Joel S. Hirschhorn

In the national debate about health care reform absolutely nothing makes less sense than the positive views of much of the public about private health insurers. There is no good reason to have positive views of private health insurers, the companies that have relentlessly increased the costs for very limited health insurance. Copays, deductibles and premiums have raped those lucky enough to have health insurance while also making it very difficult much of the time to get coverage for all kinds of health problems. The US health care system is unbelievably inefficient, providing far less effective health care for what is incredibly high costs, compared to all other industrialized countries. The main reason is the private health insurance industry.

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Stuart Littlewood

A speech made 75 years ago by a US Marine Corps general, Smedley Butler, helps put today’s belated Iraq war inquiry, promised by the British government, into proper context.

”There are only two things we should fight for,” said Butler. “One is the defence of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket…

“A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

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Allen L Roland

Neda Agha-Soltan moments before bleeding to death from a sniper wound
June 20, 2009, as her music teacher and others try to resuscitate her.

The bloody video of Neda's violent
death on Saturday has circulated in Iran and around the world on the World Wide Web. It has made Ms. Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26-year-old musician, who relatives said was not political, an instant symbol of the Iranian anti-government movement.

One short seven line poem circulating on the Internet explicitly linked Neda's death to other symbols of the Iranian protest movement ~ and I've taken the liberty to complete the poem:

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By Emily Spence

In order to raise sales and personal royalty gains, Alan Greenspan, just prior to the release of his book The Age of Turbulence, carried out a public relations blitz dragged out for a whole week in which he made remarks similar to those conveyed in his hardback. These included statements such as “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

Indeed, many Americans and people from other countries knew that domination of a region rich in fossil fuels represented the primary motive for the Iraq incursion and the only significant reason that Iran is not similarly assaulted is that it has an arsenal, unlike Saddam Hussein, capable of rendering serious damage in retaliation (i.e., aimed at U.S. troops in Iraq). Besides, the U.S. military is stretched too thin as it is with approximately 1,000 bases worldwide, along with operations occurring on every continent, such as the AFRICOM sorties, which are generally tied to oil company interests as the map at the first reference shows. [1]

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Charles E. Carlson

Judeo-Christianity is less than 200 years old. The World Jewish Zionism movement has played the key part in assuring its growth. We see the result of this mind bending in the creation of a new “Christianity” which in its extreme form is known as Christian Zionism, fed by Oxford University Press’s Scofield Reference Bible, published in New York in 1908. Bible editors, most of which are owned by secular publishing house like Oxford, have also failed to correct obvious changes in common usage of words, such as "Jew" and "Israel" that provide misleading, Zionist friendly inferences.

Oxford sold a new 20th Century theology to evangelical seminaries. The Scofield usage has become a standard in most study or reference bibles used by a wide range of evangelicals, and even penetrating mainline church bible studies and broadcast media. These books are the subject of many articles by this author and others. [1]

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Eric Margolis

Iran’s political crisis continues to blaze. It’s still impossible to say which leaders or factions will emerge victorious, but one thing is certain: the earthquake in the Islamic Republic is shaking the Mideast and deeply confusing everyone, including the US government.

Highlighting the complexity of this crisis, Meir Dagan, the head of Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, reportedly voiced his hope that Iran’s embattled president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would remain in office. On the surface, that sounds absurd, since Ahmadinejad is Israel’s Great Satan.

But, according to Dagan, if Ahmadinejad’s supposedly "moderate" rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, came to power, it would be harder for Israel to keep up its propaganda war against Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program. Besides, added the Mossad chief, the devil you know is better.

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William Buppert

Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration. ~H.L. Mencken

For some time, I have been trying to figure out why the nation and we as individuals are in the fix we are in now. Many reasons manifest themselves. We labor under a government of such monstrous reach and epic incompetence that it makes the Soviets now look like a paragon of efficiency and probity. We suffer under a ruling class that has not simply been a gangster government under Obamunism but has been this way since the defeat of the original Constitution in 1865. With each illegitimate war since 1898, the power of the Federal government has increased exponentially. With each manufactured crisis, liberties and freedoms have withered and died. This is simply the latest and greatest improvement in the ongoing process of our overseers to find emerging ways to increase the output of our slavery.

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Eric Walberg

A new world is being born, one without the US dollar greasing the wheels of commerce, notes

Yekaterinburg, famous tragically as the spot Lenin chose to have the Tsar and his family executed in 1918, and ironically as the fiefdom of Boris Yeltsin, who finished off the Russian revolution itself in 1991, witnessed something no less remarkable last week when leaders of the so-called BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) held their first summit, following the yearly meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). The BRIC countries comprise 15 per cent of the world economy, 40 per cent of global currency reserves and half the world’s population. Brazil , India and China have also weathered the financial crisis better than the world as a whole.

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Bill Van Auken

The US media, led by the New York Times , is continuing its concerted propaganda campaign against Iran over charges that the government stole the June 12 presidential election. There is not even a semblance of objectivity in the media coverage, which parrots the charges of the opposition headed by defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi as fact and dismisses the government’s claims as lies.

The opposition is lauded as democratic and reformist, while incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters are portrayed as virtual fascists. One would scarcely imagine that the two men represent rival factions within the same ruling establishment.

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Allen L Roland

The United States is just over 230 years old and is now firmly entrenched in the seventh stage of all civilizations ( Apathy ) with only Dependence and eventually Bondage ahead of it:

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through a nine stage sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacence to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back again into bondage. ( Attributed to Alexander Tytler )

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