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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The True Story of the Bilderberg Group

Since the dawn of mankind, or at least the turn of the last century, conspiracy theories have always existed. From the Kennedy assassinations to rumors of an underground network of brainwashed sex slaves, such rumors have always benefited from the supposed secrecy of the shadowy organizations they addressed, whether they be the Freemasons or the Central Intelligence Agency. These groups are said to run the world, and in some cases they’ve come close to doing just that, but the truth is hardly that simple. Nor do their tentacles extend as far as some conspiracy theorists- and even the groups’ leaders themselves- would hope. Yet that is exactly what Daniel Estulin claims in his new book The True Story of the Bilderberg Group. It is an alarming tale of greed, paranoia, and power run amok, and yet, in many ways the book suffers from the same affliction as its subjects.

The story opens in 1996 Toronto. Daniel, a veteran and seasoned reporter of the Bilderberg scene, rendezvous with a source in a mall. The encounter is classic cloak and dagger espionage. Estulin makes eye contact with the asset; they walk towards a secure location and exchange words.

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[Source: War On You