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Monday, January 23, 2012 - 12:01
The Iraq war may be over, at least for US troops, but the cover-up of the atrocities committed there by American forces goes on, even in retrospectives about the war. A prime example is reporting on the destroyed city of Fallujah, where some of the heaviest fighting of the war...
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Saturday, January 21, 2012 - 16:14
On my Yahoo home page today, there was a picture of the globe, and an instant poll asking me to check one of two choices: Yes or No, Do you believe global warming is a real threat?
I don’t usually waste my time on these things, but there was that tantalizing link to “See...
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Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - 15:52
I wouldn’t want to be Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, the 28-year-old former US Marine just recently sentenced to death by a court in Iran after being convicted of being an American spy.
Hekmati, who was born in Arizona to Iranian exile parents, and who grew up in Michigan, is being...
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Saturday, January 7, 2012 - 11:26
The tragic slaying of troubled eighth-grader Jaime Gonzalez in Brownsville, Texas by trigger-happy local police illustrates the sad an dangerous state we have arrived at as we turn our local police forces into SWAT team soldiers up-armed with assault rifles, black facemasks and stun grenades....
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Thursday, January 5, 2012 - 10:55
According to news reports, 15-year-old eighth-grader Jaime Gonzalez, who was shot and killed yesterday by police in his middle school in Brownsville, TX, was hit at least...
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Friday, December 30, 2011 - 07:44
The officer rested his arm holding the stock of the assault rifle on the top of a log pile, and aimed directly between the target’s eyes. She was looking directly at him, unblinking, from 30 feet away, and exhibited no fear. “I hate doing this,” he muttered, before finally pulling...
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Tuesday, December 27, 2011 - 08:13
It’s fascinating to watch the long knives coming out for Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul, now that according to some mainstream polls he has become the front-running candidate in the Jan. 3 GOP caucus race in Iowa, and perhaps also in the first primary campaign in New Hampshire....
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Monday, December 19, 2011 - 19:09
Yesterday, I hitch-hiked to the gym.
If I tell that to any of my friends, they look at me like I’m crazy.
Yet if I had said the same thing 40 years ago, it would have been like saying, “I just drove over to the store” or “I just had lunch.” No one would have...
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Wednesday, December 14, 2011 - 18:51
Even as President Obama and War Secretary Leon Panetta announce the supposed “end” of the Iraq War, a US “covert war” against Iran, as the National Journal put it in a December 4 article...
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Saturday, December 10, 2011 - 17:14
The mood was both celebratory and angry among a 1000-plus overflow audience packed into the balcony space of the Constitution Center in Philadelphia on the evening of Dec. 9.
The crowd of supporters of Philadelphia journalist and black political activist Mumia Abu-Jamal...
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Wednesday, December 7, 2011 - 13:51
Almost 30 years to the day of the fateful shooting incident that led to his incarderation, the decision has finally been announced: There will be no execution of African-American journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who in 1982 was convicted and sentenced to death in a highly-controversial...
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Wednesday, December 7, 2011 - 11:02
Wanted: Sculptor who works in bronze to construct life-sized group of statues of President Barack Obama, House Speaker John Boehner, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, all to be mounted at the high...
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Sunday, December 4, 2011 - 20:39
Word that the Los Angeles Police, who sent in 1200 officers in riot gear to violently rout a few hundred Occupy Movement demonstrators from their LA encampment last week, had earlier sent 12 undercover young officers into the peaceful occupation camp to spy on the activists should...
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Friday, December 2, 2011 - 17:02
The US Congress is such a craven bunch that you really have to turn to Olde English to aptly describe them.
Consider that on Thursday, by a vote of 93-7, the Senate approved a National Defense Authorization Bill that effectively defines the US “homeland” as a war zone, and...
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Monday, November 21, 2011 - 16:05
The growing number of video clips and photos showing police in Darth Vader-like riot gear assaulting peaceful demonstrators with everything from tear gas and mace to truncheons, point-blank shots with beanbags and rubber bullets, and of course the ubiquitous fist and club, have...
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Friday, November 18, 2011 - 15:40
With Congress no longer performing its sworn role of defending the US Constitution, the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee and the Partnership for Civil Justice today filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) asking the Department of Justice, the...
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Thursday, November 17, 2011 - 13:56
New York -- The scripted excuses provided by mayors around the country to justify their police-state tactics in rousting peaceful occupation movement activists from their park-based demonstrations now stand exposed as utter nonsense, and, given their uncanny similarity in...
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Thursday, November 17, 2011 - 13:56
Fighting for Our Lives:
10 Big Lies About Social Security and Medicare, and the Coming Battle to Save Both Programs and Build a New Progressive Movement
A book proposal by Dave Lindorff
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Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - 18:27
The ugly hand of the federal government is becoming increasingly suspected behind what appears to be a nationwide attempt to repress and evict the Occupation Movement.
Across the country in recent days, ultimatums have been issues to groups occupying Portland, OR, Chicago...
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Sunday, November 13, 2011 - 11:02
When it comes to mainstream press reports about a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, it’s time to check the bullshit detector.
...
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Friday, November 11, 2011 - 17:30
The real story of the Penn State child abuse scandal and coverup is not Joe Paterno or Penn State, or even the abuse of children, as vile as what happened to them is. What it’s about it the lack of basic freedom for workers in the United State of America to speak out.
On...
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Monday, November 7, 2011 - 07:56
What a devilishly sneaky guy that Jose Danial Ortega Saavedra is!
Why this president of Nicaragua, and former leader of the Sandinista rebels in their successful 1979 overthrow of U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, in order to win re-election this fall, as he...
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Friday, November 4, 2011 - 11:09
Once again we got a cheery report from most of the media about employers hiring, albeit “not enough,” and about the jobless rate falling, albeit “it’s still too high.”
The proximate cause of this latest round of propaganda from the corporate media is the latest monthly...
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Friday, October 28, 2011 - 23:13
Shanghai -- I was talking yesterday with the chief financial officer of a US-based drug firm that operates here in China, producing for the Chinese market, and got an up-close look at how bad things are for what used to be called the Almighty Dollar.
The company...
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Sunday, October 23, 2011 - 15:54
With Mumia Abu-Jamal’s sentence of death now formally vacated, thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision last week not to consider an appeal by the Philadelphia District Attorney of a Third Circuit Court panel’s ruling that that sentence had been unconstitutional thanks to flawed...
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Sunday, October 16, 2011 - 14:23
Philadelphia -- Common Terry was in a buoyant mood as he marched along Market Street Saturday afternoon along with a couple hundred activists who, following a rally outside the Liberty Bell pavilion, headed over to Philadelphia’s ornate City Hall to join the thousand or...
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Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - 18:54
Here’s a prediction: Seth Williams, the district attorney of Philadelphia, will decide not to seek to reimpose the death penalty on Mumia Abu-Jamal, the world-famous journalist, former Black Panther and condemned prisoner who has spent the last almost 30 years of his life on...
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Friday, October 7, 2011 - 12:51
As I headed out in my ’94 Volvo to drive from Philadelphia to Washington for the first day of October2011.org, the occupation of Washington, I spotted some trouble: the ABS warning light on my dashboard panel was lit. Stopping at my...
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Wednesday, October 5, 2011 - 07:40
This statement was released after a unanimous vote of Occupy Wall Street's general assembly:
As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel...
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Friday, September 30, 2011 - 13:26
It's no accident that the New York Police have been so assiduous in their protection of the big banking establishments that are housed on Wall Street and environs.
The banks don't like paying taxes, but they know how to buy the protection they need, as...
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Thursday, September 29, 2011 - 17:38
Probably the biggest accomplishment of the Occupy Wall Street movement to date has not been the light these courageous and indomitable young activists have shined on the gangsters of Wall Street, as important as that has been. Rather it has been how they have exposed the police of...
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Thursday, September 22, 2011 - 09:16
There is a whole rogues’ gallery of charlatans, cowards, racists and liars involved in the 22-year lynching of Troy Davis, the black man who whose life was summarily terminated by the state of Georgia and by the United States of America last night, but one of them, the horribly...
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Sunday, September 18, 2011 - 13:12
The first thing that needs to be said to the heartless boneheads who, at the last Republican presidential debate, cheered at the idea of letting a hypothetical 30-year-old cancer victim who hadn’t bought health insurance die, is that this is no mere hypothetical situation. The...
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Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - 18:17
Among the many shameful and cowardly things that President Barack Obama has and has not done, few can rival his complete unwillingness to express outrage at the Israeli military’s murder of a young American teen executed at close range during the Israeli Defense (sic) Force...
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Tuesday, September 6, 2011 - 06:58
When you are the New York Times, or in this case, one of the only real liberal columnists working for the Times anymore, there are apparently some things you just cannot mention.
How else to explain how a seemingly intelligent economist like Paul Krugman...
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Saturday, September 3, 2011 - 14:57
This faux "workers’ holiday" on Monday is not a day for celebrating for American workers.
The official unemployment rate, just released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed unemployment in July to be 9.1%, which is exactly the same as the rate was in June, and...
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Sunday, August 21, 2011 - 17:37
Some 35 years ago, when I was just an aspiring journalist settling into life In Los Angeles, a venerable alternative journal, the Free Press, died. This paper, which had chronicled the Beat Era, the Civil Rights Movement, and the rise of the '60s Counter Culture, much like...
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Thursday, August 18, 2011 - 09:47
There is a basic concept when it comes to justice that the punishment should fit the crime. It’s a concept that in Law-and-Order America has long vanished. Some states, like California, have done this with brutish “Three-Strikes-You’re-Out” policies that have ended up sentencing...
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Sunday, July 31, 2011 - 08:15
My wife Joyce and I were renting a car for the week this morning at a Hertz office just outside Philadelphia. There was a line of people either waiting to pick up a vehicle, or to return one.
The harried clerk behind the counter -- the only guy in the office -- was...
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Friday, July 29, 2011 - 15:38
The chief economist at ratings agency Moodys is warning that the U.S. could be headed for a renewed recession.
Calling the current situation “very perilous,” John Lonski adds that the politicians in Washington, where both parties are vying to present budgets featuring...
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Thursday, July 21, 2011 - 12:17
Glenn Greenwald has just written that President Obama, by playing a leading role in pushing for cuts in Social Security benefits as part of the whole kabuki-theater drama over the debt ceiling, and the alleged crisis of...
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Saturday, July 16, 2011 - 13:39
The smoking ruin that is the the Obama White House, and the rotting corpse that is the Democratic Party, have, incredibly, together been boxed into a corner by, of all things, the certifiably insane Republican Party.
This amazing situation has resulted not through any...
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Sunday, July 10, 2011 - 11:42
It is part of America’s state religion, the Free Market fundamentalist religion that is accepted as gospel by all leading politicians, by the “brain trust” that sets goverrnment economic policy, and by the supposedly hard-nosed analysts who convince American investors where to put...
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Thursday, July 7, 2011 - 11:50
In ways little and huge, it is clear that we live in a nation, a culture and a society that is terminally ill.
The latest outrage -- the execution of a Mexican convicted in Texas of the brutal slaying of a 16-year-old girl in blatant violation of a universally adopted...
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Monday, July 4, 2011 - 06:07
Today is the anniversary of the day that the nation’s founders, gathered in Philadelphia a few miles from my house (which as it happens had already been standing for about 28 years old at the time), at great personal risk, signed the Declaration of Independence, with its...
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Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - 18:30
The United States Military is spending $20.2 billion a year for air-conditioning the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Read that again please: $20.2 billion every year just to provide air-conditioning for our troops in these two desert countries.
...
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Wednesday, June 22, 2011 - 09:38
Let me state from the outset: I have no problem with soldiers who inflate or embellish their war stories, any more than I am bothered by anybody who likes to spice up the tale of a youthful exploit.
It’s different though, when exaggerations our outright fictions are...
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Thursday, June 9, 2011 - 20:43
Federal Judge Filipe Restrepo, a man with a solid history as a defender of civil liberties and civil rights, and a defense attorney by training and private practice experience, seems sadly to have gotten a bit thin-skinned and power-happy after donning the robes of a federal judge...
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Thursday, June 2, 2011 - 13:48
It was just as recently as a year ago that the authorities in politics, business and academe were stating boldly and confidently that the nation's economy was on the mend, and that there was no chance of a backslide into recession again.
Take Lakshman Achuthan and Anirvan...
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Sunday, May 29, 2011 - 12:45
Amid all the nonsense and gobbledegook that has been written about banking industry and about the economic slump during the last four years of the global financial crisis, New York Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson has stood out both for the clarity of her analysis, and...
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Saturday, May 28, 2011 - 07:08
In his latest speeches on the Middle East, President Obama, both at the State Department and at the G8 meeting in France, has pledged billions of dollars in economic aid to Middle Eastern countries, drawing a direct connection between the unrest and demonstrations that brought...
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Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - 15:15
Our cat died two days ago.
Soren, a little female, orange and white with a long tail and soft but fairly short fur, was a spirited, willful, and very intelligent creature. She could be incredibly affectionate and also could turn on you, scratching or biting when bothered...
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Thursday, May 12, 2011 - 22:44
A new Gallup Poll conducted for USA Today earlier this week reports that a majority of Americans (52%) say that they would prefer a...
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Wednesday, May 4, 2011 - 10:38
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Monday, May 2, 2011 - 08:53
According to the brief announcement made by President Barack Obama last night, the operation in Pakistan by US Navy SEAL special forces was a well-planned hit job.
“They took care to avoid civilian casualties,” the president said of the top-secret night-time raid by...
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Wednesday, April 27, 2011 - 12:37
Hello, everybody.
As many of you have been briefed, we provided additional information today about the authenticity of my Democratic Party registration, and my commitment to liberal values. Now, this issue has been going on for two, two and a half years now. I think it...
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Friday, April 22, 2011 - 14:26
I am 62 and have just reached the age where I could apply for Social Security retirement benefits. Of course, I’d be crazy to do that and collect some $700 a month for the rest of my life, when I could keep working and wait until I’m 70 and get $2000 a month.
But the point...
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Monday, April 18, 2011 - 17:04
Today’sbreathless anxiety-inducing headline was that Standard & Poors, the rating agency, has issued a “negative outlook” warning on US sovereign debt, claiming that the US, in comparison with other countries with a top AAA credit rating, has "very large budget deficits and...
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Saturday, April 16, 2011 - 11:30
America’s wars came home today in the mail, with a letter from the Selective Service. Enclosed was my son Jed’s draft card, just a week ahead of his 18th birthday.
The card, which unlike the ones in my day, comes in technicolor, arrived along with a glossy brochure...
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Tuesday, April 12, 2011 - 09:45
There was a truly bizarre and telling paragraph at the end of a Wall Street Journal news report today on Pakistan’s demand that the US bring home hundreds of CIA and...
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Sunday, April 3, 2011 - 16:02
Here's a new song I just wrote (to the old blues number, "Black Cat Bone""
To hear it, just go to my MySpace music site, and click the play button.''
If you want to sing...
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Friday, April 1, 2011 - 10:47
Back in the late 1980s, when I lived in a little town in rural Upstate New York called Spencer, I joined the local library board, eventually ending up through default becoming president of the board. We ran a dinky one-room library with a dedicated part-time librarian. The back of...
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Wednesday, March 23, 2011 - 10:14
President Obama’s criminal launch of an undeclared and Congressionally unauthorized war against Libya may be compounded by the crime of spreading toxic uranium oxide in populated areas of that country.
This is latest concern of groups like the...
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Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - 23:39
Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor indicted for the murder of two young Pakistani motorcyclists, whom he gunned down in the back in broad daylight through his car windshield in a busy section of Lahore, Pakistan, has been freed, after the payment of $2.34 million in “blood money,”...
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Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - 09:17
It seems rather silly now, doesn’t it, all the US concern about terrorism?
The nuclear crisis in Japan, which continues to worsen, threatens to become a total multiple meltdown, combined with the perhaps even more disastrous explosion and fire in one or several spent fuel...
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Monday, March 14, 2011 - 11:44
GE, the company that boasts that it “brings good things to life,” was the designer of the nuclear plants that are blowing up like hot popcorn kernels at the Fukushima Dai-ichi generating plant north of Tokyo that was hit by the double-whammy of a 9.0 earthquake and a huge tsunami...
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Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - 11:29
The people of Afghanistan know who was flying the two helicopter gunships that brutally hunted down and slaughtered, one by one, nine boys apparently as young as seven years old, as they gathered firewood on a hillside March 1. In angry demonstrations after the incident, they...
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Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - 14:13
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Thursday, March 3, 2011 - 14:02
The dramatic and inspiring occupation of the Wisconsin Statehouse in Madison by angry public workers and their supporters over the past few weeks is an exciting preview of what we can expect to see in the halls of Congress before long, as right-wing forces, funded by corporate...
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Tuesday, March 1, 2011 - 13:46
The ongoing case of Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor facing murder charges in Lahore for the execution-style slaying of two apparent agents of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, is apparently leading to a roll-back of America’s espionage and Special Operations...
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Friday, February 25, 2011 - 13:14
Check out Dave's interview on KPFA, San Francisco, by clicking Flashpoints on KPFA
The 12-minute interview starts at 18:54 minutes into the story, so you can just slide the button to the right.
To hear Dave interviewed on Canadian...
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Thursday, February 24, 2011 - 10:56
Pakistani and Indian newspapers are reporting that Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor in jail in Lahore facing murder charges for the execution-slayings of two young men believed to by Pakistani intelligence operatives, was actually involved in organizing terrorist activities in...
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Sunday, February 20, 2011 - 20:55
Talk about getting caught in a Big Lie.
So desperate has been the US effort to get the US government killer Raymond Davis sprung from police custody in Lahore, Pakistan following his execution-style slaughter of two Pakistani intelligence operatives in broad daylight in a...
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Wednesday, February 16, 2011 - 21:59
President Obama, before he was a President or a Senator, was a constitutional law professor. He should know the law.
And yet in the increasingly dangerous show-down over Pakistan’s arrest and detention of Lahore consular contract “security official” Raymond Davis, who is...
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Monday, February 14, 2011 - 12:47
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Friday, February 11, 2011 - 11:30
Breaking News! After 18 days of huge protests, Egypt's dictator of 30 years, Hosni Mubarak, has been driven from power by the uprising of the Egyptian people, who refused to accept his attempt last night to hang on to power.
...
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Wednesday, February 9, 2011 - 15:00
The mystery surrounding Raymond A. Davis, the American former Special Forces operative jailed in Lahore, Pakistan for the murder of two young motorcyclists, and his funky “security” company, Hyperion-Protective Consultants LLC, in the US continues to grow.
When Davis was...
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Monday, February 7, 2011 - 22:45
The mystery of American Raymond A. Davis, currently imprisoned in the custody of local police in Lahore, Pakistan and charged with the Jan. 27 murder of two young men, whom he allegedly shot eight times with uncanny accuracy through his car windshield, is growing increasingly murky...
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Monday, February 7, 2011 - 11:33
It is pathetic and even laughable to hear American leaders, and the leaders of the other Western democracies in Europe, cautioning that Egypt’s revolution needs to move slowly, as they call for a “transition” government that would be gently guided to elections by the very man, Omar Suleiman,...
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Friday, February 4, 2011 - 11:37
The propagandists in the corporate media are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to paint a rosy picture using the shockingly bad employment news out of the Labor Department today.
Here’s the raw data:
The official unemployment rate fell from 9.4% to 9.0...
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Saturday, January 29, 2011 - 11:34
I never expected to find myself agreeing with Sarah Palin, but I’ve got to admit that the woman nailed it regarding President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address. Asked to comment on it, she said it had a lot of “WTF moments.”
That’s exactly what I found...
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Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - 15:22
Looks can be deceiving.
When you see photos of Army Specialist Bradley Manning, the fresh, boyish-faced 23-year old private who has spent the last seven months in solitary confinement, first in Kuwait and later at the Marine base at Quantico, VA, enduring the...
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Friday, January 21, 2011 - 15:55
If President Barack Obama had announced this week that he was appointing Japan’s Takanobu Ito, president and CEO of Honda, to head his new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, one can imagine the shock wave that would go through the American body politic. A foreigner!--and one from...
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Thursday, January 20, 2011 - 10:40
"The wranglers over creeds and dogmas are perhaps the most persistent of all agitators; the bedrock idea being that a wrong exists which must be found and exterminated."
-- Eugene Debs
"Get it straight, I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser."...
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Thursday, January 13, 2011 - 23:27
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Tuesday, January 11, 2011 - 15:23
There is, it cannot be denied, a tendency on the part of many Americans to grab for their guns, if not actually, then figuratively.
And let’s face it, we also have an awful lot of guns to reach for. The FBI estimates that it’s 200 million, not counting the guns owned by the military, and...
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Saturday, January 8, 2011 - 21:29
At the local YMCA today, I ran into a boy who was a childhood friend of my son's. As my kid goes to a public arts high school in Philadelphia outside of our local school district, I don't see much of his old grade-school friends any more. This boy, who used to be over at our house years ago at...
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Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - 20:53
Democracy: de-moc-ra-cy, government by the people; the common people of a community, as distinguished from any privileged class
According to the latest poll conducted by CBS "60 Minutes" and the magazine Vanity Fair, 61 percent of Americans want to...
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Wednesday, December 29, 2010 - 16:33
Along with the staggering theft in broad daylight of Americans’ assets that has occurred in the course of the ongoing financial crisis, as taxpayers funded multi-trillion bank bailouts and banks stole homes through foreclosures with the help of fraudulent paperwork, American companies have also...
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Monday, December 20, 2010 - 00:38
With word that Pvt. Bradley Manning, the soldier suspected of being the source of most of the WikiLeaks documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the State Department cables, has been held in intensive solitary confinement at the Marine Base brig in Quantico, VA for five months, under...
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Saturday, December 18, 2010 - 12:06
There was a black-out and a white-out Thursday and Friday as over a hundred US veterans opposed to US wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world, and their civilian supporters, chained and tied themselves to the White House fence during an early snowstorm to say enough is enough.
...
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Monday, December 13, 2010 - 11:30
The Democratic argument for approving the rancid "compromise" reached between President Obama and his GOP "hostage-takers," which would extend the outrageous Bush tax-cuts for another two years and allow individuals to pass on, tax-free to heirs, up to $5 million, $10 million for married couples...
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Friday, December 10, 2010 - 14:56
Far be it from me to minimize the issue of rape, but to borrow from the Bard, in the case of the “rape” case being alleged against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (technically, Swedish prosecutors say it's not rape, it's "sex by surprise"), currently being held in a British jail without bail...
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Monday, December 6, 2010 - 10:15
WikiLeaks is under concerted attack from the US government. Also under attack by the US government is the whole idea of freedom of thought and of information.
It is increasingly clear that the "rape" charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange are trumped-up affairs resulting from...
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Sunday, December 5, 2010 - 14:51
Let’s just assume for the sake of argument--though I believe the claim to have been completely bogus--that the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury and all of the Bush and Obama economic advisers and Congressional leaders in late 2008 and early 2009 genuinely feared that shutting down and...
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Sunday, November 28, 2010 - 15:58
One of the major talking points issued by the Republican Party to its newly elected members of Congress is that they should always say in interviews that they are worried about the impact of government deficit spending on their grandchildren.
It sounds good: “I’m worried about what...
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Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - 11:29
Are you one of the millions of Americans flying this Thanksgiving weekend? Are you thinking about joining the national protest to opt-out of being run through an airport X-ray scanner?
If you’re worried about the alternative--getting groped by TSA screeners at the checkpoint--you might...
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Monday, November 22, 2010 - 11:46
Leave it to a soccer hero to kickstart some serious political action.
Eric Cantona, a French soccer star who finished his playing career at Manchester United and went into acting, has sparked a European, and perhaps a global uprising against the global banking industry by calling on...
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Saturday, November 20, 2010 - 09:37
Cleck here for the first half of a two-part interview of Dave Lindorff by Dori Smith, host of "Talk Show Nation," a...
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Friday, November 19, 2010 - 10:20
Is it news when police photograph and videotape demonstrations?
Apparently for American editors and reporters, making that news judgement depends on where the demonstration occurs and what nationality the police are.
When a hundred artists gathered outside a Beijing courtroom in...
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Thursday, November 11, 2010 - 16:16
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, God must love veterans; He makes so many of them.
We just finished "celebrating" Veteran’s Day earlier this month, complete with the usual parades and the show of flags, but it’s worth remembering that Nov. 11 wasn’t always a day for blindly glorifying the...
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Wednesday, November 10, 2010 - 10:39
The three-decades-long murder case of Philadelphia journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has sat in solitary in a cramped cell on Pennsylvania’s death row for 28 years fighting his conviction and a concerted campaign by the national police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, to execute him, was back...
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Monday, November 8, 2010 - 12:54
Many Americans simply assume that the government and politicians lie when they are talking about things like cutting taxes, or eliminating waste. But somehow, we tend to believe official government reports about things like economic “growth” or unemployment rates, or even cost-of-living...
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Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - 10:46
The Democrats were blown out of the water on Nov. 2.
But it’s not because of the Tea Party, or because of a resurgent Republican majority.
The Democrats deserved to lose because they have long since abandoned whatever principles they had, and more important, they’ve pissed on...
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Sunday, October 31, 2010 - 08:17
On Canada's Freedomain Radio, an interview by Stefan Molyneux:
"As the author of The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, 2006), I never thought in my lifetime that I would see a president reach the depth of moral...
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Thursday, October 28, 2010 - 11:03
So many things have been happening in the news this week--The NPR Williams firing, the latest Wikileaks leak, Bank mortgage fraud, DU weapons fallout in Fallujah, a sane person running for Texas School Board, the deepening crisis of joblessness -- I feel I should offer another perspective on...
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Tuesday, October 26, 2010 - 16:47
A victory for the government in a federal court in New York City Monday marks another slide deeper into Dick Cheney’s “dark side” for the Obama Administration.
In a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been seeking to force the Pentagon to provide information...
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Monday, October 25, 2010 - 11:55
As the author of The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), I never thought in my lifetime that I would see a president reach the depth of moral decay and depravity of President George W. Bush, but sad to say, our current president, Barack Obama, has managed to do it, and what...
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Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - 22:09
The American Revolution, for all the pious talk about freedom and the Rights of Man, was at bottom simply a matter of people not wanting to pay their taxes. It was about rank self interest, and it was a powerful movement.
That rank self-interest could spark a new revolution--hopefully...
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Thursday, October 14, 2010 - 15:35
Candidate Barack Obama, running for president, vowed to end the ludicrous Pentagon policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which, since it was established in 1993 by President Clinton has required gay and lesbian members of the uniformed services to hide their sexual orientation or be drummed out of...
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Wednesday, October 13, 2010 - 22:01
There are calls in this election season for establishing a moratorium of some sort on home foreclosures, and a number of large banks have even voluntarily stopped, at least until after Election Day, on foreclosing on houses. That’s fine as far as it goes, but what about the millions of homes...
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Thursday, October 7, 2010 - 11:57
The crazed obsession with secrecy, security, and ever-increasing intrusiveness by government policing and intelligence authorities into the lives of ordinary Americans has continued apace under the Obama administration. This madness can be illustrated by a case currently before the US Supreme...
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Thursday, September 30, 2010 - 17:51
If you have been feeling uneasy about having to be X-rayed by a Transportation Security Administration goon who can look under your clothes every time you fly, consider this: at least you can say no, and agree to be subjected to an old-fashioned full-body search.
No opt-out for...
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Monday, September 27, 2010 - 11:52
Murder is murder, and terror is terror, you might think. But when terror is committed against an American citizen by the state of Israel the response from the US government is not protest, and it is surely not to demand justice, much less seek vengeance. It is silence.
In 1985, when...
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Saturday, September 25, 2010 - 09:55
US-led forces in Afghanistan sure did a bang-up job this week at promoting the concept of Western “democracy.”
The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the puppet intelligence agency of the Afghan government, between them, arrested and held three journalists. Rahmatullah...
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Monday, September 20, 2010 - 09:58
ATTN: See a short film by Ted Passon on this story near the bottom of this homepage
During the contentious 1982 murder trial of Philadelphia radio-journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, a central argument of the prosecution in making its case for the conviction and for...
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Saturday, September 18, 2010 - 14:59
The surprise disclosure that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, through its state Homeland Security Agency, along with a number of local police departments in the state, have been employing a private Israeli security company with strong links to Mossad and the Israeli Defense Force to spy on law-...
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Saturday, September 11, 2010 - 18:10
Faced with the bad, but hardly surprising news, that poverty has increased in the US on his watch, to a record level not seen since before President Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty in 1965, President Obama is declaring that the answer to poverty and joblessness is economic growth....
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Friday, September 10, 2010 - 18:18
It’s no surprise that the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress are trying to claim that the recession (which they blame on Bush and Cheney) is over and that the economy is slowly returning to health thanks to their efforts at economic stimulus. At least those highly dubious claims...
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Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - 15:15
One of the great mantras of the modern economics profession is that markets know best, and that the collective "wisdom" of investors is generally correct.
I've never really believed that, having spent years writing about business and finance. In fact, my interviews with market...
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Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - 11:56
It’s time for us progressives to stop playing defense on Social Security.
We’ve watched the retirement system suffer years of attacks by conservatives and by class traitors in the Democratic Party. We have seen the retirement age raised since 1983 from 65 to 67, and the cost-of-living...
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Wednesday, August 18, 2010 - 16:53
The saga of the Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan, deceptively dubbed the "Ground Zero Mosque" by a right-wing clique with the avid support of Rupert Murdoch and his New York Post and Fox TV Network, exposes the right in America as a bunch of charlatans, hypocrites and plain old garden-...
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Monday, August 16, 2010 - 13:30
New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman, in his column today, is right to expose the attacks on Social Security as being the work of right-wing ideologues eager to destroy a government program that works, backed by cowardly Democrats who want to show their fiscal “...
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Friday, August 13, 2010 - 13:43
NBC/Wall St Journal Poll: 40% say country worse off since Obama, 31% say better
Federal Reserve Board: US economy is stalling again
NY TImes: “White House Memo: First Wave of Weary Aides Heads for the Exits”
Labor Dept.: New jobless claims hit record not seen since February...
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Friday, August 6, 2010 - 10:25
Wall Street lobbyists may have successfully managed to emasculate most of the important parts of the financial reform bill just passed by Congress last month, but one part of that 2000-page act, which establishes as bounty for whistleblowers who expose corporate financial wrongdoing to the...
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Monday, August 2, 2010 - 10:38
I was listening to NPR’s “Morning Edition” broadcast this morning in the car, and I heard a reporter say that President Obama was “redefining” the American role in Iraq, now that he had brought the number of US forces in that country down to “only” 50,000 troops, and that “combat operations”...
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Thursday, July 29, 2010 - 07:40
The White House’s initial response to the release of 92,000 pages of raw reports from the field by US forces in Afghanistan for a period from 2004-2009--that it was a threat to national security and to the lives of American troops--was as predictable as it was farcical.
These documents...
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Saturday, July 24, 2010 - 12:24
Prof. Bob Bea, of UC Berkeley, a civil engineer with years of expertise in marine oil drilling, says he is concerned that during the current crisis of BP’s blown-out well deep under the Gulf of Mexico, government scientists may not be getting all the information they need from the secretive oil...
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Friday, July 16, 2010 - 16:48
Updated July 19, 3:45 PM EST
It is time to ask why on earth the Obama administration and the Coast Guard are allowing BP to continue keeping a tight lid on the top of the run-away, damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico. Leaks from the sea floor are appearing and growing in...
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Thursday, July 15, 2010 - 14:34
What the hell are they thinking in Washington, and down at the “Unified Command” in New Orleans, letting BP try to close off the oil volcano spewing out the top of the damaged Blowout Preventer (BOP) stack?
And what the hell is the mainstream press doing not asking about the clear...
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Wednesday, July 14, 2010 - 12:06
If you want to avoid facing a tough prosecution for malfeasance, be a banker, not a biker.
That appears to be the lesson of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, where the lead story was about...
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Friday, July 9, 2010 - 15:30
UPDATE 7/13: ProPublica reports that the Coast Guard, under pressure from news organizations (hey, and maybe the threat of journalistic civil disobedience?) has changed its...
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Thursday, July 8, 2010 - 22:31
Looking at the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, where the results of the greed of corporate executives at BP, TransOcean and Halliburton, not to mention the greed of paid-off regulators in the Minerals Management Service and the members of the House and Senate who took dirty money to water...
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Monday, July 5, 2010 - 15:52
Finally, a politician has stood up and boldly denounced the creeping fascism that is gradually crushing democracy and political activism.
Not mincing her words, or trying to justify the jackboot, Secretary of State and 2008 presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton roundly condemned...
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Saturday, July 3, 2010 - 18:01
Just days before we celebrate the 224th anniversary of America’s declaration of independence from a colonial overlord on the other side of the world, Congress approved the allocation of yet another $33 billion in funds to support America’s attempt to occupy and run, on the other side of the...
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Tuesday, June 29, 2010 - 12:29
"I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong."
--Frederick Douglass
On the evening of February 25, participants at the Fourth World Congress Against the Death Penalty in...
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Tuesday, June 22, 2010 - 18:22
As the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico continues to spew out ever more toxic oil and methane into the sea, and as floating toxic sludge, by the millions of gallons, starts destroying the wetlands across the American Southeast, the dead hand of President Ronald Reagan is at work, making sure...
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Tuesday, June 15, 2010 - 19:43
Kevin Neish of Victoria, British Columbia, didn’t know he was a celebrity until he was about to board a flight from Istanbul to Ottawa. “This Arab woman wearing a beautiful outfit suddenly ran up to me crying, ‘It’s you! From Arab TV! You’re famous!’” he recalls with a laugh. “I didn’t know...
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Sunday, June 13, 2010 - 18:51
What does it say about the the American government, its president, and its military today, that the the largest military/intelligence organization in the history of mankind has launched a global manhunt for Julian Assange, head of the Wikileaks organization...
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Saturday, June 12, 2010 - 15:42
The false narrative initially put out by the Israeli government of hapless IDF commandos severely threatened by hardened "terrorists" on the Mavi Marmara has fallen apart, amid revelations of doctored photos, dubbed voices and other deceptions and the patent absurdity of the claim that the...
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Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - 21:32
(From the AARP Magazine, May/June 2010 issue)
The true cost of American wars is much higher than what is spent in Supplemental Appropriations each year. It is also the cost of permanent medical care for the troops who are sent overseas to kill and who come home maimed...
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Sunday, June 6, 2010 - 09:42
You want to know why we need independent journalism, and why those of you who are reading this article need to support the publication in which it is appearing? Because if you rely for your news on the US corporate media, whether ad-supported or underwriter-supported, you won’t learn that Furkan...
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Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - 10:32
Like the cop who batters someone senseless at a demonstration and then accuses the victim of “banging his head against my baton,” Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused the victims of Israel’s brutal military assault on a peace convoy to Gaza of attacking Israeli soldiers. An...
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Sunday, May 30, 2010 - 11:15
It’s Memorial Day Weekend and I am sick to death of the glorification of war in America.
And I am even sicker of politicians who wrap themselves in the bloody flag and try to rub off some of the stench of death from the bodies of those who have died, mostly in vain for worthless causes,...
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Sunday, May 23, 2010 - 18:07
Even as BP’s blown well a mile beneath the surface in the Gulf of Mexico continues to gush forth an estimated 70,000 barrels of oil a day into the sea, and the fragile wetlands along the Gulf begin to get coated with crude, which is also headed into the Gulf Stream for a trip past the Everglades...
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Tuesday, May 18, 2010 - 13:49
Let me make a postulate: In a democracy, if there is a legislative proposal that would significantly benefit 80 percent of the population and cost them nothing, and that would be paid for by a insignificant tax on the richest 20 percent of the population, who themselves would receive some...
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Monday, May 17, 2010 - 09:58
President Obama claims to have learned a lesson from the disastrous blowout of British Petroleum drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico: a “cozy relationship” between the agency that regulates oil drilling, the Minerals Management Service, and the oil industry, he charges, allowed companies to drill...
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Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - 12:27
When I lived in Hong Kong back in the ‘90s, I was surrounded by gamblers. Everyone, from wealthy bankers to stuggling street vendors, bet on everything from the horses to the stock market--and they were all well aware that there was not much difference between the two. Horse-racing was a...
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Thursday, May 6, 2010 - 10:14
With British Petroleum spewing more than 200,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico in what could be an ecological cataclysm, it is useful to look at the hypocrisy of the energy companies when it comes to an even worse crisis threatening life itself on the planet--rapid climate change...
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Sunday, May 2, 2010 - 18:16
One thing you don’t hear much mention of in all the coverage of the BP oil rig blowout that is now pouring 210,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, just a few dozen miles off the coast of Louisiana, is the 2010 hurricane season, which officially starts on June 1, but which can start...
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Sunday, April 18, 2010 - 09:41
The former Los Angeles police chief, Daryl Gates, who died late last month of cancer at his home in California, is being widely credited in mostly laudatory newspaper obituaries as the man who developed the idea of Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT)units--those paramilitary police teams so loved...
