From uExpress
By Ted Rall

Pro-Obama political cartoonists have drawn variations of the same cartoon: the president, in the role of badgered parent on a family trip, is driving a car labeled “The Economy.” The American public, depicted as Uncle Sam or Joe Average, whines: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”

With official unemployment approaching 10 percent and underemployment at 16.5 percent, Americans are running out of money–and patience. Obama’s approval ratings are down between 15 and 20 points, meaning that he has lost one in six Americans. His biggest weakness: the economy.

“I think the public knows three things: We inherited a total mess; we’re working hard on it; and we’re not going to get out of it overnight,” says Chief White House propagandist Rahm Emanuel. That part is true.

The trouble for Obama is that people don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. “The key to what this year is about is rescuing the economy from falling off the cliff and trying to put in place the building blocks of recovery”–i.e., bailing out the banks, insurers and automakers, says Emanuel. That’s what 2009 has been about for Obama. But for ordinary Americans, 2009 is about keeping or finding a job.

Creating jobs, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to be an Obama Administration priority.

Were the bailouts necessary? Economists won’t know for years. What we do know is that the Administration’s approach won’t give the American people what they want and need more than anything else: jobs.

Read more Jobs

From The NY Observer
By Joe Conason

“Fiscal conservative” is one of those terms used by politicians of all sorts to describe themselves, without any real justification. Parroted mindlessly from one news cycle to the next by major media outlets, that phrase is often used to mislead the public about the priorities and policies favored by those who claim to embody budgetary prudence.

Consider the Democrats in the Blue Dog caucus, who constantly trumpet their fiscal conservatism and enjoy hearing that claim echoed in the media, especially now, when they are threatening to block health care reform. The Blue Dogs don’t like the public option for national health insurance; they bemoan the estimated trillion-dollar cost of covering everyone; and they zealously defend the prerogatives of the private insurance industry and the pharmaceutical manufacturers (who coincidentally give them millions of dollars in contributions). When it comes to spending money on the health of uninsured or underinsured constituents, the Blue Dogs worry about every penny.

But when the budget debate turns to military spending, the voices of the Blue Dogs suddenly turn sweetly indulgent. Confronted with the gross waste of taxpayer dollars on Pentagon boondoggles, including weapons programs that are outdated or simply don’t work, these fierce budget watchdogs lose their bark and bite. But they never lose their appetite for useless contracting that brings money to their own districts.

The F-22 fighter plane, touted as the most advanced military aircraft in the world, offers a fine example of this syndrome. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is trying to cut the F-22 program because the planes don’t function very well, aren’t needed in the foreseeable future and cost nearly $400 million each.

Read more Blue Dog Math

From The Consortium News
By Jason Leopold

The Obama administration asserted a legal argument that a federal judge called the Jon Stewart “Daily Show exemption,” as the Justice Department continued a court fight to protect ex-Vice President Dick Cheney from disclosures about his role in the leak of a CIA officer’s identity six years ago.

At a federal court hearing Tuesday, Jeffrey Smith, an attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Division, argued that the transcript of Cheney’s 2004 interview with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald about the CIA leak should remain secret for as long as 10 more years.

Last month, Smith cited the possibility that the transcript’s release might discourage future vice presidents from cooperating with criminal investigations because their words could become “fodder for The Daily Show.”

When Smith revived that argument on Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan said, “You’re getting back to the Daily Show exemption. You’re not going back there, are you?”

A skeptical Sullivan asked Smith, “How do you distinguish the political fray from the public’s right to know what the government is up to?”

Smith said he was simply arguing that high-level officials like Cheney would be unwilling to speak to criminal investigators if there was a chance that what they said privately would become public. “Presidents don’t really have to cooperate if they really don’t want to,” Smith said.

Read more Cheney

From In These Times
By James Thindwa

The Republican Party’s recent passion for “democracy” in the Middle East has been on full display. Republican leaders have called for unqualified support for Iranian demonstrators, condemned the Iranian regime and castigated President Obama for not speaking out more forcefully.

Beating the drums for democracy can be inspiring, but, in international affairs, the credibility of the messenger is as important as the message itself.

Setting aside their foolish demands for direct U.S. intervention in Iranian elections, Republican leaders are the wrong messengers for democracy—especially in the Middle East. Their post-9/11 disdain for Arabs and Islam, complicity in the illegal war in Iraq, and profound disregard for Palestinian rights makes them ill-suited to champion democracy in the region. Another disqualifying offense is that Republicans have all but declared war on democracy at home.

Throughout the Bush era, the GOP freely indulged its leaders’ anti-democratic impulses. Unfazed by constitutional constraints, the party leaders rammed the Patriot Act through a cowed and compliant Congress. Now, as they call for more street protests in Tehran, Republicans seem oblivious to the restrictions that law has imposed on American protesters.

The Patriot Act’s “disruptor” crime category gives the Secret Service wide latitude to charge protesters for “disrupting major events including political conventions and the Olympics.” It also empowers the Secret Service to charge people with “breaching security” and for “entering a restricted area,” which is “where the President or other personnel are protected by the Secret Service [when they are] or will be temporarily visiting.”

Read more GOP

From The Asia Times
By David Bromwich

On July 16, in a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the “central question” for the defense of the United States was how the military should be “organized, equipped – and funded – in the years ahead, to win the wars we are in while being prepared for threats on or beyond the horizon.” The phrase “beyond the horizon” ought to sound ominous. Was Gates telling his audience of civic-minded business leaders to spend more money on defense in order to counter threats whose very existence no one could answer for? Given the public acceptance of American militarism, he could speak in the knowledge that the awkward challenge would never be posed.

We have begun to talk casually about our wars; and this should be surprising for several reasons. To begin with, in the history of the United States war has never been considered the normal state of things. For two centuries, Americans were taught to think war itself an aberration, and “wars” in the plural could only have seemed doubly aberrant. Younger generations of Americans, however, are now being taught to expect no end of war – and no end of wars.

For anyone born during World War II, or in the early years of the Cold War, the hope of international progress toward the reduction of armed conflict remains a palpable memory. After all, the menace of the Axis powers, whose state apparatus was fed by wars, had been stopped definitively by the concerted action of Soviet Russia, Great Britain and the United States. The founding of the United Nations extended a larger hope for a general peace. Organizations like the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and the Union of Concerned Scientists reminded people in the West, as well as in the Communist bloc, of a truth that everyone knew already: the world had to advance beyond war.

Read more Endless War

From TruthDig
By Reese Erlich

Walter Cronkite, who died Friday, may be best known for his 1968 CBS commentaries declaring that the United States could not win the Vietnam War. Less known is that he had been a strong supporter of the war before then.

Cronkite was the consummate mainstream journalist. His thoroughness as a reporter and his smooth delivery on television earned him worldwide respect. But while holding down the CBS anchor chair, he didn’t go too far outside the political mainstream. He criticized Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s repression of demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and he raised concerns about Watergate before the 1972 election. But those were the exceptions.

Walter narrated three documentaries I produced for public radio from 2000 to 2005. So we had a chance to talk many times, and I counted him among my friends. I don’t know how he counted me.

I think he truly blossomed after he left the constraints of the anchor chair in 1981. He was able to freely express his New Deal liberal viewpoints. He opposed U.S. aggression abroad, supported a woman’s right to choose an abortion and opposed U.S. nuclear weapons policies.

I once told him that, like Jimmy Carter, he had gotten better after he left office. Walter only smiled and chuckled.

Read more Opinions

From The Public Record
By Thomas D. Williams

Despite years of ongoing, critical public health controversies in Colombia and Ecuador over the US-assisted aerial herbicide spraying of coca and poppy crops while trying to reduce illegal cocaine and heroin production, US State Department officials are pursuing that very same spraying strategy.

In fact, last year, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s administration temporarily cast aside the latest of several State Department exhortations to begin massive herbal spraying operations on poppy crops producing heroin there.

Colombian aerosol dusting of a mix of Roundup Ultra, Cosmo-Flux and other plant-penetrating agents began seven years ago. (In 2006 alone, the United Nations reported the spraying of approximately 172,025 hectares of coca crops, producing cocaine. That equals a bit over 664 square miles.)

In the meantime, untold thousands of Colombians and Ecuadorians have become sick from the blended chemical spray. Studies have shown the environmental dangers of inhalation and skin and eye saturation of the floating mist. And critically valuable maize, yucca and plantains have been destroyed in large swaths of the fertile country.

For years, DynCorp International of Fort Worth, Texas, has had the lucrative US multimillion-dollar annual contract for Colombian aerial spraying operations.

The company is being sued in Washington, DC, and US District Court by a class of 3,000 Ecuadorians who claim spray blown over the border from Colombia has sickened them.

Read more Spraying

From Wired
By Alexis Madrigal

Mysterious, glowing clouds previously seen almost exclusively in Earth’s polar regions have appeared in the skies over the United States and Europe over the past several days.

Photographers and other sky watchers in Omaha, Paris, Seattle, and other locations have run outside to capture images of what scientists call noctilucent (”night shining”) clouds. Formed by ice literally at the boundary where the earth’s atmosphere meets space 50 miles up, they shine because they are so high that they remain lit by the sun even after our star is below the horizon.

The clouds might be beautiful, but they could portend global changes caused by global warming. Noctilucent clouds are a fundamentally new phenomenon in the temperate mid-latitude sky, and it’s not clear why they’ve migrated down from the poles. Or why, over the last 25 years, more of them are appearing in the polar regions, too, and shining more brightly.

“That’s a real concern and question,” said James Russell, an atmospheric scientist at Hampton University and the principal investigator of an ongoing NASA satellite mission to study the clouds. “Why are they getting more numerous? Why are they getting brighter? Why are they appearing at lower latitudes?”

Nobody knows for sure, but most of the answers seem to point to human-caused global atmospheric change.

Read more Glowing Clouds

From The Guardian UK
By Chris McGreal

Teenage pregnancies and syphilis have risen sharply among a generation of American school girls who were urged to avoid sex before marriage under George Bush’s evangelically-driven education policy, according to a new report by the US’s major public health body.

In a report that will surprise few of Bush’s critics on the issue, the Centres for Disease Control says years of falling rates of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease infections under previous administrations were reversed or stalled in the Bush years. According to the CDC, birth rates among teenagers aged 15 or older had been in decline since 1991 but are up sharply in more than half of American states since 2005. The study also revealed that the number of teenage females with syphilis has risen by nearly half after a significant decrease while a two-decade fall in the gonorrhea infection rate is being reversed. The number of Aids cases in adolescent boys has nearly doubled.

The CDC says that southern states, where there is often the greatest emphasis on abstinence and religion, tend to have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs.

In addition, about 16,000 pregnancies were reported among 10- to 14-year-old girls in 2004 and a similar number of young people in the age group reported having a sexually transmitted disease.

“It is disheartening that after years of improvement with respect to teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, we now see signs that progress is stalling and many of these trends are going in the wrong direction,” said Janet Collins, a CDC director.

Read more Bush Years

From Global Research
By F. William Engdahl

The US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, has just signed a decree granting vaccine makers total legal immunity from any lawsuits that result from any new “Swine Flu” vaccine. Moreover, the $7 billion US Government fast-track program to rush vaccines onto the market in time for the Autumn flu season is being done without even normal safety testing. Is there another agenda at work in the official WHO hysteria campaign to declare so-called H1N1 virus—which has yet to be rigorously scientifically isolated, characterized and photographed with an electron microscope—the scientifically accepted procedure—a global “pandemic” threat?

The current official panic campaign over alleged Swine Flu danger is rapidly taking on the dimensions of a George Orwell science fiction novel. The document signed by Sebelius grants immunity to those making a swine flu vaccine, under the provisions of a 2006 law for public health emergencies.

Not so sage SAGE

That is once the WHO in Geneva, on recommendation of the WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group on Immunizations, declared H1N1 to be Phase 6 or Pandemic, automatic emergency health response programs could be activated even in countries such as Germany where reported outbreaks of even “suspected” H1N1 can be counted to date on the fingers of slightly more than one hand.

The WHO’s SAGE is also worth scrutiny. Its Chairman since 2005 has been the UK Director of Immunization at the British Department of Health, Dr David Salisbury. In the 1980’s Salisbury reportedly drew major fire for backing a massive vaccination of children with a multiple MMR vaccine manufactured by the predecessor company of GlaxoSmithKline. That vaccine was pulled off the market in Japan after significant numbers of children developed adverse reactions to the vaccine and the Japanese government was forced to pay significant compensation to the victims. In Sweden the MMR vaccine of GlaxoSmithKline was removed after scientists linked it to outbreaks of Crohn’s disease. Apparently that had little impact on WHO SAGE chairman Salisbury.

Read more Immunity