|
Bold and Daring: The Way Progressive News Should Be
|
| If you have a problem reading this email, please click here to see the web page version You received this email because you signed up for it at OpEdNews. Unsubscribe instructions are at the bottom of this email.
There's great news from the Supreme Court and it's decision rejecting the patenting of human DNA.
It's a real surprise, that all the justices sided against a business. Who knows? Anything is possible in these pregnant times.
Also, please not my podcast, Katherine Eban; Generic Drug Investigative Reporter On Generic Drug Production Corruption
She shares some pretty upsetting information you'll want to know about.
Opednews runs on an ultra-slim budget, but we need your help to meet it. Please take a moment to make a donation today. Click here to donate.
thanks,
rob kall
Support Opednews. Make a tax deductible donation to make OEN Strong.  Daily Headlines
The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down patents on two genes associated with ovarian breast cancer, held by Myriad Genetics Inc.
By Darren Latham
Is Constitutional Conservatism Neither? How Mistaking Our Nation to Be Constituted by One Document Offends Rule of Law 
Seeking
better-informed constitutional discourse, this essay (i) details
foundational mistakes of strict-construction in constitutional
interpretation, with illustrations from abortion, health-care, gay
rights, and gun rights; (ii) refutes recent challenges to the virtue of
empathy and other judicial attributes; and (iii) shows why a broader
interpretive method better conforms to both the rule of law and
conservative values.
Williams
Olefins plant in Geismar, LA, makes 1.3 billion pounds of ethylene and
90 million pounds of polymer grade propylene annually. An explosion
and a "fireball in the air" was reported and flames were visible above a
tree line. The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and
Environmental Protection Agency have people at the scene and have
started monitoring the air quality.
The
need to bring our war dollars home is urgent. The Pentagon's budget
continues to gobble up 56.5% of federal spending while austerity grows.
Sequestration did not fix the problem, and military spending is a lousy
jobs program. Congress can fix this by voting no on the FY14 National
Defense Authorization Act which has $637.5 billion for more drones,
nukes, missile "defense" and wars.
By Norman Solomon
Clarity from Edward Snowden and Murky Response from Progressive Leaders in Congress 
As
the largest caucus of Democrats on Capitol Hill, the Progressive Caucus
could supply a principled counterweight to the bombast coming from the
likes of Boehner and Feinstein. But for that to happen, leaders of the
75-member caucus would need to set a good example by putting up a real
fight.
By Rob Kall
Katherine Eban; Generic Drug Investigative Reporter On Generic Drug Production Corruption 
Katherine
Eban has done extraordinary investigative journalism looking at
corruption in the production of generic drugs. She talks about how the
corruption affects healthcare, all about the FDA and healthcare in
America.
I
went out to my car this morning and, as I looked behind me to pull out,
this is what I saw. You can see a bit of my car in the bottom left of
the photo. There was this long single-file row of Canadian geese and
goslings.
Members
of Congress seem to be playing a game of one-upsmanship in their
increasingly hawkish reactions to the NSA leaks. Democrat Dianne
Feinstein said whistleblower Edward Snowden committed an act of treason,
and now Republican Peter King has decided that any journalists who
reported the information leaked by Snowden should face criminal
prosecution.
Many
Americans, particularly the young, are angry over government spying --
and are cheering on leakers who release "secret" documents. By taking
the "establishment" side of this debate, President Obama risks
discrediting government just as it is needed on global warming and other
critical issues.
Our
nation now finds itself at a crossroads when it comes to Constitutional
rights and civil liberties. The DHS has become way too powerful, with
no checks and balances. In effect, it's created an entire surveillance
industry around itself. It is time for a change. Repeal the PATRIOT Act,
dissolve the DHS, and let's return to sanity.
I
gave a talk on June 2, 2013 at the Public Banking Institute's
conference on the New Economy. It was titled Bottom Up Economics and I'd
written it a month earlier. But after hearing some inspirational talks
from preceding speakers, I re-wrote it and turned it into something more
impromptu that I felt would better express my vision of bottom up as a
revolution that is based on the values of bottom up ideas.
he
Rapture Right is now claiming the increase on sexual assaults within
the US military is due to the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. What's the
reasoning, you ask? Seems the troops are suddenly sex-obsessed because
they are finally free to talk about it now. Y'know, because they never
talked about sex before (!)
The
marvel of three dot journalism is that the fall of Paris, Mick Jagger's
70th birthday and the Magic Bullet theory can all be mentioned in one
column.
By Joel Hirschhorn
Limbaugh Mocks Free Speech Limbaugh is not just entertaining, he is destroying the US political system and our democracy. He continues to make extreme statements that have no factual basis, the latest being we are in a coup d'etat.
Latest drone attack in Pakistan was heinous and visciopus
By lisa Sullivan
Delegation Finds Militarization Causes Suffering, Family Separation and Death at the Border 
Hyper-militarized
America is not only terrorizing countries around the globe, it is also
busy brutalizing our neighbors along the fence in our backyard.
In
the world of nonprofit "dark money" groups, nothing is as it seems:
political committees, through the magic of the internal revenue code,
become tax-exempt "social welfare" organizations; a partisan campaign ad
becomes principled "issue advocacy."
By Richard (RJ) Eskow
Big Money and the NSA Scandal ... How Dangerous is the "Security/Digital Complex"? 
A
lot of people are getting rich from national security data contracts.
And, coincidentally or not, this corporate-driven national security
apparatus seems especially interested in protecting Wall Street banks
and bankers. In a very real way, financial institutions are now data
institutions -- and the "too-big-to-fail" ones are grabbing all the
power that comes with the hoarding of information.
Newly
liberated countries used the American First and Second Bill of Rights
as the foundation of their democracies. The transition was peaceful
because for the first time in modern history it was inarguably true that
there was more money to be made pursuing peace than war.
By Dennis Kaiser
Surveillence To Keep Us Safe. Not. It has recently been brought to our attention that Verizon (and most likely AT&T, T-Mobile, and all other phone companies) has released its data bank of all phone calls made by every phone in the United States. The same action has applied to emails,
The
revelations of Edward Snowden, and his likely fate, bring to mind a
decades-long process that has made these terrible events all but
foreordained. An aristocratic temperament made leaks necessary; a loss
of equity made whistle-blowers lose their ability to fight back.
By Tom Engelhardt
Rebecca Solnit, The Art of Not Knowing Where You Are Here are my three fleeting personal experiences of the far North. In 1982, on my only trip to Japan, I flew over the Aleutian Islands. Out the plane window was a spectacular sight, jagged, snowy mountaintops tearing through clouds -- spectacular, that is, until a stewardess came over and asked me to pull down the shade. The movie Fame was onscreen and the Aleutian light was bothering the passengers around me.
By David Swanson
A Built-In Cure for War Erin Niemela's recent proposal that we amend the Constitution to ban war is provocative and persuasive. Count me in. But I have a related idea that I think should be tried first. Latest Articles
It's evil, lawless and authoritarian. And NSA as leaker Snowden has shown us, its aims are to be all-powerful.
The
political players who have mastered television and radio and direct
mail, the Karl Roves and the David Axelrods, as well as the thousands of
consultants you've never heard of, are deep into a process that they
believe will allow them to master the Internet. The reality is that the
consulting class no longer views the Internet as a "new frontier" or a
tool that needs to be understood.
Even
though Manning pled guilty to 10 of 22 charges last March, the U.S.
Government is going ahead with all its charges, without providing a
credible rationale. One charge, under the 1913 Espionage Act, could
carry the death penalty.
Power
posing has shown that we can change our internal experience by changing
our external physiology. Is this sufficient for success>
 Best News Links from the Web
To
many people, watchdog reporting is synonymous with investigative
reporting, specifically, ferreting out secrets. But there's another,
maybe even more crucial form of watchdog reporting, especially in this
age of relentless public relations and spin. It involves reporting what
may well be in plain sight, contrasting that with what officials in
government and other positions of power say, rebuffing and rebutting
misinformation, and sometimes even taking a position on what the facts
suggest is the right solution.
House
Homeland Security Chairman Peter King isn't backtracking on his
suggestion that Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who first broke
the NSA snooping story, should be subject to criminal prosecution. King
said, "in this case, when you have someone who has disclosed secrets
like this and threatens to release more, then to me, yes, there has to
be, there should be legal action taken against him. This is a very
unusual case with life and death implications for Americans."
The
Obama administration should be leading international efforts to outlaw
the widespread use of weaponized unmanned drones, just as gas warfare
and nuclear warfare have been outlawed. Sadly, President Barack Obama is
rather promoting their use, making the world an even more dangerous
place. Such weapons, like nuclear bombs, are bound to spread and what's
good for the goose may also be good for the gander. These weapons could
come to haunt the U.S. itself in the future. They don't increase U.S.
security in the long run. They rather reduce it. --Nobody should have
the right to kill just anybody, anywhere in the world. This is the stuff
of tyranny.
Senator
Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, offered a measure that
would give military prosecutors rather than commanders the power to
decide which sexual assault crimes to try, with the goal of increasing
the number of people who report crimes without fear of retaliation. Mr.
Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said he would replace Ms. Gillibrand's
measure -- which has 27 co-sponsors, including four Republicans -- with
one that would require a senior military officer to review decisions by
commanders who decline to prosecute sexual assault cases.
Taliban
suicide bomber struck outside Afghanistan's Supreme Court on Tuesday,
killing 17 people in the deadliest attack in Kabul in over a year and a
half. It was also the second consecutive day of attacks in the Afghan
capital, undermining the ability of Afghan forces to keep security
without help from NATO troops. The attacker rammed his SUV into buses
carrying court employees at the end of the day' work. All of the dead
were civilians, including women and children, police said, and at least
39 people were wounded.
Last
week, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that while his country
had every right to sell arms to the Syrian government, Moscow had not
yet delivered the advanced S-300 air defense system to Damascus. But
that has not cooled a war of words over the S-300s that some say could
threaten an outright war between Israel and Russia over the
sophisticated missile defense system. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu continues to warn that should Russia deliver the system to
Syrian President Bashar Assad, the S-300 "is likely to draw us into a
response, and could send the region deteriorating into war."
Edward
Snowden says he wants to ask the people of Hong Kong to decide his fate
after choosing the city because of his faith in its rule of law. The
29-year-old former CIA employee behind what might be the biggest
intelligence leak in US history revealed his identity to the world in
Hong Kong on Sunday. His decision to use a city under Chinese
sovereignty as his haven has been widely questioned -- including by some
rights activists in Hong Kong. "People who think I made a mistake in
picking Hong Kong as a location misunderstand my intentions. I am not
here to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality," Snowden
said.
|
