Published by VenezuelAnalysis.com. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez denounced this Saturday US plans to attack his country and overthrow his government. During a ceremony celebrating the 227th birthday of Independence hero Simon Bolivar, Chavez read from a secret memo he had been sent from an unnamed source inside the United States. “Old friend, I haven’t seen you in years. As I said to you in my three prior letters, the idea remains the generation of a conflict on your western border”, read Chavez from the secret missive. [more]

Published by Global Research. When investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker broke the story four years ago that a DC-9 (N900SA) "registered to a company which once used as its address the hangar of Huffman Aviation, the flight school at the Venice, Florida Airport which trained both terrorist pilots who crashed planes into the World Trade Center, was caught in Campeche by the Mexican military ... carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine destined for the U.S.," it elicited a collective yawn from corporate media. [more]

Loss of Manufacturing Jobs Outweighs Concerns on Health Care Cost, Immigration, Terrorism Published by AmericanManufacturing.org. A new bipartisan poll conducted by Mark Mellman and Whit Ayres shows that going into the 2010 election cycle, both Democrats and Republicans face a deeply unhappy electorate who are unified in their concern over the loss of American manufacturing jobs and the lack of work being done on the issue by Congress. When asked about prospective economic solutions, pro-manufacturing policies won overwhelming support across demographics including non-union households, independents, union households and Tea Party supporters. The responses in the poll echo a June 21, 2010 article in the Financial Times, which quotes a projection that in 2011 the United States will lose its status as top nation in factory production to China, “thus ending a 110 year run as the number one country.” [more]

Published by Global Research. Illustration: Global Research. It’s best to quickly recognize the red flags in any failing relationship. This way, ties can be severed instead of allowing things to linger forever in dysfunction. For Democrats and teachers’ unions, the writing is on the wall. The two are simply going in opposite directions. [more]

Join PDA's Stop Global Warming/Environmental Issue Organizing Team (IOT); learn more here. Agency Specialists Say Greenhouse Gas Offsets Unenforceable and Demand Probe Published by Peer.org. The major bills before Congress to regulate greenhouse gases to combat global climate change suffer from “multiple unfixable flaws” that undermine their effectiveness, according to a detailed congressional disclosure by two U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees, posted today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). These agency experts’ unofficial protest is also testing new agency guidelines on employee free speech rights following EPA’s order last fall that the two employees remove a YouTube video they had produced on the frailties of cap-and-trade. [more]

Join PDA's Healthcare for All Issue Organizing Team (IOT); learn more here. Published by The Huffington Post. The nation's biggest insurers—not happy with provisions of the four-month-old health care reform law that would force many of them to spend more of the money they collect in premiums for their policyholders' medical care—are pressuring regulators to disregard what members of Congress intended when they wrote the law, so that they can keep raking in huge profits for their Wall Street owners. If they are successful, many policyholders will soon be shelling out even more than they do today to enrich insurance company shareholders and CEOs. Billions of dollars are at stake, which is why the insurers and their symbiotic allies are pulling out all the stops to gut a key part of the law that would require them to spend at least 80 cents of every premium dollar they take in for medical care. [more]

Published by AfterDowningStreet.org. Four days before Nora Dannehy was appointed to investigate the Bush administration’s U.S. attorney firing scandal, a team of lawyers she led was found to have illegally suppressed evidence in a major political corruption case. [more]

Join PDA's Accountability and Justice Issue Organizing Team (IOT); learn more here. Published by Andy Worthington. Photos: Omar Khadr before capture, and more recently. The Washington Post has just made available a letter from Guantánamo (PDF), written by Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was just 15 years old when he was seized in Afghanistan in July 2002. The letter, to one of Khadr’s Canadian lawyers, Dennis Edney, was written on May 26, and touches on aspects of Khadr’s impending trial by Military Commission—including his constant desire to fire his lawyers, which surfaced in recent pre-trial hearings, and which I discussed in two articles, Defiance in Isolation: The Last Stand of Omar Khadr and Omar Khadr Accepts US Military Lawyer for Forthcoming Trial by Military Commission. [more]

What anemic America can learn from Europe’s export-happy engine and largest social democracy. Published by Alternet.org. Nearly two years after the financial crisis brought the U.S. economy to its knees, more than 20 million Americans are either unemployed or underemployed and Congress can barely extend jobless benefits. Republicans propose the same old nostrums—tax cuts—while President Barack Obama burnishes his deficit hawk credentials. Nearly everyone in power appears content to return to the status quo, circa 2007, with a few tweaks in place. [more]

Tell President Obama: "Select Elizabeth Warren to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau." Published by The Huffington Post. On Monday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs lauded Elizabeth Warren as "a terrific candidate" to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: "I don't think any criticism in any way by anybody would disqualify her." [more]

See John Nichols interview Daniel Ellsberg at the PDA Grassroots Leadership Conference in Cleveland. Published by Alternet.org. Photo: US Army Sergeant Dostal adjusts the scope of his sniper rifle in eastern Afghanistan (AFP - Simon Lim). The brutality and fecklessness of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan have been laid bare in an indisputable way just days before the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on whether to throw $33.5 billion more into the Afghan quagmire, when that money is badly needed at home. [more]

Published by t r u t h o u t. Photo: John Out and About / Flickr. For years, the government has denied that depleted uranium (DU), a radioactive toxic waste left over from nuclear fission and added to munitions used in the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars, poisoned Iraqi civilians and veterans. [more]

Published by PitchEngine.com. Pledge Non-Compliance on July 29th. “A split decision only serves to split our communities. There is no partial solution to denials of our humanity. There is no partial solution to hatred. [more]

Join PDA's Immigration Reform Action Group; sign up here. Published by ThinkProgress.org. Photo: People hugging and crying at the Arizona State Capitol at the news of the injunction (Twitter user jneriRI4A). [Yesterday] afternoon, in a long-awaited decision, federal district court judge Susan Bolton enjoined several major provisions of Arizona’s immigration law, SB-1070. While it was speculated that Bolton would block parts of SB-1070 relating to warrantless arrests and document requirements, the judge also ended up striking down the law’s most controversial and significant provision: the requirement that police check immigration status. Bolton blocked the following sections of SB-1070 arguing that “the United States is likely to succeed on the merits in showing that…[they] are preempted by federal law” and the “United States is likely to suffer irreparable harm” in the absence of an injunction: [more]

Published by The Nation. Never was the case so weak for throwing another $33 billion into the Afghanistan sinkhole, but that's what a defensive US Congress did anyway on Tuesday evening. The vote was 308-114, with Republicans supplying most of the prowar votes. Washington-based peace groups, after weeks of e-mailing messages to Congress, put the best face possible on the vote, claiming a "significant" gain of fourteen additional antiwar votes over the 100 cast for a similar amendment by Representative Barbara Lee two weeks ago. (The new Democratic votes were cast by Corrine Brown, Kathy Castor, John Conyers, Rosa Delauro, Lloyd Doggett, Anna Eshoo, Chaka Fattah, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Hank Johnson, Marcy Kaptur, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, Gregory Meeks, James Moran, Christopher Murphy, Carol Shea-Porter, Mike Thompson, Lynn Woolsey and David Wu; while five Republicans joined the opposition: Paul Broun, Vernon Ehlers, Jeff Flake, Phil Gingrey and John Linder.) [more]

Published by The Nation. Never was the case so weak for throwing another $33 billion into the Afghanistan sinkhole, but that's what a defensive US Congress did anyway on Tuesday evening. The vote was 308-114, with Republicans supplying most of the prowar votes. Washington-based peace groups, after weeks of e-mailing messages to Congress, put the best face possible on the vote, claiming a "significant" gain of fourteen additional antiwar votes over the 100 cast for a similar amendment by Representative Barbara Lee two weeks ago. (The new Democratic votes were cast by Corrine Brown, Kathy Castor, John Conyers, Rosa Delauro, Lloyd Doggett, Anna Eshoo, Chaka Fattah, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Hank Johnson, Marcy Kaptur, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, Gregory Meeks, James Moran, Christopher Murphy, Carol Shea-Porter, Mike Thompson, Lynn Woolsey and David Wu; while five Republicans joined the opposition: Paul Broun, Vernon Ehlers, Jeff Flake, Phil Gingrey and John Linder.) [more]

Published by AFL-CIO Blog. After spending tens of millions of dollars trying to kill the new health care reform law, the nation’s big health insurance companies now, says Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), are:

sparing no expense to weaken this new law and the protection it promises to America’s consumers. According to a new report by the coalition Health Care for America Now (HCAN), big insurers are trying to gut proposed new rules that require they spend a certain amount of premium dollars on actual medical care, not wasteful administration, marketing or executive pay and bonuses. [more]

Published by Fire Dog Lake. I don’t know who is stupider: Is it Neel Kashkari, Bush Treasury’s former architect and Obama’s administrator of the TARP plan for purchasing toxic bank assets, who today lectured the elderly on why they should accept cuts in Social Security and Medicare because shared sacrifice is the way to save American free enterprise? Or is it the Washington Post publishers and editors who think that running Kashkari’s offensive and fact-free op ed will help in their relentlessly dishonest crusade to convince Congress that the way to save America is to slash the nation’s most important and successful safety net programs? Looks like a tie. [more]

Join PDA's Israel/Palestine Action Group; learn more here. Published by The Palestine Chronicle. Israel's botched raid against the Gaza-bound humanitarian flotilla on May 31 is the latest sign that Israel is on a disastrous course that it seems incapable of reversing. The attack also highlights the extent to which Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States. This situation is likely to get worse over time, which will cause major problems for Americans who have a deep attachment to the Jewish state. [more]

Published by Rolling Stone. “You don’t get control of the White House and two governors and the Justice Department, and then start arguing with people carrying signs.” --Al Sharpton Years ago a friend of mine in the media told me a story about an experience he had covering the execution of John Wayne Gacy in Joliet, Illinois. You won’t find anyone in the world who’d have been sad to see serial child murderer in a clown suit like Gacy die, but this reporter friend of mine said the crowd outside the prison on execution night freaked him out almost as much as Gacy had. There were something like 400 people outside the gates at Joliet and there were people selling commemorative t-shirts and pounding beers and chanting (“Kill the Clown!” was a popular one) all night. [more]