By Bob Cusack, The Hill, 22 April 2010

A new government report from Rick Foster, the chief actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), finds that President Barack Obama’s new healthcare reform law would cost $828 billion over the next decade while saving $577 billion.

Foster notes that CMS’s projections do not take into account changes to the tax code that have been enacted. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that over the next 10 years, the healthcare package would decrease the deficit.

[Read more]

April 16, 2010

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL. With all due respect, we can only wish those tea party activists who gathered this week were not so single-minded about just who’s responsible for their troubles, real and imagined. They’re up in arms, so to speak, against big government, especially the Obama administration.

But if they thought this through, they’d be joining forces with other grassroots Americans who will soon be demonstrating in Washington and elsewhere against high finance, taking on Wall Street and the country’s biggest banks.

[Read the transcript / View the programme]

You cannot man the barricades with a mouth full of Cheetos

By Joe Bageant

There is no way the world’s working people can win in the long run, which is getting pretty damned short, or even survive, except by joining the worker struggles, of China, Asia and Africa and India. The idea that American workers are the same as the Asian and Latin American and African working people goes down hard in American gullets. (I’m no expert, but it looks to me like the Euros and the Aussies and the Canadians are snotty that way too. In fact, now that I am meeting dozens upon dozens of Canadians from all walks of life, they are looking worse than Americans.)

But for Americans, it does not go down at all. As a people, they’ll never ever accept that fact, because they’ll never know it for at least two reasons. (1) They are too over worked and undereducated to find out for themselves, and (2) American corporate media machinery will never let them hear of it. Americans are screwed, blued and tattooed.

And for that I blame Anderson Cooper. That’s right, CNN’s boyishly good looking, sincere faced, Emmy Award winning Anderson Cooper. Let me explain.

[Read the article]

By Matthew Kalman / Jerusalem

The ministry says the iPad’s Wi-Fi system is configured for the United States and does not conform to the European standards used in Israel […] Aviv Eilon, a Tel Aviv attorney specializing in technology law…says the iPad conforms to the European standards approved in Israel and uses the same Wi-Fi devices as other Apple computers already in use in the country. […] One commentator, Aharon Etengoff, has openly speculated on his blog that the Ministry of Communications is acting to protect the monopoly of iDigital, Apple’s sole official Israeli importer, which is owned by Chemi Peres, son of the Israeli president.

[Read the article]

Related:
Aharon Etengoff: Why Israel banned the iPad

MrAlexSeymour — April 19, 2010 — Israel’s so-called ‘Independence Day’ celebration in London was marked by the withdrawal of two of the stars of the show and the non-arrival of the third. Protestors outside the venue, at the Department of Education, cheered as a large Palestinian flag was unfurled above the entrance to the hall and later from the top of the building.

via Palestine Video