Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Everyone’s welcome here, no special handshake required. Just check your meta at the door.
Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Breakfast News
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Greenwald’s Finale: Naming Victims of Surveillance
The man who helped bring about the most significant leak in American intelligence history is to reveal names of US citizens targeted by their own government in what he promises will be the “biggest” revelation from nearly 2m classified files.
Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who received the trove of documents from Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, told The Sunday Times that Snowden’s legacy would be “shaped in large part” by this “finishing piece” still to come.
His plan to publish names will further unnerve an American intelligence establishment already reeling from 11 months of revelations about US government surveillance activities.
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What? You haven’t heard about that? Well, that’s not too surprising. European economies, France in particular, get very bad press in America. Our political discourse is dominated by reverse Robin-Hoodism – the belief that economic success depends on being nice to the rich, who won’t create jobs if they are heavily taxed, and nasty to ordinary workers, who won’t accept jobs unless they have no alternative. And according to this ideology, Europe – with its high taxes and generous welfare states – does everything wrong. So Europe’s economic system must be collapsing, and a lot of reporting simply states the postulated collapse as a fact.
The reality, however, is very different.
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New Environmentalists Are Taking Bold Actions – and It’s Working
No longer dominated by the traditional “Big Green” groups that were taking big donations from corporate polluters, the new environmental movement is broader, more assertive and more creative. With extreme energy extraction and climate change bearing down on the world, environmental justice advocates are taking bold actions to stop extreme energy extraction and create new solutions to save the planet. These ‘fresh greens’ often work locally, but also connect through national and international actions.
The recent national climate assessment explains why the movement is deepening, broadening and getting more militant. The nation’s experts concluded that climate change is impacting us in serious ways right now. It is no longer a question of whether climate change is real – the evidence is apparent in chaotic seasonal weather; floods caused by heavier downpours of rain and deeper droughts; more severe wildfires in the West; the economic impacts of rising insurance rates, as well as challenges for farming, maple syrup production, and finding seafood in the oceans, among many others.
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How Pope Francis Exposed the Brutality of Israel’s Apartheid Wall
It was a simple gesture, but a deeply symbolic one that came during the pope’s three day visit to the Middle East. The pope prayed at a barrier that has come to symbolize Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands, which began in 1967 after the Six-Day War.The building of the separation barrier–which takes the form of a fence, a wall or electronic fence sensors, depending on where you are–is among the most controversial actions Israel has taken over the past decade. While Israeli authorities claim it was put up starting in 2002 to prevent suicide bombings, Palestinians point out that the separation barrier snakes its way throughout their territory. 85 percent of the separation barrier is located in the occupied West Bank, impeding freedom of movement in the Palestinian West Bank. It also goes around major illegal settlements, effectively enveloping communities built in contravention of international law into Israel proper.
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Woman, 92, Denied Photo ID to Vote for Lack of Birth Certificate
Here is just one more of the hundreds of thousands of reasons that have led the U.S. Dept. of Justice to file suit against Texas Republicans’ polling place photo ID restriction law.
The same law had been previously blocked by the DoJ and again by a federal court under the federal Voting Rights Act, after the state’s own data showed the law discriminated against racial minorities and others, while failing to deter actual voter fraud in the state.
But, literally minutes after SCOTUS gutted the heart of the Voting Rights Act last Summer, the section which was used to strike down the law previously, Texas Republicans announced their intention to re-enact the law which, of course, they knew to be discriminatory.
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Must Read Blog Posts
Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?
by Howard Zinn
Why Jesus Would Have Hated Most Modern Day Religion
by Frank Schaeffer
Hellraisers Journal: James Lord of UMWA & AF of L: “We will go after Rockefellers themselves.”
by JayRaye
Move On. Just Another Man Boiled Alive.
by jpmassar
They Didn’t All Die for Our Freedom
by backell
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The Daily Wiki
An aurora is a natural light display in the sky (from the Latin word aurora, “sunrise” or the Roman goddess of dawn), especially in the high latitude (Arctic and Antarctic) regions, caused by the collision of solar wind and magnetospheric charged particles with the high altitude atmosphere (thermosphere). Most auroras occur in a band known as the auroral zone,[1][2] which is typically 3° to 6° wide in latitude and observed at 10° to 20° from the geomagnetic poles at all local times (or longitudes), but often most vividly around the spring and autumn equinoxes. The charged particles and solar wind are directed into the atmosphere by the Earth’s magnetosphere. A geomagnetic storm expands the auroral zone to lower latitudes.
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Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits. ~Albert Einstein
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Breakfast Tunes
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Stupid Shit by LaEscapee
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