Clippings for 7 June 2009

Domestic Terrorism by Any Standard
Joe Conason writes for Truthdig: "If right-wing broadcasters don’t want to be blamed when someone murders a person they have demonized repeatedly—as in the case of George Tiller, the doctor shot dead in his Wichita, Kan., church last Sunday by an anti-abortion zealot—then they ought to moderate their rhetoric. No doubt they will choose their words more carefully for a while, and they will whine piteously about anyone who calls attention to their screaming extremism."

Confronting the CIA's Mind Maze
Alfred W. McCoy writes for TomDispatch.com: "If, like me, you've been following America's torture policies not just for the last few years, but for decades, you can't help but experience that eerie feeling of deja vu these days. With the departure of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from Washington and the arrival of Barack Obama, it may just be back to the future when it comes to torture policy, a turn away from a dark, do-it-yourself ethos and a return to the outsourcing of torture that went on, with the support of both Democrats and Republicans, in the Cold War years."

Recommended Audio-Visual: The National at War
From the Civil War to Afghanistan, images of military conflicts and efforts to create a lasting peace.

Europe Agrees to Terms for Accepting Guantanamo Detainees
Ian Traynor reports for The Guardian UK: "European countries yesterday agreed terms for taking in dozens of detainees from Guantanamo Bay, boosting President Barack Obama's plan to close the detention camp."

An Interesting Take on Gitmo Prisoners
The Left Brian writes of Kansas Jackass: "Pat Roberts and Lynn Jenkins will do ANYTHING to help win the war on terror....except let those detainees be housed in a certain military prison that just HAPPENS to lie the 2nd District."

Econocide: Body Count
Nick Turse writes for TomDispatch.com: "After David B. Kellermann, the chief financial officer of beleaguered mortgage giant Freddie Mac, tied a noose and hanged himself in the basement of his Vienna, Virginia, home, The New York Times made it a front-page story. The stresses of the job in economic tough times, its reporters implied, had driven him to this extreme act. 'Binghamton Shooter' Jiverly Wong also garnered front-page headlines nationwide and set off a cable news frenzy when, 'bitter over job loss,' he massacred 13 people at an immigration center in upstate New York. Similarly, coverage was brisk after Pittsburgh resident Richard Poplawski, 'upset about recently losing a job,' shot four local police officers, killing three of them. But where was the front-page treatment when, in January, Betty Lipply, a 72-year-old resident of East Palestine, Ohio, 'who feared she'd lose her home to foreclosure, hanged herself to death' shortly after 'receiving her second summons and foreclosure complaint from her mortgage lender'?"

How Pharma and Insurance Intend to Kill the Public Option, And What Obama and the Rest of Us Must Do
Robert Reich writes on Robert Reich's Blog: "I've poked around Washington today, talking with friends on the Hill who confirm the worst: Big Pharma and Big Insurance are gaining ground in their campaign to kill the public option in the emerging health care bill."

The American Health Care Choices Act
Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Ali Frick, Ryan Powers, and Igor Volsky write for Progress Report: "Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA), the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, is circulating draft legislation designed to overhaul the nation's health care system. This so-called "draft of a draft" is the first piece of concrete health reform legislation to emerge from Democrats in Congress. As the Washington Post notes, "[A]t least five congressional chairmen are working on health-care reform bills," and Kennedy's draft represents the Democrats' first attempt at "a partial road map for how the nation might address health coverage gaps and problems such as rising costs and inferior quality." The legislation, called the "American Health Choices Act," would provide affordable coverage to all Americans, require businesses to provide and individuals to obtain coverage, and establish a new public health care plan to compete alongside private insurers."

"Single-Payer" Supporters Challenge Democrats
Dan Eggen reports for The Washington Post: "As Obama and congressional Democrats work to hammer out landmark health-care legislation, they face increasingly noisy protests from those on the left who complain that a national program like those in Europe has been excluded from the debate."

Media Quarantine of Single-Payer Continues: Fifteen years later, public health insurance still taboo
Julie Hollar and Isabel Macdonald report for FAIR.org:"As a big healthcare policy debate looms once again in Washington, one thing remains as certain as it was in 1993: A single-payer plan that would provide government health insurance to everyone is off the media agenda."

Baucus Tells Single-Payer Advocates No
David Swanson writes for AfterDowningStreet.org: "Sen. Max Baucus met on Wednesday with advocates for single-payer health care, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, and told them that he might drop criminal charges against 13 people arrested for speaking up in his hearings, but that he would not include any supporters of single-payer health coverage in any future hearings. According to one report, Baucus suggested that he'd been mistaken to exclude single payer, but asserted that the process of creating health care reform legislation was too far along now to correct that omission."

Study: Medical Bills Underlie 60 Percent of US Bankruptcies
Maggie Fox reports for Reuters: "Medical bills are behind more than 60 percent of US personal bankruptcies, US researchers reported on Thursday in a report they said demonstrates that healthcare reform is on the wrong track. More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine."

Conversation With Henry Giroux: Let Us Make Haste While We Can (Part I)
Tolu Olorunda from The Black Commentator interviews Henry Giroux. Olorunda: Henry Giroux "is an accomplished scholar in the fields of education, media, cultural studies, critical pedagogy, and entertainment. As author of more than 35 books, very few public intellectuals can lay claim to the kind of expansive career Henry has nurtured for over four decades. But he's hardly amused by academic accomplishments. Henry's devotion to the transformation of the education system, and the cultivation of democratic values in this age of market-driven control, has often put him at odds with a system he describes as 'The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (The Radical Imagination).'"

Americans 'Surrounded by Paganism'
Lee Fang writes for Think Progress: "On Friday, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and Oliver North visited Rock Church in Hampton Roads, Virginia to give a three-hour long lecture on “Rediscovering God in America.” The speakers warned the audience about the “continuing availability of abortion, the spread of gay rights, and attempts to remove religion from American public life and school history books.” The Virginia-Pilot reported that Gingrich argued that, while Christianity is the foundation of American citizenship, Americans are experiencing a period where they are being “surrounded by paganism:"

Industry Defends Federal Loophole for Drilling Before Packed Congressional Hearing
Abraham Lustgarten reports for ProPublica: "In a packed and sometimes contentious hearing [1] on Capitol Hill Thursday, representatives of the oil and gas industry and their state regulators vigorously defended the practice of injecting toxic fluids underground without federal regulatory oversight [2]."

Let's Stop Women's Suffering
Mary Robinson and Alicia Yamin comment for The Boston Globe: "Human Rights organizations around the world are starting to demand that governments recognize preventable maternal death as a violation of women's rights. With the United Nations Human Rights Council's June session just around the corner, governments have a chance to prove that they value women's lives by taking concrete action on this issue."

Gay Groups Grow Impatient with Obama
Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin write for Politico: "President Barack Obama’s promises of change are falling short for one core Democratic constituency: gays and lesbians, whose leaders say Obama’s administration isn’t keeping up with the times."

Okay Obama. Now Let's Have a Speech on Gay Rights
Jonathan Capehart comments for the Washington Post: "There has been a growing roar within the gay community about seeming inaction by a man who promised change. Some activists fume that President Obama hasn’t followed through on his promise to repeal the offensive Defense of Marriage Act or muttered a substantive word about the legalization of same-sex marriage in six states. After last night's airing of NBC's Inside the Obama White House interview, in which Obama provided a tepid answer to a question about whether “gay and lesbian couples who wish to marry in this country have a friend in the White House,” the blogosphere is filling with cries of 'shameful' and 'no passion, no heart, no real connection to our cause.'"