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Mercy For Animals has once again successfully brought animal abusers to justice!

MFA’s powerful undercover investigation at a Butterball turkey facility in North Carolina has just led to even more criminal convictions of Butterball workers. On Friday, defendants Terry Johnson and Billy McBride were found guilty of animal cruelty after a bench trial.

Johnson and McBride join Butterball workers Brian Douglas and Ruben Mendoza, who were convicted in 2012 of criminal cruelty to animals arising out of the same investigation. Douglas's conviction marked the first-ever felony conviction for cruelty to factory-farmed poultry in US history.

MFA's undercover video reveals that the lives of turkeys in Butterball's factory farms are filled with fear, violence, and prolonged suffering. The turkeys confined to a life of misery at Butterball have been selectively bred to grow so large, so quickly, that many of them suffer from painful bone defects, hip joint lesions, crippling foot and leg deformities, and fatal heart attacks.

Voting rights act as needed as ever

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the Voting Rights Act in the case of Shelby v. Holder. On the same day, across the street in the congressional rotunda, a statue honoring Rosa Parks will be unveiled. And one week later, the nation will celebrate the 48th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the march from Selma to Montgomery that helped spur President Johnson to champion the act.

The Voting Rights Act has helped fulfill the nation’s commitment to inclusion — to a big tent democracy that guarantees to all citizens the right to vote. Yet many fear that the right-wing “Gang of Five” on the Supreme Court will once more display their scorn for judicial restraint and strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires pre-clearance of any voting rules that might impinge on minority participation in states and counties with histories of racial discrimination.

Top U.S. terrorist group: The FBI

A careful study of the FBI's own data on terrorism in the United States, reported in Trevor Aaronson's book The Terror Factory, finds one organization leading all others in creating terrorist plots in the United States: the FBI.

Imagine an incompetent bureaucrat. Now imagine a corrupt one. Now imagine both combined. You're starting to get at the image I take away of some of the FBI agents' actions recounted in this book.

Now imagine someone both dumb enough to be manipulated by one of those bureaucrats and hopelessly criminal, often sociopathic, and generally at the mercy of the criminal or immigration courts. Now you're down to the level of the FBI informant, of which we the Sacred-Taxpayers-Who-Shall-Defund-Our-Own-Retirement employ some 15,000 now, dramatically more than ever before. And we pay them very well.

Then try to picture someone so naive, incompetent, desperate, out-of-place, or deranged as to be manipulable by an FBI informant. Now you're at the level of the evil terrorist masterminds out to blow up our skyscrapers.

War's Lingering Phantoms

“War’s lingering phantoms haunt every society.”

As two hellish, costly and needless wars struggle toward collapse, this is the time — now, right this minute, before the next false alarm goes off — for us to look honestly at the cost and quality of national security based on militarism. It’s time to squeeze the romance out of war and get it through our heads that war is not inevitable.

War is just another form of mass murder. Its core principle is dehumanization — of all participants, the enemy and the good guys. This is because you can’t hate, dehumanize and train to kill “the other” without dehumanizing yourself and damaging your soul.

“Kill! Kill! Kill, without mercy, Sergeant! . . . Blood! Blood! Bright red blood, Sergeant!”

The dehumanization happens at an individual level, to soldiers who, in basic training, go through an intense process of overriding their humanity and establishing “muscle memory” that allows them to kill on command; and who then participate in the killing of the enemy — often enough, in our current wars, the killing of civilians, including children — in battle situations.

Ohio residents shut down fracking waste storage facility

New Matamoras OH – Ohio residents and allies from numerous environmental groups including Earth First! have disrupted operations at Greenhunter Water's hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” waste storage site along the Ohio River in Washington County. Nate Ebert, a 33-year-old Athens County resident and member of Appalachia Resist!, ascended a 30 foot pole anchored to a brine truck in the process of unloading frack waste, preventing all trucks carrying frack waste from entering the site.

Over one hundred supporters gathered at the facility, protesting Greenhunter’s plans to increase capacity for toxic frack waste dumping in Ohio. Greenhunter is seeking approval from the Coast Guard to ship frack waste across the Ohio River via barge at a rate of up to half a million gallons per load. The Ohio River is a drinking source for more than 5 million people, including residents of Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Test results from multiple frack waste samples reveal high levels of benzene, toluene, arsenic, barium, and radium, among other carcinogenic and radioactive chemicals.

According to NBCi.com, at least 10 people were arrested.

Guns, not the Klan, are the real threat

Chicago suffers unbearable levels of gun violence, yet the victims remain largely silent. They travel from funeral home to graveyard, rather than march from church to gun shop. The president is applauded when he calls for action on gun violence, but before his plane leaves the tarmac, more are shot, including even the sister of one of the young children standing behind him during his address.

If we are to free ourselves of this terror, we will have to change our minds.

Victims of tyranny have three options. They can adjust, they can resent but turn anger inward, or they can fight back.

Abbottabad-land

Diseased racist voting system needs a cure

The February 18, 2013 front page of the New York Times proclaimed “Voting Rights Act is Challenged as Cure the South Outgrown.” In reality, the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 is needed now, nationally, more than ever.

The new Jim Crow, same as the old Jim Crow, has contaminated virtually every state in the Union. The turning point that allowed the racist contagion to spread began with the outbreak in Florida in the year 2000. BBC reporter and investigative journalist Greg Palast has documented and detailed the deliberate targeting of Democratic voters, a majority of them black, that paved the way for George W. Bush’s theft of the 2000 presidential election.

Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore hastened the spreading of the undemocratic virus by refusing to let members of the Black Caucus speak during the counting of electoral votes in January 2001. It spread to Ohio where then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell became the Typhoid Mary of disenfranchisement.

Hell cruise

The Foodopoly: Too big to eat

We've come to understand that the banks are too big to fail, too big to take to trial, too big not to let them write our public policy, too big not to reward them for ruining our economy.

Why have we come to understand that?

We've been told it by a mega media cartel that has itself been deemed too big to fail, too big not to subsidize with our airwaves, too big not to reward with political ads buying back our airwaves in little bits and pieces.

Speaking of which, the buying of elections is moving rapidly in the direction of monopoly ownership itself.

The concentration of wealth and power in the United States over the past half century is not a story of ineluctable forces of technology or progress. It's a story of orchestrated corruption. Some of its key players were born after it had begun. One of them, the man who was president when some of the worst of the deregulatory legislation was passed, was of course Bill Clinton -- who ended welfare as we knew it and recreated it as we wish no one had ever imagined it. Giant corporations and banks are feeding at the public trough.

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