Friday, August 07, 2009

Keeping an Eye Out for Planet Earth

By Michael Winship
August 7, 2009

For a bit of change, let's talk about a different kind of health care reform - the kind that affects the health of the planet.

Read on.


Ex-CIA Analyst Criticizes State Secrets

By Melvin A. Goodman
August 7, 2009

My 24 years as an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency (1966-90) taught me that national security is only the ostensible reason for using the state secrets privilege in cases before the court. The real reason usually has more to do with national embarrassment and not national security.

Read on.

Olbermann-O'Reilly 'Truce' Frays

By Robert Parry
August 7, 2009

The agreement between top brass at General Electric and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation – to tamp down the war of words between MSNBC host Keith Olbermann and Fox News star Bill O’Reilly – has broken down after the truce was revealed by the New York Times last weekend.

Read on.

Thursday, August 06, 2009

Ellsberg's Hiroshima Remembrance

By Daniel Ellsberg
August 6, 2009

It was a hot August day in Detroit. I was standing on a street corner downtown, looking at the front page of The Detroit News in a news rack. I remember a streetcar rattling by on the tracks as I read the headline: A single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese city.

Read on.

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

GE Muzzles Olbermann about Fox

By Robert Parry
August 5, 2009

The emergence of liberal evening hosts on General Electric’s MSNBC has been welcomed by Democrats and others on the American Left as a counterweight to the right and center-right bias of much of the U.S. news media. But there is a difference between GE testing out whether this lineup will produce a ratings boost and actual independence in journalism.

Read on.

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Bush's Conspiracy to Riot

Robert Parry
August 5, 2009 (Originally posted August 5, 2002)

More than three decades apart, two political riots influenced the outcome of U.S. presidential elections.

Read on.

Battling for Single-Payer Healthcare

By Siobhan Kolar
August 4, 2009

The people started lining up an hour early in Aurora, Illinois, 40 miles west of Chicago and not a hotbed of radical socialism, to hear Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, talk about HR 676, the single payer bill he co-authored with Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan.

Read on.


Assessing Rumsfeld's Military Strategy

By Ivan Eland
August 4, 2009

In his new book, By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld, Bradley Graham argues that although ideology and arrogance played a role in the fiasco of invading and occupying Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld’s concept of transforming the military into a leaner, more deadly force also played a role.

Read on.

Monday, August 03, 2009

Bashing Obama on Taxes

By Robert Parry
August 3, 2009

Across the cable TV news shows on Monday was a smirking cynicism about President Barack Obama supposedly reneging on his campaign pledge not to raise taxes on the middle-class, but this new conventional wisdom rested on a weak foundation.

Read on.

Sunday, August 02, 2009

Panetta Pleads for No CIA Punishment

By Melvin A. Goodman
August 2, 2009

The ideological partnership between the Washington Post and the Central Intelligence Agency is becoming despicable.

Read on.

Why Obama's Health Plan Falters

By Jeff Cohen
August 2, 2009

I’ve started deleting them as spam.

Read on.

How Pay-to-Play Corrupts Washington

By Michael Winship
August 2, 2009

As we marvel over the depths of hypocrisy and greed currently plumbed in the health care reform debate, it may help to remember that even Honest Abe Lincoln had his share of tainted colleagues, one of the most notorious of whom was his first Secretary of War, Simon Cameron.

Read on.