Image by medithIT via Flickr
by William Blum
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Killing Hope
October 23, 2017
Capturing the wisdom and the beauty of Donald J. Trump in just one statement escaping from his charming mouth:
“Our military has never been stronger. Each day, new equipment is delivered; new and beautiful equipment, the best in the world – the best anywhere in the world, by far.”1
Image by Becker1999 via Flickr
The DNC Protests You Didn’t See on TV: Sanders Delegates Chant and Walk Out on Clinton Speech
Democracy Now! on Jul 29, 2016
http://democracynow.org – Protests continued on the floor of the convention, as chants of “No more war” could be heard throughout the evening. Some delegates walked off the floor of the DNC in protest. Democracy Now! was on the floor when protests began as retired four-star Marine General John Allen took the stage.
by Graham Peebles
Writer, Dandelion Salad
London
September 4, 2013
Image by Rita Willaert via Flickr
To be born poor in our world, is to be born vulnerable and in danger of exploitation of one kind or another; to be incarnated female and poor is to greatly intensify the risks. If you are born a girl to parents of tea-pickers in Assam in North Eastern India (earning as little as US $1.50 a day) there is a good chance you will be sold to a local recruitment ‘agent’ by your loved ones for around $50, he will sell you on to a city ‘employer’ for up to $800 and into a life of abuse and suffering. Continue reading
by Graham Peebles
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
London
January 6, 2013
Image by Imagens Evangélicas via Flickr
A woman’s lot
In the ancient land of India, where female deities deeply revered, Kali and Lakshmi, Sarasvati and Parvati, are held high upon the alter of Hinduism, where each day thousands of Hindu’s ritually bathe in the Holy waters of the Ganges, cleansed within and without by the Goddess Ganga, women and girls; in the forests, cities, villages and towns, on buses and trains, in the street, the office, at school and in the home are being violated, abused, raped and trafficked into prostitution and domestic slavery. Continue reading
Note: The Preface and Chapters One through Fourteen can be found here: The 15% Solution
by Jonathan Westminster, Ph.D. aka Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on TPJmagazine.us
May 22, 2011
This is the sixteenth installment of the serialization of a book entitled The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022. Herein you will find Chapter 15. This chapter presents 2015 interview with a White House press officer under the New American Republics. She describes policies for abortion, gun use, the use of torture in the prison system, the “Christianization of America” a la David Barton (yes, that David Barton), the reduction of education to rote memory (of New American Republics doctrine), the elimination of the research universities by de-funding them, and so on and so forth Continue reading
Note: The Preface and Chapters One through Ten can be found here: The 15% Solution
by Jonathan Westminster, Ph.D. aka Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on TPJmagazine.us
January 23, 2011
This is the twelfth installment of a project that is likely to extend over a two-year-period from January, 2010. It is the serialization of a book entitled The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022. Herein you will find Chapter 11. This chapter presents the “Proclamation of Right,” decreed by President Jefferson Davis Hague of the American Christian Nation Party, presented to the nation on Easter Sunday, 2009. An earlier Constitutional Amendment has already established that homosexuality is a matter of choice. Hague’s decree established it as a crime.
by Cindy Sheehan
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox Blog
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox
January 16, 2011
(SOAPBOX #83)
This Sunday (January 16th), Cindy presents admirably scurrulous election satire by no less than George Carlin, and then “celebrates” two anniversaries, one famous and most healthy for our nation – but oh so hated today by the “religious right” (which is really neither) – Roe versus Wade – and the other, a truly sickening anniversary, that of the opening of Guantanamo Bay Prison, on Jan 11th, 2002. Continue reading
by Jonathan Westminster, Ph.D. aka Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash,com
Sept. 9, 2010
Cover via Amazon
This is the eighth installment of a project that is likely to extend over a two-year-period from January, 2010. It is the serialization of a book entitled The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022. Under the pseudonym Jonathan Westminster, it is purportedly published in the year 2048 on the 25th Anniversary of the Restoration of Constitutional Democracy in the Re-United States. It was actually published in 1996 by the Thomas Jefferson Press, located in Port Jefferson, NY. The copyright is held by the Press. Herein you will find Chapter 7. You can find a complete archive of the chapters published to date on TPJmagazine.us as well as the Disclaimer, the cast of characters, the author’s biography, cover copy, and several favorable reviews.
by Jonathan Westminster, Ph.D. aka Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash,com
August 1, 2010
This is the seventh installment of a project that is likely to extend over a two-year-period from January, 2010. It is the serialization of a book entitled The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022. Under the pseudonym Jonathan Westminster, it is purportedly published in the year 2048 on the 25th Anniversary of the Restoration of Constitutional Democracy in the Re-United States. It was actually published in 1996 by the Thomas Jefferson Press, located in Port Jefferson, NY. The copyright is held by the Press. Herein you will find Chapter 6. In it you meet Jefferson Davis (J.D.) Hague, a Sara Palinesque character who was the 45th President of the old United States. He was a great grand nephew of the pre-World War II Mayor of Jersey City, NJ, Frank Hague, a man who once said: “You hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, ‘That man is a Red, that man is a Communist!’ You never hear a real American talk like that.”
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by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
May 13, 2010
As I have noted in a recent Commentary, the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States states: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Fascinating stuff. The “World’s Greatest Democracy,” no? Exceptional, no? Well, no, for the first. There may be a great democracy somewhere, but ours is more of a partial one. For many of our citizens, we surely ain’t it. But exceptional? Well, yes indeed. Why, both the Constitution and its implementation have been filled with exceptions since the document was first written.
by William Blum
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.killinghope.org
5 April, 2010
The Anti-Empire Report
The United States takes the matter of three-headed babies very seriously.
When did it begin, all this “We take your [call/problem/question] very seriously”? With answering-machine hell? As you wait endlessly, the company or government agency assures you that they take seriously whatever reason you’re calling. What a kind and thoughtful world we live in. Continue reading
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https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/
Bill Moyers Journal
March 26, 2010
John Nichols and Terry O’Neill
Bill Moyers takes a closer look at the newly signed health bill and explores the future of health care reform with THE NATION’s John Nichols and National Organization for Women president Terry O’Neill.
by William John Cox
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.thevoters.org
June 15, 2009
What does a shootout at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., the confessions of a Khmer Rouge jailer and the murder of a Kansas medical doctor have in common? The answer is “children,” and how they suffer from being targeted and used by extremists to advance their own hateful agendas.
In 1981, acting as a public interest lawyer, I represented a Holocaust survivor who had been a 17-year-old boy when his entire family was murdered in Nazi concentration camps. We sued a group of radical right-wing organizations that denied the Holocaust and, as a publicity ploy, had offered a reward for proof it had occurred.
During the hearing in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, I asked, “If the Holocaust is a hoax, then where are all the children?” The answer was that the death camps were primarily industrial operations that worked prisoners to death, and children were quickly murdered because they were too young to contribute either their labor or body fat to the enterprise.
by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
June 9, 2009
And so we have another tragedy. Here is another law-abiding citizen holding to a particular religious belief about when life begins, following the law as prescribed in his state, who is murdered. He is murdered by another citizen who happens to disagree with that particular religious belief as to when life begins as well as with the law concerning abortion. The murderer is convinced that his religious belief as to when life begins is the only correct one, and that all others, in his non-legal concept of the law, are criminal. He holds to the view that his particular version of “the truth” is “ordained by God,” which somehow, in his view, and in the view of many others of his ilk, justifies violence against those who disagree with them, up to and including murder.
Sent to DS by the author, thanks, Robert.
By Robert S. Becker, Ph.D.
Dandelion Salad
www.beyondchron.org
June 9, 2009
“Onward, Twisted Soldiers” Tilt Culture Wars into Cultures of Terror
If “pro-life” vigilantes who murder abortion doctors at church services imagine they advance the anti-abortion case, their logic is as contorted as their iniquity. The suspected Wichita shooter, according to his ex-wife, is “very religious, in an Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye way.” That kind of “religious” stamps him a “Christian terrorist,” especially since radical anti-abortionists have killed ten American doctors. If this be terrorism, then shouldn’t we scrutinize how this murderer got armed, just as we interminably addressed alleged weapons of mass destruction? When do we declare war on this jihad?
Though “eye for an eye” righteousness betrays Jesus’ mercy gospel, notorious evangelicals often explain human disasters as God’s wrath, however indiscriminate. Pat Robertson justified 9/11 attacks as God’s punishment for misdeeds, ranging from homosexuality to abortion to the ACLU. Later, he broke a top Ten Commandment, proposing our government “take out” Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez because assassination is cheaper than another “$200 billion war.” Remember the buffoon who vindicated Katrina carnage as God’s anger towards pagan New Orleans? Similar delusions inform those zealots defending the killing of abortion doctors as ridding the world of “mass baby murderers.” In this context, I recall Dubya’s dogmatic dictum, “You are either with us or against us.”
