"Pike will pay for this, you wait and see—we’ll destroy him for this.” —Mitchell Rogovin, CIA special counsel, 1976
Last month, former Congressman Otis Pike died, and no one seemed to notice or care. That’s scary, because Pike led the House’s most intensive and threatening hearings into US intelligence community abuses, far more radical and revealing than the better-known Church Committee’s Senate hearings that took place at the same time. That Pike could die today in total obscurity, during the peak of the Snowden NSA scanda
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Freeing Workers From the Insurance TrapBy THE EDITORIAL BOARD FEB. 4, 2014
The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Tuesday that the Affordable Care Act will reduce the number of full-time workers by 2.5 million over the next decade. That is mostly a good thing, a liberating result of the law. Of course, Republicans immediately tried to brand the findings as "devastating” and stark evidence of President Obama’s health care reform as a failure and a job killer. It is no such thing.
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The following text published by the Brussells Tribunal is Haifa Zangana’s presentation to the European Parliament in Brussels on 29 January 2014.
“The regression in women’s situation is so devastating that she has reached the bottom of human needs. Just to survive.” Haifa Zangana
The National Iraqi News Agency reported on Fri 24th January that the Iraqi military’s mortar shelling the night before left 4 people dead and 32 more injured “including women and children” and Saturday’s military shelling of Falluja left 5 people dead and 14 more injured — “most of them women and children.” Falluja General Hospital was shelled as well.
Iraqi’s government assault on Anbar continues. Maliki’s Collective punishment is called “Revenge for the martyr Mohamed” which was preceded by a campaign with the title: “Revenge for martyrs”.
And the a
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The former Port Authority official who personally oversaw the lane closings on the George Washington Bridge in the scandal now swirling around Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said on Friday that the governor knew about the lane closings when they were happening, and that he had the evidence to prove it.
In a letter released by his lawyer, the official, David Wildstein, a high school friend of Mr. Christie’s who was appointed with the governor’s blessing at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which controls the bridge, described the order to close the lanes as "the Christie administration’s order” and said "evidence exists as well tying Mr. Christie to having knowledge of the lane closures, during the period when the lanes were closed, co
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By Chris Hedges
Editor’s note: The following is the transcript of a speech that Chris Hedges gave in Santa Monica, Calif., on Oct. 13, 2013. To purchase a DVD of Hedges’ address and the Q-and-A that followed, click here.
The most prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shak
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Seattle's Socialist City Councilor Offers Radical Response to Obama Speech
In rebuttal to State of the Union, Seattle's Kshama Sawant challenges key assumptions and policies presented in presidential address
- Jon Queally, staff writer
Though Republicans tied themselves in knots and exposed their party's extensive internal rifts by offering four separate rebuttals to President Obama's State of the Union on Tuesday, a development that received less attention was the short response to the speech offered by recently-elected Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant. 
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Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone's political editor, has his own take on the State of the Union.
They keep telling us we're in a recovery, but those of us out here in Reality Land know the number on their charts have nothing to do with the real economy. Via Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson, the state of the union we're not likely to hear about tonight:
1. New income generated since 2009 that has gone to the top 1 percent: 95 percent
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 by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
A new poll shows "Blacks remain more NSA spy-friendly than whites and Hispanics.” Earlier surveys showed Blacks were the ethnic group most willing to go along with Obama’s threatened air war against Syria. What happened to Black progressivism? "If an individual exhibited such lifelong personality and values reversals, her relatives and friends would immediately suspect an emotional breakdown.”
Black Madness Under Obama: African Americans More Pro-NSA, Anti-Snowden Than Whites and Hispanics
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
"The "African American worldview has been mangled beyond imagining.”
In
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In the six pages that HRW dedicates to Venezuela in its World Report 2014, released this week, it manages to tell at least 30 serious lies, distortions, and omissions. Pointing out these lies is important, because many people believe that HRW is a neutral authority on human rights, and the mainstream press publish articles and headlines based on HRW report conclusions. Here are some of the headlines in both English and Spanish (translated to English) that have come out of the 2014 report:
Global Post –
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 After hundreds of Syrians died from Sarin gas last summer, Secretary of State Kerry insisted the U.S. had solid intelligence on the locations of the Syrian government’s launch sites used in the attack, thus justifying a U.S. military retaliation which was only narrowly averted. Now, those U.S. government’s claims have collapsed.
Secretary of State John Kerry misled the American people last summer when he assured them that the U.S. government knew for a fact that the Syrian government was responsible for the Aug. 21 Sarin gas attack outside Damascus, an incident that killed several hundred people and nearly prompted a U.S. military assault.
A ne
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