Sarah Meyer

With Bush, we had sentimental creepiness & neo-con lies; with Obama we have rhetorical hypocrisy. With many appointments now made, we can see that Obama is indeed trying to please the “48% that didn’t vote for me.” To complete his team, he might as well nominate Cheney as head of Homeland Security and Sarah Palin (with bear rugs) as Secretary of Agriculture. To placate the disgruntled anti-war movement, he could then ask “progressive” power-happy HuffPo Arianna Huffington [ “I only text three people – my two teenage children and Barack Obama.”] to be his press secretary.

Following are some comments from The Disappointed and Angry. These articles represent the 53% of the US public that voted for Obama, hope and "CHANGE."

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Stephen Lendman

Imagine life under these conditions:

Living in limbo under a foreign occupier. Having no self-determination, no right of return, and no power over your daily life. Being in constant fear, economically strangled, and collectively punished.

Having your free movement denied by enclosed population centers, closed borders, regular curfews, roadblocks, checkpoints, electric fences, and separation walls. Having your homes regularly demolished and land systematically stolen to build settlements for encroachers in violation of international law prohibiting an occupier from settling its population on conquered land.

Having your right to essential services denied - to emergency health care, education, employment, and enough food and clean water. Being forced into extreme poverty, having your crops destroyed, and being victimized by punitive taxes. Having no right for redress in the occupier's courts under laws only protecting the occupier.

Being regularly targeted by incursions and attacks on the ground and from the air. Being willfully harassed, ethnically cleansed, arrested, incarcerated, tortured, and slaughtered on any pretext, including for your right of self-defense. Having no rights on your own land in your own country for over six decades and counting. Vilified for being Muslims and called terrorists, Jihadists, crazed Arabs, and fundamentalist extremists. Victimized by a slow-motion genocide to destroy you.

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Mike Whitney

“The problems we face today cannot be solved by the minds that created them” ~Albert Einstein

Obama hasn’t even been sworn in yet, and already the Wall Street cheerleaders are celebrating his first great triumph. According the pundits, the stock market staged a surprise 494 point rally last Friday because -- get this -- it was announced that Timothy Geithner would be appointed Obama’s Treasury Secretary.

Timothy who?

What nonsense. The sudden turn-around in stocks had a lot more to do with short-covering than anything else, but don’t let that get in the way of a good story. Even so, the last minute surge on the NYSE couldn’t stop another week-long bloodbath that ended with the Dow and S&P 500 tumbling another 5 percent. That’s not to say that Geithner is not bright and talented guy. He is; and so is his White House counterpart, Lawrence Summers. But the media hype is way overdone.

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eileen fleming

Photo by me of Um Kamal/Mrs. Khurd taken one day before
she became a widow.

[Occupied East Jerusalem] Less than a five minute walk from my room at the Ambassador Hotel, Fawziya Khurd and international supporters began living in a tent, because the Israeli police enforced a court order to throw her and her spouse, Mohammed out of their home, which they had been living in since 1956. The day before my last visit, Mrs. Khurd/Um Khammal [mother of Kammal] became a widow when Mohammad expired secondary to the stress of home eviction by Israel.

At 3:30 AM on November 9, 2008, Reverend Richard Toll was awakened in his hotel room in the neighborhood when the Israeli Occupying Forces/IOF broke down the door of the home of the Al Khurd family. Rev. Toll told me [during the final day of Sabeel's 7th Annual Conference: The Nakba: Memory, Reality and Beyond] that he was jarred awake by a woman's pain filled scream that was indescribable.

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