Eve Ensler asks “What is security?”

In this TED talk, Eve Ensler (who wrote "The Vagina Monologues") addresses the question, "What is security?" According to Ensler, security is elusive and impossible, and that's the good news, "unless your whole life is about being secure." If you're one of those people who obsess about security, you will become a cultural and intellectual recluse. You will become a frozen and numbed to the possibility of change/growth and you will perceive enemies to be everywhere. All you'll have time for is to worry about protecting yourself. The talk then moves to engaging stories about women who have created real versions of security. Real security is "hungering for connection rather than power."

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Gay Marriage = Religious Freedom

One of the more ludicrous statements made in the recent NOM Gathering Storm ad was the claim that legalizing gay marriage somehow takes away freedom from those who oppose it. Here is an eloquent response to that claim. This clear and well made video exposes some of the myths and mis-information about the threat that gay marriage poses to religious freedom. In fact, the host makes the argument that only WITH gay marriage can we have religious freedom!

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Glenn Greenwald: the retired military analysts story continues to be censored by the networks

Glenn Greenwald has posted another excellent report on corruption of the corporate media. Here's the background. In 2008, the NYT's David Barstow broke the story of how retired generals posing as media analysts, "had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended." Barstow's story received extremely limited play by the corporate electronic media. Even though Barstow has now won a Pulitzer Prize, his story about the analysts is still being censored. By whom? By the television networks that made unethical use of the generals' highly biased analyses.

By whom were these "ties to companies" undisclosed and for whom did these deeply conflicted retired generals pose as "analysts"? ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox -- the very companies that have simply suppressed the story from their viewers. They kept completely silent about Barstow's story even though it sparked Congressional inquiries, vehement objections from the then-leading Democratic presidential candidates, and allegations that the Pentagon program violated legal prohibitions on domestic propaganda programs.

As Greenwald reports, these networks are now adding insult to injury. They are not even reporting on the basis for Barstow's Pulitzer.

The outright refusal of any of these "news organizations" even to mention what Barstow uncovered about the Pentagon's propaganda program and the way it infected their coverage is one of the most illuminating events revealing how they operate. So transparently corrupt and journalistically disgraceful is their blackout of this story that even Howard Kurtz and Politico -- that's Howard Kurtz and Politico -- lambasted them for this concealment.

Greenwald provides lots of details in his article, and numerous relevant links.

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Torture memos, torture judge Jay Bybee

Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow interviewed human rights attorney Scott Horton regarding the Bush-era memos that purported to provide to the CIA a justification for U.S. torture of its prisoners. Horton provided substantial criticism of the memos and of one of the authors of the memos, Jay Bybee, who currently sits in a tenured position on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals:

The clinical detail of the discussion of the torture techniques is just astonishing. You know, I think the bugs-in-the-box instance that you cited, which we really hadn’t heard anything, before the discussion of waterboarding. But just back up and put some perspective on this. These are techniques that federal prosecutors previously charged as crimes. Moreover, in prosecutions that occurred at the end of the World War II, American federal prosecutors sought the death penalty, sought capital punishment, for people who did these things. And now we see a man who is a federal judge sitting in San Francisco writing a memo saying “wink, nod, fine with me, just go right ahead and do it.” It’s just astonishing, and I think also astonishing that that individual in particular can sit as a federal judge today when the world knows that these memos have been crafted and, in fact, when he’s the subject of a pending criminal proceeding in Spain.

The entire interview worth your while.

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Who needs a tea-bag? – The truth about income, taxes, and the past 30 years

I got involved in a discussion on Ed Brayton's blog earlier today, which referenced yesterday's Tea-bag 'protests'. As a result, I ended up doing some research on pre/post tax income from 1979 to 2006. Taxes in this case is defined as 'effective' tax rates according to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) guidelines, not some 'subset', or arbitrary, or marginal rates. These are the taxes actually paid, and the income actually retained. Based on the data presented by the CBO, with all dollars equalized to the 2006 value, the richest 1% of Americans saw their incomes after taxes increase by 256% since 1979. By comparison, the poorest 20% of Americans saw their income increase by only 11% after taxes over the same time period. Putting this another way - in 1979 the wealthiest 1% earned, on average, 22.6 times the poorest 20% ($337,100 -v- $14,900). By 2006, the wealthiest 1% had extended their lead to a staggering multiple of 72.75 times the poorest 20% ($1,200,300 -v- $16,500).

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