Does this image look Photoshopped to you? US and Israeli advisers in Tehran are still trying to pull a page from the Rachel Corrie playbook, even though world outrage about the American activist crushed by an Israeli bulldozer didn’t ultimately bring them down either.

NOTMYTRIBE received this response from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to our post: IS THE MUSEUM OF NATURE AND SCIENCE GATHERING PRIVATE DATA FOR HEALTH INSURERS? In the July 26 article I outlined concerns that medical data specialists could be harvesting checkup results conducted on visitors to the DMNS exhibit “Expedition Health.” Read more »

This is how Americans are going to get national health insurance, by demanding it. In Colorado Springs we’re still passing around petitions to support President Obama’s health insurance company stop-gaps. The Des Moines Catholic Workers find themselves charged with criminal trespass, for trying to confront Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield about their egregious profit-making at the expense of the public health.

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How delighted I was to receive an email from Common Dreams, showing signs of skepticism finally at President Obama’s growing betrayal of American progressives. After censoring CD participants who criticize the Democratic Party for its capitulation to corporate centrism, even banning the persistent voices from its online discussions, the blogosphere giant now purports to have examined it stats and rediscovered its radical base. I’m thrilled that CD has met its enemy, and it is not us, but I wish their epiphany wasn’t about who’s left to tap for money.

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“You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.”
–John Ruskin, 1853, The Stones of Venice–
“Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves….On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make him a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him.”

Full text of Alaska Ex-Governor Sarah Palin‘s poetic address, wherein she explains that her contract with the voters of Alaska has a “lame duck” escape clause, stuff about a God-given right to despoil, some veiled threats to shoot gun-control revenuers, and the protections of both First Amendments.

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Everyone wants to quote Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.” I just heard it evoked by NPR, raising the alarm about a rash of albino murders in Tanzania, ostensibly for body parts considered to have medicinal value. Albinism has carried a stigma for every one person among 100,000, more in some parts of Africa. I’m sure we’re agreed it must stop. And what of HIV deaths, post-colonial greed-bred strife, slavery, or the dire environmental consequences of our industrial myopia? I offer a revision: “All that is necessary for evil to prevail, is for bad men to harp on the specter of manageable evils so that you don’t face up to the prevalent one.”

DENVER- At the Denver Museum of Nature and Science the most popular exhibit this summer is called “Expedition Health” and features high-tech diagnostic kiosks where visitors can gauge the general state of their health. Judging by the long lines, you’d think these people haven’t visited a doctor lately. I suspect that unless the medical insurance underwriters of the exhibit can be trusted, many of the DMNS-goers won’t get to see a doctor again.

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JULY 26 marks the start of Fidel Castro’s six year struggle to throw out the US dictatorship in Cuba. The JULY 26 MOVEMENT became the name of the Cuban forces, commemorating the martyrs of 1953. July 26 is the International Day of Solidarity with the Cuban People. CUBA SI, BLOCKADE NO. End the 50-year-old illegal US blockade.

I have for several weeks been submerged in the writings and poster art of the revolutionary sixties, and I’ll catch my breath to say this to the Antiwar Now from the Anti-Imperialists Then. We won no victory with the fall of Saigon, the Vietnam War wasn’t ended by protests, bombs, or the fragging of front line officers. The portend is good for those hoping to see the end of the War on Islam, but on the whole it is not.

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IS THAT RICH? UK’s oldest living veteran of the Great War died this weekend at age 111. Machine-gunner Harry Patch who survived Ypres and nearly not Passchendaele, was eulogized by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles who explained “The Great War is a chapter in our history we must never forget.” Prime Minister Gordon Brown added: “The noblest of all the generations has left us, but they will never be forgotten.” What did Soldier Patch think of the war for which he was held in patriotic regard? “It wasn’t worth it.”

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While pundits pit Professor Gates against Police Sergeant Crowley, I recommend a white man’s refresher course in Black v. Cop. The above photograph depicts the officers of the law who came from all over Alabama in 1965 to prevent the SNCC civil rights marchers from leaving Selma. Most of the images we recognize from this day were taken seconds after this one, as the southern gentlemen eagerly bludgeoned the kneeling marchers. It took the interference of the President of the United States to send Federal troops to defend the peaceful protesters from the police. Have things changed?

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HOW ABOUT, for a tribute to Walter Cronkite’s much lauded integrity, the media honor the news giant by EMULATING HIM? How cynical of corporate news peons, and of their audience nodding along, to revere Cronkite’s hindsight truth-telling, and lament alas, there will be no more like him. Big smiles and crocodile tears.

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Reports are emerging from July’s National Assembly, the vital effort to unite antiwar forces into a common movement. Delegates from the major peace organizations hammered out a strategy to address Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine. Missing from the consensus? Nonviolence, and good riddance. It goes without saying that humanitarian activists are peaceful. To legislate a dogma of non-confrontation plays right into the hands of the authoritarians. Here’s the official report:

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COLORADO SPRINGS- Intersection of Austin Bluffs and Academy Blvds, 4pm-6pm, all corners. Join Coloradans For Peace in their high-visibility every-other-Thursday rush-hour antiwar vigil, to END OBAMA’S WARS.

Actually that’s their staging date. The heavily funded by un-named Corporate Big-Pig sources, so-called “Grass-roots” movement against the Corporate Big-Pigs finally being forced to pay the bills they ran up over the past 2 centuries but ESPECIALLY the past 30 years, are once again going to be prancing around in their Capri pants, silk stockings and buckle shoes and try to look Macho while doing it. Good Luck on that. But it’s set for Sept 12 in Washing Tundy Sea. Not like I have much cause to sympathize with the Right Wing Dumbasses but…
WARNING, though, DANGER!

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All those who sat and watched and cheered when the Colorado Springs Gestapo beat elderly and disabled persons for the non-crime of participation in a parade, and still say after two and a half years that you’re “fighting for Freedom”. Bullshit. You had a chance to stand for freedom right here in America and in all that time chose not to do so.
Military both Active Duty and Paramilitary Youth groups like the Scouts and Devilpups and Young Marines… burn your uniforms. You’ve soiled them with the blood of Americans, repeatedly.

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Some on the right are howling for “justice” meaning their silly-ass demand that Dr Churchill and Dr Gates apologize for stepping out of line, they (and by extension everybody else) are supposed to say “Yassuh, Boss, we-uns is so sorry we told a different story than what y’all White Gentlemens were tellin’. We’ll be good Boss. Jes’ point us to the right cotton fields an’ we’ll get our colored asses back to work for you Boss.”
By “Cops” I’m gratuitously including Prosecutors and Judges like “Uncle” Larry Naves who routinely take sides with their fellow pigs.

There it is. The Afghans have captured a POW, we’ve been sent his image in RGB with a personal message to the American public. US military spokesmen are calling the video a violation of the laws of war. Secretary of State Clinton is calling it “just outrageous and a real sign of desperation and inappropriate criminal behavior.” She’s probably right about the desperation. But showing no signs of nudity, degradation, brutalization or rigor mortis, Army Private Bergdahl is faring better than any US detainee.

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I have to do more research, but I’m pretty sure October 7, 2009 should mark the HALFWAY POINT of the US-ISLAM WAR. I realize the Pentagon brass are calling for fifty years more of insurgency suppression in Afghanistan and Iraq, but if we grant them no more time than for America’s longest military intervention, we’ve got another eight years before beating our humiliating retreat.

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Word is out, confirming Seymore Hersh’s alarming report of last year, about the Cheney/Bush special forces tasked with assassinating terrorism suspects. Where others do it, such paramilitary raids are called “death squads.” While their existence is being admitted, Congress is upset they weren’t told sooner about the extra-judicial homicide plans. But didn’t President Bush put us all on notice in his 2006 State of the Union Address? What did you think he was snickering about when he said:
 
“All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.”

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Al Franken has no sooner reached Washington, that he’s fulfilling his comedic promise, no small thing. At the Judge Sotomayor confirmation hearing, Franken framed his parting question thus: he too was a Perry Mason fan, could Judge Sotomayor name the lone case which the television barrister famously lost? Giggles all around.

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Not from the People, that part would be a “gimme”, but from the People’s Representation. Now the Right Wing is trying to spin it that the operations in question were “The (miserably FAILED) Hunt for Osama bin Hidin’ ” and thus it’s not Patriotic to call it into question.
HOWEVER, the investigation that uncovered it was one probing the Spying on Americans programs. That they would feel the need to LIE about even that much shows a distinct pattern of Domestic State-sponsored Terrorism in action.

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The heavily funded campaign for Right Wing Simpletons to call their Congressmen and tell them how afraid they are of Health Care Reform is ramping up, I just heard their Hate Speech commercial from the other room.

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