Thursday, June 10, 2010

Truthout 6/10

VIDEO: Anti-Tax Voters Bring Hard Times in Colorado Springs
In this exclusive Truthout documentary, journalist Chris Hume explores the ways in which ultra-conservative Colorado Springs has been hit by the impact of its anti-tax policies. Hume delves into the lives of the town's citizens as they struggle to live without basic services.
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Juan Cole | Iran's Green Movement: One Year Later
Juan Cole, TomDispatch: "Iran's Green Movement is one year old this Sunday, the anniversary of its first massive demonstrations in the streets of Tehran. Greeted with great hope in much of the world, a year later it's weaker, the country is more repressive, and its hardliners are in a far stronger position - and some of their success can be credited to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and sanctions hawks in the Obama administration."
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Banksters, Corrupt Politicians Face Prosecution - in Iceland
Sam Knight, Truthout: "Last month, the publication of an Icelandic Parliamentary report commissioned 'to investigate and analyze the processes leading to the collapse of the three main banks in Iceland' shook the old guard on the island, leaving many of the country's rich and powerful facing the possibility of incarceration."
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Does Obama Really Know or Care About Who Is at Guantanamo?
Andy Worthington, Truthout: "The recently released Final Report of President Obama's Guantanamo Review Task Force was supposed to provide a cogent and definitive analysis of the status of the remaining 181 prisoners, given that it took 11 months to complete.... Sadly, however, the end result - although valid in many ways - also revealed institutional caution, credulity regarding the contributions of the intelligence services, an inability to address fundamental problems with the legislation that authorized President Bush's detention policies in the first place and a willingness to bend to the demands of political expediency."
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The BP Disaster Marks the End of the Age of Arrogance About the Environment ... Can We Change?
Chip Ward, AlterNet: "We dreamed we were living in a fabulous mansion but are waking up in a greasy gutter. The ecological and economic catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico makes our most infamous oil spill, the Exxon Valdez, look miniscule by comparison. This time we have fouled our nest on an epic scale."
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The Strange Story of Sally Hartman
H.P. Albarelli Jr., Truthout: "The human mind is a complex and intriguing organ. I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist. I don't know what provokes some people to invent situations that they claim to be true, situations and stories that I am convinced they actually came to believe themselves over time.... One story that came my way was clearly different from all the others. This story involved a woman who, in the mid-1950s, had been married to a CIA employee."
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African-American Mississippi Man Starts Record Sixth Murder Trial
Bill Quigley, Audrey Stewart and Davida Finger, Truthout: "An African-American man, Curtis Flowers, made history this week when he became the first person in US history to ever go on trial for murder six times for the same crime. Flowers has been in jail in Mississippi since 1996, accused of the murder of four people at a furniture store. Jury selection started this week in tiny Winona, Mississippi, population 5,482."
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News in Brief: BP and Officials Block News Coverage of Oil Spill and More ...
Journalists attempting to cover the BP oil spill are turned away; the UN imposes new sanctions on Iran; the FBI investigates the killing of a Mexican student by a US border agent; President Obama promises aid for Palestine; Obama's national intelligence director nominee may lose the vote on account of close ties to the Pentagon.
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Oversight Panel: Feds Jumped Too Soon to Bail Out AIG
Chris Adams, McClatchy Newspapers: "The federal government didn't exhaust all its options before it committed tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars to bail out the American International Group during the height of the 2008 financial collapse, according to a new report from a congressional watchdog panel. The Congressional Oversight Panel, which was created to monitor the spending in the 2008 bank bailout bill known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, detailed in its latest monthly report the government's extraordinary rescue of AIG and its lingering effects on taxpayers and the financial markets."
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Former Bush Official Josh Bolten Advising BP on How to "Defend Its Interests" and Restore Its Reputation
Amanda Terkel, ThinkProgress: "BP has embarked on an aggressive campaign to repair its public image in the wake of its disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It has repeatedly run full-page ads in major newspapers, retained high-powered lobbying and public relations firms, and launched a series of television ads with CEO Tony Hayward looking apologetic. The company has even hired Anne Womack-Kolton, a former top aide to Vice President Cheney, to be its new spokesperson. Now, joining Womack-Kolton in helping BP repair its image is former chief of staff to President Bush, Josh Bolten."
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E.J. Dionne Jr. | White House Comments on Lincoln Victory Sets Off Firestorm With Labor
E.J. Dionne Jr.: "This week's primaries should have been good news for Democrats. Instead, a stray comment from an Obama aide briefly threatened a civil war in the Democratic Party, which needs all the unity it can get. The administration moved quickly to heal bad feelings that burst forth when an unnamed senior White House official disparaged organized labor's unsuccessful efforts to defeat Sen. Blanche Lincoln in the Arkansas Democratic primary."
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The Intersectionist: Sy Montgomery's "Birdology"
Truthout's Leslie Thatcher reviews Sy Montgomery's new book, "Birdology: Adventures with a Pack of Hens, a Peck of Pigeons, Cantankerous Crows, Fierce Falcons, Hip Hop Parrots, Baby Hummingbirds, and One Murderously Big Living Dinosaur": "Whatever her ostensible subject, Montgomery writes about 'The Place,' the intersection where the human and nonhuman worlds, where past and present, meet and co-create in relation to one another and themselves."
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What Would "Another Haiti" Look Like? Haitian Views on Their Country's Future
Beverly Bell and Laura Wagner, Truthout: "A slogan of Haiti's popular movement - a grouping of many organized sectors, from community-based journalists, to cooperative street vendors, to children's rights advocates - is 'Another Haiti Is Possible.' Most Haitians we speak with, whatever their sector or political persuasion, have very clear ideas of what a different Haiti could look like and what would be required for its construction. Here are some of those ideas."
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Border Patrol Gone Wild
Erin Rosa, The Media Consortium: "A Border Patrol agent shot and killed a 14-year-old Mexican boy on June 7. At RaceWire, Julianne Hing reports that 'Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereca [was] on the Mexican side of the El Paso-Juarez border [and] was shot and killed by a Border Patrol officer, who was on the U.S. side.' The incident has been condemned by the Mexican government and sparked investigations by the Customs and Border Protection agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
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Joe Conason | Why We Can't Just "Look Forward"
Joe Conason, Truthout: "Torture is no longer a pressing concern for the American public, if it ever was. The country's attention has understandably turned to lost jobs, costly health care and spilled oil. Most Americans probably agree with President Obama that rather than dwell on the secret abuses of the Bush-Cheney regime, we ought to be looking forward."
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