Len Hart

As recently as 2005, Milton Friedman was still singing the praises of an utterly failed economic policies that had been put to the test by Herrs R. Reagan and Bush Sr and found tragically lacking. Friedman is enamored with policies that bankrupted the nation, made terrorism worse, created the longest, deepest recession since the crash of 1929, exported jobs abroad and resulted in absolutely destruction of the American labor movement and, as a result, the loss of employee rights. Because Ronald Reagan put into effect the lame-brained ideas of Milton Friedman, we live poised on the precipice of economic collapse at the end of the very worst Presidency in American history.

When I met Milton Friedman in Houston, Ronald Reagan had not yet plunged the nation into a two year long depression. At the time, it was the worst depression since Herbert Hoover's Great Depression of the 1930s, the one that your parents, grand-parents or great great parents have told you about.

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Sheila Samples

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
~~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The recent blowout election that gave us President Barack Obama resulted in a flood of emotion that engulfed both parties. The one thing they had in common was that neither party could believe it. Political comedian Mort Sahl once said, "Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen." If we have learned nothing else about Republicans, it's that, with few exceptions, they are vindictive, immoral, blood-thirsty, and just plain power-mad. Republicans are so much better at destroying things than Democrats are. They say and do whatever it takes to win. And if that doesn't work -- they seize it anyway.

So we were braced for another disappointment -- not because we didn't share Obama's vision of change and his hope for a better life for all Americans, but because voting machines were frantically flip-flopping votes from Obama to John McCain, minority voters were purged, telephones jangling with robocalls smeared Obama as an alien terrorist -- and John King over at CNN kept ramming solid red "magic" maps in our faces as proof that McCain could not lose. So, what happened?

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Paul J. Balles

While Americans concentrate on the cost of rescuing the US financial system, and Europeans worry about how the worldwide financial crisis will affect them, Israel blithely, with US government and European community approval, deprives Gaza's entire civilian population of food, medicine and clean drinking water.

When pushed to explain their behaviour, they claim self-defence. Defence against whom? More than 50 per cent of the population in Gaza is comprised of children under the age of 15. Few people outside of Gaza even notice this slow genocide.

Israel always manages to commit its worst deeds when no one else is looking. If they happen to be caught, they blame it on the Palestinians – on a few resistance fighters lobbing rockets into Israel in retaliation for a broken cease-fire. To the Israeli, the actions of a few violent Palestinians are justifiable cause for genocide of the entire Palestinian population in Gaza. Joe Mowrey writes:

As conditions in the Gaza Strip approach a catastrophic level of deprivation, the world media, and in particular the US media, remain largely silent. The United Nations, whose truckloads of food and medical supplies continue to be denied entry into Gaza by Israel, appears to be one of the few international voices of dissent concerning the collective punishment of 1.5 million human beings.

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Sarah Meyer

"There we go, Uncle Dick -I pardon you, and I pardon me."

EMAIL THIS. "I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process. I came to Washington with a set of values, and I'm leaving with the same set of values. And I darn sure wasn't going to sacrifice those values; that I was a President that had to make tough choices and was willing to make them. I surrounded myself with good people. I carefully considered the advice of smart, capable people and made tough decisions. I'd like to be a President (known) as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace; that focused on individuals rather than process." George Bush (The self-described "compassionate conservative": 12.11.08 interview)

Michael Isikoff wrote an article in Newsweek entitled ‘Obama To Take On Torture’: The “new Obama Justice Department is not likely to launch major new criminal probes of harsh interrogations and other alleged abuses by the Bush administration.”

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by Luisa Morgantini

Luisa Morgantini’s introduction to the Italian Press-book of the movie: LEMON TREE directed by Eran Riklis

How many emotions in this movie? How many truths? Even the trees are suffering in Palestine.

When Teodora Movies contacted me in order to talk about this new movie by Eran Riklis entitled Lemon Tree, I thought of another story told in a book, about an old Palestinian man who, seriously ill, decided to visit his home in Ramleh, from where he was forced to escape in 1948. His son accompanied him. A woman opened the door of his childhood home and did not drive him away; on the contrary she let him in and he asked her if he could see if there was still the lemon tree in the garden: it was still there, he asked for a lemon and he held it tight. The lemon was still in his hand one week later, when he died. The woman, who really exists, is called Dalia, and now that home has been transformed into a school for Israeli students of Palestinian origin and for Israeli Jews.

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