https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/
[Note the interview ends abruptly due to technical problems.]
RussiaToday
December 22, 2009
Hugo Chavez is accusing the US of flying spy planes over
Venezuela. Are the accusation true? If so, what is the US looking for,
or what does Venezuela have to hide?
by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
22 December 2009
AFP secured an interview on Monday with Mohamed Saleban Bare (known to the Pentagon as Mohammed Sulaymon Barre), the Somali refugee, released from Guantánamo at the weekend with eleven other men (including another Somali, Ismail Mahmoud Muhammad), who ran a money transfer operation for the Somali diaspora in Karachi, Pakistan, until he was seized in a house raid on November 1, 2001. The organization he worked for was, in the eyes of the US authorities, involved with another money transfer company that had ties to the 9/11 hijackers, even though the 9/11 Commission concluded over five years that this was not the case.
https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/
Physicians for a National Health Program
Dec. 22, 2009
Legislation ‘would bring more harm than good,’ group says
For Immediate Release
Contact:
David Himmelstein, M.D.
Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H.
Oliver Fein, M.D.
Mark Almberg, PNHP, (312) 782-6006, mark@pnhp.org
A national organization of 17,000 physicians who favor a single-payer health care system called on the U.S. Senate today to defeat the health care legislation presently before it and to immediately consider the adoption of an expanded and improved Medicare-for-All program.
While noting that the Senate bill includes some “salutary provisions” like an expansion of Medicaid, increased funding for community clinics and the curbing of some of the worst practices of the private insurance industry, the group says the negatives in the bill outweigh the positives.
by Dennis Kucinich
kucinich.us
Dec. 22, 2009
Wall Street Celebrates Senate’s “Significantly Watered Down” Health Care Bill
Dear Friends,
Wall Street is celebrating “Health Care Reform.” According to an industry insider report yesterday by MarketWatch (Gibson and Britt) health care stocks rallied as the bill moved through the Senate, particularly since there is no public option in the bill to compete or compare with insurance company rate-making.
“Health care investors find themselves having confronted their greatest fear, and, while there will be legislation, it will be significantly watered down …” said Mike O’Rourke, chief market strategist at BTIG LLC. As a result, shares of Aetna gained 4.7%, while Cigna rose 3.9%. United Health and Wellpoint “rallied to 52-week highs.”
by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
Sibel Edmonds’ Boiling Frogs Post
Tuesday, 22. December 2009
The Rallying Cry for an Arms Buildup & to End Public Debate about American Foreign Policy on Afghanistan
As the first journalists to enter Kabul in 1981 for CBS News following the expulsion of the Western media the previous year, we continue to be amazed at how the American disinformation campaign between Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street built around the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan lives on. We’ve seen this pattern from the media again and again. It was particularly disturbing to read Ken Herman’s December 18 interview, Charlie Wilson pessimistic about future of Afghanistan, in the AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN filled with CIA disinformation. The secret campaign was activated before the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan to sell the American people on financing the coming Muslim holy war against the Soviet Union.
[…]
via Sibel Edmonds’ Boiling Frogs Post | Home of the Irate Minority
see
World’s Sole Military Superpower’s 2 Million-Troop, $1 Trillion Wars by Rick Rozoff
September 11, 2001: America and NATO Declare War on Afghanistan by Michel Chossudovsky
Afghanistan on Dandelion Salad
from the archives:
Bill Moyers Journal: Charlie Wilson
Imperialist Propaganda – Second thoughts on Charlie Wilson’s War By Chalmers Johnson
Democracy Now!
Dec. 22, 2009
We speak with the nation’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen. He wasn’t at the Copenhagen climate summit and explains why he thinks it’s ultimately better for the planet that the talks collapsed. We also speak with with Dr. Hansen about his new book, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, and much more. [includes rush transcript]
by Cindy Sheehan
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox Blog
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox
Dec. 22, 2009
Since our son-brother, Casey, was killed in Iraq, even precious and happy moments are tinged with grief. Today is such a day—it is Casey’s youngest sibling’s birthday.
As I write this, I vividly remember the day Janey was born back in 1985. I gave birth to my babies at home with the assistance of midwives and surrounded by treasured loved ones. As the youngest of four (Casey the oldest was 6 ½), Janey was especially loved and spoiled by all, but her big brother was her protector and “go to guy” when she felt that her parents were being too harsh, or “unfair,” (popular child-whine).
by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
22 December 2009
Last Tuesday, in a letter to Illinois governor Pat Quinn, five senior Obama administration officials — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Eric Holder, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, and Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano — announced that “the President has directed, with our unanimous support, that the Federal Government proceed with the acquisition” of Thomson Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison about 150 miles north-west of Chicago, to house prisoners from Guantánamo.
By Michael Hudson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
michael-hudson.com
Economic Perspectives from Kansas City
December 20, 2009
There is a seeming riddle in the recent evolution of economic thought. It has become more otherworldly and abstract, more detached from the reality of how economies are running deeper into debt to a financial oligarchy. The global economy itself is polarizing between creditor and debtor nations, financial core and periphery (even as the United States manages to play both sides of this street). Yet academic orthodoxy treats this as anomalous, side-stepping the two key features of today’s economic crisis: the “magic of compound interest” multiplying debts owed by the bottom 90 percent of the population to savers among the top 10 percent, while industrial capitalism is turned into a “tollbooth economy” by privatizing rent-extracting privileges on what used to be the public domain.
ourjourneytosmile
December 21, 2009 Continue reading
by Walter Brasch
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.walterbrasch.com
December 22, 2009
Dick Wolf, who created “Law & Order” and its two successful spin-offs, “Law & Order: SVU” and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” should probably consider establishing a branch office in Pennsylvania.
It seems that whenever any of the New York City cops take a road trip to find a fugitive or track down a witness, they go to Pennsylvania. Apparently, New Jersey is only a buffer zone.
Part of the reason why Pennsylvania routinely figures into the hour-long dramas may be because Wolf, a New Yorker, is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Another possibility, although much more remote, may be because his first of three wives was named Susan Scranton.
By Robert S. Becker
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
rbecker@cal.net
Dec. 22, 2009
Headline from the Wall Street Journal, “Rahm Emanuel: Don’t Worry About the Left,” reporting how Obama’s chief of staff conspired with Joe Lieberman to dump the public option and Medicare buy-in. The result, according to one “former Democratic official,” is White House denial about “how much trouble they’re in” and costly miscalculations about “what’s happening with progressives and the left.”
If instead progressives are right, then this jumble called “health reform” is not just bad medicine for millions, but a drone strike against hard-won Democratic House majorities. As a result, Obama’s war on progressives surged again this week, as the dark side of take-no-prisoners, obedience-is-all, Chicago-style politics surfaced. Two nasty, parallel attacks impugned the leftwing icon, Howard Dean, for logically stating his mind: this is not health reform but an “insurance company’s dream” written by the industry lobby and setting off a “Washington scramble.”
TheRealNews
December 21, 2009
Israel’s recent wave of repression led to arrest of Jamal Juma’, coordinator of Stop the Wall Campaign.
In recent months, since the public push for The Goldstone Report, Israeli authorities have intensified their repression of activists on both sides of the segregation wall. Though Israel tries Palestinians and Israelis under separate legal systems, with the former being prosecuted in a military court and the later in domestic, civil courts, both have seen an escalation in detentions. The recent cases include Mohammad Srour, Mohammad Othman, and Abdullah Abu Rahma, all activists from the Occupied West Bank. The most recent arrest is of Jamal Juma’, an international known human rights activist and the coordinator of the Stop the Wall Campaign, a grassroots network of popular committees fighting Israel’s segregation wall.
Jamal Juma’ was born in Jerusalem and attended Birzeit University, where he became politically active. Since the first Intifada, he has focused on grassroots activism. He is a founding member of the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees, Palestinian Association for Cultural Exchange and Palestinian Environmental NGO Network. Juma’ is since 2002 the coordinator of the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign. He has been invited to address numerous civil society and UN conferences, where he has spoken on the issue of Palestine and the Apartheid Wall. His articles and interviews are widely disseminated and translated into several languages. On December 16th, 2009 Jamal Juma’ was arrested and is now detained at The Russian Compound in Jerusalem without charge, and without the right to see a lawyer.
Dandelion Salad 