Palin Crossed Border For Canadian Health Care

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — who has gone to great lengths to hype the supposed dangers of a big government takeover of American health care — admitted over the weekend that she used to get her treatment in Canada’s single-payer system.

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Kim Kaufman has sent me more about Robert Bobb, who figures heavily in Wal-Mart’s
drive to moronize the public school curriculum in Detroit. (I sent that piece out yesterday:
http://markcrispinmiller.com/2010/03/wal-mart-wants-to-stupefy-your-kids/.)

MCM

Detroit Teachers fight obsequious politicians, union bosses and privatizations plans
http://dailycensored.com/2010/02/14/detroit-teachers-fight-back/

I strongly recommend this new book by Jesse Ventura and Dick Russell, as it dares make the case
for many actual conspiracies that have long been dismissed as mere demented “theories.”

For those concerned about election fraud, American Conspiracies includes an excellent chapter on
the Mike Connell and his likely murder.

MCM

I’m sending/posting this opinion piece by Donna Brazile with a tart caveat about her.

On the one hand, she gets it (sort of) right, in this piece and elsewhere, about vote
suppression, which is indeed a major problem, as the GOP in many states has, through
many different tactics, turned the clock back to the days before the Civil Rights Act.

Such work has been enabled by the GOP’s vast propaganda drive against ACORN
and/or the spectre they call “voter fraud”–a pack of lies that has been largely parroted
by our compliant press. Thus the media has actually abetted the Republicans, by serving
as a megaphone for their loud, groundless argument in favor of more voter purges, ID
requirements, and other neo-Jim Crow measures. (All the more reason to step up the
pressure on the New York Times for refusing to retract its faulty coverage of James
O’Keefe’s fake video “exposé” of ACORN’s alleged criminality.)

So Donna Brazile (partly) “gets it” when it comes to vote suppression; but while she has
her eyes wide open on that front, she also has them tightly shut against the even greater
danger of election fraud–a problem that, inside her universe, does not exist. Her vision,
then, is badly skewed, since there can be no progress on the voting front unless those
fighting for it recognize the clear and present danger of computerized voting systems.

For one thing, vote suppression has itself been carried out not just through such old-
fashioned and explicit tricks as ID laws and legal voter purges, but, as well, through
the far simpler–and less perceptible–expedient of purging voters from the
rolls illegally, which, since all the US voter rolls are electronic nowadays, is just about
as easy as deleting emails. That’s just the kind of thing that Brazile would dismiss a mere
“conspiracy theory” (even though USA Today reported on it, in detail, two years ago),
and so her effort to “protect [the] voter gains of ‘Bloody Sunday’” is inadequate to start with.

And it’s all the weaker for the sad fact that election fraud can disenfranchise voters even
in a precinct where all eligible citizens have managed to get registered; although the surest
way to rig a contest is both to suppress the vote before Election Day, and then to change
the numbers electronically. That’s how it’s been working since 2000 (and how it worked
too in the last election–which Obama won, in fact, by a far larger margin than we’ve all been told).

And that’s how it will also work this year, unless we start to have a real discussion of this problem–which means that we must move beyond the blinkered vision of Brazile and other leading Democrats (including Pres. Obama), and start to face it not as partisans of either kind, but as the citizens of what once was–and what might be again–a promising democracy.

MCM

Protect voter gains of ‘Bloody Sunday’
By Donna Brazile, CNN Contributor
March 7, 2010 10:27 a.m. EST

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/03/07/brazile.bloody.sunday/index.html

How the DEA Scrubbed Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Poppy Garden from Public Memory

Visitors to Monticello don’t learn how Jefferson cultivated poppies, and his personal opium use may as well never have happened.

The following is an excerpt from Jim Hogshire’s “Opium for the Masses: Harvesting Nature’s Best Pain Medication” (Feral House, 2009).

Thomas Jefferson was a drug criminal. But he managed to escape the terrible sword of justice by dying a century before the DEA was created. In 1987 agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency showed up at Monticello, Jefferson’s famous estate.

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Donald Rumsfeld Torture Lawsuit Clears Hurdle, Allowed To Proceed
MIKE ROBINSON

CHICAGO–A federal judge refused Friday to dismiss a civil lawsuit accusing former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of responsibility for the alleged torture by U.S. forces of two Americans who worked for an Iraqi contracting firm.

U.S. District Judge Wayne R. Andersen’s ruling did not say the two contractors had proven their claims, including that they were tortured after reporting alleged illegal activities by their company. But it did say they had alleged enough specific mistreatment to warrant hearing evidence of exactly what happened.

Andersen said his decision “represents a recognition that federal officials may not strip citizens of well settled constitutional protections against mistreatment simply because they are located in a tumultuous foreign setting.”

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Chile’s Socialist Rebar
Naomi Klein

Ever since deregulation caused a worldwide economic meltdown in September ‘08 and everyone became a Keynesian again, it hasn’t been easy to be a fanatical fan of the late economist Milton Friedman. So widely discredited is his brand of free-market fundamentalism that his followers have become increasingly desperate to claim ideological victories, however far-fetched.

A particularly distasteful case in point. Just two days after Chile was struck by a devastating earthquake, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens informed his readers that Milton Friedman’s “spirit was surely hovering protectively over Chile” because, “thanks largely to him, the country has endured a tragedy that elsewhere would have been an apocalypse…. It’s not by chance that Chileans were living in houses of brick — and Haitians in houses of straw — when the wolf arrived to try to blow them down.”

According to Stephens, the radical free-market policies prescribed to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet by Milton Friedman and his infamous “Chicago Boys” are the reason Chile is a prosperous nation with “some of the world’s strictest building codes.”

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First Iceland, then the World
Michael Collins

The public is angry. Why should the public pay for the bankers mistakes. Iceland blogger Halldor Sigurdsson

Who cleans up the mess when ignorant, greedy bankers rack up massive debt then go broke? The people of Iceland made a strong statement Saturday. The sins of big bankers and government regulators shouldn’t fall on the citizens. By a 93% to 2% margin, they voted down a proposal requiring them to cover bad debt incurred by one of the nation’s oldest and largest banks. Covering the debt would have cost Iceland’s 317,000 citizens around $17,000 each.

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If you haven’t seen Idiocracy, just read this (although the movie’s a lot funnier).

MCM

Corporate Barbarians at the Gate: Wal-Mart internships at Detroit Schools
Written by Danny Weil Education Mar 6, 2010

Corporate Barbarians at the Gate: Wal-Mart ‘does Detroit’ as the privatized predators attempt to storm the gates of four Detroit High Schools

The following investigative story was compiled through the help of Donna Stern, spokesperson and organizer for ‘By Any Means Necessary’ (www.bamn.com), many brave Detroit teachers who were willing to speak out, and an 11th grade student at Frederick Douglass Academy for Young Men, in Detroit, Michigan, whom I will refer to in this article as ‘Jamal’, so as not to reveal his identity for fear of reprisal. I cannot thank all of them enough for their courage and willingness to allow me to share this story with you, the reader, and to fight for public education not beholden to the corporate barbarians who sell our kids for cash.

Dumping ‘The Crucible” by Arthur Miller in favor of the crucifixion by business elites

When Jamal, an 11th grade student, arrived at his English class in January of this year, he thought he would be continuing with his reading and analysis of The Crucible, by Arthur Miller. The Crucible is 11th grade reading for the Frederick Douglass Academy for Young Men, a 6-12 high school in Detroit, Michigan . Jamal was sadly mistaken. As he took his seat in class the teacher notified all students that they would be shifting their focus, just for awhile she told them, from the reading and analysis of literature to the construction of a mock ‘resume’ or ‘job application’. The ‘resume’ or ‘job application’ the students were to produce in their class was to be based on a ‘resume template’ handed out by the English teacher, by which students would then create their own ‘applications’.

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