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With health care, don't let the perfect be the enemy
Mary Shaw
Early in the morning on December 24, the U.S. Senate passed its version of a health care reform bill. The next step is conference committee, where the Senate and House versions -- quite different each another -- will be reconciled and merged.
The Senate version contains a lot of compromises -- so many that some progressives feel the Senate should have let the bill die and then started again from scratch next year. But a new Senate bill would require the same 60 votes to break a filibuster, and those 60 votes would surely require similar compromises, since the cast of characters would be the same. To wait until after the 2010 elections would be to continue losing people every day who die from lack of health insurance. That would not be acceptable.
Is Congress planning to destroy every Middle East TV Channel that criticizes Israel?
Part I: Targeting Lebanon’s Al Manar
Franklin Lamb Beirut
“Regarding Al Manar it’s personal for Israel. The reason is that Al Manar did to the Israeli government propaganda machine during and following the July 2006 war what Hezbollah fighters did to Israeli troops. Al Manar kicked butt. That station must be made to disappear. The plan is to stop the 15-20 million daily viewers of Al Manar from receiving its transmission and well as to intimidate all the other Middle East TV channels that are suspected of moving toward the growing “Culture of Resistance’ spreading in the Middle East from Lebanon.” A Washington DC observer of how Israel controls the US Congress 12/9/09
Waging false-peace by sporting symbolic arrests vs. waging political science to bring real peace!
Zahir Ebrahim
Apropos of the article “Waging Peace: Mass Arrests at White House Antiwar Rally” floating on the web, as an 'untermensch' whose people are suffering the brunt of “imperial mobilization”, I humbly say thank you to the courageous handful of conscionable American people, all 61 of them who offered their arrests to make a profound statement of conscience. Of the 200-plus million American people, that even 61 would feel the pain of “freedom” that the world is being subjected to is still a statement of conscience. Having said that, symbolism is no match for political science. None of the people mentioned above, including authors of books, who have so courageously stood up for the minimal decency that none of the rest of us seem to have, have apparently penetrated that fact in their speeches, writings, and in offering their ownselves for arrest.
COMPULSORY PRIVATE HEALTH INSURANCE: JUST ANOTHER BAILOUT FOR THE FINANCIAL SECTOR?
Ellen Brown
Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, is quoted as warning two centuries ago:
“Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an underground dictatorship. . . . The Constitution of this republic should make special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom."
That time seems to have come, but the dictatorship we are facing is not the sort that Dr. Rush was apparently envisioning. It is not a dictatorship by medical doctors, who are as distressed by the proposed legislation as the squeezed middle class is. (For a withering analysis by an outraged M.D. of the nearly 2000 - page House bill, see here.) The new dictatorship is not by doctors but by Wall Street -- the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) sector that now claims 40% of corporate profits.
The Unbearable Likeness of Being Part of an Empire
Thomas H. Naylor
When I moved to Vermont in 1993 I thought Vermont was the most radical state in the Union in terms of its commitment to human solidarity, sustainability, direct democracy, egalitarianism, political independence, and nonviolence. Seventeen years later, I’m not so sure. Politically speaking, Vermont has become more and more like every other state—a mirror image of the Empire of which it is a part. Above all, it is one of the most politically correct states in the nation. The academic, political, spiritual, and media leaders of the Green Mountain State, once known for their fearless independence, behave as though they were experimental mice on an electric floor after experiencing learned helplessness from repeated shocks, waiting to be rescued by Barack Obama. But Barack Obama is nowhere to be found.
The "Omaha Two:" Victimized by COINTELPRO Injustice
by Stephen Lendman
After a two week April 1971 trial and four days of deliberation, an 11 white/one black member jury convicted Mondo we Langa (formerly David Rice) and Edward Poindexter for the bombing murder of police officer Larry Minard on August 17, 1970. Both men denied involvement, and ever since consistently maintained their innocence, insisting they were framed. Supporters agree, including Amnesty International that declared them political prisoners, and no wonder.
They were Omaha chapter National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF) leaders, an off-shoot of the Black Panther Party, targeted (as later revealed) by secret FBI/police Domino task force/COINTELPRO tactics, following J. Edgar Hoover's orders to infiltrate, disrupt, sabotage, and destroy their activism for ethnic justice, racial emancipation, and real economic, social, and political equality across gender and color lines.
U.S. – led World Community Fails, Palestinians on Brink of Explosion
By Nicola Nasser*
"In the absence of all hope, we cry out our cry of hope,” Palestinian Christian leaders, representing churches and church-related organizations, meeting in Bethlehem on December 11, concluded in their 13-page document titled “Kairos Palestine – 2009: A Moment of Truth,” enlisting Christians worldwide in proactive efforts to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Their “cry” symbolizes the popular mood of their people as well as the political status quo.
On both sides of the inter-Palestinian divide between the U.S. – backed presidency and the Israeli – hunted legislative, the Fatah – led West Bank (where the leadership of the Palestine Liberation organization (PLO) is committed to peace, direct negotiations and security coordination with the Israeli occupying power, but the 16 –year old “peace process’ has reached an impasse and the negotiations are deadlocked in a one –year old stalemate over the cancer – like expanding Jewish colonial settlements) and the Hamas – led Gaza Strip (where the Islamic resistance Movement (Hamas) is strictly committed to ceasefire save in self – defense while conducting indirect negotiations mediated by Egypt and Germany over an exchange of POWs), both political and military solutions for the century – old Arab – Israeli conflict have failed and aborted all prospects of peace, which have proved an elusive mirage, a stark failure of the U.S. led world community. An imminent explosion seems the only breakthrough ahead.
One Year after the Gaza Genocide, Palestine addresses the conscience of humanity!
Salim Nazzal
At 9 am Jesus was crucified. Around 12 am darkness has fallen over Palestine .The murderers thought the crusification is the end of lightness, but history shows that the crusification was the beginning of lightness: the rise from the dark grave towards the lightness of heavens proves that darkness was a temporary phenomenon, and the will to resist the darkness prevail, and the culture of life will defeat the culture of death.
Was the darkness befell over Palestine a divinely act with the aim of showing the deep contrast between darkness and lightness or, was it a natural phenomenon that darkness precede lightness, and thusly it is an obligatory passage to move towards lightness? Joseph Conrad, in his novel (Heart of darkness) saw it as nothing than a spiritual hollowness on the side of the murderers. It is a spiritual darkness by which the culture of death imposes horror on natives with a presumed banner of civilization which is the story of colonization throughout history but Zionists contributed to the theory of oppression fairy tales and mythology to justify the philosophy of death.
Relax, Holy Father. Viva Palestina and George Galloway are doing the job for you
Stuart Littlewood
Dignitaries, emissaries, human rights delegations, fact-finding trippers… they come and go, but Gaza's suffering continues and day by day gets worse, thanks to the corrupted leadership of the international community who are the scandal of our age.
But here's a spot of Christmas cheer for the starving, desolated Palestinians imprisoned in the tiny coastal enclave.
Sometime in February they are likely to get a visit from none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. At least, that's what his office at Lambeth Palace says. Yes, archbishops in England live in palaces and hang out in the House of Lords.
Committing Treason for a Piece of the Pie
By: Peter Chamberlin
If things were as they seemed, then the most powerful military force that the world has ever seen would have had no trouble defeating Afghan or Iraqi tribes, or the already decimated military of Saddam Hussein. But things are not as they seem on the nightly news; in fact, most things prove to be the exact opposite of how they are portrayed. In a country like America (and sadly, most countries want to be like America), the people prefer to believe whatever they are told.
No one questions now, nor did they at the time these things occurred, why American military forces performed in the following unprofessional, illogical manner—they consistently refused to contain the forces they fought against in any encounter (never closing the back doors) and they always stopped fighting just short of victory, allowing their enemies years to rebuild their forces while American soldiers were restrained from finishing the enemy to become instructors. Continuing the Iraq and Afghan wars was more important than winning or ending them; continuing the wars was “winning” them in the lexicon of the Empire-builders.
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