A Tale of Two Bailouts: Wall Street vs. Detroit

The Rachel Maddow Show: Rachel's take on why there appears to be two different standards of bailouts. White collar vs. blue collar, those who take a shower before work and those who take one after:

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Coolest Company In The World

This week, Better Place cut a $1bn dollar deal to bring electric car charging stations to the San Francisco area. Better Place is without question, the most ambitious startup to ever come out of Israel and perhaps the company that has the best chance of restructuring the automobile industry in the next 5 years.Better Place will replace fossil fuel burning cars with electricity consuming cars using a series of battery swapping stations around a given metropolitan area. Nissan is the first company to build the cars. Israel became the first country to commit to building the infrastructure and now Denmark and San Francisco are joining them.

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Refuse to Tolerate Torture - New report details shattered lives of released Guantanamo detainees

Refuse to Tolerate Torture By Linda Rigas November 18, 2008 Excerpts from Scott Horton's Justice After Bush: Prosecuting An Outlaw Administration in Harper's Magazine. This administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself. It transformed the Justice Department into a vehicle for voter suppression, and it also summarily dismissed the U.S. attorneys who attempted to investigate its wrongdoing. It issued wartime contracts to substandard vendors with inside connections, and it also defunded efforts to police their performance. It spied on church groups and political protestors, and it also introduced a sweeping surveillance program that was so clearly illegal that virtually the entire senior echelon of the Justice Department threatened to (but did not in fact) tender their resignations over it. It waged an illegal and disastrous war, and it did so by falsely representing to Congress and to the American public nearly every piece of intelligence it had on Iraq. And through it all, as if to underscore its contempt for any authority but its own, the administration issued more than a hundred carefully crafted "signing statements" that raised pervasive doubt about whether the president would even accede to bills that he himself had signed into law.New report details shattered lives of released Guantanamo detaineesFrom UC Berkeley Human Rights Center and International Human Rights Law Clinic | 12 November 2008 Press conference video from C-SPAN WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Detainees released from U.S. detention in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Afghanistan live shattered lives as a result of U.S. policies in the war on terror, according to a new report by human rights experts at the University of California, Berkeley. (Read full article.)

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Chief Judge Gets Away With Obama Donations

Utah"s chief federal judge won"t be disciplined for violating the Judicial Code of Conduct by making several contributions to Barack Obama"s presidential campaign.

Although Judge Tena Campbell violated Canon 7 of the Code of Conduct for United States judges, she will face no consequences for her unruly behavior. Judge Campbell, a Bill Clinton appointee, gave multiple donations of $100 and $200 to Obama"s campaign in mid 2007.

The Judicial Code specifically prohibits federal judges from making contributions to political organizations or candidates as well as demonstrative political activity. When a Utah newspaper broke the story in late October, Judge Campbell said she thought she was prohibited only from taking public action supporting a candidate and not from making donations.

Federal Election Commission disclosures of her Obama contributions list Judge Campbell"s profession as a lawyer and her employer the government. When the donations were made public by the media, the Obama campaign returned the money and the Tenth Circuit Judicial Council, which hears complaints against the region"s federal judges, launched an investigation.

In his decision not to take disciplinary action, Chief Judge Robert Henry acknowledges that Judge Campbell"s political donations were unethical but, at the time, she believed they were permissible. He further writes in the three-page ruling that Judge Campbell has agreed not to make similar contributions in the future and that she took Sappropriate voluntary corrective action that acknowledges and remedies the complaint.

The chief judge for the Tenth Judicial Circuit evidently bought an argument that many Americans may find tough to swallow; that a state"s top federal jurist, who spent years as a county and federal prosecutor before getting her lifetime bench appointment, truly didn"t know the rules that govern her prestigious job.

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Mining: The sun sets on BHP's bid

An audacious attempt by BHP Billiton to get control of Rio Tinto has fallen apart

BHP BILLITON’S boss, Marius Kloppers, wasted no time leaping into action when he took charge a little over a year ago. In November 2007, barely a month into his tenure as chief executive of the Anglo-Australian mining giant, he began making unwanted advances to Rio Tinto, a vast rival, in the form of a proposed all-share bid that was valued at some $140 billion. After a year of politely but firmly reiterating the merits of the huge deal and several months into painstaking antitrust investigations by the European Union, however, his company has sprung another surprise, deciding to drop its bid, now valued at $66 billion.

The giant mining company admits that the crippling credit crisis and a deteriorating world economy mean that now is not the right time to pursue one of the world’s biggest takeovers. So a year of effort and $450m of shareholders’ cash, the cost of dropping the chase of Rio, have yielded nothing. The decision to quit may pain the ambitious Mr Kloppers, but the reasons for doing so had been mounting steadily. ...

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Douglas Rushkoff Interview

An interview with media expert Douglas Rushkoff: Boucher: In addition to improving our intellectual understanding of media, could you outline some simple techniques or activities which we can put into practice in our lives based on the insights we derive from the process of de-constructing mass media? Rushkoff: There are simple things you can do to keep the media from having quite as strong an impact on you without your consent. You can observe how you feel when watching TV, and try to see what kinds of images or situations make you tense. And when you feel this anxiety, try to figure out why you feel this way, and who wants you to feel this way. And why?Or try to figure out who is paying for what you're watching. That's almost the easiest one. Who paid for this thing? Why do they want me to see this?It's also fun to try to pick out which segments on the news are fake. I mean, which are actually tapes sent in by public relations firms or even the government, disguised as news reports. (This isn't conspiracy theory; it's plain common fact.) Every night the news shows slip those in because they don't have the budget to fill out the whole show by themselves. But they're really just corporate or government propaganda.

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The British Occult Secret Service

It is not really surprising that historically occultism and espionage have often been strange bedfellows. The black art of espionage is about obtaining secret information and witches, psychics and astrologers have always claimed to be able to predict the future and know about things hidden from ordinary people.

Gathering intelligence is carried out under a cloak of secrecy and occultists are adept at keeping their activities concealed from sight. Like secret agents they also use codes, symbols and cryptograms to hide information from outsiders. Occultists and intelligence officers are similar in many ways, as both inhabit a shadowy underworld In 1570 Walsingham wasof secrets, deception and disinformation. It is therefore not unusual that often these two professions have shared the same members.

The ‘father of the British Secret Service’ was the Elizabethan lawyer, politician, diplomat and spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. He was a Protestant and as a young man during the bloody reign of the Catholic Queen Mary was forced to flee abroad to escape persecution. While in exile, Walsingham learnt Italian and French and became acquainted with the work of the famous Venetian Secret Service that used its spying skills for trade and commerce under the cloak of diplomacy.

U.S. Supreme Court Wont Hear Campaign Finance Case

On March 24, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, 07-953. This is the case brought by people who wanted to make and advertise a film that would be shown in theaters and would try to make a profit. Yet the subject of the film would be to attack Hillary Clinton. The group wanted to be free of campaign finance reporting requirements.

Technically, the Court ruled that it doesn’t have jurisdiction to hear this case, because of procedural problems. This is slightly different than merely choosing not to hear the case.