girls. This year, his affiliation is with the University of Arizona, where he studies the evolution of aging.

Let The Sun Shine In......

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Another chance to connect the dots:

Let The Sun Shine In......

Bailouts, Huge Fraud.

Hat-tip to Crooks & Liars for content!

This Bill Moyers interview is going viral so fast, I can't even keep up with it. And for a very good reason - former S&L regulator Bill Black explains exactly why the current banking bailout is a mistake.

complete transcript

Full interview video is here

There's so much information, you simply have to read or watch the entire thing. Some snippets:

BILL MOYERS: Yeah. Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover-up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: You are.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely, because they are scared to death. All right? They're scared to death of a collapse. They're afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent. They think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we'll run screaming to the exits. And we won't rely on deposit insurance. And, by the way, you can rely on deposit insurance. And it's foolishness. All right? Now, it may be worse than that. You can impute more cynical motives. But I think they are sincerely just panicked about, "We just can't let the big banks fail." That's wrong.

BILL MOYERS: But what might happen, at this point, if in fact they keep from us the true health of the banks?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, then the banks will, as they did in Japan, either stay enormously weak, or Treasury will be forced to increasingly absurd giveaways of taxpayer money. We've seen how horrific AIG -- and remember, they kept secrets from everyone.

BILL MOYERS: A.I.G. did?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: What we're doing with -- no, Treasury and both administrations. The Bush administration and now the Obama administration kept secret from us what was being done with AIG. AIG was being used secretly to bail out favored banks like UBS and like Goldman Sachs. Secretary Paulson's firm, that he had come from being CEO. It got the largest amount of money. $12.9 billion. And they didn't want us to know that. And it was only Congressional pressure, and not Congressional pressure, by the way, on Geithner, but Congressional pressure on AIG.

Where Congress said, "We will not give you a single penny more unless we know who received the money." And, you know, when he was Treasury Secretary, Paulson created a recommendation group to tell Treasury what they ought to do with AIG. And he put Goldman Sachs on it.

BILL MOYERS: Even though Goldman Sachs had a big vested stake.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Massive stake. And even though he had just been CEO of Goldman Sachs before becoming Treasury Secretary. Now, in most stages in American history, that would be a scandal of such proportions that he wouldn't be allowed in civilized society.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, like a conflict of interest, it seems.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Massive conflict of interests.

BILL MOYERS: So, how did he get away with it?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: I don't know whether we've lost our capability of outrage. Or whether the cover up has been so successful that people just don't have the facts to react to it.

Let The Sun Shine In......

Red Cross 'gravely concerned' about detainees who 'disappeared'

Will this night-terror never end?

04/09/2009 @ 9:31 am

Filed by John Byrne

Secret prison detainees have effectively vanished

The Central Intelligence Agency -- under President George W. Bush and now President Barack Obama -- has refused to allow the International Red Cross access to tortured detainees captured in the US war on terror, a new human rights report reveals.

The CIA's refusal, caught by veteran Newsweek correspondent Michael Isikoff and The Public Record, has prevented the group from finding out more information about detainees that were transferred by the Bush Administration after the revelation that they were being held in secret prisons.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a former Bush official told Isikoff that the Red Cross has not been informed of the detainees' whereabouts. Nor has the State Department received assurances that the detainees won't be tortured in their home countries where many of them have been transferred to, the official said. The issue is particularly important to human rights groups because of a recently leaked Red Cross report that concluded the US tortured some terrorist suspects captured under the Bush Administration.

"This issue has been hiding in plain sight—but nobody has connected the dots," the former official is quoted as saying.

"The majority of the people in the CIA program are unaccounted for," John Sifton, a human-rights investigator and lawyer told Isikoff. "We don't know what happened to them."

Vice President Cheney disclosed last year that at least 100 people had been captured and interrogated under the CIA's secret prison program. Thirty three, Cheney said, had been subjected to "enhanced interrogation," a euphemism devised by the Bush Administration for practices the US previously labeled as torture.

Red Cross investigators believe most detainees held in secret CIA prisons have been returned to their home countries. Many of the suspects' home countries continue to torture their domestic prisoners -- among them Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Syria.

President Obama's CIA director, Leon Panetta, told a Senate panel during his confirmation hearings that he wouldn't prosecute CIA employees who particpated in the program. He's also come under fire for allegedly protecting at least two CIA employees who took part -- and is purportedly part of an effort to convince President Obama not to release "torture" memos written under the Bush Administration.

Writing in the Daily Beast Wednesday, John Sifton, a private investigator and attorney, says Leon Panetta is giving cover to two of his subordinates by pleading with the Obama administration to not release three torture memos by a former Office of Legal Counsel attorney that the American Civil Liberties Union has sued to gain access to.

Contacted by Isikoff, the CIA refused to comment on any aspect of the Red Cross report. But CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said CIA Director Panetta "has taken decisive steps to ensure that the CIA abides by the president's executive orders" prohibiting cruel and unusual treatment of detainees and has also "stated repeatedly that no one who took actions based on legal guidance from the Department of Justice at the time should be investigated, let alone punished."

President Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, has said the practice of waterboarding (simulated drowning), employed by the CIA in questioning some suspects under Bush, is torture and is now prohibited.

Let The Sun Shine In......

In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ's New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush's

I can only hope that, at the very most, Obama intends to use these abhorrent violations of the Constitution to keep an eyes on certain people; people whom many of us believe were and continue to be a threat to the people of the U.S.

I won't actually believe it as I see it!

Will someone please tell the truth?

April 7th, 2009

Commentary by Tim Jones

We had hoped this would go differently.

Friday evening, in a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA, EFF's litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping of countless Americans, the Obama Administration's made two deeply troubling arguments.

First, they argued, exactly as the Bush Administration did on countless occasions, that the state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue out of hand. They argue that simply allowing the case to continue "would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security." As in the past, this is a blatant ploy to dismiss the litigation without allowing the courts to consider the evidence.

It's an especially disappointing argument to hear from the Obama Administration. As a candidate, Senator Obama lamented that the Bush Administration "invoked a legal tool known as the 'state secrets' privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court." He was right then, and we're dismayed that he and his team seem to have forgotten.

Sad as that is, it's the Department Of Justice's second argument that is the most pernicious. The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying — that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes.

This is a radical assertion that is utterly unprecedented. No one — not the White House, not the Justice

Department, not any member of Congress, and not the Bush Administration — has ever interpreted the law this way.

Previously, the Bush Administration has argued that the U.S. possesses "sovereign immunity" from suit for conducting electronic surveillance that violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). However, FISA is only one of several laws that restrict the government's ability to wiretap. The Obama Administration goes two steps further than Bush did, and claims that the US PATRIOT Act also renders the U.S. immune from suit under the two remaining key federal surveillance laws: the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act. Essentially, the Obama Adminstration has claimed that the government cannot be held accountable for illegal surveillance under any federal statutes.

Again, the gulf between Candidate Obama and President Obama is striking. As a candidate, Obama ran promising a new era of government transparency and accountability, an end to the Bush DOJ's radical theories of executive power, and reform of the PATRIOT Act. But, this week, Obama's own Department Of Justice has argued that, under the PATRIOT Act, the government shall be entirely unaccountable for surveilling Americans in violation of its own laws.

This isn't change we can believe in. This is change for the worse.

For further reading, we suggest Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald and The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder.

Related Issues: NSA Spying

Related Cases: Jewel v. NSA

Let The Sun Shine In......

Independent Light

Saturday, April 11, 2009

WH Responds To Cheney's Criticism: 'I Guess Rush Limbaugh Was Busy.'

Tell Obama To Stop Protecting the Bushies!

CBO: Ethanol production hiked food prices

A Look At The Right VIA Rush

A Warning To Israel

Thank Be To God!!!

Our foreign policy can no longer be controlled by Israel or any other nation!!!

Why do we support any nation that considers itself a religious state? It is against our founding principles. No one would support attacking religious states/nations but nor should we support them.

Biden warns Israel off any attack on Iran

What's Up With The Dems?

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009

Another chance to connect the dots:

Bailouts, Huge Fraud.

Red Cross 'gravely concerned' about detainees who 'disappeared'

04/09/2009 @ 9:31 am

Secret prison detainees have effectively vanished

In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ's New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush's

Lijit Ad Wijit

Blogs

Pelican Trinity

Pelican Briefs

CONTACT:

Deals

K STREET

Contained within is all there is.....

Lijit Search Wijit

Followers

Blog Archive

Some favorite sites

About Me

Disclaimer

Our New Mission

TRANSFORMATION OR THE END OF LIFE AS WE KNOW IT