News bits

[tangaroa]

• Germany's Social Democratic Party lost nearly a third of its support in elections, with the deficit split between the two further left parties and the liberal to libertarian Free Democratic Party. Germany's next government is likely to be a coalition of the plurality-winning centrist Christian Democratic Party and the FDP.
• U.S. Congressman Alan Grayson described the Republican Party's approach to high health care costs as "don't get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly." Republicans were outraged, but Chris Weignant at the Huffington Post notes that "the Republicans have been saying worse things for the past four months" about the Democratic plan. Incidentally, what Grayson described is the way life works. Health care has a cost, and dying quickly reduces the amount of time and energy spent on a person's health care. Grayson's words also describe the Republican plan because the Republicans have been opposing the very idea that an organized society can do better. Side note: Grayson also referred to the normal course of people getting sick and dying as a Holocaust, which is just as dumb as calling abortion a Holocaust.
• The U.S. Congress earlier this year banned all flavoured cigarettes except for menthols. This law was led by the Democrats who were nearly unanimous in support of it, but Republicans voted in even numbers both for and against it. The conspiracy theory going around is that the law is an attempt by the big players in the tobacco industry to shut down competition from small innovators, as Altria (the former Phillip Morris) had lobbied in support of the bill.
• Honduras redeclared martial law and is repressing pro-Zelaya media outlets, accusing them of inciting violence. The executive director of Radio Globo, a radio station shut down by the state, responded by blaming the Jews for Zelaya's dismissal.
• Venezuela is organizing militias to defend land-reform beneficiaries against attacks from the former land owners. The article also describes a low-level war in Venezuela between land owners and organized squatters.
• This is old news but it is important and I somehow missed it when it happened: Israel's Mossad intelligence agency claims to have wiretaps in which Balad party founder Amzi Bishara directed Hezbollah artillery against Israel. Bishara has fled the country. Balad is one of Israel's most prominent Arab parties; Arabs are under-represented in Israel's Knesset parliament and in the mainstream Israeli parties in general, and those few who are elected on the tickets of the Arab parties tend to be supportive of the pan-Arab war to destroy Israel. Things like this will further divide the Arab and Jewish communities of Israel.
• An Indian woman shot and killed a member of Lashkar e-Taiba who had broken into her family's home. The dead man had been a local leader of the terrorist group. The family was forced to flee their home after the group threatened revenge.
• The United Nations deputy ambassador to Afghanistan, Peter Galbraith, has been fired for pressing accusations of fraud in the recent Afghan elections.
• British propaganda leaflets killed a young girl in Afghanistan.
• An Egyptian writer for the state-owned magazine Democracy Review faces disciplinary action for interviewing Israel's ambassador to Egypt.
• Major U.S. media figures Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Lou Dobbs are celebrating the fact that the U.S. was denied the opportunity to host the 2016 Olympics. Brazil won, with the games to be in Rio de Janerio, but these guys are happy that the U.S. lost just because President Obama had argued for the U.S. to host the games.
• Glenn Beck is suing for control of a domain name that, in reference to a Gilbert Gottfried routine, falsely accuses him of raping and murdering a young girl in 1990. Also: The domain owner's response is amusing.
• Newsmax writer John L. Perry, the former editor of the Rome, Georgia News Tribune, calls for a military coup in the United States.
• Digby remembers the U.S. media's constant pillorying of President Clinton during the 1990s, and Chris Matthews doesn't.
• Richard Cohen of the New York Times complains that Obama is not acting enough like a dictator.
• A previously unknown private military contractor calling itself "American Police Force" or "American Police Group" drove into the small town of Hardin, Montana with logos of the non-existent "City of Harden Police Department" on their own private SUVs. The group has licensed rights to the town's empty jail, but the person in charge of American Police Force has a history of fraud and the Attorney General of Montana is investigating the deal.
• The Los Angeles Times reports on shortages of access to health care in Canada.
• U.S. Supreme Court Justice Scalia raises the question of whether too much intellectual talent is being drawn to the legal industry.
• In the Los Angeles Times, writer Neal Gabler describes the U.S. right wing as a "religion".
• A U.S. judge ruled that sports players don't have likeness rights, allowing video game developers to create players that look just like them.