President Obama’s signature health care reform law is now at the mercy of the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices will make their final ruling in private on Friday after several days of often contentious hearings. The Court’s official verdict on whether or not the “Affordable Care Act” is constitutional will not be known publicly until June at the earliest, [...]
SPECULATION OR SANCTIONS: WHAT IS DRIVING UP GLOBAL OIL PRICES? (Antiwar.com) While some analysts argue that market speculators are artificially manipulating prices to their benefit, U.S. Energy Information Administrator Howard Gruenspecht calls this a “minority view.” The real major factor in that rise, he says, is the effect of U.S. and E.U. sanctions against Iranian [...]
FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTEMPT: DOES ANYTHING MORE NEED TO BE SAID ABOUT THE MUTUAL HOSTILITY OF AMERICANS AND AFGHANS IN AFGHANISTAN? (Dissident Voice) In a season of near-daily assaults of Afghans on Americans or Americans on Afghans, Gary Leupp surveys some history and notes that this tends ever to be the case in “Empires” when domination [...]
“WE CANNOT FIGHT WARS BY POLLS”: LEON PANETTA JUST HAD HIS OWN “DICK CHENEY” MOMENT (Army Times) ` In March of 2008, with the war in Iraq dragging on and every opinion poll showing rising public anger over the American occupation of that country, then-Vice President Dick Cheney famously dismissed public anger by responding [...]
Back in 2005, when the state of Florida’s now-infamous “Stand Your Ground” legislation had just been approved by the Sunshine State’s Republican legislature, then-Gov. Jeb Bush praised the new measure as “common sense” before signing it into law. Bush said the following at the 2005 ceremony celebrating “Stand Your Ground”: “It’s common sense to allow [...]
“WE EXIST IN A LESSER CATEGORY.” (Electronic Intifada) Rana Baker, a young Gazan student, writes a post of this title on her blog. She reflects on the world-wide attempt to “understand” if not condone the American soldier who killed 16 Afghan civilians, with no such sympathy in sight for Mohammed Morah, the Palestinian man who killed three [...]
AN IRAN-PAKISTAN PIPE LINE? PROVOCATIVE MOVE ON THE GRAND CHESSBOARD OF U.S.POLITICAL POWER IN CENTRAL ASIA. (OilPrice.com) Increasingly volatile relation between the U.S. and Pakistan resulting from U.S. actions in the “war of terrorism” that Pakistanis see as violation of their sovereignty and a deprivation of their desperate need for Iranian oil leads Pakistan to pursue [...]
No issue has become a more significant election-year “hot button” than gas prices, with prices at the pump spiking to seasonal record highs thanks to an unpredictable global oil market. Naturally, the pain at the pump has led to unfettered political grandstanding from both sides, with both Democrats and Republicans each claiming to outdo the other [...]
TRUST BUT DON’T VERIFY. (Salon) Glenn Greenwald stands on its head Ronald Reagon’s famous admonition to demand evidence of Soviet nuclear disarmament, not to “take their word for it.” Kevin Drum of Mother Jones says—and countless trusting followers of Barack Obama apparently agree—that only a “sociopath” would insist, as did Obama, on the continued imprisonment in [...]
“TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS.” IT’S GROWING AGAIN IN THE UTAH DESERT. (Alternet) “Democracy Now!” interviews a columnist for Wired magazine who wrote an expose article on a massive “eye in the sky” facility being built at Bluffdale UT. This piece of cyperspace surveillance will give the government almost unlimited power to record and preserve virtually every [...]
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