The IRA killed many police (and the police many of them) during their underground days. Their leaders, elected officials now, just backed a vote and got an overwhelming 90% in favor of supporting policing. One who voted yes killed an police officer as a teenager, spent 15 years in prison, and said it was time for the party to change.

The vote doesn’t mean Sinn Fein supports the police as constituted now as other events must occur first for this to happen, but this is a seriously big deal.

From the BBC.

Will that mean Sinn Fein members and supporters lining up to apply for the right to don the uniform of [the police]?

That sounds unthinkable, incredulous, even ridiculous. But then again for almost a century, so did what happened today.

Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were underground armed insurgents who not only survived but eventually assumed positions of power. Whatever you might think about them, their political and survival skills are quite extraordinary.

Slugger O’Toole, a blog in Northern Ireland, comments on what happened with their usual astute on-the-ground observations.

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From Danny Schechter, producer/director of “WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception” and author of ” author of “Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception: How the Media Failed to Cover the Iraq War”, comes his new movie “In Debt We Trust. America Before the Bubble Bursts.”

It is a journalistic confrontation with what former Reagan advisor Kevin Phillips calls “Financialization”–the “powerful emergence of a debt-and-credit industrial complex.”

While many Americans may be “maxing out” on credit cards, there is a deeper story: power is shifting into fewer hands…..with frightening consequences.

The poor get gouged and swindled while a tiny few get wealthier. But it’s a bubble and it won’t last. Foreclosure rates are rising in California. Interest rates on credit cards rise with lots of extra fees. Those who get caught in the credit trap generally are hard working with jobs, the problem is a system stacked against them where increasingly they can’t make enough to live. Then the credit vultures swoop in. But now, even some of the vultures are dying.

Trailer and movie info

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From reader Kiwini Oe

The Second Life Netroots group has partnered with the Second Life chapter of CodePink to help bring a virtual version of the January 27th national peace march on DC to Second Life.

The SL peace march to Capital Hill takes place Monday 2 pm

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This makes, to my knowledge, the second such protest in the virtual world of Second Life, the first being by the Scottish Socialist Party against extreme right National Front of France.

In a few years such events will may well be commonplace, large, and influential.

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Seriously.

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