Across the nation many Progressives have been disillusioned with the leadership shown by President Obama on Healthcare. As a former single-payer proponent himself we simply hoped that he would fight harder for a better bill. Instead, he allowed the Congress to mostly write the healthcare bill and far from gave a ringing endorsement to a more Progressive direction. Many of us also feel this timidness also lost the momentum in a critical time for the debate.

George W. Bush, in the duplicitous run-up to the invasion of Iraq, insulated himself, closed his mind and refused to meet with civic associations in his own land. Like an autocrat bent on plunging a country into war and occupation, knowingly on false pretenses, he deliberately deprived himself of the information that might have restrained his disastrous, messianic militarism. Disastrous, not to him and Dick Cheney, but to our country, soldiers, and economy, and to the devastated Iraqi people and their ravaged nation. -- Who would have thought last year that on assuming the presidency, that you would consider plunging deeper in to this quagmire without an exit strategy? - The deeper you plunge, the greater your rejection of the history of occupations fueling insurgencies in that region. --- The more you insulate yourself from contrary judgments to those you have been receiving from your inner councils. Our country, its people and innocent Afghan people will pay the price. -- George W. Bush, in the duplicitous run-up to the invasion of Iraq, insulated himself, closed his mind and refused to meet with civic associations in his own land. Like an autocrat bent on plunging a country into war and occupation, knowingly on false pretenses, he deliberately deprived himself of the information that might have restrained his disastrous, messianic militarism. Disastrous, not to him and Dick Cheney, but to our country, soldiers, and economy, and to the devastated Iraqi people and their ravaged nation. -- Who would have thought last year that on assuming the presidency, that you would consider plunging deeper in to this quagmire without an exit strategy? - The deeper you plunge, the greater your rejection of the history of occupations fueling insurgencies in that region. --- The more you insulate yourself from contrary judgments to those you have been receiving from your inner councils. Our country, its people and innocent Afghan people will pay the price. -- You owe the American people an un-Bush-like explanation. - Why are you not receiving these groups of American from varied backgrounds and experience at the White House on this pending Afghan decision? - They may wonder, by contrast, why you have so many White House meetings with major corporate CEOs from Wall Street, from the health insurance companies and the drug companies. - Is not the White House the peoples' House? - Along with many other citizens in our country, I look forward to your response.

In 2007, Congress shut the door to corporate-provided air travel by passing the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act. This week, those idiots at the Federal Election Commission reopened the door.

Congressman DeFazio said yesterday: We think it is time, maybe, that we turn our focus to Main Street ... Unfortunately, the President has an adviser from Wall Street, Larry Summers, and a Treasury Secretary from Wall Street, Timmy Geithner, who don't like that idea. They want to keep the TARP money either to continue to bail out Wall Street...or to pay down the deficit. That's absurd... "[Obama] is being failed by his economic team ... We may have to sacrifice just two more jobs to get millions back for Americans.

Barack Obama has nominated the former President George Bush's press secretary, Dana Perino, for a spot on the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). The BBG oversees the US government-sponsored international broadcasting. "I'm honored by the president's announcement and I'm looking forward to serving on the bipartisan board, if I'm confirmed," Perino said after she was tapped for the key job late on Wednesday by the US president, reported AFP. Established in 1994, the BBG oversees all of the US government's non-military international broadcasting outlets, including Voice of America, Alhurra television, Radio Sawa, TV Marti, Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe. Politically conservative Perino is presently a Fox News contributor and holds a job, as a counselor, for the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller. Perino and other nominees need the Senate approval to be formally appointed to the top job. [Note: I am having deja vu.]

The problem, however, is that people like Palin stopped being funny a while ago. The prominence they enjoy in our political discourse is so far out of whack with their abilities and intentions that it vastly exaggerates their influence over a variety of very serious matters that affect each and every one of us. The British have the Monster Raving Loony Party, who are a joke and exert no real influence, and we have the Republican Party, filled with monster raving loonies who exert a tremendous amount of influence because the news media thinks we are a nation of people who like to look at car accidents on the highway, which, by and large, we are. We've been well-trained by 20 years of shock television to mistake clowns and jesters for serious people, and because of that mistake, these people's deranged opinions and deformed ideas get taken seriously. As digby recently noted on the excellent Hullabaloo blog, "I'm not saying that we should panic. These people are politically weak in their own right. But when I see the liberal gasbags on TV blithely dismissing this as if it's impossible that Americans could ever fall for such lunacy, I feel a little frisson of alarm. I've read too many accounts of people who, 80 or so years ago, complacently made the same assumption.

CNN en Español has been running a story all afternnon that men dressed as Venezuelan troops blew up two pedestrin bridges over the Santander River on the Venezuela-Colombia border. Colombian ministers denounced the actions today in both the OAS and the UN. Cnnenespañol.com does not yet have an article on the story. The demolition took place in the early morning hours, and no one was hurt. [Note: to be continued.]

The economic elite have launched an attack on the U.S. public and society is unraveling at an increased rate. You may have missed it in the mainstream news media, but statistical societal indicators are reading red across the board. Before exposing the root causes of this breakdown, let’s look at some vital statistics and facts...

THOSE WHO CLAIM to PROTECT DEMOCRACY MUST READ The settlements within Hebron have been declared illegal by the Geneva conventions. The official city maps, which are the documents used by Israeli courts, are wildly inaccurate. They claim that ghost streets, long sealed off by concrete and metal, are functioning thoroughfares and marketplaces. Walking through the streets of Hebron, you find a city carved up by the violent military presence and constant threat of settler violence. Some roads have a concrete barrier running along the edge, leaving a few feet for Palestinians to walk along while two wide lanes are reserved for settlers. The souks, Old City markets, have wire screens or makeshift netting overhead: insufficient protection for attacks from settlers living on the floors above. The wire screens are heavy with trash, bricks, giant concrete chunks, and exploded plastic bags that contained sewage and urine when they burst onto the people and racks of goods below. Hisham told us one young man was in a coma after a sharpened metal rod came through the screen and penetrated his skull. Now, when you look up, you can see piles of objects that got caught in the screen: crowbars, bricks, stones, chairs. While walking through a market, we saw a settler woman throw sand from her third story apartment down at a crowded market where Palestinians were shopping.

First there was Medicare for all 300 million of us. But that was a non-starter because private insurers and Big Pharma wouldn't hear of it, and Republicans and "centrists" thought it was too much like what they have up in Canada -- which, by the way, cost Canadians only 10 percent of their GDP and covers every Canadian. (Our current system of private for-profit insurers costs 16 percent of GDP and leaves out 45 million people.)--- Our private, for-profit health insurance system, designed to fatten the profits of private health insurers and Big Pharma, is about to be turned over to ... our private, for-profit health care system. Except that now private health insurers and Big Pharma will be getting some 30 million additional customers, paid for by the rest of us. Upbeat policy wonks and political spinners who tend to see only portions of cups that are full will point out some good things: no pre-existing conditions, insurance exchanges, 30 million more Americans covered. But in reality, the cup is 90 percent empty. Most of us will remain stuck with little or no choice -- dependent on private insurers who care only about the bottom line, who deny our claims, who charge us more and more for co-payments and deductibles, who bury us in forms, who don't take our calls.

Geithner, like Larry Summers inside the White House, has failed to respond to main street's needs directly and powerfully, and failed to stand up to Wall Street interests when they are inimical to sustained stability.

"The chief federal appeals court judge in San Francisco bluntly ordered the Obama administration Thursday to stop resisting his finding that the wife of a lesbian court employee was entitled to government insurance coverage."

Indeed, the Chinese are treating the energy technology competition if it were an arms race. China is spending as much or more on greentech as it does on its military, hundreds of billions of dollars annually on renewable energy and grid infrastructure improvements. Those investments, if not vigorously countered, will effectively erode America's greentech industry leadership and secure China's dominance. China's economic stimulus package, targeted 38% of spending on greentech, as compared to a miserly 12% of the U.S. stimulus program. By 2013, greentech will account for 15 percent of the Chinese GDP. While the United States is projected to roughly triple its wind generation by 2020, China will increase its capacity twelvefold to a wind generating capability more than twice that of America's. And, while the United States is projected to increase its installed solar generation a modest 33% by 2020, China's solar generation is projected to increase 20,000%.

THE HAGUE — A United States ambassador said Thursday that Washington was concerned about how aggression will be defined as an international crime.

"Congress left consumers extremely vulnerable when it gave the credit card industry as long as 15 months to end the deceptive predatory practices outlawed in the spring in the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act. The credit card industry, which clearly wants to make a killing in the Christmas season, used this unnecessarily long grace period to intensify its predations, doubling interest rates on people who pay on time and driving up rates by an industry wide average of about 20 percent. NOTE: Merry Xmas everyone! Get out there and shop till you drop.

Earlier this week, the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, a k a, the bank bailout fund, released his report on the 2008 rescue of [AIG]. The gist of the report is that government officials made no serious attempt to extract concessions from bankers. Throughout the financial crisis key officials have shied away from doing anything that might rattle Wall Street. And the bitter paradox is that this play-it-safe approach has ended up undermining prospects for economic recovery. Finishing the job of fixing the broken economy has become nearly impossible now that the public has lost faith in the government’s efforts. Officials could have called on bankers to offer a better deal [to bear part of the cost of the bailout], for their own sake, and simultaneously threatened to name and shame those who balked. It was their choice not to do that. And these seemingly safe choices have now placed the economy in grave danger. For the economy is still in deep trouble and needs much more government help. So here’s the real tragedy of the botched bailout: Government officials, perhaps influenced by spending too much time with bankers, forgot that if you want to govern effectively you have retain the trust of the people. And by treating the financial industry — which got us into this mess in the first place — with kid gloves, they have squandered that trust.

Two powerful lobby groups in the food industry, The Grocery Manufacturers of America and the Organic Trade Association, recently intervened as friends of the court in a federal consumer class-action lawsuit accusing the nation's largest supplier of private-label organic milk of consumer fraud. In what has been described as "the largest scandal in the history of the organic industry" USDA investigators, in 2007, found that Aurora Dairy had willfully violated federal organic standards. However, industry lobbyists are now concerned that convicting Aurora will set a dangerous legal precedent. Aurora bottles private-label organic milk for Wal-Mart, Costco, Target, Safeway and many other grocery chains.

Today, the House Financial Services Committee passed an amendment to their financial regulatory reform bill that would mandate an audit of the Federal Reserve. The Paul-Grayson amendment, named for its chief sponsors, Reps. Ron Paul and Alan Grayson, passed the committee by a count of 43-26. Supporters of the audit the Fed effort were concerned that a competing amendment by Mel Watt would gut whatever Paul-Grayson added in transparency to the Fed. After heated discussion today inside the committee, it appears that Paul and Grayson have won this round.

We have to invest months of hard work in planning and coalition building. - Seattle was built at the grass roots for months through educational efforts and the facilitation of creative planning by diverse groups. A coalition was built that included communities directly impacted by the WTO's actions. And it was a diffuse, decentralized coalition of affinity groups and clusters using open democratic decision-making and collective leadership. - People were trained, and trained well, in nonviolent resistance, including in the use of locks and other equipment for the creation of human barriers. The city was divided into pie slices with the WTO meeting place at the center, and different groups had the responsibility to shut down their slice of the pie. -- There is a myth that Seattle had the advantage of surprise. On the contrary, it had the advantage of extensive publicity. -- Plans were heavily publicized and, therefore, mainstreamed. Labor unions participated. Taxi drivers and longshoremen and warehouse workers went on strike. - And a great deal of energy went into art and street theater used to energize and communicate messages, as well as to block streets. People were presented with very clear and immediate reasons they should participate. -- If you think it's time we shut down the empire at the heart of the WTO with tactics so effectively used to weaken the WTO, pick up a copy of "The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle" and get in touch -- and get your organizations in touch -- with this group of dedicated citizens in order to coordinate your own independent efforts to close off a pie-slice of Capitol Hill: http://peaceoftheaction.org

"In the military, you're trained to shoot at a target, but sometimes the humanity of that target intrudes, and people come to question what they've done," said Dr. Shira Maguen (putting it, I would say, mildly). Maguen is a staff psychologist at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and lead author of a recent study of the factors causing PTSD, conducted in conjunction with the University of California, San Francisco. The study, published in the October 2009 issue of the Journal of Traumatic Stress, used data from 1,200 veterans of the Vietnam War. It found, much to the researchers' surprise, that "the negative psychological effects of killing" made all other factors pale in comparison.