Foreigner – That Was Yesterday What’s on your mind tonight…?

Mosque haters get paid federal bucks to paint themselves into a corner.

To say all the combat troops are out of Iraq is just an accounting trick…

Seemingly seeing the dearth of things to talk about this week, a federal judge has decided to issue a preliminary injunction blocking federal funding for stem cell research on the grounds that it forces the destruction of human embryos.

Adult stem cell researchers filed the suit back in June against the Obama Administration’s executive order on stem cell policy, allowing for federal funding. President George W. Bush banned most stem cell funding except on existing stem cell lines in August 2001.

How do you steal $196 trillion dollars and get away with it? In Plunder, The Crime of Our Time, journalist Danny Schechter dissects the crime scene, Wall Street.

Cliff May is entirely not up to the task of defending why the Park51 center should not be built in its currently planned location and finally just tells Glenn Greenwald to “shut up” on Dylan Ratigan’s show.

The Treasury Department has shifted their thinking on HAMP, their tentpole foreclosure mitigation program. Despite initial estimates of the program being able to keep 3 million people in their homes (to date, just 400,000 have been approved for a permanent loan modification, with only .1% of those actually getting the kind of principal reduction that can really make a difference), Treasury now says that the goal was to delay foreclosures so the market could better absorb the glut of vacant homes, and prices would remain somewhat stable. Treasury claims they couldn’t justify spending the amount necessary to keep borrowers in their homes; however, just $250 million of an earmarked $75 billion has been spent on the program, according to the Special Inspector General for TARP ($50 billion of the $75 billion for HAMP is supposed to come from TARP, with the rest from Fannie and Freddie).

In a series of recent articles, I’ve pointed out Yoo, Bybee, and later Office of Legal Counsel attorney Stephen Bradbury, disregarded internal SERE documents related to the safety of waterboarding. Now we can add the suppression of complaints by SERE trainees of having contracted PTSD from participation in SERE training. This directly contradicts the Yoo/Bybee contention in the Aug. 2, 2002 memo to Rizzo, where they wrote, “Through your [i.e., CIA] consultation with various individuals responsible for such training, you have learned that these techniques have been used as elements of a course of conduct without any reported incident of prolonged mental harm.”

Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms of Iowa, two Iowa-based dairy farms, have collectively recalled 550 million eggs due to a salmonella outbreak, the largest such recall in recent history. Both have close ties to Jack DeCoster, an agribusiness owner. Now, Rep. Rosa DeLauro wants to know more about DeCoster, and what federal regulators knew about them.

All three pollsters agree that Rep. Kendrick Meek now has at least a ten-point lead over Billionaire Jeff Greene. But in the race for the Republican nom for governor there is less agreement–the pollsters are all over the map with their numbers.