"Deficit Neutral" Health Care Reform
"Deficit Neutral" Health Care Reform
Absurdity upon Absurdity
The health care debate and general political climate compound absurdity upon absurdity.
First we're told that our health care is only worth the time and effort if the remedy has no negative impact on the budget. No deficits allowed. The deficit risk defines your chances for health and longevity.
At the same time, we see that Wall Street failures and the overseas war effort are not held to the same standard on deficits spending.
PermalinkThe Nobel Prize, the Brand and the President
Gilad Atzmon
Imprisoned by the most dangerous Zionist guards
People out there are divided whether it was a right decision to award Obama with a Nobel prize for peace. In fact, almost everyone around me is outraged, what ‘peace’ they ask, what about Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Palestine? We are tired of promises they insist. The Nobel Prize committee on its part ‘highlighted Obama’s effort to support international bodies, build ties with the Muslim world, act in favour of nuclear disproliferation and fight Climate change’. Those who are unimpressed with Obama stress that the above is just ‘empty rhetoric’, nothing but ‘hot air’. “We want to see action, we demand facts on the ground”.
While Obama’s critics raise some valid points, they for some reason seem to fail to grasp the distinction between ‘Obama the Brand’ and ‘Obama the President’. The ‘Brand’ stands for hope and humanism. It tends to say the right things on the right occasions. It is ethically aware. It employs reason occasionally and it even manages to talk sense often enough. ‘Obama the Brand’ is, no doubt, a refreshing event in the Western political arena.
Who's in Big Brother's Database?
James Bamford
The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency
by Matthew M. Aid
Bloomsbury, 423 pp., $30.00
On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.
Barbara Ehrenreich: The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
Emily Wilson
The author talks about how a plague of positive thinking is permeating our society, from medicine to business, and is even contributing to our financial crisis.
When Barbara Ehrenreich went to be treated for breast cancer, she was exhorted to think positively; and when she expressed feelings of fear and anger, she was chided for being negative.
Ehrenreich, the author of 16 books, including Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, which examine the blue- and white-collar job markets, took on what she sees as an epidemic of positive thinking in her new book: Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.
Positive thinking is different, she says, from being cheerful or good-natured -- it's believing that the world is shaped by our wants and desires and that by focusing on the good, the bad ceases to exist.
Ehrenreich believes this has permeated our culture and that the refusal to acknowledge that bad things could happen is in some way responsible for the current financial crisis.
In her new book, Ehrenreich examines how the positive-thinking movement was started by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and an amateur metaphysician named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby in response to Calvinism; how being positive became mandatory in corporate culture; and how she thinks prosperity preachers, such as Joel Osteen of Lakewood Church in Houston encouraged a culture of debt by telling their congregations that God wants them to have a big house and a nice car.
The Republicans and the Taliban: More alike than Rush will admit
Mary Shaw
Republican congressman Pete Sessions as Taliban insurgent
Just when ACORN needed a break from all the hysterical right-wing finger pointing, along came the perfect diversion: President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. And so a new feeding frenzy began.
Erick Erickson of Redstate.com wrote: "I did not realize the Nobel Peace Price had an affirmative action quota."
Glenn Beck chimed in with his usual kind of absurdity: "The Nobel Peace Prize should be turned down by Barack Obama and given to [...] the tea party goers and the 9-12 Project."
But the reaction that most caught my attention came from Republican Party chief Rush Limbaugh: "Folks, do you realize something has happened here that we all agree with the Taliban and Iran about and that is he doesn't deserve the award. Now that's hilarious, that I'm on the same side of something that the Taliban, and that we all are on the same side as the Taliban."
Obama's Mandate from and Vanunu's letter to: 2009 Nobel Peace Prize Committee
eileen fleming
In his congratulatory message to President Obama upon being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Israeli President Shimon Peres stated:
"Very few leaders if at all were able to change the mood of the entire world in such a short while with such profound impact. You provided all of humanity with fresh hope, with intellectual determination, and a feeling that there is a Lord in heaven and believers on earth. Under your leadership, peace became a real and original agenda. And from Jerusalem, I am sure all the bells of engagement and understanding will ring again. You gave us a license to dream and act in a noble direction." [1]
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