World-News

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/23-13



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Obama
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Flares in the Political Dark

Norman Solomon, Truthout: "The winter solstice of 2009 arrived as a grim metaphor for the current politics of health care, war, and a lot more. 'In a dark time,' wrote the poet Theodore Roethke, 'the eye begins to see.' After a year of escalation in Afghanistan, solicitude toward Wall Street and the incredible shrinking health care reform, we ought to be able to see that the biggest problem among progressives has been undue deference to the Obama administration."

http://www.truthout.org/1223095

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Obama’s lost opportunity

Heartland Institute
by Greg Scandlen

12/30/09

With President Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats twisting themselves like pretzels to get something — anything — passed on health reform with no Republican support, it’s instructive to review what might have been. During the campaign Obama promised to work in a bipartisan fashion to solve problems. He told one interviewer, ‘I have always been able to work together with Republicans to find compromise and to find common ground.’ If he had stuck with that in health care we might be telling a very different story today...

http://tinyurl.com/yfh5rqf



Back from the brink

The Weekly Standard
by Irwin M. Stelzer

12/30/09

For years, perhaps decades to come, Americans will be whittling away at the mountain of debt the Obama administration has built, in part to apply Maynard Keynes’s nostrums to the sagging economy, in greater part permanently to expand the size and role of government. On the day before Christmas, immediately after its dawn vote to pass the health care bill, when few were watching, the Senate joined the House in raising the debt ceiling so that the administration could borrow enough money — $290 billion — to keep the government running, but only for a few months, so great is the amount of red ink pouring onto the federal books. Congress is also preparing a second stimulus bill — it will have a different name — and instead of using the money flowing in from the banks to repay the government’s bail-outs to reduce the deficit, the president and Congress are converting it to a slush fund to be spent on a variety of new programs. Throw in the fact that no one believes the health care bill will not add to the deficit, and Americans will remember 2009 as the year they loaded huge burdens on their children and grandchildren...

http://tinyurl.com/ydo3eor


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Obama
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=what+change
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Henry A. Giroux, Truthout: "This is a difficult time in American history. The American people have every right to demand to live in peace, enjoy the comforts of economic security, have access to decent health care, be able to send their children to quality schools and live with a measure of security. And yet, at a time when public values are subordinated to the rationality of profits, exchange values and unbridled self interest, politics and the institutions and culture that support it become corrupt, devoid of agents and reduced to empty rituals largely orchestrated by those who control the wealth, income, media and commanding institutions of American society."

http://www.truthout.org/1223094



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=casino+capitalism
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Henry+A.+Giroux

Liberty & Power
by Robert Higgs

12/22/09

In truth, any ‘constitutionally protected rights’ you are now exercising exist solely at the pleasure and convenience of the rulers. The minute the continuation of your life or liberty no longer pleases them, they will, as the Court’s decision makes clear, simply declare you an unperson to be dealt with as they choose, whether they choose to torture you, confine you in a steel cage for the rest of your life, or peremptorily kill you. They recognize NO rights in anyone (except themselves, of course) that they are bound to respect. This horror is the end to which a brave experiment has come. If the rulers can, at their pleasure, declare ANYONE THEY SELECT a legal unperson, the notion that the United States is a free country is nothing but the sickest of sick jokes...

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/121551.html



Oath Keepers? I’m still waiting

Albuquerque Libertarian Examiner
by Kent McManigal

01/15/10

No, I am not a fan of the Constitution, although I do believe a Constitutional government would be better than the travesty that attempts to rule us now. I have to wonder, though, if the individual Oath Keepers really understand what ‘unconstitutional’ means. Don’t rely on the black-robed furniture abusers of the Supreme Court to tell you what the Constitution means. They are wrong more often than they are right, and it was never their job to tell you and me what the Constitution means. That authority rests in you and me alone. They stole that ‘authority’ for themselves and have gotten away with it so far...

http://tinyurl.com/yaqrugw


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Supreme+Court
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Constitution
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Robert+Higgs
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Kent+McManigal

Independent Institute
by William F. Shughart II

12/21/09

Fresh from his recent White House-sponsored jobs summit, President Barack Obama is pushing a new economic stimulus plan intended to soften the pain of a 26-year-high unemployment rate that sees one in 10 Americans out of work. Against all expectations, $200 billion of the money originally appropriated by Congress for bailing out financial institutions under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) either remains unspent or already has been repaid to the Treasury. Will wonders ever cease? Rather than use that $200 billion to either pay down the monumental federal debt or, better yet, return it to taxpayers, Obama proposes spending $50 billion to ‘create’ additional jobs...

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2687



Obama, left behind

Reason
by Matt Welch

12/22/09

Boy, this ‘Obama Derangement Syndrome’ really has gotten out of hand. Why, just this past week the decreasingly popular president has been called a ‘bald-faced liar,’ ‘an executive who can’t bring himself to lead,’ and even an ‘Uncle Tom.’ And that’s just by liberals. The progressive crack-up, before Obama even reaches the end of his first year, has been an awesome and occasionally humorous sight to see...

http://reason.com/archives/2009/12/22/obama-left-behind


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Obama
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=stimulus
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=bailout
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http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=William+F.+Shughart
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Truthout
by Lawrence Wittner

For many years, Americans prided themselves on their nation never having lost a war and this fed into the assumption that it never could lose one. During the Vietnam War, J. William Fulbright, chair of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned repeatedly of ‘the arrogance of power’...

http://www.truthout.org/topstories/1221093



Lustful money and hateful religion

Strike the Root
by Bob Wallace

12/22/09

In a nutshell, the arrogance and blindness of hubris and overweening pride always leads to some kind of a collapse. It doesn’t matter at all how convinced people are that their economic policies and their religion are absolutely true. Reality always trumps their falsehoods...

http://www.strike-the-root.com/92/wallace/wallace4.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Vietnam
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=arrogance+of+power
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Lawrence+Wittner
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Bob+Wallace

MSNBC

12/22/09

Universities and colleges are still waiting for tuition payments for thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who attended school last fall under the new GI Bill, leaving the veterans panicked that they’ll be unable to return to class in January. Veterans Affairs Department officials promise to get them back into the classroom. The VA says the number of veterans with claims unprocessed is now fewer than 5,000 — down from tens of thousands — and the goal is to have them all processed by the end of the year...

http://tinyurl.com/ygm7hsf


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=veterans
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Veterans+Affairs+Department

Viele bunte Pillen
http://www.heise.de/tp/blogs/3/146804



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Pharmaindustrie

Wird schon werden

Die Finanzpolitik der schwarz-gelben Regierung ist eine Luftnummer, aber wir scheinen uns wie die Politiker in eine Haltung der Nichtverantwortlichkeit und des Aussitzens geflüchtet zu haben.

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/31/31775/1.html



Deutsche Unternehmen warnen vor Blasenbildung

Die Angst vor der Geldschwemme wächst, weil das Geld spekulativ und nicht produktiv angelegt wird.

http://www.heise.de/tp/blogs/8/146800



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Finanzpolitik
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Schwarz-Gelb

- Antennes relais et Taxes Foncières : iniquité.
- Dévalorisation du patrimoine & Jugement Cour d'Appel Bordeaux

http://www.next-up.org/France/Taxes_Foncieres.php#1

Is this the ghost of America's future?
http://snipurl.com/tt1u7



More prime mortgages default in 3rd quarter

Also: Many homeowners with modified mortgages fall behind again. And the number of homes in foreclosure rises, though new foreclosures are steady, report shows.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-foreclosures22-2009dec22,0,7969044.story


From Information Clearing House



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=homeowner
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=mortgage
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=foreclosure

By Mike Whitney

Ben Bernanke has been a bigger disaster than Hurricane Katrina. But the senate is about to re-up him for another four-year term. What are they thinking?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24247.htm



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Bernanke
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Mike+Whitney

Americans Are Hell-Bent on Tyranny

Paul Craig Roberts

Here in Great Moral America we only hold accountable celebrities and politicians for their sexual indiscretions. Tiger Woods is paying a bigger price for his girlfriends than Bush or Cheney will ever pay for the deaths and ruined lives of millions of people.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24245.htm



Racism and War: The Dehumanization of the Enemy

By Mike Prysner

Our real enemy is not the ones living in a distant land whose names or policies we don't understand; The real enemy is a system that wages war when it's profitable, the CEOs who lay us off our jobs when it's profitable, the Insurance Companies who deny us Health care when it's profitable, the Banks who take away our homes when it's profitable. Our enemies are not several hundred thousands away. They are right here in front of us.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24249.htm



A Christmas Remembrance

By William A. Cook

Having witnessed American warships firing their guns at naked islanders in the Marquesas, Tahiti, and Hawaii and watched "rapacious hordes of enlightened individuals" seizing the "depopulated land" from the natives, reducing them to starving "interlopers" in their own country, he realized that the superior white Christian civilization epitomized absolute savagery and that cannibals treated others with more humanity than these self-identified enlightened me.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24248.htm

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Red Mass?

William Rivers Pitt, Truthout: "The nature of modern American politics has been off-the-wall weird for a dozen years now. We've seen a president impeached for lying about sex. We've seen another president who was selected instead of elected in an orgiastic festival of Florida and federal fraud. We saw an administration use the darkest day in our history as an excuse to scare us, spy on us, steal from us and start false wars in our name. We've seen a vice president go on national television and advocate the benefits and blessings of torture. We came within an eyelash of seeing the first woman president elected in this still-misogynist nation, and did see the first African-American president elected in this still-racist nation."

http://www.truthout.org/red-mass56086



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By Jeremy Scahill

The Army's arrangement with Burhan and other companies like it across Afghanistan demonstrates the extent to which the most powerful military on earth depends on protection from local Afghans. This phenomenon will only expand as the number of contractors in Afghanistan grows.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24240.htm

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Listening to Afghanistan

The American Prospect
by Ann Friedman

12/22/09

In the spring of 2008 I wrote a column, ‘Listening to Iraq,’ in which I lamented the lack of access that most Americans had to the voices and opinions of the people most affected by the ongoing war. This made it difficult, I wrote, ‘for even the best-intentioned anti-war American to see Iraqis as partners, rather than as a political project.’ I was reminded of that column after Obama’s speech announcing his Afghanistan strategy…. As the American left debates, I’m struck by a desire to know what Afghan women, who have been living under the U.S. occupation for roughly eight years now, think would be best for their country…. To me, the answer is tragically apparent: It doesn’t matter whether U.S. military intervention can be a force for humanitarianism because, in Afghanistan, it never has been and won’t become one...

http://tinyurl.com/yk24lqx


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Obama
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Afghanistan
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=contractor
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Jeremy+Scahill

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/22-2



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Wall+Street
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Zach+Carter

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/22-6



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Bush+legacy
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=oligarch
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Juan+Cole

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul625.html

Neocon Pundits Amp Up Demonization Efforts in Response to Possible Ron Paul 2012 Run
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul626.html

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Christians United for War

AntiWar.Com
by Philip Giraldi

12/24/09

On December 10th a group calling itself the Christian Leaders for a Nuclear-Free Iran sent a letter to both political parties’ leaders in Congress as well as to the chairman and ranking member of the House Foreign Relations committee. The letter, beginning ‘We write today as Christian leaders,’ preceded a December 15th vote in the House of Representatives in which 412 house members approved the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act of 2009, with only twelve votes opposed. The sanctions proposed by the House of Representatives and endorsed by the Christian leadership have correctly been seen by many as amounting to an act of war...

http://tinyurl.com/ylqg66u



Onward Christian soldiers, again

AntiWar.Com
by Philip Giraldi

02/04/10

On Christmas Eve I reported about a group of ‘Christian leaders’ who were calling on the US government to initiate harsh sanctions against Iran. Their lobbying contributed to an overwhelming House of Representatives vote (412-12) in support of the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act, which seeks to cut off Tehran’s importation of refined petroleum products, amounting to 40% of its energy needs, and bring the country’s economy to its knees. The supporters of the House resolution believe that pressuring Iran in that fashion will somehow convince its government to alter its nuclear energy policy.

http://tinyurl.com/y9plxnq


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

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'No proof Iran nuclear program is military'

Moscow is not convinced that Iran plans to weaponize its nuclear program, and has not been shown evidence convincing it otherwise, deputy Russian foreign minister Alexander Saltanov told The Jerusalem Post this week.

http://snipurl.com/tuofq



Is Anyone Telling Us The Truth?

By Paul Craig Roberts

Who benefits? Clearly, attacking Iran is on the Israeli-U.S. agenda, and someone is creating the "evidence" to support the case, just as the leaked secret "Downing Street Memo" to the British cabinet informed Prime Minister Tony Blair's government that President Bush had already made the decision to invade Iraq and "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24352.htm



GOP Congressman wants to deport every Iranian

The National Iranian American Council is on high alert after a South Carolina Congressman announced this week that he will introduce legislation which would require the deportation of all Iranians living in America.

http://rawstory.com/2010/01/gop-congressman-deport-iranian/



Congressman seeking to bar Iranians from US

The STEP Act, a bill that was originally presented in 2003, would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to bar citizens of Iran, Cuba, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from entering the United States.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=115931&sectionid=351020101



Graham: U.S. may have to use military action against Iran

The U.S. may have to act militarily, he said, if other methods fail."It would be better to use military force to go after Iran before they get the bomb," Graham said. "I told the president the same thing."

http://snipurl.com/u32vu


From Information Clearing House



http://freepage.twoday.net/topics/Is+Iran+next/
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Downing+Street+Memo
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Obama
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http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Tony+Blair
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Lindsey+Graham
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=sanctions
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=military+force
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=military+action
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=neocon
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=GOP
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Ron+Paul
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=com/paul
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Philip+Giraldi
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Paul+Craig+Roberts

http://www.lewrockwell.com/manion/manion93.1.html

The Stupid and Evil Party
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried115.html

Republican Political Correctness
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried116.html

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The Cheney offense

The American Prospect
by Adam Serwer

12/23/09

According to John Bolton, the conservative magazine Human Events chose Dick Cheney as its ‘conservative of the year’ because of his ‘persuasive positions on substantive policy matters.’ In fact, Cheney was chosen for his ability to effectively manipulate American fear to defend the lawlessness of the prior administration. In a year when the GOP has tried to ride a wave of understandable but wrongheaded populist anger and anxiety over rising deficits, it chose as its figurehead a conservative who thinks deficits don’t matter and whose crowning achievement is making torture a central part of the Republican platform. … The Obama administration’s national security policies differ in substance from those of the Bush administration’s second term mostly at the margins...

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_cheney_offense



Changing the narrative for war

Campaign For Liberty
by Philip Giraldi

12/29/09

In spite of the calamities of the past eight years, there continues to be no shortage of neoconservatives in one’s face in the media, advising their fellow Americans that wars can be won quickly and decisively and that using military force to change how other nations behave is sound policy. The Washington Post features Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, all three Kagans, John Bolton, and Eliot Cohen on a regular basis. The Wall Street Journal editorial page is the epicenter for those who favor muscular interventionism...

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=482


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

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Neocons 'The Transparent Cabal'

Video

Press TV interview with Dr. Stephen Sniegoski (Author of 'The Transparent Cabal')
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24366.htm



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