Most ER Personnel Say Cops Use Excessive Force

Posted by Digby, Hullabaloo at 11:11 AM on December 25, 2008.

But Tasers weren't included in the study.

A bunch of readers have sent this story to me today and it fits in
quite well with another than that several forwarded to me yesterday.
First, we have a vast number of ER docs saying that based upon their
observations of injuries, police often use excessive force:

In a survey of a random sample of U.S. emergency physicians, virtually
all said they believed that law enforcement officers use excessive
force to arrest and detain suspects.
The sample included 315 respondents. While 99.8 percent believed
excessive force is used, almost as many (97.8 percent) reported that
they had managed cases that they suspected or that the patient stated
had involved excessive use of force by law enforcement officers.

Nearly two thirds (65.3 percent) estimated that they had treated two
or more cases of suspected excessive use of force per year among their
patients, according to a report of the survey published in the January
2009 issue of the Emergency Medicine Journal.

The Right-Wing Economics That Got Us into This Mess Should Go the Way
of Soviet Communism

By Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post. Posted December 26, 2008.

It's high time we cast "free market" economic theory into the dustbin
of history.

The collapse of Communism as a political system sounded the death
knell for Marxism as an ideology. But while laissez-faire capitalism
has been a monumental failure in practice, and soundly defeated at the
polls, the ideology is still alive and kicking.

The only place you can find an American Marxist these days is teaching
a college linguistic theory class. But you can find all manner of free
market fundamentalists still on the Senate floor or in Governor's
mansions or showing up on TV trying to peddle the deregulation snake
oil.

Take Sen. John Ensign, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial
Committee, who went on Face the Nation and, with a straight face, said
of the economic meltdown: "Unfortunately, it was allowed to be
portrayed that this was a result of deregulation, when in fact it was
a result of overregulation."

The US Has 761 Military Bases Across the Planet, and We Simply Never
Talk About It

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted September 8, 2008.

America garrisons the globe in ways that are truly unprecedented, but
if you live in the United States, you rarely hear a word about it.

Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year,
there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S.
soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid...

Why I'm Rooting for 3 Big Economic Bubbles

By Stephen Pizzo, News for Real. Posted December 26, 2008.

We need a healthcare bubble, an infrastructure bubble and a green bubble
right now -- or else the whole thing will pop.

Let's see, I've lived and worked through how many bubbles and bubble pops?

My first bubble must have been the real estate bubble that developed during
the Carter Presidency. Housing prices in my Northern California region were
popping up 2%% a month. Everyone and their uncle suddenly wanted to buy a
"fixer upper" and cash in.

That bubble burst sometime late in 1979, if I recall properly, which I
should since I owned a real estate company at the time. I knew the end was
near for that bubble when suddenly the investors showing up in my office
weren't grizzled old pros, but average Joes. "Hi, my neighbor and I scrapped
together five grand and we want to invest it in a fixer upper," they'd tell
me.

I took that as a sure sign that the jig was up. I sold my office and went
looking for another line of work. That turned out being the newspaper
business, which is a story for another day.

Pentagon Tries to Lock Obama Into an Outrageously Bloated Budget

By Mark Engler, In These Times. Posted December 24, 2008.

The U.S. spends as much on the military in a single year as it did in
the $700 billion financial bailout. Yet the Pentagon is now calling
for more.

At the end of a long electoral season marked by bipartisan vows to
bring "change," America's massive military budget remains a hulking
and seemingly immutable fact of national life. Given the financial
crisis and the promise of President Bush's departure from office, many
have hoped that overheated defense spending might give way to the need
to addressing domestic problems.

Cheney's Shocking Admissions on How Close He Came to Nearly Destroying the
Country

By Robert Parry, Consortium News. Posted December 24, 2008.

In a series of departing interviews, Cheney challenges anyone to repudiate
the imperial presidency constructed in the Bush era.

As Vice President Dick Cheney goes public in exit interviews about his
vision of expansive executive powers, it's getting clearer how close the
American Republic came to suffering major deformity - if not destruction -
in the past eight years.

It is also apparent that the risks to the Republic are not over, unless
incoming President Barack Obama repudiates many of the executive powers that
Cheney and his boss, George W. Bush, made central to their governing style.

In a revealing Dec. 21 interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday,
Cheney disclosed that he briefed congressional Republican -- and
Democratic -- leaders about the administration's program of warrantless
wiretapping inside the United States and that the leaders, presumably
including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, endorsed the spying.

On Sep 22, 3:49 pm, \/\/...@nog.org wrote:

New McCain Economic Plan: More Gas Guzzlers

Posted by Josh Dorner, Sierra Club at 6:00 PM on September 19, 2008.

McCain unveiled his most ridiculous economic plan yet.

In the midst of our ever-deepening economic crisis, John "the
fundamentals of our economy our strong" McCain unveiled his most
ridiculous economic plan yet: sell more gas guzzlers.

McCain unveiled a new ad yesterday called "Michigan Jobs." The ad is
so full of lies, deceptions, and failed approaches to our most
pressing problems, it's hard to know where to even begin. His
simple-minded pandering is an insult to the intelligence of
Michiganders (and all Americans). I'll get to the gas guzzlers bit in
a minute, but let's run through the ad's other distortions.

First, McCain trumpets his support for loans to help the auto
industry. What he doesn't tell you is that he was opposed to helping
the automakers until just last month when he looked at his standing in
the polls start to slide.

The Sierra Club knows times are tough in Michigan and supports helping
the automakers, so long as they are serious about using the loans to
retool in order to make real improvements in fleet-wide fuel economy.)

Obama and McCain's Health Care Plans: The Story Mainstream Press Won't
Tell

By Trudy Lieberman , Columbia Journalism Review. Posted September 22,
2008.

Health policy talk means little if it's not placed in the context of
real people's lives.

This is the second in a series examining how the candidates' health
care proposals will affect ordinary people and how the press could
cover that angle. Part I is archived here.

James Bell III and James Bell IV

Father and son walked into the Dr. Vesudevan Wellness Center, a Delta
Area Health Education Center jointly funded by the state of Arkansas
and the federal government. The elder James, age sixty-two, looked...

Anatomy of a Frame-up: The Shocking Case of Troy Davis

By Marlene Martin, International Socialist Review. Posted September
19, 2008.

Troy Davis faces execution on September 23rd. Will Georgia knowingly
kill an innocent man?

Since this article was written, the Georgia Board of Pardons and
Paroles denied Troy Davis clemency, giving the green light for his
execution. Go here to help stop the execution.

AUGUST 18, 2008, marked a horrible milestone for Troy Davis. Nineteen
years before, Savannah, Georgia, police officer Mark Allen McPhail was
shot and killed -- a crime for which Troy would be accused, convicted
and sent to death row.

McPhail was shot and killed in the early morning hours in a Burger
King parking lot. In short order, twenty-five fellow officers were
assigned to the case and began to scour the neighborhood for the
perpetrator. The media sensationalized the case of a 27-year-old white
father of two shot in the line of duty. One officer told a reporter,
"There is a desire among the police to have the suspect locked away
before McPhail is buried."