Bill Moyers' discussion with two expert analysts of health care, Trudy Lieberman, director of the health and medical reporting program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and Marcia Angell, senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.
posted by semmi
on Jul 25, 2009 -
100 comments
Leaving the left. "I departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any point of view through silence, fear, or coercion." Keith Thompson
posted by semmi
on May 22, 2005 -
184 comments
Anything goes. A Libyan court began hearing an appeal by five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who face the death penalty for allegedly infecting 380 children with the AIDS virus, in spite of testimony from Luc Montaignier, the French doctor who first isolated the HIV virus, and Swiss and Italian colleagues, that the epidemic was due to a lack of hygiene. Tripoli has said that in exchange for the freedom of the nurses, it wants compensation equal to that paid by Libya to relatives of the victims of the Lockerbie plane bombing carried out by its secret service in 1988. (Yahoo/AFP news)
posted by semmi
on Mar 30, 2005 -
18 comments
"In every existing government we find clamor, abuses of power, newspapers with triumphant, lying headlines, lies of every kind in public life. This being the case, someone like me, who understands nothing of politics, is compelled to think about politics and despair of ever understanding it, is compelled to envision something entirely different."
Natalia Ginzburg, Member of the Italian Parliament,
writer, and
critic.
posted by semmi
on Mar 24, 2005 -
4 comments
Lie Down for America, by Thomas Frank. "'How can anyone who has ever worked for someone else vote Republican?' she asked. How could so many people get it so wrong?"
posted by semmi
on Oct 18, 2004 -
67 comments
An
OpEd piece by Bruce Springsteen, announcing the tour of Vote for Change, the umbrella of a new group including the Dave Matthews Band, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., the Dixie Chicks, Jurassic 5, James Taylor and Jackson Browne. (NYT)
posted by semmi
on Aug 5, 2004 -
71 comments
The grayest of gray Republican eminences weigh in on the Iraq Debate. Brent Scowcroft, an ex-general with the prejudices and proclivities of his scholarly peers --the nattering nabobs of negativism-- proposes that the United States forget about invading Iraq.
Henry Kissinger, one of the great American opportunists, has positioned himself as a kind of stealth critic, a loyal oppositionist who is doing his darnedest to nudge Bush in a multilateral direction.
James Baker, who is intimately tied to a wide range of allegedly satanic forces and has an incredibly long and distinguished record of public service, to chasten George W. Bush's hawkish impulses on Iraq, proposes that the administration sponsor "a simple and straightforward resolution requiring that Iraq submit to intrusive inspections anytime, anywhere, with no exceptions, and authorizing all necessary means to enforce it."
posted by semmi
on Sep 19, 2002 -
11 comments
The "merger" of the Egyptian Zawahiri's Islamic Jihad and the Saudi Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda in 2001, based on the foundation of Qutb's book "Milestones", provide outlet for those who have no other way of expressing their objections to the authoritarian regimes of the countries they live in, and the reach of American power in the Middle East.
posted by semmi
on Sep 17, 2002 -
19 comments
From Richard Wilbur: "Dear Bill,
The only thing I can say right now is this. There is no excuse for the cold inhumanity of 11 September, and there is no excuse for those Americans, whether of the left or the religious right, who say that we had it coming to us.
Dick"
posted by semmi
on Sep 9, 2002 -
23 comments
An article in the New Republic promoting the notion why the Perl video, an advertisment by the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistan Sovereignty, should be seen despite FBI demands to remove it, with link to it.
posted by semmi
on Jun 13, 2002 -
6 comments
There is no far-right Vichyite renaissance
in France, no Pieds Noirs uprising, nor, really, is there any antiSemitic rampage (Le Pen is spasmodically anti-Semitic but systematically anti-immigrant; i.e., anti-Arab.), but it's a safe bet that Jean-Marie Le Pen can never peacefully become President of the French Republic. It used to be said that for evil to triumph it was necessary only for good men to do nothing; in France, historically, for evil to enter it is necessary for good men to tell other good men that nothing is the best thing a good man can do. As the French are now being reminded, it is better to muddle through with your pants around your ankles than to die lucidly with your nose in the air.
How relevent these words and events are here in the US?
posted by semmi
on May 5, 2002 -
32 comments
He does return favors, but how does it affect the workers? Eugene Scalia is President Bush's nominee for Labor Department solicitor. Scalia is one of nine children of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was a driving force behind the court ruling that stopped the counting of disputed presidential votes in Florida last year.
posted by semmi
on Dec 17, 2001 -
11 comments
Culture clash. A pilot's investigation of the crash of EgyptAir 990, and the cultural reverberations of a seemingly straightforward airplane crash. Truth as political expediency.
posted by semmi
on Nov 28, 2001 -
3 comments
The tax bill was based on conservative ideology: not only did it offer the largest rate breaks to the richest people, but it had the explicit purpose of reducing the activities of the federal government.
posted by semmi
on Aug 29, 2001 -
21 comments
