For years, promises to leave the United States in the wake of an undesirable political development have been the domain of liberals. Celebrities such as Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon all at some point suggested they would move to Canada if a Republican won the White House.

(There's even a Facebook group around to motivate them, complete with a helpful link to Canada's department of citizenship and immigration.)

While most of those were empty threats, there are notable exceptions: Film director Robert Altman moved to France after George W. Bush's victory in 2000; Law & Order star Michael Moriarty shipped off to Canada well before that.

But now the decidedly non-liberal Rush Limbaugh has made a similar move, telling his audience he will move to Costa Rica if health care reform becomes law. And now the only question that remains is whether Limbaugh will make good on his word, or join the ranks of the empty-promisers.

"If the health care bill passes, where would you go for health care yourself?" a caller asked Limbaugh on his radio show Tuesday.

"I’ll just tell you this, if this passes and it’s five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented — I am leaving the country. I’ll go to Costa Rica," Limbaugh replied.

This audio is from Premiere Radio Networks' The Rush Limbaugh Show, broadcast March 8, 2009 and uploaded by Media Matters.

The National Security writer for the Associated Press saw through the propaganda, but she apparently decided to run with it, anyway.

"Defense Secretary Robert Gates, aiming to show progress in the expanded war against insurgents in south Afghanistan, took a brief, heavily guarded walk Tuesday down a rutted street in this scruffy market town where the Taliban lobbed mortars at U.S. forces only weeks ago," Anne Gearan reports for the AP.

Now Zad was the scene of first significant military push following President Barack Obama's announcement in early December that he would add 30,000 troops atop 17,000 reinforcements he had already sent into the flagging war.

With the additional firepower, Marines moved into Now Zad last December and quickly pushed out Taliban fighters who had seized the town four years ago and forced every civilian to flee. Families that had lived in Now Zad for generations fled their houses with laundry still on the lines, said the top U.S. officer in the district, Marine Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson.

"A few months ago this place was a ghost town, a no-go zone," Gates is quoted as saying. "Now, as I saw for myself, stores are opening, people are returning."

After eight paragraphs, the AP reporter notes that "Gates' walk" required "armed guards in front of and behind him and soldiers dressed for battle posted all along his short route."

After thirteen paragraphs, Gearan finally observes, "Ironically, to demonstrate that the town is safe enough for Gates to visit, U.S. forces held at bay the very Afghan townspeople Marines fought to bring back."

On Monday, journalist and historian Gareth Porter wrote, about how the media had fallen for the bait "to hype up Marja as the objective of 'Operation Moshtarak' by planting the false impression that it is a good-sized city."

For weeks, the U.S. public followed the biggest offensive of the Afghanistan War against what it was told was a "city of 80,000 people" as well as the logistical hub of the Taliban in that part of Helmand. That idea was a central element in the overall impression built up in February that Marja was a major strategic objective, more important than other district centres in Helmand.

It turns out, however, that the picture of Marja presented by military officials and obediently reported by major news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war, apparently aimed at hyping the offensive as a historic turning point in the conflict.

Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers' homes or a large agricultural area covering much of the southern Helmand River Valley.

"It's not urban at all," an official of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who asked not to be identified, admitted to IPS Sunday. He called Marja a "rural community".

Porter noted that the propaganda campaign had probably been ordered from the top.

A central task of "information operations" in counterinsurgency wars is "establishing the COIN [counterinsurgency] narrative", according to the Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual as revised under Gen. David Petraeus in 2006.

That task is usually done by "higher headquarters" rather than in the field, as the manual notes.

The COIN manual asserts that news media "directly influence the attitude of key audiences toward counterinsurgents, their operations and the opposing insurgency." The manual refers to "a war of perceptions…conducted continuously using the news media."

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of ISAF, was clearly preparing to wage such a war in advance of the Marja operation. In remarks made just before the offensive began, McChrystal invoked the language of the counterinsurgency manual, saying, "This is all a war of perceptions."

The Washington Post reported Feb. 22 that the decision to launch the offensive against Marja was intended largely to impress U.S. public opinion with the effectiveness of the U.S. military in Afghanistan by showing that it could achieve a "large and loud victory."

The false impression that Marja was a significant city was an essential part of that message.

Last year, RAW STORY's Brad Jacobson reported,

A key senior figure in a Bush administration covert Pentagon program, which used retired military analysts to produce positive wartime news coverage, remains in the same position today as a chief Obama Defense Department spokesman and the agency’s head of all media operations.

In an examination of Pentagon documents the New York Times obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request -- which reporter David Barstow leveraged for his April 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé on the program – Raw Story has found that Bryan Whitman surfaces in over 500 emails and transcripts, revealing the deputy assistant secretary of defense for media operations was both one of the program’s senior participants and an active member.

....

The program was ostensibly run out of the Pentagon’s public affairs office for community relations, as part of its outreach, and attended to by political appointees, most visibly in these records by then community relations chief Allison Barber and director Dallas Lawrence.

But as Barstow noted in his report, in running the program out of that office rather than from the agency’s regular press office, “the decision recalled other Bush administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism.” In addition to concealing the true nature of the program and the retired military officers’ participation in it, this tactic produced one other effect.

It provided Bryan Whitman, a career civil servant and senior Defense Department official who oversees the press office and all media operations, cover if and when the program was revealed.

During an appearance on Good Morning America Tuesday morning, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that there is no truth to the allegations that Democratic leadership forced Rep. Eric Massa to resign because he wouldn't vote for health care reform.

"I think this whole story is ridiculous. I think the latest excuse is silly and ridiculous," Gibbs said. "We're focused not on crazy allegations but instead on making this system work for the American people rather than insurance companies."

On his last day as a US congressman, Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) blasted White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Democratic leaders for allegedly conspiring to remove him from Congress. He also addressed allegations that he harassed a male aide, admitting his actions were "inappropriate."

The White House spokesman referred to Massa's admission that he "grabbed [a] staff member sitting next to [him at a wedding] and said, ‘Well, what I really ought to be doing is frakking you,'" after first only copping to using "salty language": "I think clearly his actions appear to be in the appropriate venue in the Ethics Committee to look at."

A GMA article further quotes Gibbs:

"The president has confidence in each and every person that works here," Gibbs said today. "The president is not focused on palace intrigue. ... He wants us to focus on getting something done for the American people, getting health care reform through Congress, focusing on the economy and getting jobs coming back here to this country."

ABC News' Senior Political Reporter Rick Klein agrees with the White House that the charges sound outlandish, but he offers some caution.

In an analysis posted at The Note, Klein writes, "Self-contradicting, borderline paranoid ramblings need not necessarily be taken seriously, even when uttered by someone who, until now, held a seat in Congress -- or who was part of Rahm Emanuel’s crop of 'Fightin’ Dems' back in 2006 (They got the fighting part right.)."

But the difficulty for Democrats is that Massa’s conspiracy theories take on just a whiff of believability after deals so famous that they instantly earned nicknames.

And in Emanuel, Massa is naming a scapegoat who was vulnerable even fully clothed, in a town that’s in a scapegoating mood at the moment. This is a (shower?) curtain the White House didn’t need lifted this week.

Context just might make this bigger than it would otherwise be: “Conservatives have complained about other examples of what they see as illegitimate deal-making to secure votes: what they call the ‘Cornhusker Kickback’ and the ‘Louisiana Purchase’ in the Senate to line up Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.), respectively, and Obama's appointment last week of a Utah professor -- the brother of Rep. Jim Matheson (D-Utah), an opponent of the health bill -- to the federal appeals bench,” Paul Kane writes in The Washington Post.

“He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote,” Massa said of the White House chief of staff, which takes on more meaning you realize that he also called Rahm “the son of the devil’s spawn.”

This video is from ABC's Good Morning America, broadcast March 9, 2010.

Download video via RawReplay.com

LONDON (AFP) - – Veteran rock band Pink Floyd took their record company EMI to court in London Tuesday in a row over online royalty payments.

Pink Floyd signed with EMI in 1967 and their albums include "Dark Side Of The Moon", one of the top-sellers of all time.

Their lawyer Robert Howe told the High Court that the dispute was about online royalties and whether EMI was entitled to sell individual tracks "otherwise than in the original configuration of the Pink Floyd albums".

He argued that this was "expressly prohibited" under their contract but said EMI argued that the clause did not apply to online sales. The case is likely to run for days.

Pink Floyd found fame with their brand of progressive rock in the late 1960s and early 1970s, hitting the global big-time with 1973's "Dark Side of the Moon", followed by "Wish You Were Here", "Animals" and 1979's "The Wall".

Relations between the original members of the band were strained in recent years but they reunited for the giant Live 8 concert in London's Hyde Park in 2005. Keyboard player Richard Wright died of cancer in 2008 aged 65.

Northern Ireland faced a crunch vote on policing and justice Tuesday, prompting a rare intervention from former US president George W. Bush as leaders scrambled to keep devolution on track.

Bush called the leader of Britain's main opposition Conservatives, David Cameron, in the hope of persuading him to talk his allies the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) out of opposing the deal.

But it appeared the intervention was likely to have little effect, with the UUP vowing to hold firm in opposing the deal and the Conservatives admitting they cannot "order around" the UUP.

The Northern Ireland Assembly is voting on an agreement carved out last month after days of negotiations between the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Fein, the one-time foes who now share power in a devolved government.

Under the deal, policing and justice powers -- a highly sensitive issue due to Northern Ireland's bloody sectarian history -- would transfer from London to Belfast on April 12.

This would be the final major piece in the devolution process which started in 1998.

Although a UUP no-vote would not wreck the deal, there are fears it could ultimately prove unsustainable without all-party support.

Conservative Northern Ireland spokesman Owen Paterson confirmed a report in the Guardian newspaper that Bush had called Cameron, telling BBC radio it was "a very constructive and friendly conversation".

Cameron had subsequently spoken to UUP leader Reg Empey, he said, but added: "It doesn't matter how eminent the people are that put pressure on us or on the Ulster Unionist party, we are not in a position to order the Ulster Unionist party around."

The Guardian said White House was so concerned about the situation that the US economic envoy to Northern Ireland, Declan Kelly, had persuaded Bush to step in and contact Cameron.

"This is the most active thing George W. Bush has done in his post-presidency period," one anonymous source quoted by the paper said.

The paper also published a letter to Cameron from a bipartisan group of 21 US Congress members urging him to encourage the UUP to back the deal and "secure the future" for the people of Northern Ireland.

The Conservatives are just ahead of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's ruling Labour party in opinion polls ahead of a general election likely on May 6 and are to field joint candidates with the UUP in Northern Ireland at the poll.

But the UUP is sounding uncompromising over the vote.

Empey has said his party is facing "blackmail and bullying" while Ken Maginnis, a senior UUP member now in Britain's House of Lords who backs devolution, described policing and justice in Northern Ireland as "a broken machine".

"What on earth do they (Bush and the US congressmen) know about day-to-day security and justice in Northern Ireland?" he told BBC radio.

"We're being asked to take over a broken machine and what we're saying is: 'Hey hold on, we've enough trouble building up an assembly... don't foist on us a broken machine called policing and justice'".

The UUP, like the DUP, is Protestant and favours Northern Ireland remaining part of Britain. Sinn Fein is Catholic and wants Northern Ireland to become part of a united Ireland.

Sinn Fein and the DUP are both expected to support the deal.

Northern Ireland's three decades of violence known as "The Troubles", in which more than 3,500 people died, have largely been ended by a 1998 peace deal but sporadic violence still rocks the province.

Last month, a massive car bomb exploded outside a courthouse in Newry, south of Belfast. Police said it was a "miracle" no one was hurt.

Ken Starr has joined a list of prominent conservative attorneys to step up and rebuff Liz Cheney's recent attack campaign against Justice Department lawyers.

Cheney's political advocacy group "Keep America Safe" last week launched an ad suggesting that a number of Justice Department officials are terrorist sympathizers for having represented detainees during the Bush administration. The spot labels them the "Al-Qaeda 7" and questions their "values."

"This was very unwise, and really an out-of-bounds characterization and challenge to good, honorable lawyers," Starr said in his first-ever appearance on MSNBC's Countdown With Keith Olbermann. He called the ads "unfortunate" and "ill-conceived."

Currently the dean of Pepperdine University School of Law, Starr is best known for his investigations in the 1990s that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. He has long been a target of progressives.

He defended the Justice Department attorneys targeted by Cheney, arguing that it was "in the finest traditions of our country" for attorneys to take on "unpopular causes" and defend those subjected to government power.

"You do not impute the causes of the client to the lawyer who is called upon to make sure that that client's rights are being protected," Starr said.

The former Solicitor General joins a list of conservative attorneys who have rebuked the ad campaign in a letter. Politico's Ben Smith reports:

"We consider these attacks both unjust to the individuals in question and destructive of any attempt to build lasting mechanisms for counterterrorism adjudications," wrote the 19 lawyers whose names were attached to the statement as of early Monday.

The attacks on the lawyers “undermine the Justice system more broadly,” they wrote, by “delegitimizing” any system in which accused terrorists have lawyers, whether civilian courts of military tribunals.

The letter’s signers include some of the top officials of a Bush Justice Department that wrestled at length with the legal questions surrounding terrorist detentions. []

The signers include former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, John Ashcroft’s No. 2, and Peter Keisler, who served as acting attorney general during President Bush’s second term. They also include several lawyers who dealt directly with detainee policy: Matthew Waxman and Charles “Cully” Stimson, who each served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs; Daniel Dell’Orto, who was acting general counsel for the Department of Defense; and Bradford Berenson, a prominent Washington lawyer who worked on the issues as an associate White House counsel during President Bush’s first term.

Conservative author and attorney Paul Mirengoff, a fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute, said on Friday that the ad "could be worse than some of the assertions made by [Joe] McCarthy." Several journalists and writers have compared her to the notorious former Republican senator.

This video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast March 8, 2010.

Download video via RawReplay.com

Labels it a 'bailout' for the insurance industry

Facing razor-thin margins in the House, Democratic leaders are hoping to convert the sole liberal who opposes their health care bill, but it seems they have their work cut out because he isn't budging.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) on Monday defended his opposition to the proposal in an appearance on MSNBC's Countdown With Keith Olbermann, citing as his central concern its lack of a robust public option to provide competition for insurance companies.

"This bill represents a giveaway to the insurance industry," Kucinich said. "$70 billion dollars a year, and no guarantees of any control over premiums, forcing people to buy private insurance, five consecutive years of double-digit premium increases."

The proposal the White House and Democrats are coalescing around comprises subsidies for lower-income individuals and a mandate that they purchase insurance. It also bans insurers from dropping sick people from their plans or denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions.

An ardent proponent of a single-payer or Medicare-for-all system, Kucinich reiterated his view that the current template offers private insurers "a version of a bailout" and predicted they'll continue "socking it to consumers."

"I told the president twice in two different meetings that I couldn't support the bill if it didn't have a robust public option and at least if it didn't have something that was going to protect consumers from these rampant premium increases," he added.

The Congressional Budget Office projected that the Senate bill, upon which the current version is closely based, will by 2019 extend coverage to roughly 31 million legal American residents while reducing the deficit by $132 billion.

Democrats and progressives consider Kucinich one of the more likely Congressmen to flip his "no" vote, as he favors a progressive health care overhaul and agrees with the broad principles behind the reform effort.

He voted against the narrowly-approved House legislation in November, which contained a public option but one that was weaker than progressives advocated for. The likely elimination of the provision altogether seems to make Kucinich's vote all the more elusive.

The Ohio congressman left no doubt that he plans to oppose the bill again, even if he were to cast the swing-vote. "If that sounded like a no, you're correct," he told guest host Lawrence O'Donnell, declaring the effort was like "building on sand."

Many Democrats and progressives insist that failing to pass health care reform would be politically disastrous for the party in the November midterm elections.

The congressman told Raw Story in January that Democrats "lost the initiative the minute that our party jumped into bed with the insurance companies." He alleged that the proposals on the table would further escalate income inequality in the United States.

This video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast March 8, 2010.

Download video via RawReplay.com

The US Supreme Court has agreed to consider whether vitriolic anti-gay protesters who picket the funerals of US soldiers are protected by free speech laws.

The emotionally-charged case was brought by the family of US Marine Matthew Snyder, who was killed in combat in Iraq in 2006.

His family organized a private Christian funeral for him in Maryland that attracted members of the radical Westboro Church led by Baptist preacher Fred Phelps.

Phelps and his congregation regularly demonstrate at military funerals, carrying inflammatory signs to draw attention to their anti-gay message.

The religious group protest at the funerals of soldiers, regardless of the sexuality of the deceased military personnel, and use the events to bring publicity to their campaign.

The preacher and six relatives arrived at Snyder's funeral carrying signs that read "America is doomed," "Matt in hell" and "Semper Fi fags," in reference to the Marine motto "Semper Fi."

After the funeral was over, Phelps continued to deride and criticize Snyder on his website, prompting the dead Marine's family to sue the preacher before a Maryland court.

Snyder's father Albert claimed Phelps had intruded on a private event and intentionally inflicted emotional distress on the bereaved family and won an initial award of five million dollars.

But the award was overturned on appeal, where a court ruled that Westburo protesters were simply exercising their First Amendment right to free speech.

Protests launched by Phelps and his congregants have been met with revulsion across the United States and around 40 states have now passed laws regulating demonstrations at funerals.

For being caught with just over a quarter pound of pot, 54-year-old Henry Walter Wooten will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars, thanks to a jury in Tyler, Texas.

His prosecutor, Smith County Assistant District Attorney Richard Vance, originally sought a sentence of 99 years over the 4.6 ounces of marijuana police found in Wooten's vehicle, according to published reports.

Wooten was reportedly caught smoking pot within 1,000 feet of a day care center, within the radius of a so-called "drug free zone." Tipped off by the smell, police would later search the man's vehicle, only to discover his cannabis stash and a digital scale, according to The Tyler Morning Telegraph.

Wooten, who was convicted of two felonies in the 1980s, was also accused of marijuana possession in a drug free zone in 2008, the paper noted. Drug free zones, or perimeters around schools, playgrounds, churches and other selected institutions or organizations, mandate significantly stronger penalties for anyone caught with illegal substances on the wrong side of the boundary. They were passed in the 1980s amid a surge in the popularity of "crack" cocaine, which the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was later found to have aided the distribution of.

The Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based thinktank, reported in 2006 that drug free zones have done little to enhance public health or safety and have instead disproportionately targeted minorities, according to the Associated Press.

"We just hope [Texas Department of Criminal Justice] can free up room for this menace to society; maybe the state can release a child molester or serial arsonist to find a cell for Wooten," Houston Press scoffed in a Friday blog post.

"The fact is that most of you who are reading this article will probably believe that sentencing a person to prison for 35 years for the possession of a non-toxic, non-addicting, all natural substance that has proven anti-cancer capabilities is not really protecting society from anything dangerous," opined a post on the Texas NORML forum. "He might have been stupid choosing his location to medicate, after all, it was Tyler, 'Texas', but nobody should spend a day in a steel cage for medicating, much less their entire life or 35 years."

Wooten’s sentence is identical to the punishment dealt to Alejandro Arreola, who was given 35 years in jail by a jury in Del Rio, Texas for his involvement in a multimillion dollar marijuana smuggling ring. Arreola, according to reports, transported over 24 TONS of the stuff into the United States. His accomplice, Casey Bob Hutto, got 24 years.

The U.S. State Department claimed earlier in March that Mexican marijuana cultivation escalated some 35 percent in 2009, while the Mexican military's interdiction efforts decreased in the face of more dangerous substances like methamphetamine. Houston and the surrounding areas are well-known drug trafficking zones for the Mexican marijuana cartels and a significant portion of marijuana consumed in the state can be traced south of the border.

CORRECTION: The closest major metropolitan area to Tyler is Dallas/Fort Worth, not Houston. Modified from an original version.

Over 140 U.S. lenders folded in 2009 alone. To remedy the financial void left in their wake, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation wants public pension funds, which safeguard the retirement funds of millions, to buy in part or in whole the banks that couldn't manage to keep their depositors' funds.

"Direct investments may allow funds such as those in Oregon, New Jersey and California to cut fees for private-equity managers, and the agency to get better prices for distressed assets," anonymous sources reportedly told Bloomberg News.

In a speech to the National Association for Business Economics Washington Policy Conference, FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair outlined what she called "a pre-funded resolution mechanism," but did not specify what exactly that is. She instead said it would be "similar to the FDIC's receivership authority for failed banks," exposing only shareholders to risk, as opposed to the bank bailouts that saw billions of taxpayer dollars funneled into a near-crippled financial system.

"Shareholders and creditors would bear the losses, not the public," she explained. "But, the process would be orderly and help prevent a catastrophic collapse of other firms."

"From this speech, it's a little unclear whether or not Bair has a more simplistic view, where a resolution authority would just close troubled firms," wrote The Atlantic's staff editor, Daniel Indiviglio. "Right now, most banks are just wound down by the FDIC with failure looming. While that's one option, if the market could be saved from some additional losses associated with outright failure without taxpayers bearing the cost of keeping a firm going, then I don't see why regulators wouldn't want to include that option as well."

Bloomberg News notes that pension funds in Oregon, New Jersey, California and New York may participate. The wire service also reported that firms being targeted for the plan control over $2 trillion in retirement funds.

"Investing in distressed banks doesn’t always pay off, as the U.S. Treasury Department learned with the Troubled Asset Relief Program," Bloomberg added. "At least 60 lenders skipped some of their promised dividends to the TARP fund, according to SNL Financial, and a $2.33 billion stake in CIT Group Inc. was wiped out last year when the lender went bankrupt."

"The House has approved a bill to create a $150 billion fund, while the Senate is considering a measure that would first use taxpayer funds to dismantle an institution, with those funds later recouped from banks," MarketWatch noted.

A total of 26 U.S. banks have failed so far in 2010.

The FDIC holds about $40 billion of assets from seized banks and expects to gather more as institutions continue to collapse after the worst U.S. recession and real-estate slump since the Great Depression, according to agency officials," iStockAnalyst reported. "Real estate loans at U.S. banks that are at least 90 days overdue or that are expected to default almost doubled in 12 months to 7.1 percent, according to December FDIC data."

Only a "catastrophic event" could prevent combat troops from coming home from Iraq, according to the top US general in Iraq.

"But we don't see a catastrophic event on the horizon right now," General Ray Odierno told MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell Monday.

"The plan is we will continue to turn control over to the Iraqi security forces and by August we believe we'll be able to end our combat mission and get down to about 50,000," he said.

Odierno said it could be years before the United States can gauge whether its long military campaign there had achieved any measure of success.

The general was speaking a day after millions of Iraqis defied deadly bomb, mortar and rocket attacks to vote in the first parliamentary elections since 2005, seen as a test of the war-shattered state's fragile democracy.

He rejected the premise of the current Newsweek magazine cover titled "Victory at Last: the Emergence of a Democratic Iraq" with a photograph of former president George W. Bush walking below his infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner during a May 1, 2003 Iraq speech on an aircraft carrier.

"I don't think we'll know whether we were successful or not in Iraq until three to five or 10 years down the road," he told MSNBC television.

"Is Iraq a democratic country able to contribute to peace and stability in the region? That will be the true test."

Speaking on ABC television, the general said the United States was "on track" to bring US troop levels down to 50,000 combat forces by September 1, and to withdraw all US military from the country by the end of next year.

He warned US support for Iraq's fledgling democracy would not end when all its troops leave the country.

"This will be over a long period of time. We think we have an opportunity we might never have again," said Odierno.

On Sunday, US President Barack Obama hailed Iraq's elections as an "important milestone" in the country's history, and praised the courage of Iraqi voters casting their ballots despite a wave of violence that left 38 people dead.

"We know that there will be very difficult days ahead in Iraq and there will probably be more violence, but like any sovereign independent nation, Iraq must be free to chart its own course," he said.

This video is from MSNBC's Morning Joe, broadcast March 8, 2010.

Download video via RawReplay.com

(with AFP report)

Sarah Palin has a message for critics of her crib-notes during February's Tea Party keynote speech: God did it too.

At a fundraiser on Friday for the Ohio Right to Life group, Palin assailed the media for getting "all wigged out about that" and claimed they're attacking her because they "couldn't argue the content" of the words.

Referring the crowd to a Bible passage from Isiah 49:16, she assured them she's "in good company."

"If what was good enough for God, scribbling on the palm of his hand, it's good enough for me, for us," Palin said. "In that passage he says, I wrote your name on the palm of my hand to remember you. And I'm like okay, I'm in good company."

The passage reads: "See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; your walls are ever before me."

A still-frame of Palin's speech at the Memphis, Tennessee convention revealed that the words she had written on her left hand were "Energy," "Tax cuts," and "Lift America's Spirits." She was later caught peeking at them during the question-and-answer session.

Mediaite notes that the crux of the substantive criticism was because Palin had criticized others for using notes during speeches. "What is ridiculous is that she’s still defending her cheat-notes after mocking Obama for using a teleprompter," wrote Drew Grant.

Blogger Gryphen at The Immoral Minority added, "I heard NUMEROUS reporters and pundits call her out on both the content of what she wrote on her hand during the teabagger convention as well as the fact that she had to write it down to remember it."

"Sarah Palin Has A God Complex," headlined liberal blogger Oliver Willis.

While her critics responded with amusement and derision, some of Palin's admirers were impressed. Two Tea Parties flashed her a celebratory "Go Sarah" note on their own palms during an appearance on Fox & Friends last week.

The video is from the Ohio fundraiser, uploaded to YouTube by user Cynthiaabcd.

LONDON (AFP) – Scouting founder Lord Robert Baden-Powell was invited to meet Adolf Hitler after friendly talks with the Hitler Youth about forming closer ties, secret British files released Monday showed.

Britain's Baden-Powell, who started the Scouts in 1907, held talks with German ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop and Hitler Youth chief of staff Hartmann Lauterbacher on November 19, 1937.

Lauterbacher, then 28, was in Britain to foster closer relations with the Boy Scout movement and Ribbentrop invited Baden-Powell to tea with the Hitler Youth leader, newly declassified MI5 Security Service files revealed.

A letter from Baden-Powell to Ribbentrop the day after the meeting showed how he felt about the talks.

"I am grateful for the kind conversation you accorded me which opened my eyes to the feeling of your country towards Britain, which I may say reciprocates exactly the feeling which I have for Germany," Baden-Powell wrote.

"I sincerely hope that we shall be able, in the near future, to give expression to it through the youth on both sides, and I will at once consult my headquarters officers and see what suggestions they can put forward."

In a report on the meeting, Baden-Powell described Ribbentrop as "earnest" and "charming".

He wrote: "I had a long talk with the ambassador, who was very insistent that the true peace between the two nations will depend on the youth being brought up on friendly terms together in forgetfulness of past differences.

"He sees in the Scout movement a very powerful agency for helping to bring this about if we can get into closer touch with the Jugend (Youth) movement in Germany.

"To help this he suggested that if possible we should send one or two men to meet their leaders in Germany and talk matters over and, especially, he would like me to go and see Hitler after I am back from Africa."

He went on: "I told him that I was fully in favour of anything that would bring about a better understanding between our nations, and hoped to have further talks with him when I return from Africa."

There is no evidence that Baden-Powell ever met Hitler.

Once the war had been under way for several years, the security services had no doubt about the nature of the Nazi youth wing.

An October 1944 intelligence assessment warned that the organisation should not be taken lightly and could not be compared to the Scouts.

It said: "It is a compulsory Nazi formation, which has consciously sought to breed hate, treachery and cruelty into the mind and soul of every German child.

"It is, in the true sense of the word, 'education for death'."

BAGHDAD (AFP) – Iraq's general election saw a strong turnout of at least 50 percent in most areas, initial forecasts showed Monday, even after rocket, mortar and bomb attacks had already killed 38 people.

Millions voted in the poll, winning international praise for their courage and determination in a crunch test of the war-shattered nation's young democracy less than six months before American combat troops quit the country.

US President Barack Obama paid tribute to all those who cast ballots in the nationwide poll on Sunday, the second parliamentary election since US-led forces ousted dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003.

"I have great respect for the millions of Iraqis who refused to be deterred by acts of violence, and who exercised their right to vote," Obama said in his first reaction to the ballot. Related article: Iraqis vote 'without fear'

His comments came at the end of voting on a warm spring day that saw long queues at polling stations in Baghdad, in Sunni towns that mostly boycotted the 2005 parliamentary vote, and elsewhere across the country.

The Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) said in preliminary estimates that voter turnout was 50 percent or more in all but one of the 16 provinces it was able to provide figures for.

Turnout was strongest, 76 percent, in Arbil, capital of Iraq's autonomous northern Kurdish region, and in the disputed province of Kirkuk, 70 percent, which is at the centre of a battle for control between Arabs and Kurds. Related article: Kurds vote timidly for change

The Sunni stronghold provinces of Nineveh -- 65 percent -- and Anbar -- 64 percent -- were not far behind, according to data compiled late Sunday, IHEC officials told AFP.

Full election results are not expected until March 18, and after that it will likely take months of horsetrading before a new government is formed as no single political bloc is set to emerge dominant from the vote.

The United Nations praised voters and election organisers, while urging caution about premature predictions of the outcome.

"This day has been a triumph of reason over confrontation and violence," Ad Melkert, the UN's envoy to Iraq told reporters in Baghdad on Sunday.

"The polling process was well-organised, orderly... and polling procedures were properly applied," he said after visiting voting centres in the Iraqi capital and the northern city of Kirkuk.

Baghdad bore the brunt of Sunday's violence, with around 70 mortars raining down on mostly Sunni areas.

The cities of Fallujah, Baquba, Samarra and several other areas were also hit by mortar rounds or bombs, many of them exploding near polling stations.

Twenty-five of the dead perished when a rocket flattened a residential building in the north of the capital, and all the other deaths were in or near the city.

A total of 110 people were wounded in the attacks, which came despite the 200,000 police and soldiers deployed in Baghdad and hundreds of thousands more across the country.

An Al-Qaeda group, which sees the election as validating the Shiite-led government and the US occupation, warned Friday that anyone voting ran the risk of being attacked, heightening an already tense security situation.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said the attacks "are only noise to impress voters but Iraqis are a people who love challenges and you will see that this will not damage their morale."

Sunni Arabs boycotted nationwide polls in 2005 in protest at the rise to power of the nation's long-oppressed Shiite majority. Factfile: Iraq

That boycott deepened the sectarian divide and heightened unrest that killed tens of thousands of Iraqis in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion and which has only eased in the past two years. Related article: Key dates since US-lead invasion

Washington hopes the election will bolster Iraq's democracy, making it a beacon in a region where free and fair elections are the exception, and pave the way to a smooth pullout of American troops.

Maliki, the Shiite head of the State of Law Alliance, is bidding to become the first Iraqi voted back into office at the will of the people who for decades had no choice but Saddam's Baath Party.

His opponents include Iyad Allawi, a Shiite former prime minister who heads the Iraqiya list, a rival secular coalition that has strong support in Sunni areas, who on Sunday criticised the conduct of election organisers.

"I demand a wide investigation from the new parliament and all senior members of the IHEC should be made accountable," said Allawi.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has either a tack for exaggeration or a faltering memory, if his conclusion about the use of reconciliation during a Sunday television appearance is any indicator of such things.

His comments on CBS' Face the Nation seemed to echo other Republicans who've been attempting to frame the 51-vote parliamentary device as some kind of radical usurpation of democracy, almost akin to “ripping a piece of the fabric of America off," according to Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC).

"It would be catastrophic," Graham claimed, comparing the pending reconciliation vote on health reform to Republicans triggering the so-called "nuclear option" to ban filibusters over President Bush's judicial nominees.

Graham also claimed, "we've had reconciliation votes, but all of them have had bipartisan support. The least was 12 when we did reconciliation with tax cuts."

"Graham’s claim that 'the least' amount of Democratic votes a GOP reconciliation bill received 'was 12' is flat out false," Matt Corley noted over at Think Progress. "As The Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky has detailed, during the Bush presidency, the Republican-controlled Senate passed three reconciliation bills with three or less Democratic votes. The 2003 Bush tax cuts were supported by only two Democrats and needed Vice President Dick Cheney’s tie-breaking vote to pass."

Republicans have been scolded in recent weeks by the Senate's Democratic leadership for making wild exaggerations about the use of reconciliation. Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) slammed opposition lawmakers as being entitled to their opinions, but "not your own facts."

The Senate leader noted that his party has made various concessions to GOP health care demands, only to be continually rebuffed at every turn. He pointedly blamed Republicans for playing fast and loose with the truth.

"So let's look at the facts a little bit more, because they can be stubborn, you know."

Republicans have used reconciliation 17 times in the last 30 years: in 1980, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1990, 1993, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2005, according to MSNBC.

This video is from CBS' Face the Nation, broadcast Sunday, March 7, 2010, as snipped by Think Progress.

Washington has awarded more than 107 billion dollars in payments to foreign and US companies doing business in Iran despite US sanctions, The New York Times has reported.

That sum included nearly 15 billion dollars paid to companies that defied US sanctions law by making large investments that helped Iran develop its vast oil and gas reserves, said the paper.

The Times compiled the figures from an analysis of government and business records.

Both President Barack Obama and former president George W. Bush had sent mixed messages to the corporate world when it comes to doing business in Iran, said the report.

Their administrations had rewarded companies whose commercial interests conflicted with US security goals, it added.

More than two-thirds of the government money had gone to companies doing business in Iran?s energy industry, a stronghold of the increasingly powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Yet this group is meant to a primary focus of the Obama administration?s proposed sanctions because of its involvement in Iran's nuclear and missile programs, the paper said.

Other companies had been involved in auto manufacturing and distribution.

The government payments included 102 billion dollars contract payments since 2000; and nearly 4.5 billion dollars in loans and loan guarantees from the Export-Import Bank.

Another 500 million dollars was paid out in grants for work including cancer research and the transformation of agricultural byproducts into fuel, said the report.

In addition, oil and gas companies that had done business in Iran had over the years won lucrative drilling leases for close to 14 million acres of offshore and onshore federal land, the paper said.

The government bars US companies from most types of trade with Iran.

Among the foreign companies in the report were South Korean engineering giant Daelim Industrial, Anglo-Dutch oil giant Royal Dutch Shell and Brazilian state-controlled energy conglomerate Petrobras.

The American Civil Liberties Union has never treated the Obama administration with kid gloves, but with their latest ad buy it's become increasingly clear that their patience for the continuance of some Bush-era policies has run quite thin.

"What will it be Mr. President?" the ACLU asks in a full-page New York Times advertisement published Sunday. "Change or more of the Same?" The ad also features a portrait of Obama that morphs into Bush.

The ACLU's images of the subtle transition between presidents is filtered and lacking in detail, and spans just four frames. However, it appears to be a take-off of a protest image that circulated Facebook and some progressive blogs late last year, showing a similar transition in eerie detail.

The ACLU's full-size advertisement is below this text.

The ad specifically pressured the administration to hold fast to their decision to try the alleged 9/11 plotters in the judicial system and not by military tribunal as many Obama opponents have called for.

President Barack Obama's administration had announced it would try self-confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other accused at a New York courthouse, just steps from where the World Trade Center once stood.

But the plan for the "trial of the century" met a backlash from Republican lawmakers who have introduced legislation to require a military trial, throwing a challenge to Obama months ahead of mid-term elections in November.

Obama made bringing Sheikh Mohammed to a civilian trial a centerpiece of a broader plan to end what he saw as serious abuses of law in the time of his predecessor George W. Bush and his powerful vice president Dick Cheney.

The Washington Post reported earlier this week that aides were recommending that Obama adopt Republicans' position and proceed with a military trial as part of a deal that could help him shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison.

A White House official said Friday it would need weeks to decide on the trial of the accused 9/11 co-conspirators.

"As president, Barack Obama must decide whether he will keep his solemn promise to restore our Constitution and due process, or ignore his vow and continue the Bush-Cheney policies," the ACLU ad read.

ACLU executive director Anthony Romero also wrote a letter to Obama saying these were "the most important terrorism trials -- and arguably the most important criminal trials -- in the entire history of the nation.

"We placed this ad because it’s critical that Americans know what is at stake here: nothing less than America’s commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law. The military commissions are seriously flawed and unprepared to handle these complex cases. If President Obama reverses his attorney general’s principled decision under political pressure, it will strike a devastating blow to American values and do serious damage to our nation’s credibility. We urge the president to do the right thing and keep these cases in federal court, where they belong."

"It would be a colossal mistake to reverse the administration's decision to try these defendants in federal criminal court and again relegate these landmark trials to irretrievably defective military commissions."

However the plan has seen growing opposition from groups criticizing the cost of security in Manhattan and in some cases the principle of providing civilian trials with greater protections for the alleged 9/11 plotters.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg changed his mind at the end of January after initially backing the civilian trial in Manhattan, suggesting that the highly sensitive case could instead proceed on a military base.

In its ad, the ACLU noted that the US criminal justice system has "successfully handled" more than 300 terror-related cases, compared to only three by military commission.

With AFP.
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GRANADA, Spain — EU president Herman Van Rompuy called on Morocco during a summit Sunday to make progress in respecting human rights, including in the disputed Western Sahara region.

Van Rompuy said during the EU-Morocco summit that the European Union supported UN efforts "for a just, lasting and mutually acceptable solution" in the area, where some activists demand independence.

"We also wish for improvements to the situation of human rights and their defenders on this issue," he said in Spain's southern city of Granada.

He appeared to be referring mainly to the case of Western Sahara activist Aminatou Haidar who held a 32-day hunger strike last year at an airport on Spain's Canary Islands after Moroccan authorities denied her entry.

Morocco has also been accused by Human Rights Watch of cracking down on people who question the monarchy and Islam.

Van Rompuy said at a press conference at the end of the summit, the first between the EU bloc and the Arab country, that he had sent a "clear and unequivocal message" to Morocco about this demand.

Led by Haidar, several hundred Polisario backers held a counter-summit in Granada.

Demonstrators criticised the European Union's 2008 offer to Morocco of "advanced status" relations, which makes the country a privileged partner of the 27-nation bloc particularly on trade.

Morocco in 1975 annexed the Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony, sparking a war between its forces and Algerian-backed Polisario guerrillas.

The two sides agreed to a ceasefire in 1991 but the UN-sponsored talks on Western Sahara's future have since made no headway with Rabat pledging widespread autonomy for the region, but ruling out independence.

The Polisario Front wants a referendum on self-determination, with independence as one of the options.

Moroccan Prime Minister Abbas el Fassi told the same press conference that his country's territorial integrity could not be "destroyed because of one or two cases".

He also claimed that 85 percent of people in Western Sahara valued their Moroccan nationality.

The leader criticised the role of Algeria, which supports the Polisario Front, and urged the country's European partners not to practise double standards.

He accused the Algerian military of "constantly violating human rights" in refugee camps for people from Western Sahara in Tindouf, southern Algeria, where he said there was no freedom of speech or movement.

The Moroccan side also pressed the EU to quickly ratify an agreement negotiated in December to free up agriculture trade between Europe and Morocco, which has some farmers in France and Spain up in arms.

"Given the importance of the new agriculture agreement... Morocco ... regrets the delay in its implementation," King Mohammed VI said in a written speech delivered at the summit in his absence.

European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso told reporters after the summit that the pact's ratification hinged on "a favourable vote by the European Parliament" which sets its own agenda.

Some 2,000 Andalusian farmers protested on Sunday in Granada against the agreement, which calls for total customs levies on Moroccan farm products to be cut by 55 percent.

President Barack Obama paid tribute to the "courage" of Iraqis who "defied threats to advance their democracy" by voting Sunday in Iraq's second general election since the 2003 invasion.

"I congratulate the people of Iraq for casting their ballots in this important parliamentary election," Obama said in his first reaction to the crucial vote.

Iraqis defied waves of bomb, mortar and rocket attacks that killed 38 people to turn out in huge numbers to vote in elections seen as a test of the war-shattered state's fragile democracy.

"I have great respect for the millions of Iraqis who refused to be deterred by acts of violence, and who exercised their right to vote today," Obama added in a statement.

"Their participation demonstrates that the Iraqi people have chosen to shape their future through the political process."

The president also commended the Iraqi government and security forces for providing security at tens of thousands of voting booths and polling stations across the war-torn nation.

"We mourn the tragic loss of life today, and honor the courage and resilience of the Iraqi people who once again defied threats to advance their democracy," he said.

By speaking to Muslim countries, the president gives support to those who don't believe the official account of 9/11, says former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

"I saw even Ahmadinejad is now saying 9/11 is a fabrication," Romney told Fox News' Chris Wallace.

"These sorts of voices should not receive any kind of support from the words of the president of the United States."

On what critics are calling a "foreign policy mythology" book tour, Romney is repeatedly spinning several falsehoods about Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Romney's new book "No Apology: The Case for American Greatness" he writes: "President Obama has positioned himself as a figure transcending America instead of defending America... What makes his speeches jump out at his audience are the steady stream of criticisms, put-downs, and jabs directed at the nation he was elected to represent and defend."

Romney says he's glad the Patriot Act was extended, but Obama's "Apology Tour" was a mistake.

Wallace did not ask Romney about his tan.

This video is from Fox's Fox News Sunday, broadcast March 7, 2010.

Download video via RawReplay.com