Bold and Daring: The Way Progressive News Should Be
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| Back when I organized my first StoryCon Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story, at the closing conversation, one of the attendees, a storyteller from England, told a story about how when truth walked into town
It started like this:
Truth walked into a village. The local inhabitants started cursing at him. Spewing epithets, they chased him out of the village. Truth walked along the road to the next town. They spit at him and cursed and spewed epithets, driving him out of town.
Read the rest of the story here, but first, consider this.
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  Daily Headlines
....today's "trade agreements" should really be called "global corporate agreements" because they're mostly about protecting the assets and profits of these global corporations rather than increasing American jobs and wages. The deals don't even guard against currency manipulation by other nations.
Facing grim prospects from a Clinton presidency, ALL progressives should fear that Democrats' Warren wing is a "paper tiger," impotent in the face of party control by Clinton and her oligarch donors. If Warren (like her colleague Bernie Sanders) really wants backing by a movement capable of standing up to Dems' corporatists, that movement must show utter ferocity toward Clinton. Thus the Progressive Hammer campaign.
Homelessness has been in America for centuries. One city has made a HUGE leap in ending their chronic homelessness by putting people in housing, saving them time and money and actually helping those in need to get back on their feet.
Article discusses recent moves by federal government to silence an Iraq War whistleblower.
On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
However she died, it seems that Kayla Mueller forfeited her sacred American citizenship -- indeed, her very humanity -- by committing the heinous crime of " supporting Palestinian rights. That's all it took for her to be branded "a Jew-hating b*tch." That's all it took for inveterate foes of the "savage barbarians" in the Middle East to tweet and trumpet their jubilation at her death.
Washington is ruled by true extremists, once known inside the Beltway as "the crazies." This has been true since before 9/11. A few are outright fascists. Asserting US dominance is their undisguised game and, as the events in Ukraine demonstrate, they are prepared to risk a nuclear war with Russia.
By Glenn Greenwald
Hailed As A Model For Successful Intervention, Libya Proves To Be The Exact Opposite 
What we see here is what we've seen over and over: the west's wars creating and empowering an endless supply of enemies, which in turn justify endless war by the west. It was the invasion of Iraq that ushered in "Al Qaeda in Iraq" and ultimately ISIS. It has been the brutal, civilian-slaughtering drone bombing of Yemen which spawned Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in that country.
Despite promises of "openness," President Obama has treated information that could inform American democracy like Tolkien's character Gollum coveted his "precious" ring. Obama is keeping for himself analyses that could change how the public sees the crises in Syria and Ukraine, writes Robert Parry.
This article questions and challenges the brutal act of burning human beings by all parties.
Life can exist without oxygen, but without plentiful nitrogen to build genes -- essential to viruses, bacteria and all other organisms -- life on the early Earth would have been scarce. The ability to use atmospheric nitrogen to support more widespread life was thought to have appeared roughly 2 billion years ago. Now research from the University of Washington looking at some of the planet's oldest rocks finds evidence that 3.2 billion years ago, life was already pulling nitrogen out of the air and converting it into a form that could support larger communities. "Imagining that this really complicated process is so old, and has operated in the same way for 3.2 billion years I think is fascinating. It suggests that these really complicated enzymes apparently formed really early, so maybe it's not so difficult for these enzymes to evolve."
Kaspersy Labs Reports Spyware Discovered on Computers World-wide
A very sophisticated set of spyware tools has been discovered deep in the low-level software that controls hard drives. It has spread to at least 30 countries. It was discovered by Kapersky Labs, a Russian-based cyber-security firm. Its operation is close to Stuxnet, the sophisticated bug used to attack Iranian nuclear facilities 5 years ago, and for that reason it is thought to be developed by government security agencies in Israel or the US or both. It's called "the Equation Group" and it can hide itself beyond detection of most programmers and most anti-virus software. It can read passwords and transmits to its owner in a deeply encoded language of its own. It has been found on computers not connected to the internet, fueling speculation that it can hide on thumb drives, or perhaps it is pre-installed by manufacturers of hard disks.
The head of Israel's election commission acted on Monday to limit any pre-election boost Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may get from a March 3 speech to the U.S. Congress, in which he will warn of the threat from Iran's nuclear program. The speech has caused controversy in Israel and the United States, where Democrats and the White House are angry that the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, invited Netanyahu to speak at a sensitive time in the nuclear negotiations between Iran and six big powers including Washington, and only two weeks before Israel's closely fought March 17 election.
New ozone-destroying gases on the rise; not controlled
In the new study, published today in Nature Geoscience, the scientists also report the atmospheric abundance of one of these 'very short-lived substances' (VSLS) is growing rapidly.
Link found in how cells start process necessary for life
Researchers have found an RNA structure-based signal that spans billions of years of evolutionary divergence between different types of cells, according to a new study. The finding could alter the basic understanding of how two distinct life forms -- bacteria and eukaryotes -- begin the process of protein synthesis.
Mothers can pass traits to offspring through bacteria's DNA, mouse study shows -- ScienceDaily
A new study in mice has shown that the DNA of bacteria that live in the body can pass a trait to offspring in a way similar to the parents' own DNA. According to the authors, the discovery means scientists need to consider a significant new factor -- the DNA of microbes passed from mother to child -- in their efforts to understand how genes influence illness and health.
Ancient rocks show life could have flourished on Earth 3.2 billion years ago -- ScienceDaily
A spark from a lightning bolt, interstellar dust, or a subsea volcano could have triggered the very first life on Earth. But what happened next? Life can exist without oxygen, but without plentiful nitrogen to build genes -- essential to viruses, bacteria and all other organisms -- life on the early Earth would have been scarce. The ability to use atmospheric nitrogen to support more widespread life was thought to have appeared roughly 2 billion years ago. Now research looking at some of the planet's oldest rocks finds evidence that 3.2 billion years ago, life was already pulling nitrogen out of the air and converting it into a form that could support larger communities.
Bill Maher's satire and criticism of Brian Williams and network news quickly dissolves into superficial commentary, ignoring the real crimes of the corporate media as shills for the empire.
The execution-style murders of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, N.C. came at a time of rising anti-Muslim tensions nationwide. This crime has struck a powerful chord in the hearts of Muslim-Americans and everyone else who cares about Islamophobia. There is much to suggest these three young, promising community members weren't murdered solely over a parking space. This heinous act looks more like a hate crime.
CURMUDGUCATION: Milwaukee's New War on the Poor; by Peter Greene
Senator Alberta Darling and Representative Dale Kooyenga released "New Opportunities for Milwaukee." It'stunning. It's a blueprint, a plan, a carefully-crafted rhetorical stance that turns the war on poverty into a war on the poor. Does it present new opportunities? It surely does-- but they are opportunities for more privateers to use the language of civil rights to mask the same old profiteering game."Make sure your seat belts and safety harnesses are locked in place, because we are about to travel to a place where up is down and forward is backward. The first chunk is directly related to education; the rest is not, but I'm going to go the distance anyway because it helps lay out a particular point of view that is driving some reformsters. The full report is twenty-five pages; I've read them so that you don't have to, but you may still want to. Forewarned is forearmed."
Despite their virtues, many conservative Republicans have an unfortunate habit of picking on the weak and disadvantaged, slandering the people least able to fight back. We saw a glimpse of this callousness in Mitt Romney's disparagement of the "47 percent" who are "takers" living off the hard-working "makers." The newly empowered GOP majority in Congress is going down the same road--targeting the millions of sick or injured Americans who receive Social Security disability payments.
The safety net helped keep Camille Saunders from falling, but not Charles Constance.
By andre vltchek
Sanctions Imposed on the U.S.? The Empire overthrew every decent government in Africa, in the Middle East, Asia and until recently, in Latin America. It liquidated peaceful and secular Muslim governments and replaced them with thugs or extremists.
The difficulty of achieving GDP growth while reaching primary fiscal surplus targets is very evident in Greece. Avoiding rapidly escalating government debt to GDP ratios has consequently proven very challenging.
A federal judge in Texas has ordered a halt, at least temporarily, to President Obama's executive actions on immigration, siding with Texas and 25 other states that filed a lawsuit opposing the initiatives. In an order filed on Monday, the judge, Andrew S. Hanen of Federal District Court in Brownsville, prohibited the Obama administration from carrying out programs the president announced in November that would offer protection from deportation and work permits to as many as five million undocumented immigrants. The first of those programs was scheduled to start receiving applications on Wednesday.
Obama will never satisfy the Neocons -- either they'll sue him for over-reaching on Affordable Care or attack him for not going far enough on IS. There is no bowl of porridge that is "just right" for these flying monkeys.
MOUNT CARBON, W.Va. Multiple cars from a CSX train that was hauling crude oil and derailed continued to burn Monday afternoon. Several of the cars exploded, shooting flames an estimated 300 feet into the area. Emergency officials said the train derailed about 1:30 p.m. A home caught fire and was destroyed in the incident, and the man in the residence, identified as Morris Bounds, escaped in his bare feet without serious injury. He was taken to the hospital as precaution to be checked for breathing problems.
Republicans who side with unions are rare these days. But Illinoisans in particular have reason to expect more of the Grand Old Party than Rauner's anti-labor obsession. After all, it was an Illinois Republican who said, "Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." His name was Abraham Lincoln.
By Tom Engelhardt
Jane Lazarre: On the Problems of Breathing in America It was 1969 and 1973, both times in early fall, when I first saw your small bodies, rose and tan, and fell in love for the second and third time with a black body, as it is named, for my first love was for your father. Always a word lover, I loved his words, trustworthy, often not expansive, sometimes even sparse, but always reliable and clear.
By Sherwood Ross
U.S., Russian, Nuclear Exchange Would Destroy Human Race Russia has held its largest nuclear war rehearsals ever; Russia and the U.S. are at loggerheads over the strife in the Ukraine; the dangers of a nuclear war starting by intent or accident are growing; here, scientist Steven Starr describes the impact of just one nuclear bomb exploded over Times Square, New York. The city, it is believed, may have as many as 10 of them targeting it. Latest Articles
A second installment of this proposed constitution series.
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Charter schools struggling to meet academic growth; by: KIM MCGUIRE
Students in most Minnesota charter schools are failing to hit learning targets and are not achieving adequate academic growth, according to a Star Tribune analysis of school performance data. Students in most Minnesota charter schools are failing to hit learning targets and are not achieving adequate academic growth, according to a Star Tribune analysis of school performance data. The analysis of 128 of the state's 157 charter schools show that the gulf between the academic success of its white and minority students widened at nearly two-thirds of those schools last year. Slightly more than half of charter schools students were proficient in reading, dramatically worse than traditional public schools, where 72 percent were proficient. Between 2011 and 2014, 20 charter schools failed every year to meet the state's expectations for academic growth each year,...
Who's ready for another government-shutdown threat? House Speaker John Boehner, for one. Here's a taste of what a Republican-dominated Congress can do: Sunday, Boehner made an appearance on Fox News to tell the GOP's backup singers at the Murdochian media mothership about his fine plan to let the legislative process limp to a halt as a result of the ongoing differences between his party and the president over the immigration issue.
"The US government released a 1987 Defense Department report detailing US assistance to Israel in its development of a hydrogen bomb, which skirted international standards. Israelis are 'developing the kind of codes that will enable them to make hydrogen bombs. That is, codes that detail fission and fusion processes on a microscopic and macroscopic level,' said the report, the release of which comes before Netanyahu's speech in front of the US Congress in which he will oppose any deal that allows Iran's legal nuclear program to persist. 'I am struck by the degree of cooperation on specialized war making devices between Israel and the US. It's our basic position that in 1987 the Department of Defense discovered that Israel had a nuclear weapons program, detailed it and then has covered it up for 25 years in violation of the Symington and Glenn amendments, costing taxpayers $86 billion.'"
Many residents in the liberal enclave of Madison, where Mr. Walker is deeply unpopular, see his willingness to slash funding for higher education as a reminder of his background: Mr. Walker abruptly dropped out of Marquette University, a Jesuit institution in Milwaukee, during the spring semester of his senior year. "Walker doesn't value the university," said Jessi Mulhall, a government worker, pausing during a chilly walk down State Street, near the campus. "He has disdain for anything intellectual. He doesn't care if the populace is educated."
NEPC: The Failure of Test-Based Accountabilty, BY DIANE RAVITCH
"On behalf of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, Kevin Welner and William Mathis have written an excellent overview of the failure of standardized testing as the driver of educational reform. Here is the summary: "In this Policy Memo, Kevin Welner and William Mathis discuss the broad research consensus that standardized:" "Current debates over the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), of which NCLB is the most recent iteration, now center around specific assessment issues such as how many tests should be given and which grades should be tested, as well as the respective roles of state and federal governments.6 Largely lost in these debates is whether test-based accountability policies will produce equitable educational opportunities through substantially improved schooling." This explains explains why they will not...
NYC Charters: Civil Rights Suspended, by Diane Ravitch
Advocates for Children, a nonpartisan civic group in NYC, conducted a study of discipline policies in New York City's charter schools. Every school had its own rules, and many of those rules violate state and/or federal law. If charter schools are public schools, they should abide by the law; if they are private schools, they can continue to diverge from state and federal law. As matters stand, when children enroll in charters, they check their rights at the door. The NY Times did a study, summarized by Ravitch, " (1) 107 of the 164 NYC charter school discipline policies we reviewed permit suspension or expulsion as a penalty for any of the infractions listed in the discipline policy, no matter how minor the infraction. "By contrast, the New York City Department of Education's (DOE) Discipline Code aligns infractions with penalties, limiting suspension to certain violations"...
Now, more than ever, it is crucial that Europe's leaders remember the right history. If they don't, the European project of peace and democracy through prosperity will not survive.European creditors should realize that flexibility -- giving Greece a chance to recover -- is in their own interests. They may not like the new leftist government, but it's a duly elected government whose leaders are, from everything I've heard, sincerely committed to democratic ideals. Europe could do a lot worse -- and if the creditors are vengeful, it will.
The FBI is monitoring the investigation of a fire that caused $100,000 worth of damage at the Quba Islamic Institute on Friday. The blaze began around 5:30 a.m. Although the fire did extensive damage, nobody was injured in the unoccupied structure. The fire followed a couple of suspicious incidents at the Islamic Center. A visitor who had his face concealed had to be chased off the property earlier in the week. One day before the fire was started, a man drove by the center, yelling mocking chants at the Muslims who were present at the facility.
House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio said President Barack Obama's request to Congress to authorize military operations against Islamic State isn't sufficient and that he will aim to strengthen it in the coming weeks. "I don't believe that what the president sent here gives him the flexibility or the authority to take on this enemy and to win." Obama's request to Congress to authorize military operations against Islamic State set relatively few hard limits for him or his successor but appears designed to force lawmakers to shoulder more of the responsibility for a lengthy conflict.
"Agents of the Food and Drug Administration know better than anyone else just how bad scientific misbehavior can get. Reading the FDA's inspection files feels almost like watching a highlights reel from a Scientists Gone Wild video. It's a seemingly endless stream of lurid vignettes--each of which catches a medical researcher in an unguarded moment, succumbing to the temptation to do things he knows he really shouldn't be doing. Faked X-ray reports. Forged retinal scans. Phony lab tests. Secretly amputated limbs. All done in the name of science when researchers thought that nobody was watching. "That misconduct happens isn't shocking. What is: When the FDA finds scientific fraud or misconduct, the agency doesn't notify the public, the medical establishment, or even the scientific community that the results of a medical experiment are not to be trusted."
"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends to meet with ordinary citizens next week around the country on a 'Bibi-bus,' Likud officials said on Thursday. The bus will make its first stop on Friday in Herzliya without Netanyahu, but with MK Danny Danon."
Two U.S. presidents named Bush have legacies dominated by wars in Iraq. That leaves a potential third, Jeb Bush, facing a uniquely sharp dilemma over how to tackle the current crisis. Democrats say Jeb Bush inevitably will be asked to explain to war-weary Americans how he would handle Iraq differently than his brother. "It's a hard problem for him because he's obviously going to say that going to war in Iraq was the right thing to do," said Democratic strategist Bob Shrum, who was campaign manager for the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.
Egyptian jets bombed Islamic State targets in Libya on Monday, a day after the group there released a video showing the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians, drawing Cairo directly into the conflict across its border. Egypt said the dawn strike hit militant camps, training sites and weapons storage areas in neighboring Libya, where civil conflict has plunged the country into near anarchy and created havens for armed factions.
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