Well, OK, so maybe the murder of hundreds of thousands isn't a reasonable case for impeachment, but maybe grand larceny is. Our penalties for crimes against property have always been more harsh than those for crimes against persons .

In The Great Iraq Swindle Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi reports on how President George W. Bush-appointed contractors in Iraq are exploiting American tax payers.

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient.

Much has been written about the incompetence and ineptitude of Our Dear Leader. It seems, though, that he does exhibit extraordinary skill in one area of expertise: Killing people from a safe distance. In "The War Criminal in the Living Room " Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, writing on Antiwar.com warns that Bush seems intent on continuing to practice this dark art.

Bush is too self-righteous to see the dark humor in his denunciations of Iran for threatening 'the security of nations everywhere' and of the Iraqi resistance for 'a vision that rejects tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women, and children in the pursuit of political power'. Those are precisely the words that most of the world applies to Bush and his Brownshirt administration.

By Elizabeth de la Vega
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Friday 03 August 2007

Sometimes you think you're winning a cat-and-mouse game, but it turns out you're losing a dogfight.

Such was the case in the summer of 1973 when, unbeknownst to most of the public - particularly myself because I spent nearly every waking hour of that summer driving an ice cream truck - Richard Nixon and his wily cats John Erlichman and Robert "Bob" Haldeman were trying to appease the public and Congress by batting around half-truths about the Watergate burglary and cover-up. They thought they had a winning strategy. Indeed, in July of 1973, Henry Kissinger told Nixon: "In a year's time your Congressional opponents are going to look like a bunch of dogs snapping at your heels." Clearly, given that the House of Representatives passed three Articles of Impeachment against Nixon a year later, a large number of people in that White House did not understand that their cat-and-mouse game had turned into a dogfight.

Based upon the recent performance of Republican Senator Arlen Specter, it appears that the Bush White House may be operating on the basis of similar misapprehensions.

"...We have people up there in Congress with the brain of a 2-year-old who don’t know what they are doing, they don’t experience it. I challenge the president or anyone who has us for 15 months to ride alongside me. I’ll do another 15 months if he comes out here and rides alomg with me every day. I’ll do 15 more months. They don’t even have to pay me extra." -- Spc. Gabriel Vassell, 2nd Platoon Apache Company

The Guardian's award-winning photographer and filmmaker Sean Smith spent two months embedded with US troops in Baghdad and Anbar province. His harrowing documentary exposes the exhaustion and disillusionment of the soldiers.

Click to view portions of Smith's documentary, "Inside the Surge"

 Click the "read more" link at the bottom to view the citations.

• • The United States is the only industrialized country in the world without a universal health insurance system.1
• • In 2006, the U.S. census reported that 46 million Americans (recently revised downward to 45 million) have no health insurance.2
• • "Over a third (36%) of families living below the poverty line are uninsured. Hispanic Americans (34%) are more than twice as likely to be uninsured as white Americans, (13%) while 21% of black Americans have no health insurance."3
• • More than 9 million children lack health insurance in America.4
• • Eighteen thousand people die each year because they are uninsured.5
• • According to the UN Human Development Report, "The uninsured are less likely to have regular outpatient care, so they are more likely to be hospitalized for avoidable health problems. Once in hospital, they receive fewer services and are more likely to die in the hospital than are insured patients. They also receive less preventive care. Over 40% of the uninsured do not have a regular place to go when they are sick and over a third of the uninsured say that they or someone in their family went without needed care, including recommended treatments or prescription drugs in the last year, because of cost."6
• • Half of all bankruptcies are caused by medical bills. Three-quarters of those filings are people with health insurance.7
• • U.S. health care spending is approximately $2 trillion per year, or $6,697 per person.8
• The United States continues to spend significantly more on health care than other countries in the world.9
• • Administrative costs account for 31 percent of all health care expenditures in the United States. The average overhead for U.S. private health insurers is 11.7 percent; for Medicare, it is 3.6 percent; for Canada's national health insurance program, it is 1.3 percent.10
• • According to the UN Human Development Report, while the United States leads the world in spending on health care, "countries spending substantially less than the US have healthier populations.... The infant mortality rate for the U.S. is now higher than for many other industrial countries."11
• • A baby born in El Salvador has a better chance of surviving than a baby in Detroit. The infant mortality rate in Detroit is 15.5, compared to El Salvador's rate of 9.7.12
• • Canadians live three years longer on average than we do.13
• • A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that older Americans are significantly less healthy than their British counterparts - we have more diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, lung disease and cancer. Even the poorest Brits can expect to live longer than the richest Americans.14
• • Cubans have a lower infant mortality rate than the United States and according to the U.N. Human Development Report, a longer average lifespan.15
• • Over the next decade, the federal government will give the drug and health care industries an estimated $822 billion as a result of the 2003 enactment of Medicare Part D (the Medicare prescription drug plan).16
• • There are four times as many health care lobbyists in Washington as there are members of Congress.17
• • Ninety percent of Americans believe the American health care system needs fundamental changes or needs to be completely rebuilt. Two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government should guarantee universal health care for all citizens.18

We've all heard a lot of talk about the "Red 'T'" in Pennsylvania over the years. Subtract the "Blue" areas, Philly and Pittsburgh, from PA and you're left with a vague "T" shape.

Well maybe that's not an accurate depiction after all.

The Center for American Progress and Free Press today released the first-of-its-kind statistical analysis of the political make-up of talk radio in the United States. It confirms that talk radio, one of the most widely used media formats in America, is dominated almost exclusively by conservatives.

Check out Philly talk radio:

Absolutely ZERO progressive or liberal voices being heard in the fifth largest market in the country. Hell, even Harrisburg gets United for Progress (thanks, Don). So the next time someone starts kvetching about the liberal media ,you can point to Philadelphia and say, "Not in my town!!"

Before you get all huffy about your liberal creds out Pittsburgh way, note that the same study reflects that KDKA (CBS owned) broadcasts 9 hours per day of conservative talk and 0 (yes, that's ZERO, not a letter "O") hours of progressive programming. And, WTZN (interestingly, also CBS owned) boasts 3 hours of conservative yammering and another zero hours of liberal chatter.

So, there you are. No "T", it's ALL red on the radio. I guess that's why they put those flashing RED lights on the transmitters.

Submitted by Lou Hancherik, organizer of Western PA DFA -

For our June monthly DFA Link meeting, Western PA DFA [WPA-DFA) attended the Citizens Forum on Health Care Reform held at La Roche College. WPA-DFA was one of the co-sponsor of this very important event sponsored by Western Pennsylvania Coalition for Single Payer Healthcare. This was an opportunity to Learn more about the issue and participate in building an action plan to advocate for single-payer health care.

The Forum featured testimonies from Doctors, Patients and Union officials giving a comprehensive view of just how broken our current health care system is. As a result we are ranked 37th in the world in quality of care even though we spend twice as much as the next closest nation.

Nearly 47 million Americans and 1.4 million Pennsylvanians are uninsured. The other 250 million are underinsured. 18,000 Americans die each year because of no Health Care Coverage. Half of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are related to debt from medical expenses.

Attendees were presented with a very professional presentation by Gabriel [Gabe] Silverman, President of the Student Alliance for Healthcare Reform (STAHR) concerning the healthcare crisis in our region. Gabe presented the single-payer solution, also known as Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, specifically HR 676. Introduced in Congress by US Rep. John Conyers with now over 70 co-sponsors, including Pittsburgh Congressman Mike Doyle. Essentially HR 676 does away with all insurance companies and replaces them with a single payer; a US Govt. Agency similar to Medicare. All citizens would have comprehensive health care provided by the system including long term care. No deductibles, co-pays or exclusions except cosmetic.. Citizens are free to go to any Doctor or health care provider.

Under the current mish-mash of insurance providers we are paying for a highly inefficient system. Profits and administrative overhead currently take 25-30% of health care premium dollars. Medicare programs have only a 3% overhead. These savings and negotiated drug prices can help provide the necessary money to provide comprehensive high quality health care to all U.S. citizens.

John Nichols, author of THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT: The Founders' Cure for Royalism, writes in The Nation:

The Nation - (click to read entire article) -- The campaign to impeach Alberto Gonzales -- organized by Democracy for America and filmmaker Robert "Outfoxed" Greenwald's Brave New Films crew under the slogan "President Bush won't fire Attorney General Alberto Gonzales... but YOU can!" -- is keeping the heat on the Bush administration's most scandal-plagued appointee. At a time when the drive-by media is playing the president's game by turning its attention away from the constant -- and increasingly dramatic -- revelations of high crimes and misdemeanors on the attorney general's part, this sort of citizen activism becomes all the more essential.

More than 77,000 Americans have signed onto the campaign's online petition, which declares: "We, The Undersigned, urge the House Judiciary Committee to begin the process of impeachment of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in accordance with Article II, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution,