Monthly Archives: January 2011

Seeding the Future of Our Food

January 31, 2011
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Seeding the Future of Our Food

HERD ABOUT IT? by Ana Grarian Ana has been away attending an Agriculture Law and Policy conference at the Vermont Law School. Pollinate & Cultivate: Seeding the Future of Our Food a student-organized conference designed to inspire creative solutions to the many challenges facing our current food systems. Ana wishes that more students had been required to attend the panels as part of their course work, as it hosted an impressive roster of speakers including Lynn Henning the 2010 Goldman Environmental Prize winner, Chris Petersen former president of the Iowa Farmer’s Union, Jack Lazor owner of Butterworks Farm, an organic Jersey dairy in VT., and a host of other folks interested in farming sustainably, the ethical treatment of farm laborers, and the environment.

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The Teabagger Congressman in ‘My Name is Oil’

January 31, 2011
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The Teabagger Congressman in ‘My Name is Oil’

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Today’s Quote-to-Quote on Ayn Rand’s Opinion of Democracy

January 30, 2011
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I wonder if the House ‘Budget Czar,’ Rep. Paul Ryan, who provided the Republican response to Obama’s SOTU January 23rd, understands his idol Ayn Rand wasn’t exactly enthralled with democracy? Maybe some member of our MSM will ask Ryan why he holds an anti-democratic elitist like Rand in such high regard? “Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom.” – Ayn Rand, as quoted by Mark Ames. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” [...] “Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism.” – Rep. Paul Ryan, praising Ayn Rand on two separate occasions, as quoted by Joshua Holland.

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Finding Jesus

January 30, 2011
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Finding Jesus

Courtesy Bartcop.com

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Clarence Thomas and the Sound of Crickets

January 29, 2011
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Remember all of the Right-wing outrage over Charlie Rangel’s failure to report income on a house in the Dominican Republic?  Drawing and Quartering him before running him through a blender wasn’t enough of a punishment for him — they wanted more.  And More. But here we have Supreme Court Clown,  Clarence Thomas who has lied on every financial disclosure statement for the last six years stating that his wife, was unemployed.  Yet it has to be awful hard for him to have missed the $686,589 she made while working for the Heritage Foundation and Hillsdale College during that time. Thomas, in his response has stated that his wife’s income was “inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions.” Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause, said he found Justice Thomas’s explanation about the omission to be “implausible.” As a Supreme Court justice who regularly hears complex legal cases, “it is hard to see how he could have misunderstood the simple directions of a federal disclosure form.” … or Thomas just deliberately left it out.  Either way, it is time that this clown needs to either step down or be removed. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.  Congress isn’t going…

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Ayn Rand: Another Conservative Hypocrite

January 29, 2011
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[Editor's Note: Actually, when I read "The Fountainhead" as a teenager, I took it as a tale of an artist, in this case an architect, displaying his integrity by creating only what he wanted, and flouting the establishment rather than selling himself out to the highest bidder and producing mediocre work. The unregulated capitalist 'Libertarian' side of the novel's protagonist, Howard Roark, was not immediately apparent to my young eyes - if anything, it showed those wealthy men who ran big businesses and other power-brokers in a poor light, with a few exceptions. That said, Rand's anti-government 'Objectivist' philosophy became the basis for Libertarianism, and much of the justification for selfishness and cruelty to others we now hear expounded daily by the GOP, so the author's use of government social programs like Medicare in her waning years is a particularly acute form of hypocrisy.] Ayn Rand Railed Against Government Benefits, But Grabbed Social Security and Medicare When She Needed Them by Joshua Holland, AlterNet, January 29, 2011 Ayn Rand was not only a schlock novelist, she was also the progenitor of a sweeping “moral philosophy” that justifies the privilege of the wealthy and demonizes not only the slothful, undeserving poor…

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My Favorite Martian

January 29, 2011
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My Favorite Martian

Written by andsoitgoes for smirkingchimp.com Decades ago, courtesy of our astronauts who boldly went where no man had gone before, I saw a photograph of Earth for the first time. The sight of our planet, in all of its magnificent splendor, dangling out there in space, filled me with reverent awe. Yet…at the same time…it was pretty horrifying. I mean, how does it just float there? What if it falls or something? It looks so freaking vulnerable…just hanging there like a sitting duck. Suppose some wayward asteroid decides to play some outer space Bocce with it? Seriously, it makes me very nervous to actually think about Earth. It’s sort of just easier to live here and go about my business and not dwell on the whole improbable thing too much. But, still…that picture haunts me. This miniscule orb that we’re all inhabiting – blue with those stunning land masses and white, puffy clouds…surrounded by all that space – all those stars – all those planets – it’s a very striking, beautiful image. And at the same time…it always makes me dizzy. Give me a minute. I’ve got to put my head between my knees… Okay…better now… So, anyway, the other…

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The GOPs Slash-Spending, Balance-the-Budget School Lunch Program Illustrated

January 29, 2011
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The GOPs Slash-Spending, Balance-the-Budget School Lunch Program Illustrated

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Inspection- Lying for the FOX

January 28, 2011
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Inspection- Lying for the FOX

With slightly less makeup than Tammy Faye Baker her wide angry eyes look at the camera and then her guest. She asks him if he has ever watched FOX News programs and before he can answer she claims she watches every day and they never make Nazi references, like he claimed, when talking about the Left. Jon Stewart then airs many of the Nazi references made on FOX: including on her program. Megyn Kelly lied. And she knows it.

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Disarray in the Religious Right’s Armageddon-ville

January 28, 2011
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Disarray in the Religious Right’s Armageddon-ville

Written by Bill Berkowitz Joel Rosenberg, prominent Christian Zionist, best-selling author of fiction and non-fiction books enmeshing apocalyptic visions with Biblical prophecy, and a sought after speaker on issues related to the Middle East and The Rapture, is no stranger to the End Times business. You might say that he has been milking it for all it’s worth, carving out a nice little niche for himself. But no matter how many times he cites scripture when talking or writing about events in the Middle East (what he calls the Epicenter) presaging an End Times scenario, he is careful to avoid the one thing that could put the kybosh on his cottage industry: he never offers a specific timetable for when the Final Days will unfold.

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