Nathaniel Popper | July 22

LA Times - Wall Street is supposed to have lost love for President Obama since his election, but early donations suggest he actually is doing better with Wall Street this time around.

Among big fundraisers, Obama has drawn close to a third of his money from people in the finance industry, up from 20% during his 2008 campaign, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The amount raised so far is more than two-thirds what Wall Street elites helped Obama raise in his entire 2008 campaign. And it is enough to make the finance world the single largest source of big-ticket donations for Obama. By comparison, the legal profession was his top source in 2008.

The center looked at information that Obama released last week about his so-called bundlers, people who helped collect at least $50,000 for Obama and the Democratic National Committee.

Obama listed 244 bundlers in the disclosure last week and is well on his way to raising more from bundlers than he did in 2008. Outside the finance industry, big names on the list included Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel and producer Jeffrey Katzenberg.

All together, these bundlers raised at least $34.9 million for Obama, at least $11.8 million of which came from people in the finance industry. Among the nine bundlers who raised at least $500,000, four were from the financial world. The numbers are inexact because the campaign gave only broad ranges for what each donor raised.

Notable Wall Street names on the list included Jon Corzine, the former Goldman Sachs executive and governor of New Jersey, and Orin Kramer, who runs the hedge fund management firm Boston Provident.

All of this despite Obama’s moves to criticize and regulate bankers, and the open resentment some Wall Street magnates have expressed toward the president.

Just goes to show that Obama only wants donations from the little people to cover his ass

By Michael Collins

Question: Why did President Obama put Social Security and Medicare on the table in the budget negotiations when 80% of the people oppose cuts to these programs?

Answer: The president is not in office to represent those people. He was selected, funded and carried over the finish line by corporate America. Look at the appointment of Wall Streeter Timothy Geithner, the bailouts, and the failure to prosecute any of the crooks who caused the current recession. He's serving the people who put him in office. Those people don't need Social Security and Medicare.

Oslo | July 22

BBC - A large explosion has hit near government headquarters in the Norwegian capital Oslo.

The blast is thought to have caused damage to the offices of Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and a number of other official buildings.

Witnesses have said several people were injured in the incident in the centre of the city.

There are reports of windows being shattered and smoke drifting in the streets.

Please check comments for updates

Wow, we've done a lot! We drove up to the Taos area today. And then across the Rio Grande Gorge. Included in this set are many photos from Santa Fe, as well. The photos begin here and move forward. The full set can be seen here. Enjoy!

Ian Traynor | Brussels | July 21

The Guardian - European leaders are poised to take a quantum leap to safeguard the future of the euro and rescue Greece from insolvency by turning the eurozone's 15-month-old bailout fund into a much more ambitious instrument resembling an embryonic European monetary fund.

The deal being hatched at an emergency summit of eurozone leaders also looked certain to entail haircuts – losses – for Athens' private investors, increasing the likelihood that Greece will become the first eurozone country deemed to be in some form of default on its sovereign debt.

Did you know there was a Republican Presidential Debate last night?

Don't bother looking for repeats of it on CNN or video on YouTube.

It was held on Twitter

Now there's the @140townhall, hosted by the Tea Party, for a few hapless GOP 2012 candidates.

I don’t think enough attention has been paid to how terrible, asinine and embarrassing it was. It was almost funny. The only way it could possibly have been worse would have been if Romney had showed up.

Cenk Uygur (host of The Young Turks) explains why he turned down a new, significantly larger MSNBC contract after hosting a prime-time show on the network that was beating CNN in the key demo ratings.

(Amazingly, they attempted to tone him down and reduce him to contributor status because "Washington" didn't approve).

video

The Murdoch's and their former chief executive of News International testified before a House of Commons committee yesterday. Their hours of explanations can be summarized in a phrase: we knew nothing. (Image)

Rupert Murdoch was too busy flying around the world milking his cash cow media properties to be at all involved.

Number two son James was the executive in direct command and he heard nothing.

Rebekah Brooks, editor of the News of the World at the time of the Milly Dowler hacking, completed the trifecta of ignorance. Since she knew nothing, her very frequent contact with the Murdoch father-son team had to be, as the Fugs said, "a whole lot of nothing."

Stephen C. Webster | July 20

RawStory - A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that calling for someone to kill the President of the United States cannot be classified as a threat because standing law does not prohibit "predictions or exhortations" to violence.

In a 2-1 decision, judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that California resident Walter E. Bagdasarian was engaging in free speech when he wrote that Obama "will have a 50 cal in the head soon," then called on someone to "shoot the nig."

Bagdasarian published his comments on a Yahoo finance website in the weeks leading up to the 2008 presidential election. He was arrested weeks later, after one of the other commenters reported a potential threat to the Secret Service. During a search of his residence, authorities discovered that he did indeed possess a .50 caliber rifle.

"These statements are particularly repugnant because they directly encourage violence," the judges wrote. "We nevertheless hold that neither of them constitutes an offense within the meaning of the threat statute under which Bagdasarian was convicted."

"There are many unstable individuals in this nation to whom assault weapons and other firearms are readily available, some of whom might believe that they were doing the nation a service were they to follow Bagdasarian’s commandment," they continued. "There is nevertheless insufficient evidence that either statement constituted a threat or would be construed by a reasonable person as a genuine threat by Bagdasarian against Obama."

If this is so, how come this guy hasn't been released and why was he arrested? Or is only people who threaten Obama that get to walk the streets.? links fixed

Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet.

We know that trees can help mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon dioxide from the earth’s atmosphere. But what is less widely understood is how many of these trees can also help to bring an end to hunger and poverty.

Today, Nourishing the Planet takes a look at five varieties of tree that you have likely never heard of, but that are helping to alleviate hunger and poverty and protect the environment.

Once upon a time, in a land that now seems to have been populated by tooth fairies and unicorns, there was a political party that had a set of core beliefs to which they actually adhered.

Among them was that actually balancing the budget, as opposed to just talking about it, was sacrosanct. Slow change, while necessary, had to be balanced against the traditions of the United States, ones that had mostly served us well over two centuries.

Can't find a place to hear this for free on the Internet. Ranks near the top on the list of prescient songs of our time.

Atlas shrugged

by Matt King

We’re burning bones of the dinosaurs
Pretty soon there’ll be no more
Paying for peace but we’re still at war
Can you hear the engines humming?

The air is thick and the ground is dry
The sun’s burning a hole in the sky
Some say soon we’re all going to die
Don’t you know we had it coming?

It’s the same old story, a different spin
You can call it Karma, you can call it sin

First, there were all those banks that needed bailing out because they were "too big to fail."

Yesterday, Rupert Murdoch said that News International was "too big" for him to know what was going on.

While the elder Mr. Murdoch has long had the reputation of being a hands-on manager, pressing for and savoring the scoops scored by the newspapers he had always felt were the soul of his media empire, he said in his testimony that in the case of The News of the World, he had no knowledge of the specifics of what was going on.

The Brunette and I visited White Sands and many other places today. There are about sixty photos, some of The Brunette, which I am certain y'all will enjoy!

The entire set is here, today's photos begin here.

Robert Pear | Washington | July 19

NYT - The National Academy of Sciences recommended Tuesday that all health insurance plans be required to cover a wide range of preventive services, including free contraceptives for women, under President Obama’s health care overhaul.

To reduce unintended pregnancies, a 16-member panel from the academy’s Institute of Medicine said that insurers should cover the full range of contraceptive methods approved by the Food and Drug Administration, as well as sterilization procedures and “education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity.”

The panel said insurers should be forbidden to charge co-payments for these services because even small charges could deter their use. Defending its recommendation, the panel said that nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States were unintended, and that about 40 percent of unintended pregnancies ended in abortion. Thus, it said, greater use of contraception would reduce the rates of unintended pregnancy, teen pregnancy and abortion.

It is with deep sadness that I take note of this:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. A space shuttle left the International Space Station for the very last time Tuesday, heading home to end the 30-year run of a vessel that kept U.S. astronauts flying to and from orbit longer than any other rocketship.

Atlantis slipped away after performing a partial lap around the space station. Ten pairs of eyes pressed against the windows, four in the shuttle and six in the station.

All that remains of NASA's final shuttle voyage is the touchdown, targeted for the pre-dawn hours of Thursday back home in Florida.

Here is one by Baudelaire:

The Albatross

Often, to amuse themselves, the men of a crew
Catch albatrosses, those vast sea birds
That indolently follow a ship
As it glides over the deep, briny sea.

Scarcely have they placed them on the deck

Than these kings of the sky, clumsy, ashamed,
Pathetically let their great white wings
Drag beside them like oars.

That winged voyager, how weak and gauche he is,
So beautiful before, now comic and ugly!

One man worries his beak with a stubby clay pipe;

Another limps, mimics the cripple who once flew!

The poet resembles this prince of cloud and sky

Who frequents the tempest and laughs at the bowman;
When exiled on the earth, the butt of hoots and jeers,

His giant wings prevent him from walking.

— Charles Baudelaire, translated by William Aggeler, from The Flowers of Evil

I'll try to keep this brief.

Frankly, IMO, the entire debt ceiling "debate" amounts to being hyper-concerned about a manufactured problem. In short, "there is no spoon".

I know there's no spoon because the 14th Amendment says so.

Unfortunately, the "complementary" Matrix-like quality of this travesty is that we're all "linked in" so that if the mini-minds busy bending themselves and their "reality" reach the breaking point, those of us who recognize the irrelevance of it all will find our financial lives buffeted just as much as those committed to the myth.

The President's behavior on this matter is detestable on every vector. I'll not repeat old critiques here, but I will add this latest insight - a trait common to us slow learners.

The Brunette and I have been driving for two days and still aren't out of Texas yet! We are close, however, we're in El Paso right now and will be in New Mexico in about an hour.

There are about three dozen photos here, best place to start is here and move forward. Also note this photo and this photo for contrast: they show the damage the fires in West Texas caused this spring. On the west of the highway for forty miles all was charred. On the east all was as it always is. The highway had been a firebreak. The full set is here.

Enjoy the photos!

Last but not least we saw a horned toad today! He was awesome!

By Michael Collins

How will they get rid of Rupert Murdoch and his toxic enterprises?

July 4, 2011 may turn into the people's Independence Day. On that day, stellar journalist Nick Davies of the Guardian released his story; Missing Milly Dowler's voicemail was hacked by News of the World. Twelve year old Milly Dowler had been kidnapped with foul play feared. The Murdoch tabloid couldn't resist. News of the World (the News) hired a private detective to hack Milly's voicemail. Finding the mail box full, the News or its hired dick deleted existing messages to make room for new ones, all to fuel their ongoing coverage. The deleted messages raised hopes by Milly's parents that she was still alive and using her voicemail. (Image)

The Davies story elicited a reaction of near universal shock, outrage, and revulsion. Milly had already been murdered by the time the Murdoch paper began its illegal tapping.

The public revulsion resulted in immediate and fervent popular demands for justice. Those demands were compounded by follow-up stories on other Murdoch media hacking. As it turned out, the News also broke into the voicemails of war widows to capture their most intimate exchanges on the loss of fallen soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. All in all, at least 4,000 citizens had their voicemails hacked to boost the Murdoch publication's circulation and profits.

Paul Tait | Jun 18

Reuters - General David Petraeus, Washington's new intelligence chief, handed over command of U.S. and NATO-led troops in Afghanistan Monday, a day after a tentative start was made to a gradual process of transferring security to Afghan forces.
Petraeus, credited with reversing a spiral toward civil war in Iraq, took over in Afghanistan a year ago after his predecessor, General Stanley McChrystal, was sacked by President Barack Obama for comments made in a magazine story.

He is leaving the military to take over as director of the Central Intelligence Agency as part of a wider shake-up of senior U.S. security officials and takes over from Leon Panetta, the new U.S. defense secretary.

Petraeus, who hands over to U.S. Marine Corps General John Allen, oversaw a "surge" of 30,000 extra U.S. forces which helped stop the momentum of a growing insurgency, especially in the Taliban heartland in the south. He led a similar escalation of forces that helped turn around the Iraq conflict in 2007-08.

However, despite gains in violent southern provinces during Petraeus' year in charge, the Taliban-led insurgency is still far from quelled.

Violence across Afghanistan in 2010 hit its worst levels since the Taliban were ousted by U.S.-led Afghan forces in 2001, with civilian and military casualties hitting record levels, and this year has followed a similar trend.

Stop the momentum? He must have forgot to inform the Taliban.

Rupert Murdoch runs a gangland empire:

The lawyer for Rebekah Brooks, who was arrested Sunday in the burgeoning British phone hacking scandal, says she is not guilty of any crime and that police will have to "give an account of their actions" in taking her into custody, the BBC reports.

Brooks, who resigned last week as CEO of News International, the British arm of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, was editor of the tabloid News of the World when the most sensational phone hacking incidents allegedly occurred. The 168-year-old paper was shut down last week by Murdoch in an effort to put the scandal to rest.

The Guardian is now reporting that Rebekah Brooks has been arrested. This means the scandal goes right to the top: no low level malefactors, but the very cream of the executive team. The question that now needs asking is this: what did Rupert Murdoch know and when did he know it?