Some number of people in Generation Y (the Millenials, who are now 28 and younger) can say, “I went to college, and what I learned was that 9/11 was an inside job.” Several influences are contending for the attention of that generation: the 9/11 Truth movement; the pro-Constitution and end-the-Fed movements (call it the Ron Paul movement); and the Tea Party movement. Most of these matters are outside the scope of this article, but when the 9/11 Truth movement holds sway, there is need to correct the national narrative. That national narrative has been hijacked by the faces of “Old Media,” rendering stories that are bought, paid for, and/or dictated by those who hold undue sway in the public discourse. Their story is impossible.

In just two days, Alan Grayson has piled up 50 co-sponsors to his Medicare buy-in bill, which is designed as a stand-alone bill rather than as an amendment to the health reform bill. Here is the complete list of 50 co-sponsors:

Health reform is back from the dead. Many Democrats have realized that their electoral prospects will be better if they can point to a real accomplishment. Polling on reform shows signs of improving. And I’ve been really impressed by the passion and energy of Obama. But reform still has to run a gantlet of misinformation and outright lies. So let me address three big myths about the proposed reform: (1) Obama is proposing a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy — [but] the only part of health care in which there isn’t already a lot of federal intervention [like Medicare and Medicaid] is the market in which individuals who can’t get employment-based coverage buy their own insurance, [which] is a disaster that reform aims to fix; (2) proposed reform does nothing to control costs — [but] the Medicare actuary's assessment finds that it would raise total health care spending by less than 1 percent, while extending coverage to 34 million Americans — and the C.B.O. has just concluded that the arithmetic of reform will look better in its second decade than it did in its first; (3) health reform is fiscally irresponsible —[a denial of the] C.B.O. predictions that reform would actually reduce the deficit. Compared with the Platonic ideal of reform, Obamacare comes up short. If the votes were there, I would much prefer to see Medicare for all. For a real piece of passable legislation, however, it looks very good. This is a reasonable, responsible plan. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

In reality, if not for his strange public meltdown and the personal behavior that apparently set it all in motion, Massa could have been on track to become a Democratic Party superstar.

A plain reading of yesterday's vote on the Kucinich war powers resolution is that an overwhelming majority of the House has authorized the Afghanistan war, including a majority of Democrats. The war now has greater legitimacy. The vote was 356-65-9. [If Rep. John Conyers had been present, the dissenting bloc would have been 66, including just five Republicans. Few members took the option of abstaining.] Strong Kucinich supporters will feel vindicated that their hero took a lonely stand and forced the House to a moment of choice. Critics will note that a dubious war has been legitimized, and that it will be more complicated for those who voted "aye" to reverse course in the months ahead. -- The outcome will make the anti-war forces appear weaker for now than they are, and appearances do matter. --- --- By contrast in Germany, 100-plus members of the Left Party demonstrated inside the Bundestag last week against expanding the German troop commitment, and were thrown out of the parliament for hours. They too lost the vote, but they made their point to the German people and parliament, drawing a sharp line in German politics.

It is the Wall Street equivalent of a coroner’s report — a 2,200-page document that lays out, in new and startling detail, how Lehman Brothers used accounting sleight of hand to conceal the bad investments that led to its undoing. Richard S. Fuld Jr., Lehman’s former chief executive, certified the misleading accounts, the report said. “Unbeknownst to the investing public, rating agencies, government regulators, and Lehman’s board of directors, Lehman reverse engineered the firm’s net leverage ratio for public consumption,” Mr. Valukas wrote. Mr. Fuld was “at least grossly negligent,” the report states, adding that Henry M. Paulson Jr., who was then the Treasury secretary, warned Mr. Fuld that Lehman might fail unless it stabilized its finances or found a buyer. Lehman executives engaged in what the report characterized as “actionable balance sheet manipulation,” and “nonculpable errors of business judgment.”

Videos on the post. Audio also available on the post. "Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich joins us to discuss two House debates in which he’s played a central role this week. The Ohio Democrat is threatening to vote against his party’s healthcare reform package because it does not contain a robust public option. Meanwhile, Kucinich’s bill to force the withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan was taken up on Wednesday. After a rare three-and-a-half-hour debate on the war, the majority of House Democrats joined with Republicans to defeat the measure. "

12 Mar 2010 In 1951 a quiet village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were committed to asylums and hundreds afflicted. Now, evidence suggests that the CIA peppered food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind-control experiment at the height of the Cold War. H.P. Albarelli jnr, an investigative journalist, claims the outbreak resulted from a covert experiment directed by the CIA and the U.S. army's top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland. During the 1950s, the U.S. launched a vast research program into the mental manipulation of prisoners and enemy troops. Scientists at Fort Detrick told him that agents had sprayed LSD into the air and also contaminated "local food products." [Gee, al-Qaeda's a paragon of virtue, alongside CIA terror cells. And so, when Citizens for Legitimate Government asserts that the H1N1 virus, etc., was possibly concocted in a US lab (so the pharmaterrorists could make a *killing* on mercury-laden vaccines) it isn't a stretch, is it? --LRP]

When the case first filed in the U.S., Chevron appealed that it should be moved to Ecuador. It was confident in Ecuador's judiciary system. When the case continued in Ecuador under President Correa and no longer confident of Ecuador's judiciary, Chevron asked that the case be moved back to the United States for arbitration. Ecuador protested this change; however, a US judge ruled in favor of Chevron's request and arbitration will proceed in the U.S. further delaying the complaint by the indigenous population.

In her 2002 book titled, "Water Wars," noted author, social activist, and ecologist Vandana Shiva called privatizing water: -- ecological terrorism; -- a global water crisis; -- along with overuse, waste and pollution, it can cause "the most pervasive, most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth;" -- the road to "an ecological crisis with commercial causes but no market solutions; (they) destroy the earth and aggravate inequality; the solution to an ecological crisis is ecological, and the solution for injustice is democracy;" and -- water rights are natural and "usufructuary....water can be used but not owned;" it belongs to everyone as part of the commons as an essential "basis of all life....under customary laws, the right to water has been accepted as a natural, social fact." --- --- Shiva lists nine water democracy principles: (1) it's nature's gift; (2) it's essential to life; (3) "life is interconnected through water;" (4) it must be free "for sustenance needs;" (5) it's limited and exhaustible; (6) it must be conserved; (7) it's a commons; (8) "no one has a right to overuse, abuse, waste, pollute," or own it; it belongs to everyone; it can't be treated as a commodity; and (9) there's no substitute. --- --- --- Corporate profiteers have other ideas and, since 1997, have met triennially at the World Water Forum (WWF) to discuss privatizing water globally in coordination with the World Water Council (WWC). It's dominated by two of the world's largest water companies, Suez and Veolia, as well as the World Bank, other financial interests, UN bodies, and powerful interest groups representing business and world nations. --- WWC's agenda is profits through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) wanting to privatize global water resources, sell them to the highest bidder, promote destructive dam and water diversion projects, extort high prices, and make an element of life available only to those who can afford it. --- Their scheme involves controlling city/municipal/community distribution as well as stealing public water, bottling it, selling it at exorbitant prices, and claiming it's pure when, in fact, it's no safer than tap water.

"I think the biggest mistake that he has made in his first year was to put bipartisanship ahead of fixing the country," Maher declared Wednesday on MSNBC's Countdown With Keith Olbermann. He said Obama should have "com[e] in with all the energy from the election and saying, you know what, we're in a crisis mode, I won this election by a sizable mandate -- here's what we're going to do; if you don't like it, Republicans, you can suck on it."

"The New York Times reported on March 1 that, “At least two suspects in the killing of a Hamas official in a hotel here in January traveled to the United States afterward, according to a person familiar with the investigation.” “One suspect traveling on a British passport arrived in the United States on Feb. 14; the other used an Irish passport and arrived on Jan. 21, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case. He did not say where the men entered the country, and added that there was no known record of their leaving,” wrote Robert F. Worth in a story filed from Dubai. Worth’s report noted that if the suspected assassins who entered the U.S. presented foreign passports, they would have been photographed and finger printed upon arrival. "

we bring good things to life.....The abuses suffered by GE's "green" workers confirm our worst fears that there's little guarantee so far that green jobs are going to be good jobs. What are now touted as green jobs can all too easily instead be minimum wage jobs with poor working conditions without job security or benefits.

The pro-health care reform group Health Care for America Now has released a study (pdf) that contradicts insurance companies' claims that their recent, exorbitant rate hikes were driven by increases in the cost of medical care. The study shows that over the last eight years premiums have almost doubled, while medical inflation only increased by 40 percent. HCAN found that insurance companies are raising their rates more than 20 percent faster than the amount they are paying out to doctors, and twice as fast as their underlying costs of medical care are rising. In short, insurance companies are hiking premium prices much more quickly than their costs are increasing.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unveiled the Obama administration's first full review of human rights around the globe to much fanfare. However, this new set of reports, like their annual predecessors, are incomplete and do not live up to the expectations of a key U.N. declaration of human rights, according to a prominent global advocacy organization.

Nobel Prize-winning economists and scientists will deliver a letter to the U.S. Senate today, urging lawmakers to require immediate cuts in global warming emissions. The letter was signed by more than 2,000 prominent U.S. economists and climate scientists, including eight Nobel laureates, 32 National Academy of Sciences members, 11 MacArthur "genius award" winners, and three National Medal of Science recipients.

It isn’t just that he was an innocent man thrown into Gitmo, or that he was held even after a CIA analyst concluded that he was innocent, or that National Security Council Staffers were aware of his innocence and actively trying to bring about a review of his detention — Mr. al-Rabiah’s case is apt because after the CIA’s 2002 determination of his innocence, he spent another seven years wrongly imprisoned, regaining his freedom and seeing his children only after retaining the help of American attorneys. Ms. Cheney, Mr. Kristol, Mr. Thiessen and Mr. McCarthy assert that American lawyers who represent Guantanamo Bay detainees are helping the enemy in a time of war. Here is a case, however, where the Guantanamo Bay detainee was innocent, languished for years in custody without a lawyer despite official knowledge of his innocence, and ultimately achieved his freedom with legal help.

"Anyone who thinks that perhaps the public sector could do a better job than the private one on virtually anything, is chewed up by the Democratic-Republican Party’s meat grinder and swiftly spirited off to Nowheresville — or perhaps the Central African Republic as was done to former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Anyone standing in the way of historic health care reform (sic) is as good as dead. It’s times like these where establishments like Kos’s web blog should be illuminating people to the mystifications of the ‘liberal’ Democrats, but in good standing as a card carrying Republican-Democrat that’s precisely the opposite of what Kos seems to be pursuing."

“We have wasted month after month negotiating with people who do not support serious reform,” he said at a progressive media summit on Capitol Hill. "It's been a year now and I think the White House finally got that message."

Legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions through a new cap-and-trade system has languished in the Senate for the better part of a year. The bill has gone nowhere, despite the best efforts of supporters who keep the flame alive, and occasional assurances of progress from the lawmaker taking the lead on the bill this year, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). Meanwhile, things are just about as much a stalemate over on the second climate front that's opened up in the Senate over the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to limit emissions under the Clear Air Act.