I Googled "Evil" and it took me to Google

Google may have been, unil now, the Obama of hip internet monopolies. No matter how many nations the President bombs, people still put Obama peace-sign stickers on their cars. No matter how many radical rightwing initiatives Google funds, people still think it's a "progressive corporation" -- How could it not be? It's making progress!

Google is funding Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, the Federalist Society, the American Conservative Union, and the political arm of the Heritage Foundation.

And there's more really bad news: Google is funding ALEC, the powerful, secretive, and destructive lobbying force from which many companies concerned with their public images are fleeing. ALEC is in the news this week, holding its 40th annual meeting. Together with allies, RootsAction.org is applying as much pressure as we can. And it might just be that the tide is turning. Google just might have to start worrying about whether its users favor plutocratic plundering or not.

Return of the Golden Calf

’Tis the season to feel rage and heartache about the economy.

I feel hope as well, praise the Lord, thanks to Pope Francis and the alley behind my house, where nothing of value goes to waste.

I’m the kind of person who can’t throw anything away, but sometimes I have to anyway — an old microwave, a sewing machine that hasn’t been used in 20 years, a threadbare easy chair, tangled computer wires and other excruciating miscellany — and when I do, it’s usually gone within a day, if not an hour. When I can no longer find value in what I possess, others see it as a gift from the universe.

The alley economy flows though my Chicago neighborhood 24/7, a sort of gift economy that continually revitalizes one’s material possessions, in unnoticed defiance of the official, throwaway, money-profit-growth economy that has its claws around our world and is squeezing us to death. The alley economy is, in fact, part of a rudimentary social ecosystem, where forces collude for the common good and nothing is wasted.

Under the Global Shadow of Big Brother, Journalism Must Light Up the Political Sky

Every new revelation about the global reach of the National Security Agency underscores that the extremism of the surveillance state has reached gargantuan proportions. The Washington Post just reported that the NSA “is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world.” Documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden have forced top officials in Washington to admit the indefensible while defending it. One of the main obstacles to further expansion of their Orwellian empire is real journalism.

Real journalism is “subversive” of deception that can’t stand the light of day. This is a huge problem for the Obama administration and the many surveillance-state flunkies of both parties in Congress. What they want is fake journalism, deferring to government storylines and respectful of authority even when it is illegitimate.

Will Speaker John Boehner apologize for his latest lie?

This week, Boehner helped aggressively spread the story of a New York man unable to cover his toddler on his new family insurance plan through the Affordable Care Act.
Turns out that, despite coverage in the New York Post, the man's appearance on Fox, and Boehner's posts on his website and Twitter account, the man was simply mistaken—he'd typed the wrong number when listing his family members. "100% false," as a spokesman for New York's Department of Health said. "Of course, everyone is covered in the family policy."
This is just one of many mistaken, falsified, or debunked stories being spread since the rollout of the new health care exchanges. The difference this time? Boehner has yet to apologize, edit the post on his website, or even delete the tweet he posted. He's apparently standing by this story.

But it's one thing for the media to settle for bad journalism—it's another for the nation's most powerful lawmaker to go around perpetuating lies. Can you join other MoveOn members in publicly calling on Boehner to apologize?

Open our eyes

While catching up with one another over the challenges facing ordinary Afghans and Egyptians, Sherif Sameer and I talked about how ‘opening our eyes’ could go a long way to building a better world. We decided to co-write this piece, from Ismailia, Egypt and Kabul, Afghanistan.



Open Our Eyes in Egypt

The truth is there, clear and burning like a sun. We only need to open our eyes and take a look. ‘Our eyes’ means ‘our minds’. The mind is that big thing on top of our necks inside of our heads, and it has a function called ‘thinking’. Just last year, I was taken from my village in Egypt to spend some time in Spain, because I wrote a short story and won a prize. There, I noticed that I was walking around with a belief in the cleanliness and accuracy of everything. I was drinking tap water believing it was so pure and clean, eating food as if it was coming from heaven, even after I got diarrhoea and had to take medicine. I believed that the medicine will cure me like magic. I had faith in absolutes and that meant that my mind was dysfunctional.

And so the fracking cover up begins

A headline in the Saturday, November 30 Columbus Dispatch screamed: “Family’s well not tainted by driller.” The lead asserts that, “Natural gas that caught fire after it bubbled from a faucet in a Portage County house did not come from a nearby shale well, state officials have concluded.” The question is, can we trust these state officials?

The investigation conducted by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) needs to be closely examined. The ODNR is at best a “captured agency” which has been accused repeatedly of promoting the oil and gas industry and specifically fracking, the practice of horizontal drilling.

The freepress.org reported earlier this year that formal complaints were filed against ODNR employees for falsifying “production records on wells.” Reports were also made to the FBI that the ODNR was covering up 1200 gas wells that were on record without tax ID numbers in southern Ohio. By leaving out ID numbers, the wells’ ownership can often be hidden so public doesn’t know who is responsible for the pollution.

Mansfield Council votes in support of fracking waste ban in Ohio

City officials and citizens of Mansfield Ohio continue to move forward in protecting communities against the inundation of hydraulic fracturing waste disposal. In a unanimous vote, Mansfield City Council passed resolution 13-343 which strongly supports the passage of Ohio House Bill 148. HB 148 proposes prohibiting the disposal of brine by deep well injection and land application in the state of Ohio.

Ohio is targeted as a toxic dumping ground by the oil and gas industry and Ohio residents are seeing an increasing amount of waste flowing into their communities. As local municipalities fight to prevent the influx of toxic waste, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources continues to permit Class II injection wells and welcome millions of gallons of hazardous waste from inside and outside the state. In 2012 almost six hundred million gallons of toxic fracking waste was dumped on Ohio communities via injection and almost sixty percent of that came from out of state.

Thailand protesters demand appointed regime to replace "Bad Politicians"

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The authoritarian leader of an increasingly violent anti-government protest met Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra on Sunday (Dec. 1) and told her to resign so a dictatorial provisional regime could run Thailand and stop voters electing "bad politicians".

Hours earlier, the government advised Bangkok residents on Sunday (Dec. 1) to stay indoors overnight after three people died and police battled protesters, while mobs swarmed government ministries, TV stations and police headquarters, escalating their week-long clashes to topple the prime minister.

Protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban "told the prime minister that dissolution of parliament, and her resignation paving the way for new election, could not resolve the underlying deep-rooted problem because bad politicians" could return to power, Thai Public Broadcasting Service (ThaiPBS) reported.

"He said the problem could be resolved only when she returned the power to 'the people' to form the 'people's council' [which could] appoint a 'people's government' to rule the country," the report said.

Suthep announced his ultimatum in a live TV broadcast at 10 p.m.

The National-Security State’s Assassination of John F. Kennedy

For 50 years defenders of the Warren Report have claimed that JFK conspiracy theorists simply cannot accept that a little man killed a great man.

Really?

Let’s see now. John Lennon was a great man. Oh sure, he was monitored and spied on by the U.S. national-security state but that was only because national-security state officials were convinced that anyone who opposed what the national-security state was doing during the Cold War was a communist or communist sympathizer and part of the world-wide communist conspiracy to take over the United States, not to mention, of course, a grave threat to “national security.”

Yet, despite how the national-security state viewed Lennon, most everyone would agree, I think, that Lennon was great man and that his assassin, a man named Mark David Chapman, was a little man.

Yet, I don’t see a huge number of people saying that Lennon was the victim of the U.S. national-security state and that Chapman was nothing more than a “patsy” for the assassination. In fact, I don’t see many assassination researchers saying that about the assassination attempts against Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford.

Give thanks now, shop later

Thanksgiving Day — a day of family gatherings to give thanks for our many blessings — has evolved into a day of turkey and football, as the NFL’s Thanksgiving Day rivalries fill the TV. Now, it threatens to be taken over by a shopping spree. This year, Wal-Mart has announced it will open its stores at 6 p.m. on Thursday to begin its “Black Friday” sales. Macy’s, Target, Kmart and others are all moving up their opening times on Thursday. Suddenly, Thanksgiving dinner itself is at risk.

This lust for stuff is a stark contradiction to the origins of Thanksgiving. Days of thanksgiving were celebrated in England from the 1500s as part of the Protestant Reformation. This country traces a thanksgiving feast back most famously to 1621, when the Puritans in Plymouth Colony gave thanks for a bountiful harvest. In 1789, President George Washington issued the first national proclamation declaring a day of “thanksgiving and prayer.”

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