Electronic Pen

The National Labor Relations Board said the rocket company had wrongly dismissed eight people for a letter raising concerns about the chief executive.

An effort to overhaul how children learn to read, known as the science of reading movement, is sweeping the country. Here’s where it stands.

Rodgers, the Jets quarterback, suggested during an appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show” that Kimmel had a connection to Jeffrey Epstein, leading Kimmel to threaten legal action.

How the left, not just the right, helped bring Gay down.

The killing of Saleh al-Arouri, a key Hamas strategist, in Lebanon sets the organization back at a vulnerable time. The group has rebuilt after the assassination of other leaders, though.

Iowa and New Hampshire may soon make Donald Trump the unofficial G.O.P. presidential nominee. But could Nikki Haley pull off a surprise?

General Suleimani, the powerful commander heading Iran’s Quds Force, was considered a hero by some in the country. The anniversary of his death has attracted horrific violence.

Anton Deibe, 17, and his family were flying into Tokyo when their plane collided with a Coast Guard aircraft.

In addition to a well-trained crew and an advanced plane, the safe evacuation of 367 passengers came down to a relative absence of panic.

Nobody disputed that the defendant had handed over a note demanding money — please — from a Newark bank. The only remaining question: How dangerous had he been, really?

The fate of Harvard’s president is the latest evidence of a deep crisis in American academia.

Even though I am no longer observant, my religious upbringing is still essential to me. I love ancient Jewish texts and Orthodox deep cuts.

ValTown, an account on X and other social media platforms, spotlights gangs and drug kingpins of the 1980s and 1990s — and how crime and celebrity often intersect.

WILL DURST FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

And now, another installment in the continuing saga that is The Herman Cain Sexual Harassment Soap Opera. When last we left him, the candidate was praising his main backers: "The Koch Brothers are my brothers from another mother."  Guess we should be grateful he hasn't dismissed his accusers with an offhand: "Bros before hoes."

You could say the situation is fluid, or more precisely glutinous. It's hard to tell who or what to believe. Conservative talk shows pound home the theory this is all a put- up job while the liberal media remains incredulous the Cain Train hasn't derailed into a fiery pileup. Right now it all boils down to a classic case of He Said. She Said. She Said. She Said. She Said. She Said. She Said.

The good news for the first- ever, serious black Republican Presidential candidate is a new CBS poll reveals 61% of potential GOP primary participants don't consider the charges serious. Apparently there's a large contingent of voters who either believe girls lie or boys will be boys. In three short years this country has gone from Hope and Change to Grope and Change. Ain't life odd?

In his defense, Cain maintains he's never engaged in any inappropriate behavior. Ever. Really? Ever? Hell, if this Presidency thing doesn't work out, the guy should run for Pope. Or maybe he's better equipped to replace Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Of course, the term "inappropriate" is objective. Fashionistas might call his cowboy hat highly inappropriate.

Cain's staff went so far as to say the sexual harassment allegations have actually helped the campaign. Helped! Wow. All he needs is a false imprisonment charge, he could sew this thing right up.

Cain has changed his story almost as often as Mitt Romney changes positions. And his memory problems draw right up to Rick Perry's Energy Department. Again, almost. First he couldn't remember anything, then admitted a charge may have been investigated, but there was no settlement, then maybe there was An Agreement, but now he refuses to comment on any of the cases, relentlessly retreating to his stuttering German "nein, nein, nein."

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JACQUELINE MARCUS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Climate change produced Japan's catastrophic earthquake and tsunami.  Although the corporate media and the U.S. government have swept the Fukushima nuclear disaster under the proverbial censorship rug, it's important to remember that an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale and the ensuing 50-foot high tsunami wave led to a meltdown of three of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors. Japan's nuclear regulatory agency reported that 31 radioactive isotopes were released. In contrast, 16 radioactive isotopes were released from the A-bomb that hit Hiroshima Aug. 6, 1945. The agency also reported that radioactive cesium released was almost 170 times the amount of the A-bomb, and that the release of radioactive Iodine-131 and Strontium-90 was about two to three times the level of the A-bomb.  And that information doesn't include the unknown deadly amount of radioactive water from the Fukushima plants that are being perpetually dumped into the Pacific Ocean since the meltdowns occurred last March 2011.

Terming Fukushima Japan's "second massive nuclear disaster," novelist Haruki Murakami said "this time no one dropped a bomb on us" but instead "we set the stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own lands, and we are destroying our own lives. While we are the victims, we are also the perpetrators. We must fix our eyes on this fact," he continued. "If we fail to do so, we will inevitably repeat the same mistake again, somewhere else."   Indeed, a recent report revealed that radiation is being detected across Europe. "Anywhere spent nuclear fuel is handled, there is a chance that... iodine-131 will escape into the environment," the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says on its website.

Speaking as a part-time resident of Kauai, we've been immensely concerned about radiation plumes blowing over from Japan.  If the government has been monitoring radiation levels, then that critical information has been concealed from the public.

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On the morning of November 14th, the Oakland police again dismantled the Occupy camp in Oscar Grant Plaza. This action was allegedly taken because a man was killed in an altercation near Occupy Oakland last week, and because the Occupy camp has become a place where homeless people can be fed and sheltered.

It was the 101st murder this year in Oakland, and its use as a reason to squash Occupy Oakland is tragically absurd:

A man was shot and killed Thursday just outside the Oakland encampment that anti-Wall Street protesters have occupied for the last month, causing a scream-filled commotion in the City Hall plaza where the camp stands and turning a planned anniversary celebration into a somber, candlelit memorial.

With opinions about Occupy Oakland and its effect on the city having become more divided in recent days, supporters and opponents immediately reacted to the homicide - the city's 101st this year.

Camp organizers said the attack was unrelated to their activities, while city and business leaders, cited the death as proof that the camp itself either bred crime or drained law enforcement resources from other parts of the Oakland.

Mayor Jean Quan, who has been criticized by residents on both sides for issuing mixed signals about the local government's willingness to tolerate the camp, issued a statement Thursday providing a clear eviction notice.

"Tonight's incident underscores the reason why the encampment must end. The risks are too great," Quan said. "We need to return (police) resources to addressing violence throughout the city. It's time for the encampment to end. Camping is a tactic, not a solution."

Ironically, as BuzzFlash at Truthout noted awhile back, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) is under the watch of a federal judge who has said the department is so egregiously in noncompliance with reasonable police standards that it may be put into federal receivership. It seems that the OPD has a history of planting evidence, framing arrested individuals and being trigger happy, among other "irregularities."

But the most profound injustice is the notion that in a city where 100 people have been killed this year - and even with the heavy police presence around the Occupy Oakland site, this one particular murder wasn't prevented - somehow the Occupy movement was the cause of the shooting.

To blame the Occupy movement for a shooting located in a society that does little to prevent approximately 10,000 firearm homicides a year in the United States, with a large chunk of them in neglected African-American and Latino communities, is beyond nonsensical; it's admitting the failure of the status quo to address violence in a large economically deprived underclass that is generally ignored.

As to feeding and housing the homeless and hungry, isn't that something cities across the nation should be doing? Isn't that what Christ implored of his followers?

What the Occupy movement is doing is not causing an increase in violence and homelessness; it is inadvertently exposing the epidemic of violence, particularly shootings, and poor people without means in need of services.

That is the biggest threat to the status quo of the Oakland municipal government, and to cities across the nation that are unleashing militarized police forces on generally harmless protesters advocating for a just society. The institutionalized powers of government and the 1 percent would prefer that the squalid, deadly underside of our society remain swept under the rug, all covered up.

The truth is too inconvenient and disruptive.

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The One Percent Solution is the name of a novel by

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TONY PEYSER FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

The verbal gaffe that's basically ended

The Texas Governor’s political life

Reminded me of this famous incident in

The long career of Barney Phife

Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBuPQgV8yBM

BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Some in the pro-choice community are certainly breathing a deep sigh of relief as Mississippi's Personhood Amendment, which would have defined life as beginning at conception, was soundly defeated on Tuesday, November 8. With nearly 60 percent of the state's voters rejecting Initiative 26, there is no doubt that a celebration is in order.

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Body

 

Someone recently coined the phrase the "elevation of stupidity" to describe the gyrations of current political campaigners. Indeed there is a depressing array of candidates who lack original ideas and the ability to articulate agendas worthy of serious discussion.

Yet day after day, debate after debate media lightweights and heavyweights alike spend hours of what passes for informed discourse boring the daylights out of most reasonable Americans. The only audience that enjoys the hyperbolic nonsense is one waiting to hear what they already believe - - ready to applaud the most absurd observations ever to be afforded a public forum. It is important, though to realize that members of the human caucus are comfortable celebrating the death penalty meted out in large numbers in Texas or finding it appropriate that others must die because they lack health insurance. It is a state of mind we would not otherwise know were it not for media coverage and so it is best that we are so informed.

But that we are forced to listen to the rants of mindless pontificators holding forth on everything from abortion to the tax code or opt out of news cycles is an unhealthy sign of our times. Where did the Santorums, the Bachmanns and their fanatical colleagues ever get the idea that their opinions were sound enough to guide the rest of us along the paths of righteousness? And what gives them the right to insult a president who is light years ahead of them intellectually or to constantly criticize programs they are incapable of either understanding or revising to accommodate today's economic intricacies?

A cheer goes up from supporters when Governor Perry suggests eliminating the Commerce Department without understanding that Commerce conducts the census among other functions. To be sure certain efficiencies could no doubt be realized at Commerce, but it seems obvious that cheering audiences, caught up in a frenzy of cost cutting, have no idea what they are so excited about and only a vague notion of what tasks various government agencies are charged to undertake. Health care? Why not just accept the Bush assertion that no-one in this country goes without medical attention because they can always go to the local emergency room, even if that care is limited and extremely expensive?

And we are expected to believe that criticism of Herman Cain is the result of the left being unwilling to see a "businessman" in the White House. Perhaps there's an inchoate fear among voters who actually think about stuff that Cain, the businessman could be counting pizza profits when that three-o'clock call reached the White House. Cain, like so many in the general population and among Tea Partiers in particular is incapable of gaining ground in the complex international milieu into which he would be thrust should he somehow reach the pinnacle of power as president. But even in the sorry state of our political condition and an electorate too often willing to mistake the most absurd rhetoric for legitimacy it is hard to imagine Herman Cain rising above his current state of controlled ineptitude.

On the debate stage Mitt Romney does indeed look the most presidential, but the truth is that just looking presidential isn't what the country needs right now. The debates are showing us not who the best candidate is, but rather who is the least foolish among a cast of small-minded hucksters.

 

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

You might not think that Missoula, Montana, (population around 65,000) would be the place that a revolt against corporate personhood might start, but you'd be wrong.

In fact, this past Tuesday, 75 percent of the voters in Missoula supported a referendum declaring that "corporations are not human beings." It's part of a national movement to encourage states to support a constitutional amendment to deny to corporations the rights given to individual Americans. The campaign was launched after the 2010 US Supreme Court decision granting corporations the rights of free speech guaranteed to individuals, including campaign spending.

According to the Missoulian, Cynthia Wolken - the councilwoman who initiated the referendum - was hopeful that other cities would follow suit:

"Basically, it affirmed what we were all seeing on the streets, which is the average Missoulian wanted to have their voice heard ... and they want their elected officials to fix the problem of corporate personhood," Wolken said. "So I hope this message is heard and we get started on fixing the problem."

As she sees it, corporations have been given too much power, and as stated in the Missoula resolution, their "profits and survival are often in direct conflict with the essential needs and rights of human beings."

Every week, over the past few months, Truthout has been excerpting Thom Hartmann's prescient book, "Unequal Protection," on how corporate personhood mistakenly became embedded in court rulings. In the book - available in a revised and expanded edition from Truthout - Hartmann writes:

For humans to take back control of our governments by undoing corporate personhood, we'll have to begin with the governments that are the closest and most accessible to us. It's almost impossible for you or me to go to Washington, D.C., and have a meeting with our senator or representative - most of us usually can't even get them on the phone unless we're a big contributor. But most of us can meet with our city council members or show up at their meetings. Lobbying within the local community is both easy and effective. Local politicians are the closest to - and generally the most responsive - to the people they represent.

When enough local communities have passed ordinances that directly challenge corporate personhood, state legislatures will begin to notice. As with the issues of slavery, women's suffrage, and Prohibition (among others), when local communities take actions that are followed by states, eventually the federal government will get on board.

Missoula, the home of the University of Montana, is showing the way.

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