By Dave Lindorff

If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you’ve chosen to sit
amongst your bone-headed, slacker friends, don’t turn to them for help
when you can’t figure out of any of the answers. They may all tell you
the same thing, but they’ll all be wrong.

By David Swanson

I have not approved of much my congressional representative has done. He votes for war funding. He votes for bailouts for both "bankers" and the sickness industry (aka health insurance "reform"). Like any member of the Democratic Party he does what the party that funds him tells him to do.

But he is 100% correct to denounce as part of a very disturbing trend the announced plans of his craziest critics to burn him in effigy. Symbolizing violence and threatening violence contribute nothing to any discussion. Instead, these tactics degrade, intimidate, anger, and coarsen our politics. They also drown out legitimate criticism, so that the only positions possible are demonization or defense of a person rather than analysis of his actions.

Here's a campaign I support that seeks to expose and discourage this trend before it goes any further: http://stopdomesticterror.com

By Dave Lindorff

The way I see it, President Obama has a couple of months to turn his failing administration around.

The war in Afghanistan is going south, and within a couple of weeks,
his General William Westmoreland, Gen. Stanley McCrystal, will be
coming to him asking for more troops. Things are getting hairier in
Iraq too.

His signature health care initiative is foundering, with Republicans working in lockstep to see to it that it fails.

Pressure is mounting for an honest probe into the criminality of the
prior administration in its authorization and promotion of torture
against captives--most of them innocent--in the Bush/Cheney "war" on
terror.

By Dave Lindorff

Some critics have written, in response to my article
calling for extension of the single-payer plan called Medicare to all
Americans, that actually Medicare is a badly flawed program that leaves
America's elderly without coverage for many important health services,
and which requires them to pay for supplemental insurance, or to go on
Medicaid, too.

By Dave Lindorff

The Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats are finally
hitting the inevitable wall that was bound to confront them because of
the president’s congenital inability to be a bold leader, and because
of the party’s toxic decades-old decision to betray its working class
New Deal base in favor of wholesale corporate whoredom.

The wall is health care reform, which both Barack Obama and the
Democratic Party had hoped would be the ticket for them to ride to
victory in the 2010 Congressional elections and the 2012 presidential
election.

But you cannot achieve the twin goals of reducing health care costs
and providing access to health care to 50 million uninsured people,
while leaving the profit centers of the current system—doctors,
hospitals and the health insurance industry—in charge and in a position
to continue to reap profits.