Today a local alternative newspaper, Voices of Central Pennsylvania, has broken new developments in the story of the political forces that led to the milk labeling ban in Pennsylvania. The story is one of pressure by Monsanto and its allies to force this ban. You can read this story here.

More information on this story out soon.

In late October, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture announced it was banning milk labeling as of January 1, 2008. Now that decision has been postponed to February, according to a brief memo.

Today, the White House announced that it is finally taking appropriate action to deal with 9/11. It is cutting federal employee pay. I guess they figured out that "going shopping so the terrorists don't win" was just not working.

The First Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees the right of Americans peaceably to assemble…but not, evidently, their freedom from detention, interrogation, and fingerprinting after dispersing. Or so a court in New York has ruled.

There’s an assumption built into that question, accepted uncritically even by many who should know better. And who’s keeping the death toll? Consider this report today from McClatchy:

Gunmen in Baghdad's Shaab neighborhood stormed into a house not far from an Iraqi police checkpoint and killed 11 members of an Iraqi journalist's family, witnesses and journalism organizations reported Monday.

Iraqi police and U.S. military officials said they had no record of the killings.

The White House website is utterly perverse. Normally, what it doesn’t say is much more significant than what it does. The correct way to read Pravda on Pennsylvania Ave. is to look for what is omitted.

Today, for example, there are three gaps each the size of Texas.

Many Middle East experts have wondered aloud what point there is to the Annapolis peace conference. It appears destined to achieve nothing significant. One of its main purposes, I think, must be to demonstrate that Iranian-backed Hamas can in fact be marginalized. That PR victory would be worth enough to the Saudi regime that they'd send their Foreign Minister to a doomed conference.

Simultaneously, the US military is gearing up for some kind of very large show of force against Iran to occur during the next 90 days. Reuters reported over the weekend that very large amounts of fuel are being stockpiled at US naval and air bases in the U.A.E., Qatar, and Diego Garcia (where long-range bombers are based).

It’s officially the beginning of the holiday shopping season, and I’m going to have to give my family members some bad news: our preferred form of gift-giving is unacceptable. I learned this from MSN’s Liz Pulliam Weston:

Oh, those wacky libertarians are at it again.

You know the free love, free market people. Or is it love the free market? Or maybe it's free the free market and love it until the working class is properly punished for having the temerity to ask for liveable wages.

Anyway, they're back with a vengance with their latest branding campaign to unleash the free market movement in a cloyingly oh-so-über-hip-aren't-we-clever video that's surely all the rage among the self-righteous Ayn Rand Book Club crowd.

It is work that seems to embody good values - recycling tires into useful products and thus keeping tires out of landfills - providing jobs to prisoners. But this combination proved to be a recipe for serious worker injury.

The first story in this series of mine safety protection gone very wrong under Bush appointee Richard Stickler is here. That report describes flawed fatality inspections and no oversight to correct them. Plus a truculent response to the Inspector General's findings by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). This second IG report shows a failure to inspect mines.

Have you noticed the increase in mine accidents in recent years? Did you follow the news when Bush appointed Richard E. Stickler - to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) - after he had been rejected by Congress as unfit? Then you will not be surprised that a new Inspector General report finds gross failures in MSHA's accident investigation procedures. Truly, there has been a cave-in and that cave-in is at the offices of the agency charged with protecting miners.

The morning paper was about twenty times its normal Thursday size today. No surprise there. Ads for more stores than I knew were around. And with the 25th of Kislev just two weeks away and the 25th of December about a month later, you probably are probably thinking about gifts.

We at unbossed, every ready to serve our public, would like to help you think over what that means and how you can be true to your values.

According to a new study by the United States Department of Agriculture, when asked this question, more than 1 of every 10 Americans say: No.

But rather than talk about hunger, the term is "food insecure." I guess when they sit down to nothing to eat, they have food insecure pangs.

Here is the most recent labor news update by David Williams from Union1 with comments on the Smithfield law suit against the UFCW and other aggressive anti-union action.

Today Bush’s disastrous homeland security assistant, Fran Townsend, announced that she would “take a respite from public service”. Her career had been “both a blessing and a privilege”—but not, she seemed to think, “a curse”.

Her handwritten letter of resignation, dated simply “November 2007”, tells as much as you need to know about Townsend’s sycophantic career:

In 1937, the playwright Maxwell Anderson wrote of President George Washington: There are some men who lift the age they inhabit, til all men walk on higher ground in their lifetime.

Mr. President, you are such a man.

The English language hasn’t enough foul words to describe quite how a reader of the letter, other than George Bush, ought to receive that particular information. Anyhow Scott Horton is far too polite. His error is in treating Townsend’s blathering as if it were meant seriously.

Smithfield Foods is attempting to use the courts to intimidate and silence those who are publicizing dangerous and otherwise unpleasant conditions at Smithfield's packing plant.

On October 17, Smithfield filed a racketeering lawsuit against a union and community groups that are trying to organize workers at Smithfield's plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. Among the activities that Smithfield alleges are criminal: publishing a report, passing resolutions, and speaking to the press.

Now that nuclear power is on track to be the new Green Power, maybe we should consider costs other than narrow focus on carbon - so narrow it does not take into account all the costs of nuclear - including the real carbon contributions caused by nuclear power. But that is for another day and those equipped with the tools to do that accounting. For today, let's just look at the costs of cleaning up radiation from existing plants.

Res Gestae Divi Agricolae

This monumental text, dating to the first quarter of the 21st century, is generally regarded as the most significant inscription to survive from antiquity. It records the emperor’s own account of his public career, which coincided with the final transition from Republic to Empire. It is a very partial and partisan account of those critical years, which omits much that we would wish to know about. Yet it also affords us a rare glimpse into the mind of the man who revolutionized the state, then at the very height of its powers.

You may have read yesterday's headline that scientists have found that Monkeys Can Distinguish Unfair Situations. Apparently, the Wall Street Journal has yet to catch up with them.

Ironically, on the very same day we learned that monkeys "fuss over inequality" we found the WSJ flinging poo at anyone who dares "fuss" about income inequality.

If you've been listening to Mike Huckabee or John Edwards on the Presidential trail, you may have heard that the U.S. is becoming a nation of rising inequality and shrinking opportunity. We'd refer those campaigns to a new study of income mobility by the Treasury Department that exposes those claims as so much populist hokum.

The article then admits:

OK, "hokum" is our word.

No, sweethearts, it's not just your word, it's your trade.

Fraud by the Medicaid providers, that is.

The Government Accountability Office has just released a report on . . . GAO. Specifically on GAO and its stealth operations.

Starting point for what? To ban labeling that gives the public information it wants about how their food is produced. Thus said, Pennsylvania Secretary of Agriculture Dennis Wolff last month. Yes, milk is just the starting point.

You may recall that last November I wrote about a story sent to me from North Carolina by my friend Milo. It concerned a dispute among local Baptist churches, some of which wanted to expel the usurers in their congregations while others were for tolerance: The Only Sin that has its own advocacy group.

In recent days the story has broken wide about Pennsylvania Secretary of Agriculture Wolff's ban on labeling that allows the public to know whether their milk has been produced by a process that includes using rBST or pesticides.

Just because you do not live in Pennsylvania, don't think your milk is not in the crosshairs. If you search the news about absence labeling, you will find a number of areas of the country where this move is afoot.

According to press releases and news stories, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Agriculture, Dennis Wolff, decided to ban milk labels that state the milk is rBST free, as a result of the findings of a Food Labeling Advisory Committee. Now don’t you feel better knowing that the decision was made based on the deliberations and findings of a committee and not the whim of one man?

Well, don't get too comfortable.

I have to make another pitch for this radio show. Anyone interested in current events and how they are reported must listen to this show - On the Media - every week. Just this past week, the reports include these very hot topics:

Last month I commented, regarding a disturbing (and overlooked) White House initiative, the "National Strategy for Information Sharing," that the Bush administration was redefining the very meaning of personal privacy. To judge by the "National Strategy", the only legitimate privacy concern that citizens may have any longer is that personal information shouldn't be divulged unnecessarily to other parties once the government has collected it.

I have to conclude that for Bush, “protecting” privacy means “controlling” it in the government’s hands.

Today we learn that a top intelligence official, Donald M. Kerr, has said essentially that at a government-sponsored Geospatial Intelligence conference.

The author DWG has kindly permitted unbossed to repost this remembrance, which originally appeared at Daily Kos.

This is the story of two men that were large part of my formative years. To me, they were just my grandfathers. They were also veterans of the Great War, the War to End All War. They fought on opposite sides in the war, but had an unspoken bond of respect that I never fully understood.

So who is Dennis Wolff besides the Pennsylvania Secretary of Labor This is a follow up to this post.

Why is he so interested in outlawing the public's right to know whether the milk they are buying is comes from cows laced with rBST? Is he a Wolff in Sheeps's Clothing? Is there a Monsanto connection - because rBST is a Monsanto product, and the public has made it clear that we are uncomfortable with adding rBST to our milk.

In October, Dennis Wolff, Pennsylvania's Secretary of Agriculture, gave a huge gift to the Monsanto company.

Bovine growth hormone (BGH) is an artificial additive used by industrial dairies to increase milk production. Wolff issued an order banning dairies from using labels that say their products are free of BGH - even when those labels are telling the truth.

Tomorrow's Observer sheds some further light on the rush to war with Iran. American intelligence officials and interrogators in Iraq, interviewed by reporter David Smith, say that they're under "huge pressure" from Washington to find evidence of links between Iran and captured Iraqi insurgents. The pressure is distorting the way interrogations are conducted, with the goal now being not to discover the truth about the insurgents but instead to find some fuel to throw onto the flames of war.

It's impossible to avoid the parallels with the run-up to the attack upon Iraq.

The President was being himself today in the presence of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Right away you just know that this is going to make you cringe:

The news outlets hype-de-jour is Killer Staph. It's annoying when you see something hyped like this to sell papers, boost ratings, etc. Someone I was close to died of a staph infection a few years ago, leaving a young child, and depriving us all of her talents and intelligence. So staph can be dangerous. Fortunately for all of us, one thing our tax dollars pay for is research into disease and treatment and free and available information.

So many neglected stories, so little time to comment. Let me point you toward some links you might want to check out:

One of the earliest acts of the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress was to kill OSHA's ergonomic protections. They claimed it would do little to help workers and burden employers with enormous costs. A new study shows they were so, so very wrong.

Since Democrats took control of Congress in January, the Pentagon has been increasingly obstreperous toward the original branch of government. In particular, the military has taken to prohibiting service members from testifying to Congress in high profile investigations. Yesterday the Pentagon did it again, instructing a Marine lawyer that he was not permitted to testify at today’s hearings on enhanced drowning waterboarding before the House Judiciary Committee. This comes in the midst of the battle over the nomination of Michael Mukasey, a man who pretends that he doesn’t know whether enhanced drowning constitutes torture.

Today the FBI declassified super secret intelligence about an alleged al Qaeda plot...allegedly in order to share it with state and local authorities. Just by chance, it immediately found its way into the hands of journalists. The latter duly performed their appointed role: Spread the message of terror far and wide.

Another coincidence is worth mentioning. The alleged plot happens to be the worst nightmare scenario for that small segment of the American public that still backs the Bush administration’s GWOT excesses.

The “plot” involves (a) kiddies, and (b) shopping malls. Oh, the horror.

Or at least put them in jail as a first step. Shakespeare had it right. If you want to kill a democracy, get those pesky lawyers out of the way. Especially those whose focus is human rights. If you feel powerless and want to know one thing you can do, here it is.

In a report out this week, GAO takes issue with the way that the Administration has been requesting funding for the DOD's actions in the GWOT and the "longer war against terror." This issue is about more than just a lot of money. GAO thought it was serious enough to initiate this study on its own. That is not unheard of , but it is definitely not the norm.

By now it ought to be clear that George Bush doesn’t have a foreign policy; instead he has a GWOT around which everything else is ‘organized’. By the same token, Bush has no Pakistan-policy; he has a Musharraf-policy.

The Deputy Secretary of State, John Negroponte—who already in the 1980s had a record of cozying up to “friendly” dictators—assured the House Foreign Affairs Committee today that Musharraf is in fact “indispensable” to the United States.

So there it is.

When I got the notice that my polling place had been changed, I was alarmed to say the least. When I saw that it was in the next city over, I was outraged. When I read that it was in the lobby of the Assembly of God Church, I was filled with dread and knew no good could come of it.

These were all the ingredients of a disaster in the making.

My first thoughts were along the lines of "WTF?!? Isn't there supposed to be some sort of separation of church and state thingy in this country? (my impromptu outraged thoughts aren't excessively articulate)... Surely, voting in a church is the THE one line that should never be crossed. Is this a Bush thing? When did it start?"

But I told myself I was being prejudiced and irrational in my trepidation about the new polling place. That the words "Assembly of God" were coloring my outlook. That I was just suffering from a knee-jerk church aversion reaction. Think of it as just another public gathering spot, I told myself.

Little did I dream that the reality was going to be so much worse than I imagined.

We may want our kids to "just say no," but when it comes to doling out abstinence-only funding, Congress isn't abstaining. In the latest federal budget bill, Congress gives it away. Big time.

This evening at 9 PM Frontline will talk to several experts about the CIA's secretive world-wide spiderweb for kidnapping and torturing suspected terrorists. The documentary is primarily the work of Stephen Grey, an investigative reporter and author of Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Rendition and Torture Program. If you haven't been following this scandal as closely as we have over the years at unbossed, then I'd strongly urge you to watch it tonight or view it online at PBS after tomorrow.

So what's the key problem with the use of military contractors? According to the report give to the military November 1, it's that there aren't enough of them.

More than good tactical officers, good policy people, what we need is military people who know how to contract for the military's work. In other words, the terrorists have won if we don't go shopping.

UnionOne is a project that shows what just one talented and dedicated person can do.

More than two days after the coup in Pakistan, George Bush finally speaks about it. Trouble is, he’s still saying nothing.

So says John Bellinger, Senior Associate Counsel to the President and Legal Adviser to the NSC, and a close aide to Condoleezza Rice. When asked whether foreign governments could be permitted to waterboard American citizens, Bellinger declared that he couldn’t rule it out.

The logic of permitting George Bush to do whatever he wishes to suspected terrorists, regardless of the law, also means that you have lost your legal rights too. It requires that you’re no longer a citizen, but instead a subject. The American government can’t be counted on to defend your human rights because you don’t have them any longer.

Terrifying, sure, but Bellinger’s position is nothing if not rigorously logical.

Crossposted from a story by Jim Spencer at Colorado Confidential.com.

Denver Post owner Dean Singleton's front-page editorial attacking Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter on Sunday appears unprecedented in its name-calling, at least in the newspaper's recent history.

On Saturday I commented that the American news media were pretending to themselves that the Bush administration had taken a strong stance against the imposition of martial law in Pakistan. The opposite was true: Bush had gone completely silent, while the Pentagon had let it be known that it wouldn't let a little coup stand in the way of their close cooperation with General Musharraf. It was left to a State Dept. spokesman to issue a tepid expression of chagrin about the "state of emergency". Condoleezza Rice managed to weaken that even further while showing that she was barely cognizant of who was in touch with Musharraf.

The harvest of shame continues today. Bush is still ducking questions and Rice remains mealy-mouthed. What has changed, however, is that a few in the media have discovered that American journalists were fibbing yesterday when they credited the administration with a strong response to the coup.

Why the sudden about-face? Several prominent politicians today decried the Bush administration's failure to take a clear stance against the coup, making it acceptable (evidently) for journalists to tell the truth on Bush.

George Bush has remained silent as General Pervez Musharraf imposed martial law in Pakistan.

That's a pretty remarkable fact, one that you won't find the American news media saying much about. It's a token of the debasement of both our presidency and the media that nobody wants to discuss Bush's unwillingness to discuss this outrage against civil society in Pakistan.

It also reflects upon a foreign policy held hostage to its own worst demons; a policy so weakened, so chaotic and feverish that disasters like this are presumed to belong in the normal run of events.

Some may call me a self-made person. They’ll tell me I should be proud I pulled myself up by my bootstraps. And maybe I could feel that way about myself, but I’d be a liar, if I did. The only way I could feel that way would be if I were blind. So as we head into a holiday based on gratitude, let us reflect on the many blessings we have and give thanks for them and to the people who have been blessings in our lives.

Dear Senator Specter,

I gather that you remain undecided about the vote to approve the nomination of a man who cannot or will not say whether a technique used by the Spanish Inquisition is or is not torture. I think his failure to speak is an eloquent demonstration of his unfitness to lead the Justice Department.

Had any police officers employed waterboarding against suspects in your jurisdiction when you were a District Attorney, I have no doubt that you would have prosecuted them for a crime. In fact, if anybody had treated an animal that way, you would have felt obliged to prosecute.

A jury in London delivered a verdict of guilty today in the case of the Wrong Man. Jurors imposed a staggering fine upon the Metropolitan Police. It was a bloody crime, if you ask me.

All the police did was get the Wrong Man.

The Wrong Man was an obscure young electrician who for a time lived in London. He may not have been as dark-skinned as the police let on, but he was definitely acting all nervous and twitchy.

Mr Thwaites said a conviction would have the effect of "putting handcuffs on the police". He said the prosecution should never have been brought and that Mr de Menezes was acting like a suicide bomber when he was shot.

This is straight from the report. Devastating! Not Independent - not trustworthy. Stenography - not Inspection.