Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Truthout 5/19

How Bush's DOJ Killed a Criminal Probe Into BP That Threatened to Net Top Officials
Jason Leopold, Truthout: "Mention the name of the corporation BP to Scott West and two words immediately come to mind: Beyond Prosecution. West was the special agent in charge with the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) criminal division who had been probing alleged crimes committed by BP and the company's senior officials in connection with a March 2006 pipeline rupture at the company's Prudhoe Bay operations in Alaska's North Slope that spilled 267,000 gallons of crude oil across two acres of frozen tundra - the second largest spill in Alaska's history - which went undetected for nearly a week."
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Sestak Defeats Specter in Pennsylvania Primary; Paul Defeats Grayson in Kentucky
William Douglas, David Lightman and Halimah Abdullah, McClatchy Newspapers: "Sen. Arlen Specter, who switched from Republican to Democrat because he felt he couldn't survive a GOP primary, lost Pennsylvania's Democratic primary Tuesday night to Rep. Joe Sestak, unable to shake his Republican past and the anti-incumbent sentiment prevalent among the nation's voters."
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ACLU Fights Restrictive, Unconstitutional Arizona Law in Court
Yana Kunichoff, Truthout: "The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a coalition of civil rights groups are tackling Arizona's restrictive immigration law head-on; they filed a class action lawsuit Monday to challenge the new law, which requires police to demand 'papers' from people suspected of being in the United States without proper documentation."
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Will Bunch | Representative Weiner Goes After Glenn Beck's House of Gold
Will Bunch, MediaMatters: "Throughout Glenn Beck's meteoric rise to become king of all right-wing media, a once-obscure Santa Monica peddler of gold coins called Goldline International has been along for the ride. The support of Beck and other radio hosts - mainly conservatives like Mark Levin and Fred Thompson - who spend 55 minutes creating fear of an economic collapse and then five minutes telling you why coins from a company like Goldline are the only safe haven has helped Goldline become a $500 million company."
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Maybe We Can All Get Rich Cleaning Up Each Others' Pollution
Max Ajl, Truthout: "The pictures are everywhere and they are really ugly: the waters of the Gulf of Mexico marred with cocoa-brown blots of oil, seabirds brown-black with oil gunk that will probably kill them. Reportage of the explosion of the Deepwater Horizons offshore drilling rig is full of facts about ecological devastation, mismanagement of the rig, corporate wrong-doing and, rightfully, Barack Obama's abominable stance on offshore drilling. But could something good come out of this mess?"
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Tom Tomorrow | This Modern World
Acclaimed cartoonist Tom Tomorrow takes on the spectrum of responses to Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court.
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Robert Reich | The "Mad-as-Hell" Party Scores as the Anxious Class Stews
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog: "Kentucky Tea Party hero Rand Paul scores a knockout victory over Republican Trey Grayson. Before that, Utah Senator Robert Bennett loses to a Tea Party-fueled Republican insurgent. Is the lesson here the rise once again of the Republican right? Not so fast."
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Jim Hightower | Which CEO Will Win the 2010 "Icky" Award?
Jim Hightower, Truthout: "It's not nearly as well known as an Emmy or Grammy, but the annual awarding of the 'Icky' often produces high drama, fierce competition and gasps of surprise. This coveted corporate prize goes to the group of CEOs whose performances in the whose performances in the past 12 months exhibit the best combination of greediness, goofiness and grossness."
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Elena Kagan: Supreme Poker Player
Deb Price, Truthout: "Elena Kagan is in line for a pivotal seat on the Supreme Court, the one being vacated by ardent gay ally Justice John Paul Stevens. She literally could decide which way the closely divided court tips on the next wave of gay cases. How would she rule on whether Uncle Sam can deny federal benefits to gay couples legally married in their home states?"
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Red State Road Trip 2: Where Have All the Mountains Gone? (Video - Part 13)
Chris Hume, Truthout: "America's fossil fuel fetish continues - in spite of horrendous crimes against the earth. Travel into the belly of West Virginia, and get a front row seat in the fight against one of the worst environmental atrocities of all: Mountaintop Removal Coal Extraction."
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A New Oil Rush Endangers the Gulf of Mexico and the Planet
Michael T. Klare, TomDispatch: "Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age of Tough Oil, a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy sources. Make no mistake: we're entering the danger zone. And brace yourself, the fate of the planet could be at stake."
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Bill for Afghan War Could Run Into the Trillions
Eli Clifton, Inter Press Service: "The U.S. Senate is moving forward with a 59-billion-dollar spending bill, of which 33.5 billion dollars would be allocated for the war in Afghanistan. However, some experts here in Washington are raising concerns that the war may be unwinnable and that the money being spent on military operations in Afghanistan could be better spent."
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Clashes, Fires Roil Bangkok Despite Red-Shirt Protest Leaders' Surrender
Simon Montlake, The Christian Science Monitor: "Thai troops punched into a downtown protest camp Wednesday, ending a five-week rally but failing to stop violent unrest spreading around the capital as a nighttime curfew was declared."
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News in Brief: Incumbents Fare Badly in Senate Primary and More ...
Kentucky chooses Tea Party candidate Rand Paul in Senate primary; Republican senator blocks a higher liability cap on oil spills; Taliban attacks US airfield at Bagram in Afghanistan; President Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderon meet today to discuss immigration, the violent drug war and the economy; Russia suspends US adoptions of Russian children.
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How to Think Like a Feminist Economist
Susan Feiner, On the Issues: "As a feminist economist I am constantly amazed - though I suppose I should be used to it by now - by the ways conventional analyses of economic matters completely ignore gender asymmetries. Because I am a feminist economist, I am hypersensitive to differences in women's and men's economic circumstances."
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Minding the Education Gap
Emily Badger, Miller-McCune: "The minority education gap, if not addressed, will have a huge impact on the U.S. economy in the future as good-paying jobs increasingly require college degrees. Americans aren't exactly making progress in closing the country's deep education gap. Thirty-two percent of Asians and whites held a bachelor's degree in 2008, compared to only 15 percent of blacks and Hispanics - a larger disparity than a decade ago."
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Meditations on Hip Hop Part II: Death
Tolu Oluronda, All Hip Hop: "It didn't take long after Queensbridge MC Nas declared Hip Hop dead in early 2006 for the blowback to begin. In those subsequent days, fans, artists, and even music executives at once sauntered from beyond the halls of obscurity to register their firm dispute with any such notion that this music which had dominated public consciousness for over two decades was approaching death rattles, and on verge of chugging down the final pill."
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