Their new plastic bag tax, coupled with an massive ad campaign to bolster public support, resulted in a 94% drop in plastic bag usage in just a few weeks.

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Lefti on the News video’ed PSL Presidential Candidate Gloria La Riva last week in Hollywood speaking at the unveiling of the Free the Cuban Five billboard and at the protest outside the Democratic debate.

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Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) speaks to Focus The Nation on] how we can turn the potential hard hit of climate change into the “triple play of another American century” by cleaning the air, creating jobs, and reducing oil dependency for national security. The real surprise was his likening of EPA regulations to biblical law in their mutual support for stewardship of the earth.

Such a triple play would create a good century for the planet not just America. But it would certainly help us too.

I think Inglis is pioneering new ground and has caught on to a bigger idea here about how the US can revitalize its leadership potential — even if we are waving goodbye to hegemony — when he suggests we can no longer afford to look like “the fat cats who really don’t care.”

This guy gets it way better than most Democrats… Global warming can be a catalyst to create serious, long-lasting, and needed change.

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Four have been cut so far. Two near Egypt, another off Dubai, and a fourth cable between the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Conspiracy?

One particularly imaginative theory is that a US submarine severed the cables in order to cut off internet service to Iran. Another is that it’s all a ruse to distract attention from a big wire-tapping effort.

Four severed cables does seem beyond the possibility of coincidence, but who would benefit and why?

DailyWireless has an comprehensive overview of the outages.

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The Guardian reports on collusion between Colombia’s Farc and the Venezuela military, saying Venezuela is being used as the primary shipping point of Columbian cocaine out of South America. Given the amounts of money involved, it would seem naive or deliberately evasive to pretend such corruption couldn’t exist.

No source I spoke to accused Chávez himself of having a direct role in Colombia’s giant drug-trafficking business. Yet the same people I interviewed struggled to believe that Chávez was not aware of the collusion between his armed forces and the leadership of Farc, as they also found it difficult to imagine that he has no knowledge of the degree to which Farc is involved in the cocaine trade.

Were Chavez to interfere in the drug trade and corruption too overtly maybe the military, or at least parts of it, wouldn’t remain loyal to him.

A European diplomat with many years of experience in Latin America echoed this view. ‘The so-called anti-imperialist, socialist and Bolivarian nation that Chávez says he wants to create is en route to becoming a narco-state in the same way that Farc members have turned themselves into narco-guerrillas. Perhaps Chávez does not realise it but, unchecked, this phenomenon will corrode Venezuela like a cancer.

While the diplomat seems no friend of Chavez, he does have a point.

P.S.  No Mas FARC or Pizzo.

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It’s a staggering number. Over 50% of current real estate sales now in San Diego are short sales or REO. The distressed properties are no doubt selling faster because their price is so low. But that will drive all prices down, forcing even more homeowners underwater on their mortgage, and the downward spiral will continue.

She gave me an example of a house that sold for $500K in 2005. The bank foreclosed and is now asking $380K - with no offers - and she believes it will eventually sell for $300K or less.

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Today. At the Warfield Theatre in S.F.

Mickey Hart, Phil Lesh, and Bob Weir, joined by Jackie Greene, John Molo, and Steve Molitz, will play show together in support of Barack Obama.

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The blizzards and ice have caused a 45 mile backup of stopped cars on one highway. The Army is driving tanks on the road to break up the ice.

Tanks? Do they not have snow plows? Guess not. And tanks could well break up the road as well as the ice. Plus, breaking up the ice is only part of the job, another vehicle then needs to push the ice off the road.

Sure, they are having freak cold and snow, but when large areas have been without power for days with transportation nearly shut down then one wonders if the government is able to cope.

Comparisons to the US government’s response to Hurricane Katrina are certainly in order.

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Here’s the WaPo chart: The Neocons: An illustrated progression. It starts with Leon Trotsky. Yes, that Leon Trotsky. But not for the reasons one might assume.

Lenin’s Tomb is not amused.

But [the chart] does so all to the purpose of linking it all back to a dead revolutionary, who in all likelihood would have had the neocons taken on a blind date with a firing squad (I like that phrase).

But the neocon-Trotsky link genuinely exists. From a LewRockwell.com rant.

The Trotskyist pedigree of neoconservatism is no secret; the original neocon, Irving Kristol, acknowledges it with relish: “I regard myself to have been a young Trotskyite and I have not a single bitter memory.”

Maybe this explains it better.

What is a NeoCon? Neocon is a neo-conservative who began as anti-Stalinist Trotskyist before moving to the far right in U.S. politics. NeoCons have roots in the Leon Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1950s and 1970s that movement morphed into anti-communist liberalism. Today the NeoCons are embedded in the imperial right and militarism of the U.S. defense and foreign affairs departments.

Trotsky vehemently opposed Stalinism and he and his followers were instrumental in getting the truth about what Stalin was doing out to the world at large. But that hardly makes him the fountainhead of the neocon movement. That many neocons began as Trotskyites then went sharply to the right is not because of anything Trotsky did. He opposed Stalin because he thought the revolution had been betrayed.

Peter Camejo comments.

Leon Trotsky’s efforts to argue that the Russian revolution of 1917 was betrayed and that one should not associate Stalinism with socialism was supported by only a small number of those considering themselves socialist.

The factual information on the crimes of Stalinism and truth about the internal regime in the USSR put out by the Trotskyist movement in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s is now accepted by almost everyone. In fact, all research has confirmed that the factual description of the internal reality of Stalinist society by Leon Trotsky was completely accurate.

Thus, the primary similarity between neocons and Trotsky is that both viewed Stalin as the monster he was. (Another might be his belief in the need for “permanent revolution.”) That some former Trots morphed into early, influential neocons yet still remained sympathetic to Trotsky appears a journey understandable only to those who were part of it. Doubtless the tangled history and resultant differences of far left sects are incomprehensible to outsiders too.

Trotsky of course paid dearly for his views. He was assassinated in Mexico in 1940 by a Soviet agent.

Trotsky’s last words were “I will not survive this attack. Stalin has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before.”

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