NewsTrust - All Rated Stories

Kipling Haunts Obama's Afghan War

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Ray McGovern - Nov. 01 (Editorial) - The White Man's Burden, a phrase immortalized by English poet Rudyard Kipling as an excuse for European-American imperialism, was front and center Thursday morning (October 29) at a RAND-sponsored discussion of Afghanistan in the Russell Senate Office Building.???? The agenda was top-heavy with RAND speakers, and the thinking was decidedly "inside the box" - so much so, that I found myself repeating a verse from Kipling, who recognized the dangers of imperialism, to remind me of the real world: It is not wise for the Christian white To hustle the Asian brown; For the Christian riles And the Asian smiles And weareth the Christian down. At the end of the fight Lies a tombstone white With the name of the late deceased; And the epitaph drear, A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East. With a few notable exceptions, the RAND event offered conventional wisdom to a fare-thee-well.

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A Simpleton Tries to Understand the Health Care Debate

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By William Fisher - Oct. 25 (Opinion) - After all, these two things are not the same. Insurance companies are not in the health care business. They are in the risk business. They assess risk and then charge you a fee - it's called a premium - to protect you against that risk. Just like your car or your home insurance. If your car gets wrecked, the insurance company doesn't make it better; it gives you money so that you can make it better.

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Obama Administration Accused Again of Concealing Bush-Era Crimes

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Matt Renner - Oct. 14 (News Report) - the Obama administration has sought to conceal information in several high-profile court cases, in an effort that civil libertarians say amounts to covering up crimes committed by the Bush administration. Last week, in a federal courthouse in New York, Obama's Justice Department attorneys again argued in favor of secrecy.

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Unintended Consequences in Nuclear Pakistan

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthDig - By Fred Branfman - Oct. 09 (News Report) - If U.S. military leaders are right that they cannot prevail in Afghanistan without escalating into Pakistan, this is the strongest possible argument for withdrawing from Afghanistan. For nothing, not even Taliban rule in Kabul, could justify allowing the tiny Afghan tail to wag a giant, nuclear-armed Pakistani dog whose stability is clearly America’s very top priority in the region. Further instability in Pakistan would only benefit al-Qaida, which has already made deep inroads into Pakistan and is unlikely to return to Afghanistan even if the U.S. withdraws from there. Former N.Y. Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer is right: “It should be engraved on the minds of every American diplomat: Do nothing that will further destabilize Pakistan” (from the “Rethink Afghanistan” video).

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Why Obama Must Spend More

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Joe Conason, - Oct. 08 (Opinion) - The latest signals from the White House suggest that President Obama now realizes he must do more - and quickly - to ease the economic suffering of working families. He knows that most Americans believe his administration and Congress have so far provided more help to major banks and Wall Street investment firms than to workers and small companies, as a survey released by pollster Peter Hart reported recently.

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Marching Backwards: The Spectacle of Fear

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By John Cory - Oct. 03 (Opinion) - Glenn Beck is not original, nor was Joe McCarthy. The "red scare" of McCarthyism was merely the recycled red scare of the 1920's, when Attorney General Mitchell Palmer and his right-hand assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, conducted warrantless raids on union halls and labor organizations deemed socialists or communists for their suspected anti-American, anti-corporate beliefs.

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Advocates Fight Mountaintop Removal

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Matthew Cardinale - Oct. 02 (News) - Environmental groups across the southeast United States, from Georgia to the Appalachia region, are stepping up their opposition to a controversial but widespread practice by coal companies of removing the tops of mountains with explosives.

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Banning a Book Near You

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Connie Schultz - Sep. 30 (Opinion) - Hopkins told me she has received thousands of letters from teenagers who say her books helped them turn their lives around. She also said she is seeing an uptick in attempts by individual parents to ban books by her and other authors, and she thinks she knows why.

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The Republican War Against ACORN

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Jason Leopold - Sep. 27 (News Report) - In recent days, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other major news outlets have recounted the "troubled" history of the poor people's advocacy group ACORN, but left out the five-year anti-ACORN campaign led by White House adviser Karl Rove and other Republican operatives.

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Data Reveals California's Private Insurers Deny 21 Percent of Claims

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Amy Goodman - Sep. 09 (News Report) - The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee has released new data that shows one in every five requests made for medical claims by insured patients, even when recommended by a physician, are rejected by California's largest private insurers.

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Flushing Blackwater

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Jeremy Scahill - Sep. 03 (News) - In addition, Blackwater is being investigated by the Justice Department for possible crimes ranging from weapons smuggling to manslaughter and by the IRS for possible tax evasion. It is being sued in federal courts by scores of Iraqi civilians for alleged war crimes and extrajudicial killings. Two of its men have pleaded guilty to weapons-smuggling charges; another pleaded guilty to the unprovoked manslaughter of an Iraqi civilian, and five others have been indicted on similar counts. The US military is investigating Blackwater's killing of civilians in Afghanistan in May, and reports are emerging that the company may be implicated in the CIA's extraordinary rendition program.

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Joe Scarborough Is Shocked, Yet Awed by Single-Payer Logic

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By 9 Leslie Savan - Aug. 21 (News) - Something rather remarkable happened on Tuesday's Morning Joe. Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York pointed out that the health insurance industry has no clothes, and Joe Scarborough, after first trying to spin it some gossamer threads, broke down and said, By God, you're right, this emperor is a naked money-making machine

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Israel's Jerusalem Evictions Defy Obama, Undermine Peace Process

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Dan Murphy - Aug. 03 (News) - On Monday, three people protesting the eviction were arrested by the police. The two families had lived in the homes for almost 50 years. They moved into the neighborhood after being evicted from their homes in West Jerusalem in 1947 by Israeli forces.

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Cohn-Bendit Advocates "Revolutionary" Carbon Tax

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Pierre-Alain Furbury, Lucie Robequain - Jul. 31 (Interview) - Michel Rocard, president of the Conference of Experts on the "climate-energy tax," must hand in proposals to Christine Lagarde and Jean-Louis Borloo. The former prime minister envisions the establishment, by 2010, of a carbon tax on fossil energy, but also on electricity. The cost would be 32 euros per ton of CO2 emitted next year and 100 euros as of 2030.

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Afghanistan War Resister to "Put the War on Trial"

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Dahr Jamail - Jul. 14 (News Report) - "What I did there, I know I contributed to death and human suffering," Agosto told Truthout from Fort Hood, in Killeen, Texas, in May, "It's hard to quantify how much I caused, but I know I contributed to it."

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Kicking the Nuclear Habit

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Lawrence Wittner - Jun. 27 (Opinion) - Six reasons for supporting nuclear abolition are particularly cogent.

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Some Observations on the Iranian Presidential Election and Its Aftermath

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Phil Wilayto - Jun. 19 (Opinion) - In my opinion, both of the above characterizations are superficial. The fundamental contradiction between the two leading candidates has to do with their respective bases of support and, more importantly, their different approaches to the economy.

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Teachers File Racial Discrimination Suit Against School "Turnaround" Plan

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Bruce A. Dixon - Jun. 17 (Opinion) - Turning schools into test-prep centers doesn't improve the quality of education. Neither does repeating the corporate propaganda about our schools being 'dropout factories,' as Arne Duncan does. What works are resources, stability, parent and community involvement and smaller class sizes. Schools in wealthier neighborhoods have all these things.

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"Clean" Energy and Poisoned Water

Mon, 25 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Chris Hedges - May. 25 (Opinion) - Corporations in Colorado, Texas, Louisiana, Pennsylvania and upstate New York have launched a massive program to extract natural gas through a process that could, if it goes wrong, degrade the Delaware River watershed and the fresh water supplies that feed upstate communities, the metropolitan cities of New York, Philadelphia, Camden and Trenton, and many others on its way to the Chesapeake Bay. "The potential environmental consequences are extreme," says Fritz Mayer, editor of The River Reporter in Narrowsburg, N.Y. His paper has been following the drilling in the Upper Delaware River Valley and he told me, "It could ruin the drinking supply for 8 million people in New York City."

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Fixing America, Erasing Bush

Mon, 25 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By William Rivers Pitt, - May. 25 (Opinion) - issues of torture and secrecy lead directly to the office of the President of the United States, and the manner in which Mr. Obama has proceeded thus far offends the very nature of the nation he presumes to lead. Mr. Obama sang the praises of our founding documents on Thursday, while failing utterly to live up to the oath he swore to them.

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US Courts - Enemies of Education?

Fri, 08 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Davic Bacon - May. 08 (Opinion) - chermerinsky believes that without popular pressure and new judicial appointments that reverse the present course, the right to education will be further contricte3d, and even lost....the supreme court has.....[undermined] the right to education.

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DOJ Report Reaches "Damning" Conclusions for Bybee and Yoo

Wed, 06 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Jason Leopold, - May. 06 (News Analysis) - News reports published on Tuesday, describing details of Jarrett's report, said it specifically states that neither Yoo nor Bybee, should be prosecuted for drafting the legal memoranda that sanctioned torture. But it would be unusual for an ethics report to make a definitive statement against prosecutions as that is usually left to the attorney general. Indeed, according to OPR policies and procedures, "If OPR determines that professional misconduct or poor judgment occurred, it prepares a report containing its findings and conclusions, and provides that report to the Deputy Attorney General as well as the appropriate Assistant Attorney General, the Director of [Executive Office of US Attorneys], or other appropriate component head.

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Mortgaging the White House

Sat, 02 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Bill Moyers, Michael Winship - May. 02 (Opinion) - President Obama's been busy, but contrary to many of the pundits, he's no FDR. Our new president got his political education in the world of Chicago ward politics, and seems to have adopted a strategy from the machine of that city's longtime boss, the late Richard J. Daley, father of the current mayor there. "Don't make no waves," one of Daley's henchmen advised, "don't back no losers."

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Torture Used to Link Saddam With 9/11

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Marjorie Cohn - Apr. 26 (Opinion) - Obama's intent to immunize those who violated our laws banning torture and cruel treatment violates the president's constitutional duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

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"... The Horrible Truth"

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Dahr Jamail - Apr. 26 (Opinion) - The Sahwa have been abandoning their security posts in protest at having not been paid by the Iraqi government for their work, as well as in protest of the ongoing targeting of their leaders by the government. Prime Minister Maliki perceives the Sahwa as a political threat to the existence of his government, so has taken it upon himself to undermine their existence at every turn, as he has from the beginning.

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