Join the Occupy Movement by staying home from work!

And if you can't do that, then come out to one or more of the rallies around New York City.

99 Picket Lines

Unity Rally

Solidarity March

And finally, check out the following for continuing updates:

Occupy Project List.

Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark carried a woman out of a burning house and was treated for smoke inhalation on Thursday night.

Mr. Booker arrived to his home in the Upper Clinton Hill neighborhood to find a neighbor's house on fire, said Anne Torres, a spokeswoman. The Fire Department had not yet arrived, she said, and Mr. Booker went inside with two members of his security detail and rescued one woman.

Pretty amazing.

Mayor Bloomberg: You watching this?!!

"The governor subsequently steered $4 billion earmarked for the tunnel to the state's near-bankrupt transportation trust fund, traditionally financed by the gasoline tax. "

Why?

"The report is likely to revive criticism that his decision, which he said was about "hard choices" in tough economic times, was more about avoiding the need to raise the state’s gasoline tax, which would have violated a campaign promise."

They should impeach him; there's no bigger transportation project as important in this country as the one Christie torpedoed.

Paul Krugman seems to agree, as his column today (4/13/12) lays out:

Mr. Christie insisted that his state couldn't afford the cost. As we've already seen, however, he apparently couldn't make that case without being dishonest about the numbers. So what was his real motive?

One answer is that the governor is widely assumed to have national ambitions, and the Republican base hates government spending in general (unless it's on weapons). And it hates public transportation in particular. Indeed, three other Republican governors -- in Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin -- have also canceled public transportation projects supported by federal funds. The difference, of course, is that New Jersey is a densely populated state, most of whose residents live either in Greater New York or Greater Philadelphia; given that position, public transit is the state’s lifeblood, and refusing to invest in such transportation will strangle the state's economy.

Another answer is that canceling the tunnel allowed Mr. Christie to divert funds from that project -- as his critics have said, to cannibalize the investment -- and put them into the state highway fund, thereby avoiding the need to raise the state's tax on gasoline. New Jersey gas taxes, by the way, are lower in real terms than at any point in the state's history. But, as a candidate, Mr. Christie said that he wouldn't raise those taxes, so cannibalizing the tunnel helped him avoid embarrassment.

The crucial point about both of these explanations is that they stand Mr. Christie's narrative about himself on its head. The governor poses as a man willing to make hard choices for the future, but what he actually did was sacrifice the future for the sake of personal political advantage. He catered to national Republican prejudices that are completely at odds with New Jersey's needs; he cared more about avoiding embarrassment over a misguided campaign pledge than about serving an urgent public need.

Unfortunately, Mr. Christie's behavior is all too typical these days.

America used to be a country that thought big about the future. Major public projects, from the Erie Canal to the interstate highway system, used to be a well-understood component of our national greatness. Nowadays, however, the only big projects politicians are willing to undertake -- with expense no object -- seem to be wars. Funny how that works.

The thing is, because so much of our transportation future is at stake, its just not that funny that the voters of New Jersey picked Christie in the first place. All of our future generations are going to suffer for it.

Today begins three days of oral arguments for and against President Obama's historic Affordable Care Act (derisively referred as Obamacare). You can follow it all at the following sites:

New York Times

SCOTUS blog

C-SPAN

And from the Supreme Court itself, when it posts the recordings of the oral arguments.

History is indeed being made this week, with the final denouement due by the end of June.

I went on a walk in Manhattan the other day with a young woman who once had to work these streets, hired out by eight pimps while she was just 16 and 17. She pointed out a McDonald's where pimps sit while monitoring the girls outside, and a building where she had repeatedly been ordered online as if she were a pizza.

Alissa, her street name, escaped that life and is now a 24-year-old college senior planning to become a lawyer -- but she will always have a scar on her cheek where a pimp gouged her with a potato peeler as a warning not to escape. "Like cattle owners brand their cattle," she said, fingering her cheek, "he wanted to brand me in a way that I would never forget."

After Alissa testified against her pimps, six of them went to prison for up to 25 years. Yet these days, she reserves her greatest anger not at pimps but at companies that enable them. She is particularly scathing about Backpage.com, a classified advertising Web site that is used to sell auto parts, furniture, boats -- and girls. Alissa says pimps routinely peddled her on Backpage.

What is Backpage and who owns it?

Backpage accounts for about 70 percent of prostitution advertising among five Web sites that carry such ads in the United States, earning more than $22 million annually from prostitution ads, according to AIM Group, a media research and consulting company. It is now the premier Web site for human trafficking in the United States, according to the National Association of Attorneys General. And it's not a fly-by-night operation. Backpage is owned by Village Voice Media, which also owns the estimable Village Voice newspaper.

That's right - The Village Voice is responsible for child sex trafficking in this country. It's not the only publication making money off of this despicable and illegal practice, of course, but it's by far the largest. They should follow Craig's list from two years ago:

Let's be honest: Backpage's exit from prostitution advertising wouldn't solve the problem, for smaller Web sites would take on some of the ads. But it would be a setback for pimps to lose a major online marketplace. When Craigslist stopped taking such ads in 2010, many did not migrate to new sites: online prostitution advertising plummeted by more than 50 percent, according to AIM Group.

FIFTY PERCENT! Let's give The Village Voice a shove, shall we? Make sure to sign the Change.org petition demanding that they stop selling sex trafficking ads to pimps.

Then, just after 2 p.m., police officers began telling a large group of protesters that they could not stand on the sidewalk on a stretch of Liberty Street. Officers pushed the crowd until more than 100 protesters on the sidewalk were pressed against a wall that borders the park.

Then the police began grabbing and arresting people, taking into custody at least half a dozen. Officers surged into the crowd, dragging protesters toward the street, as people yelled objections.

"They were grabbing people randomly," Zachary Kamel said, adding that his girlfriend, Lauren DiGoia, had been arrested while dancing on the sidewalk.

One sergeant grabbed a woman wearing a green shirt by the bottom of her throat and shoved her head against the hood of a car. A moment later, another officer approached and forcefully pressed her head against the car before placing her into the back of a police truck.

WTF! Are we right back to where we started last September?

The warm weather will only swell the ranks of those in the Occupy Movement. Straight into the 2012 Presidential election.

This Sunshine Week, as the nation commemorates the importance of open government and freedom of information, the Sunlight Foundation is leading a campaign to engage voters to call on their lawmakers and the Obama administration to address the disastrous effects of the game -- changing rulings by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) and a federal district court in SpeechNow.org v. FEC. These rulings paved the way the rise of super PACs and for a small group of elites to spend unprecedented sums -- with little or no transparency -- to influence voters.

To address this problem, Congress should take immediate action by passing the DISCLOSE Act, recently introduced in the House (H.R. 4010, available via OpenCongress here). This bill is an update to a previous version introduced two years ago in the last Congress, and goes straight to the problem: the lack of transparency for unlimited, secret super PAC money and the influence it has on our elections and our elected officials. This simplified bill, stripped of controversial non-transparency provisions the previous version contained, is a good solution to the 'dark money' problem.

We adore the Sunshine Foundation because they are non-partisan and devoted to opening up our government, which is owned and operated by us..not "them." Follow their easy-to-use instructions on composing a letter to the editor that will then get automatically sent to newspapers in and near your zip code.

Get crackin' so we can part the clouds and let the sun shine down!

The last veteran of World War I was a waitress, and for 90 years no one knew her name.

Florence Green, a member of Britain’s Royal Air Force who was afraid of flying, died in England on Saturday, two weeks shy of her 111th birthday. She was believed to have been the war’s last living veteran — the last anywhere of the tens of millions who served.

With the death in May of Claude Stanley Choules, an Englishman who served aboard a Royal Navy battleship, Mrs. Green became the last known person, male or female, to have served in the war on either side.

Though she was aware of her historical position as the war's last veteran, Mrs. Green was philosophical about the war itself, one of the defining events of modern history, in which more than 20 million people died.

"It seems," she remarked to The Independent last year, on the occasion of her 110th birthday, "like such a long time ago now."

A long time ago, indeed...when the world was a much bloodier place, that's for sure:

But though she was aware of her historical position as the war's last veteran, Mrs. Green was philosophical about the war itself, one of the defining events of modern history, in which more than 20 million people died.

Imagine that number: 20 million.

And yet that was only 1/3 the number of humans killed in World War II: 60 million.

SIXTY MILLION DEATHS!

It's just staggering that 80 million humans were killed between 1915 and 1945. Staggering.

"According to Planned Parenthood, its centers performed more than 4 million breast exams over the past five years, including nearly 170,000 as a result of Komen grants."

Cutting funding for breast cancer exams is a despicable political move as a result of extreme Right Wing pressure on the foundation. All men and women who are interested in eradicating breast cancer should exert pressure on them to reverse this decision. Until they do, we are urging all of our friends to withhold support for the Susan G. Komen Race for a Cure Foundation.

Send SKG a message on any of their Facebook pages, like this one.

Twelve protesters were arrested Sunday night on a march through Lower Manhattan to show support for Occupy protesters in Oakland, where a violent confrontation erupted on Saturday night between the police and demonstrators who tried to take over an empty convention center.

The crowd in New York, about 300 strong, occasionally surged into streets, and on at least two occasions someone in the crowd threw a bottle, apparently aimed at police officers who accompanied the march on foot and in vehicles. The police plunged into the crowd several times.

Three men were charged with assault and one with criminal weapons possession, the police said. Most of the rest of those arrested were charged with disorderly conduct. Three of the 12 people arrested were women. One officer sustained an injured finger.

About 400 people were arrested and three police officers were injured after a weekend protest by members of the Occupy movement in Oakland, Calif., turned into a violent confrontation with law enforcement officers that led to an assault on City Hall.

The clashes began about 3 p.m. on Saturday when protesters marched toward the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center and began to tear down construction barricades, and the violence extended into early Sunday. The Oakland Police Department said in a statement that the crowd was ordered to disperse after protesters "began destroying construction equipment and fencing."

'Officers were pelted with bottles, metal pipe, rocks, spray cans, improvised explosive devices and burning flares," the police statement said. Officers responded by firing smoke and tear gas canisters and beanbags, and they initially arrested 20 people.

Several hours later, some protesters broke into City Hall, the police said, although some of the demonstrators said they found the building's door ajar. Mayor Jean Quan surveyed the damage there on Sunday, and the city administrator, Deanna J. Santana, said at a news conference that the protesters had broken a window and damaged a historic model of the building. Flags were stolen, she said, and one of them was burned in front of City Hall.

Omar Yassin, 42, a member of the group's media committee, said the vandalism was "not something I would have done."

"But I do understand that people were enraged by the brutality that they had already seen," he said. "There were children in that crowd; there were families in that crowd."

And finally, OccupyWashingtonDC is getting ready to be evicted:

In the wake of a recent Congressional hearing on Occupy DC, misleading threats from Mayor Vince Gray about nonexistent "health" concerns in the park, and yesterday's taser attack that hospitalized a resident of the park, the National Park Service has given Occupiers in McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza until 12:00 noon today until they will begin enforcing a no-camping ban. Occupy DC has begun preparing nonviolent resistance and is calling for all supporters to join them.

More here from the NY Times.

This is JANUARY! Imagine what the Spring will bring...

The movement continues...

The big question going into this election in November is why we allow these hedge fund and private equity owners to be taxed at the long-term capital gains rate. Capital gains are taxed at a lower rate to supposedly encourage long-term investment (defined as longer than one year) by individuals. The stated goal is to encourage long-term investing of our own money into investments like stocks and real estate. But these hedge-fund owners aren't investing their own money. They're investing other people's money (same with Bain Capital). So why are they receiving this lower rate?

Romney's tax returns will shine a light on this form of class warfare, where those making far less than Romney (like his secretary) pay a much higher tax rate. Billionaire Warren Buffett has repeatedly spoken about this inequity.

He said this today in South Carolina, when asked about his tax rate:

"It's probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything," Mr. Romney said. "Because my last 10 years, I've -- my income comes overwhelmingly from some investments made in the past, whether ordinary income or earned annually. I got a little bit of income from my book, but I gave that all away."

Mr. Romney added: "And then I get speaker's fees from time to time, but not very much."

Americans don't mind their candidates being rich (see Mike Bloomberg as mayor of New York City). What they hate are rich folks who pretend to not be rich (or to show how completely out of touch they are with ordinary folk). Is Mitt Romney so clueless as to think that a few hundred-thousand dollars made from speaking engagements is "not very much" money?

In fact, in the most recent year, Mr. Romney made $374,327.62 in speaker's fees, at an average of $41,592 per speech, according to his public financial disclosure reports.

At least he gave the money away (so he says).

Romney's real Achilles heel, though, is the 15% tax rate that he pays. This income inequality will play right into the Occupy Wall Street movement, the main goal of which is to reveal the huge income disparities that exist in this country.

The Republicans just might be committing harakiri by nominating such a rich, tone deaf man as Mitt Romney.

More than 500 people associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement gathered in Zuccotti Park on Saturday and, in a return to scenes from earlier in the year, the evening began with the sound of drumming and calls of the now familiar slogan, "We are the 99 percent" -- and it ended with torn-down barricades and a scuffle with police officers.

Just after 10:30 p.m. on New Year's Eve, officers carried a person out of the park, prompting protesters to follow behind them, shouting "Shame!" The reason the person was escorted away was unclear.

About 20 minutes later, a group of protesters grabbed some of the metal barricades that surround the park and began piling them inside. As they gripped the barricades, police officers took hold as well, and a shoving match began, the silver bars trapped in between. At least one police officer fired an arch of pepper spray into the crowd behind those barricades.

Moments later, at least a dozen police officers charged into the park, plowing directly into a crowd of people, some of whom were trying to flee, pushing and shoving. One man was thrown down and pinned to the ground by several officers.

2012 is going to be a very busy year for #OWS.

No one could have known that when a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on fire in a public square, it would incite protests that would topple dictators and start a global wave of dissent. In 2011, protesters didn't just voice their complaints; they changed the world.

Witness these female protesters in Egypt brutalized by members of the SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces):

So disgusting.

Meanwhile, here in America, the #OWS protesters are going strong. Witness this short clip of a demonstration here in Lower Manhattan last night:

And make sure to follow Mona Eltahawy on Twitter. She's an Egyptian writer and activist who is in Egypt and was just detained for 12 hours. Her tweets are powerful.

After nearly nine years, some 4,500 American fatalities and about $1 trillion, America's war in Iraq is about to end. Officials marked the finish Thursday with a modest ceremony at the airport days before the last troops traverse the southern highway to Kuwait, going out as they came in, to conclude the United States' most ambitious and bloodiest military campaign since Vietnam.

Iraqis will be left with a country that is not exactly at war, and not exactly at peace. It has improved in many ways since the 2007 troop "surge," but it is still a shattered country marred by violence and political dysfunction, a land defined on sectarian lines whose future, for better or worse, is now in the hands of its people.

In the hands of a people who still want to kill each other:

There are still roughly a dozen insurgent groups and militias active in Iraq: Sunni groups made up of former members of the ruling Baath Party and the home-grown insurgent group, Al Qaeda in Iraq; and Shiite militias supported by Iran and Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric.

And how many Iraqis did the Bush/Cheney War Machine kill before we got on the path of diminished violence?

While more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians perished in the war and its aftermath, violence has decreased significantly since 2007, when there were almost 7,500 attacks a month. But Iraq remains an extremely dangerous place. According to the American military, there were 500 to 750 attacks a month this year, including bombings, rocket attacks and assassinations.

Considering that the last surviving veteran from World War One just died this year and we have been paying his benefits for almost 100 years, the American Tax Payer can expect to be paying Iraqi War Veterans' benefits for about another 80 or so years.

Just setting aside the human tragedy of all the U.S. and Iraqi deaths, check out this Wikipedia page detailing how much all of these wars have cost us. And just as Vietnam turned into a non-issue after all of these decades, so will Iraq.

What a complete and utter waste.

Watch the slideshow of photos from this historic day here.