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The answer to the deficit is pretty easy in my opinion. Get out of the war business, get corporate money out of politics, get rid of extravagant spending and make the rich pay their fair share. What follows is an article on how taxing the super rich will help us find the “missing” money in our budget. by Robert Reich.
To read, click here
Unbelievable! You can’t bat an eye. Last Tuesday the Arizona Senate passed a bill that would prohibit malpractice suits against anti-abortion doctors who withhold important information from a patient they fear might lead her to seek an abortion. Nine states have quietly slipped such laws on the books.
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/03/09/az-allowing-doctors-to-practice-bad-medicine
It was too much for many newspapers, but if you want to see the banned Doonesbury,
click here
The recent massacre in Afghanistan should not be seen as an aberration. It is time to realize that modern war is too terrible to be justified by any traditional philosophic argument for a just war. I will list five reasons why modern war has become too horrific to solve our problems, if it ever did.
National boundaries are now too unclear. Modern geopolitics are so complicated, that we can no longer think in the simple terms of friends and enemies. As Pakistan has demonstrated, the same nation can be friend or enemy depending on the situation.
Our own interests are too conflicted. At this point, industry and war are too intertwined to discern our own motives.
Our Weapons are too terrible. No ancient philosopher could have imagined weapons that cause birth defects lifetimes after their usage. Depleted uranium and cluster bombs are such terrible weapons that many more innocent lives are affected than are intended targets.
Modern urban war is so traumatic that human beings simply can’t cope. The danger is too close. You can’t tell who the enemy is. You must make rapid decisions. You have at your command a power you barely understand. It’s not a question of “a few bad apples” making good soldiers look bad. Most people have a breaking point and if they are holding a weapon when they do, it will be hell for someone.
We are too ignorant of the rest of the world. Americans are so isolated and insulated from the rest of the world that our interventions into the affairs of others are inevitably ham-handed. If we don’t care enough about the rest of the world to learn their languages or even their stories, we don’t care enough to save them from the dangers we imagine them facing.
According to this report, the gunman groped and insulted the women as he killed friends and family members. For many in the US every one of these violations of human rights large and small is an unexplainable glitch in an otherwise sterling and virtuous enterprise. For many who live in other countries each of these monstrosities is one further example of why the death grip of the US Empire on their lives has to be broken by any means necessary.
To read, click here
Many voices are calling for the US to intervene in Syria. The Pentagon released statements cautioning against rushing into yet another military venture.
To read, click here.
The Russian newspaper Pravda ran the headline “U.S./NATO forces have invated Syria.” Wikileaks recently released similar information. The Russian ambassador also made the claim before the Security Counsel of the UN. “We have information that in Libya, with support from the ‘authorities’, there is a special training center for Syrian rebels, and groups are sent from there to Syria, to attack the legal government,” said Churkin. He added: “It is completely unacceptable. This practice is undermining stability in the Middle East.” No way to tell from this distance, but it doesn’t hurt to listen to all the voices:
To read the Pravda article, click here.
I.F. Stone was one of the greatest reporters of all times. When asked what he knew that helped him break so many international stories he responded in three words: “All governments, lie.” At the same time the US was talking about leaving Iraq, it was building a fortress like embassy as large as the Vatican. Now, according to the UK Guardian, at the same time Obama is promising to leave Afghanistan, secret talks are being held to extend that stay for decades. “To read, click here.
In a disturbing report, The centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that HIV among African-American women was five times highr than thought, and that one in thirty-two black women will be diagnosed with the disease in their lifetime.