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Legend says curses come in threes. Let's pray that doesn't happen with the unholy trinity of the Corporate Climate Bill.

It demands drilling for oil, digging for coal and big money for new nukes. How such a devil's brew could help save the Earth conjures a corporate cynicism beyond the scope of the human mind and soul.

It all now bears a special curse. It was meant for Earth Day. Then it slipped to the April 26 Chernobyl anniversary. But co-sponsor Lindsay Graham (R-SC) pitched a fit over immigration and pulled his support.

As did Earth herself. Just prior, more than two dozen hill country miners were killed in a veritable Three Mile Island of black carbon. This entirely avoidable accident was built on years of sloppy denial by King Coal and the tacit assent of pliant regulators. With mountains of offal being pitched into rivers and streams, and underground hell holes filled with gas and soot, coal has been slaughtering people and eco-systems here for more than a century. Now, as at TMI, the death has become visible.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Two Thai faces appear behind the sharpened bamboo poles and hundreds of car tires which form lengthy menacing barricades, now stinking of urine, rotten food and other debris, along Bangkok's busy downtown streets.

The face of British-born and Oxford-educated Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, hated by the thousands of Red Shirts behind the barricades, is plastered all over their occupied zone.

His eyes are cut out, or reddened along with his mouth to make him appear ghoulish, on handbill-sized posters which place him above photographs of three corpses.

A bullet hole punctures the center of one man's forehead. Another dead man is wrapped in Thailand's red-white-and-blue national flag on a gurney. A third man lays in the street with a chunk of his bloodied head missing.

They were among the 25 people killed, and 900 injured, when Abhisit and the military failed to crush the Red Shirts on April 10.

The other face behind the nine-foot (three-meter) tall barricades is of the authoritarian Thaksin Shinawatra, who won three elections before being toppled in a 2006 military coup.

The panic has set in at the Big D in the state capitol. The staid daily monopoly, also known as the Columbus Dispatch, published an op-ed by senior editor Joe Hallett confirming what the Free Press previously reported – Tea Party activists will take over the Buckeye State’s Republican Party.

By Hallett’s estimate, the 66-member Republican state central committee has 54 Tea Party activists running in Tuesday’s primary. How many are expected to win? A high-level Republican official told the Free Press that he thinks 50 of the 66 seats may go to the Tea Party. However, the official cautioned that he’s not as sure as the Free Press or the Dispatch that the Tea Party activists are “far right.” He claims most are “fiscal conservatives.”

Hallett doesn’t see it that way. He writes that if the Tea Party takes over the Ohio Republican Party central committee, “…the Ohio GOP will die.” Where does Hallett see the Tea Party heading? That direction, indeed, is "right, far right."

War makers, torturers, warrantless spyers, and all sorts of other categories of criminals are still off the hook. But there is a bit of "looking backward" going on. Two out of the three people whom we at StopTheChamber.com have asked for criminal investigations of are now under investigation. We're wondering about the third, the big one, the one that ties the other two and so much more together.

On April 12th, we asked for criminal charges against Massey Energy's Don Blankenship for the homicide of mine workers. We set up Facebook and Twitter campaigns in support. On the 15th, we sent a formal request to the attorney general for a special prosecutor. On the 26th we posted a video of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., calling for the prosecution of Blankenship. Kennedy said that “Massey Energy is a criminal enterprise” that "cannot do business without breaking the law." He said that Don Blankenship should be "in jail."

Massey is now facing a criminal investigation for the mine blasts, and possible bribery.

On February 1, 1960, four black students took seats at a lunch counter at the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s. The white waitresses ignored them. They remained in their seats. Supervisors told them to leave. Woolworth’s in North Carolina didn’t serve colored people. The students refused to move and demanded service.

In the early Spring of 1960, I went with two other students from Madison, Wisconsin, to Montgomery, Alabama, to try to build a civil rights support network. We met with Reverend Ralph Abernathy in Montgomery and established links with his church; then to Birmingham and Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth.

As we descended the steps of his church an Alabama state policeman met us and told us to drive to the Mississippi border without stopping. He followed us, red light on top of his car blinking. As we entered Mississippi, a highway patrol car met us. That cop delivered similar orders and followed us to the Tennessee border. The white power felt uneasy.

As a leftist, I already came from a political analysis that was anti-prison, and thought that I had a fairly good idea of what being in jail would be like. I certainly knew it wasn't going to fun when I volunteered to get arrested with the Sodexo workers in an attempt to shame Sodexo- so as to allow its workers to form a union. The Ohio State University hires its food service workers through Sodexo, an international company, which has been paying many of its worker's just barely over minimum wage, not gauranteeing them hours, and offering no health care or benefits. Many of these same workers are expected to raise a family on these wages. To the rational person, it is insane and quite frankly, impossible. The way that our society has shaped class politics in this country (and all over the world) has always disgusted me, and a few hours in jail seemed like a small sacrifice if it meant holding a multi-million dollar company accountable for not paying or treating its worker's fairly. Despite how much Angela Davis I've read, however, I was not prepared for emotional turmoil that jail is when one is a prisoner.

As the founder of an animal rights organization you would think that nothing would surprise me, but last year a disgusting cruelty was brought to my attention called “Crush Videos.” Crush videos are one of the sickest atrocities to happen to animals and its all for human pleasure. The description of these videos is sure to shock anyone with a drop of humanity or even half of a heart. A woman is heard talking like a dominatrix to a tiny kitten, puppy, hamster, rat, guinea pig, bird or even a monkey and rather than whipping, chaining, burning, and hurting a man, she burns the animals with cigarettes, near drowns them, lights them on fire, drives nails through their tiny bodies and then places them on the floor.

While the twisted minds that are watching are about to hit their sexual peak, the woman crushes the animal with her stiletto high heel and in some cases her bare feet. This fetish should not only be deeply disturbing to animal rights activist, but to you as well. Your next door neighbor could be enjoying these twisted videos or even making them and then giving you and your children a friendly, “Hello”.

FOREST PROTECTION ACTION ALERT! Please contact US Senator John Kerry, immediately, and ask him to remove wood burning biomass from being included as “clean and renewable” energy and eligible for public subsidies and preferential treatment in his climate and energy bill. These perverse incentives would lead to large-scale cutting of forests for tiny amounts of energy and would greatly increase carbon dioxide emissions and pollution. The current forest protections in the climate bill are very limited and weak and will not protect forests in Ohio or nationwide.

Tell Senator Kerry that burning forests is not “green” energy. It emits more CO2 even than coal, pollutes as much or more than fossil fuels and will devastate forest ecosystems. Specifically, wood burning biomass should not be eligible for our taxpayer “clean” energy subsidies or any other preferential legislation or benefits.

With all the current hype about the "threat" from Iran, it is time to review the record--and especially the significant bits and pieces that find neither ink nor air in our Israel-friendly, Fawning Corporate Media (FCM).

First, on the chance you missed it, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said publicly that Iran "doesn't directly threaten the United States." Her momentary lapse came while answering a question at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar, on Feb. 14.

Fortunately for her, most of her FCM fellow travelers must have been either jet-lagged or sunning themselves poolside when she made her unusual admission. And those who were present did Clinton the favor of disappearing her gaffe and ignoring its significance. (All one happy traveling family, you know.)

But she said it. It's on the State Department Web site. Those who had been poolside could have read the text after showering. They might have recognized a real story there. Granted, the substance was so off-message that it would probably not have been welcomed by editors back home.

Chris “the Anarchist” Ryan, a long time Central Ohio resident, was sentenced today, Monday April 26, 2010 in Nebraska by Judge Mary C. Gilbride, of the District Court of Nebraska. Chris the Anarchist was sentenced to one to one and a half years in prison. Chris pleaded guilty to felony charges of transporting 154 pounds of marijuana through Nebraska, one of the 36 States that has not yet legalized medical marijuana. Fourteen States have enacted laws legalizing medical marijuana: Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Hawaii, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.
Medical Marijuana

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