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LET THEM FILIBUSTER
by Mary Pitt
The Democrats are terribly worried about their ability to gain the sixty votes required for cloture in order to vote for passage of their health plan in the Senate. There are many of us, particularly on the Progressixe side who see the benefits of bringing the bill to the floor regardless of the pre-vote count and let the speeches begin!
The Republicans are griping that the discussions regarding the content of the bill have not been open and transparent as promised by Candidate Obama. Committees have had meetings and administration officials have consulted experts in closed door sessions. Now it is time for the "transparecy" for which they pine.
Nuke Gaza
By Jeff Gates
Israeli officials are right to worry. Gazans too. Yet Americans should worry even more.
Israel's "legitimacy" will not last. Of course, that assumes its legitimacy was deserved. That issue also is now called into question in light of the consistency of Israeli behavior over the past six decades. The emerging issues are these:
When and how will the recognition of Israel's nation-state status be withdrawn? How will Tel Aviv behave in the interim?
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman may have tipped his Masada hand when he reportedly told Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan that Israel may use nuclear weapons against Gaza. The threat to Israel is not the 1.5 million Gazans who reside in the world's largest open-air prison.
TWO PUPPETS ARE NOT BETTER THAN ONE
Eric S. Margolis
The US government has wanted to dump the hapless Karzai, but could not find an equally obedient but more effective replacement. There has been talk in Washington of imposing an American `chief executive officer’ on him. Or, in the lexicon of the old British Raj, an imperial Viceroy. This may yet happen.
Here we go again with more political theater in war-ravaged Afghanistan. -The last vote, held in August, was so blatantly rigged that Washington put a gun to the head of its Afghan client, Hamid Karzai, and forced him into the humiliation of holding a runoff vote in November against rival Abdullah Abdullah.
As Henry Kissinger once observed, being America’s ally can be more dangerous than being its enemy.
Israel, the United States and international law
Jean Shaoul
Israel has responded to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s endorsement of the Goldstone report accusing it of war crimes during its assault on Gaza in 2008-2009 by denouncing the UN and seeking to overturn existing international law.
The explicit aim of Tel Aviv is to give the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) carte blanche to do as it likes in the name of “combating terrorism.”
The report by South African Judge Richard Goldstone said the war on Gaza was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”
Goldstone said that the UN Security Council should refer the case to the International Criminal Court if Israel failed to carry out an independent investigation into the military’s conduct. Those countries that were signatories to the 1949 Geneva Conventions had a duty to use their powers of “universal jurisdiction” to search for and prosecute those responsible for war crimes, he added.
A little R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Even for War Criminals?
eileen fleming
The passionate Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah, was the first to be arrested on October 15, 2009, when 30 activists vocally disrupted former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert during his speech at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy.
Olmert was Prime Minister during Israel's Dec.-Jan. attack on Gaza that killed 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza and also during Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon that killed 1,200. As Prime Minister and the top civilian commander of Israel's armed forces, he was involved in and responsible for planning and execution of both attacks.
ISRAEL SEEKS FINAL CONFRONTATION AGAINST IRAN
Damien Lataan
The reality is this: Iran, as it keeps telling the world, has no nuclear weapons program and is intent only on generating electrical energy. Israel insists that Iran does have a nuclear weapons program – despite the total lack of evidence – because it wants to use it as an excuse to attack Iran.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent to the entire world now that, no matter what Iran does with regard to its nuclear program, it will never be enough for Israel and Israel will continue to pursue its witch-hunt against Iran until the regime in Iran has been changed and it will use Iran’s so-called ‘nuclear weapons program’ as the excuse they need to eventually instigate a final confrontation that they hope will lead to that regime change.
UN in the Claws of the Colonialists
Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan
The UN has completed 64 years since its establishment. A few days ago, world Heads of States and envoys celebrated the 64th anniversary of the United Nations, calling it a common home.
In his audacious speech to the UN General Assembly, Moa mar Al-Gaddafi, said that 65 wars and battles have taken place since the formation of the United Nations but UN has not played any role to thwart them—rather its role has been very negative in this regard. The reason behind the failure of the World Body to help nations achieve their rights; to raise above discriminations to represent the oppressed people of the world and as a common house of the people on the planet, live up to its name, is that, that unfortunately, this Organization has remained in the grips of a few countries who arrogantly have kept it under their belly. The right of a veto by the 5 member countries of the Security Council is a wicked instrument which they use it time and again against the remaining members of the United Nations. Thus they have deprived other nations of their rights; hurled stumbling blocks in the way of development and prosperity of people and have denied them participation in the process of decision making.
Exposing Lies About the FED, the CIA, the Murder of JFK
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
New allegations about CIA involvmenet in the murder of JFK put a glaring spotlight on the current bankster crisis. Those who pull off crimes are, naturally, most motivated to lie about them! The CIA, therefore, looks very guilty of two murders that ripped America apart: the murders of JFK and RFK.
As mews broke this week that CIA lies about the JFK murder had been exposed, I recalled that among the motives for JFK's murder was his threat to abolish the FED, the very source of the government's 'funny money' and most certainly, the root cause of the current banking collapse. JFK had threatened to strip the power of the FED, smash the CIA into 'a thousand pieces' and abolish the oil industry's sacred cow: the Oil Depletion Allowance.
RUSH TO WARs - false grounds, tainted history
Excerpts, editing by Carolyn Bennett
Reverberations in U.S./Iran (U.S.'s Afghanistan, Somalia, Iranian Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi), a Brit's inconvenient truths running up to war that won't go away
"Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create? .. Thirty years since resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories we do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply...
"Britain' positive role in the middle east does not redress the strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world at what it sees as one rule for the allies of the US and another rule for the rest. Nor is our credibility helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change ... That explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case for war."
Failed State Update with Krugman and Roberts
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
In theory, a near worthless dollar is great for American manufacturers, American jobs. Lower costs for American goods means US exports should rise, reducing our trade deficit and helping pay off the national debt! That's the theory, the rationale behind Richard Nixon's decision to take the US off the so-called 'gold standard' back in the 70s.
The reality is this: despite the right wing's subversion of the dollar, despite the deals Nixon and subsequent GOP regimes gut with China, US exports have decreased, US jobs have decreased, the US standard of living as decreased as just one percent of the population has prospered at everyone else's expense at least since Ronald Reagan's tax cut of 1982, a tax cut which benefited only this rich base of GOP/right wing supporters. These downward trends have defined US history since the 1970s despite temporary gains made during the Carter and Clinton years. I have previously posted the key 'stats' which prove this to have been the case.
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