It’s been a long holiday weekend of gratitude and family strife, yet somehow the world continues to turn. Here comes Larry Gross with an update of all that’s new and interesting.

We’ll continue to update this entry with new items as Larry sends them to us. The newest bits are on top, and the list gets older as you scroll down.

How the Media Blew the ACORN Story
How is it that after laboring in relative obscurity as a community organizer for almost 40 years, ACORN was so falsely framed in news stories that many Americans believed the absurd and alarming notion that it stole a presidential election?
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Book Review: Youth in a Suspect Society
In the past week alone, we’ve seen students arrested for a food fight. We’ve seen over 200 suspended for dress code violations at one school. We’ve even seen students suspended for bringing food from McDonald’s to lunch.
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Four Things That Would Truly Help the Economy
I keep seeing this image of Franklin Roosevelt rolling over in his grave.
What might have our late, great president perturbed? Today’s debate about how to get the economy going again.
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How to Control Health Costs
During a conference call with reporters, Peter Orszag defended the Senate health care reform bill’s minor cost-control measures ... This must be a joke.
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AF-PAK Math
Just over 100,000 U.S. and allied European troops, plus 200,000 Afghan security forces and police, have not been able to defeat 25,000 Taliban. Why adding another 30,000 will make any difference is not clear. Incidentally, the administration’s other target, al-Qaida, is a force too small to be shown on this chart. There are fewer than 100 of them in Afghanistan, according to retired Gen. James Jones.
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Get Ready for the Obama/GOP Alliance
With Barack Obama pushing a huge troop escalation in Afghanistan, history may well repeat with a vengeance. And it’s not just the apt comparison to LBJ, who destroyed his presidency on the battlefields of Vietnam with an escalation that delivered power to Richard Nixon and the GOP.
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Obama’s Profile in Courage, or Cave In?
“It took a lot of courage on [John F.] Kennedy’s part to defy the Pentagon, defy the military — and do the right thing,” said retired Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, according to Robert Dreyfuss in his recent Rolling Stone article “The Generals’ Revolt.”
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A Key British Official Reminds Us of the Forgotten Anthrax Attack
A vast array of establishment and expert sources do not believe this episode was really resolved.
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Hockey Dad, Gay Son
This ESPN story is breaking all over the sporting news. Brian Burke, president and general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs, “a most public example of hockey machismo,” has a gay son, and accepts him. Not only that, but the son, Brendan, plays hockey for Miami University of Ohio. As an out player, he is helping break down the walls of homophobia in sports.
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Dreaded Stasi Propaganda Film Shows 5-Year-Old Kids Simulating War Games
London, Nov. 27 (ANI): East Germany’s secret police Stasi propaganda film made in 1977 shows children as young as 5 being made to simulate war games.
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How to Get Out of Afghanistan
Here is a sensible and detailed analysis of the options facing the president, and why he should choose to get out of this war right now.
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Getty Images Offers Grants for Editorial Photography and Nonprofit Work
Getty Images has announced a new round of Grants for Editorial Photography and Grants for Good.
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Returning to a Secret Country
I remember the boys dressed in army surplus, the girls in hessian, their silhouettes framed in beach shanties, staring across an abyss. You were not meant to talk about them. They were not counted in the census, unlike the sheep, and anyway were dirty and feckless and dying off. 
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Encompassing an estimated 78 percent of e-mail, spam remains the bane of many Internet users. The man who has declared himself spam’s godfather, Alan Ralsky, has been sentenced to 51 months in prison for his role in an e-mail stock scam.  —JCL

CNN:

A man who claims to be the “Godfather of Spam” has been sentenced to 51 months in prison by a federal judge in Detroit for his lead role in an e-mail stock scam scheme, according to court documents.

Alan Ralsky, 64, also faces five years probation and will have to forfeit $250,000 that was seized by the government in 2007.

U.S. District Judge Marianne Battani also sentenced three others Monday for their involvement in the scheme, including Ralsky’s son-in-law Scott Bradley, 48, who received 40 months in prison and five years probation.

Ralsky and Bradley were charged for conspiring to commit wire and mail fraud and violating the CAN-SPAM Act, which criminalizes large, commercial e-mail messages sent using an unauthorized computer or with the intent to hide the e-mail’s original source, according to the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. They were also charged with committing wire fraud and engaging in money laundering.

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Some 93 percent of soybeans and 80 percent of corn: Those numbers reflect how much of each crop is grown with seeds genetically altered under the patents of agro-giant Monsanto. An antitrust investigation is at hand, as questions about a monopoly status seem not too far off.  —JCL

The Washington Post:

For plants designed in a lab a little more than a decade ago, they’ve come a long way: Today, the vast majority of the nation’s two primary crops grow from seeds genetically altered according to Monsanto company patents.

Ninety-three percent of soybeans. Eighty percent of corn.

The seeds represent “probably the most revolutionary event in grain crops over the last 30 years,” said Geno Lowe, a Salisbury, Md., soybean farmer.

[...] The revolution, and Monsanto’s dominant role in the nation’s agriculture, has not unfolded without complaint. Farmers have decried the price increases, and competitors say the company has ruthlessly stifled competition.

Now Monsanto—like IBM and Google—has drawn scrutiny from U.S. antitrust investigators, who under the Obama administration have looked more skeptically at the actions of dominant firms.

[...] This year, the Obama Justice Department tossed out the antitrust guidelines of its predecessor because they advocated “extreme hesitancy in the face of potential abuses by monopoly firms.”

[...] Although farmers have grumbled about Monsanto’s regular price increases for Roundup Ready technology for seeds, it is DuPont, a Monsanto rival, that has pressed the antitrust case.

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Iran seems to enjoy its nuclear swagger. Tehran has now approved construction of 10 uranium enrichment plants, a remarkable development given that a U.N. watchdog agency demanded last week that Iran cease construction of a previously secret enrichment facility.  —JCL

The Guardian:

The Iranian government has approved the construction of 10 new uranium enrichment plants, according to state TV, in a further escalation in the diplomatic battle over the country’s nuclear capability.

The Iranian nuclear agency has been told by the government to begin work on five new sites, with locations for a further five to be found in the next two months, the report said. The decision was reportedly made during a cabinet meeting headed by the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, this evening.

It comes shortly after Iran warned it may cut back already limited co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency after being censured by the UN watchdog for concealing the existence of a nuclear enrichment plant.

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Human rights researchers and former detainees agree: Despite its stated goal of improving detention conditions, the U.S. continues to run a secret prison in Afghanistan, a site that holds inmates, sometimes for weeks at a time, without access to outside groups such as the Red Cross. Another such U.S. jail is said to exist in Iraq. —JCL

The New York Times:

An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates for sometimes weeks at a time and without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.

The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day. Detainees said that their only human contact was at twice-daily interrogation sessions. ...

...  The jail’s operation highlights a tension between President Obama’s goal to improve detention conditions that had drawn condemnation under the Bush administration and his stated desire to give military commanders leeway to operate. While Mr. Obama signed an order to eliminate so-called black sites run by the Central Intelligence Agency in January, that order did not apply to this jail, which is run by military Special Operations forces.

Military officials said as recently as this summer that the secret Afghanistan jail and another like it at the Balad Air Base in Iraq were being used to interrogate high-value detainees in isolation. And officials said recently that there were no plans to close the detention centers.

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Citing the fact that industrialized countries cause much more environmental destruction than loggers and farmers in the Amazon, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has called on Western countries—“gringos”—to help halt deforestation.

The Guardian:

Brazil’s president said today that “gringos” should pay Amazon nations to prevent deforestation, insisting rich western countries had caused much more environmental destruction than the loggers and farmers who cut and burn trees in the world’s largest tropical rainforest.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was speaking before an Amazon summit at which delegates signed a declaration calling for financial help from the industrialised world to halt deforestation, which contributes to global warming.

“I don’t want any gringo asking us to let an Amazon resident die of hunger under a tree,” Lula said. “We want to preserve, but they will have to pay the price for this preservation because we never destroyed our forest like they mowed theirs down a century ago.”

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Honduras’ controversial election for president is Sunday, and conservative candidate “Pepe” Lobo has a clear lead in the most recent opinion polls. The contest, after a military coup ousted President Manuel Zelaya, has little international support.  —JCL

Voice of America:

Opinion polls in Honduras show conservative candidate Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo has a clear lead ahead of Sunday’s controversial presidential election.

Polls give Mr. Lobo of the opposition National Party a 16-point lead over Elvin Santos of the ruling Liberal Party, which ousted its own leader, Manuel Zelaya, as Honduran president in June.

Both Mr. Lobo and Mr. Santos support Mr. Zelaya’s removal from power, a move that brought international isolation to the poor Central American nation.

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This is just the kind of news that doesn’t bode well for the state of democracy in America: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg shelled out $102 million of his own money in his recent successful (albeit close) run for re-election. That shakes out to about $183 per vote, and the final tally may still rise.  —KA

The New York Times’ “City Room”:

Mr. Bloomberg, the wealthiest man in New York City, shattered his own previous records: he poured $85 million into his campaign in 2005, and $74 million on his first bid for office in 2001.

And the $102 million tab is likely to rise: the mayor has not yet doled out his storied bonuses to campaign workers, which can top $100,000 a person. That spending will not be reported until after his inauguration.

He has now officially spent more of his own money in the pursuit of public office than any other individual in United States history.

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Dubai’s debt issues caused trouble in other parts of the world Friday. Stock markets from Europe to Asia to the U.S. registered the effects of the city-state’s announcement that it would need to put off paying back $60 billion in debt incurred from investments, according to The Wall Street Journal.  —KA

The Wall Street Journal:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was off 233 points at its morning low and ended the shortened post-Thanksgiving session with a 154.48-point decline, off 1.5%, at 10309.92, hurt by declines in all 30 components. The Dow, which entered Friday’s session at a 13-month high, ended the week down 0.1%, snapping a three-week winning streak.

Traders and money managers drew some comfort from the U.S. market’s recovery from its intraday lows Friday. Many point out that Dubai’s main creditors are European banks, not Wall Street firms. But that could still lead to gyrations next week and beyond if investors with exposure to Dubai’s troubles continue to unload commodities, U.S. shares, and other assets that have shown hefty gains this year to raise cash.

“We still need to see if there’s going to be a domino effect here,” with Dubai’s credit woes spreading to its neighbors and trading partners, said Kevin Shacknofsky, of Alpine Woods Capital Investors. “The markets are telling us for now that this is a containable problem, but we’re not absolutely certain of that yet.”

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According to a newly released report commissioned by the Irish government, the Archdiocese of Dublin and other Catholic authorities in Ireland kept hundreds of complaints concerning the sexual abuse of children by members of the clergy covered up—for nearly 30 years.  —KA

CNN:

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin apologized Thursday in a news conference. “No words of apology can ever be sufficient,” he said.

And Dermot Ahern, Ireland’s justice minister, said he felt a “a growing sense of revulsion and anger” as he read the report.

“Bottom line is this: A collar will protect no villain,” he said.

The commission was set up in March 2006 to look into allegations of child sexual abuse made against clergy in the Irish capital. Its report was completed in July.

Although the commission said it was not its place to “establish whether or not abuse occurred ... it is abundantly clear ... that child sexual abuse by clerics was widespread throughout the period.”

One victim, Marie Collins, said those who covered up the abuse were just as guilty as the perpetrators of the crimes.

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