Courtesy The Guardian (UK):

 

Iranian riot police used batons and teargas today to break up defiant protests after prayers in Tehran, where Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the country’s most powerful clerics, warned that the regime was “in crisis” and urged a release of prisoners detained in post-election unrest.

Rafsanjani, a bitter rival of the supreme leader,Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, broke his month-long silence to issue a stark warning that the Islamic Republic had lost popular support. His carefully crafted address stopped short of directly attacking Khamenei or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose victory in June’s presidential poll has been widely denounced as a fraud. But its message was still strong.

“Today is a bitter day,” Rafsanjani declared from the pulpit at Tehran University’s sprawling prayer ground. “People have lost their faith in the regime and their trust is damaged. It’s necessary to regain people’s consent and restore their trust in the regime. Everyone has lost.”

-Article continues @ Source.

Courtesy The Daily Beast:

Audra Shay, the Young Republicans leader accused of endorsing racism on Facebook,  was elected head of the group for GOP members under 40 this afternoon.

Audra Shay, who became the subject of a national controversy after The Daily Beast uncovered racist comments she wrote on Facebook and other social-networking sites, won the race to become head of the Young Republicans by approximately 50 votes (out of about 950 voting delegates) at their national convention this afternoon in Indianapolis.

Shay faced calls to remove herself from the election after appearing to laugh at a racial slur about President Barack Obama, The Daily Beast’s John Avlon exclusively reported. The comments, in which Shay responded to a comment calling blacks “coons,” were quickly deleted, but prompted fellow Young Republicans to urge her to take her hat out of the ring for the national election. And though Shay issued a statement that neither she, nor her Young Republicans slate, “condones the use of racial slurs on my wall,” Avlon reports that Shay has a history of racial comments, encouraging extremism and partisan hate online.

Before the election, Meghan McCain urged the group not to choose hate by electing Shay: “What exactly do the Young Republicans expect to achieve by electing a 38-year-old woman who thinks racial epithets are acceptable?”

-Continued @ Source.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – California “IOU” recipients can turn to credit unions and check-cashing storefronts if a state budget deal does not appear by Friday and if three major banks refuse to accepting the notes beyond Friday as planned, analysts said on Tuesday.

The willingness of the smaller institutions to take IOUs from the cash-strapped state should also stop the development of a secondary market for trading them, although individuals could end up paying hefty fees to get their hands on cash.

The state government of California, the world’s eighth largest economy, is experiencing a severe revenue slump brought on by recession, rising unemployment and the lengthy housing downturn, forcing it to issue IOUs in lieu of some payments.

The government of the most populous U.S. state began its fiscal year on July 1 with a $26.3 billion budget gap and risks burning through its cash unless Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and lawmakers quickly balance the state’s books. Most U.S. states are not permitted to run budget deficits.

Three major banks are currently accepting the IOUs, but only through Friday. After that recipients may turn to credit unions to cash them or, perhaps, to check-cashing storefronts.

Continued @ Source.

Warning! the Following Video purports to depict the Ultimate Sacrifice of an Iranian Woman in the cause of that Nation’s struggle for self determination.

YouTube Link

By Robert Fisk, The Independent:

First the cop screamed abuse at Mir Hossein Mousavi’s supporter, a white-shirted youth with a straggling beard and unkempt hair. Then he smashed his baton into the young man’s face. Then he kicked him viciously in the testicles. It was the same all the way down to Vali Asr Square. Riot police in black rubber body armour and black helmets and black riot sticks, most on foot but followed by a flying column of security men, all on brand new, bright red Honda motorcycles, tearing into the shrieking youths – hundreds of them, running for their lives. They did not accept the results of Iran’s presidential elections. They did not believe that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won 62.6 per cent of the votes. And they paid the price.

“Death to the dictator,” they were crying on Dr Fatimi Street, now thousands of them shouting abuse at the police. Were they to endure another four years of the smiling, avuncular, ever-so-humble President who swears by democracy while steadily thinning out human freedoms in the Islamic Republic? They were wrong, of course. Ahmadinejad really does love democracy. But he also loves dictatorial order. He is not a dictator. He is a Democrator.

Yesterday wasn’t the time for the finer points of Iranian politics. That Mir Hossein Mousavi had been awarded a mere 33 per cent of the votes – by midday, the figure was humiliatingly brought down to 32.26 per cent – brought forth the inevitable claims of massive electoral fraud and vote-rigging. Or, as the crowd round Fatimi Square chorused as they danced in a circle in the street: “Zionist Ahmadinejad – cheating at exams.” That’s when I noticed that the police always treated the protesters in the same way. Head and testicles. It was an easy message to understand. A smash in the face, a kick in the balls and Long Live the Democrator.

Many of the protesters – some of them now wearing scarves over their faces, all coloured green, the colour of Mousavi’s campaign – were trying to reach the Interior Ministry where the government’s electoral council were busy counting (or miscounting, depending on your point of view) Friday’s huge popular national vote. I descended into the basement of this fiercely ugly edifice – fittingly, it was once the headquarters of the Shah’s party, complete with helipad on the roof – where cold chocolate lattes and strawberry fruitcake were on offer to journalists, and where were displayed the very latest poll results, put up at 10.56am Iranian time.

Eighty per cent of the votes had been counted and the results came up as Ahmadinejad 64.78 per cent; Mousavi 32.26 per cent; Mohsen Rezai (a former Revolutionary Guard commander) 2.08 per cent; and Mehdi Karoubi (a former parliament speaker) a miserable 0.89 per cent. How could this be, a man asked me on a scorching, dangerous street an hour later. Karoubi’s party has at least 400,000 members. Were they all sleeping on Friday?

There were a few, sparse demonstrators out for the Democrator, all men, of course, and many of them draped in the Iranian flag because the Democrator – devout Muslim as he always displays himself – wrapped his election campaign in the national flag. Each of these burly individuals handed out free copies of the execrable four-page news-sheet Iran.

“Ahmadinejad,” the headline read, “24 million votes. People vote for Success, Honesty and the Battle against Corruption.” Not the obvious headline that comes to mind. But Mousavi’s Green Word newspaper allegedly had its own headline dictated to it by the authorities – before they shut it down yesterday: “Happy Victory to the People.” And you can’t get more neutral than that.

-Article Continues @ Source.

The 450 Workers of Rochester’s Hickey-Freeman voted Unanimously to stage a sit in at their work places if Wells-Fargo shuts down the plant or liquidate the company:

“There are a lot of married couples that work here. If they lost their jobs, their families would be devastated,” said Debbie Glinski, who has worked at Hickey-Freeman in Rochester for 15 years. “These banks received bail out money and that came from taxpayers like us. We helped them out and they need to help us out too.”

“We want to work. We’re willing to sit-in-and do more if necessary-to keep working,” said 50-year Hickey-Freeman employee Fred Cotraccia.

The Hickey-Freeman plant have been members of the Workers United Local for 90 Years.

Courtesy Workers United.

Good Luck and good fortitude guys, I, and many others are pulling for you. -Shinai.

Former AL Governor Don Siegelman appears to be headed back to Jail now that the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has declined to hear his appeal:

“[Siegelman] goes back for re-sentencing now. It will be difficult for him to stay out of jail because it is unlikely that the Supreme Court will hear this case,” Horton said.

Courtesy Rawstory.

The Wall Street Journal Covers the call by Gil Kerlikowske of the White House office on National Drug control Policy, to End the Drug War:

“Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them,” he said. “We’re not at war with people in this country.”

The article goes on to examine what this could mean as well as Reaction to Mr. Kerlikowske’s Statement. As usual it pays to be skeptical, this is after all a Murdoch owned Paper.  But it would be great if this shift is allowed to happen. Heres to Hoping. -Shinai.

Word comes via the New York Times, that the New York State Assembly has passed Same Sex Marriage Legislation:

The final vote was 89 to 52….

According to the Article, the battle for Marriage Equality now heads to that state’s Senate.  Where both sides are gearing up for major fight, including Television ads to sway public opinion.  Best of luck to all you committed couples in New York State.

-Shinai.

Courtesy NYTimes:

Discord is nothing new for Roman Catholicism. But the controversy surrounding the appearance of President Obama at the University of Notre Dame’s commencement on May 17 suggests that run-of-the mill discord among American Catholics is escalating into something closer to civil war.

Just watch that airplane circling over the famous Golden Dome of Notre Dame’s Main Building and the spire of the university’s Basilica of the Sacred Heart. The plane pulls a banner with a picture of an aborted fetus.

The group flying the banner is unhappy not just with the university but also, according to a spokesman quoted in The South Bend Tribune, with “the pro-life community at Notre Dame.”

“If they were doing a good job of reaching the campus,” he said, “it’s unlikely Obama would have been invited.”

Now listen to Bishop Robert W. Finn, bishop of the Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese in Missouri. “We are at war!” he told an anti-abortion convention on April 18. “We are engaged in a constant warfare with Satan.”

-Article Continues…