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By David Halberstam
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By Eugene Robinson — The nut jobs and carpetbaggers are outnumbered by confused and concerned Americans who seem genuinely convinced they’re not being told the whole truth about health care reform.
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The Nobel Prize-winning economist writes that “around a million more Americans are working now than would have been employed without that [stimulus] plan. ... ” He also argues that “it’s possible to be dissatisfied, even angry, about the way the financial bailouts have worked while acknowledging that without these bailouts things would have been much worse.”
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By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet —
How the health care industry, the GOP and one media mogul made common cause with the anti-government fringe.
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AP / Markus Schreiber
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By Scott Ritter — Now that the remains of Navy Lt. Cmdr. Scott Speicher have been recovered from Iraq, Sen. Pat Roberts and other politicians will have to stop shamelessly exploiting his disappearance to sell their war agenda. Update from the author
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U.S. Army Signal Corps
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Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame writes that “official secrecy and deceptions about our nuclear weapons posture and policies and their possible consequences have threatened the survival of the human species.”
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By Ruth Marcus — Does President Obama care about passing health care reform that truly gets costs under control and getting the nation’s fiscal house in order or does he care more about getting re-elected?
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Screenshot of "Telescreens" from the film "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
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With millions of cameras watching its citizens’ every move, Britain is already one of the world’s leading surveillance states. Now the government wants to go even further, putting cameras in 20,000 private homes “to make sure children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals,” reports the Telegraph. Update
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By Amy Goodman — Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, ousted in the middle of the night just over a month ago, enjoys global support for his return, with the exception of the Obama White House.
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By William Pfaff — The more wars you undertake abroad, the more places you intervene and the more bases you build around the world, the less secure you are.
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Flickr / kevindooley
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After losing about $7 billion this fiscal year, the U.S. Postal Service may shut down as many as 700 local post offices. The postmaster general has also asked Congress to approve cutting deliveries to five days a week.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Things are looking up for the Republicans, relatively speaking. There’s just one problem: The country still doesn’t like them.
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Was Socrates an atheist, a guru to a strange sect and an elitist corrupting the youth of a democratic Athens defeated in the Peloponnesian War, as his accusers successfully charged? A new book by Robin Waterfield seeks to dispel the myths about “Why Socrates Died.”
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U.S. Navy
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By Col. Timothy R. Reese —
As the old saying goes, “guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose.
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By Marie Cocco — Medicare is where political posturing runs headlong into historical truth: It is, along with Social Security, the most successful government program that the United States has ever created.
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gpoaccess.gov
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House Democrats have caved to the rebellious Blue Dogs and agreed to make the health care reform bill friendlier to business at the expense of the poor. Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Lynn Woolsey wasn’t happy: “They can’t possibly be taking us seriously if they’re going to bring this forward.” Above, top dog Mike Ross.
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Flickr / jonrawlinson
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By David Sirota — The wealthiest 1 percent’s share of America’s total income is the highest it’s been since 1929, their tax rates are the lowest they’ve faced in two decades and they’ve bought unprecedented protection for themselves on the most pressing issues.
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By William Pfaff — For all America’s trouble, Iraq has turned out to be a sectarian, authoritarian ally of Iran with no interest in working with the U.S. The “new Vietnam” of Afghanistan, meanwhile, is turning out to be worse than Vietnam.
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DoD / Cherie A. Thurlby
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By Joe Conason — Fiscal conservative is one of those terms used by politicians of all sorts to describe themselves, without any real justification. That phrase is often used to mislead the public about the priorities and policies favored by those who claim to embody budgetary prudence.
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By Scott Thill, AlterNet —
Tens of thousands of parents are refusing to accept the medical research that shows little correlation between vaccines and autism and are taking on the medical establishment.
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By Ruth Marcus — If you’re interested in how to get health care costs under control, the case of the F-22 offers an instructive example.
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By William Pfaff — There is new evidence that the Obama government is serious about halting Israel’s colonization of the Palestinian territories—and about imposing, rather than merely inviting, a two-state Middle East solution.
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Flickr / Kiwi Flickr
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Soon California can stop being the butt of jokes—although seriously, Alabama, let’s not point fingers. Party elders in Sacramento have reached an agreement that should balance the budget with $15.5 billion in cuts that will hurt students, the poor, children and the elderly. Republicans, who make up only about a third of the state Legislature, managed to thwart any new taxes.
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By Sean Penn, Ross Mirkarimi and Reese Erlich —
In reality, the U.S. has very little ability to impact what has become a massive, spontaneous movement for change in Iran. And it shouldn’t.
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U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Andrew Smith
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By Chris Hedges — Al-Qaida could not care less what we do in Afghanistan. We are fighting with the wrong tools. We are fighting the wrong people. We are on the wrong side of history. And we will be defeated in Afghanistan as we will be in Iraq.
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Flickr / Haldini
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By David Sirota — The planet’s already on the brink of resource exhaustion and climate catastrophe, and China is 17 times more populous than America was during our industrial era. If we just sit back and celebrate “miracles,” then there’s not going to be much of a world left.
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By Amy Goodman — Wendell Potter is the health insurance industry’s worst nightmare. He’s a whistle-blower. Potter, the former chief spokesperson for insurance giant CIGNA, recently testified before Congress, “I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick—all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.”
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Flickr / SmackNHawaii
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Billionaire T. Boone Pickens has dropped his plan to build a huge wind farm in Texas, citing financing problems and challenges posed by the economic recession. The collapse of the project adds weight to the notion that we won’t have practical alternative energy generation until the governments of the world, and the populations they represent, make lasting commitments of money and attention.
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By Marie Cocco — There’s a lot of argument in Washington about the economy, but if anyone’s looking for some clear voices, there are 650,000 of them just waiting to be heard. That is roughly the number of long-term unemployed who will begin losing their jobless benefits in September.
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By Joe Conason — Al Franken left showbiz to prove himself a serious policy wonk as well as a devoted family man; Sarah Palin transformed herself and her family into a reality television show. Their long, odd trips reflect the journeys of their respective parties.
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By Amy Goodman — Nonviolent activists and Muslims are held in draconian conditions, while the man charged with killing Dr. George Tiller trumpets from jail the extreme anti-abortion movement’s campaign of intimidation, vandalism, arson and murder.
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The progressive Democrats in Congress have had just about enough of all this bipartisanship, especially if it means scrapping a public health care plan. Rahm Emanuel recanted his hint of compromise to a room full of hopping-mad House liberals Tuesday night. Earlier, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made it clear that losing a public option was a deal-breaker for 10 to 15 Senate Democrats.
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AP photo / Hadi Mizban
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By Scott Ritter — It is wishful thinking to believe that the Iraqi military will be able to hold the ruins of Iraqi society together without major U.S. intervention. The United States has assumed the role of Saddam’s Special Republican Guard, waiting to be called in to crush any sign of rebellion or insurrection. It’s a lose-lose situation with only one way out.
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Flickr / Paul Keleher
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President Obama and most Democrats see a government-run health plan that competes with private insurers as vital to real health care reform, but a veto- and filibuster-proof majority just ain’t what it used to be. In the face of a massive lobbying effort, the White House has indicated a willingness to shelve the public option.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — As the president and centrist Democrats in Congress haggle over the deficit, they could usefully recall that the party’s inability to deliver on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign pledges, particularly on health care, led to a stunning defeat two years later.
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Portrait by Auguste Millière
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By Scott Tucker — “That filthy little atheist,” as Thomas Paine was called by Theodore Roosevelt, has few monuments dedicated to his memory. Building a bronze and marble monument to Paine will never revive the republic, but his words still carry an electric current of freedom. His intellectual and political energy is always available for rediscovery.
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AP photo / Louis Lanzano
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By Robert Scheer — Bernard Madoff should be exhibit A in why the dark world of totally unregulated private money managers and hedge funds should be opened to the light of systematic government supervision. Instead, he is being treated as an aberrant menace.
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By William Pfaff — Now that American troops are withdrawing from the cities of Iraq, the calculation must begin as to whether the loss of some half-million to million lives and the ruin of the infrastructure and social structure of Baghdad and much of the rest of the Iraqi nation have served some good purpose.
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By Marie Cocco — As the media trumpets sound for the pullback of American troops from urban areas in Iraq, the essential lesson of our involvement must be recalled: Nothing about our entanglement in Iraq has ever been as it seemed.
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AP photo / Khampha Bouaphanh
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By Andrew Becker and Hugo Cabrera, CIR —
While the nation’s understaffed immigration courts strain under a backlog that has grown to more than 200,000 cases, thousands of new border agents have been hired and the number of government attorneys who argue for deportation has increased by 35 percent, pushing more cases onto an already overburdened system.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The president has shied away from handing Congress his own plans on “stone tablets,” but if he doesn’t intervene in the health care debate, and soon, lawmakers are going to send him an unworkable monstrosity of a bill.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Joe Conason — Democrats who are talking down Obama’s health care initiative tend to have something in common—their abject dependence on campaign contributions from the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations fighting against real reform.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The United States Supreme Court claims to be above politics, and it sometimes even achieves that aspiration.
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Collage from Fox and James Montgomery Flagg
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Health care reform is shaping up as astronomically expensive, but that’s only if private insurers and Big Pharma get their way, writes Clinton-era Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Without competition from the government—a public option—the health care industry will continue to gouge and Americans will still be in the weeds, a trillion dollars poorer.
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AP photo / Brennan Linsley, pool
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By Robert Scheer — The Bush-Obama strategy of throwing trillions at the banks to solve the mortgage crisis is a huge bust. The financial moguls, while tickled pink to have $1.25 trillion in toxic assets covered by the feds, along with hundreds of billions in direct handouts, are not using that money to turn around the free fall in housing foreclosures.
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By Amy Goodman — Tools of mass communication that were once the province of governments and corporations now fit in your pocket. As these technologies have developed, so too has the ability to monitor, filter, censor and block them.
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By William Pfaff — The truly significant result of the suppressed Iranian revolt is that the most important Islamist radical movement in the contemporary world has demonstrated that it has become a brutally repressive dictatorship whose leaders rig elections and beat down clear popular demands.
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The president opened his Tuesday press conference by saying, “The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings, and imprisonments of the last few days. I strongly condemn these unjust actions… .”
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Flickr / @@:@@
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Iran’s Guardian Council has found “no major fraud or breach in the election” and will not annul the vote, a spokesman announced Tuesday. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, meanwhile, jumped into the fray, calling on the Iranian government to “respect fundamental civil and political rights.”
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AP photo / STR
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By Robert Fisk — You don’t overthrow Islamic revolutions with car headlights. And definitely not with candles. Peaceful protest might have served Gandhi well, but the supreme leader’s Iran is not going to worry about a few thousand demonstrators on the streets, even if they do cry “Allahu Akbar” from their rooftops every night.
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AP photo / Ali Zare
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By Chris Hedges — Iranians do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and representative government. We gave to the Iranian people the corrupt regime of the shah and his savage secret police and the primitive clerics that rose out of the swamp of the dictator’s Iran.
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