The stench of Republican hypocrisy permeates the Spring air as GOP "leaders" from John Boeher to Sarah Palin make weak, limp wristed statements of condemnation of the "violence" unleashed following months of rabble-rousing rhetoric tailored to reach the deepest, inner most recesses of the reptilian portion of their tea bagger minions' brains. Observes ConsortiumNews.com's Nat Parry, "In other words, if you were angry about Bush’s actions, you were irrational, but if you’re furious about Obama’s policies on health reform, your fury is considered “understandable.”" Curious that Moose-olini while lighting the bonfires of tea bagger emotions with her soiled thong at the "Showdown in Searchlight" near Senate majority leaders Harry Reid's Nevada home finds it convenient to denounce her followers' perchance for violence, with a wink and a smile.

JPMorgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and UBS AG were among more than a dozen Wall Street firms involved in a conspiracy to pay below-market interest rates to U.S. state and local governments on investments, according to documents filed in a U.S. Justice Department criminal antitrust case. A government list of previously unidentified “co-conspirators” contains more than two dozen bankers at firms also including Bank of America Corp., Bear Stearns Cos., Societe Generale, two of General Electric Co.’s financial businesses and Salomon Smith Barney, the former unit of Citigroup Inc., according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on March 24.

Author and journalist Christopher Hitchens appeared on "Real Time With Bill Maher" Friday and slammed the Catholic church for it's handling of the "rape and torture of children." Pope Benedict XVI was criticized this week after internal church files showed that in his prior capacity, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had ignored multiple letters from Bishops asking him to defrock a Wisconsin priest who abused as many as 200 boys at a school for the deaf. On top of these claims, the church is dealing with a wave of sex abuse allegations in Germany, Benedict's homeland. Hitchens argued that the church has been complicit in abuse by protecting abusers and shuttling them from parish to parish. As he sees it, the moral church wants "wiggle room" for "the one crime that no one can think about without vomiting."

Last Fall, it was all about the wall: financial bigwigs like former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker, former Citigroup co-CEO John Reed, Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, all espoused reestablishing the legal barrier between the derivatives casino that masquerades today as Wall Street and commercial banks holding insured deposits. It made good sense: the wall goes up in 1933, America becomes the premier financial center for 66 years. The wall comes down in 1999, the financial system collapses exactly 9 years later with the precise characteristics of the massive Wall Street swindles that occurred in the late 1920s when there was also no wall. But the wall has now gone missing in the current financial reform bill advanced out of the Senate Banking Committee by its Chairman, Senator Christopher Dodd.

Part 2 of the interview with Helen Thomas. "Most press rolled over and played dead during Bush years, press was gung-ho to go to war."

"Country music is an important modern cultural movement; hip-hop isn't. Thomas Jefferson deserves to be erased from a list of "great Americans", but Ronald Reagan doesn't. And we should re-evaluate Senator Joe McCarthy: he was almost certainly a national hero. If you think that sounds like a quirky rewriting of American history with a right-wing twist, then you're not alone. "

Every leader from Hitler to Billy Graham has used words to influence people, so Mr. Boehner the word Armageddon does mean something. It may mean nothing to you, but to most Christians it brings on visions of something, the End Times. And the Republican base is Fundamentalist Christians for whom the word "Armageddon" is message received, loud and clear.

In one of the most transparently false attempts at spin we’ve seen since the Bush administration left town, Palin is trying walk back what she intended to convey by releasing a map that certainly appears to be a hit list — which she sent out with a personal message to her violence-prone base: “Don’t Retreat, Instead — RELOAD!”

The Three Great Myths - Why progressive end up spitting into the wind --- They can be summarized succinctly: Myth 1) the free market, left to it's own devices, will solve all our problems and make us all rich; Myth 2) Gubmint' can't do nothin' but take your money and waste it while destroying the entrepreneurial spirit of everyday ‘Mericans; and Myth 3) there's really scary stuff out there (Commies and socialists, terrorists, black people, immigrants, gays, flag-burners, gay flag-burners, black gay flag-burners - whatever it takes to keep us from examining the other myths).

Many doctors, who discovered only last week that pharmacies were giving their patients unproved heart tablets, now say they have no way of knowing whether patients have suffered unnecessarily as a result. “If it’s not approved and no one has tested it, we can’t be sure that it’s safe and effective,” said Dr. Harry M. Lever, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic. If patients with angina took substandard or ineffective nitroglycerin tablets, Dr. Lever said, their pain might not subside and the problem could potentially progress to a heart attack. The F.D.A., which in recent years has been cracking down on a decades-old backlog of unapproved drugs, sent warning letters last week to two drug makers ordering them to stop marketing unapproved nitroglycerin tablets. But the drugs are still being sold at pharmacies while the order takes effect.

Senators writing climate and energy legislation are vigorously courting business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce....The Sierra Club’s new executive director is warning that the powerful environmental group will fight the legislation if the concessions to industry pile up too high.

Like many insurance disputes, the Galeotti case has its share of miscommunication, bureaucratic wrangling and missing documents. But it remains a stark example of a murky practice by some insurance companies and employers – cutting off coverage retroactively for some patients with expensive medical claims. The new health care reform bill bans retroactive decisions by insurers in policies sold to individuals, except in cases of fraud. However, as it stands the ban would not apply to group policies, such as the one held by the Galeotti family, which cover some 150 million Americans.

THERE were times when last Sunday’s great G.O.P. health care implosion threatened to bring the thrill back to reality television: Karl Rove all but lost it, John Boehner revved up his “Hell no, you can’t!," [and] goons hurl(ed) venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. As the week dragged on, reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York — [with] a brick hurled through a [Congressional office] window. The historic Obama-Pelosi health care victory is a big deal, but the bill does not erect a huge New Deal-Great Society-style government program. The health care bill is merely a handy excuse [for this anger which] predates the entire health care debate. When Social Security was passed by Congress in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, there was indeed heated opposition — but nothing like this. It was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. [But as] yet, no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner. Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

No Republican had the courage to remind the rabid that America, at other great crossroads, did put government into their lives. The wealth of countless white middle class families today stems from World War II veteran housing bills that too often, we conveniently forget, discriminated against black veterans along with housing segregation. Surely, more than one tea partier has Medicare or uses a VA hospital. Yet most Republicans do anything they can to deflect responsibility for the frenzy.

"Whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks is planning to release a video that reveals what it's calling a Pentagon "cover-up" of an incident in which numerous civilians and journalists were murdered in an airstrike, according to a recent media advisory. The video will be released on April 5 at the National Press Club, the group said. They also noted their members have recently been tailed by individuals under State Department diplomatic immunity, and that "one related person was detained for 22 hours" while authorities seized computer equipment."

AT&T said Friday that the charge reflects changes to how Medicare subsidies are taxed. Companies say the health care overhaul will require them to start paying taxes next year on a subsidy they receive for retiree drug coverage. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Thursday that the tax law closed a loophole

That wickedly satirical Ambrose Bierce described politics as "the conduct of public affairs for private advantage." Bierce vanished to Mexico nearly a hundred years ago - to the relief of the American political class of his day, one assumes - but in an eerie way he was forecasting America's political culture today. It seems like most efforts to reform a system that's gone awry - to clean house and make a fresh start - end up benefiting the very people who wrecked it in the first place. Which is why Bierce, in his classic little book, "The Devil's Dictionary," defined reform as "a thing that mostly satisfies reformers opposed to reformation." So we got health care reform this week - but it's a far cry from reformation. You can't blame President Obama for celebrating what he did get - he and the Democrats needed some political points on the scoreboard. And imagine the mood in the White House if the vote had gone the other way; they would have been cutting wrists instead of cake. Give the victors their due:

Dean Baker released the following statement today regarding the Obama Administration's overhaul of its foreclosure prevention program: The latest Obama Administration initiative aimed at easing the nation's foreclosure crisis may be well-intentioned, but fails to give proper consideration to the state of the housing market. The biggest winners are likely once again to be the banks. In particular, holders of second mortgages are likely to see this program as a huge bonanza.

As many observers have noted, if these countries had their own national currencies, they could allow their currencies to depreciate. This would give their economies a boost by making their exports more competitive and reducing imports. But this is only one part of the problem caused by their subordination to the Euro. It is not just the impact of the Euro on their trade that is crushing their economies. The more important part is that they are unable to use the expansionary fiscal and monetary policies that would help pull their economies out of recession – or worse, they are being forced to adopt "pro-cyclical" policies, as in the case of the budget cuts and tax increases being adopted in these countries.

Professor Jensen discusses the current crisis facing journalism, and failures of the profession in addressing and framing the major issues confronting us today. The world is facing a collapse of current economic and political systems, with dramatic consequences in the realms of social justice and sustainability. And journalists need to recognize that this is now the defining story of our time and one that must be addressed.