This is just shameful. As a Jew (if not a particularly practicing one), watching how the American-Israel lobby gives a horrible name to Israel (and Jews for that matter) becomes more embarrassing every day. And since Republicans have decided to make believe that Obama is "vulnerable on Israel" --- they will say anything for perceived political gain, no matter whether it's actually true or not --- I suspect this sort of thing is only going to get shamefully worse as the 2012 election nears.

Two recent examples, both detailed below, demonstrate the desperation and willingness of these folks to use the State of Israel as little more than a propaganda bludgeon for Republican political causes.

The first example includes blatantly misleading --- and easily debunked --- lies to claim "anti-Semitism" at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Who is behind the video ad smear? Top Republican neo-cons, naturally.

The second is revealing in that it actually puts the lie to the claim that the American-Israel Lobby gives a damn about the supposed Iranian Menace, since new documents reveal they have blatantly decided to give two particular businessmen a Get Out of Jail Free Card, despite recent revelations that the two have spent years profiting by illegally trading with Iran, Israeli's supposedly mortal enemy. Those two businessmen and traitor traders? Charles and David Koch, naturally...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Republicans wave the white flag, surrender to China; Obama doesn't, as clean energy jobs are the fastest growing sector in the U.S.; Gov. Rick Perry's political appointees censor climate change from a scientific environmental report; PLUS: This week's historic floods now arriving in Bangkok, in a year of record flooding across the globe ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Arctic Ozone Hole: Inaction Risks “Future Nasty Climate Change Surprises Far More Serious”; Solar is getting cheap fast; Radioactivity found in plankton near Fukushima; Coal: for every $1 in cheap electricity, coal causes $2 in damages; Interior to allow BP into Gulf lease sale; U.S. sanctions BP, contractors for Gulf oil spill; Canadian pipeline company threatens U.S. landowners with eminent domain; Judge strikes down Bush-era ruling on polar bears; EPA Tries To Put To Rest 'Myth' of Farm Dust Rules; Herman Cain's long tes to Koch Brothers; Scientists nderplay Climate Impacts; Climate Change Poses Immediate Threat To Health; Salmon-Killing Virus Seen for 1st Time in Wild; Bringing a 'dead' TN river back to life; House Republicans Score Another Symbolic Defeat for EPA; Where Did Global Warming Go?; Climate Change is Shrinking Species, Research Suggests...PLUS: 'Occupy the Tundra': One woman's lonely vigil in bush Alaska ...

Say it, don't spray it! Am I right, Mike Huckabee?!

While campaigning in favor of Issue 2 in Ohio (the referendum forced onto the ballot by voters in an attempt to veto the GOP bill that strips public unions of many collective bargaining rights), hilarious former Arkansas Governor and 2008 Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee encouraged supporters to suppress the votes of opponents...

Hilarious stuff. Particularly in Ohio. As Comedy Central's Dennis DiClaudio pointed out, "if any person who ever voted for a Democrat ever got within a 70-yard radius of a microphone and made a joke even slightly similar to that one, Andrew Breitbart would spend a long weekend foaming at the mouth in the video bay attempting to edit down footage of the guy into something that made him look like he murdered Ronald Reagan, and James O'Keefe would be trying to seduce him in front of a hidden camera with a salame."

But, ya know, IOKIYAR.

But it's not the first time Huckabee --- now a host of a weekly show on Fox "News," a cable channel that pretends to care about "voter fraud," but only when they can trick viewers into believe it's being performed by Democrats --- has told the same bad "joke." As we reported in April of 2009, he used the exact same voter-suppression hilarity while stumping for Virginia's then Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell...

Remember WI's 45-year old Republican state Sen. Randy Hopper? The one whose own wife revealed, during signature gathering for his recall election earlier this year, that he was no longer even living in his own district after he'd split to move in with a 25-year old Republican aide?

Last August, Hopper lost his seat during those Badger State recall elections.

Last night, he was spotted driving "all over the road" --- with the aide/girlfriend in his car --- and ended up spending the night in jail for driving while intoxicated.

If his driver's license is taken away, will Hopper now even be able to cast a vote next year in Wisconsin, in the wake of the polling place Photo ID restrictions that Hopper and the Republican Party jammed through the legislature as part of their new voter suppression laws? Will he have to face the same ridiculous hoops that other citizens have been met with in order to do so?

UPDATE 10/19/11: More details on Hopper's drunken comments as he was hauled away after his arrest, including his warning to the arresting officer: "Don’t ever run for office, by the way"...

Poor Rupert. He had trouble getting out much of his speech in San Francisco on the need to privatize use more private technology in our public education system...

Oh, well. That's hardly the worst thing that could happen this week to poor Rupert.

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

As is reflected at right in a 1912 photo taken in Cincinnati, OH, Electric Vehicle (EV) technology has been with us for a very long time.

Underscored in the 2006 documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car? (see video trailer below), the principle obstacles to the development of practical and affordable Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs, as opposed to PHEVs, or Plug-in Electric Vehicles) have been political and economic, as opposed to technological.

As today is National Plug-in Hybrid Day, a look at the current state of our nation's struggle to realize the massive benefits of truly green automotive technology seems in order --- particularly as the job-creating industry continues to face uphill battles from both fossil fuel-funded obstructionist Republicans in Congress and aggressive attempts by China and other nations to "win" the fight for renewable energy technology at any cost...

I'm still largely off the grid for another day or so (as I have been for the last 24 hours+), but delighted to check in to see so much great conversation on D.C. Douglas' #OccupyWallStreet video we posted in the previous item. Also delighted to check in to see that the worldwide #OWS movement is today's top story across all the major corporate media outlets!

Incredibly, I'm here in Las Vegas (for a conference) and find huge signs advertising CNN's next GOP debate here on Tuesday being held at The Venetian. The embarrassing perfection and irony of the next Presidential debate being held at a CASINO is something I don't have time enough or perhaps even skills enough, to adequately elucidate upon at the moment.

All as some 20 #OccupyWallStreet protesters were reported arrested just minutes ago attempting to close their accounts at Citibank near Washington Sq. Park in Manhattan! More irony there than you can shake a GOP debate in a casino at.

In the meantime, cursorily related --- on both the irony scale and several others --- I was interviewed by Bob Jimenez on LA Business Today, about two weeks ago on our local LA Cityview 35 channel as the uprising was just begin to force its way onto the national corporate mediascape.

The segment, seen below, aired earlier this week. We discussed blogging, journalism, capitalism, the "occupation," e-voting and more in the very quick 12-minute segment...

Back soon! Viva La Occupation!

An awesome video from D.C. Douglas. Could well become an anthem for the movement...

The video is brilliant. Please crank up your speakers and watch it. You won't be sorry. But just to highlight the four items Douglas, no enemy of capitalism, calls for changing --- each of which would make very worthy demands for Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement, should they decide to create specific ones...

• Reinstate Glass-Steagall: Restore the firewall, created during the depression to avoid a similar mess in the future, then abolished in 1999, which kept banks out of the business of risky investment and speculation schemes.
• Audit The Fed: Force transparency for the trillions of tax-payer dollars given away in corporate bailouts and/or manipulated by the currently unaccountable public/private "national bank".
• Reverse Citizens United via Constitutional Amendment: End the absurdity of corporate "personhood" and unlimited (and secret) corporate money in politics, as established by the U.S. Supreme Court last year.
• Overhaul the Tax Code for Corporations & Top 1%: They often pay less of their income than you do. Sucker. That is simply obsene.

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

Contrary to the Republican Party's recently launched, all-out War on the EPA, the 40-year old Environmental Protection Agency, founded during the Richard Nixon Administration with strong bi-partisan support, is a job creator, according to a newly released report by the Majority Staff of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Chaired by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D), the committee's 29-page report [PDF] touts "essential contributions that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and landmark environmental laws" contribute towards "protecting public health and promoting economic growth."

It also highlights quotes from radical leftists like George W. Bush's Republican EPA Director, Christie Todd Whitman ("[I]t is easy to forget how far we have come in the past 40 years. We should take heart from all this progress and not, as some in Congress have suggested, seek to tear down the agency that the president and Congress created to protect America’s health and environment.") and President Gerald Ford ("Nothing is more essential to the life of every single American than clean air, pure food, and safe drinking water").

The Democrats' report excoriates the deceptive partisan attacks embodied in recently introduced GOP House legislation meant "to weaken EPA's authority to regulate toxic emissions," and concludes by underscoring the EPA's role in promoting both environmental and economic health in the nation...

Missed this late last week, but it's still well-worth flagging here...particularly for all of the pretend "conservatives" who visit this blog.

Here's UK Prime Minister David Cameron speaking at last week's annual Conservative Party conference in Manchester [hat-tip Towleroad]...

So, again, with the vast majority of self-identified "conservatives" in the U.S. not actually conservative at all, and most "liberals" not particularly liberal, we know why Rightwing media love to use those completely misleading labels, but what's the pathetic excuse for the rest of the media doing so?

Guest editorial by Ernest A. Canning

While both phenomena --- Occupy Wall Street and the "Tea Party" --- have emerged at a time of acute economic distress and a sense of alienation, disenchantment and betrayal brought on by an increasingly authoritarian corporate capitalism, they are as different as night is to day.

Occupy Wall Street is a genuine, organic, knowledge-driven democratic uprising. Its source, as perceptively described by Ben Manski, Executive Director of the Liberty Tree Foundation, is to be found in a profound "contradiction." "The promise of the Unites States is democracy," he writes, yet "The reality is that corporate elites rule."

The American "promise" is embodied in the lofty, egalitarian principles of the Declaration of Independence, in the recognition provided by the U.S. Constitution that the purpose of government is to "promote the general welfare," and in the concept inscribed above the portico of the U.S. Supreme Court --- "EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW." The "reality," as noted by former New York Times reporter, Chris Hedges, is that political power in the U.S. has been seized by a "criminal class" of rapacious oligarchs, whose radical goal is not merely the ability to carry out their criminal pillage of the economy and the environment with impunity, but the decimation of "all impediments to the creation of a neo-feudalistic corporate state."

The goal of Occupy Wall Street, Manski observes, is "to make the promise the new reality." It is, in that sense, a broader movement than both the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, for it is not limited to a rejection of Jim Crow and imperial conquest, but a total rejection of the authoritarian corporate security state that the rapacious oligarchs have erected.

Like the occupiers, the indoctrinated followers of the "Tea Party" are experiencing a profound sense of fear, alienation and betrayal. But what the latter do not realize is that theirs is a misdirected anger --- the product of an Orwellian manipulation by the same reactionary billionaires (aka "economic royalists" per FDR) who, in reality, are the source of their economic insecurity and political oppression.

But, before exploring the Orwellian manipulations of billionaire sociopaths, let's examine the underlying political and economic conditions that have given rise to Occupy Wall Street...

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Occupy Wall Street movement pushes back against dirty fossil fuel corporations; World's newest oil spill, now in New Zealand!; Keystone XL pipeline bombshell --- pipeline company's buddies help Obama/Clinton State Dept. approve the pipeline, but no complaints from Republicans; Million-dollar Solyndra bankruptcy gets more coverage than Billion-dollar Iraq war contracting corruption; PLUS: Rightwing freakout over peaceful Occupier protests challenging corporate greed ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Every $1 of coal power costs U.S. $2 in damages; Too late for Central Appalachia to prepare for collapse of the coal industry?; China's PV Feed-In Law Results in Solar Boom, Unlike Weak US Subsidies; Illinois Team Wins Oil Spill Cleanup X Challenge; Study: 25% renewable energy by 2025 would create millions of new jobs; Algae biofuel industry wants equal fed treatment; Lessons for the Colorado River from drought-stricken Australia; EPA Whistle-Blower Warns EPA Must Not Buckle to Industry Pressure and Greenwash Fracking; Sandia Laboratory testing miniature glitter-sized solar cells; Pharmaceutical manufacturer fined for Violating Hazardous Waste Law; This is where your plants will come from after the Ecopocalypse; UN Ambitions in Check on Global Climate Deal; Conservation Funding Sparks Political Battle; Robo-Deer Used to Catch Poachers; CA Bans Possession, Sale of Shark Fins ...PLUS: Obama Rips GOP Defeatism: ‘I’m Not Going To Surrender To Other Countries’ ...