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Good Morning!
Longwood Gardens. June, 2011 by joanneleon
A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.
~James Keller
News
The End of Privacy?
Cellphones, e-mail, and online social networking have come to rule daily life, but Congress has done nothing to update federal privacy laws to better protect digital communication. That inattention carries a heavy price.
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Electronic correspondence deserves no less protection than letters kept in a drawer. The government would still be free to access blog postings and other publicly available content, and exceptions to the warrant requirement would remain for emergencies and intelligence investigations. Similarly, existing law requires a warrant for the government to access photos, calendars and other private data stored on laptops or desktop computers at home, but not for the same files stored with a service provider in the “cloud.”
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Both the Leahy bill and the location privacy bill break away from the traditional “third-party doctrine,” which says there is no reasonable expectation of privacy if the information is held by third parties, like the cell carriers. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court shied away from eliminating that doctrine when it rightly ruled this year that having the police attach a GPS device to a car constitutes a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. The Leahy bill has not attracted any Republican co-sponsors. That is all the more reason to put it before the Judiciary Committee and begin a debate on this critical issue.
U.S. Is Building Criminal Cases in Rate-Fixing
As regulators ramp up their global investigation into the manipulation of interest rates, the Justice Department has identified potential criminal wrongdoing by big banks and individuals at the center of the scandal.
The department’s criminal division is building cases against several financial institutions and their employees, including traders at Barclays, the British bank, according to government officials close to the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing. The authorities expect to file charges against at least one bank later this year, one of the officials said.
The prospect of criminal cases is expected to rattle the banking world and provide a new impetus for financial institutions to settle with the authorities. The Justice Department investigation comes on top of private investor lawsuits and a sweeping regulatory inquiry led by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Collectively, the civil and criminal actions could cost the banking industry tens of billions of dollars.
Full Show: Banking on Greed
July 13, 2012
Just when you think the reputation of banks couldn’t get any worse, comes word that we’ve seen nothing yet. As many as 20 banking institutions, including Barclays Bank, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, UBS and HSBC, are reportedly under investigation for illegal and unethical practices toward protecting their profits at all costs and letting others pay for their mistakes. In this episode, financial expert Sheila Bair talks with Bill about the lawlessness of our banking system and the prognosis for meaningful reform. Bair was appointed in 2006 by President George W. Bush to chair the FDIC. During the 2008 meltdown, she argued that in some cases banks were NOT too big to fail — that instead of bailouts, they should be sold off to healthier competitors. Now a senior adviser to the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bair has organized a private group of financial experts including former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, former Senators Bill Bradley and Alan Simpson, and John Reed, once the chairman of Citicorp, to explore ways to prevent the banking industry from scuttling reforms created by the Dodd-Frank Act.
Video: http://vimeo.com/...
Transcript: http://billmoyers.com/...
Afghan suicide bomber kills military and government officials at wedding
More than a dozen guests are killed by bomber who infiltrated MP's daughter's wedding in northern Samangan province
A suicide bomber has killed a senior anti-Taliban leader, top security commanders and more than a dozen other guests at a family wedding in northern Afghanistan in one of the bloodiest attacks on military and government officials of the war.
The main target was Ahmad Khan Samangani, an ethnic Uzbek MP who was attending the wedding of his daughter and his nephew in Aybak, the capital of the northern province of Samangan, when the blast happened.
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His killing follows the assassination in recent years of a string of key commanders from the north who once helped lead resistance to the Taliban and might have been candidates to do so again were civil war to return.
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The Taliban might be reluctant to claim a brutal attack on a wedding party, because it violates instructions from the group's leadership to avoid civilian casualties.
Jolting the Democratic Party from Its Stupor
The Democrats should be landsliding the worst Republican Party in history. Talk about extremists. There are virtually no moderate or liberal Republicans left in Congress after being driven out by their own party hard-liners. So this Republican Party, united over their extremism, should be very easy to challenge.
It is not happening. Though rolling in promotional capability, the Democrats still have not come up with a clear list of the hundreds of Republican disastrous proposals – passed in the House or proposed. These wrongful Republican initiatives should be boiled down to their vicious essence for public diffusion. Instead, the blue dog Democrats are constantly, and with impunity, giving Republicans cover –recently 17 Democrats supported a rash political move by Representatives Boehner, Cantor and Issa in citing Attorney General Eric Holder for contempt of Congress.
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Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr. and two dozen progressive co-sponsors are behind a bill called “Catching Up To 1968 Act of 2012” (H.R. 5901). This would raise the federal minimum wage, depleted by inflation over the years, from $7.25 to $10.00, thereby helping thirty million workers and boosting the recessionary economy. Neither the Democratic leadership nor President Obama have come out in support of such popular (70 percent in the polls) legislation that historically has been identified with the Democratic Party since the first minimum wage law in 1938.
The Silence on Global Warming
Harrowing predictions of climate scientists are coming true, as glaciers melt, forests burn, heat waves proliferate and freakish weather strikes in unexpected places. But the propagandists of global-warming denial have succeeded in silencing most politicians and the mainstream press
What has become most striking about the growing evidence that climate change is a clear and present danger – indeed an emerging existential threat – is the simultaneous failure of the U.S. news media to deal seriously with the issue, another sign of how the Right can intimidate the mainstream into going silent.
We have seen this pattern before, as the Right sets the media agenda by bullying those who threaten its ideological interests. Before the Iraq War, anyone who dared raise questions about the Bush administration’s justifications could expect to be marginalized or worse. Just ask Phil Donahue, Scott Ritter and the Dixie Chicks.
Governors come out swinging over Medicaid
The issue that dominated the annual National Governors Association meeting this weekend in the historic Virginia town of Williamsburg was the court's ruling that Congress cannot penalize states who refuse to enroll a wider group of people in Medicaid, which is operated by states with federal reimbursements.
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In the two weeks since the court's decision, five Republican governors have opted out of expanding their states' programs and at least four more are leaning toward the same. Many more are undecided. These governors say they were caught by surprise after expecting the court to either strike down or uphold the entire law that they derisively call "Obamacare."
Mahmoud Jibril seeks coalition with Libya's Islamists after his poll win
National Forces Alliance wants to rebuild country but faces resistance from the Justice and Construction party
Mahmoud Jibril, leader of the moderate pro-business National Forces Alliance that swept to a landslide victory against the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya's elections, is trying to assemble a ruling coalition this weekend, even as the last votes remain to be counted.
Election officials confirmed on Saturday that with 98% of votes from last weekend's election, the first in Libya for 48 years, the NFA and its allies won 17 of the 20 "super constituencies", with the Muslim Brotherhood's Justice and Construction party capturing only one.
New Teachers Beware: You Will Face Impossible Expectations
Conventional views of public education as "failing" are wrong, says this author. It's time for teachers to start challenging that narrative.
I regularly encounter, as I travel around the country, teachers who are dispirited by what they feel is an unrestrained contempt for their calling and career. These teachers feel that this contempt, initially expressed by politicians and “experts” with no classroom experience, has been repeated so frequently that it has spread to the public at large. They feel they are being blamed for all the inequities in American society, and are expected to rescue children from impoverished families and communities with no support from others in society.
They feel abused by demands that they discard curriculum it has taken them years to develop, curriculum they are convinced has inspired children who had little prior interest in school, to love learning and inquiry. They do not believe that requirements that they focus on preparing students for standardized tests is respectful of the educational process or their own expertise, because such tests reflect only a tiny part of the knowledge and skills children need. These teachers are embittered and feeling put upon by those who claim to represent the interests of poor children but express this interest by trying to destroy the public education system that is the only institution attempting to serve these children. The teachers I meet all consider some colleagues to be inadequate and would like to see them leave. But the teachers I meet insist that poor performers are a small minority in their schools, and resent the now-popular and, they feel, indiscriminate witch hunt to cleanse schools of incompetents.
Syria crisis: What happened in Tremseh?
• UN: evidence points to battle between fighters and troops
• Locals: Troops "shot at anything moving"
• Government: No heavy weaponry was used
• Red Cross: This is now a civil war
Photographers using Google Street View - in pictures
On Google Street View you can take a virtual walk down almost any street in the developed world – and it's inspiring some fascinating new art
Blog Posts of Interest
Jesus Loves the Little Children by OPOL
Coming soon... a new cooperative site with content and discussion that focuses on the real issues of the day.
More signal, less noise.
"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen."
~ Winston Churchill
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