Tainted Saints

After Congressman Dennis Kucinich, (D-Ohio), lobbied throughout the past week to get his amendment calling for a single-payer health care system modeled after Medicare back on the table, the House rejected Kucinich’s attempts to reinsert the amendment in the bill.

That’s after a committee stripped the amendment from the House health care bill without giving him any advanced explanation.

In a letter to supporters on Wednesday, Kucinich wrote, “Thank you for all of your efforts on behalf of the Kucinich Amendment for a state single-payer option, which would protect the right of states to pursue a single payer health care system.

“Unfortunately, the House Leadership has rejected the many appeals on behalf of the amendment and will not reverse their decision, which removed the amendment from the bill. Therefore, the Kucinich Amendment for a state single payer option will not be included in the Manager’s Amendment and is not in the bill which will come before the House soon.” [more...]

What if, as a result of efforts to fight climate change and boost energy efficiency, global oil demand peaked in the foreseeable future? You could argue that such an achievement would be one of the most historic accomplishments of human civilization to date, proof, indeed, that we are civilized. It’s a task that will require lots of hard work all over the globe, but based just on the actions taken by President Obama in his first year of office, in the United States, we have made real progress toward that goal.

The International Energy Agency, reports Spencer Swartz in the Wall Street Journal, is predicting that even if China and India continue to consume ever more oil, overall, the world’s appetite for crude is slowing down. [more...]

[I guess embracing it would have reversed 60 years of U.S. policy... -Ed.]

The house on Tuesday voted 344 to 36 in favour of a non-binding resolution calling on Barack Obama, the US president, to maintain his opposition to the report, which was written by a panel led by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge. [more...]

Paul Jay, senior producer of The Real News Network, interviewed former military analyst and Pentagon whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg about the common thread between the conflict in Afghanistan and the war in Vietnam.

Like Vietnam, Ellsberg said “no victory lies ahead [for the US] in Afghanistan” and President Barack Obama knows it.

Still, Ellsberg believes Obama will “go against his own instincts as to what’s best for the country and do what’s best for him and his administration and his party in the short run facing elections, which is to avoid a military revolt.” [more...]

Barack Obama has been busy – offering the Jewish People blessings for Rosh Hashanah, and recording a flattering video for the President’s Conference in Jerusalem and another for Yitzhak Rabin’s memorial rally. Only Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah surpasses him in terms of sheer output of recorded remarks.

In all the videos, Obama heaps sticky-sweet praise on Israel, even though he has spent nearly a year fruitlessly lobbying for Israel to be so kind as to do something, anything – even just a temporary freeze on settlement building – to advance the peace process.  [more...]

“…Senate leaders and the White House will now merge the Finance Committee measure with another version of the legislation approved this summer by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The merged bill could be ready for debate before the full Senate later this month.

The Finance Committee measure, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates would reduce the federal deficit $81 billion over the next 10 years, differs in one major way from the health committee bill: It lacks a government-run health insurance plan, or “public option” alternative to private insurance, which President Barack Obama and Democratic congressional leaders want.

Three committees in the House of Representatives have approved legislation that includes a public option. Those bills are being combined into one, and the full House is expected to debate the legislation later this month. Prospects for approval there look good.

“We don’t intend to go to the floor without a public option in our bill,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has vowed…”

Do Californians keep re-electing Dianne Feinstein out of sentimentality for her days on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors?  Because she’s about as liberal as Dick Cheney, and her husband is clearly profiting from this state of continuous war…

“Dianne Feinstein is a fairly typical Democratic Senator from a solidly blue state.  In 2002, she voted to authorize the attack on Iraq.  Throughout the Bush years, she repeatedly stood with the GOP to fund the war without the conditions and timetables sought by some of her fellow Democrats.  Using her position on the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, she was the key Democrat who twice voted to legalize Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program — first with the Protect America Act (which Obama opposed) and then with the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which also immunized lawbreaking telecoms.  She led the Senate effort to confirm Gen. Michael Hayden as CIA Director even after he had been caught presiding over the illegal surveillance program (confirmation which Obama opposed), and she then joined with Chuck Schumer to single-handedly assure Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General even after he refused to answer basic questions about torture and indefinite detention of U.S. citizens (confirmation which Obama also opposed).  In 2006, she proudly described herself as the “main Democratic sponsor” of a Constitutional amendment to criminalize flag burning.  Just this past week, she used her position as Chair of the Intelligence Committee to gut virtually every proposed reform to the Patriot Act. 

Feinstein isn’t merely a typical (though particularly destructive) Democratic Senator, but also a very typical Washington insider, as her substantial personal wealth is tied directly to the very National Security State policies she relentlessly works in the Senate to expand.  As her hometown San Francisco Chronicle put it in 2003 — in an article headlined “War brings business to Feinstein spouse: Blum’s firms win multimillion-dollar defense contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan“:  “When it comes to scoring mega-military-related contracts, Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s multimillionaire husband, Richard Blum, is right in the thick of things.” ”

“President Obama announced in March that he would be sending 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But in an unannounced move, the White House has also authorized — and the Pentagon is deploying — at least 13,000 troops beyond that number, according to defense officials.

The additional troops are primarily support forces, including engineers, medical personnel, intelligence experts and military police. Their deployment has received little mention by officials at the Pentagon and the White House, who have spoken more publicly about the combat troops who have been sent to Afghanistan.

The deployment of the support troops to Afghanistan brings the total increase approved by Obama to 34,000. The buildup has raised the number of U.S. troops deployed to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan above the peak during the Iraq “surge” that President George W. Bush ordered, officials said.”

<Click here for better legibility>

“…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. The case involved 23 lawyers representing detainees at Guantánamo Bay who alleged in court papers that they were targets of the Bush administration’s so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program(TSP), an initiative operated by the National Security Agency (NSA) that Obama called “unlawful and unconstitutional” during his presidential campaign in 2007.”