Tag: obama

  Call for Elections to be Halted, Government Seized Publication Demands "Interim Military Dictatorship" for America, says Scaife publication By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor (UNEDITED TEXT BELOW) Newsmax...

Times Square Bomb - a possible set-up to attack Pakistan?

The President's Cancer Panel on Thursday reported that "the true burden of environmentally induced cancers has been grossly underestimated" and strongly urged action to reduce people's widespread exposure to carcinogens. The panel advised President Obama "to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our nation's productivity, and devastate American lives."

Update: AP:  Arizona's new immigration law is unconstitutional   Civil liberties fight looms on Arizona's new look-like-an-immigrant law on Fourth Amendment and 14th Amendment grounds, as the...

Believe everyone is with Paul Krugman on this one, except for the GOP leadership. Don’t Cry for Wall Street By PAUL KRUGMAN On Thursday, President Obama went...

Update: For more information, see White House blog knocking down Wall Street Talking Points and Norm Scheiber's  Head Lock: The inside story of how Goldman and...

FEW AMERICANS ARE AWARE THAT FOX NEWS IS DIRECTLY TIED TO LIKUD EXTREMISTS IN ISRAEL ISRAEL'S PROPAGANDA MACHINE, WAGING WAR AGAINST ISRAELI'S "ALLIES" By Gordon Duff...

The original Tea Party, remember, wasn't directed just against the British redcoats. Colonial patriots also took aim at the East India Company. That was the joint-stock enterprise originally chartered by the first Queen Elizabeth. Over the years, the government granted them special rights and privileges, which the owners turned into a monopoly over trade, including tea.

The Pentagon has increased its use of the military's most elite special operations teams in Afghanistan, more than doubling the number of the highly trained teams assigned to hunt down Taliban leaders, according to senior officials.

HALF OF WASHINGTON IS WALKING AROUND FREE, POCKETS FULL OF MONEY BECAUSE OF "SECRECY" IT ISN'T JUST OLLIE NORTH, NOT BY A LONG SHOT By Gordon...

Normally, if two countries with powerful nuclear arsenals were openly musing about attacking a third country over mere suspicions that it might want to join the nuclear club, we’d tend to sympathize with the non-nuclear underdog as the victim of bullying and possible aggression.

KARZAI'S ATTEMPTS TO PLAY US, INDIA, PAKISTAN AND RUSSIA AGAINST EACH OTHER A CHILDISH ATTEMPT AT REVIVAL OF "COLD WAR THINKING" By Gordon Duff STAFF...

DIALOG IN A MADHOUSE, MOB RULE IN THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor Editors note:  Rumors are still flying about the "Obamacare"...

A PROGRAM FOR REASSESSING AND MOVING FORWARD By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor This week an expose' in Newsweek showed us that our new Afghan police...

THE MOST EPIC PIECE OF LEGISLATION IN OUR LIFETIME...IT'S ALL ABOUT FREEDOM ABSOLUTELY NO LOSS OF BENEFITS TO ANY RETIREE OR VETERAN AND LOW COST...

THE "SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP" IS DEAD LEARN SOME OF THE "WHY" BEING KEPT FROM YOU By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State...

While the Cheneys, father and daughter, continue to hammer away at the accusation that the Obama administration has a "mindset" problem because it (sometimes) chooses to deal with terrorists through the criminal justice system, another bullet-hole has been leveled at their argument by, of all nations, Germany. This isn't France that chose to try terrorist suspects in a civilian criminal court. This is big bad Germany. And these were not just any terrorists. The judge in the case declared,

Where do you start? John McCain is facing a challenge in Arizona. He is going to drag out his military record and his experience as a personal recommendation. Few Americans really know that McCain is a mental case with a "war record" he has had to have "classified" to keep himself out of prison.

This summary briefing comes to us through the courtesy of Just Foreign Policy. Summary: U.S./Top News 1) Japan's Social Democratic Party, a junior partner in the ...

Juan Cole at Informed Comment offers some excellent advice for climate scientists under attack from corrupt corporate and media sources. Al Gore writes that ignoring climate change won't make it go away nor will continuing to dump 90 million tons of pollutants into the atmosphere daily at the New York Times. A 110-year-old Chicago woman reflects on Jim Crow and the civil rights movemnt in the Chicago Sun Times. Those stories and more in today's picks.

When Al Franken ran for the Senate, people questioned his credentials, but good grief, people, comedy is hard work compared to harrumphing. It takes brains and elegance and courage to make people laugh. A comedian who joins the Senate has taken a step down on the social scale and everybody knows it.

That's what has led to the current disaffection by both liberals and conservatives toward government. The American people can sense their rights slipping away, but they have yet to come to terms with what is actually going on. They have yet to realize that congressional gridlock is a convenient way of denying them their rights. They have also yet to recognize that the majority in the senate is allowing the minority to abuse of the filibuster procedure because both parties are in collusion. The Republican filibuster provides cover for the Democratic majority for failing to enact, or greatly watering down, legislation being demanded by the people, but neither party wants to enact.

The people of Gaza have suffered enormously since the blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt following Hamas's coup, and particularly following Operation Cast Lead.... The unabated suffering of Gazan civilians highlights the urgency of reaching a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we ask you to press for immediate relief for the citizens of Gaza as an urgent component of your broader Middle East peace efforts.... Despite ad hoc easing of the blockade, there has been no significant improvement in the quantity and scope of goods allowed into Gaza.... The crisis has devastated livelihoods, entrenched a poverty rate of over 70%, increased dependence on erratic international aid, allowed the deterioration of public infrastructure, and led to the marked decline of the accessibility of essential services.

It’s becoming apparent to the foreign policy wonks in the Obama administration that the goose in Afghanistan is cooked. Now it’s only a matter of talking themselves into sticking a fork in it. The “great dilemma of this war,” as the New York Times calls it, is “whether to reconcile with the men who sheltered Osama bin Laden and who still have close ties to al-Qaeda.” That option is considered to be “rife with political risk at home” which means the neocons and their pals in the right-wing hate chorus will flay Obama alive if he takes it.

Are airlines becoming the shopping malls of our skies? Jim Hightower wants to know. Veterans will not be surprised to learn that 8 people died for a scrap of real estate "of no strategic value," many of us have seen that in the past. On the lighter side, more great editorial cartoons from McClatchy in today's picks.

While U.S. officials prefer to focus on low-level fighters while hoping that an additional 30,000 troops can pummel the Taliban into a weaker negotiating position, President Karzai's government has stressed the need to reach out to the Islamist movement's leadership, the Washington Post reports. "It's questionable why the United States just wants to reintegrate the low level of the Taliban and not the leadership," said Karzai's policy chief. "That's something they are concerned about, but from the Afghan side, we are trying to include everyone in negotiations." In public statements, the Taliban has predicated any negotiation on the departure of foreign troops.

Would President Obama speak at a prayer breakfast organized by the KKK? Would Jim Wallis and other "progressive" Christians attend? Then what will they be doing on Thursday Feb 3 at the National Prayer Breakfast founded and sponsored by the notorious gay-bashing "The Family" fringe far right group? (I ask this as a practicing progressive Christian and repentant former religious right leader).

Deficit hysteria has reached new levels, yet where is the attention to an out of control defense budget that is now the largest since World War II? While the Obama Admistration's three-year freeze on discretionary spending is a bad idea, it's made even worse because unprecedented Pentagon spending is exempted from it.

Yes Magazine's Brooke Jarvis brings tells an entertaining and timely story of Murray Hill Inc, the first corporation to run for political office; proving, I suppose, that some Corps retain a sense of the absurd. Haiti's thoroughly inept government is taking increasing fire from her beleaguered citizens and Jim Hightower is back firing away at Corporate personhood in today's picks.

The Obama administration’s pact to use seven Colombian military bases accelerates “a dangerous trend in U.S. hemispheric policy,” an article in The Nation magazine warns. Although much of Latin America is in the vanguard of the “anti-corporate and anti-militarist global democracy movement,” Grandin writes, the Obama administration is “disappointing potential regional allies by continuing to promote a volatile mix of militarism and free-trade orthodoxy in a corridor running from Mexico to Colombia.” Grandin’s article in The Nation’s February 8th issue is titled, “Muscling Latin America.”

So it was, undoubtedly, with New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, who accompanied Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as he stumbled through a challenge-filled, error-prone two-day trip to Pakistan. Gates must have felt a little like a punching bag by the time he boarded his plane for home having, as Juan Cole pointed out, managed to signal “that the U.S. is now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated… and that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had admitted it. In baseball terms, Gates struck out.”

TIME WE TOOK STOCK IN WHAT IS REAL AND ISN'T TIME TO GET MAD AT THE RIGHT PEOPLE By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor I belong to...

Sherwood Ross writes about Howard Zinn's view of the "war on terror," Joan Walsh is pleased to see Obama come off the ropes and step into the center of the ring, bin Laden claims that the US did in JD Salinger?, Texas' Jim Hightower says Hang Tax 'em High and Global warming truths in today's picks.

As you know, President Obama delivering his second State of the Union address on Wednesday, January 27 , 2010. With the vast majority of Americans (the electorate) not having a loved one in the military thus not committed to the wars, it was no surprise that Obama's message focused on domestic priorities, and he only reiterated and defended his policy decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan, including the most recent surge of 30,000 troops in November, 2009.

USA’s new “Turn”…!!!  By Sajid Ansari for VT  After lots of drum-beating of “war-on-terror” and Al-Qaida, for 9 years, which is nowadays under heavy criticism, at...

National progressive leaders gathered outside the White House last Wednesday, on the one year anniversary of Obama’s inauguration, with the message of Losing Hope...

American academics are expressing disappointment in President Obama’s performance and believe he is headed toward a “mediocre” presidency. That’s the term liberal historian Howard Zinn of Boston University uses in an article that solicited many viewpoints in the February 1st issue of The Nation magazine.

The SCOTUS pulled off a bloodless coup yesterday and declared its intention to hand America to the plutocrats; the New York Times takes issue as does most of the press. Obama declares that he welcomes a fight with the banksters. Aid is arriving in Haiti but not yet being delivered effectively. More...

Among today's picks, Reining in the Gods of the Fed, Did Obama Win the Iraq War?, Taxing Wall Street Down to Size, The crime of not "Looking Backward," Tomgram: William Astore, Going Rogue in Combat Boots, Alaska Sen. Murkowski's attempt to curb EPA draws criticism, George Will Displays Core GOP Value: Cheap, Disposable Labor # In eastern Afghan province, preview of upcoming surge strategy

America elected Barak Obama for one reason only. We had spent years with a government found to have become utterly corrupt, a pack of criminal gangsters no better than Pinochet in Chile or Pol Pot in Cambodia. We were going to go in, put Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Rice, Ashcroft, Gonzales along with 2 dozen top military leaders and more senior members of Congress in prison. When we were done, we would go thru the oil companies, banks, defense giants, insurance companies and more, doing the same. We hoped that when we were finally done, whoever was left would know that they were part of a government by and for the people, not employees of a criminal conpiracy.

By Sherwood Ross As President Obama steps up the war that is inflaming ever wider sectors of the Middle East, USA continues its rapid slide...

Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice makes offers a comparison between GW Bush Constitutional Trampler and Barack Obama Constitutional Lawyer in which Obama doesn't fare well. The similarities in their approach/contempt for the law are compelling.