Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Everyone’s welcome here, no special handshake required. Just check your meta at the door.
Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Breakfast News
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ICC prosecutor to examine alleged British crimes in Iraq war
In January, a Berlin-based human rights group and a British law firm submitted what they describe as 250 pages of analysis to Bensouda’s office. They said more than 400 Iraqi former detainees had made allegations of grave mistreatment, of which 85 had been chosen as “representative cases.”
Bensouda’s office said in a statement earlier on Tuesday: “The communication alleges a higher number of cases of ill-treatment of detainees and provides further details on the factual circumstances and the geographical and temporal scope of the alleged crimes.”
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How Parasite Corporations Like Pfizer are Chucking U.S. Citizenship to Escape from Taxes
Let’s say you’re a giant American corporation like Pfizer, founded in Brooklyn way back in 1849. The fact that you exist and make a profit is largely due to the generous support of U.S. taxpayers. It’s the taxpayers, after all, who pony up for the National Institutes of Health, which does the basic research you rely on to develop drugs on which you make gigantic sums. And it’s the taxpayers who shell out large amounts of money to protect your patents, broker trade treaties in your favor, and protect your interests around the world in international negotiations. The same ones who pay for the public education of your employees and the costly infrastructure-the highways, airports, etc.-needed to move your products. The very folks who pay the billions in federal contracts you receive.
So what do you do? Do you pay your share of taxes to return some of this largesse?
Oh, no. You vigorously lobby for lower taxes and leave no loophole unexploited. You are not satisfied to have received $2.2 billion in federal tax refunds from 2010-2012 while raking in $43 billion worldwide even though 40 percent of your sales are in America. You’re not ashamed in the least that in 2012, you stashed $73 billion in profits offshore on which you paid zilch in U.S. income taxes.
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We Should Slice the Pentagon Budget-It Would Save Trillions and Rescue America
For 40 years, as the United States waged Cold War against the U.S.S.R. and hot wars in Korea and Vietnam, the Pentagon budget fluctuated between a high of $632 billion in 1952 at the height of the Korean War and lows of $386 billion in 1954 and 1975 when we returned to a “peacetime” military budget at the end of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. (These amounts are in “constant” 2014 dollars from Pentagon documents*, and I’ll keep using those figures throughout this article so that you can be sure we’re comparing “apples to apples.”) Pentagon spending peaked again at $554 billion at the height of the Vietnam War in 1968 and at $586 billion in 1985 at the peak of what Assistant Defense Secretary Lawrence Korb called “a wartime buildup without a war.”
So, as we transition away from the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, why is Congress debating a Pentagon budget that splits the difference between the budgets for 1952 and 1985, the two highest peaks of Cold War military spending?
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Judge overturns Idaho ban on gay marriage as unconstitutional
A federal judge struck down Idaho’s ban on gay marriage on Tuesday, saying it relegated same-sex couples to a second-class status in violation of constitutional guarantees of equal protection under the law.
The ruling by U.S. Magistrate Judge Candy Dale, was the latest in a string of decisions by federal judges against state bans on same-sex matrimony that, if upheld by higher courts, would sharply broaden access to marriage for U.S. gay couples.
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Why Marijuana Works Better Than Opiates to Control Pain
One compelling argument for the legalization of medical marijuana is its ability to ameliorate intense pain. Currently available technologies have helped us gain understanding of cannabis, as well as its more-commonly-accepted opioid counterparts, and the affects they have on pain.
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Must Read Blog Posts
‘I Have Been to the Darkest Corners of Government, and What They Fear is Light’
by Glenn Greenwald
What Ukraine Really Needs
by William Pfaff
Wheeler on the “NYPD’s new spying outrage: Innocent Muslims treated worse than guilty bankers”
by bobswern
Hagel says he’s open to reviewing transgender eligibility
by rserven
Hellraisers Journal: Rockefellers Undisturbed by “Agitators” as Miners and Families Mourn Their Loss
by JayRaye
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The Daily Wiki
One of the most awesome dives I ever did was with these guys…
Manta rays are large eagle rays belonging to the genus Manta. The larger species, M. birostris, reaches 7 m (23 ft) in width while the smaller, M. alfredi, reaches 5.5 m (18 ft). Both have triangular pectoral fins, horn-shaped cephalic fins and large, forward-facing mouths. They are classified among the Elasmobranchii (sharks and rays) and are placed in the eagle ray family Myliobatidae.
Mantas can be found in temperate, subtropical and tropical waters. Both species are pelagic; M. birostris migrates across open oceans, singly or in groups, while M. alfredi tends to be resident and coastal. They are filter feeders and eat large quantities of zooplankton, which they swallow with their open mouths as they swim. Gestation lasts over a year, producing live pups. Mantas may visit cleaning stations for the removal of parasites. Like whales, they breach, for unknown reasons.
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Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. ~Bertrand Russell
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Breakfast Tunes
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Stupid Shit by LaEscapee
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