From Toni Marshall:

The About page at Adv Engl Grammar says author is Todd Pekel, an American married to a Greek woman. Together they own and administer 5 English language schools in Greece:

http://www.advanced-english-grammar.com/about-advanced-english-grammar.html

Lots of google results for Todd Pekel.

Here is a hint about his bias against Obama–his article, “I follow the thing that good is,”the website read-bible.com:

http://www.read-bible.org/articles/latest/i-follow-the-thing-that-good-is.html

toni
http://www.cfsnova.com/

Halliburton May Be Culprit In Oil Rig Explosion

This story has been updated

Giant oil-services provider Halliburton may be a primary suspect in the investigation into the oil rig explosion that has devastated the Gulf Coast, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Though the investigation into the explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon site is still in its early stages, drilling experts agree that blame probably lies with flaws in the “cementing” process — that is, plugging holes in the pipeline seal by pumping cement into it from the rig. Halliburton was in charge of cementing for Deepwater Horizon.

Read more.

From Steve Brant:

Mark,

I found the NYTimes coverage by searching Google News on “march on wall street april 2010″:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/business/30protest.html?src=busln

However, I could not find the story by searching the Times website in the ordinary way–by
going through the home page to the Business and NY/Metro pages.

My conclusion: They buried it somehow–under the heading “Business Day.” (I have no idea what that means.)

I suggest you ask all your readers to write to public@nytimes.com and demand to know why this story cannot be found using a “reasonable search procedure.” Why was it not featured?

We all know the expression “plausible deniability” from the Nixon days. I think that Clark Hoyt
should be asked, Who made the decision to bury this story, and why?

Steve

Also, people can contact the reporter through the Times web site. He may not know that his story was buried. Maybe he had some ideas:

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/g/steven_greenhouse/index.html?inline=nyt-per

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Voting-News-Imposter-on-F-by-Joyce-McCloy-100429-8.html

Via Steve Brant:

Hi, everyone.

As many of you may know, the catastrophic explosion that caused an oil spill from a BP
offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico has reached the shoreline early Friday morning.
The leak is currently releasing 5,000 barrels of oil per day, and efforts to manage the spill
with controlled burning, dispersal and plugging the leak were unsuccessful Thursday. This
oil spill is on track to become the worst oil spill in history, surpassing the damage done by
the Exxon Valdez tanker that spilled 11 million gallons of oil into the ecologically sensitive
Prince William Sound in 1989. Unlike the Exxon Valdez tragedy, in which a tanker held a
finite capacity of oil, BP’s rig is tapped into an underwater oil well and could pump more oil
into the ocean indefinitely until the leak is plugged.

But we need your reports, too. If you have photos, videos, please upload them here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/30/louisiana-oil-spill-2010_n_558287.html

If you have ground reports, reply to this email.

Ground reports can be sent to submissions@huffingtonpost.com

Vermont House Passes Single Payer Bill: Why It Can’t Opt-Out Of Federal Health Reform To Implement It

Last Friday, the Vermont House approved “its own version of legislation passed earlier by the Senate” that would allow the state to design “a single-payer system, in which a government agency would administer and make all payments for health care” or a public option. California passed similar legislation earlier this year, and theoretically, under a provision added to the new health care law by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), both states could opt-out of the requirements of federal health care reform and establish a single-payer structure.

Read more.

http://edpearl.blogspot.com/2010/04/moyers-says-goodbye-welfare-for.html

News:

Over 15,000 unionists marched on Wall Street, thursday. AFL-CIO
Pres. Richard Trumka: “We’re here today for the folks who were played for
suckers in the casino economy and will be silent no more. The message
we bring is this: Wall Street, fix the mess you made.”

America lost 8.5 million jobs because of the financial crisis created
by Wall Street, Trumka said, and now is 11 million jobs in the hole.

Absolutely no mention in NYTimes.com Nat’l or Business sections.

Sanctimonious Deficit Hawks Target Social Safety Net
Dan Froomkin

They come off as so reasonable, so high-minded, so balanced in their thinking.

They are the pillars of the Washington establishment, and they were everywhere you looked at Wednesday’s gala “Fiscal Summit” organized by corporate-takeover mogul Peter G. Peterson’s eponymous foundation. (C-SPAN has it all on video.)

Listen to them and they will tell you how troubled — how very, profoundly troubled — they are by the nation’s rising debt and dangerous fiscal path. They will tell you very self-righteously how you should be troubled, too. And they will tell you that, fortunately, they know — in fact, “everybody knows” — what is best for all of us.

Read more.

Check out the definition of “run against” in this on-line grammar textbook.

MCM

From Dorothy Fadiman:

Subject: Can you believe this????

MARINA, OUR UKRAINIAN RUSSIAN LANGUAGE TRANSLATOR,
JUST SENT US THIS:

Dear Dorothy,

I was practicing my English phrasal words online and look what I found!!

RUN AGAINST = compete in an election

“OBAMA ran against McCAIN in the 2008 U.S. elections and, unfortunately, won.”

I was shocked to see such sentence in an American GRAMMAR BOOK, which is more
or less official!

http://www.advanced-english-grammar.com/phrasal-verb-run.html

Phrasal Verb RUN

Below the phrasal verb run is shown in its many forms. There is an exercise below to help you see how well you understand this particular phrasal verb.

RUN ACROSS = find or meet unexpectedly

I ran across some old photos while I was cleaning my house.

RUN AFTER = chase

Mother was running after her three children all day.

RUN AGAINST = compete in an election

OBAMA ran against McCAIN in the 2008 U.S. elections and, unfortunately, won.

Ilene Proctor PR
(310) 858-6643
Bobby Kennedy Jr. And Eliot Spitzer Ask, Where Are The Prosecutors?
Watchdog Group Calls For Criminal Prosecutions Of U.S. Chamber Of Commerce

Washington, D.C.–StopTheChamber.com, a network of national organizations dedicated to corporate accountability, has been calling for months for a full criminal investigation into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its top staff, including CEO Tom Donohue, for racketeering, fraud, false reporting, and campaign finance violations. Now the network is adding obstruction of justice to that list. In the past two weeks, the United States has been hit with three major disasters, all tied to the polices and practices of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. First, 29 miners were killed in a Massey Energy coal mine explosion, second, 11 oil workers were killed in an British Petroleum oil rig fire, and third, Goldman Sachs was charged with a massive billion dollar fraud enterprise.

Each of these companies uses the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with its army of lobbyists and lawyers, as its first line of defense, corruptly influencing politicians and judges to protect corporations and thwart investigations, and spinning public relations to justify criminal conduct.

The Chamber has spent hundreds of millions on behalf of Wall Street robber barons, and has been directly coordinating with Goldman Sachs to maximize its profits and minimize the fallout from its criminal activities. The Chamber has been fighting laws and regulations to protect worker safety on behalf of Massey Energy and British Petroleum, and in fact, Massey CEO Don Blankenship is a Director of the Chamber and confidant of Chamber CEO Tom Donohue. Massey and BP have been cited for thousands of safety violations, while the Chamber has been representing them and their trade groups to avoid regulation of any kind.

Bobby Kennedy Jr. said on Sunday that “Massey Energy is a criminal enterprise” that “cannot stay
in business without breaking the law.” He says that Don Blankenship should “be in jail” for creating the conditions that led to the deaths of the 29 miners. On Tuesday, Eliot Spitzer, probably the most experienced attorney general to go after Wall Street criminals, asked, with regard to Goldman Sachs, “Where are the prosecutors?”

StopTheChamber.com calls on both the United States Attorney General and state attorneys general
to launch widespread criminal investigations of the operations of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, racketeering and other serious felonies. “The Chamber is like the mafia dons of past eras,” said campaign spokesman and attorney Kevin Zeese. “All the criminal companies have to pay off the Chamber in order to get protection. The Chamber in turn launders that money in secret, and then pays off judges, politicians and even the media with donations, advertising, jobs, and other means of corruption. Tom Donohue, to quote Eliot Spitzer, ‘has never once found a crime that he couldn’t justify, as long as it was committed by one of his dues-paying members.’ The Chamber, like the mafia, also uses threats to get its way, unleashing waves of goons, lobbyists and lawyers to intimidate anyone who dares to challenge it. Tom Donohue proudly says that the Chamber is so strong that ‘when it bites you in the butt, you bleed.’ We are calling on attorneys general across the country to focus their prosecutorial resources on the root of the corporate wrongdoing problem, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which enables, protects and conspires with these criminal companies to violate the law to the detriment of all Americans. There can be no more business as usual, and the Chamber must be held accountable in the same way the mafia dons were held accountable-prosecutions for conspiracy and racketeering.”

Source: StopTheChamber.com