Its bad enough that British Petroleum’s CEO said his massive, endless gushing spill was only a tiny blip in a huge ocean…

Its bad enough that British Petroleum has not mourned the ELEVEN DEAD WORKERS who died in the blast on the oil rig that is responsible for the gushing toxic spill…

One of the youngest workers on the rig, Shane Roshto, 22, is survived by his son and his wife, Natalie, who has filed a lawsuit against BP, Transocean and Halliburton. An inspiration to his friends, he wrote two dates — his wedding day and his son’s birthday — inside of his hard hat, referring to these dates when he was having a bad day.

Its bad enough that the oil rig company has already received $270 million in insurance money as a claim for the lost oil rig, none of which will go to cleanup or to compensate the families of the dead…

Its bad enough that British Petroleum sent its lawyers in within hours of the beginning of the spill to get the widows and residents of coastal Alabama  to sign off any future lawsuit against BP, for a measly $5,000 per life…

But now, on American soil, British Petroleum is in charge of law enforcement, puppet-mastering the local sheriffs’ offices and the Coast Guard, keeping reporters from the beaches.  Americans are being kept from the beaches by a foreign corporation.

So much for the ‘new’ logo, the earth-friendly ‘Beyond Petroleum’ public relations campaign of a few years ago, BP’s attempt to win over environmentally aware consumers, designed to show the company’s commitment to, get this, the environment and solar power…

British Petroleum is firmly an oil company.  It is dodging responsibility for its epic, monumental, continuing spill and  its degradation of the US coastline, AND its running our own sovereign law enforcement agencies.  How can Americans know the extent of damage, if reporters are turned away from American soil by a British conglomerate?

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He made a big point of the fact that it was mutual (she helped him film his abstinence video – shades of John Edwards and his videographer) and that she works PART TIME for him. You know what that means?

Probably NO HEALTH INSURANCE, no benefits… He was messing with a woman who probably didn’t have a safety net.

That’s not ‘mutual’, buddy, when you’ve got lifetime health benefits and retirement pay…

Oh, and his first response to the affair allegations was ‘it’s revenge politics’.

No, its not, Mark, it’s integrity, which you lack.  YOU’VE GOT HER INTERVIEWING YOU ABOUT TEEN ABSTINENCE EDUCATION!!!  Hmmm, Abstinence, Affair, Adultery.  Mark, get your A words straight.  Don’t let the door hit you on your way out…

He said, “In the poisonous environment of Washington, DC, any personal failing is seized upon and twisted for political gain.’

Um, Mark? No. Your affair, which, once CAUGHT, you now call a personal failing, is seized on because of your epic hypocrisy.  Your affair is used for political gain because you stand for nothing anymore, you’ve gone against every word you’ve uttered.

With your morality politics, through your 8 terms, you’ve made decisions that have impacted the lives of all Americans, yet you can’t even walk your own walk.  You’ve voted for the nuclear family, over other definitions of ‘family’ and yet you betrayed yours.  You filmed yourself talking about abstinence-only education, but committed adultery.  You say marriage can only be between a man and a woman, but you can’t even stay faithful to your own marriage, how can you judge the intent and fidelity of others?

Time for all of you who represent us in Congress to fess up, clean out your closets and act from integrity.

It’s no longer a surprise that the Representative from Indiana had an affair in his office, its so cliché…

Yet he and his brethren are the ‘deciders’ for the morality of the rest of Americans.  We’ve got infidels in charge.

Time to sweep them out and bring in representatives who act from the truth of their lives, caring enough not to throw the PART TIME worker under the bus…

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But Zuckerberg is WRONG.  There IS a place for privacy on the web, and most of his users completely believe that Facebook WILL protect their privacy.  A few days ago, supposedly, Facebook bigwigs sat down for a quickly pulled together meeting, because of the global backlash against Facebook’s ‘we own you’ draconian privacy intrusions.

You know Facebook will deny they’re up against a wall, but they are up against a proverbial wall.

The kid who allegedly texted while at Harvard saying that people who gave him personal information on the internet are dumb f**ks, is now in charge of the largest-ever cache of human information in history.  Is he acting with maturity, with foresight and with hindsight?

No.

Because he’s too young to understand the implications of his actions.  He’s literally selling the individual proprietary stories of millions of human lives, in the interest of money making.  He’s enacting a social experiment that he doesn’t understand, and he’s destroying any trust that Facebook users have in him.

What he doesn’t see is that he’s already created the most successful (yet) global brain.  People from all over the planet connect on his platform.  He’s gone from ‘fringe’ to ‘mainstream’, in less than a decade.  He has a caretaking, leadership responsibility to all his users, and he fails them when he makes them take 20 steps to protect their privacy.  I went on to my account and my daughter’s account and shut the spy hole on us, but I was able to do it because I’m tech savvy.  Regular social users of Facebook are being sold upriver.

So let’s hope there’s a bit of ‘Dude, you don’t know enough to have made this decision’ conversation today.  Let’s hope that Facebook has some wise, more life-experienced people at the meeting, who can tell the Emperor that he’s accidentally stripped all the people instead of himself.

At this point in the growth of the social web, it DOES matter that each individual assumes that they are protected by apps and websites and platforms that they use.

Zuckerberg, and sadly Facebook, have not shown maturity and consideration and due diligence in caring for their community.  This just-turned 26 year old clearly doesn’t understand what he’s done and hopefully SOMEone at Facebook can get him to do what’s right, not sell his users.

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University of Maryland’s International Center for Media & the Public Agenda did a study,

The study’s results statement says: “American college students today are addicted to media, describing their feelings when they have to abstain from using media in literally the same terms associated with drug and alcohol addictions: In withdrawal, Frantically craving, Very anxious, Extremely antsy, Miserable, Jittery, Crazy.”

Susan D. Moeller, the journalism professor who conducted the study, noted “What they spoke about in the strongest terms was how their lack of access to text messaging, phone calling, instant messaging, email and Facebook, meant that they couldn’t connect with friends who live close by, much less those far away.”

What’s going on here?  I suggest we look at this from a different perspective.  Kids are prolific connectors these days, sending 100s of texts a day.  They communicate everything that they see and feel and think, in the very moment that things happen to them.  This can be very healthy, in that they don’t feel their wounds alone and they do not stay stuck in their response to events.  They share almost immediately, and sharing sorrows or fears or wounds and receiving feedback helps to diminish them, making them manageable.  Then the kid moves on to the next life experience.

They share their joys and judgments and distrust and distractions and together they are creating an invisible, below-the-radar tribe.

The stereotypical ‘teen angst’ experience of feeling alone and not understood in the world is quelled by constant interaction, even though it is via computers and cell phones.  One student in the study said, “Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort. When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable.”

Given that their usual avenues to the news were voluntarily blocked for 24 hours, did they turn to old media sources? No.  Interestingly, only a scant few said they turned to newspapers or radio, because they are used to getting their news from social media and each other.  Only the Olympics and such big events got them to turn on the TV for news.

Again, from a different perspective, these kids are used to immediate reception of news and immediate sharing of not only the news but their thoughts on it.  They are relevant within their circle of friends.  They bond together in ‘Like’ groups on Facebook, they are extremely aware of current events, as they happen, and they are interested in what is happening around the globe.

I think they are not so much addicted, as experiencing brain evolution.   Their brains can and are handling massively increased brain activity.  The sending and receiving neurons, the connectors, all are being called upon minute–by-minute as they text and update and check in with each other, whether they are close friends or online friends.  A sense of loyalty exists, not just to those few kids that they know and run into in classes or after school programs, but also to hundreds of other kids near and far that they connect with only online.   In other words, their brains are firing for people in their local ‘family’, and their regional and international ‘family.’

This so-called ‘addiction’ to social media is, to me, the best sign that humanity will continue.  Because while the old white haired guys are throwing bombs at each other and sending up spy satellites, these kids’ brains are connecting, not looking for differences.  Of course, there is still teen hate, teen judgment, teen cruelty, but their ‘tribe’ isn’t just three kids they eat with at the school lunch table.

Their tribe is the hundreds of friends they have in social media, and they clearly show compassion when they hear about and communicate about events that do not personally affect them, like the earthquake in Chile that happened while some of the students were ‘unplugged.’  The only problem I see is that the ownership of smart phones, ipods and laptops is probably related to economic strata and therefore kids within lower income households aren’t getting the benefit of these enlarged social networks.

So their brains are hyper-active, in a way that does not need to be medicated.  Their brains have brought them into larger, safer, more solid groups within which they can hopefully learn to be their best selves.  That’s not addiction.  That’s a healthy learning environment.  If their parents and educators could see from a new perspective, social media could be the glue to a new, larger, more global coherent community.

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I’ve clipped two of his screen shots, because they are pretty shocking.  The first comes at 3:50 into the video, where he shows how the economy did WITHOUT taking into consideration Mortgage Equity withdrawals.  Blue bars show GDP WITH Mortgage Equity withdrawals showing up as “Spending”.  The red bars show the GDP calculations WITHOUT Mortgage Equity withdrawals showing up.  Two negative years would have scared us somewhat straight…  But, no, we were told to spend…

The second is a graph of the debt super cycles that comes 1 minute into the video.  The gray bars are recessions.

Its a LONG video, but its worth it.  Lots of remedial information about economics and the US economy in particular.

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This guy helped found the Ella Baker Center, a modern day civil rights organization in Oakland, California, providing the launching pad for  needed activist groups such as Books Not Bars and Color of Change AND he provided shelter and advocacy for families who lost their homes to the disaster of Hurricane Katrina.  He wrote the definitive book on rescuing both our jobless and our environment, “The Green-Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems“.

His sin?  Once signing something that wondered whether or not 9/11 was an inside job.  And believing in a society of equality.

Westboro Baptist Church?  What have they done for a city, the oppressed, the overlooked, the homeless?  Nothing.  They show up at funerals and picket the dead, with whom they have NO connection.  They carry signs that say ‘God Hates Fags’.  They showed up at a memorial for a bus accident…  They showed up at a memorial for the Sago Mine Disaster.

They show up at the funerals of U.S. soldiers who die in the line of duty.  They showed up and one brave father sued them for disrupting his own right to privacy, to grieve his son who died in battle.

What is Westboro’s sin?  For which no one has yet caught or stopped them?  For which Conservative Pundits DO NOT attack???  They honestly believe that their hate-filled God is killing AMERICAN innocents around the world as a SIGN that we are doomed because the United States is becoming more tolerant of homosexuality.  (Forget that their Jesus said ‘do not judge’…)  The Dixie Chicks suffered more for saying ONE THING in 2003 (in the run-up to invading Iraq): “we don’t want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas”, than Westboro has EVER suffered for their far, far worse inflammatory calls to civil war.

They believe 9/11 was an inside job.  They believe that the pregnant woman who jumped from the burning, collapsing Tower ‘deserved’ to die, along with her 3700 fellow Americans murdered that day.  They don’t care if you are gay or straight, their God wants to kill you.

Where are the Conservative pundits now?  Why did they attack (like ravenous wolves) a man who stood up for the poor and the incarcerated?

Why are the Conservative pundits now silent, when a soldier’s father is forced to pay the legal bills of a pseudo-religious group that wants to incite riots?  WHY ARE THEY SILENT?

Could it be that the activist is black?  And the preacher is white?  Their base is white and Christian…

We are sitting on a powder keg.  These protests are not lawful.  They are meant to incite real violence.  Letting them scream their vitriol is like allowing the shouting of ‘FIRE’ in a crowded theater.  Until now, there have been no riots, because individuals or groups like the Patriot Guards show up and buffer the crazy protesters from the grief stricken families.

We give tax exemption to anyone who claims they are a religion.  Let’s outlaw that.  Why should one portion of society not pay the costs of the society they operate within, especially when they cost us LOTS OF MONEY for increased police protection when they host these HATE events?  The Roman Catholic Church’s Legion of Christ is worth $20 billion. Scientology is a rich religion.  Why allow tax benefits to nut jobs like Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist Church?  Let them be taxed at the same rate as regular Americans.

And where are the same Conservative pundits who ripped Van Jones to shreds, when Westboro says exactly the same thing, only crazier?

Sitting on their hands, silent.  As usual.

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Here is a youtube video for you, of their training, including burning the United Nations flag and replacing it with a Christian cross flag. Because Jesus died so they could carry guns…

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Honey, I couldn’t make this stuff up.

Under current federal law, a first time simple possession of five grams of crack cocaine requires the same five-year mandatory minimum prison sentence as a person in possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine.

Dick Durbin and Jeff Sessions think they did a FANTASTIC job, equalizing the criminal justice playing field 4/5 more, by changing the sentencing disparity, instead of eliminating the unconstitutional disparity between crack and powder cocaine.

“If you ever wonder if anything good ever happens there (in the Congressional Gym? the weights room or the shower?? ed. comment), it appears something good might have happened there,” Durbin said, which may or may not have been an oblique reference to former Congressman Eric Massa’s tale about being lobbied by Rahm Emanuel in the House gym. “Senator [Orrin] Hatch was there to witness it.”

Dick thinks quid pro quo is more important than doing the right thing:

The compromise was that Durbin would accept Sessions’ amendment to change the disparity from 100 to 1 to 20 to 1. In return, Sessions offered to withdraw his amendments that would have narrowed the circumstances under which a judge could reduce penalties for offenders who acted with “fear, impulse or affection,” and would have imposed a 10-year mandatory maximum for simple possession rather than eliminating the five-year mandatory minimum for simple possession entirely.

“My position is for one to one, equity and equality in sentencing, but in order to get things done you have to be prepared to make mutual concessions,” Durbin said. “That’s what we have done.”

Tell that to the poor person with 1/100th the amount of one type of cocaine in their possession, who serves as much time as the wealthier person with the 100x of a different type of cocaine in theirs.  Changing that sentencing law to ‘a poor person with 1/20th the amount of one type of cocaine in their possession serves as much time as the wealthier person with 20x of a different type of cocaine in their possession’ doesn’t seem to be doing much more than moving chess pieces on a board.

And since when is legislation decided between TWO MEN, instead of the entire Senate?  These guys act as though they single-handedly solved the racial crisis in our prison systems, by bartering.  The sad thing is, for those caught in the wrong social strata, these two men create the rules.

We need a rule about qualifying to work for the U.S. Government.  You should have to work in a day-care, deliver food to the elderly, sit with kids in school, and visit the incarcerated AND their families.  You should not be able to legislate in such an impotent way when it harms one racial group more than your own, period.

Then we would have some protection against this kind of ‘wasted time’ legislation.

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This could be seen as hypocritical, because here are four ‘old white men’ holding up funding to a program that serves a predominately minority constituency of CHILDREN, while these same four ‘old white men’ are NOT PUSHING FOR REFORM on the hundred million dollar bonuses of their ‘old white men’ Wall Street buddies.

Chuck Grassley, R-IA, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla, Jon Kyl R-AZ and John Cornyn, R-TX have joined together to block further federal funding of Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

The allegations against Boys and Girls Clubs of America are:

Roxanne Spillett, president and CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, received a total compensation of $988,591 in 2008, according to the charity’s tax filings. She got a base salary of $360,774, a bonus of $150,000 and other compensation of $83,152, for a total of $593,926. She also received $385,500 in deferred compensation, most of which went to a retirement plan, and $9,165 in nontaxable benefits.

They are concerned that:

the chief executive of a charity that has been closing local clubs for lack of funding was compensated nearly $1 million in 2008. They also questioned why in the same year officials spent $4.3 million on travel, $1.6 million on conferences, conventions and meetings, and $544,000 in lobbying fees.

Hmmm, excessive travel and conference expenses, conventions and meetings and LOBBYING FEES?  Sounds like the typical life of a POLITICIAN.  What these men do not tell you is how many officials were included in that $4.3 million travel spending, whether the $1.6 million spent on conferences were to put on one conference or fifty, and why in all fairness a childrens’ organization NEEDS to spend $544,000 to LOBBY for funding…

Here’s what Boys and Girls Clubs of America accomplish:

• More than 4 million boys and girls served
• More than 4,000 Club locations
• Locations in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and on U.S. military bases around the world
• More than 50,000 trained professional staff

Boys and Girls Clubs of America have helped millions of kids across America, including R&B singer, Usher.

From academic failure and gang violence to poverty, drugs and obesity, America’s youth face a daunting array of problems – with serious consequences and fewer safety nets at home and in the community. According to a 2007 BGCA alumni survey conducted by Harris Interactive, 57 percent of alumni reported, “The Club saved my life,” while another 28 percent credited Boys & Girls Clubs with keeping them in school.

“Growing up in the Club, I had the chance to experience a lot of positive things; it helped reinforce the values I learned at home including good character, leadership and giving back to my community, my country and my world,” said Usher. “It’s where I developed my love of singing and performing, received help with my homework, and it’s where I found a safe place to go after school.”

So how do we begin to have constructive change, when the complainers do exactly what they’re trying to stop?

And why do our kids need lobbyists to fight for money that is channeled to Big Banks whose CEOs’ crazy annual incomes are NEVER LIMITED?

Where is the integrity?

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