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POPSPatriot Act Used in Non-Terrorism Cases Yes, you don't have to be a suspected terrorist for the US government to sneak into your home and search your premises without serving you a search warrant. Let's call it by its real name: a police state tactic.
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POPSTed Kennedy is Dead He lived too long to receive the mythologizing that his older brothers received and, so, strode among us more like a man than a demigod. Of course, the mythologizing of Jack and Bobby placed them at level Ted Kennedy would never achieve. His lot was to stay behind and watch over the Kennedy clan and do the hard work in the Senate over decades, work that has wrought justice and help for millions of Americans. He has always been my favorite of the three and I have often wished that he could have been President. I think he would have made a good and principled president. I'm sorry that he's gone. I'll miss his fire and compassion and fearlessness in promoting a righteous cause. Many are the better because Ted Kennedy lived.
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POPSLeon Panetta Should Be Fired If CIA Director Leon Panetta cannot accept that it's a proper role of the Department of Justice to investigate and, if necessary, prosecute anyone in the CIA for possibly breaking federal laws against torture, then he should be removed from his job. He should be fired. His primary duty is NOT to give cover to potential criminals within the CIA but to help in upholding the law.
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POPSAnonymous Blogger Unmasked by Court Anonymous blogging is supposed to give the blogger a level of protection that the self-identified blogger lacks: freedom from the repercussions that come from self disclosure. But the veil of protection has just been pierced by a court. The court ordered Google to give up the IP address to the plaintiff of the blogger who used words like "skanky," "ho", and "whoring" beneath the photographs of the plaintiff (a model). Be careful my anonymous blogger friends.
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POPSUnion Jobs Provide More Vacation Time Leave it to the marketplace and workers would get very little, if any, vacation time. In the USA there are no federal laws requiring paid vacation time, a position the USA alone occupies among industrialized nations. Union representation, however, makes a difference. But the paid vacation act, pending in Congress, hopes to address the larger problem of mostly non-unionized workplaces. It's hardly adequate. It requires firms with 100 employees or more to provide only a week of paid vacation. But it is a start and it deserves our support.
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POPSObama Abandons Public Option
Many progressives had hoped for a single-payer, universal health care system, the kind that many industrialized countries have and which have a demonstrable history of working well. But it was clear that when Obama ran for president that possibility would never materialize during his administration. The "public option" was the best one could hope for. Now Obama is ready to abandon that idea in favor of co-ops, a sort of Fanny-Med approach to public health care. Because these co-ops will be required to maintain the same financial reserves as private insurerers, the competitive adavantage they will provide to private insurers will probably little better than marginal. The upshot will be the continuation of millions of Americans without health insurance of any kind. Continued bankruptcies, the continuation of people dying from the lack of health care, etc. A slight improvement perhaps, but everything remaining much the same. The political need for Obama to declare victo
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POPSLying Works Well, the end of life counseling, which would have allowed Medicare to "pay to pay doctors who counsel patients about planning for end-of-life decisions," has now been removed from the Senate health care bill. The lies about the "death panels" worked.
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POPSAnd Some Think Nothing Scary is Going On When you hear people suggest that frightening speech isn't going on in the USA right now, think again. Just remember: it's a characteristic of ideological apologists of any persuasion to mitigate the extremism of their comrades, especially when that extremism represents a valid, if distant, conclusion of their ideology. Keep that in mind and all the special pleading of the ideological apologists won't seem confusing.
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POPSQuitter Sarah Palin Reaches New Low Below are the words of quitter Sarah Palin about health care reform. She suggests that under an Obama plan, her child and elderly parents might have to go before a "death panel" to see if they should live or die. All she needs to do now is assault someone at a public meeting to fully join the right-wing goons whose fear-mongering mentality she shares.
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POPSGoon Threatens Democratic Congressperson A right-wing goon has threatened Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) over health-care reform. As a consequence, the Congressperson has decided to hold no town hall meetings. The goons are succeeding in showing their contempt for democracy. I love the way they are exposing themselves.
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POPSAPA Repudiates Gay-to-Straight Therapy The American Psychological Association might be breaking new ground and this is a welcome development, but, still, questions should be raised about what took them so long. Obviously, a latent social conservatism held back the association from conclusions long considered obvious by other thinking people.
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POPSCNN Refuses to Run Ad Critical of Health Care Industry It would be easy to accuse CNN of cowardice, but it's probably more likely that some other concern is operating here. Try this for example: CNN doesn't want to send the message to advertisers that their companies and CEOs could be the subject of critical ads aired on CNN. By protecting one company and CEO, CNN sends a message of reassurance to many of them. In my view, it's about nearly all their advertising dollars.
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POPSMore Red-Baiting of Obama: The "Socialist" Joker Here we have yet another demonstration of lablelling substituting itself for critical thought. Obama gets red-baited once more. It's a pity that Tyler Nixon at Delaware Libertarian isn't an artist because if he were he could do an image of Obama as a fascist, something he labeled the President in a recent post: http://tinyurl.com/nq7bjn Thoughtful criticism must be difficult for these people.
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POPSQuotation of the Day Of course, Jonathan Alter is sarcastically quoting the woman. But her words capture the irony in a large body of ignorance about a public health care system.
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POPSIs the GOP Rank & File Daft? Basically, 58% of the GOP either think that President Obama was not born in the USA or are unsure about his place of birth. That is nuttiness on a massive scale.
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POPSHousing Sales Up for the First Time in 3 Years Alas, more bad news for conservative Republicans and Libertarians. It seems that those Obama administration financial incentives for home purchases have increased housing sales for the first time in three years. Funny how those government investments in the economy that aren't supposed to stimulate the economy actually do.
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POPSCheney Wanted to Use Military to Arrest Terror Suspects in the US Republican Party superstar Dick Cheney, while acting as Vice President, actually wanted President Bush to order troops to arrest terror suspects in 2002 in Buffalo, NY. This is a clear violation of the constitution, although Cheney and his attorney David Addington argued that the President could ignore the constitution using his war powers authority. Remarkably, Bush showed sounder judgment at the time and nixed the idea. In the end, the FBI had no problem effecting the arrest. Yet another strange tale from the Bush administration.
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POPSCNN Crackpot Lou Dobbs Continues to Raise Questions about Obama's Birth Certificate Even though his own network (through a substitute host on his own show) thoroughly debunked the birther nonsense, CNN crackpot Lou Dobbs continues to raise questions about Obama's birth certificate. Why CNN continues to employ this crank and passes him off as a responsible journalist escapes all reason. My guess is that he has good ratings and CNN is only concerned about its profits and not its journalistic integrity.
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POPSTea Party Activist Uses Racist Picture of Obama Experience some of the tea party activists up close and personal as I have done and you won't be the least bit surprised that one prominent member of their "movement" fowarded this racist picture of President Obama. It was supposed to be "funny stuff." But pressed on what was funny about an image that plays on racist stereotypes about Africans, McKalip declined to say, instead offering to talk about why he opposes Obama's health-care proposals. "I have a busy day," he said eventually, before ending the call.
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POPSIn the US You Can Be Fired for Who You Marry I think that one of the greatest injustices in the USA is the tenuous nature of employment. In some states you can be fired without any cause whatsoever. Here is a story of man who is fired from his job simply because of who he married even though by all accounts he did a good job. Something completely outside of his employment became the cause for firing him. How is that just? How is that acceptable? Why aren't there laws that protect people from such capricious terminations?
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