American Revolution finished

Battle Tested
I am a disabled veteran, so I have health care. However, a lot of the people we depend on for our everyday needs, cashiers, fast food workers, and many others cannot afford it. I know someone making about $12 an hour that was recently quoted $208 per month for just herself! Something needs to be done. I would hope everyone would at least have affordable access to at least basic care. Too many people in this country are concerned only about themselves. Is this really the world we as a people wish to live in? Where only the rich can afford to be healthy? Or is it time for revolution?

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The end of the hope of the Enlightenment and of the American revolution

Chris Hedges | Ralph Nader: "The Left Has Nowhere to Go"
Chris Hedges, Truthdig: "Ralph Nader in a CNN poll a few days before the 2008 presidential election had an estimated 3 percent of the electorate, or about 4 million people, behind his candidacy. But once the votes were counted, his support dwindled to a little over 700,000. Nader believes that many of his supporters entered the polling booth and could not bring themselves to challenge the Democrats and Barack Obama. I suspect Nader is right. And this retreat is another example of the lack of nerve we must overcome if we are going to battle back against the corporate state. A vote for Nader or Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney in 2008 was an act of defiance. A vote for Obama and the Democrats was an act of submission. We cannot afford to be submissive anymore."

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I think of the soldiers committed to eradicating some offensive idea like self determination while spreading terror and killing women and children

LAHORE, Pakistan – Lawyers showered rose petals over the suspected killer of a prominent Pakistani governor when he arrived at court Wednesday and an influential Muslim scholars group praised the assassination of the outspoken opponent of laws that order death for those who insult Islam.
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Can’t imagine a more contemptuous opportunist than King

In an interview with The Hill, New York Republican Rep. Peter King didn’t mince words about his feelings towards The New York Times.
“I have nothing but contempt for them,” King said. “They should be indicted under the Espionage Act. … The New York Times is just basically being a mouthpiece for political correctness.”
King’s comments come in response to a recent New York Times editorial that painted a rather negative portrait of his interactions with the Muslim community.

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Maybe it’s time to eradicate the deprived and the depraved, people who climb fences. Make it clean and simple and swift

NOGALES, Mexico, Jan 5 – A U.S. Border Patrol agent was involved in a shooting on the Arizona border with Mexico on Wednesday that resulted in the death of a 17-year-old boy trying to illegally scale the border fence, Mexican police said.
Ramses Barron was found dead outside a hospital in Nogales, Sonora, in the early hours on Wednesday with a wound from a bullet fired by a U.S. Border Patrol agent, Sonora state police said citing witnesses. Three men left Barron's body at the hospital, hospital workers told police.

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Defending ourselves against Defense may become latest new idea. Instead of cutting social security, what about raising taxes on the wealthy

U.S. Deficit Is a National Security Issue, Defense Expert Says: "We Can Defend the Country Better for Less"

Bottom line: "The deficit itself is a national security issue,“ Hartung says. “If you have an economy that is going downhill, you cannot have the strongest military in the world.”
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DUH--the Israeli blockade of Gaza was not a humanitarian effort

JERUSALEM – A U.S. diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks says Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip was meant to push the area's economy "to the brink of collapse."
The March 3, 2008, document, published Wednesday by Norway's Aftenposten newspaper, clearly spells out one of Israel's chief objectives of the blockade: to cause widespread economic hardship in a bid to weaken the Hamas government.

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Better to be distracted by the Holocaust

Noam Chomsky | Breaking the Israel-Palestine Deadlock
Noam Chomsky: "While intensively engaged in illegal settlement expansion, the government of Israel is also seeking to deal with two problems: a global campaign of what it perceives as 'delegitimation' - that is, objections to its crimes and withdrawal of participation in them - and a parallel campaign of legitimation of Palestine."

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Tentacles of U.S government turn it into legendary Giant squid

How Afghanistan Became a War for NATO
Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service: "The official line of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO command in Afghanistan, is that the war against Afghan insurgents is vital to the security of all the countries providing troops there. In fact, however, NATO was given a central role in Afghanistan because of the influence of U.S. officials concerned with the alliance, according to a US military officer who was in a position to observe the decision-making process."
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The Giant Squid of the post legal system. Instant justice

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration has ramped up its secret war on terror groups with a new military targeting center to oversee the growing use of special operations strikes against suspected militants in hot spots around the world, according to current and former U.S. officials
The White House has more than doubled the numbers of special operations forces in Afghanistan alone, as well as doubling the CIA's use of missile strikes from unmanned drones in Pakistan and expanding counterterror operations in Yemen.
The data also could be used at times to advise domestic law enforcement in dealing with suspected terrorists inside the U.S., the officials said. But the civilian authorities would have no role in "kill or capture" operations targeting militant suspects abroad.
At the heart of the new center's analysis is a cloud-computing network tied into all elements of U.S. national security, from the eavesdropping capabilities of the National Security Agency to Homeland Security's border-monitoring databases. The computer is designed to sift through masses of information to track militant suspects across the globe
and eliminate them, letting the terminator be judge, jury, and hangman for everybody including the accidental caste.