Late Breaking—Sometimes Broken—News by Rosemary and Walter Brasch

by Rosemary and Walter Brasch
Featured Writers
Dandelion Salad
www.walterbrasch.com
September 14, 2009

WNEP-TV, a large regional station in northeastern Pennsylvania, led its noon news, Friday, Sept. 11, with the announcement that there was finally a compromise on the state budget.

The legislators have been playing politics, stalling, and delaying for more than two months, leaving Pennsylvania the only state without a budget. To the viewer, it seemed that the executive branch and the legislative branch finally figured out that the people’s money needed to be budgeted and used. This would have been great news–except that in the same story, we also learned there were still some details to be worked out.

Gerald Celente: What’s next for America? Revolution!

RussiaToday
September 14, 2009

Gerald Celente – the most trusted name in trends – sits down for an exclusive interview with RT’s Anastasia Churkina to talk about what the future holds for America during and after the Great Recession, gives advice to Obama, and forecasts the unexpected.

Corporate Corruption Killing America by Joel S. Hirschhorn

by Joel S. Hirschhorn
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.foavc.org
Sept. 14, 2009

Anyone smart and strong enough to fight delusional thinking and who pays attention to current events should clearly see that corporate corruption of the US political system is so pervasive and powerful that there will be no genuine reform of both the health care and financial sectors.

I always believed that president Obama was just a different color corrupt politician who was subservient to the two-party plutocracy.  His so-called reform efforts and ludicrous federal deficit spending should disappoint all his non-delusional supporters.

For health reform the only genuine and sensible reform legislation should have been not much more than a single sentence mandating that every American has a right to full Medicare coverage.  Period.  End of story.  True reform.  True universal health insurance.

Balkans Revisited: U.S., NATO Expand Military Role In Southeastern Europe by Rick Rozoff

by Rick Rozoff
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Stop NATO
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/41649
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/266/
September 14, 2009

On September 11 a Balkans news source cited the chairman of the South East Europe Center at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC, John Sitilides, as claiming that “Although the United States is not focused on the Balkans as it was in the 1990s, the challenges in this region are still reviewed at a very high level in Washington.” [1]

Nothing Short of Complete Peace on Earth by Cindy Sheehan

by Cindy Sheehan
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox Blog
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox
Sept. 14, 2009

At one of my many events in Kentucky this past week at a delightfully named coffee and beer hangout in Louisville, Ray’s Monkey House, a lovely woman named Trudie came up to me with tears in her eyes and she told me: “Cindy, when you were in Crawford that summer, I thought to myself, ‘this is the beginning of the end of war.’ It might take time, and it might not happen in our lifetimes, but what you started to honor your son will end war.”

If only. If only, we the people could finally realize that it is not up to our governments to end war. Our governments and the War Machine are locked in a violently greedy mutual stranglehold and could not care less about our opinions or our children.

Stop Begging Obama to Be Obama and Get Mad by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
September 14, 2009

The right-wing accusations against Barack Obama are true. He is a socialist, although he practices socialism for corporations. He is squandering the country’s future with deficits that can never be repaid. He has retained and even bolstered our surveillance state to spy on Americans. He is forcing us to buy into a health care system that will enrich corporations and expand the abuse of our for-profit medical care. He will not stanch unemployment. He will not end our wars. He will not rebuild the nation. He is a tool of the corporate state.

The right wing is not wrong. It is not the problem. We are the problem. If we do not tap into the justifiable anger sweeping across the nation, if we do not militantly push back against corporate fraud and imperial wars that we cannot win or afford, the political vacuum we have created will be filled with right-wing lunatics and proto-fascists. The goons will inherit power not because they are astute, but because we are weak and inept.

Max Blumenthal: The Unauthorized 9.12 Teabagger Tour

mblumenthal
September 14, 2009

Max Blumenthal covers the 9.12 anti-Obama rally on the National Mall, where tens of thousands of teabaggers demonstrated their opposition to healthcare reform by calling Obama the biggest Nazi in the world, claiming he wants to put “real” Americans in concentration camps, and was born in Kenya. But how many of them have health insurance, and do they know they’re pawns in the game of healthcare industry front man Dick Armey? Of course.

Postcard from Canada: Why I Missed Obama’s Speech by Sara Robinson

by Sara Robinson
OurFuture.org
Sept. 10, 2009

True confessions: I missed the health care speech. While the whole lefty blogosphere was watching and blogging and tweeting, I was sacked out in my attic bedroom high on a mountainside in Vancouver, sleeping off a narcotic haze and the exhausting aftermath of a long night spent in the emergency room at Lions Gate Hospital.

President Obama tried to remind Americans all over again why health care reform matters. I didn’t need a speech: I’d just had an up-close-and-personal encounter with a rational, not-for-profit, single-payer health care system. And it reminded me all over again (as it does every time we see a doctor here) why health care reform is the most crucial battle of our generation.

Is it Time to Disband the Republican Party? By Mike Whitney

By Mike Whitney
September 13, 2009 “Information Clearing House”

Is it time to disband the Republican Party?

Surely, the events of the past week suggest that the G.O.P. has outlived its shelf-life and needs to be conveyed pell-mell to the nearest dumpster. First, there was the Joe Wilson flap, where the indignant representative from South Carolina barked “You Lie” to President Barack Obama during his prepared remarks to Congress on health care. This is the very same Wilson who applauded all the bogus allegations about imaginary weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaida made in countless speeches by ex-president George W Bush. Now we are expected to believe that Joe is acting in “good conscience” in opposing minimal health care to a larger swath of uninsured Americans?

Right.