Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. This is the United States of America. Our pilot and crew are under the influence of unseen forces. Our position is unknown and our time is growing short. We have 311 million souls on board. We are in urgent need of assistance.

There's "May Day" and there's "Mayday." "May Day" is a celebration of life and renewal. For the last 125 years or so it's also served as a rallying cry for the rights of working men and women. "Mayday," on the other hand, is the international phrase which indicates that a vessel, building, or person is in imminent danger and needs help immediately.

It's May Day. Mayday.

I take it back, conceding Karl Rove (a.k.a. Turd Blossom) must be smart. Perhaps W.'s nickname is telling, as in laying "an egg." Didn't this PR con artist mastermind the re-election of our most illiterate, incurious, wastrel president -- whose habitual "deer faces reality" gaze let slip his opacity? Notwithstanding that this twice-elected regime unleashed our most virulent, Constitution-bashing V.P -- still haunting us, the undead from a bad horror movie.

Yes, the old man's Supreme Court iced the flunkey's first appointment, but that's nothing compared to ripping John Kerry with this abysmal "compassionate conservative" turned botched "war president." All the more impressive considering Bush-Cheney's serial albatrosses: caught defenseless by triple sneak attacks, storm-trooping us into non-9/11 wars, the Plame-Libby scandals, and incessant class warfare -- altogether a walking-talking gaffe of a presidency.

— Originally published at WhoWhatWhy

Secret Service agents are one category of law enforcement whose agents typically get the glory treatment. Recent books by members of JFK’s secret service detail, almost devoid of revelations or candor, have nevertheless received lots of positive coverage. Meanwhile, legitimate questions about the service—how it works, what kinds of people it employs, how effective it is—are pushed aside.

Maybe that’s why the media reacted with such astonishment to learn that Secret Service agents preparing for Obama’s visit to Cartagena, Colombia, consorted with prostitutes. Eight agents have been forced out of their jobs, and a ninth is on his way out. Military personnel along on the trip are under investigation as well. The activity raised questions not only about the appropriateness of such conduct, but of whether this behavior threatened the President’s safety.

— from TomDispatch

In my childhood years of the 1950s, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic landscapes were a dime a dozen. In the Arctic, the first radioactivated monster, Ray Bradbury’s famed Rhedosaurus, awakened in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and began its long slouch toward New York City; in the Southwestern desert, near the Trinity testing grounds for the first atomic bomb, a giant mutated queen ant in Them! prepared for her flight to the sewers of Los Angeles to spawn; in space, the planet Metaluna displayed “the consequences of a weak defense system” by suffering nuclear-style incineration in This Island Earth; and in 1954, the irrepressible returned big time when Godzilla, awakened by atomic tests, stomped out of Japan’s Toho studios and later barnstormed through American movie theaters. (All those “family” films, by the way, were successes.)

Not kidding, read it for yourself: New Obama slogan has long ties to Marxism, socialism,

The Obama campaign apparently didn't look backwards into history when selecting its new campaign slogan, "Forward" — a word with a long and rich association with European Marxism.

... Vladimir Lenin founded the publication "Vpered" (the Russian word for "forward") in 1905. Soviet propaganda film-maker Dziga Vertov made a documentary whose title is sometimes translated as "Forward, Soviet" (though also and more literally as "Stride, Soviet").

Little of what Allen West says ever surprises me. He's called President Obama "a low-level socialist agitator," said anyone with an Obama bumper sticker on their car is "a threat to the gene pool," and told liberals like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to "get the hell out of the United States of America." Apparently he gets his talking points from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or Ted Nugent. But this time I shook my head in disbelief. Seventy-eight to 81 Democrats, members of the Communist Party?

That's when the memory hole opened and a ghost slithered into the room.

Two key steps have helped to ruin May Day in the United States. First, Labor Day was created at a completely different time of year -- labor day without the struggle, labor day without the history, labor day without the labor movement. Second, Loyalty Day was created on May 1st.

Loyalty Day is a monstrosity for a few reasons. We already have Veterans Day (created by ruining Armistice Day), Memorial Day, Yellow Ribbon Day, Patriots Day, Independence Day, Flag Day, Pearl Harbor Day, an Iraq-Afghanistan Wars Day (created, believe it or not, by Congress in 2011), and of course the xenophobic blood-curdling celebration of every September 11th. That should be enough. We already have a dangerous excess of loyalty. According to the International Social Survey Programme, the United States is number 1 among nations in the percentage of its people who say that everyone should obey the law even when the law is unjust, and also number one in the percentage of people who say everyone should support this country even when it is wrong. Conscious intentional harm. Institutionalized stupidity. How low can we go? A 13-year-old girl in Pennsylvania was just punished for refusing to stand and robotically chant a fascistic Pledge of Allegiance.

Regular readers of the U.S. mainstream news might have been surprised the past several days to learn that a number of prominent Israelis disagree with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assessment of the Iranian threat. That public shock is understandable since leading American news outlets and the U.S. Congress have done little besides parrot and praise Netanyahu’s positions.

Much like the pattern before the Iraq War – when the U.S. news media abetted President George W. Bush in misleading most Americans into believing that Iraq had WMDs and was implicated in the 9/11 attacks – the mainstream press now has left large segments of the population thinking that Iran already has a nuclear bomb or is hard at work on one with plans to use it against Israel.

Sibel Edmonds' new book, "Classified Woman," is like an FBI file on the FBI, only without the incompetence.

The experiences she recounts resemble K.'s trip to the castle, as told by Franz Kafka, only without the pleasantness and humanity.

I've read a million reviews of nonfiction books about our government that referred to them as "page-turners" and "gripping dramas," but I had never read a book that actually fit that description until now.

The F.B.I., the Justice Department, the White House, the Congress, the courts, the media, and the nonprofit industrial complex put Sibel Edmonds through hell. This book is her triumph over it all, and part of her contribution toward fixing the problems she uncovered and lived through.

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A study has found that climate change is causing higher corn prices. Let the higher-corn-prices denialists begin their wonderful dance!

I’ve been thinking about austerity. Actually I’ve been thinking about the European elections, cut backs, doing without, Illinois, Social Security, and the prime candidates for the office of POTUS. This is going to be quite a week. The public will be exposed to the most recent labor report(s), the manufacturing index, more quarterly profit figures, and the European elections in France and Greece. Spain, Portugal, and Italy are stewing in their record debts, unemployment, and government deficits. In each case, the word “austerity” keeps surfacing.

I'm proud to be part of a series of articles by intelligence and military interrogators denouncing torture this week at the Huff Post.  Here's my entry.

When I wrote my eighth thriller, Inside Out, in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners.  The plot was of course based on actual events, and I considered naming one of the characters Jose Rodriguez, the Director of the National Clandestine Service at the time the actual tapes were destroyed.  In the end I decided against real names, though, because, after all, the characters in the book were committing terrible crimes, and to name them after real people seemed a recipe for a libel suit.

Here's something you just gotta read. It's from an article by Abigail Field over at Firedog Lake. The author explains how the banks are gaming the system to stabilize housing prices. It's another scam designed to lure John Q. Public back into the market so he can get fleeced one more time. Here's a clip from the article:

"Phoenix: RealtyTrac identifies 6,611 “bank-owned” properties there. An Arizona realty website lists only 275 for sale. Similarly, Yahoo real estate claims there’s over 8,000 foreclosure properties in Phoenix, but Realtor.com lists less than 4,000 homes of any type. AZHomeonline.net lists a bit over 4,000, plus 312 foreclosures and shortsales. So are the foreclosures in Phoenix on the order of 300 or 6,600? Makes a wee bit of difference when the non-”distressed” market is about 4,000, don’t you think?

Something strange and ominous is happening to young people, especially women but also to lesser numbers of men. They are dying of sudden heart attacks (acute myocardial infarction, AMI) without the classic symptoms of heart disease, chest pain or blocked arteries. They die quickly, as though blind-sided by a devastating accident.

Every year since accounting began, there has been a tiny number of persons in the U.S. who died abruptly for no apparent reason. In fact, the annual list of mortality statistics issued by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics included 'unknown cause' as a category, along with heart disease, cancer, stroke, and so on, until about 10 years ago. It was about that time that I called a statistician at NCHS to ask if the number dying for unknown reasons was going up. His answer was a definite and frustrated 'Yes!'

I was at the White House Correspondents' Dinner last night. And I loved 85% of it. This makes me somewhat of a hypocrite because I often criticize a lot of the people in that room, and I especially single out the chuminess of the press with the government.

Now, I justify my participation in this bacchanal event by saying two things. I am a spy for our audience -- it's important to know how these things work at a minimum. And it's important to have conversations with folks in DC because you never know what you might get out of it and what you might learn. I promise you that these are 100% true. But nonetheless, it doesn't justify me enjoying it so much.

But by the end of tonight I was feeling uneasy. I came home and tried to figure out why. My unease was first triggered by seeing Gen. David Petraeus there. He was in full uniform, but it wasn't the standard green one you see on TV, it was a reddish formal one. He reminded me of the Roman centurions. But it wasn't just that.

— from TomDispatch

He has few constraints (except those he’s internalized). No one can stop him or countermand his orders. He has a bevy of lawyers at his beck and call to explain the “legality” of his actions. And if he cares to, he can send a robot assassin to kill you, whoever you are, no matter where you may be on planet Earth.

He sounds like a typical villain from a James Bond novel. You know, the kind who captures Bond, tells him his fiendish plan for dominating the planet, ties him up for some no less fiendish torture, and then leaves him behind to gum up the works.

As it happens, though, he’s the president of the United State, a nice guy with a charismatic wife and two lovely kids.

How could this be?

The mainstream media gets more than its share of flack these days from both the left and the right. But their biggest flaw is not that they fail to report the news, or report it with bias, but that they fail to find the truth of matters. The press has become little more than over-paid stenographers. They write down what politicians say and then report it as news.

That's why we now have a House of Representatives filled with representatives who think like the kind of people you move away from if they plant themselves on a stool next to you at the local bar or cafe. Their lives are small and their world-view even smaller. They know what they know without knowing virtually anything about what they "know."

And the Republican Party has made a Faustian alliance with this lot.

Today's false equivalence award goes to Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein for their Washington Post op-ed titled, Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

This false equivalence award is noteworthy, as the authors claim to be writing about false equivalence! In the op-ed they write that false equivalence is a "traditional refuge" for cowed media,

“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.

At the annual Wells Fargo Shareholders’ meeting in San Francisco on Tuesday April 24, 2012, at least 150 "shareholders" were denied their lawful right to attend by means of the use of police force and barricades. True, none of them were big shareholders and their priorities in attending were not to cheerlead the continuing massive profits Wells Fargo rakes in. Instead they hoped to bring to light the predatory role of Wells Fargo in pursuit of these profits — a role that is economically devastating countless working families and their future.

The concerns of these excluded shareholders did not go unheard. They were loudly shouted by a crowd of about 1,200 Occupy, trade union, and community activists in the streets 15 stories below where the shareholders’ meeting was to take place. It was part of a carefully considered plan to use the shareholders meeting as an opportunity to confront the 1% both on their turf, in the exquisite halls of their corporate headquarters, and on ours, the streets.

Military technology continues to spill over into domestic law enforcement as unmanned drones – used to hunt down and kill suspected “militants” abroad – are now touted as the latest tool for monitoring Americans, a development that has drawn scant attention, writes Danny Schechter.

It’s easy to understand why Presidents, politicians and the military love robots. They don’t talk back. They follow orders. You press a button and they do what they are told. They are considered so efficient, and so lethal. These modern killing machines represent science fiction reborn as science “faction.”

Robots and drones don’t burn Korans or pose with the heads of their captives on the battlefield. (Robots also don’t protest wars.) Lose the human factor and you get silent but deadly total destruction. These new toys are used both for surveillance and targeted assassinations.

PARIS – France and Europe were left shaken and confused after Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front party won 18% of the vote in last week’s first round presidential election.

President Nicholas Sarkozy did better than polls had predicted, but the widely anticipated first place win of Socialist Francois Hollande was still a humiliation to the hyperkinetic Sarkozy who sought to wrap himself in the French flag. Polls show Hollande, a bland, unassuming figure, continues to lead Sarkozy in the final election to be held on 6 May.

The National Front is no longer on the ballot in the final two-man race, but it remains the hulking 800-kg gorilla in the ornate drawing room of French politics.

They told me I was the best, better than any human. I didn't hesitate. I didn't flinch. I didn't think.

It wouldn't have occurred to me to think. I'd been taught to value obedience above all else, and I did so, and they loved me for it.

They told me I could fly faster without a pilot onboard, and that I had no fear. I didn't know what fear was, but I took it to be something truly horrible. I was glad I didn't have any of it.

There was something else I didn't have either. It was something more important than fear. Even pilots at a desk, even my pilots, suffered from it. At first I thought it was simply a decline in energy, because it showed up on lengthy missions.

— from the Bloomington Alternative

The Greene Report is a compilation of environmental stories written by Linda Greene for the Alternative and WFHB Community Radio's EcoReport. This week's edition includes:

• Indiana leads the country in pollution discharges
• Trial begins on ALCOA’s toxic waste dump at Indiana’s Squaw Creek coal mine
• IU-Bloomington named one of top “green” colleges and universities
• Westinghouse gets the okay to supply nuclear reactors to India
• No second term for Krinstine Svinicki, NRC commissioner
• Gatica wins the Goldman Environmental Prize
• Nine low-tech steps to community resilience under global warming
• Coming to your supermarket: dioxin-laced corn
• Let’s eliminate carcinogens in our everyday products
• Prescribed burns and managed wildfires are deadly

On April 25, with a stroke of the governor's pen, Connecticut became the 17th U.S. state to abolish the death penalty - and the fifth state to do so in five years. This reflects a growing momentum to end capital punishment in the U.S., which is the only major industrialized Western nation that still claims for itself the "right" to kill its citizens. The death penalty has already been abolished in all European countries except for Belarus. In fact, today over two-thirds of the world's nations have ended capital punishment in law or practice. This global trend towards abolition of the death penalty reflects the growing awareness that there are alternative punishments that are effective and which do not involve state-sponsored killing.

Whenever you hear Mitt Romney say President Obama is a failure when it comes to the economy, remember that in the first six months after the 2010 midterm election alone nearly 2 million jobs were lost due to GOP-backed legislation that passed the House.

Yes, 200 days after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said his plan was to make Obama a one-term president, the GOP voted ten times against Democratic job bills.

Consider the audacity of Mitt Romney, or any Republican candidate for Congress, to call this president an economic failure when a quick look at the GOP record, and the damage they did in less than a year from the time they took control of the House shows that it is the Republicans, and not the president, who are responsible for lackluster job growth.