Keeping Them Honest by Paul Krugman 'I appreciate your efforts, and look forward to working with you so that the Congress can complete health care reform by October.' So declared President Obama in a letter this week to Senators Max Baucus and Edward Kennedy. The big health care push is officially on.
The Grim Picture of Obama's Middle East by Noam Chomsky A CNN headline, reporting Obama's plans for his June 4 Cairo address, reads 'Obama looks to reach the soul of the Muslim world.' Perhaps that captures his intent, but more significant is the content hidden in the rhetorical stance, or more accurately, omitted.
World Environment Day Calls for End to CO2 Addiction by Gyles Beckford * U.N. urges action on CO2 emissions * Environment Day events staged around the world * Dispute over CO2 targetsWELLINGTON - The United Nations urged the world on Thursday to kick the habit of producing carbon dioxide, saying everyone must act to fight climate change.
See no evil: Mainstream U.S. media are fully complicit in the conspiracy by Robert C. Koehler The heavily armed, trained killer was 'under stress' when he raped, then murdered a 14-year-old girl and tried to burn her body, after having murdered her parents and 7-year-old sister.'He's my Steve. You can't stop loving someone.'Here are the two poles of our existence, the human condition stretched between them, as taut as it can go, perhaps. How do we embrace a crime such as this -- we, as Americans, who underwrote it? We want to push the accused into the deepest corner of our forgetting, but we can't quite do so.
Obama's Cairo Speech Is Nice, But Misses The Point by Allison Kilkenny President Obama's speech in Cairo focused on the themes of brotherhood and bridging the divide between the west and Muslim world. Obama explained away the agony of the occupied by essentially arguing that all individuals resisting or angered by American occupation are radical Muslims, who think the west is modern and scary. So while it's nice that we finally have a president that can pronounce 'As-Salamu `Alaykum,' and understands Middle Eastern history, Obama misses the point in the very same way the Bush administration kept missing the point for eight years.
Nick Turse, A Silent (and Violent) Epidemic by Tom Engelhardt — from TomDispatchIn a recent interview about our economic meltdown moment, economist James Galbraith spoke of widespread fraud in the financial system, pointing out that, in response to the Savings and Loan scandals of the 1980s, 'there were 1,000 felony convictions for S&L insiders and about 700 or so went to jail. This is a bigger crisis, so you could easily be talking about a larger number of convictions.'
Judge Declines to Show Up for His Own Impeachment by David Swanson A judge gropes and harasses his female employees, lies about it to investigators, is tried and convicted, and is on his way to prison. The U.S. House of Representatives springs into action, activating something none of us even knew existed during the entire eight-year hell of Cheney-Bush: the House Judiciary Committee Task Force on Judicial Impeachment. And what did Judge Groper do on Wednesday? He chose not to show up, as requested by Congress, for his own impeachment hearing.
Ex-SEC chief reincarnated as Goldman Sachs policy adviser by Matt Taibbi 'Arthur Levitt Jr., the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, will advise the Goldman Sachs Group on public policy issues, the firm announced Tuesday.' -- The New York TimesWell, here's something amazing. It's like protocapitalist buddhism: the endless life-cycle continues. Clinton's SEC chairman, the man who powdered his nose and fondled himself for years and years while companies like Goldman Sachs bilked America with one 'Bullshit.com' IPO after another, is now going to work for... wait for it... Goldman, Sachs. Nothing like years of hideously ineffectual non-enforcement to attract those lucrative Wall Street job offers!
Playing Chicken with North Korea by Eric Margolis Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who seems the primary voice in US foreign policy these days, just warned the US will not allow North Korea to become a nuclear power.North Korea's efforts to develop nuclear capabilities threatens the entire globe, Washington insists, even though it has some 10,000 nuclear warheads deployed at home and abroad, 28,500 troops permanently based in South Korea, and large contingents in Japan, Okinawa and Guam.
A Day in the Life by William Rivers Pitt 'What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.'-- Kerry ThornleyThe Obama administration opened the White House doors to NBC correspondent Brian Williams and a large herd of television cameras last week, the fruits of which became a two-day television special titled 'Inside the Obama White House,' which NBC aired Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
Good Times by Brian Morton I can't help but smile.Sure, we're nowhere out of the weeds yet. Jobs are still hemorrhaging, gas prices have started sliding upward for the summer, North Korea is lighting matches next to their underground atomic bonfire project, the jury's still out on all the bailout money we've thrown at Wall Street, and the automakers and the entire state of California look like they're next at the payout window. But still, there remain things to laugh about.
What's Wrong With Sotomayor Being Racist? by David Michael Green When I hear big old fat white male bloviators like Newt Gingrich or Rush Limbaugh calling Sonia Sotomayor 'racist', just one thought comes to mind: Why are these regressives endorsing her to be the next associate justice of the Supreme Court?I mean, since when did racism become a problem in their circles?
Just who is really destroying America? by Doug Thompson Didn't take long for Rush Limbaugh to offer his own, twisted, fantasy-driven view of President Barack Obama's speech to the Muslim world.The mouth that roared immediately claimed Obama is trying to destroy America by reaching out to Muslims. Limbaugh told his brain-dead followers that if al Qaeda wants to destroy America it had better hurry before Obama beats them to it.
