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All members welcome and encouraged to participate. Please post Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News on this thread. If you can: 1. Post stories and announcements you find on the web. 2. Post stories using the "Election Fraud and Reform News Sources" here: 3. Re-post stories and announcements you find on DU, providing a link to the original thread with thanks to the Original Poster, too. 4. Start a discussion thread by re-posting a story you see on this thread. Please "Recommend" for the Gr...

All members welcome and encouraged to participate. Please post Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News on this thread. If you can: 1. Post stories and announcements you find on the web. 2. Post stories using the "Election Fraud and Reform News Sources" here: 3. Re-post stories and announcements you find on DU, providing a link to the original thread with thanks to the Original Poster, too. 4. Start a discussion thread by re-posting a story you see on this thread. Please "Recommend" for the G...

All members welcome and encouraged to participate. Please post Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News on this thread. If you can: 1. Post stories and announcements you find on the web. 2. Post stories using the "Election Fraud and Reform News Sources" here: 3. Re-post stories and announcements you find on DU, providing a link to the original thread with thanks to the Original Poster, too. 4. Start a discussion thread by re-posting a story you see on this thread. Please "Recommend" for the Gr...

All members welcome and encouraged to participate. Please post Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News on this thread. If you can: 1. Post stories and announcements you find on the web. 2. Post stories using the "Election Fraud and Reform News Sources" here: 3. Re-post stories and announcements you find on DU, providing a link to the original thread with thanks to the Original Poster, too. 4. Start a discussion thread by re-posting a story you see on this thread. Please "Recommend" for the Gr...

All members welcome and encouraged to participate. Please post Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News on this thread. If you can: 1. Post stories and announcements you find on the web. 2. Post stories using the "Election Fraud and Reform News Sources" here: 3. Re-post stories and announcements you find on DU, providing a link to the original thread with thanks to the Original Poster, too. 4. Start a discussion thread by re-posting a story you see on this thread. Please "Recommend" for the Gr...

All members welcome and encouraged to participate. Please post Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News on this thread. If you can: 1. Post stories and announcements you find on the web. 2. Post stories using the "Election Fraud and Reform News Sources" here: 3. Re-post stories and announcements you find on DU, providing a link to the original thread with thanks to the Original Poster, too. 4. Start a discussion thread by re-posting a story you see on this thread. Please "Recommend" for the Gr...

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More than 1,000 rally to keep prison open PONTIAC, Ill. - Despite intermittent pouring rain, more than 1,000 people insisted on showing their support for keeping Pontiac Correctional Center open. Pontiac Mayor Scott McCoy estimates that from 1,500 to 2,000 people showed Saturday for a "Save Pontiac Prison" photograph. Everyone wore a navy blue shirt as they milled around the Livingston County Courthouse. The photograph and a previous parade were part of an effort to convince Gov. Rod Blagoj...

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By next month, all American medical schools will have abandoned a time-honored method of teaching cardiology: operating on dogs to examine their beating hearts, and disposing of them after the lesson. Case Western Reserve School of Medicine was the last to use the method, but the dean, Dr. Pamela Davis, said it would no longer do so after this month. On Nov. 19, New York Medical College in Valhalla joined New York’s 11 other medical schools and announced that it would close its dog laboratory....

By Raymond C. Scheppach, High-quality post-secondary education is crucial to ensuring America’s competitiveness in the global economy. U.S. colleges and universities equip our students with advanced critical-thinking and adaptive skills to generate new knowledge and solve problems. While America’s public post-secondary education system is still highly prized, many countries around the world are not only improving on our system, they are developing new models—models that link more closel...

More than $14 million in checks are on their way to 18,481 Michigan mortgage loan borrowers as part of a settlement with Ameriquest Mortgage Co. The checks are part of a $295 million national settlement of a predatory lending lawsuit against the company, said Ken Ross, acting commissioner of Michigan's Office of Financial and Insurance Services. The Michigan borrowers are among more than 300,000 nationwide who will receive a share of the settlement amount. Total restitution to Michigan resid...

By Gillian Tett and Paul J Davies Published: December 16 2007 18:33 | Last updated: December 16 2007 18:33 When the New York markets open on Monday, all eyes will be on Wall Street’s banks. As the US Federal Reserve, in a bid to ease the liquidity crisis, holds a novel type of money market auction to inject some $20bn of funds into financial institutions, investors and policymakers will be watching closely to see how many large banks bid for how much cash – and what that, in turn, indicates ab...

We think torture is mainly the province of dictators and juntas - the kind of thing that happens behind the iron doors of repressive regimes. In a democracy, with open courts and a free press, torture should be a relic. In the words of an American World War II poster, torture is "the method of the enemy." But a closer look at the modern history of torture suggests that exactly the opposite is true. Torture isn't an alien force invading our democracy from the benighted realms of dictatorships....

WASHINGTON - December 13 -- Today, The U.S. Supreme Court was asked to hear a key civil rights tax appeal which could affect thousands of past and future victims of civil rights offenses and whistleblower retaliation. In Murphy v. IRS, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed its own original ruling in deciding that court awards for damages such as emotional distress and loss of reputation are taxable as income. The case was brought by Marrita Murphy, an environm...

One of the more lively papers delivered at this week's in London was by the LSE's Charles Goodhart: . Goodhart believes monetary economics has "a long way yet to go", and few economists "have bothered much to relate theory to reality." Here's the abstract to his short paper: Lionel Robbins was much concerned about the methodology of economic science. When he discussed the desirable relationship between theory and ‘reality’, two of the three examples that he presented where the theoretical a...

If you are a government employee asked to testify at a Senate committee hearing one would think you would do your homework, right? If the committee in question was investigating the topic of reverse mortgages targeted at the elderly, and likely to be concerned about whether predatory lenders were taking advantage of seniors, you would come with all the relevant numbers at your fingertips, right? But when Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., asked Margaret Burns, an official at the Department of Hous...

So what is fascism ? Lawrence Britt, writing in Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 2, summarizes fourteen common traits of a fascist society. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause Supremacy of the Military Rampant Sexism Controlled Mass Media Obsession with National Security Religion and Government are Intertwined Corporate Po...

Everything negative you’ve heard about immigration is true. In fact, all the election cycle talk about lazy parasites pouring over borders to leech off another nation’s resources doesn’t go far enough in explaining the gravity of this ongoing crisis. Scream it from the mountaintops (or at least on your blog): Immigrants are destroying any and all hope of for planetary survival. Illegal aliens are Public Enemy #1. Foreigners are terrorists. If you don’t believe me, just ask any sweatshop worke...

America lags behind in math and science because an unusually high number of its students attend racially isolated, high-poverty schools Greg Anrig December 13, 2007 10:00 PM The response to the newly released 2006 Programme for Student International Assessment (Pisa), which showed US 15-year-olds ranking lower in scientific understanding than their peers in 16 out of 29 other countries, has been pretty much the same as it always is after the publication of similar studies reporting mediocre ...

Anticrime alliance drawing praise and opposition Federal immigration agents are forging new alliances with local law enforcement agencies across Massachusetts in an effort to crack down on hard-core criminals, spurring anxiety and applause within immigrant communities. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has been taking its message on the road from Concord to Cape Cod, offering so-called ICE 101 presentations to the state's district attorneys, probation officers, and, most recently,...

Whatever else one might say about America's accident-prone intelligence agencies, it seems clear that the system of congressional oversight that was established in the mid 1970s to supervise them isn't working. Right now, we are getting the worst possible mix - a dearth of adequate congressional scrutiny on the front end that could improve performance and check abuses, and a flood of second guessing at the back end, after each flap, that further demoralizes and enfeebles the spies. Congress si...

States, cities lead with clean-money alternative to a seamy system. The election year hasn't even begun, but the nation's political system is already awash in record amounts of money, much of it spent to buy influence. In other times, this would have evoked outrage. But candidates have grown so dependent on the money that all but a few stand mute — afraid to push the obvious remedy, public financing of elections. So perhaps it's worth pausing to note some of the reasons that the idea makes sens...

American conservatives preach about the sanctity of life, yet do not promote programs that would help millions of low income citizens get health care. Cutting through the hypocrisy to get to the hope, the author calls for more accountability among the "pro-life". ... snip ... Conservative rhetoric preaches about the sanctity of life. Unfortunately, and vexingly, this "profound respect for the life within the woman" is code for fetal life, not necessarily the mother's. Voices shout out for the ...

We need a strategy to end the occupation of Iraq and stop the next invasion, in Iran or elsewhere. One reason it’s been hard to mobilize people since the invasion of Iraq is the absence of a clear logic as to where our efforts are headed.What will another march, continued lobbying, or even a nonviolent direct action add up to? How will we actually stop this war and prevent the next one? As we approach another presidential election, we have to look soberly at the history of candidates who mobili...

The head of Mayo Clinic's Peripheral Nerve Section is Doctor P. James B. Dyck. He has been seeing workers from the Quality Pork Processing plant who have symptoms of a neurological illness. Dyck says doctors aren't drawing any conclusions yet, but it's possible that contact with neural material could have led to an autoimmune response. That's when the body's immune system attacks itself. "I think that's a very intriguing idea," he says. "That neural tissue could have perhaps set up some so...