There she is
A Healthy New Year
January 1, 2007
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The U.S. health care system is a scandal and a disgrace. But maybe, just maybe, 2007 will be the year we start the move toward universal coverage.
In 2005, almost 47 million Americans — including more than 8 million children — were uninsured, and many more had inadequate insurance.
Apologists for our system try to minimize the significance of these numbers. Many of the uninsured, asserted the 2004 Economic Report of the President, “remain uninsured as a matter of choice.”
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The Not Wanted Signs
January 1, 2007
By BOB HERBERT
I’ve heard the concern expressed dozens of times by New Orleans residents who are poor and black and still living in enforced exile from their wounded city: Maybe they don’t want us back.
You hear it again and again and again, the tone of voice varying from sadness to anger to resignation, but always laced with the unmistakable pain of feeling unwelcome in one’s own home. I’ve come to think of it as the New Orleans lament.
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Saddam: The death of a dictator
Through the bumbling of the U.S.-backed regime, justice becomes revenge, and a despot becomes a martyr.
By Juan Cole
Robert Fisk: A dictator created then destroyed by America
Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation.
Ten Suggestions for Rescuing the Bush Legacy
December 31, 2006
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Particularly after all the tributes to Gerald Ford in the last few days, President Bush may be pondering his own legacy and obituary. Sorry, Mr. Bush, but it doesn’t look good right now, with your obit perhaps beginning something like this:
“George W. Bush, who achieved tremendous acclaim for his handling of the 9/11 terror attacks but left office vilified and disgraced, mired in the Iraq war and stalemated at home, his hard-line partisan tactics souring the electorate and crippling his beloved Republican Party for a generation, died. …”
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Happy Birthday Douglas Coupland
It’s the birthday of novelist Douglas Coupland, born on a Canadian military base in Baden-Solingen, Germany (1961). He is best known for his controversial novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991). He invented the term “Generation X,” which was later attached to a whole generation of people, and he continues to write about pop culture.
Coupland started off as a sculptor, working with wood and fiberglass, earning his degree in studio sculpture in 1984. He did all kinds of jobs to make money, working as a gas station attendant, making copies of blue prints, and even designing baby cribs. Coupland’s writing career began mostly from luck, when an editor at Vancouver magazine read a postcard he had written to a friend. He liked Coupland’s style and hired him to write for the magazine. And that was the beginning of his career as a writer.
[Writer's Almanac]
Bush Silences a Dangerous Witness
George W. Bush may have felt a thrill of vindication as he went to bed with visions of Saddam Hussein dangling at the end of a rope, but Bush achieved something more important for the Bush Family legacy. He silenced a unique witness who, if given the opportunity, could have testified about the roles of George H.W. Bush and other top U.S. officials in aiding and abetting Hussein’s crimes against humanity. By making sure that Hussein never appeared before an international tribunal, Bush kept those Bush Family secrets safely tucked away.
End of Another Year…
You know your country is in trouble when:
- The UN has to open a special branch just to keep track of the chaos and bloodshed, UNAMI.
- Abovementioned branch cannot be run from your country.
- The politicians who worked to put your country in this sorry state can no longer be found inside of, or anywhere near, its borders.
- The only thing the US and Iran can agree about is the deteriorating state of your nation.
- An 8-year war and 13-year blockade are looking like the country’s ‘Golden Years’.
- Your country is purportedly ’selling’ 2 million barrels of oil a day, but you are standing in line for 4 hours for black market gasoline for the generator.
- For every 5 hours of no electricity, you get one hour of public electricity and then the government announces it’s going to cut back on providing that hour.
- Politicians who supported the war spend tv time debating whether it is ’sectarian bloodshed’ or ‘civil war’.
- People consider themselves lucky if they can actually identify the corpse of the relative that’s been missing for two weeks.
Crisis in Housing Adds to Miseries of Iraq Mayhem
While 1.8 million Iraqis are living outside the country, 1.6 million more have been displaced within Iraq since the war began.
Ice Mass Snaps Free From Canada’s Arctic
A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada’s Arctic, scientists said.
“This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are loosing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead,” Vincent said Thursday.
A Failed Revolution
December 29, 2006
By PAUL KRUGMAN
After first attempting to deny the scale of last month’s defeat, the apologists have settled on a story line that sounds just like Marxist explanations for the failure of the Soviet Union. What happened, you see, was that the noble ideals of the Republican revolution of 1994 were undermined by Washington’s corrupting ways. And the recent defeat was a good thing, because it will force a return to the true conservative path.
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Saddam’s ‘final message’ urges Iraqis to unite against US
“The enemies of your country, the invaders and the Persians, have found your unity a barrier between you and those who are now ruling you. Therefore, they drove their hated wedge among you,” he said in a handwritten letter released by his lawyer yesterday.
“O faithful people, I bid you farewell as my soul goes to God the compassionate,” he wrote. “Long live Iraq. Long live Iraq. Long live Palestine. Long live jihad and the mujahideen. God is greatest.”
Reservist Due for Iraq Is Killed in Standoff With Police
Army Reservist James E. Dean had already served 18 months in Afghanistan when he was notified three weeks ago that he would be deployed to Iraq later this month. The prospect of returning to war sent the St. Mary’s County resident into a spiral of depression, a neighbor said.
Vs.
Journalist Robert Parry talks about Gerald Ford’s role in ending the Watergate era, his moves to limit Congressional and media oversight on executive power, and the roots of Bush administration in the Ford White House.
VERSUS
Adieu, Gerald Ford
Farewell to Our Greatest President
By Alexander Cockburn
We bid a sad adieu to Gerald Ford. Here at CounterPunch it has always been our position that Gerald Ford was America’s greatest President. Transferring the Hippocratic injunction from the medical to the political realm, he did the least possible harm. Under Ford’s tranquil hand the nation relaxed after the hectic fevers of the Nixon years. And, of course, it was Ford who finally pulled the US troops out of Vietnam.
Ford Disagreed With Bush About Invading Iraq
“I don’t think I would have gone to war,” he said a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford’s own administration.
Aiming for the Brain’s Sweet Spot
December 27, 2006, 10:16 pm
By Daniel Goleman
As Congress prepares to debate whether to renew the No Child Left Behind Act, its members might do well to consider the biology of boredom, frazzle and the brain’s sweet spot for performance. Or they may inadvertently widen the gap between high- and low-achieving students. (more…)
The Power of ‘Sorry’
December 26, 2006
By Richard Conniff
The airwaves this year have been practically trembling with apologies. Comedian Michael Richards said he was sorry on David Letterman’s show. Actor Mel Gibson did it on “Good Morning America.” Senator George Allen did it, but not well enough, in the middle of his unsuccessful campaign for reelection. Former Representative Mark Foley had his lawyer do it for him, pleading sorry, but with excuses. (more…)
’Tis the Season . . . To Recycle All of That Junk
December 27, 2006
Talking Points
By ELEANOR RANDOLPH
An overstuffed, faintly guilty feeling always settles over me about this time of year.
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Consultant Helps Democrats Embrace Faith, and Some in Party Are Not Pleased
In an interview, she said she told candidates not to use the phrase “separation of church and state,” which does not appear in the Constitution’s clauses forbidding the establishment or protecting the exercise of religion.
Flash! President Bush Says He Reads Papers
“I — every morning I look at the newspaper.”
Look at ≠ read.
U.S. Says Captured Iranians Can Be Linked to Attacks
The American military said Tuesday that it had credible evidence linking Iranians and their Iraqi associates, detained here in raids last week, to criminal activities, including attacks against American forces.
Jailed for blogging
CAIRO: In a cramped jail cell in Alexandria, Egypt, sits a soft-spoken 22-year-old student. Kareem Amer was sent to prison for over a month for allegedly “defaming the president of Egypt” and “highlighting inappropriate aspects that harm the reputation of Egypt.” Where did Amer commit these supposed felonies? On his weblog.
Announcing the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 2006
Many can plausibly lay claim to stinky media performances, but only a few can win a P.U.-litzer.
By Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen, AlterNet.
Lessons Never Learned
December 28, 2006
By BOB HERBERT
It would not be easy to find two men more different than Gerald Ford and James Brown. But I had a similar reaction to each of their deaths — a feeling of disappointment at some of the routes the nation has traveled since their days of greatest prominence.
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