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.

Watch out, the Democratic Party has had all its war-making clowns out on tour all at one time! VP Biden has been out there and was busy snuggling up to Georgia and Ukraine while insulting Russia, and then soft cop Hillary comes along and afterwards tells the Russian bear that the US government is their friend! Who is this convincing to? Maybe nobody?

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“Washington’s Mid-East envoy George Mitchell has said Syria has a “crucial role” in finding a comprehensive peace settlement, during a visit to Damascus.’ …from Mitchell: Syria has ‘crucial’ role in peace

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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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Barack and Hillary are just so damn nauseating as they tried to pretend to the world that they are not behind the coup in Honduras. President Zelaya put them to the real test though by trying to re-enter his country, Honduras. Here per the LA Times is Hillary opposing this move openly… ‘U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has called the trip “reckless” and said it would not help restore democratic and constitutional order.’ See Zelaya to set up camp at Honduras border for full report as of this time. Barack and Hillary are playing the clowns in this made-in-the-US coup, and they’re fooling nobody except the US public. The US government of Barack is the defender of democracy nowhere. That goes double in Latin America.

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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Noam Chomsky on WHY it’s not happening? Noam Chomsky on Health Care–Why has reform taken so LONG …why is real reform still not possible?

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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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Ever notice how the Federal Government can raise the moon and stars and move the earth to do anything for the Big Corporations, but when it comes to the common folk, remains utterly paralyzed and frozen in inaction? That’s because we do not live in a real democracy where your voice counts, but rather in a Dictatorship of the Corporate World instead.

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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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Cops and reactionaries all around the US are rallying on behalf of Sargeant Crowley, the Cambridge cop who had Harvard University Professor Henry Gates arrested out of his own home. They say that Barack Obama has unjustly called the arrest ’stupid’ and unjustly asked for Crowley to apologize for his actions. But wait a second, weren’t the actions of this cop not just ’stupid’ but criminal, since cops are legally required to identify themselves when asked to do so? Instead, this cop had the person legally making this request arrested! It is the cop who should be fired for doing so and prosecuted, since it was in fact the cop who broke the law.

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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.

Reader Jose of Miami, Florida writes to us lamenting the generally low cultural level of our site, NotMyTribe. He further requests that we introduce into The Heart Land of the Bored, Colorado Springs, the song Cumbia de Los Aburridos done by Calle 13, a post modernist Puerto Rican dude or two, who are the modern day equivalation of Mozart. Andale, Papo, then… (the only Puerto Rican I have ever thought of as family, but you know how that goes).

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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.