Archive for November 1st, 2007


McKinney and Nader to run for President on two parties

Apparently Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader will be running for president in the California primaries on both the Green Party and Peace & Freedom Party tickets. Thus,  the same two candidates will be on two different tickets simultaneously.

Confused yet? Good, so am I.

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Chomsky: There was no 9/11 conspiracy

Among other things he believes that some aspect of the plan would have leaked and too many events on that day were too elaborate to have been planned to perfection and therefore would not have been worth the risk for the Bush Administration.

No doubt some of the loonier 9/11 conspiracists will say this just proves that Chomsky was involved in it. You laugh? Wait.

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Cynthia McKinney files as Green presidential candidate

It’s official!

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All charges dropped against L.A. 8

The U.S. government’s 20-year attempt to deport two Palestinian men ended Oct. 31. The country’s highest body overseeing immigration cases, the Board of Immigration Appeals, dismissed all charges pending against Michel Shehadeh and Khader Hamide. This is a major victory in a precedent-setting case.

Read the full story of the twisted, vindictive attempt by the US government to jail the LA 8, activists who were arrested for advocating the Palestinian cause by handing out flyers. Yup, that’s right. Twenty years of prosecution for handing out flyers.

[The judge said] that the government had violated the constitutional rights of Shehadeh and Hamide. His opinion attacked the U.S. government’s conduct throughout the case: “the attenuation of these proceedings is a festering wound on the body of respondents and an embarrassment to the rule of law.”

The joke among the L.A. 8 is they’d become the L.A. 40 since they’d all had kids and grandkids in the past twenty years. Now they can visit them without fear of yet more malicious prosecution and threat of deportation.

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Tulip mania

The price of Google stock hit $707 yesterday.

This is irrational. While one analyst predicted it will hit $985 next year, I say $100 will be closer to the actual number. A small number of tech stocks have been performing this way, masking the decline in the market at large. It won’t last.

Update: Google now has the 5th highest market cap, higher than B of A, P&G, and Berkshire Hathaway. It’s not often you see delusions of this magnitude.

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The more things change…

The Department of Defense is taking control of Iraq security from the State Department. However, the Department of Defense entity that oversees outsourced security is, you got it, outsourced itself.  To Aegis, which “is run by the infamous old-school gun-for-hire, Tim Spicer.”

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Respect / SWP. The bigger issues

There’s an interesting discussion on Marxmail on the Respect / SWP donnybrook, discussing how the party-building doctrine of a Marxist vanguard sometimes means they use mass organizations as recruiting and propaganda tools rather than as a way to work with other factions in a coalition and focus on the issues at hand.

Lest this seems esoteric, Respect is the British party founded by Member of Parliament George Galloway, while SWP is a vanguard party within it. But maybe not for long.

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Peak coal comes to Appalachia

The coal there was supposed to last for many more years. But that looks doubtful now. Appalachian coal is the highest quality too. It’s the same story as oil, all the easy stuff has already been gotten out of the ground. What remains is way more costly to get at.

So, if oil and coal are getting increasingly difficult and expensive to produce, then that makes moving to renewables (and probably nuclear) even more of a priority. Coal was supposed to be our dirty little ace-in-the-hole. But maybe not.

Plus, some US coal companies export it to other countries. Oh yeah, that’s real carbon-friendly. Mine it with huge machines, then ship it across  the ocean somewhere.

We really need cleaner, more efficient ways to create power.

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