NightBlogger

855 bills have passed the Senate with no debate, no amendments, no votes

Today, U.S. Senators Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) and Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) released a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) finding that 94 percent of bills the Senate has passed in the 110th Congress have been without a vote, debate or a single amendment. The 855 bills that have been secretly passed spend more than $9 billion, though a final total is not available because many of the bills were rushed through before a cost analysis could be performed.

Senator DeMint: “It would surprise many Americans to learn that the ‘World’s Greatest Deliberative Body’ passes the overwhelming majority of legislation without any debate at all. Democrats think they are entitled to pass bills without debate or votes, and they’ve tried to ram them through right before recess to pressure us to give up. But, Senators shouldn’t fear debate on these important bills. It’s in the best traditions of our republic to demand the Senate actually do its job and have a public debate on bills that expand government and increase the burden on taxpayers. Senator Reid can complain all he wants, but Republicans represent millions of Americans whose voices are being silenced by Democrat strong-arm tactics.” More

In These Times
Foes of nuclear proliferation got two disturbing bits of news last month. One was the May 26 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which said Iran has not been candid about its uranium enrichment program and that it has serious concerns about alleged research into nuclear weapons.

The other news was less official but perhaps more sobering: Former President Jimmy Carter said Israel has at least 150 atomic weapons in its arsenal. Carter responded to a question about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran during a news conference at a May 25 literary festival in Wales, U.K. “The U.S. has more than 12,000 nuclear weapons; the Soviet Union (sic) has about the same; Great Britain and France have several hundred, and Israel has 150 or more,” Carter said, according to the BBC.

This off-handed reference to Israel’s nuclear capabilities was unusual for U.S. officials, who are usually mute on the issue. According to a May 26 story from BBC News, however, “most experts estimate that Israel has between 100 and 200 nuclear warheads, largely based on information leaked to the Sunday Times newspaper in the 1980s by Mordechai Vanunu, a former worker at the country’s Dimona nuclear reactor.” U.S. officials usually follow Israel’s policy of “nuclear ambiguity,” which neither confirms nor denies Israel’s nuclear capacity. This is official deception and it has allowed Israel to ignore the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, as well as conventions on biological and chemical weapons. More

Guy T. Saperstein
Huffington Post

1. Assassination is still on the table, but it is only one possibility out of many. In light of the public furor in response to Hillary’s assassination comments, for the time being this possibility will be de-emphasized.

2. Astrophysicists are predicting an increase of meteor showers between now and the Democratic Convention. It is possible that a small meteor could hit Barack Obama in the temple at any time.

3. The most common place where people suffer fatal injuries is in their bath tub and shower. Obama is rumored to bathe every day.

4. It has been reported that Obama likes tofu; it is a little-known fact but many people have died choking on tofu.

5. We are engaged in secret conversations with George Bush and Dick Cheney to encourage them to move up the Iran invasion date from mid-October to the first week in August. We will jump all over this issue in support of the invasion and our brave troops. America likes invading other countries. That peacenik wimp Obama won’t stand a chance.

6. Obama uses an airplane to fly to many of his campaign appearances. With the soaring price of jet fuel, there is a chance his plane will run out of fuel in-flight. It is not a glider.

7. Obama plays basketball every morning. It is possible, even likely, that he could suffer serious damage to his knees and not be able to walk between now and November without a walker or wheelchair. No one wants a President in a wheelchair. We know there is the precedent of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but that was before TV.

Photo Andy Rob

Kris Maher
Wall Street Journal
Two of the nation’s largest labor unions have struck confidential agreements with large employers that give the companies the right to designate which of their locations, and how many workers, the unions can seek to organize.

The agreements are raising questions about union transparency and workers’ rights. A summary document put together by the unions says it is critical to the success of the partnership “that we honor the confidentiality and not publicly disclose the existence of these agreements.” That includes not disclosing them to union members.

The agreements involve workers who provide food, laundry and housekeeping services on an outsourced basis. The employers are Sodexho Inc. and the Compass Group USA unit of London-based Compass Group PLC. The unions are the 1.7 million-member Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, and Unite Here. The unions say they negotiated a similar agreement with Aramark Corp. but that Aramark broke the deal last year, and they’re trying to reach a new one. An Aramark spokesman declined to comment on that. Read more

Photo bobster

counterpunch
Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime that, according to those familiar with its contents, “unprecedented in its scope.”

Bush’s secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines – up to and including the assassination of targeted officials. This widened scope clears the way, for example, for full support for the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, the cultish Iranian opposition group, despite its enduring position on the State Department’s list of terrorist groups. More

The New York Times has exposed a secret Pentagon campaign to infiltrate the media with pro-war propaganda. The scheme reaches all the way to the Bush White House, where top officials recruited dozens of “military analysts” to spread favorable views of the war via the news. Many of these propaganda pundits didn’t reveal that they were working from Pentagon scripts or lobbying for companies seeking to cash in on major military contracts. This is a violation of every conceivable standard of journalism — and possibly of federal law.

Oprah discusses how a philosophy on the law of attraction covered in the commercially successful book, The Secret, changed her life. There was also a film based on the book. The Secret is a Pop culture version of the Jane Robert’s books published in the 1970s which gave birth to many popular western authors like Louise Hay, who claims to have cured herself of cancer and believes–like many who share this belief system–that you, and you alone create your own reality. In other words, we are never victims and nothing happens to us by chance–we draw life experiences to us.

Photo by .A.A.
Noah Shachtman, in a piece for Wired, writes, “A study, written for U.S. Special Operations Command, suggested ‘clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers. This 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, ‘Blogs and Military Information Strategy,’ introduces the military audience to the ‘blogging phenomenon,’ and lays out a number of ways in which the armed forces — specifically, the military’s public affairs, information operations, and psychological operations units — might use the sites to their advantage.”

In other words, a propaganda campaign.

From the report:

Information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence… to pass the U.S. message. In this way, the U.S. can overleap the entrenched inequalities and make use of preexisting intellectual and social capital. Sometimes numbers can be effective; hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering. On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the U.S. military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.

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