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POPSThe sleazy advocacy of a leading "liberal hawk" What Galbraith kept completely concealed all these years was that a company he formed in 2004 came to acquire a large stake in a Kurdish oil field whereby, as the NYT put it, he "stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars." In other words, he had a direct -- and vast -- financial stake in the very policies which he was publicly advocating in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and countless other American media outlets, where he was presented as an independent expert on the region. As Cobban wrote: Galbraith has never expressed any such regrets, and last November, he was openly scornful of Bush's late-term agreement to withdraw from Iraq completely. The revelation that for many years Galbraith had a quite undisclosed financial interest in the political breakup of Iraq may now further reduce the clout, and the ranks, of the remaining liberal hawks.
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POPSHow GeoCities Invented the Internet A garish collection of home pages paved the way for blogging, social networks, and the rest of Web 2.0. By Farhad ManjooPosted Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009, at 5:04 PM ET
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POPSFormer UK Ambassador: CIA Sent People to be ‘Raped with Broken Bottles’ Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan's natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline. "The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan," Murray noted. "There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you'll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It's what it's about. It's about money, it's about oil, it's not about democracy."
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POPSBeck says Net Neutrality would 'destroy the free market that created the Internet'. Oh really? 
The origins of the Internet reach back to the 1960s when the United States funded research projects of its military agencies to build robust, fault-tolerant and distributed computer networks. This research and a period of civilian funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science Foundation spawned worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies and led to the commercialization of an international network in the mid 1990s, and resulted in the following popularization of countless applications in virtually every aspect of modern human life. Meanwhile, Beck has yet to explain how regulations constraining the mega-corporations that provide our Internet infrastructure from deciding what content we can and can't access would actually take the system "out of the private hands of private business". Maybe Beck can explain to us why Comcast was attacking peer-to-peer file sharing on its network system.
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POPSMalalai Joya, Afghanistan Woman Speaks Out For expressing my views I have been expelled from my seat in parliament, and I have survived numerous assassination attempts. The fact that I was kicked out of office while brutal warlords enjoyed immunity from prosecution for their crimes should tell you all you need to know about the "democracy" backed by Nato troops. In the constitution it forbids those guilty of war crimes from running for high office. Yet Karzai has named two notorious warlords, Fahim and Khalili, as his running mates for the upcoming presidential election. Under the shadow of warlordism, corruption and occupation, this vote will have no legitimacy, and once again it seems the real choice will be made behind closed doors in the White House. As we say in Afghanistan, "the same donkey with a new saddle".
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POPSBarney Frank: Predatory Lender Why is Barney Frank still in charge of the Financial Services Committee? Last years FNMA, FHA (GSE) loans are this years foreclosures. How is that working out for taxpayers. And in addition, lets keep non-paying borrowers in homes for 2 - 3 years without paying. How much is that costing taxpayers. Maybe cheaper to give those borrowers a big Cash for Keys check rather than continue to have a non-paying asset and cost of continuous litigation for a barrage of new federal mandates and state legislation that fuels plaintiff attorneys.
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POPSACORN foresaw the foreclosure crisis in 2001
More: Moreover, Oakland's law would have gone much farther than requiring that borrowers could afford loans. In 2001, ACORN officials already recognized that the driving force behind the subprime lending was the ability of brokers to chop up risky mortgages, repackage them with good loans as "securities," and sell them to other banks on a largely unregulated market. When homeowners who couldn't afford their loans later defaulted on them, these securities became widely known as "toxic assets" and were the primary cause of the world financial crisis… But if Oakland's law had been widely adopted, the bailout likely would have been unnecessary and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression probably averted. Why? Because the city's ordinance not only would have held mortgage brokers liable for making bad loans, but also every other bank that later bought pieces of those bad loans after they were securitized. In short, the market for subprime loans would have dried up.
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POPSThe BBC's amazing U-turn on climate change The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO). For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too. But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down. These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.
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POPSObama loosens missile technology controls to China Dear God!!! Is this the price paid to China in return for all the debt this President is mounting??? Regarding Space Systems/Loral and Hughes Electronics Corp.... "Both companies improperly shared technology with China and were fined $20 million and $32 million, respectively, by the State Department after a U.S. government investigation concluded that their know-how was used to improve China's long-range nuclear missiles. " And WHO was President during the late 1990s? "dangerous space junk" my foot!!!
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POPSSean Hannity helps Jerome Corsi promote his black-helicopter 'New World Order' conspiracy theories As Steven Thomma explained for McClatchy: In truth, Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., has proposed a bill that would order the Homeland Security Department to prepare national emergency centers — to provide temporary housing and medical facilities in national emergencies such as hurricanes. The bill also would allow the centers to be used to train first responders, and for "other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security.
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POPSGrowing Up Bin Laden Wife and son bare secrets of terror kingpin (married to a monster). Najwa says Americans were kind and friendly, but the country was not to her conservative tastes. Pets met horrible ends. A monkey the children loved was run over by one of Osama's men. She watched the television in horror as the Twin Towers fell, claiming the lives of 2,991 people. Najwa says she has not spoken to Osama since the attacks. And this is the kind of animal species, the pals of Obama that exist at Gitmo, yet liberals defend this trash. Incredible. Just revolting.
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POPSBehind the Scenes: Picturing Fetal Remains Other questions arose. How did you know for sure that Malachi was not a miscarriage? How did you know the damage to the fetus did not come from simple decomposition, or the month that it was outside the freezer? Mr. Benham said there was no doubt in his mind that the image captured the truth of abortion because Malachi was found at a clinic dedicated to abortions. He cited the mark by Malachi’s right ear. “You can see that, it’s forceps,” he said.
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POPSWho Are the Taliban? Does anyone understand these fanatics? Restore peace, no! Establish their version of Sharia, maybe, but at what price to human life, mostly not their own?
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POPSDeath Merchants: Rick Scott profits off the uninsured And this isn't the first time that Scott's warnings about the ills of socialist medicine have found an ironic echo in his own healthcare business. Scott argues that socialized medicine rations care and strangles competition, yet just after his first stint as anti-reform spokesman in the 1990s, while he was running the world's largest healthcare company, he was accused of monopolizing markets and choking out the competition while slashing the chain's costs to the point that it affected patient care. And while he asserts that two of the core principles of healthcare reform are "accountability" and "personal responsibility," Scott ran a company that ultimately pleaded guilty to defrauding the government in one of the nation's largest Medicare frauds ever. Two executives went to prison, the company paid almost $2 billion in fines, and Scott was pushed out of the company. Before he could retake the political stage, he had to build his healthcare business all over again.
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POPSMuch Of Traditional Journalism Went Backwards
and were so badly in the tank for one candidate in 2008 that 90 percent of the public can see it. As ABC’s Michael Malone wrote in October of 2008: I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes . . .and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain’s. That’s what reporters do, I was proud to have been one, and I’m still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water. So why weren’t those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal? The editors. The men and women you don’t see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn’t; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay-out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits. Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you’ve spent 30 years
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POPSThe Fraud Of GOP Tax And School Choice Policy Shown In Arizona In the mid to late 1990s, a group of dogmatic conservative Republican leaders, led by Arizona Congressman Trent Franks and a leading GOP school reform and voucher advocate, Lisa Graham Keegan, saw an opportunity to implement some of the pet school reform projects of national conservative Republican think tanks in the Arizona school system as test cases. The results were as predictable as they are bleak:
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POPS"Democrat-Media Complex" “The unorthodox roll-out was orchestrated to protect James and Hannah,” said Breitbart. “The moment that their peril ended, was when Jon Stewart reported on this, making fun of the media for missing the story. At that moment I called James and Hannah and said, “You’re mostly in the clear, and the only people left who’ll attack you will be some liberal bloggers.’” Breitbart knows something about liberal bloggers. His pre-BigGovernment career included many months working to launch The Huffington Post. (He had been a researcher for Arianna Huffington in the early 1990s, before he joined Drudge, when both of them were still conservatives.) “I wanted the world to see what the Left and the Los Angeles/Manhattan salons had to think about national politics,” Breitbart told TWI. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant. I thought it would be great for Arianna and I thought it would be great for the right, because it gave them source material.”
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POPSUnderstanding Government Subsidies There are many people who will rally behind "socialized" oil, but read on: Hidden Oil Subsidies The real price of gasoline is what people actually pay for it, not just what they pay for it at the pump. That might seem subtle, but there's a big difference. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think-thank, did a study on the subject. What they found is simply mind-boggling. They calculated that the US spent between $30 to $60 billion (with a 'b') a year safeguarding oil supplies in the Middle East during the 1990s, even though its imports from that region totaled only about $10 billion a year during that period. A more comprehensive study that includes the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and other oil protection services (the coast guard is clearing shipping lanes and doing navigational support to oil tankers, etc) shows that actual subsidies to Big Oil are between $78 to $158 billion (again, with a 'b') per year.
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POPSA Precious Gift for Lovers of Literature
The Paris Review Interview Archive "Since 1953, when the first issue of the magazine appeared with an interview of E. M. Forster, our Q&A encounters with the great writers of our times have come to be recognized as a sort of literary genre unto themselves: the Paris Review interview. More than fifty years—and more than three hundred interviews—later, the archive continues to grow with each new issue of the magazine. In November 2006, the first volume of a four-book set of The Paris Review Interviews was celebrated by reviewers across the English-speaking world. In tandem with this publishing project, we offer here online a complete index of every interview ever published, searchable by author and by date—as well as a substantial sampling of the archive’s finest interviews, posted in their entirety. Taken together, these conversations with novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists, biographers, journalists, and critics constitute what Salman Rushdie calls “the finest available inqui
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POPSRAF: 'That (UFOs) exist is indisputable.' more (at source): "If the reports are taken at face value then devices exist that do not use conventional reaction propulsion systems, they have a very wide range of speeds and are stealthy. I suggest we could use the technology, if it exists." The internal debate in the MoD came to a head in 1995, when documents were made public revealing that UFO reports were routinely copied to specialist "Defence Intelligence" branches. An exasperated intelligence office wrote to the UFO Desk: "I see no reason for continuing to deny that (Defence Intelligence) has an interest in UFOs.
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