Truthout 2/22

Obama, Tea Parties and the Battle for Our Brains
George Lakoff, Truthout: "Over the past couple of weeks, The New York Times has been reporting on results from the cognitive and brain sciences that confirm past research in those fields partly by me and partly by my community of colleagues. What makes this of general, not personal, interest is that the scientific results are especially important for understanding what has been going wrong for the Obama administration and for liberals generally, and what has been going right for conservatives."
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Terrorism Law, the New McCarthyism
Stephen Rohde, The LA Daily Journal: "Tomorrow, the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the first encounter with the free speech and association rights of American citizens in the context of terrorism since the 9/11 attacks, and in the first test of the constitutionality of a provision of the USA Patriot Act."
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Robert Reich | Enact Health Care With 51 Senate Votes
Robert Reich, RobertReich.org: "This week the president is hosting a bipartisan gab-fest at the White House to try to tease out some Republican votes for health care. It's a total waste of time. If Obama thinks he's going to get a single Republican vote at this stage of the game, he's fooling himself (or the American people)."
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Sen. Bernie Sanders | The Senate's Reconcilable Differences
Sen. Bernie Sanders, In These Times: "The United States is in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the 1930's. Millions of Americans continue to lose their jobs, homes, life savings and ability to send their children to college. Since December of 2007, more than 7 million Americans have lost their jobs; a staggering 17.3 percent of the American workforce is either unemployed or under-employed, and over 6 million Americans have been out of work for more than six months, the highest on record."
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Major Fallout Predicted Over Obama's Nuclear Power Proposal
Grace Huang, Truthout: "While President Obama has announced an offer of $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for two new nuclear reactors, worries about potential cost overruns, health risks and safety concerns lead many to believe his proposal may cause far more harm than good - assuming that the reactors can be successfully built."
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Afghan Push - Hype or History in the Making?
Jean MacKenzie and Mohammad Ilyas Dayee, GlobalPost: "Six days into the battle for Marjah, the spin doctors in Kabul and Washington may be regretting all the advance hype. With 15,000 combined Afghan, American and British forces arrayed against what was thought to be a handful of insurgents, victory had seemed assured."
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It's Not the Budget Deficit; It's the Trade Deficit
Dean Baker, Truthout: "The Wall-Street-financed crew that is pushing to gut Social Security and Medicare is used to playing fast and loose with facts and logic to advance their agenda. Unfortunately, many of the reporters who cover these issues have little knowledge of economics, so they are often suckered."
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New York Times' "Mystery" Op-Ed Calls for More Afghan Civilian Deaths
Robert Naiman, Truthout: "On Thursday, The New York Times made an astonishing editorial choice, for which its editors owe the public an explanation: it published an op-ed by an obscure and poorly identified author attacking Gen. Stanley McChrystal for his directive last July that airstrikes in Afghanistan be authorized only under 'very limited and prescribed conditions.' The op-ed denounced an 'overemphasis on civilian protection' and charged that 'air support to American and Afghan forces has been all but grounded by concerns about civilian casualties.'"
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Visiting a Modern-Day Slave Plantation
Angola 3 News, Truthout: "Professor Nancy A. Heitzeg Ph.D.: 'I was at Angola with a university-level off-campus class I was teaching on Racism In The Criminal Justice System. Students and I were in New Orleans for a week where we met with Sister Helen Prejean and did some work for the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana. I had been to Angola once before and both tours were comparable."
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New Grist for Hype on Iran
Ray McGovern, Truthout: "Here we go again. A report issued Thursday by the new Director General of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano, has injected new adrenalin into those arguing that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon."
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Nanotechnologies: Are We All Nanogrub Guinea Pigs?
Agnes Rousseaux, basta! "After GMO, nanotechnologies come uninvited onto our plates: nanofoods, treated with nanopesticides and contained in nanopackaging are on the rise. At stake: colossal financial profits for manufacturers and environmental and health risks impossible to evaluate today. All in a complete and unbelievable absence of rules and controls!"
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Community and Popular Radio in Haiti Today
Beverly Bell, Truthout: "Sony Esteus is squeezed into an elementary school chair, the kind with the curved piece of wood in front, in a courtyard. Around him are chickens, a fly-swarmed pile of compost, a truck and a tent. Sony runs his laptop off of an extension cord running out a window. The cord and the courtyard are on loan from a nonprofit, and they have formed Sony's work station since the earthquake's destruction of his own organization's building. Sony is director of the Society for Social Mobilization and Communication - SAKS by its Creole acronym - which provides training, technical support, equipment and production to help popular radio stations educate and inform the community."
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A Snitch in Your Pocket
Michael Isikoff: "Amid all the furor over the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program a few years ago, a mini-revolt was brewing over another type of federal snooping that was getting no public attention at all. Federal prosecutors were seeking what seemed to be unusually sensitive records: internal data from telecommunications companies that showed the locations of their customers' cell phones - sometimes in real time, sometimes after the fact."
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Explain Something to Me: Fixing What's Wrong in Washington ... in Afghanistan
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com: "Explain something to me. In recent months, unless you were insensate, you couldn't help running across someone talking, writing, speaking, or pontificating about how busted government is in the United States. State governments are increasingly broke and getting broker. The federal government, while running up the red ink, is, as just about everyone declares, "paralyzed" and so incapable of acting intelligently on just about anything."
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