by Jeff Gates

On September 24th, U.S. President Barack Obama will preside over a U.N. Security Council session on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. In March 2010, Moscow will host a Global Nuclear Summit that the U.S. has agreed to attend.

The next six months could prove hopeful or harmful—depending on the impact on Israel’s nuclear arsenal. With U.S. backing, Tel Aviv has thus far avoided compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—joining North Korea, India and Pakistan.

President John F. Kennedy tried to stop Israel from starting a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. In a June 1963 letter to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, he insisted on proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Israel was not developing nuclear weapons at its Dimona reactor facility. Though his letter was cabled to the U.S. embassy, Ben-Gurion resigned (citing undisclosed personal reasons) before the message could be physically delivered.

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by drfrogsplat

I keep seeing headlines and articles that seem to put Christians, Republicans and Public-Healthcare-Opposers all in one group together, which is either totally unfair and biased, or suggests that there are a lot of Christians who are actually opposed to a public health care system... I find this a little worrying and confusing, and so write this not as evangelism to non-Christians (you guys can stop reading now...), but as evangelism to conservative Christians, who I ask to turn off Fox News and pick up their bible and see what you find in there about the matter...

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Allen L Roland

America's illusionary economic recovery is being fueled by bailouts and wishful thinking while Wall Street insiders frantically sell. The reality is that Main Street is broke, jobless, deep in debt and will not spend and inflate the debt bubble that just burst ~ which leaves the stock market over priced and vulnerable for a major correction:

Last week, U.S. home foreclosures hit new all-time record highs and are still rising. Personal bankruptcies are skyrocketing ~ even among the rich. Unemployment is still soaring. Consumer borrowing is contracting dramatically and the commercial real estate market is rapidly deteriorating.

Graham Summers nails our present precarious economic condition in his September first article, Crooks, Computers, and the Coming Crash, and states the obvious by calling the present stock market rally " a liquidity rally driven by non-thinking computer programs, not a rally based on fundamentals."

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Joel S. Hirschhorn

Anyone smart and strong enough to fight delusional thinking and who pays attention to current events should clearly see that corporate corruption of the US political system is so pervasive and powerful that there will be no genuine reform of both the health care and financial sectors.

I always believed that president Obama was just a different color corrupt politician who was subservient to the two-party plutocracy. His so-called reform efforts and ludicrous federal deficit spending should disappoint all his non-delusional supporters. For health reform the only genuine and sensible reform legislation should have been not much more than a single sentence mandating that every American has a right to full Medicare coverage. Period. End of story. True reform. True universal health insurance.

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Matt Taibbi

"It pains me to say this as an American, but we are the only people on earth dumb enough to use a nationwide campaign of “teabag parties” as a form of mass protest, in the middle of a real economic crisis. What’s next? The Great Dirty Sanchez-In of 2010? A Million Man Felch?" -Matt Taibbi

"Many protesters expressed a sense that basic American freedoms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are threatened by new Washington policies seen by many as more socialistic than capitalistic. The proposed taxpayer bailout of homeowners who may have inflated their earnings in order to secure mortgages is one example, says Jeff Crawford, a protester from Dacula, Ga.

“The first year after the Mayflower arrived, the colonists tried a communal method of storing and sharing food and it failed miserably,” says Mr. Crawford. “Why are things any different now?”

Eighteenth-century symbolism was rife at the Atlanta event as speakers drew comparisons with the Boston patriots who dumped the King’s tea in Boston Harbor to protest taxation without representation, an act that began the American Revolution and the founding of the United States." via Michelle Malkin » A Tax Day Tea Party cheat sheet: How it all started.

I have to say, I’m really enjoying this whole teabag thing. It’s really inspiring some excellent daydreaming. For one thing, it’s brought together the words teabag and Michelle Malkin for me in a very powerful, thrilling sort of way. Not that I haven’t ever put those two concepts together before, but this is the first time it’s happened while in the process of reading her actual columns.

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By Mike Whitney

Surely, the events of the past week suggest that the G.O.P. has outlived its shelf-life and needs to be conveyed pell-mell to the nearest dumpster.

First, there was the Joe Wilson flap, where the indignant representative from South Carolina barked "You Lie" to President Barack Obama during his prepared remarks to Congress on health care. This is the very same Wilson who applauded all the bogus allegations about imaginary weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaida made in countless speeches by ex-president George W Bush. Now we are expected to believe that Joe is acting in "good conscience" in opposing minimal health care to a larger swath of uninsured Americans?

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Noam Chomsky

The United States was founded as an "infant empire," in George Washington's words. The conquest of the national territory was a grand imperial venture, much like the vast expansion of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. From the earliest days, control over the hemisphere was a critical goal. Ambitions expanded during World War II, as the US displaced Britain and lesser imperial powers. High-level planners concluded that the US should "hold unquestioned power" in a world system including not only the Western hemisphere, but also the former British Empire and the Far East, and later, as much of Eurasia as possible. A primary goal of NATO was to block moves towards European independence, along Gaullist lines. That became still more clear when the USSR collapsed, and with it the Russian threat that was the formal justification of NATO. NATO was not disbanded, but rather expanded, in violation of promises to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not even fully extend to East Germany, let alone beyond, and that "NATO would be transforming itself into a more political organization." By now it is virtually an international intervention force under US command, its self-defined jurisdiction reaching to control over energy sources, pipelines, and sea lanes. And Europe is a well-disciplined junior partner.

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