The Economist: Levenson's inquiry - The Desmond Defence

Most of the newspaper folk who have testified to the Leveson inquiry into the British press, set up in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal, have been rather supportive of the inquiry's aims. Although they have strongly defended free speech, they have tended to concede that some form of stricter newspaper regulation is in order. A few have the zeal of converts to the regulatory cause, and then there's Richard Desmond. Mr. Desmond, who owns the Daily Express and the Daily Star newspapers, testified last  afternoon. The effect was akin to to one of those strings of small explosives that, when your correspondent was a child, friends would occasionally smuggle into the country from France. His competitors are "idiots", he explained. He attacked the Daily Mail, calling it the "Daily Malicious". He called the inquiry "the worst thing that's ever happened to newspapers" and suggested he would very much like to be rid of it. He complained bitterly about the former chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, whose name nonetheless slipped his mind. There was a particularly splendid moment when Mr Desmond was reminded that Kate and Gerry McCann, whose daughter Madeleine disappeared in 2007, had objected to fully 38 stories published in one of his newspapers over a four-month period.

Chris Hedges: Why I am Suing Barack Obama!

Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern US District Court in New York City on Chris Hedges' behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for the Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31. The act authorizes the military, in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled "Counter-Terrorism," for the first time in more than 200 years, to carry out domestic policing. With this bill, which will take effect March 3, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any US citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. Suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until "the end of hostilities." This is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties. Chris spent many years in countries where the military had the power to arrest and detain citizens without charge, and he has been in some of these jails. He has friends and colleagues who have "diappeared" into military gulags. He knows the consequences of granting sweeping and unrestricted policing power to the armed forces of any nation. While his battle may be quixotic, it is one that has to be fought if we are to have any hope of pulling this country back from corporate fascism.

Lisa Karpova: US Pushing World to the Brink of World War

While local US police use excessive force and violence against OWS protesters, the US government continues to attempt to spread "freedom and democracy" of this same kind around the world. Reports come daily about beatings, clubbings, tasering, a female having her bicycle thrown at her, and disabled veterans being abused. Meanwhile, Libya attempts to free itself from this "freedom and democracy" scourge brought to Libya by thousands of terrorists: murderers, psychopaths, head chopping nut cases that enjoy bodily mutilation even when the body is already dead, raping women, looting, burning. Oh, the joy of freedom and demon-crazy compliments of NATO Nazis. NATO literally dumped this murderous trash into Libya, to fight along local criminals and traitors in order to plunder the country's resources. So NATO did more than drop illegal weaponry, including chemical and biological agents - white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and sarin, There have even been outbreaks of white phosphorous, depleted uranium and sarin, as well as tuberculosis. The country's water supply has been bombed and poisoned, and tuberculosis outbreaks are now common. 

Attorney Orly Taitz: Georgia Judge Subpoenas Obama!

Attorney Orly Taitz has reported that a Georgia Judge has issued a subpoena demanding Barack Obama appear in court January 26 and produce his original long form birth certificate, passport records, college registration records and more. Dr. Orly Taitz, attorney for one of the plaintiffs in the Georgia eligibility cases working their way rapidly through the courts, posted a copy of what is reportedly asubpoena, issued by Judge Michael Malihi of Georgia. The subpoena demands that Barack Obama himself appear in court on January 26, and bring with him a laundry list of official documents that will prove or disprove his eligibility for office. The list is frankly a "birther's" dream. Unlike previous cases, where only certain documents were requested or discussed, this subpoena issued by Judge Malihi includes every document that serious eligibility experts have been discussing from the beginning. The list requires Obama to produce each of the following: Any and all birth records, including a long form birth certificate. While we take a moment to rejoice in a court finally willing to examine the Constitutional status of Obama, who, evidence supports  as being not a lawful president but a Usurper-in-Chief, we cannot rest on our laurels. While we may hope that Georgia will be the beginning of the end of the line for the Obama campaign, motions to quash and vicious legal push back by Team Obama are a given. We must work MUCH harder now to open battle on many more fronts, and compel the rest of the States to do their "due diligence" and demand Obama provide PROOF POSITIVE evidence of eligibility to appear on our ballots! 

Robert Parry: Herding Americans to War with Iran!

For many Americans the progression toward war with Iran has the feel of cattle being herded from the stockyard into the slaughterhouse, pressed steadily forward with no turning back, until some guy shoots a bolt into your head. Any suggestion of give-and-take negotiations with Iran is mocked, while alarmist propaganda, a ratcheting up of sanctions, and provocative actions, like Wednesday's assassination of yet another Iranian scientist, push Americans closer to what seems like an inevitable bloodletting. Even the New York Times now acknowledges that Israel, with some help from the United States, appears to be conducting a covert war of sabotage and assassination inside Iran. "The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim on Wednesday, when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran's morning rush hour," Times reporter Scott Shane wrote in Thursday's editions. Though US officials emphatically denied any role in the murder, Israeli officials did little to discourage rumors of an Israeli hand in the bombing. Some even expressed approval. Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai said he didn't know who killed the scientist, but added: "I am definitely not shedding a tear."The latest victim, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was the fifth scientist associated with Iran's nuclear program to be killed in the past four years. 

Bill Moyers: Is This Land Made for You and Me?

The traveling medicine show known as the race for the Republican presidential nomination has moved on from Iowa and New Hampshire, and all eyes are now on South Carolina. Well, not exactly all. At the moment, our eyes are fixed are fixed on some big news from the great state of Oklahoma, home of the legendary American folk singer Woody Guthrie, whose 100th birthday will be celebrated later this year. Woody saw the ravages of the Dust Bowl and the Depression firsthand. His own family came unraveled in the worst hard times, and he wrote tough, yet lyrical stories about the men and women who struggled to survive, enduring the indignity of living life at the bone, with nothing to eat and no place to sleep. He traveled from town to town, hitchhiking and stealing rides in railroad boxcars, singing his songs for spare change or a ham sandwich. What professional success he had during his own lifetime, singing in concerts and on the radio, was often undone by politics and the restless urge to keep moving on. "So long, it's been good to know you," he sang, and off he would go. What he wrote and sang about caused the oil potentates and preachers who ran Oklahoma to consider him radical and disreputable. For many years he was the state's prodigal son, but times change, and that's the big news. Woody Guthrie has been rediscovered, even though Oklahoma's more conservative than ever, one of the reddest of our red states, with a governor who's a favorite of the Tea Party.

Dennis Rahkonen: Pretty Boy Mitt, Contemporary Capitalism!

Piracy, pillage and plunder were how ruthless individuals historically first came to acquire great wealth. Later, slavery and feudalism allowed emerging aristocrats to luxuriate while masses suffered. Then came the Gilded Age of robber barons and callous tycoons, who would still be merciless exploiting us except for reforms won by trust busters and labor unions. No one could credibly laud such predatory behavior, but Mitt Romney is an enthusiastic practitioner of even what other Republican presidential aspirants are condemning as downsizing, outsourcing, deeply immoral "vulture capitalism."Romney exemplifies the worst of the greed-driven social irresponsibility that tanked our economy in 2008. His tone-deaf remark "I like being able to fire people" was followed by an interview answer in which he said that worsening American income disparity should be addressed in "quiet rooms." Forget painfully impacted workers at street rallies or other venues of public protest! At Bain Capital, Romney stripped countless wage-earners of their livelihoods, all for cruelly maximized private profit. Folk legend Woody Guthrie's words from his song Pretty Boy Floyd forcefully spring to mind: As through this world I've  wandered, I've seen lots of funny men; Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain pen.