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POPSWrong Woman; Wrong Message Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, "I still can't answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?" When asked about Iraq, she said, "I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq."
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POPS"World needs a vacation from USA" He called for immediate technology transfer from the West to the Third World, to allow development based on clean technology — stressing the need to “reject intellectual property rights”. funds should not be distributed through the World Bank, which was trying to regain legitimacy by portraying itself as a “climate bank” while continuing to push fossil-fuel-driven development. Confronting global poverty and climate change means confronting US power. “I don’t think the world needs US leadership”, he said. “They should be more humble.” Whether the US achieves its goals “is where we, as civil society come in”, Bello said, suggesting that, by making intervention costly for the US, civil society could encourage a “new US isolationism”. The struggle is, he stressed, global. “The world needs a vacation from the messaianism of the US … A few decades of a self-absorbed US would be very good for the world.”
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POPS World Animal Day 2009 World Animal Day started in Florence, Italy in 1931 at a convention of ecologists. On this day, animal life in all its forms is celebrated, and special events are planned on locations all over the globe. 4 October was originally chosen for World Animal Day because it is the feast day of Francis of Assisi, a nature lover and patron saint of animals and the environment. Numerous churches throughout the world observe the Sunday closest to 4 October with a Blessing for the Animals.
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POPSCensorship in American Universities: Harvard But is it anti-Semitic to ask why the Palestinians should pay the price for the ghastly crime of the Germans? Why were the property rights of the German perpetrators sacrosanct and those of the guiltless Palestinians adjudged an acceptable casualty? In U.S. foreign policy, not all racial groups are guaranteed the same rights and protections. Otherwise, why does the U.S. rightly defend Jewish people’s claims on EU bank accounts, property, and compensation for labour expropriated during the 1930s and 1940s, while quashing the rights of millions of Palestinians refugees to lands, houses, and goods stolen as a condition of Israel’s founding in the late 1940s? As a nation we seem unconscious of the hypocrisy. The convention that persecuted Europeans had the right to safe havens on lands stolen from non-EU was, by the mid-20th century, as outmoded as the Confederacy’s defence of slavery in the mid-19th. ...Harvard Crimson
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POPSSarah Palin: More Earmark Hypocrisy The earmarks that Palin apparently will accept could also be ridiculed in a McCain-ish fashion. They include $475,000 to construct a "heritage center" in the Chilkat Indian Village; $150,000 to support private industry participation in two international fishery groups; $200,000 for investigating and prosecuting bootlegging; $200,000 for researching the king crab; and $855,000 for building fairgrounds. The Alaska earmarks also include $1.2 million for construction work on an airport on Akutan, a tiny island that relies on seaplane for contact with the Alaskan mainland. (The Coast Guard handles medical emergencies.) The island has roughly 800 residents. Could this be dubbed the Airport to Nowhere?
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POPS"Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus" NEWSWEEK has also learned that Palin's shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain's top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy. One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. But instead, the vice presidential nominee began buying for herself and her family -- clothes and accessories from top stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards.
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POPSAre You Washed In The Blood? "A campaign had emerged to promote the idea that the Bible was entirely without error, even in matters of history and science. Some feared that more liberal theological positions were being taught in the convention's seminaries. n August, he visited the White House. In "Our Endangered Values," Carter recalls Smith saying, at the close of their meeting, "We are praying, Mr. President, that you will abandon secular humanism as your religion." HMMMMM . . . where have I heard that before? I thinky maybe here on CM, yes I do. I think I have had that charge leveled on me that I MUST be a secular humanist. God FORBID that I promote peace, I MUST be a pacifist -(even though Jesus was the ultimate pacifist). God FORBID I must be a voice against violence, homophobia, patriarchy, sexism, and racism. I MUST be secular. God wouldn't want those values; the only values God wants are crotch based.
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POPSWhy The Media Should Apologize To Sarah She gave a really good speech. And why go beyond that? As we all know, speeches cannot be written by others and rehearsed for days. They are true windows to the soul. Unless they are delivered by Barack Obama, that is. In which case, as Palin said Wednesday, speeches are just a “cloud of rhetoric.”
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POPSConfessions of an Economic Hit Man Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign "aid" organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.
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POPSWhy Jimmy Carter left the Southern Baptist Convention Subservience of women to men is a false argument, dependent upon selection of certain verses of the Bible and the exclusion of many others. Suppressing female leadership is a cultural decision of male leaders, not an accurate reading of Scripture.
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POPSF*** Politics! Why the f*** did I clip this? I like the word friggin' much better. .:) Anyway! I saw someone wearing a t-shirt that said "F*** the President" and wondered if it was legal? (With letters and not asterisks though.) The f-word does seem to be becoming more and more acceptable as common language nowadays. Do I like it? Naaa, I guess I must be friggin' old-fashioned, but I loved the t-shirt though. *LOL* In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the mere public display of fuck is protected under the First and Fourteenth Amendments and cannot be made a criminal offense.
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POPSThe Man Behind the Anti-Obama Hate Fest He prepared to run as a Democrat for Congress in Connecticut, where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew power.” He ran as a Republican for the Florida State Senate and the United States Senate in Illinois. When running for president in 1999, he aired a television advertisement in New Hampshire that accused George W. Bush of using cocaine. A motion he filed in a 1983 bankruptcy case called the judge “a crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.”
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POPSHow Barack Knocked the Satire Out of Me Man, that son-of-a-gun can give a speech. I can hardly wait for the inaugural. BTW, or perhaps not btw, it was a speech that got him here in the first place: at the Democratic convention in 2004. I remember watching him, riveted (I was a speechwriter myself, in the Coolidge administration), thinking, “Wow. Where did this guy come from?” I wrote in the New York Times (I know, I know: the height of vanity, quoting yourself): “Barack Obama is the Tiger Woods of American politics.” Ahem. You read it there first.
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POPS100+ countries adopt cluster bomb ban in Dublin This despite the absence of the United States, China, Russia, Israel, India and Pakistan -- all major cluster bomb stockpilers and producers. Supporters said they hoped the treaty would pressure them to change track or shame them into not using cluster bombs. "We all know that there are important states not present, but I am convinced that we will have succeeded in stigmatising any future use of cluster munitions," Irish Foreign Minister Micheal Martin said.
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POPSPre-RNC raids: so who hates freedom now? Doesn't look like any evidence has been uncovered thus far of intent to commit anything beyond non-violent protests. Kind of an unnerving story if you ask me, but, hey, it's a post-9/11 world, and the cops are just trying to keep us all safe, right? (It's funny, when I was a kid growing up in the eighties, there used to be after-school specials about how this kind of thing happened in apartheid South Africa.)
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POPSUN torture officer: US must prosecute Bush, Rumsfeld "the United States has a clear obligation” to bring proceedings against Bush and Rumsfeld. He noted Washington had ratified the UN convention on torture which required “all means, particularly penal law” to be used to bring proceedings against those violating it."
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