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The Duped and the Duplicitous: The Secret of Obama’s “Popularity”
Andrea Freiboden
There are several reasons why Obama has won over many Americans, but I shall consider two. There are two kinds of Obama supporters. There is the genuinely duped, the kind of people who really look at him as the messiah of CHANGE and HOPE for whatever pitiful reason–ignorance, sappiness, guilt, fear, anxiety, etc. But, there is also the duplicitous, the kind of people who know exactly who and what Obama is and feel that they know the Grand Game Plan. It is the combination of images of radiance(for the duped) and of radicalism(for the duplicitous) that has fueled Obama to power. Unless one understands this duality, one cannot grasp the essence of the Obama phenomenon.
Don't Look Now, Mr. President
Mary Pitt
Don't look now but your base is slipping! You may ask anyone involved in the Katrina disaster how important those few little grains of sand sliding off to the side can be. Nobody seemed to notice when the levees that held back the waters of Lake Ponchartrain began deteriorating but we all now know that they were the precursers to calamity.
In the same way, a few of your supporters were disgruntled when your first cabinet appointees were simply re-treaded from the Bush and Clinton administrations. We can appreciate that you needed a few key people with experience from Day One but, rather than they adapting to your point of view, you appear to have accepted their influence to shift your own views to coincide with that of the leaders for whom they previously worked!
Talking to Iran will make it “easier to sell” war on Iran, says man responsible for talking to Iran
saifedean
As Iranians go to the polls to repudiate (it seems) some of the most pernicious aspects of Ahmadinejad’s rule, America’s Iran point man continues to make Ahmadinejad look like a reasonable peacenik.
The newly released book by Dennis Ross, President Obama’s special adviser on Iran, reads like a how-to manual for launching a war on Iran, marketing the war successfully, and making sure the Iranians cop all the blame for it. Ross will have none of Bush’s incompetent warmongering on flimsy pretenses of democracy and WMD’s; when Ross launches his illegal war on Iran, it will be stage-managed to within an inch of its life.
“Tougher policies – either militarily or meaningful containment – will be easier to sell internationally and domestically if we have diplomatically tried to resolve our differences with Iran in a serious and credible fashion,” writes Ross.
Note that there is no way to read this sentence but to see that the goal is to attack Iran. America trying to diplomatically resolve its differences with Iran is not a goal in itself; it is merely a means to more easily sell war and sanctions.
MasterCard and the Extremist Settlers of Silwan
eileen fleming
Occupied East Jerusalem, June 13, 2009- Over thirty CODE PINK activists met with a few of the soon to be 1,500 homeless residents of the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, located minutes away from the Temple Mount and the Al Aqsa Mosque.
On June 8, 1998, under the cover of darkness, members of the fundamentalist nationalistic settlement group Elad [a Hebrew acronym for: To the City of David] entered four Palestinian homes, threw out the furniture and raised Israeli flags on the property.
War is the only language humanity understands
Roland Michel Tremblay
At this time we cannot state that this world is moral, just or ethical, whatever the area of society: political, religious, corporate and even people taken individually. Life is more like a struggle and a fight to survive than anything else. We have reached an all time low. What can society expect of its citizens, if all they ever encounter is pettiness, selfishness, unfairness and punishment? Well then, we should expect war at every turn, and this is what we witness everyday everywhere. But there is hope for humanity.
There is always a larger picture to everything, to any situation, to any debate or attack, no matter how small it is. Should there not be some sort of ideal world we could all live in, where everyone would be allowed to find happiness, or at least some sort of compromise which could make it all acceptable and liveable?
THE LULL BEFORE THE STORM
Allen L Roland
There is a strange lull in our present economic recession wherein the Administration's economic advisors are saying that the worst is over while consumers are beginning to feel the leading edge of a major depression:
The current cheer leading by some economic leaders, that the worst is probably over, sounds vaguely hollow in light of a Wall Street top down stimulus package that left out Main Street consumers ~ who paid for this massive infusion of capital and who increasingly want their money back.
AMERICA IS LIVING ON BORROWED TIME
Allen L Roland
America is living on borrowed time as the credit clock time bomb approaches midnight. The Obama administration still doesn't get it with its top down stimulus plan ~ Americans are in survival mode. They are broke, their credit cards are maxed out, they only spend for necessities wherein food and rent take precedence over credit card purchases or payments: Allen L Roland
The Obama administration is still trying to reinflate the credit bubble that just burst with the same cast of characters who initially inflated it ~ and it is about to blow up in their face.
On June 30th, 2008 I wrote a column HUGE CREDIT CARD CRISIS NEXT FOR AMERICA in which I said that many Americans are living off their credit cards but be forewarned ~ that bubble is about to burst as more Americans are using high-interest credit card cash to pay at least part of their mortgages. http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2008/06/30.html
Peru: Blood Flows in the Amazon
James Petras
In early June, Peruvian President Alan García, an ally of US President Barack Obama, ordered armored personnel carriers, helicopter gun-ships and hundreds of heavily armed troops to assault and disperse a peaceful, legal protest organized by members of Peru’s Amazonian indigenous communities protesting the entry of foreign multinational mining companies on their traditional homelands. Dozens of Indians were killed or are missing, scores have been injured and arrested and a number of Peruvian police, held hostage by the indigenous protestors were killed in the assault. President García declared martial law in the region in order to enforce his unilateral and unconstitutional fiat granting of mining exploitation rights to foreign companies, which infringed on the integrity of traditional Amazonian indigenous communal lands.
Congress on a Path to Transfer Hundreds of Billions in Tax Dollars to the Insurance Industry While Calling it Health Care Reform
By Kevin Zeese
Single payer witnesses show the common sense path, but Congress is listening to industry donors
Yesterday, as Senator Tom Harkin (D-IO) left the health care hearing room he leaned over to me and said:
“I used to sell insurance. The basic rule is the larger the pool the less expensive the health care. Today we have 1,300 separate pools – separate health care plans – and that is why health care is so expensive; 700 pools would be more efficient and less expensive and one pool would be the least expensive. That’s why single payer is the answer.
Ill-Treatment and Torture of Palestinian Children
from South Lebanon
[RAMALLAH, 11 June 2009] – Today, DCI-Palestine is releasing a report which documents the widespread ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children at the hands of the Israeli army and police force – Palestinian Child Prisoners: The systematic and institutionalised ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children by Israeli authorities.
The release of the report comes just days after an article was published in The Independent newspaper reporting the testimonies of two Israeli soldiers which detail the deliberate abuse of Palestinian children. One soldier is reported as saying that in an incident that occurred in a Palestinian village in March, he saw a lot of soldiers ‘just knee (Palestinians) because it's boring, because you stand there for 10 hours, you’re not doing anything, so they beat people up.’
The report published today contains the testimonies of 33 children, one as young as 10 years old, who bear witness to the abuse they received at the hands of soldiers from the moment of arrest through to an often violent interrogation. Most of these children were arrested from villages near the Wall and illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. There is evidence that many children are painfully shackled for hours on end, kicked, beaten and threatened, some with death, until they provide confessions, some written in Hebrew, a language they do not speak or understand.
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