XDR-TB, A New and Deadly Form of TB That is Becoming a Global Pandemic

These photographs are both powerful and moving.  They highlight the awful disease XDR -TB, a new and deadly form of tuberculosis that is threatening to become a global pandemic.

By viewing and passing on this link we can help to spread awareness, which is the first step to halting the disease. XDRTB.ORG (http://www.xdrtb.org/)

(As background, the photographs were taken by leading photojournalist James Nachtwey and were 'unveiled' on October 3rd, 2008 in more than 50 cities on seven continents as a deliberate attempt to highlight this new danger faced by the world.)

AMY GOODMAN, Host of DEMOCRACY NOW!, First Journalist to Win "ALTERNATIVE NOBEL"

Steal Back Your Vote. The Theft of 2008.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blew the lid off the Theft of 2004 in his masterful Rolling Stone article.

Investigative reporter GREG PALAST for BBC television exposed Katherine Harris’ “felon purge” which fixed the 2000 race.

Now Kennedy and Palast have teamed up to investigate THE THEFT OF 2008. They’ve uncovered the scheme to swipe votes by the millions.

So,what are you going to do about it?


That’s easy: STEAL BACK YOUR VOTE!

How can you do that? Easy again . . .

Sign up to get updates on the Steal Back Your Vote! investigation. And be the first to find out about the release of the voter Guide by Palast and Kennedy. Illustrated by graphic gonzos Ted Rall, Lukas Ketner and Troubletown’s Lloyd Dangle.

1. Get your organization to sponsor the Steal Back Your Vote! Campaign. There’s no charge for your group to join The Progressive Magazine, Guerrilla News Network, VoterRescue, Action Point with Cynthia Black, Air America Radio’s Clout!, Progressive Democrats of America, and the Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation.
   
   
2. Contact StealBackYourVote@gregpalast.com. Hell, sign on yourself Donate $100 (www.PalastInvestigativeFund.org) get your name on the guide.
   
   
3. Get informed - sign up to get the full story on how they’re shoplifting the White House at www.StealBackYourVote.org - via RSS, myspace, facebook or e-mail.

Watch out! Coming soon - Greg Palast and Bobby Kennedy in Steal Back Your Vote! - the Film - from the pueblos of New Mexico to Karl Rove’s emails (really!), the real scoop.

www.StealBackYourVote.org is a project of the non-partisan, non-profit Palast Investigative Fund.


(Above is a sample of the 24-page Graphic Voter Guide. This is the work of artist Lukas Ketner; check back tomorrow for another sample page at StealBackYourVote.org

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Supreme Court Vacancies Likely in Next Four Years

From the The Votemaster @ Electoral-Vote.com

Supreme Court Vacancies Likely in Next Four Years

One issue that has been totally absent from the campaign is the Supreme Court. Five of the justices are 70 or more. Justice Stevens is 88 and unlikely to want to serve 4 more years. Justice Ginsberg had cancer and was operated on for it. Justice Souter is known to want to retire and return to New Hampshire. These are three of the most liberal justices on the court. If all three retire and are replaced by Obama, the court will retain its even split between liberals and conservatives for many years to come. If all three are replaced by McCain, the conservatives will have a clear majority and surely reverse Roe v. Wade and many other decisions that conservatives think are wrong. It is amazing that the court has gotten so little attention.

Stevens 88

Ginsburg 75

Scalia 72

Kennedy 72

Breyer 70

Souter 69

Thomas 60

Alito 58

Roberts 53

Justice	Appointed by	Sworn in	Age
John Paul Stevens	Ford	1975	88
Ruth Bader Ginsburg	Clinton	1993	75
Antonin Scalia	Reagan	1986	72
Anthony Kennedy	Reagan	1988	72
Stephen Breyer	Clinton	1994	70
David Souter	Bush 41	1990	69
Clarence Thomas	Bush 41	1991	60
Samuel Alito	Bush 43	2006	58
John Roberts	Bush 43	2005	53

You're Vote Ain't Worth Shit. Republicans Election Fraud is the Shit.

This election won't be won or lost at the debates. Nor will it be determined by the two campaigns' "ground games" -- their get-out-the-vote efforts. Nor, unfortunately, will its outcome even depend on how many Americans wake up on Election Day intending to vote for one candidate or the other.

Instead, my fear is that the Electoral College results will hang on the swing state voting systems' vulnerability to sabotage.

It's already happening.

In El Paso County, Colorado, the county clerk -- a delegate to the Republican National Convention -- told out-of-state undergraduates at Colorado College, falsely, that they couldn't vote in Colorado if their parents claim them as dependents on their taxes.

In Montgomery County, Virginia, the county registrar issued a press release warning out-of-state college students, falsely, that if they register to vote in Virginia, they won't be eligible for coverage under their parents' health and car insurance, and that "if you have a scholarship attached to your former residence, you could lose this funding."

In Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, Democratic voters received a mailing containing tear-out requests for absentee ballots addressed to the clerk in Caledonia -- the wrong location. In Middleton, Wisconsin, Democratic voters received absentee ballot requests addressed to the clerk in Madison -- the wrong address. Both mailers were sent by the McCain campaign.

Florida, Michigan and Ohio have some of the country's highest foreclosure rates. "Because many homeowners in foreclosure are black or poor," says the New York Times, "and are considered probable Democratic voters in many areas, the issue has begun to have political ramifications." If you're one of the million Americans who lost a home through foreclosure, and if you didn't file a change of address with your election board, you're a sitting duck for an Election Day challenge by a partisan poll watcher holding a public list of foreclosed homes. In states like New Mexico and Iowa, the number of foreclosures is greater than the number of votes by which George W. Bush carried the state in 2004.

In the 2006 election, according to the nonpartisan Fair Elections Legal Network, black voters in Virginia got computer-generated phone calls from a bogus "Virginia Election Commission" telling them that they could be arrested if they went to the wrong polling place; in Maryland, out-of-state leafleters gave phony Democratic sample ballots to black voters with the names of Republican candidates checked in red; in New Mexico, Democratic voters got personal phone calls from out of state that directed them to the wrong polling place. Does anyone think this won't be tried again in 2008?

The reason behind Alberto Gonzales' attempted purge of US Attorneys was that some of them wouldn't knuckle under to Karl Rove's plan to concoct an "election fraud" hoax that would put Republicans in control of the nation's voting lists. "We have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today," Rove falsely told the Republican National Lawyers Association, an evidence-less problem crying out for a draconian solution. Does anyone think that Rove's move from the White House to Fox has dampened Republican ardor for this ruse?

And if all of that doesn't alarm you, consider the new report on electronic voting systems [pdf] from the Computer Security Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which concluded that "all voting systems recently analyzed by independent security testers have been found to contain fatal security flaws that could compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the voting process.... Unless electronic voting systems are held up to standards that are commensurate with the criticality of the tasks they have to perform, the very core of our democracy is in danger."

And did I mention that on Election Day, some polling places in minority precincts in battleground states will be shocked, simply shocked, to discover that so many people want to vote that it will take hours of standing in line to vote. That is, of course, unless they run of out ballots.

So while the presidential and vice presidential debates may make for swell political theater, the likelihood is that victory will be determined not by how the debates move a small percentage of undecided Americans off the fence, but by the voting experiences of a few thousand voters in a few swing states on November 4. Josef Stalin is reputed to have said, "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." I think he had it half right. Those who decide who cast the votes also decide everything.
by Marty Kaplan

Banks Robbing The People

Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal by Danny Schechter.

Read the book’s introduction here. (Alert: PDF.)

With the takeover by the U.S. government of mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over this past weekend (which Schechter discussed on his blog, News Dissector, yesterday), the seriousness of the financial and credit crisis is confirmed… as is the timeliness of Plunder.

How did the American economy go from boom to gloom in less than a year with markets melting down, banks writing off billions with regulators standing by or slashing interest rates and spurring unchecked inflation?

“This didn’t just happen in the course of a usual business cycle,” insists investigative journalist and media analyst Schechter. In Plunder he offers an in-depth investigation into the decline of the economy that’s causing millions to lose jobs and face foreclosures and across-the-board price hikes.

“You wouldn’t know it by relying on our media, but the subprime scandal masks massing looting by Wall Street firms using carefully calculated predatory lending schemes enabled by regulators who don’t regulate and a media that looked the other way. We have lost trillions and dislocated millions with no relief in sight. Every American is paying for the greed of our financiers in the grocery store, gas pump and unemployment line. Bank robberies are not new — but banks doing the robbing is.”

Schechter is uniquely qualified to tell this story. Schechter, a.k.a “The News Dissector” spent decades as a truth teller in the media with leading media companies, and as an independent filmmaker with award-winning independent company Globalvision. A graduate of Cornell and the London School of Economics, Schechter was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard,, and a multiple Emmy Award winner at ABC News , where he was among the first  to cover the S&L crisis. He has written on the economic crisis for Nieman Reports, Editor & Publisher, The Nation, The Huffington Post, and other websites including Mediachannel.org, the media issues network he edits.

Plunder is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

Pentagon Bailout Fraud. Looting of American Taxpayers!

From TomDispatch

Let's start with the money the Bush administration has already thrown at the war in Iraq. According to the June congressional testimony of William Beach, director of the Center for Data Analysis, the war has cost $646 billion so far. The new defense budget for 2009 tacks on another $68.6 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan in the coming year. However, military expert Bill Hartung of the New America Foundation puts a conservative estimate of the costs of a single week of the Iraq War at approximately $3.5 billion (or about $180 billion a year).

In other words, the war in Iraq will cost far more in the next year than the Iraq portion of that $68.6 billion Congress is about to pony up in the defense budget, and so will be funded, as has long been true, through supplemental war bills submitted by the Bush administration (and then whatever administration follows). In other words, sometime in 2009 the direct costs of the war the Bush administration once predicted would cost perhaps $50-60 billion in total will stand at more than $800 billion, or $100 billion above the cost (if all goes well, which it won't) of the bailout of the financial system now being proposed in Washington.

Estimates of the true long-term costs of the President's war of choice, including payments of health care and veterans benefits into the distant future, soar into the budgetary stratosphere. They range from the Congressional Budget Office's $1-2 trillion to an estimate by economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes of up to $4-5 trillion. So we're talking somewhere between one-and-a-half and seven bailouts-worth of taxpayer dollars flowing into the morass of disaster, corruption, and carnage in Iraq.

And here's another curious bit of information: Just the other day, the website ThinkProgress pointed out a strange glitch in Iraq planning. The Bush administration, deep into negotiations with the Iraqi government, evidently managed to wheedle an extra year's time for the prospective withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq; its negotiators pushed the date from 2010 -- the year suggested by both Barack Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- to 2011. According to Maliki in an interview with an Iraqi TV station, this change came from the administration's concern over the "domestic situation" in the U.S. (that is, the needs of the McCain campaign).

"Actually," said Maliki, "the final date was really the end of 2010 and the period between the end of 2010 and the end of 2011 was for withdrawing the remaining troops from all of Iraq, but they asked for a change [in date] due to political circumstances related to the [U.S] domestic situation so it will not be said to the end of 2010 followed by one year for withdrawal but the end of 2011 as a final date." So we're talking about another perhaps $150-180 billion in 2011 -- or approximately the full suggested initial payout in the Washington bailout plan of at least one key Democrat. This gives the phrase "presidential politics" new meaning. Now, just imagine for a moment the situation we might be in if there had been no Iraq War. We could have bailed ourselves out many times over.

As Chalmers Johnson, author most recently of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, the final volume of his Blowback Trilogy, has pointed out for years, the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, and America's wars are in the process of bankrupting us. How strange then that, as he indicates below, no one in the mainstream even blinks when a staggering new Pentagon budget sails through the House of Representatives and then, by voice vote, through the Senate just as negotiators in Washington are scrambling to find a similar sum to deal with a catastrophic financial meltdown; nor does anyone in the mainstream bother to make any connection between that budget and the funds we don't have available to use elsewhere, or between the looting of Iraq and the looting of our financial system (and, in both cases, of course, the looting of the American taxpayer). Tom

We Have the Money
If Only We Didn't Waste It on the Defense Budget

By Chalmers Johnson There has been much moaning, air-sucking, and outrage about the $700 billion that the U.S. government is thinking of throwing away on rich New York bankers who have been ripping us off for the past few years and then letting greed drive their businesses into a variety of ditches. In fact, we dole out similar amounts of money every year in the form of payoffs to the armed services, the military-industrial complex, and powerful senators and representatives allied with the Pentagon.

On Wednesday, September 24th, right in the middle of the fight over billions of taxpayer dollars slated to bail out Wall Street, the House of Representatives passed a $612 billion defense authorization bill for 2009 without a murmur of public protest or any meaningful press comment at all. (The New York Times gave the matter only three short paragraphs buried in a story about another appropriations measure.)

The defense bill includes $68.6 billion to pursue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is only a down-payment on the full yearly cost of these wars. (The rest will be raised through future supplementary bills.) It also included a 3.9% pay raise for military personnel, and $5 billion in pork-barrel projects not even requested by the administration or the secretary of defense. It also fully funds the Pentagon's request for a radar site in the Czech Republic, a hare-brained scheme sure to infuriate the Russians just as much as a Russian missile base in Cuba once infuriated us. The whole bill passed by a vote of 392-39 and will fly through the Senate, where a similar bill has already been approved. And no one will even think to mention it in the same breath with the discussson of bailout funds for dying investment banks and the like.

This is pure waste. Our annual spending on "national security" -- meaning the defense budget plus all military expenditures hidden in the budgets for the departments of Energy, State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, the CIA, and numerous other places in the executive branch -- already exceeds a trillion dollars, an amount larger than that of all other national defense budgets combined. Not only was there no significant media coverage of this latest appropriation, there have been no signs of even the slightest urge to inquire into the relationship between our bloated military, our staggering weapons expenditures, our extravagantly expensive failed wars abroad, and the financial catastrophe on Wall Street.

The only Congressional "commentary" on the size of our military outlay was the usual pompous drivel about how a failure to vote for the defense authorization bill would betray our troops. The aged Senator John Warner (R-Va), former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, implored his Republican colleagues to vote for the bill "out of respect for military personnel." He seems to be unaware that these troops are actually volunteers, not draftees, and that they joined the armed forces as a matter of career choice, rather than because the nation demanded such a sacrifice from them.

We would better respect our armed forces by bringing the futile and misbegotten wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to an end. A relative degree of peace and order has returned to Iraq not because of President Bush's belated reinforcement of our expeditionary army there (the so-called surge), but thanks to shifting internal dynamics within Iraq and in the Middle East region generally. Such shifts include a growing awareness among Iraq's Sunni population of the need to restore law and order, a growing confidence among Iraqi Shiites of their nearly unassailable position of political influence in the country, and a growing awareness among Sunni nations that the ill-informed war of aggression the Bush administration waged against Iraq has vastly increased the influence of Shiism and Iran in the region.

The continued presence of American troops and their heavily reinforced bases in Iraq threaten this return to relative stability. The refusal of the Shia government of Iraq to agree to an American Status of Forces Agreement -- much desired by the Bush administration -- that would exempt off-duty American troops from Iraqi law is actually a good sign for the future of Iraq.

In Afghanistan, our historically deaf generals and civilian strategists do not seem to understand that our defeat by the Afghan insurgents is inevitable. Since the time of Alexander the Great, no foreign intruder has ever prevailed over Afghan guerrillas defending their home turf. The first Anglo-Afghan War (1838-1842) marked a particularly humiliating defeat of British imperialism at the very height of English military power in the Victorian era. The Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989) resulted in a Russian defeat so demoralizing that it contributed significantly to the disintegration of the former Soviet Union in 1991. We are now on track to repeat virtually all the errors committed by previous invaders of Afghanistan over the centuries.

In the past year, perhaps most disastrously, we have carried our Afghan war into Pakistan, a relatively wealthy and sophisticated nuclear power that has long cooperated with us militarily. Our recent bungling brutality along the Afghan-Pakistan border threatens to radicalize the Pashtuns in both countries and advance the interests of radical Islam throughout the region. The United States is now identified in each country mainly with Hellfire missiles, unmanned drones, special operations raids, and repeated incidents of the killing of innocent bystanders.

The brutal bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, on September 20, 2008, was a powerful indicator of the spreading strength of virulent anti-American sentiment in the area. The hotel was a well-known watering hole for American Marines, Special Forces troops, and CIA agents. Our military activities in Pakistan have been as misguided as the Nixon-Kissinger invasion of Cambodia in 1970. The end result will almost surely be the same.
We should begin our disengagement from Afghanistan at once. We dislike the Taliban's fundamentalist religious values, but the Afghan public, with its desperate desire for a return of law and order and the curbing of corruption, knows that the Taliban is the only political force in the country that has ever brought the opium trade under control. The Pakistanis and their effective army can defend their country from Taliban domination so long as we abandon the activities that are causing both Afghans and Pakistanis to see the Taliban as a lesser evil.
One of America's greatest authorities on the defense budget, Winslow Wheeler, worked for 31 years for Republican members of the Senate and for the General Accounting Office on military expenditures. His conclusion, when it comes to the fiscal sanity of our military spending, is devastating:

"America's defense budget is now larger in inflation-adjusted dollars than at any point since the end of World War II, and yet our Army has fewer combat brigades than at any point in that period; our Navy has fewer combat ships; and the Air Force has fewer combat aircraft. Our major equipment inventories for these major forces are older on average than any point since 1946 -- or in some cases, in our entire history."

This in itself is a national disgrace. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on present and future wars that have nothing to do with our national security is simply obscene. And yet Congress has been corrupted by the military-industrial complex into believing that, by voting for more defense spending, they are supplying "jobs" for the economy. In fact, they are only diverting scarce resources from the desperately needed rebuilding of the American infrastructure and other crucial spending necessities into utterly wasteful munitions. If we cannot cut back our longstanding, ever increasing military spending in a major way, then the bankruptcy of the United States is inevitable. As the current Wall Street meltdown has demonstrated, that is no longer an abstract possibility but a growing likelihood. We do not have much time left.
Chalmers Johnson is the author of three linked books on the crises of American imperialism and militarism. They are Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006). All are available in paperback from Metropolitan Books.

Copyright 2008 Chalmers Johnson

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Rise of Porn Culture and Abu Ghraib

Over at Broadsheet on Salon is a great interview with Carmine Sarracino, the coauthor of: "The Porning of America: The Rise of Porn Culture, What It Means, and Where We Go From Here

You write in your book about the Abu Ghraib scandal. What did it reveal about American sexuality?

What it revealed is that when these people wanted to humiliate the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, they thought in terms of porn. That in itself is noteworthy. The language of humiliation is the language of sexual humiliation in porn. The upshot of it is that the prisoners were cast in the role of the "bitch" in humiliation porn.

Which is traditionally the female role, right?

That's really what they did. They turned them into females, knowing that it was one of the most horrible things they could do, culturally. It's a commentary on American identity in most cultures. Part of the Great Satan label is not only our military might but also our going into a culture that's very inhibited and very modest with a culture of porn.

Read the rest of the interview at Broadsheet on Salon

Green Jobs Now. America's Number One Resource Isn't Oil, It's PEOPLE.

Sign the "I'm Ready" Petition

According to Van Jones, there is only one comprehensive solution to the present economic mess: put America back to work retrofitting and repowering America with millions of green-collar jobs.

Van's leadership on this issue is one of the many reasons we had him speak at Netroots Nation in July--and the reason we support the initiatives at Green for All, the organization he founded.

This Saturday, Green for All, in partnership with 1Sky and the We Campaign, is rallying tens of thousands of people in all 50 states to demand real solutions to the economic and climate crises in a national initiative called Green Jobs Now. Learn about what they are doing at www.greenjobsnow.com.

This is a unique opportunity for our community to unite around a single call to action. The demand for comprehensive solutions to save our economy and our climate must be heard from coast to coast, and no one can spread a message like the Netroots.

Help spread the message that America's number one resource isn't oil, it's people.

Green Jobs Now will give people from all walks of life and backgrounds a chance to advance a socially just and inclusive green economy by hosting or participating in an event.

In the next two days, you can help push this historic event into the national spotlight. Post it on your blog, spread it to your personal networks, pitch it to your local media, or participate in a local service project in your own community.

The voice of the Netroots must become part of this sweeping grassroots call for change.

As of today, there are more than 600 events planned. View event details at www.greenjobsnow.com.

Co-Producers

Featured Friend: ACORN

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) helps those who have historically been locked out become powerful players in our democratic system by building community organizations that are committed to social and economic justice. ACORN is the nation’s largest grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people with over 400,000 member families. More  

Support Fund

Green Jobs Now has started a Support Fund for grassroots organizers in low-income communities.  We want to make sure that the communities that most need green-collar jobs get to participate fully in the national day of action.

This fund will award grants to deserving communities that have the energy to create spectacular gatherings on September, but lack adequate means.If you've been looking for a way to support Green Jobs Now events beyond your own community, this is the perfect way.