Truthout: 3 April 2012

Broken Promises: America's Forgotten Iraqi Allies Face Death and a Long Road Home
Mike Ludwig, Truthout: "Hope for US-affiliated Iraqis like Ali came in 2008, when a bipartisan effort in Congress created a special visa program to allow interpreters and other professionals who are in danger because they worked for the US, especially those under threat of assassination, to immigrate to America. But last year, the Obama administration added new layers of security clearance to the program, exacerbating a growing backlog of applications and leaving former employees like Ali waiting in refugee limbo."
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Unmasking the GOP's Faith-Based Economics
John Kane, Truthout: "From Ron Paul to Mitt Romney, politicians consistently employ their own framing of why the economy is performing poorly, and thus, promote a consistent remedy for how to improve it. Government doesn't need to do more, they contend, it needs to do less - less regulating, less spending, less taxing. They believe in these solutions, I argue, not necessarily because of some secret allegiance to the rich, but because of their longstanding blind faith in the ability of the so-called 'free market' to correct economic problems on its own."
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"Guidebook to False Confessions": Key Document John Yoo Used to Draft Torture Memo Released
Jason Leopold, Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout: A key document that describes the origins of the Bush administration's torture program was just released by the Department of Defense under the Freedom of Information Act. The so-called Pre-Laboratory Operating Instructions was a manual used to teach US servicemembers how to withstand torture if captured by an enemy. The document was shared with top Bush administration officials during White House meetings in May of 2002 as they discussed an "alternative interrogation methods" for high-value detainee Abu Zubaydah. Seven of the techniques in the manual ended up in the August 2002 torture memo drafted by former Justice Department attorney John Yoo.
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Partisan Rulings on Strip Searches and Citizens United Could Put Supreme Court on Trial in 2012 (Video)
Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show: "Rachel Maddow reviews the details of a controversial 5-4 Supreme Court ruling on strip searches."
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"Empty Buildings Are the Crime": Occupy SF Commune Evicted After One Day
Susie Cagle, Truthout: "It lasted less than 24 hours, but the Occupy SF Commune at 888 Turk may have pushed the movement forward harder than many other of the movement's Bay Area actions of late. And despite Monday's raid, many occupiers saw the building operation as a success."
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Nuclear Zero: Getting to the Finish Line
David Krieger, Truthout: "We have come a long way, but we haven't reached the finish line, which is a world without nuclear weapons. The issue we face now is to educate decision makers and the public that the dangers of nuclear weapons have not gone away. There are still many flash points of nuclear danger in the world: India-Pakistan, North Korea, the continued possession of nuclear weapons by the UK and France, the possession of nuclear weapons by Israel and the incentive for nuclear proliferation this creates in the Middle East, and the relationship of the nuclear energy fuel cycle to nuclear proliferation."
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In Haiti, Global Failures on a Cholera Epidemic
Deborah Sontag, The New York Times News Service: "As the deaths and continuing caseload indicate, the world's response to this preventable, treatable scourge has proved inadequate. Cholera, never before recorded in Haiti, stayed one step ahead of the authorities as they shifted gears from the earthquake recovery. While eventually effective in reducing the fatality rate, the response was slow to get fully under way, conservative and insufficiently sustained."
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On the News With Thom Hartmann: The Federal War on Marijuana Continues, and More
In today's On the News segment: The federal war on Marijuana continues, Republican budget is nothing more than a Trojan horse, new study shows long-term unemployed are dying younger, the Supreme Court thinks you need to be strip-searched, and more.
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Data Mining You: How the Intelligence Community Is Creating a New American World
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch: "In the new world of the National Security Complex, no one can be trusted - except the officials working within it, who in their eternal bureaucratic vigilance clearly consider themselves above any law. The system that they are constructing (or that, perhaps, is constructing them) has no more to do with democracy or an American republic or the Constitution than it does with a Soviet-style state. Think of it as a phenomenon for which we have no name. Like the yottabyte, it's something new under the sun, still awaiting its own strange and ugly moniker."
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Arizona Legislators Trying to Declare Pregnancy Two Weeks Prior to Conception
Amanda Marcotte, RH Reality Check: "Legislators have had so much success smuggling in ulterior motives with 20-week bans that they're now looking for ways to expand the amount of hard right anti-choice nonsense they can attach to those bills. The most recent - and extreme - example is Arizona. There, lawmakers are writing a 20-week abortion ban that starts counting off at the first day of a woman's period. Yes, they're arguing that you're 'pregnant' while you're actually getting your period."
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Israeli Experts Mum on Iran Attack to Support Bibi's Bluff
Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service: "The widespread impression among the Israeli national security elite and press corps that Netanyahu's threat of war against Iran is a bluff does not guarantee that Netanyahu will not attack Iran. But it does help explain why there has not been a much bigger outcry against a war option that is widely regarded as irrational for Israel."
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Green Cards for Clean Energy Job Creators
Maria Gallucci, InsideClimate News: "So far, the EB-5 program has created at least 43,300 full-time American jobs and attracted more than $2.2 billion in investments, according to USCIS data provided to InsideClimate News by the agency. At least half that activity occurred since 2008, and most was in real estate development. But more and more developers and cities are turning to the program to get their clean energy projects off the ground, said Peter Joseph, executive director of the Association to Invest in USA (IIUSA)."
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There Is Nothing More Anti-Capitalist Than "the People First"
L'Humanite Staff, l'Humanite: "For l'Humanite Dimanche, Jean-Luc Melenchon explains the meaning of the citizens' revolution, specifies the first measures that the government of the Front de gauche will place on the workbench once in power, and describes the steps to be taken in order to impose these measures on the French and European oligarchy."
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TRUTHOUT'S BUZZFLASH DAILY HEADLINES

GOP Presidential Candidates Aren't Job Creators: They Are Just Seeking One for Themselves Funded by Taxpayers
Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash at Truthout: "When you vote for leadership to spur innovation in America to create economic growth, it's pretty hard to follow grown men who symbolize in their lives an interest in only one job - being president - and that position is already filled. That's what the Republican presidential candidates bring to the table: they haven't been creating jobs in recent years, just seeking one."
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The 99 Percent for the 100 Percent: The Case for Deep Patriotism
Read the Article at The Nation

Breaking News: Women Like Having Access to Contraception
Read the Article at Mother Jones

Permitted Concealed Firearms Would Be Allowed in GOP Convention Protest Zone
Read the Article at The Tampa Bay Times

Obama: Ryan Budget Is "Thinly Veiled Social Darwinism"
Read the Article at Talking Points Memo

National Organization for Marriage's Racialist Divide-and-Conquer Strategy Wins Support
Read the Article at BuzzFlash

Hillary Clinton Slams Rush Limbaugh "Verbal Assault"
Read the Article at Politico

Good Jobs: Three Reasons There Aren't More
Read the Article at The Boston Review

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