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On February 17th, 2002, Marc Ash and I attended a forum in Los Angeles where Rep. Dennis Kucinich delivered his "Prayer for America." A few days later I interviewed the Congressman, and he closed the interview with the following statement:  "Peace is in our national interest. International cooperation is in our national interest. We need to have grand civic dialogue about what we might be able to do here to change the direction of the nation. It certainly needs change. We can spend an extra forty-five billion dollars this year for military when they can't even keep track of their own budget, and still we have forty-two million people without adequate health insurance, senior citizens splitting pills in order to try to meet their health requirements and still protect their budget. We have schools that are still falling apart with programs that don't work. We have so much to do. Yet, society is becoming militarized."  "People want change. The fifteen thousand emails in the last three weeks told me that people want a different direction. I think they are representative of millions of Americans who want to take a different approach. They don't want to be trapped into a condition that the level of support for war is equated with patriotism."  Our country has yet to have that dialogue, and things have only gotten worse. The Nation republished the speech yesterday with a new introduction penned by Kucinich. - SMG/RSN 

When the war in Libya began, the U.S. government convinced a large number of war supporters that we were there to achieve the very limited goal of creating a no-fly zone in Benghazi to protect civilians from air attacks, while President Obama specifically vowed that "broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake."  This no-fly zone was created in the first week, yet now, almost three months later, the war drags on without any end in sight, and NATO is no longer even hiding what has long been obvious: that its real goal is exactly the one Obama vowed would not be pursued -- regime change through the use of military force.  We're in Libya to forcibly remove Gaddafi from power and replace him with a regime that we like better, i.e., one that is more accommodating to the interests of the West.  That's not even a debatable proposition at this point. What I suppose is debatable, in the most generous sense of that term, is our motive in doing this.  Why -- at a time when American political leaders feel compelled to advocate politically radioactive budget cuts to reduce the deficit and when polls show Americans solidly and increasingly opposed to the war -- would the U.S. Government continue to spend huge sums of money to fight this war?  Why is President Obama willing to endure self-evidently valid accusations -- even from his own Party -- that he's fighting an illegal war by brazenly flouting the requirements for Congressional approval?  Why would Defense Secretary Gates risk fissures by so angrily and publicly chiding NATO allies for failing to build more Freedom Bombs to devote to the war?  And why would we, to use the President's phrase, "stand idly by" while numerous other regimes -- including our close allies in Bahrain and Yemen and the one in Syria -- engage in attacks on their own people at least as heinous as those threatened by Gaddafi, yet be so devoted to targeting the Libyan leader?

One of the most bewildering aspects of the current health care debate is the failure to learn key lessons from health systems abroad. Conservative talk show hosts decry the alleged evils of "socialized medicine" in countries with universal health coverage; they warn grimly of rationed health care. Yet there's nary a peep from Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck - let alone Congress - about countries such as Germany, France, Switzerland or Japan, where coverage is universal, affordable, and top quality, and patients see private doctors with little or no waiting. And, oh yes, their health costs are a fraction of our bloated numbers: The French spend 10 percent of GDP on health care, the Germans 11 percent, and they cover every citizen. We spend a whopping 17 percent and leave tens of millions of Americans uninsured. If you want a very readable short course on how European systems really work, take a look at "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care," by T.R. Reid, a former Washington Post foreign correspondent. You might also watch a fascinating 2008 Frontline series, available online, in which Reid was an adviser: "Sick Around the World: Can the U.S. Learn Anything From the Rest of the World About How to Run a Health Care System?"

Article continued (Diigo would not highlight!?) - So far, the answer seems to be "no," not because there aren't valuable lessons, but because politicians won't relinquish their myths about European health Advertisement systems. Reid takes up that task. Myth No. 1, he says, is that foreign systems with universal coverage are all "socialized medicine." In countries such as France, Germany, Switzerland, and Japan, the coverage is universal while doctors and insurers are private. Individuals get their insurance through their workplace, sharing the premium with their employer as we do - and the government picks up the premium if they lose their job. Myth No. 2 - long waits and rationed care - is another whopper. "In many developed countries," Reid writes, "people have quicker access to care and more choice than Americans do." In France, Germany, and Japan, you can pick any provider or hospital in the country. Care is speedy and high quality, and no one is turned down. Myth No. 3 really grabs my attention: the delusion that countries with universal care "are wasteful systems run by bloated bureaucracies." In fact, the opposite is true. America's for-profit health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs of any developed country. Twenty percent or more of every premium dollar goes to nonmedical costs: paperwork, marketing, profits, etc. In developed countries with universal coverage, such as France and Germany, the administrative costs average about 5 percent. That's because every developed country but ours has decided health insurance should be a nonprofit operation. These countries also hold down costs by making coverage mandatory and by using a unified set of rules and payment schedules for all hospitals and doctors. This does not mean a single-payer system or a government-run health system. But it does sharply cut health costs by eliminating the mishmash of records and charges used by our myriad insurance firms, who use all kinds of gimmi

Burma is a country with about 0.7 million Muslim population out of total 75 million population. Muslims in Burma have been suffering badly since the year 1962 after the military took over. Since then thousands of Muslims have been killed and thousands of women have been raped but the recent wave of violence is worse than all the previous incidents. Almost every family of Muslims is a victim of Buddhist led regime of Burma. Suffering from such deliberate genocide, many of the Muslims have been compelled to leave their houses and migrate to neighboring countries. The most sad and tragic aspect of this genocide is that nobody is willing to speak against this cruelty. The entire mainstream media is showing criminal silence upon this mass killing going on in Burma against Muslims. We are not seeing any projection for Burmese Muslims in British Broadcasting Corporation, Cable News Network; Fox New, Bloomberg, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and other mainstream print and electronic sections of the media. The response from various Human Rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and others is also very tragic and disappointed. These human rights organizations have failed to project this inhuman genocide against Muslims which is going on in Burma. Like is the case with international platforms or so called representatives of the world. The United Nations Organizations also failed to show significant and powerful response against mass killings of Muslims in Burma. The only considerable response we have seen yet is from the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) and a few Islamic countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan etc. Similarly, social media campaigns are also projecting this inhuman incident effectively; there are a number of pages on Facebook and other social media websites that are raising voice for this cause.

What amazes me most whenever I write about this topic is recalling how terribly upset so many Democrats pretended to be when Bush claimed the power merely to detain or even just eavesdrop on American citizens without due process.  Remember all that?  Yet now, here's Obama claiming the power not to detain or eavesdrop on citizens without due process, but to kill them; marvel at how the hardest-core White House loyalists now celebrate this and uncritically accept the same justifying rationale used by Bush/Cheney (this is war! the President says he was a Terrorist!) without even a moment of acknowledgment of the profound inconsistency or the deeply troubling implications of having a President - even Barack Obama - vested with the power to target U.S. citizens for murder with no due process. Also, during the Bush years, civil libertarians who tried to convince conservatives to oppose that administration's radical excesses would often ask things like this: would you be comfortable having Hillary Clinton wield the power to spy on your calls or imprison you with no judicial reivew or oversight?  So for you good progressives out there justifying this, I would ask this:  how would the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process look to you in the hands of, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann?

The US imagines itself a great democracy, yet most Americans despise its politics. Which is why direct democracy inspires them

Although it happened before my physical existence, yet my mother's memories with emergency keeps those 21-months of Political unrest alive as if I experienced them personally.

Under the guise of religious consciousness and First Amendment rights, Conservatives are mounting yet another assault on women's health and freedom that would deny millions of women access to affordable contraception. While the challenge scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court was not brought by Catholics, it's all the same to me. Besides, they were the loudest and most aggressive in their objections. So, I decided to repost this information I presented during the 2010 debate because the objections represents the epitome of hypocrisy and false morality to me.

As soon as the news was reported that Gen. David Petraeus is succeeding soon-to-be-retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, the media narrative was set in stone: the super-general who won the war in Iraq with the so-called surge can now work his magic in another theater. It's hard to stop a locomotive meme-which is what the surge story has become. But the success of the surge in Iraq remains debatable to this day. Still, try injecting that point into media discussions of Iraq or Afghanistan. Yet with Petraeus taking over the Afghanistan war, it's worth noting the other side of the surge tale. So as a public service, here are a few analyses that question the surge hype.

The Great Recession could have spawned another era of fundamental reform, just as the Great Depression did. But the financial rescue reduced immediate demands for broader reform. Obama might still have succeeded had he framed the challenge accurately. Yet in reassuring the public that the economy would return to normal, he missed a key opportunity to expose the longer-term scourge of widening inequality and its dangers. Containing the immediate financial crisis and then claiming the economy was on the mend left the public with a diffuse set of economic problems that seemed unrelated and inexplicable, as if a town's fire chief dealt with a conflagration by protecting the biggest office buildings but leaving smaller fires simmering all over town: housing foreclosures, job losses, lower earnings, less economic security, soaring pay on Wall Street and in executive suites.

Good economic news has been virtually extinct in Ohio for a few years now, but Gov. Ted Strickland suddenly finds himself overseeing small yet hopeful moments of recovery:

Jobs were offered by the White House Chief and Deputy Chief of Staff to clear the field in primary elections, yet President Obama did not know about it? Sounds a little far fetched to me.

Without online technologies, Barack Obama would never have gotten past the primaries. Had Facebook, YouTube, texting, a 13-million name email list and a website developed by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes been absent from his campaign, he would never have raised enough money, been seen and heard by enough people, or enlisted enough volunteers. Yet progressive hopes are faltering, not only because of Obama's compromises and mistakes and Republican intransigence, but also because far too many of his supporters have come to believe they can act exclusively through these online technologies, to the exclusion of face-to-face politics.

BP and the government say the spill is fast disappearing-but dramatic new science reveals that its worst effects may be yet to come.

There's no doubting the conservative bona fides of Bruce Fein. A high-level Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration in the 1980s and previously a resident scholar with the Heritage Foundation, he is a long-time advocate for uncompromising right-wing political principles. Yet paradoxically, Fein has been, and remains, one of the most eloquent and incisive political voices over the last decade. He was one of the earliest and most emphatic critics of Bush and Cheney's radical abuses of executive power. Two weeks after The New York Times revealed in December, 2005, that Bush had ordered the NSA to illegally eavesdrop on Americans without the warrants required by law, Fein used his column in the right-wing Washington Times to warn that "Mr. Bush has adamantly refused to acknowledge any constitutional limitations on his power to wage war indefinitely"; to scorn as "war powers nonsense" the theories assembled "to defend Mr.

Both the Irish and Middle Eastern conflicts figure prominently in American domestic politics - yet both have played out in very different ways.

"The figures on Muslim rape of Western women in Europe are astounding. In Denmark and Norway, between 65% and 70% of all rapes are committed by Muslims, who as yet still less than 5% of the population. One local judge in Norway actually exonerated one rapist by accepting his defense that the victim's dress was taken by him to mean that she was egging him on. Her dress was nothing special to Norwegians, but the judge found it to be unbearably provocative to this poor Muslim immigrant. A curious argument, is it not? Even if she had been dressed a la Gisele Bundchen doing a shoot for Victoria's Secret -- and she of course was not -- rape is not an acceptable response."

This is a re-imagined Donald Duck cartoon remix constructed using 50 classic Walt Disney cartoons from the 1930s to 1960s. Donald's life is turned upside-down by the current economic crisis and he finds himself unemployed and falling behind on his house payments. As his frustration turns into despair Donald discovers a seemingly sympathetic voice coming from his radio named Glenn Beck.   Will Donald's feelings of disenfranchisement lead him to be persuaded by his radio's increasingly paranoid and divisive rhetoric? Or will our favorite Disney duck decide that this voice is not actually on his side after all? Watch and find out!   * Listen to Glenn Beck's response on his radio show to this remix video: YouTube via stopbeck.org - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHHByFFSh54  * Better yet check out ikat381's remix of Beck's response using Mickey Mouse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbjjTLVrkKA  This transformative remix work constitutes a fair-use of any copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US copyright law. "Right Wing Radio Duck" by Jonathan McIntosh is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License - permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.  * Please link back to my website: http://www.rebelliouspixels.com * English captions are now working in case you're not fluent in duck-speak  * Learn about fair-use at the Center for Social Media: http://centerforsocialmedia.org * Learn about transformative works at the OTW: http://transformativeworks.org * Useful Media Matters archive of Glenn Beck clips: http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Jonathan McIntosh http://www.rebelliouspixels.com * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *  List of Cartoons used:  * Window Cleaner - 1940 * Lucky Number - 1951 * Symphony Hour - 1942 (Mickey Mouse Cartoon)  * Put-Put Troubles - 1940 * Donald's Dilemma -19