Mitchell: Attack on Gaza: U.S. Media Silent - As Israeli Newspaper Raises Doubts

Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, has a great piece discussing the typically deafening silence of the U.S. media vis a vis Haaretz on Israel's crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Check out Mitchell's piece at Huffington.

The moral indignation at Haaretz could not be more dissimilar to the indifference and cowardice of most American politicians and the U.S. corporate media.

How Bush Broke Government

Good accounting of the disaster of the Bush administration at the American Prospect:

"You know how there are all these checks and balances in the government?" says Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. "Under the Bush administration, all that was turned on its head. When you look at what they did, it's like reading the opposite of the Federalist Papers."

And a nice outline of what Bush did over at the VA while waving the American flag:

Department of Veterans Affairs:
Secretary Jim Nicholson embarked on a campaign in 2005 to reduce the number of claims made by veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder, announcing a plan to review the cases in which veterans receive full disability benefits for the disorder. He said he wanted to root out 'fraud.' Shortly thereafter, a New Mexico veteran who was undergoing review committed suicide, partly over concern about the review, according to veterans' advocates. On Nov. 10, 2005, Nicholson discontinued the claim review.
...
Department of Veterans Affairs:
When Anthony Principi requested an increase for the agency's fiscal year 2005 budget, President George W. Bush balked. He recommended that the VA receive a budget of $65.3 billion, $1.2 billion less than what Principi wanted. Principi, who had served as an acting secretary of the VA in the first Bush administration, knows how things work in Washington. Nevertheless, he spoke out during a House Veterans Affairs Committee hearing on Feb. 4, 2004. By December, Principi was out of a job. His departure marked a turning point for the VA. Many of the programs that he had championed, such as a mental-health task force and efforts to improve claims processing for veterans who have been injured in combat, lost the strong backing in the agency and were allowed to languish. ...
Department of Veterans Affairs:
Bush's initiative allowed a set of institutional changes at Veterans Affairs that have had a significant impact on the constitutional separation of church and state. In the past, faith-based groups supported by federal grants had to agree that they would not use religion while helping veterans. Under the new regulations,
individuals supported by federal funds do not have to make this promise. Meanwhile, at the VA Health Care Network in upstate New York, 'spirituality assessments' of patients are conducted by a chaplain within 24 hours of a patient's arrival, according to a lawsuit that was filed by members of a Wisconsin-based organization, Freedom from Religion Foundation. A VA hospital in Big Spring, Virginia, also conducts a basic spiritual assessment, with such questions as 'When talking to people, how often do you mention spiritual or religious things?' and 'How often do you pray?' And at the Loma Linda VA Medical Center in California, a questionnaire states one of the goals of the assessment: 'Maintain Optimal Spiritual Health.' In some facilities, these spiritual assessments are documented in a patient's medical progress report.

Media Blacks Out Israel's Aggression

To listen to corporate American media, Israel's illegal blockade of Gaza, its illegal collective punishment of human beings who live in Gaza, and its illegal ground war do not matter.

The only question is will this ground war cost too much: For Israel?

The same timid, unthinking analysis by the American media that led up to the Iraq War (an illegal war of aggression similarly based upon an array of fabrications and distortions) is on display as the 1,000s of casualties pile up in Gaza.

The United Nations Security Council has scheduled emergency consultations to address Israeli aggression: Its relevancy is, well, less than certain. That the overwhelming number of nations in the world, and the UN itself, condemn Israeli human rights violations thus far has not resulted in any anything approaching substantial influence in this sordid affair.

Krugman on the GOP

The reality-based community has long asserted what Paul Krugman sums up in his column this morning in the Times: That the GOP is more a faction dedicated to power acquisition that is in direct conflict with the American people than it is a political party representing citizen views.

Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision. ... That’s why the soon-to-be gone administration’s failure is bigger than Mr. Bush himself: it represents the end of the line for a political strategy that dominated the scene for more than a generation.
The reality of this strategy’s collapse has not, I believe, fully sunk in with some observers.

That's an understatement.