I wrote this a while back after Romney got the nom, and, in light of the blizzard of bullshit that will be coming at us in the next few months, I thought I would put it out now.

Now that the Republican primary circus is over, I began to think about what a vote for Obama would mean.

Since most of the examination of our President comes from either the daily hypocrasies of Mitt and friends or the coddling progressive left, I thought I would examine “our guy” on a few issues with a bit more scrutiny and fairness.

The typical arguments in favor of another Obama presidency are centered around avoiding a fantical rightwing take over of the Oval Office. Obama is perceived as the last line of defense from the corporate barbarians--and, of course, the Supreme Court. There is a cynical logic behind this view, and I tend to agree with Garry Wills' description of the Republican primaries as  “a revolting combination of con men & fanatics, and agree proundly that “the current primary race has become a demonstration that the Republican party does not deserve serious consideration for public office.”

However, there are certain Rubicon lines, as constituational law professor Jon Turley calls them, that Obama has crossed that should not be ignored.

All political questions are not equal no matter how much you pivot. When people die or lose their physical freedom to feed certain economic sectors or ideologies, it becomes a zero sum game for me.

This is not an exercise in bemoaning regrettable policy choices or cheering favorable ones, but rather to ask a couple fundimental questions: Who are we? What are we voting for? And what does it mean?

Three markers — the Nobel prize acceptance speech, the escalation speech at West Point, and the recent speech by Eric Holder — crossed that Rubicon line for me.

During his 2008 campaign, ...

A study out of Buenos Aires has found that glyphosate, an herbicide created by Monsanto, and used on GMO soy in Argentina, could cause birth defects in unborn children. The most interesting thing about this revelation is that the herbicide known as glyphosate in Argentina, is also known to be connected with Roundup in the U.S.

Roundup Ingredient Shown to Cause Birth Defects

According to the Latin American Herald Tribune, researchers with the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research conducted the study on amphibian embryos. The lead researcher says their results are “completely comparable to what would happen in the development of a human embryo.”

“The noteworthy thing is that there are no studies of embryos on the world level and none where glyphosate is injected into embryos,” said professor Andres Carrasco, one of the lead authors of the study.

The amounts shown to cause birth defects were said to be much lower than those levels used in fumigations. However, it’s important to note that the glyphosate was injected directly into the fetuses, not administered via food products, as it would be in humans.

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When President Richard Nixon proclaimed in the early 1970’s that he wanted to secure national energy independence, the United States imported a quarter of its oil. By the decade’s end, after an Arab oil embargo and the Iranian Revolution, domestic production was in decline, Americans were importing half their petroleum needs at 15 times the price, and it was widely believed that the country was running out of natural gas.

Energy shocks contributed to a lethal combination of stagnant economic growth and inflation, and every US president since Nixon likewise has proclaimed energy independence as a goal. But few people took those promises seriously.

Today, energy experts no longer scoff. By the end of this decade, according to the US Energy Information Administration, nearly half of the crude oil that America consumes will be produced at home, while 82% will come from the US side of the Atlantic. Philip Verleger, a respected energy analyst, argues that, by 2023, the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s “Project Independence,” the US will be energy independent in the sense that it will export more energy than it imports.

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Occupy Wall Street activists took to the streets of New York to march for affordable education and against police repression, in solidarity with the massive, ongoing student uprising taking place in Quebec and now spreading across the world. As protesters have in Argentina, in Chile, in Spain and now in Canada, they banged pots and pans as they marched — a practice called casseroles or   cacerolazo. Manissa McCleave Maharawal and Zoltán Glück, who recently wrote for WNV about their experience among the students in Montreal, discuss the aims and meaning of this kind of protest.

Over the course of the night, the march made its way from Washington Square Park up to Times Square, often stopping traffic in the middle of the street, and then ended at the Quebec government’s office at Rockefeller Center. For more details on the march see this collection of tweets and photos by WNV editor Nathan Schneider.

The march is part of the Robin Hood Tax global week of action taking place from May 18 to May 22 in the wake of the G8 Summit at Camp David, which began this Friday. Activists around the world are lobbying for this global financial transactions tax, supported by a range of United Nations (U.N.) human rights experts, including Olivier De Schutter, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to food, . 

In the United States, unions, think tanks and groups that focus on the environment, international health, consumer protection and financial reform lobby for "Wall Street to give back to Main Street", as a website in support of the Robin Hood Tax says. The idea of a financial transaction tax has existed since the 1930s, when leading economist John Maynard Keynes was a popular driver of the tax. 

"After the bank bailout, the government now needs a lot of money to deal with a huge budget deficit and to help meet the USA’s commitments on aid and climate finance," the website adds. 

A financial transactions tax (FTT) would affect the purchase and sale of stocks, bonds, commodities, unit trusts, mutual funds and derivatives such as futures and options. The tax would generate revenues needed to pay for and protect global public goods like education, health and the environment, with a number of variations having been proposed of how high the tax should be. 

One of the most prominent ideas is a tax rate of .1 percent on equities and bonds and .01 percent on derivatives. 

Estimates suggest that at its lowest rate, the FTT would yield about 48 billion U.S. dollars across the group of countries known as the G20, with higher rates offering up to 250 billion U.S. dollars per year to offset the costs of the enduring economic, financial, fuel, climate and food ...

Conflict and intrigue over valuable energy supplies have been features of the international landscape for a long time.  Major wars over oil have been fought every decade or so since World War I, and smaller engagements have erupted every few years; a flare-up or two in 2012, then, would be part of the normal scheme of things.  Instead, what we are now seeing is a whole cluster of oil-related clashes stretching across the globe, involving a dozen or so countries, with more popping up all the time.  Consider these flash-points as signals that we are entering an era of intensified conflict over energy.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific, Argentina to the Philippines, here are the six areas of conflict -- all tied to energy supplies -- that have made news in just the first few months of 2012:

1. A brewing war between Sudan and South Sudan: On April 10th, forces from the newly independent state of South Sudan occupied the oil center of Heglig, a town granted to Sudan as part of a peace settlement that allowed the southerners to secede in 2011.  The northerners, based in Khartoum, then mobilized their own forces and drove the South Sudanese out of Heglig.  Fighting has since erupted all along the contested border ...

After experiencing the traumatizing death of her daughter to kidney failure just three days after her daughter was born, Sofia Gatica from Argentina became determined to find out what killed her daughter. Her conclusion? Monsanto’s genetically modified soy fields that surrounded her neighborhood, laced with damaging insecticides negatively affecting nearby neighborhood children and adults alike. Gatica began to detail how her small town was plagued with astronomically high birth defect rates, respiratory disease, and even infant mortality.

From this point, the courageous mother decided to take on Monsanto. Amazingly, she is not alone in her struggle against the biotechnology colossus when it comes to causing birth problems, as a large group of farmers — also from Argentina — have launched a lawsuit against Monsanto for causing ‘devastating birth defects‘ in children. Gatica was initially alone, however, when she first began her uphill battle. Forming a group of concerned mothers in her local area of Ituzaingó after hosting an event at her home to discuss her experiences, the mother would be one of the very few who has actually beat Monsanto.

After sharing her story with local mothers who were also concerned for the safety of their children and families as a ...

After losing a 3-day old daughter to kidney failure, a woman named Sofia Gatica from Argentina made a decision to spearhead an anti-Monsanto movement with other mothers of sick children. Monsanto is a biotechnology, agrochemical company which has been polluting the environment and human health with herbicides, pesticides, genetically modified foods, and other substances for decades. Numerous cases have been brought against Monsanto for biological damage and even death — such is the recent case in which farmers say the biotech giant’s creations spawned ‘devastating birth defects‘.

Near where Gatica lives, there are soybean fields covering the land where farmers spray loads of chemicals on the crops. The primary weed killer used on the fields is the one and only Roundup, the most popular herbicide used by farmers which contains the active ingredient glyphosate. Gatica didn’t initially connect the chemical exposure to her baby’s death until she noticed that many of her friends and neighbors were also experiencing health problems.

“I started seeing children with mouth covers, mothers with scarves wrapped around their heads to cover their baldness, due to chemotherapy…There are soybeans to the north, to the south, and to the east, and when they spray, they spray over the people because there’s no distance,” Gatica said to a Grist reporter.

In fact, researchers found that people in her area had three to four agricultural chemicals in their blood, including ...

The "Dispositivo de Alerta para Mujeres Agredidas" (DAMA – Alarm Device for Battered Women) was created in Tigre, a city of 35,000 people located 30 km north of Buenos Aires. It is similar to devices used in countries such as Spain and the United States. \

By pushing a button on the small electronic device, the domestic violence victim will activate an alarm in the city’s monitoring center, which will show her exact location. The nearest police car in the area will be notified and sent to her aid, even if she is outside the city limits.

In a conversation with IPS, Malena Galmarini, the secretary of health and human development in Tigre, explained that the system would begin by distributing the devices to 50 women who have filed domestic violence complaints against their former partners, and who are interested in participating in the program, which is not compulsory.

"The aim is to keep the violence from escalating and to prevent ‘femicides’ (gender-related murders) in cases in which the justice system has ordered the aggressor to move away and stay away from the home but the accused continues harassing the woman," she said.

The new device, the first of its kind to be used in Argentina, was officially launched Mar. 8, International Women’s Day.

When the panic button is pushed, the police immediately know whom the victim is and who is stalking or harassing her, giving them the necessary elements to take action.

In addition, a voice channel is activated. "As of that moment, everything that is said near the device is heard and recorded," Galmarini said.

She added that besides the 50 devices to be distributed in the first phase of the project, a similar number are available for later distribution.

The project is based on studies by NGOs, which note that ...

Emerging markets have performed amazingly well over the last seven years. In many cases, they have far outperformed the advanced industrialized countries in terms of economic growth, debt-to-GDP ratios, countercyclical fiscal policy, and assessments by ratings agencies and financial markets.