ABC announced a new TV series "Homeland Security USA", premiering Jan. 6, which is supposed to be a reality show that is produced with the Giant Helping Hand of Homeland Security, which certainly wants and needs lots of entertainment-style propaganda. According to this NYT article:

In an announcement Thursday, ABC said the production "has been given unprecedented access to the agencies," including Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard.

But this isn't about anti-terrorism efforts. This is about immigration.

Out with those telescopes, all! Away from your computer, astronomy happens. This from New Scientist:

The full Moon will loom larger in the sky on Friday than it has since 1993, as it will be nearly as close as it ever comes to Earth in its orbit.

And brighter, too. And there's a meteor shower in the backdrop. If there ever was a time for skywatching...

In spite of the life-death importance of health care, the subject frequently borders on boring. But in India, "health care" means the struggle between life and death, poverty and survival, superstition and rationality, being human and being nothing - "a stone without a soul". The unimaginable transformation of a small corner of rural India and those who inhabit it has a wider, deeper meaning for all humankind. What these people have done transcends ordinary heroics. It gets to the bottom of everything wrong, and right, with people.

This is the story of Sarubai Salve, Babai Sathe, and a mind-boggling "community health" (but really way beyond this paltry subject line) project called Jamkhed (whose website is here) founded by 75-year-old Raj Arole and his wife Mabelle (who died in 1999) in one of the poorest areas in India. The idea was to provide health care for India's most destitute people, people without hope, people like the untouchables.

Many are now expressing dismay over President-elect Obama's choices for a security team, including Bushco's Defense Secretary Robert Gates, as being far too hawkish to give us hope for "change" when it comes to conduct of the wars and foreign policy. As this article put it,

The assembly of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan Rice and Joe Biden is a kettle of hawks with a proven track record of support for the Iraq war, militaristic interventionism, neoliberal economic policies and a worldview consistent with the foreign policy arch that stretches from George HW Bush's time in office to the present.

So you think you understand finance? Do you think anybody understands finance? Does the Secretary of the Treasury understand finance? Well...according to this website:

Our money system is not what we have been led to believe. The creation of money has been "privatized," or taken over by a private money cartel. Except for coins, all of our money is now created as loans advanced by private banking institutions — including the private Federal Reserve. Banks create the principal but not the interest to service their loans. To find the interest, new loans must continually be taken out, expanding the money supply, inflating prices — and robbing you of the value of your money.

Could this be what's behind the whole economic collapse we're now trying to dig ourselves out of by selling bad debts to China? And would that then rob the Chinese of the value of their money?

Nothing like this has ever happened before. The sheer numbers of people - a quarter million in Chicago's Grant Park & environs - all mesmerized, inspired, united, moved to the core, and ecstatic about Barack Obama's election as President of the United States - doesn't count the untold millions watching on their televisions and computer screens: an amazing celebration of democracy - a peaceful, dramatic, and real people's victory - of the people, by the people, for the people. Was it the numbers, the enthusiasm, the sense of release from a dark period, of freedom from some unnamed threat, or was it the sheer power of human cooperation on a scale grander than anyone really comprehended until it actually went down?

Or was it the power of one man to lead in a time that cried out for rational, sensible, genuine leadership - by gathering and uniting an entire nation to turn the page??

When great change is about to roll over, the roaches crawl out. In flaming red (neck) Pensacola, as in other places (where even more abominable acts have been committed) - such as yesterday's busted Neo-Nazi assassination plot, more racist, violence-edged action reared its ugly head. This time, a CSX (train) bridge in Pensacola, Florida was spray-painted with "MURDER OBAMA" grafitti - and quickly painted over on Monday evening.

It was linked in spirit, if not in actual connections, to the skinhead plot to kill Barack Obama - a cameraderie of the cockroach? no, that's unfair to cockroaches - in a kind of union of hate-mongers and racists. Is that all the John McCain has left? Not exactly, but...

It's one thing to say "end the war in Iraq." It's another thing to deal with the thousands of detainees it is holding there without charge and with fewer rights than Guantanamo detainees. What's going on, and what will happen?

This question is addressed in David Enders' great report on Camp Bucca in Iraq and the situation with detainees from the Iraq war.

The real issue here is not so much torture (although that isn't ruled out) but a policy of endless detention, endless war, and detaining people, including hundreds of children, without charge or due process. And their families are also victims. And... is all this a side effect of the "Surge"?

It's simply obvious. And predictable. This report says

Scott Horton reports today that PBS may have refused to nationally air a controversial documentary on the use of torture by the U.S. government in order to protect its funding.

You can view the documentary called "Torturing Democracy" here.

What stinks about it is that PBS is supposed to be "viewer supported" and hence above the level of government censorship and influence. But apparently not:

According to producer Sherry Jones, PBS told her that "no time slot could be found for the documentary before January 21, 2009″ — the day after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney leave office.

McCain is no "uniter" and when it comes to incitement to violence, he's not an innocent bystander - he's fanning the flames. Maybe this is already out there. But to no surprise to many, it's official: Huffpo's Jeffrey Feldman reports:

According to Time, McCain campaign staffers in Virginia are teaching volunteers to see Barack Obama as having terrorist 'friends,' and then providing these volunteers with arguments for persuading voters that Sen. Obama, like Osama Bin Laden, shares responsibility for bombings of the Pentagon.

The report from inside the McCain campaign brings to light an alarming fact: while McCain tells his supporters publicly to refrain from violent rhetoric,  he continues to teach his volunteers rhetoric designed to elicit violent responses.

Is that the sort of responsible leadership we need in these critical times? Or does it actually break up the "union"?

There may be a lot of reasons for this, but isn't it absurd that the Presidential debates have so far totally ignored the issue of immigration? Is that because it's too hot-button? Or because they hope they can get elected without dealing with it? Angela Kelley brings this issue up:

Latino community to immigration advocates to probing journalists have been eagerly awaiting to hear more about what the two candidates plan to do about the 12 million undocumented people living in the United States. To date, they've heard very little.

She's not going to say it outright. But Sarah Palin couldn't pin down a straight answer on a simple question in her field of "expertise" - energy - about exports of Alaskan oil to China.

A questioner at a town hall-style meeting in Wisconsin said he had heard that at least 75 percent of the oil drilled in Alaska was being sold to China and said, if true, he would like to know why.

"No. It’s not 75 percent of our oil being exported," Palin said, suggesting some of Alaska’s oil, in fact, may be going abroad but not that much.

"In fact," she added, "Congress is pretty strict on, um, export bans of oil and gas especially."

Ah, when the "experts" pontificate! She's giving us a two-fer!

Going into the debates, it makes sense to look at the potential effect of the two candidates' speaking styles, and experts have been watching and analyzing. New software into whether or not political candidates are being honest or just spinning based on speech and verbal patterns, inflections, style, etc., came to this unexpected conclusion - honesty aside - about John McCain's style:

"The voice analysis profile for McCain looks very much like someone who is clinically depressed," says Pollermann, a psychologist who uses voice analysis software in her work with patients. Previous research on mirror neurons has shown that listening to depressed voices can make others feel depressed themselves, she says.

So that's why he picked Sarah Palin! Someone who, in contrast to his "depressed" and depressing monotone style, is the closest one could possibly get in politics to totally "manic".

There's a new propaganda war on Islam in this election season, cooked up by "neocons and ex-Israeli diplomats", according to this article:

A group of hard-line U.S. neo-conservatives and former Israeli diplomats, among others, are behind the mass distribution, ahead of the November U.S. presidential election, of a controversial DVD that critics have denounced as Islamophobic.
The group, the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), is working with another organisation called the Clarion Fund, which produced the 60-minute video and is itself tied closely to an Israeli organisation called Aish Hatorah.

The usual fear-mongering propaganda working for McCain? This time it appears to be illegal - and doesn't say much for the newspapers who distribute it either.

Well, if you thought the Bush Administration couldn't do more damage, think again. Now, in the continuing, time-honored tradition of dumping allies - remember our "friend" Saddam Hussein? - a story has now surfaced that the US is planning to dump Iraq's President Maliki - say what??? - yes, Maliki is now a possible target of US assassination plans... for what? First, of course, for his lack of enthusiasm for being under US military occupation and control for the forseeable indefinite future. And, backing that up, for his "leanings" towards that Satan, or possibly anti-Satan, Iran.

Years ago I wandered into a Georgia grocery store run by two twin men in their 70's with a fondness for milk - and politics. Bush I was president then, and we got to talking about how bad things were. He told me that throughout his life, he noticed a clear repeated pattern: whenever the Republicans were in power, they ruined the economy and started wars. Any wars, even little wars (like Reagan's invasion of Grenada), but they had to start wars. He said that's basically what the Republicans were all about.

Now we have the Republican agenda taken to its logical extreme: war without end Amen (the GWOT with its "fronts" in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere), and Total Economic Meltdown.

Not only have some of the biggest banks gone bad, oil prices become an issue, and the housing market gone bad, but the stock market made its worst decline in years, and most analysts are saying this is the worst financial situation since the Great Depression.

Even though there has been a declared "hurricane amnesty" for undocumented workers in Texas, even though the National Weather Service has issued a "certain death" evacuation order, many migrant workers are afraid to evacuate. ICE, the police arm of the DHS (Department of Homeland Security), has been known to deport people even after Michael Chertoff assured people they wouldn't be picked up for evacuating. ICE, as migrants will tell you, has a will of its own, an agenda.

An agenda like all of the DHS, where humanitarian considerations often take last place to the heavy-handed mandate for Security, fanned by "patriotic"-labeled mania and panic. So what's happened to those people?

Think about it, folks. The US re-hired just 4 years ago a couple of guys to run the "World Superpower" we call home (but they call "Homeland", which is totally different, as we've found out) after they effectively gutted the economy, started War Without End Amen based on patent lies, and institutionalized torture, among other things, and now they want to "bail out" their mess with this huge Fannie/Freddie buyout.

Now, after allowing some of those cronies to get rich quick by bloating up on houses as if the housing market was based on Perpetual Motion (and in case that was wrong, they stocked up the Plan B Solution Warehouse with snake oil), we are being told - I repeat, just being told (as in "read only memory" - you can only receive, not input) that your government has just decided to suddenly "buy", and in effect, "be", Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both of whom have become wildly bankrupt and in hopeless debt. And who have "played" with their accounting methods.