Everyone in the world seems to recognize the obvious crimes perpetrated by the Bush/Cheney regime. Their overwhelming negative status in the world has now confined them to personal prisons where they can no longer travel abroad for public events. It appears they're only welcome in heavily-secured private dragon lairs for the rest of their waking years. But even those locations are shrinking for these torturers and mass murderers.

Cheney, scheduled to speak in Toronto with his daughter next month, had to cancel the speaking appearance due to "security concerns stemming from their experiences in Vancouver in September 2011," according to a press release about the event.

The September event referred to in the press release was hardly a public event at all. It cost $500 a ticket to attend and took place at the Vancouver Club which the Canadian Press called "one of Vancouver's most exclusive clubs." Still, the public caught wind of the event and staged a rambunctious protest calling for Cheney's arrest. The angry crowd caused Cheney to be locked in the club for seven hours longer than he was scheduled.

In February of last year, George W. Bush had to cancel a speaking engagement in Switzerland because human rights groups put pressure on the Swiss government to arrest him over torture allegations if he enters the country. Even though officials claimed Bush had diplomatic immunity because he was a former head of state, they recognized that torture is a legitimate crime under international law. Organizers of the event felt the "atmosphere had become too threatening" and the gala went on without Bush.

Qatar's aggressive stance towards Assad has led to a string of resignations at the country's al-Jazeera TV news channel. Those who left describe bias at the station which they say has become a tool to target the Syrian regime. RT's Paula Slier describes those accusations.

An archived clip of different Congressional hearings exposes the fact that the CIA directly plants stories in the media, both in the United States and the rest of the world.

Question: Do you have any people being paid by the CIA who are contributing to a major circulation journal?

Answer: We do have people who submit pieces to American journals.

Question: Do you have any people paid by the CIA who are working for television networks?

Answer: This I think gets into the details I'd like to get into in executive session. [so the public doesn't hear how we control all the networks]

Considering that this was going on in the 1950s, it is highly likely that this is happening now and at a much larger extent. The CIA and other government agencies literally control the corporate controlled media.

Anytime you hear a story on the major networks that has any implication in US foreign or domestic policy rest assured that it was, at the very least, vetted by the CIA before being released.

In the early 90s CNN was also used to test Army psychological operations.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has foregone a trip to Canada on the grounds that it's "too dangerous," according to a report in Canada's National Post.

Cheney was set to appear at an event in Toronto on April 24, but canceled on grounds that the risk of trouble from protesters was too great.

Cheney's last Canadian appearance in September of 2011 erupted in violence as protesters swarmed the entrance of the private Vancouver club where the former Bush administration official and Iraq War architect was speaking. The protesters rained down verbal abuse on attendees and, in once instance, choked a security guard.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum says that even his home-schooled 12-year-old could "out-reason" HBO comedian Bill Maher.

During his Friday "New Rules" segment, Maher had called out Santorum's stance against public education.

"The Taliban may want to live in the eighth century but the Christian right wants to go back even further - to Adam and Eve, who screwed it up for everybody when they ate an apple from the Tree of Knowledge," Maher explained on the March 9 broadcast. "Rick Santorum home schools his children because he doesn't want them eating that fucking apple. He wants them locked up in the Christian madrassa that is the family living room, not out in public, where they could be infected by the virus of reason."

"If you're a kid and the only adults you've ever met are mom and dad then they're also the smartest adults you've ever met. Why not keep it that way? why mess up paradise with a lot of knowledge? After all, a mind is a terrible thing to open."

Remember the story about the Wall Street guy who rented out all 94 rooms of an Aspen hotel for three days for his daughter's Bat Mitzvah?

The main character in that tale was an individual named Jeffrey Verschleiser, a former Bear Stearns executive who was instrumental in helping blow up that venerable firm. Verschleiser among other things was reportedly involved with an elaborate Wall Street version of a merchandise return scam, only instead of taking the proceeds from returned TVs and stereos, his unit was pocketing the cash from crap mortgages sold back to banks on behalf of investors.

Verschleiser also made a bundle burning Bear's bond insurers, whom he bet against after inducing them to insure his crappy mortgage bonds, nicknamed "Sack of Shit" bonds by one of the funny dudes in his department. Verschleiser reportedly bragged that he made $55 million shorting his own bond insurers in the space of three weeks. Those interested in the whole sorry story should check out reporter Teri Buhl's excellent Atlantic magazine piece entitled, "E-mails Suggest Bear Stearns Cheated Clients Out of Billions."

After Verschleiser decided to monopolize the elegant Hotel Jerome in Aspen for his daughter's Bat Mitzvah, news reports about his identity leaked out, and the event spurred some local controversy in Aspen and plenty of inflamed commentary around the interwebs. But it seems that the negative press has not hurt Verschleiser's career.

Fort Collins -- Some northern Colorado cities are earning thousands of dollars selling water for use in hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

The Fort Collins Coloradoan reports the town of Windsor sold more than 8.4 million gallons for nearly $17,000 between Nov. 1 and March 1.

In all of 2011, Greeley sold more than 491 million gallons, mostly to the oil and gas industry, for $1.6 million.

In the wake of the NGO funding scandal the Egyptian parliament is to consider cutting more than $1 billion in US aid along with putting the military-appointed interim government to a vote of confidence.

The move by the lower chamber of the parliament comes after the March 1 departure of six American defendants in the case, leading to accusations that US pressure had led to interference in the judicial process.

The People's Assembly urged that the person who allowed the Americans to leave Egypt be put on trial and declared its desire to refuse massive annual aid from the United States, Al-Ahram daily reports.

"We hope that members of the American Congress listen carefully to the decisions of the Egyptian parliament - the parliament of the revolution -and know quite well that the Egyptian people will never accept tinkering with the sovereignty of Egypt or American assistance to be used to humiliate it," parliament speaker Saad El-Katatni said as quoted by the paper.

The Santorum Strategy is not just about Santorum. It is about pounding the most radical conservative ideas into the public mind by constant repetition during the Republican presidential campaign, whether by Santorum himself, by Gingrich or Ron Paul, by an intimidated Romney, or by the Republican House majority. The Republican presidential campaign is about a lot more than the campaign for the presidency. It is about guaranteeing a radical conservative future for America.

I am old enough to remember how liberals (me included) made fun of Ronald Reagan as a not-too-bright mediocre actor who could not possibly be elected president. I remember liberals making fun of George W.Bush as so ignorant and ill-spoken that Americans couldn't possibly take him seriously. Both turned out to be clever politicians who changed America much for the worse. And among the things they and their fellow conservatives managed to do was change public discourse, and with it, change how a great many Americans thought.

The Republican presidential campaign has to be seen in this light.

Liberals tend to underestimate the importance of public discourse and its effect on the brains of our citizens. All thought is physical. You think with your brain. You have no alternative. Brain circuitry strengthens with repeated activation. And language, far from being neutral, activates complex brain circuitry that is rooted in conservative and liberal moral systems. Conservative language, even when argued against, activates and strengthens conservative brain circuitry. This is extremely important for so-called "independents," who actually have both conservative and liberal moral systems in their brains and can shift back and forth. The more they hear conservative language over the next eight months, the more their conservative brain circuitry will be strengthened.

This point is being missed by Democrats and by the media, and yet it is the most vital issue for our future in what is now being discussed. No matter who gets the Republican nomination for president, the Santorum Strategy will have succeeded unless Democrats dramatically change their communication strategy as soon as possible. Even if President Obama is re-elected, he will have very little power if the Republicans keep the House, and a great deal less if they take the Senate. And if they keep and take more state houses and local offices around the country, there will be less and less possibility of a liberal future.

"Click this Button or African children will die": How the "Kony 2012" video drafted a Facebook army to support the militarization of Africa

In 1877 the British Empire was at the height of its glory, the Spanish Empire would soon collapse, and a young Oxford student named Cecil Rhodes was gripped by a sudden religious vision. Rhodes scrawled out a manifesto. In it, he called for an "Anglo-American Empire" that would begin in the heart of Africa and spread out to conquer the known world.

"Africa is still lying ready for us," he wrote. "It is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes-that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race; more of the best, the most human, most honorable race the world possesses."

Rhodes went on to found the DeBeers diamond cartel and devote his company's vast wealth to the colonial project in Africa. He couldn't have known that, just over a century later, a new invention called the Internet would be tweaking his message, smoothing out his more inflammatory language, and sending his ideas around the globe through YouTube and Facebook. Nor would he ever had imagined that the first black president of the United States would be the one to carry his vision to its ultimate conclusion, under the guise of "humanitarian intervention."