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By Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar
$ 19.77
By Ned Sublette
$18.45
$20
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By Marie Cocco — Sen. Max Baucus’ health care plan would shift massive amounts of tax money away from traditionally blue states.
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CIA / JFK Presidential Library
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How about that Eric Holder? The Justice Department plans to make it harder for the government to hide behind “national security” in legal cases—a process that has been abused since a highly flawed Supreme Court decision first allowed wide latitude in such matters.
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By Amy Goodman — Manuel Zelaya, the democratically elected president of Honduras, is back in his country after being deposed in a military coup June 28.
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — All of the health bills on offer, even the supposedly “liberal” House bill, are already centrist compromises built on a private health insurance market. Above, Olympia Snowe, who may turn out to be the single Senate Republican voting for reform.
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Bill O’Reilly says of the very public option that makes his Foxy friends’ heads explode: “I want that. ... [I]f the government can cobble together a cheaper insurance policy that gives the same benefits, I see that as a plus for the folks.” Quick, look out your window to see the flying pigs.
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By Marie Cocco — We are warned it is dangerously protectionist to enforce existing trade laws against China’s cheap tire surge, but Obama is obligated to do so—and for good reason.
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U.S. Army / Sgt. Teddy Wade
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By William Pfaff — The more one hears the discussion among Democrats about the war in Afghanistan, the more one feels that it is a serious handicap that Barack Obama has no personal experience of international relations or of foreign policy or military service.
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Flickr / ISM Palestine
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A U.N. fact-finding mission has concluded “there is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity.” (Full release after the jump.)
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AP Photo / Toby Talbot
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By Marie Cocco — Overlooked in the health care debate is the recently reconfirmed fact that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are working better than ever.
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White House / Pete Souza
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From the creation of the White House Council on Women and Girls to the State Department’s global focus on women’s rights, President Obama is scoring points with feminists who worked against him in the primaries.
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Flickr / Roger@elaws ?
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A year after Lehman Brothers went under—taking a big chunk of the economy with it—the deregulation and lax oversight that enabled the crisis are still a problem. According to this New York Times report, things might even be worse.
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California Emergency Management Agency
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By G.W. Schulz, California Watch —
Records show that communities across California had difficulty managing millions in anti-terrorism grants handed out by Congress after Sept. 11.
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AP / Joseph Kaczmarek
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By Daniel Ellsberg — The document in his hand was almost unthinkable: It projected roughly 600 million deaths in a U.S.-Soviet war. Here’s the first installment of a memoir of the nuclear era by Daniel Ellsberg, the man who revealed the Pentagon Papers.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Bill Boyarsky — President Barack Obama’s health care reform speech to Congress Wednesday night was impassioned, but it also echoed a lot of ideas from insurance company lobbying.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — By joining specifics, a powerful moral argument and an unapologetic defense of government’s role in promoting social justice, the president sought to rescue the health care debate from the mire of a congressional system that has encouraged delay and obstruction.
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The president’s speech to Congress on Wednesday was not without surprises, including a Ted Kennedy-inspired appeal to the “character of our nation” and a rowdy (and democratically elected) heckler. Here is the full text.
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By William Pfaff — Since the 1970s, the nation has been in a dizzying downward spin in the effective purchase of public office by corporations.
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By Michael Grabell, Christopher Flavelle and Emily Witt, ProPublica —
Congress created a $5 billion emergency fund for needy families that can be used to immediately create jobs or pay rent for families facing eviction, but many states say they can’t afford to take advantage of the windfall.
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AP / Rick Rycroft
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By Chris Hedges — Our most potent political weapon is food. If we take back our agriculture, if we buy and raise produce locally, we can begin to break the grip of corporations that control a food system as fragile, unsafe and destined for collapse as our financial system.
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By Eugene Robinson — A new report by Physicians for Human Rights reaches a sickening but inescapable conclusion: “Health professionals played central roles in developing, implementing and providing justification for torture.”
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Project on Government Oversight
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Much of the furor over the conduct of private embassy guards in Kabul appears preoccupied with what one whistle-blower describes as the “gay shit” rather than the exploitation of young Afghan women or the deteriorating security situation at the embassy. The latter, after all, was the major focus of the complaint that blew this story open.
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By Ellen Goodman — When exactly did the Republicans start operating one of those marketing scams that target the elderly?
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ABC
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The White House is about to relaunch its health reform campaign and some, including Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, are hopeful that the president will “more aggressively fight for a strong health reform bill with a strong public option.” Behind the scenes, however, his staff may be looking for the best way to kill it.
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U.S. Navy / MC3 Joshua Cassatt
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By William Pfaff — The most important political question faced by a Japan led by the Democratic Party concerns the Japanese-American security relationship, which is both humiliating and exploitative.
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By Amy Goodman — The 2009 Copenhagen climate conference will be critical to the success or failure of establishing a practical, binding global plan of action before human-caused climate change reaches the point of no return, creating a cascade of catastrophes.
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AP / Jack Dempsey
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By Chris Hedges — Voices of change, who speak in powerful and yet unfamiliar words, are on their way to Pittsburgh. They will cry out to defy the heads of state, bankers and finance ministers meeting there for the G-20.
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Mr. Fish
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Ted Kennedy’s suffering and failures fed a humane humility that led him to reach out to others who fell, to empathize with those burdened by pain, to understand human folly, and to appreciate the quest for redemption.
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By Amy Goodman — It looked like it was business as usual for President Barack Obama on the first day of his vacation, as he spent five hours golfing with a top executive from UBS, a bank that sheltered wealthy tax dodgers while hardworking U.S. taxpayers were bailing it out.
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By William Pfaff — Thus far in the torture debate that has gone on in the United States since 2001, I can think of only one high American government figure currently in office taking a stand on torture in terms of justice, honor and national integrity.
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By Marie Cocco — The summer of disinformation seems to have accomplished its goal: to preserve for the private insurance industry an effective monopoly over how much most Americans pay for health care, and on what terms they can buy it.
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Wikimedia Commons
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By Eugene Robinson — History’s demands can seem inconvenient, unfair or unreasonable. But they can’t be ignored. Especially when it comes to torture.
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AP / Bob Child
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By Chris Hedges — The proposed health reform plans rattling around Congress all ensure that the profits for corporations will increase and the misery for ordinary Americans will be compounded.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — If governments had not acted aggressively, the economic situation would have become a cataclysm. But because the cataclysm was avoided, this is an invisible achievement.
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Peter Richardson’s fascinating new book explores the short, unruly life of Ramparts Magazine and its extraordinary effect on American politics and media.
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By Eugene Robinson — Here’s the least surprising news of the week: Americans are souring on the Democratic Party. The wonder is that it’s taken so long for public opinion to curdle.
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Kremlin / Presidential Press and Information Office
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According to a report in Miller-McCune, scientists have determined that muscles make men irritable and politically aggressive. That makes Vladimir Putin’s pecs troublesome, say the researchers: “If governmental decision-makers are like other humans, then their musculature may be playing a role, unconnected from rational evaluation, in their decisions to go to war.”
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AP / Jae C. Hong
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By William Pfaff — The president is simply too decent to get the job done. His advisers never learn from their mistakes and the American public is intolerant and hasn’t a clue as to what really is going on in the world.
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Facebook / Boycott Whole Foods
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Turns out comparing unions to herpes and raving against health care reform in The Wall Street Journal isn’t great for business, at least when your business sells granola to progressives, hippies and other Truthdig readers. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s efforts have earned him a boycott. Guess we’ll just have to get our gluten-free almond cookies elsewhere.
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White House / Pete Souza
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Press secretary Robert Gibbs called the media’s determination that the president had abandoned the public option “one of the more curious things I’ve ever seen in my life.” Is this a case of spin or spine? Read Gibbs’ entertaining back-and-forth with reporters (full text after the jump) and come to your own conclusion.
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By Marie Cocco — Red-faced people are now hurling the same falsehoods at the nonexistent Obama plan that they hurled at Clinton’s plan—and Harry Truman’s national health insurance proposal, and Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare.
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By Eugene Robinson — It’s true that politics is the art of the possible, but it’s also true that great leaders expand the scope of possibility.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By T.L. Caswell — Obama, under political pressure, has softened his call for that element of health care reform, and a Congress awash in industry money is likely to be all too happy to bid it adieu.
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USMC / Cpl. Kristofer Atkinson
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By Patrick Cockburn — Don’t let the bombings fool you: The American military withdrawal stabilizes Iraq to a degree never admitted by protagonists of the original invasion.
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By Joshua Holland, AlterNet —
Forget the fearmongering scare tactics of the right, here’s how your life will actually be better.
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White House / Pete Souza
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The president and his lieutenants are on a whistle-stop tour of disappointment. It started Saturday, when Obama called the public insurance option “just one sliver of” health care reform, “whether we have it or we don’t have it. ... ” You don’t have to be clairvoyant to see the cave coming.
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By William Pfaff — Little mainstream comment seems to have appeared on the latest revelations of incompetence and sadistic fantasy that have been published this week about the ways in which the American nation lost its honor and international reputation because of the Bush administration’s infatuation with torture.
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By Joe Conason — The ugly fact is that every year we fail to reform the existing system, that failure condemns tens of thousands of people to die—either because they have no insurance or because their insurance companies deny coverage or benefits when they become ill.
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U.S. Navy / MC1 Nicholas Lingo
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DynCorp International got caught charging the government $50 million over contract for providing living facilities in Kuwait. The company’s CEO told a congressional commission, “If we’re not competitive [in costs], it’s possible for the government to replace us.” But the opposite seems to be true when it comes to contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, where fraud, waste and abuse have been all too common for years.
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tvguide.com
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By Amy Goodman — The 50 people a day who die from inadequate health care might be tempted to call on Jack Bauer—or the grandfather of the man who plays him.
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