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Updated Special Report | 2010 Mid-term Election Guide

  • Walk away from the Democratic Party and back progressive, third party candidates until the Democrats feel enough heat to adopt our agenda. We must be willing to say no. If not, we become slaves. -- Chris Hedges
  • 2010 Elections: Why Have the Democrats Lost Popular Support?

David Culver, ed., Evergreene Digest

David Horsey

Eight False Things The Public “Knows” Prior To Election Day, Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future

  • If the public votes in a new Congress that rejects the idea of helping to create demand in the economy because they think it didn't work, then the new Congress could do things that cause a depression.
  • This stuff really matters.
  • Five Things People "Know"
  • People Are Allergic to the Facts

Duty to Warn: Lessons from History to Guide AntiFascist Voters, Gary Kohls, Evergreene Digest

  • What Can Happen if We the People Let Down our Guard and Vote for Our Future Oppressors
  • Excerpts, without comment, from Milton Mayer’s “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45”
  • Advice for citizens who still have hope for America

Duty to Warn: Don't Vote for Your Future Oppressors, Gary Kohls, Evergreene Digest

  • Who should freedom-loving people vote for?
  • Advice for citizens who still have hope for America

Advancing the Progressive Agenda in November: Don’t Vote Dem! David W. Culver, Evergreene Digest
Walk away from the Democratic Party and back progressive, third party candidates until the Democrats feel enough heat to adopt our agenda. We must be willing to say no. If not, we become slaves.

The left has lost its nerve and its direction, Chris Hedges, Philadelphia Inquirer | PA
If the left wants to regain influence in the nation's political life, it must be willing to walk away from the Democratic Party, even if Barack Obama is the (president), and back progressive, third-party (officials) until the Democrats feel enough heat to adopt our agenda. We must be willing to say no. If not, we become slaves.

U.S. Midterms: Political Freak Show, Cliff Schecter, Huffington Post
I'm you, dear readers. Well, actually, I'm not. But I'm also not a witch, so at least I've got that going for me.

Ignorance as Authenticity, Joe Klein, Swampland

  • There is something profoundly diseased about a society that idolizes its ignoramuses and disdains its experts.
  • People Are Allergic to the Facts

Empire of Illusion, Jeff Dietrich, The Catholic Agitator

  • It's all about spectacle and debauchery. People are so disconnected from reality that they don't know how to read what is happening--they cannot grasp that the walls are tumbling down--and so they retreat into absurdities. This is the disease gripping American society today.
  • Building a Nation of Know-Nothings
  • Lady Gaga: Pop Star for a Country and an Empire in Decline

Lessons of the Obama Debacle, Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus

  • The failure of progressives (is) to translate their vision and values into a program that is convincing and connects with the people trapped in the terrible existential conditions created by the global financial crisis.
  • Our side has been derailed (but) ... we can fight back to political relevance.

Anti-tax fervor undermines the common good, Neal Peirce, Syndicated columnist, Seattle Times | WA

  • Facing yawning deficits, many years of tough sacrifice and reckoning lie ahead of us. But to use that as an excuse to eviscerate government functions left and right, or push down taxes just when government needs them to remain solvent, represents a strange kind of patriotism.
  • The Myths of Austerity
  • Hey Tea Party-Republicans: The Founders Are Not Your Guy

2010 Elections: Why Have the Democrats Lost Popular Support?, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun.org<http://www.tikkun.org/>

  • What the Democrats Could Have Done
  • Scaring Us To The Polls

Greg Palast | My Big Fat Greek Minister

Greece is a crime scene. And its working people are not the perpetrators of the crime, they are the victims - scammed, defrauded, their national industries looted and their treasury drained by financial flim-flam.

Greg Palast, Vice Magazine

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Greek minister Theodoros Pangalos

Monday, May 20, 2013 | It wasn't too difficult picking out the Fat Bastard in the crowd of Russian models, craven moochers and media mavens. Besides, Fat Bastard and I were both desperate for coffee and heading for the same empty urn.

(We'd both signed on for Kazakhstan's annual Eurasia Media Forum, a kind of Burning Man festival for Eastern oilgarchs and their media camp followers.)

Full story…

Guatemala's Ríos Montt Genocide Conviction

  • Omen For US Presidents And Their Hired Assassins
  • US Guilty of Genocide in Guatemala Should be Real Headline

 

Jay Janson, Countercurrents.org

 

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com 18

 

May, 2013 | Presiding Judge, "he knew about everything that was going on and he did not stop it, despite having the power to stop it from being carried out."  US President Ronald Reagan also had the power, greater power, to stop the massacres being perpetrated by dictator General and President Ríos Montt.   Instead visited him in Guatemala City and praised Rios Montt as “a man of great personal integrity and commitment. Who was more guilty?

 

José Efraín Ríos Montt began the his political and military career as a young officer taking part in the bloody successful CIA-organized coup against the first democratically elected president in Guatemalan history that was ordered by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954. Two years earlier he had attended what peace activists call, the 'US School for Assassins,' namely, the long infamous School of the Americas.  He ended his career a few days ago, convicted of genocide by the Guatemalan court he once controlled as president and dictator. 

 

Full story…

 

Related:

 

US Guilty of Genocide in Guatemala Should be Real Headline, Ajamu Baraka, Black Agenda Report

  • Now that former Guatemalan president Efrain Rios Montt has been convicted of genocide, it’s time for the “hegemonic puppeteer,” the United States, to be put on trial
  • “If Efrain Rios Montt, and by extension the Guatemalan military, are guilty of the crime of genocide, the U.S. government and its officials are just as guilty.”
  • Federal Judge Orders Release Of Names Of SOA/ WHINSEC Graduates
 

MD Gov. Deval Patrick | Gay Marriage and the Right to Be Ordinary

 

"Nine years ago Friday, same-sex marriages started happening in Massachusetts, and the time since then has proved wonderfully unremarkable. The sky has not fallen. The earth has not opened to swallow us up." 

 

Gov. Deval Patrick, Washington (DC) Post

 

This article is made possible with the generous contributions of all reader supported Evergreene Digest readers like you. Thank you!

 

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signing H.3810, 'An Act Relative To Gender Identity,' in the Senate Reading Room at the State House on Thursday. (photo: Eric Haynes/Governor's Office)

May 16, 2013 | I had an uncle whose second or third wife nobody in my family liked. I don’t really know why, and I didn’t have an opinion of my own. Yet no one uttered a contrary word in their presence. We may have been poor folk on the South Side of Chicago, but we had a Victorian sense of decorum. It was generally understood both that my family disapproved and that my uncle and aunt’s marriage was nobody’s business but their own.

 

When I was 10, around the same time I was coming to understand my family’s attitude toward my uncle’s marriage, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional to prohibit blacks and whites from marrying. Now, that seems like another world ago. Interracial marriages are common today. Loving v. Virginia marked a seismic cultural shift. Yet what applied to my uncle’s marriage made sense here, too. Some things are private matters, nobody else’s business.

 

Full story…

The IRS Was Dead Right To Scrutinize Tea Party

  • This scandal does not stem from the IRS actually levying action that contravenes the law. It's simply about whom the IRS decided to scrutinize. And the IRS had abundant reason to look carefully at the applications for tax exempt status sent in by people who are prone to portray taxes as something as base as slavery.
  • Obama Did It for the Money

Peter S. Goodman, Huffington Post

 

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Walt Handelsman 

 

05/15/2013 | Lost in the latest political scandal is a simple fact: The Internal Revenue Service was acting in the public interest when it opted to train its auditing power on the Tea Party and affiliated groups.

 

In castigating government as the root of all evil while portraying taxation as a form of tyranny, the Tea Party is no less than a mass celebration of the evasion of the basic responsibilities of American citizenship. Common sense alone tells you that people drawn to its ranks may feel extra temptation to find ways to limit what they surrender to the rogue federal bureaucrats who have supposedly seized the nation.

 

Full story…

 

Related:

 

Obama Did It for the Money, Robert Scheer, Truthdig

  • The president has chosen to fill two key Cabinet positions dealing with business practices with people who specialized in financial rip-offs.
  • Robert Scheer on Penny Pritzker
  •  

 

Obama’s forgotten agenda

  • He talked about urgent action on minimum wage and climate at the start of this term. A few months later: Nada
  • Obama Did It for the Money

Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon

Barack Obama gives his State of the Union address, Tuesday Feb. 12, 2013. (Credit: AP/Charles Dharapak)

Wednesday, April 10, 2013 | Two months ago this week, an emboldened President Obama laid out an ambitious agenda for a second term in his State of the Union address. Congress and the media have been consumed by important debates over a small array of those issues like gun control, immigration reform and the budget (which he’ll unveil today). But other items critical to the progressive agenda of his second term — especially raising the minimum wage and addressing climate change — have largely fallen out of view.

And while it’s still just a few months in, a look at these important but overshadowed goals, as he outlines his budget, does not suggest much progress — or urgency.

Full story…

 

Related:

Obama Did It for the Money, Robert Scheer, Truthdig

  • The president has chosen to fill two key Cabinet positions dealing with business practices with people who specialized in financial rip-offs.
  • Robert Scheer on Penny Pritzker

 

 

Obama Did It for the Money

  • The president has chosen to fill two key Cabinet positions dealing with business practices with people who specialized in financial rip-offs.
  • Robert Scheer on Penny Pritzker

Robert Scheer, Truthdig

If you like reading this article, consider contributing a cafe latte to all-reader supported Evergreene Digest--using the donation button in the above right-hand corner—so we can bring you more just like it.

 

President Obama looks to longtime fundraiser Penny Pritzker after announcing her nomination to run the Commerce Department and that of economic adviser Michael Froman, left, as the next U.S. Trade Representative. AP/Carolyn Kaster

May 7, 2013 | The love fest between Barack Obama and his top fundraiser Penny Pritzker that has led to her being nominated as Commerce secretary would not be so unseemly if they both just confessed that they did it for the money. Her money, not his, financed his rise to the White House from less promising days back in Chicago.

“Without Penny Pritzker, it is unlikely that Barack Obama ever would have been elected to the United States Senate or the presidency,” according to a gushing New York Times report last year that read like the soaring jacket copy of a steamy romance novel. “When she first backed him during his 2004 Senate run, she was No. 152 on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans. He was a long-shot candidate who needed her support and imprimatur. Mr. Obama and Ms. Pritzker grew close, sometimes spending weekends with their families at her summer home.”

Full story…

Former FBI Agent Confirms the Surveillance State Is Real

  • A former FBI counterterrorism agent acknowledged this week on CNN that every telephone conversation that takes place on American soil “is being captured as we speak.”
  • Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?

TruthDig

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Lydia Howell

This article is made possible with the generous contributions of all reader supported Evergreene Digest readers like you. Thank you!

May 4, 2013 | Tim Clemente’s spontaneous admission was made on the CNN show “Erin Burnett OutFront” on Wednesday in a discussion about phone calls between Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his 24-year-old wife, Katherine Russell. Those conversations have become a focus of the government’s investigation into the attack. The revelation came when Burnett asked whether investigators could gain access to the calls in the event Russell refuses to talk about them.

Here is the exchange between Clemente and Burnett:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."

Full story...

Related:

Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?, Glenn Greenwald, Guardian (UK)

A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims on CNN that this is the case.

 

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