Paying the Bin Laden Tax
By Tom Engelhardt
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Consider Inauguration Day, more than two weeks gone and already part of our distant past. In its wake, President Obama was hailed (or reviled) for his "liberal" second inaugural address. On that day everything from his invocation of women's rights ("Seneca Falls"), the civil rights movement ("Selma"), and the gay rights movement ("Stonewall") to his wife's new bangs and Beyoncé's lip-syncing was fodder for the media extravaganza. The president was even praised (or reviled) for what he took pains not to bring up: the budget deficit. Was anything, in fact, not grist for the media mill, the hordes of talking heads, and the chattering classes?
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"[T]he airspace above Washington... [will be] a virtual no-fly zone for 30 miles in all directions from the US capital. Six miles of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers will be shut down, with 150 blocks of downtown Washington closed to traffic, partly out of concern for car or truck bombs... with counter-snipers on top of buildings around the capital and along the parade route... [and] detectors monitoring the air for toxins... At the ready near the capital, thousands of doses of antidotes in case of a chemical or biological attack… All this security will cost about $120 million dollars for hundreds of federal agents, thousands of local police, and national guardsmen from 25 states."
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Bin Laden, of course, is long dead, but his was the 9/11 spark that, in the hands of George W. Bush and his top officials, helped turn this country into a lockdown state and first set significant portions of the Greater Middle East aflame. In that sense, bin Laden has been thriving in Washington ever since and no commando raid in Pakistan or elsewhere has a chance of doing him in.
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In the meantime, he—and 9/11 as it entered the American psyche—helped facilitate the locking down of this society in ways that should unnerve us all. The resulting United States of Fear has since engaged in two disastrous more-than-trillion dollar wars and a "Global War on Terror" that shows no sign of ending in our lifetime. (See Yemen, Pakistan, and Mali.) It has also funded the supersized growth of a labyrinthine intelligence bureaucracy; that post-9/11 creation, the Department of Homeland Security; and, of course, the Pentagon and the US military, including the special operations forces, an ever-expanding secret military elite cocooned within it.
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Will Democrats Sell Your Political Opinions to Credit Card Companies?
By Lois Beckett
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For years, state Democratic parties have been gathering information about individual voters' political leanings. They have noted down the opinions voters shared with canvassers — which candidates they said they supported or their positions on policy issues.
Now, the record of what people told Democratic volunteers may go up for sale — and not just to political groups. Democrats are looking into whether credit card companies, retailers like Target or other commercial interests may want to buy the information.
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But local Democratic parties also have information about voters' views and preferences collected over many campaign cycles. (We wrote about Minnesota's data-collecting "Grandma Brigade" last month.) Some state Democratic parties have used this raw data to create sophisticated estimates of how likely any voter is to vote for a Democrat, support Barack Obama or have certain opinions, say, on abortion or gun control.
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Individual states have different laws about how their public voting records can be used. Many states mandate that public voter rolls can only be used for "political purposes," and some states explicitly ban using voting records for "commercial purposes." The co-op and its clients must abide by these rules.
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"Generally, information freely provided to the party by the voter, or data about who participated in a primary [that the party collects] is not subject to any prohibition on it being sold," said Karl Sandstrom, a former vice-chairman of the Federal Elections Commission and an attorney for the co-op.
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Motorcycles deadly no matter rider's skill
By (UPI)
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No matter how skilled or experienced motorcyclists are, they have far higher risk of being killed while riding than someone in a car, U.K. researchers say.
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The researchers investigated population-wide motor vehicle driver and motorcyclist casualties, excluding passengers, recorded in Britain between 2002 and 2009. To adjust for exposure and measure individual risk, the researchers said they used the estimated number of trips of motorcyclists and drivers, which had been collected as part of a national travel survey.
The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, found motorcyclists were 76 times more likely to be killed than were drivers for every trip. Older motorcyclist age -- with more experience, better skill sets and superior riding behavior -- did not abate the risks of high-powered motorcycles, the study said.
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How can we prepare for climate change without screwing poor people?
By David Roberts
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Shit is getting real. Coastal cities are facing decisions about how to plan for higher seas and more frequent floods, about which lands to abandon and which to “up armor” with levies and seawalls. These are present-day decisions, not something for the distant future. Whether or not the particular plans in SF and NYC go through — they are expensive, and will face much local resistance — they are only the beginning. And it’s not just the coasts. Decisions of a similar spirit will face places like Las Vegas and Phoenix, which exist only by virtue of a steady supply of outside water. What will happen in 10, 20, 30 years, when there are more droughts and less rain? What can be sustained and what must be abandoned?
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So, when these decisions are made, who benefits? Who gets protected when the weather comes? Who gets made whole after the weather has done its damage? If a community needs to be abandoned to nature, how is it compensated and where are its people put?
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In the wake of Katrina there was talk of abandoning some areas rather than continuing to subsidize them through public insurance. But in the stew of class and racial suspicion during and after the hurricane, such discussions had very little chance of unfolding rationally. Blacks quite reasonably suspected that such talk was code for screwing them even more, driving their communities from the city entirely.
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I wish I could offer some sort of Grand Idea about how these stresses can be anticipated and mitigated, probably something that uses the words “stakeholders,” “collaborative,” and “open” a lot. But honestly, I have no idea. The cynic in me thinks that poor and minority people getting screwed is a kind of axiom, a feature of public life as predictable as the rising sun. Climate will increasingly force big, rushed, fear-based decisions on us, and those are precisely the circumstances in which poor and minority folk are most likely to get screwed.
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Secret DOJ Memo Suggests Drone Strikes May be Necessary to Kill American "Terrorists"
By Jason Mick
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The U.S. Department of Justice and Obama administration likely wished that a 16-page memo/white paper building a detailed case justifying killing American citizens with drone strikes never made it into the hands of the media. But that is precisely what ended up happening. The memo -- titled "Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force" -- leaked to NBC News via a source who had access to it. And the memo's suggestion of highly qualified scenarios for death strikes is reviving a major debate over due process and terrorism.
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The memo leak comes on the eve of the confirmation hearing for potential U.S. Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan. Mr. Brennan, a former counterterrorism advisor to President Obama, was among the first to make the case publicly for deadly drone strikes on Americans involved with terrorist groups. At a speech last year he argued such strikes were "consistent with the inherent right of self-defense."
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But the white paper goes beyond the public comments of Mr. Brennan and the Attorney General, arguing that even in cases where there is not a known imminent risk, use of deadly force is justified. This principle is described therein as a "broader concept of imminence", which suggests that mere membership and training activities in high-profile terrorist groups represents an imminent risk.
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Sen. Ron Whyden (D-OR) and a bipartisan group 10 other senators, have written a letter [PDF] to President Obama asking him to release the rumored classified DOJ memos on drone strikes on Americans. In the letter the group writes, "[T]here will clearly be circumstances in which the president has the authority to use lethal force [against Americans who fight against their own country]... [However] it is vitally important ... for Congress and the American public to have a full understanding of how the executive branch interprets the limits and boundaries of this authority."
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