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Vader

House Democrat: Wisconsin Governor Walker like a 'dictator'

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Washington - Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), the co-chair of the House progressive caucus, said Wednesday that Wisconsin's Republican Gov. Scott Walker is behaving like a "dictator."

Walker has been "absolutely unreasonable, and is basically taking on the posture of a dictator," Ellison told reporters on a conference call organized by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

The standoff between Republicans and Democrats in Wisconsin continues for a second week as Walker refuses to back down on a budget measure curtailing the collective bargaining rights of public employee unions. Fourteen Democrats fled the state last week to protest the measure and prevent Republicans from getting the votes.

Cheeseburger

Seattle restaurant puts TSA workers on no-eat list

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A restaurant near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is so tired of the way the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has been treating their customers that they've actually banned agents from eating at the establishment.

KC McLawson, a worker at the restaurant, told journalist Christopher Elliott exactly how far her boss had taken the ban.

"We have posted signs on our doors basically saying that they aren't allowed to come into our business," she said. "We have the right to refuse service to anyone."

Telephone

US: On prank call, Wisconsin governor discusses strategy

On a prank call that quickly spread across the Internet, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was duped into discussing his strategy to cripple public employee unions, promising never to give in and joking that he would use a baseball bat in his office to go after political opponents.

Walker believed the caller was a conservative billionaire named David Koch, but it was actually a liberal blogger. The two talked for at least 20 minutes - a conversation in which the governor described several potential ways to pressure Democrats to return to the Statehouse and revealed that his supporters had considered secretly planting people in pro-union protest crowds to stir up trouble.

The call also revealed Walker's cozy relationship with two billionaire brothers who have poured millions of dollars into conservative political causes, including Walker's campaign last year.

Walker compared his stand to that taken by President Ronald Reagan when he fired the nation's air-traffic controllers during a labor dispute in 1981.
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"That was the first crack in the Berlin Wall and led to the fall of the Soviets," Walker said on the recording.

The audio was posted on the Buffalo Beast, a left-leaning website in New York, and quickly went viral.

Eye 1

US: Update: 'Use live ammunition' against Wisconsin protesters, Indiana official says

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Update (3:15 pm ET): Indiana deputy attorney general loses job

The Indiana Attorney General's office announced Wednesday that the deputy attorney general who called for Wisconsin riot police to use deadly force on protesters is no longer employed by the agency, according to WISH.

Update (2:30 pm ET): Indiana official delete personal blog

An Indiana deputy attorney general who called for Wisconsin riot police to use "live ammunition" on protesters has deleted his personal blog.

Jeff Cox had claimed that Mother Jones would try to "silence" him.

Original report continues below...

One official in Indiana suggested over the weekend that riot police should use deadly force on those protesting Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker's plan to strip unions of their rights.

Stormtrooper

Libyan aircraft crashes after troops refuse bombing orders

A Libyan military aircraft crashed Wednesday southwest of Benghazi after the crew refused to follow orders to bomb the city, Libya's Quryna newspaper reported.


The pilot and co-pilot parachuted out of the craft, and the plane crashed in an uninhabited area, the paper said.

The Russian-made Sukhoi-22 aircraft crashed west of the city of Ijdabiya, 160 km (100 miles) southwest of Benghazi, Quryna reported, citing military sources.

Display

US: Buffalo Beast Website Goes Down Following Walker, Koch Prank Call

The online news site Buffalo Beast has gone offline after publishing a prank phone call between Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and a Buffalo Beast editor who posed as David Koch.

Buffalo Beast Publisher Paul Fallon told The Huffington Post that the audio is "absolutely legit" (listen to it here).

The Buffalo Beast website seems to be suffering from traffic overload, causing many to see this message: "Error establishing a database connection." Some pages also say, "The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable."

It's not the first time the Web has made the news in the Wisconsin protests. A pro-union website was blocked at the Capitol Building in Madison.

The Buffalo Beast was founded in 2002 as an alternative biweekly newspaper in Buffalo, N.Y. It became an online-only news operation in 2009.

Attention

US: Indiana official draws fire for 'Use live ammunition' comment on Wisconsin protesters

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© John Hart / Wisconsin State Journal via APOpponents of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's budget bill sleep in the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol on Tuesday.
An Indiana state official has found himself in the middle of his own labor controversy for tweeting that riot police in neighboring Wisconsin should "use live ammunition" to clear out pro-union demonstrators.

The Indiana Attorney General's Office said Wednesday it is reviewing statements Jeffrey Cox, a deputy attorney general, purportedly made in tweets and blog posts, including one in which he said he advocated "deadly force" against "thugs" who threatened state elected officials in Wisconsin.

The tweets in question were made in an exchange with Adam Weinstein, a copy editor at Mother Jones who has been writing about the worker protests at the Wisconsin Capitol. Wisconsin workers and their supporters have been demonstrating for well over a week against Republican Gov. Scott Walker's plan to strip public sector workers of nearly all their bargaining rights. Walker says the legislation is needed to help solve Wisconsin's looming budget deficit.

X

Lebanon sentences 'Israeli spy' to death

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© Agence France-PresseAmin Ibrahim al-Baba sent information to Israel through his internet cafe, according to the charge sheet
A Lebanese military court sentenced a man to death on charges of spying for Israel's Mossad and providing the agency with information on the militant group Hezbollah, a judicial official said Friday.

"A military court has sentenced Amin Ibrahim al-Baba to death ... for contacting Israeli intelligence and providing information that aided Israeli attacks on Lebanon," the official told AFP.

The charge sheet said Baba, 44, had opened an Internet cafe in southern Lebanon through which he sent information to Israel, including information that facilitated the 2006 assassination of brothers Mahmud and Nidal Mazjoub of the Sunni Islamic Jihad movement.

Dollar

Analysis of the Global Insurrection Against Neo-Liberal Economic Domination and the Coming American Rebellion - We Are Egypt

If you think what's happening in Egypt won't happen within the United States, you've been watching too much TV. The statistics speak for themselves.

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© Unknown

In previous Revolution Roundups, before we were knocked offline, we featured mass protests by the people of Ireland, Italy, Britain, Austria, Greece, France and Portugal, as the Global Insurrection contagion spread throughout Europe. And now, as we have seen over the past month, North African and Middle Eastern nations have joined the movement as the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Morocco, Gabon, Mauritania, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Palestine, Iraq, Sudan and Algeria have taken to the streets en masse.

The connection between this latest round of uprisings and the prior protests throughout Europe is one the mainstream media is not making. We are witnessing a decentralized global rebellion against Neo-Liberal economic imperialism. While each national uprising has its own internal characteristics, each one, at its core, is about the rising costs of living and lack of financial opportunity and security. Throughout the world the situation is the same: increasing levels of unemployment and poverty, as price inflation on food and basic necessities is soaring.

Whether national populations realize it or not, these uprisings are against systemic global economic policies that are strategically designed to exploit the working class, reduce living standards, increase personal debt and create severe inequalities of wealth. These global uprising, which have only just begun, are the first wave of the inevitable reaction to the implementation of a centralized worldwide Neo-Feudal economic order.

People

Roughly 1/5 of Bahrain's Population Out in Protests

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© n/aManama, Bahrain
Island Nation's Protests Overwhelm Regime's Security Forces

The island nation of Bahrain's Pearl Square Roundabout has been the site of major protests for more than a week, but today they were an absolute mass of people, with over 100,000 protesters, fully 1/5 of the island's population, massed to protest against the regime.

The protesters had initially demanded major reforms and equal rights for the nation's Shi'ite majority, which has complained it is kept out of important jobs by the Sunni ruling class. After violent crackdowns, the protesters demanded the ouster of the king entirely and a regime change.

The king has sought to calm the protesters, initially offering a $3,000 per family "gift" and now, with the protests swelling to record highs, promising to release a number of Shi'ite political prisoners accused of "plotting against the state."

Despite its small size, Bahrain is particularly important to the US, both because it is the home of the American Fifth Fleet and because the island borders the oil producing portion of Saudi Arabia, itself contain a large, downtrodden Shi'ite population. There is concern, particularly amongst the Saudis, that if Bahrain's monarchy is replaced with a democracy that it will provoke massive protests demanding freedom in that nation as well.