World Contraception Day is For Women's Rights, But It's For the Environment, Too

FDL Coverage of Bradley Manning’s Detention

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DJ EU CRISIS ROAD MAP: Key Milestones Ahead

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Surge of Lobbying Fuels Keystone XL Pipeline Project

TransCanada Corp., the Keystone XL pipeline's owner and operator, is at the center of this controversy.

One look at the company's lobbying expenditures shows that it has seen its desire to influence lawmakers increase sharply beginning in 2008. In 2008, TransCanada spent $190,000 on lobbying, according to research by the Center for Responsive Politics, and every year since, it increased this number: first to $490,000 in 2009, then to $720,000 last year and to $790,000 so far in 2011.

That's an increase of nearly 300 percent between 2008 and 2010 alone.

Federal sweep rounds up 2,900 illegal immigrants

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Bill for Denying Coal Bust is Coming Due

coal-pandering states like Kentucky are about to free-fall without either economic or energy alternatives as a cushion.

"Leave it to the FBI"

One of the more shameful instances in America's recent past was COINTELPRO, an acronym standing for Counter Intelligence Programs. No matter what you call them or what justification was or is used, it boils down to one very ugly and downright un-American thing: The criminalization of dissent.
For fifteen years, the FBI took counterintelligence methods that had proven effective against wartime enemies and used them against groups at home that advocated for positive change. This, by J. Edgar Hoover's lights, threatened the status quo, and if it threatened the status quo, it was, by definition, a threat to national security.
Legitimate groups that were working for the betterment of American society, like the civil rights movement, the feminist movement and virtually every group opposed to the war in Vietnam -- including random student protests -- were, to Hoover's way of thinking, not just political opponents, but vile subversives and domestic enemies.
COINTELPRO spied on, branded as criminals, disrupted the lives of and even assassinated American citizens who had the audacity to disagree with the conservative agenda.
So he prettied up the old national security trope and paraded it around on the Hill, using it for justification to infiltrate organizations -- most of them progressive in nature and politically left -- in order to thwart them from achieving their goals...and to use any means necessary to do so.
COINTELPRO was launched in 1956 as a small, targeted program with a miniscule budget and a limited mission: Disrupt, embarrass and spark defections from the Communist Party U.S. in order to undermine the group and humiliate its members.
That limited mission was soon abandoned, however, and Hoover was, in short order, sending his minions to infiltrate a whole host of groups (the Socialist Worker's party, militant white hate groups like the KKK, black nationalist groups and the entire "New Left" -- even though no one knew exactly what that was, other than an "attitude") in an effort to undermine, embarrass and neuter them.
By the time COINTELPRO was exposed, pretty much anyone to the left of William F. Buckley, if not Frederick Koch, Sr., was a likely target of investigation. The entire "New Left" was being monitored and infiltrated and sabotaged by the FBI, even though no one could actually define the "New Left" as anything more than a "general attitude."
From the final report of the Church Committee:
While the declared purposes of these programs were to protect the "national security" or prevent violence, Bureau witnesses admit that many of the targets were nonviolent and most had no connections with a foreign power. Indeed, nonviolent organizations and individuals were targeted because the Bureau believed they represented a "potential" for violence -- and nonviolent citizens who were against the war in Vietnam were targeted because they gave "aid and comfort" to violent demonstrators by lending respectability to their cause.
I wrote the following over four years ago [4]:

It's Simply How a Patriot Ought to Act
Posted by -- Blue Girl at 12:18 AM
Saturday, April 14, 2007 George Christian, the Connecticut librarian who, along with three colleagues stood up to the FBI and refused to turn over computer records of patrons who used the library computers during a 45 minute window of time appeared before a Senate panel this week.
The librarians clung to the principles of the Constitution and refused to comply.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I'm not a gullible sap, either. And I not only see COINTELPRO replaying, I see a disengaged public that doesn't care; in fact, so long as they're going after Muslims and assorted brown people, they're all for it. This doesn't just infuriate and frustrate me, it sickens me as well.
Absolute power absolutely does corrupt absolutely, and the United States is the most powerful country on Earth. Of course it follows that abuse of power is rife throughout, especially where we find ourselves now, by Dick Cheney's design: a torture state that kills with impunity and can issue kill orders against an American citizen (Anwar al Awlaki/aka/Adam the Goat Farm Dork, has been targeted by drone attacks in Yemen), throws people in secret prisons indefinitely without charge, trial nor sentence, and that is engaged in a perpetual hot war, with no end in sight...
...against a transitive adverb.*

China buys gold, challenges US dollar

WikiLeaks cables allege that China is buying gold to weaken the US dollar's supremacy as the world's reserve currency. ( 13-Sep-2011 )