From dimension04 at sbcglobal.net Tue Sep 1 07:23:30 2009 From: dimension04 at sbcglobal.net (Connie Smith) Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2009 06:23:30 -0500 Subject: [CitizensTruth] WTC witness experiences Message-ID: In the report at the link below, the firefighter describes being in one of the Towers after people started jumping from the fires high up. (Horrible.) At some point he states that then there was a sound like an incoming missile, a very loud "shhhhhh" sound -- and then all of sudden KA-BOOM, a huge and literally deafening explosion -- he couldn't hear for awhile. (I think a lot of us have heard that on the YouTube clip of 2 firemen and a civilian at a phone booth, the guy trying to call his mom, then a BOOM from the buildings that stunned them.) Back to witness in the Tower: Following that huge explosion there came a wind of such magnitude that he went flying like a tumbleweed. (Others have reported this experience.) Then he was nearly buried in debris and dust -- especially dust. He thought he would suffocate from all the dust. But he soon got out and eventually got hosed down, etc. Does anybody have any knowledge or any theories about what was the missile-sound, the huge explosion, the hurricane wind? I know nano-thermite has been proven -- has anybody read of all this having those effects? http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/9110308.PDF Worst thing I've heard yet: In Judy Wood's "Request for Correction" to NIST, she stated witness reports of people disappearing and turning to dust before their eyes. I know Wood is controversial, but in looking at some official witness reports in the NY Times files, there are many lines blacked out. Any of those could have been that same report. Your thoughts? Connie -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From garyfranchi at gmail.com Wed Sep 2 17:05:43 2009 From: garyfranchi at gmail.com (Gary Franchi) Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2009 16:05:43 -0500 Subject: [CitizensTruth] Email from Germany Message-ID: <2c9e41bb0909021405w227724ddo2dec6794aa9e7bc8@mail.gmail.com> Hi all, I just got this email from Germany that I thought I would share: -Gary ===== Hi Gary, in germanspeaking regions here in Europe we will paint the streets with chalk at this day: They lie about 911 etc. So, next morning at 911 all drivers can read and people cannot say: We knew nothing about it. Just in Germany, it was the problem in former time of Hitler, that the people said: We knew nothing what happened. But the truth is: They not wanted to know and if there happened something, they turned around not to see. Therefore at this day, it's important, that all people can see it. Greetings from Germany and Switzerland Christoph -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From garyfranchi at gmail.com Thu Sep 3 13:07:25 2009 From: garyfranchi at gmail.com (Gary Franchi) Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 12:07:25 -0500 Subject: [CitizensTruth] [ LIVE ] Richard Gage at 2pm central! Message-ID: <2c9e41bb0909031007j41eb735bw6daa3151c6e66055@mail.gmail.com> Today at 2pm Central we are bringing you Richard Gage from Architects & Engineers for 911 truth! Mr. Gage is one of the foremost experts on the 9/11 cover-up and you can access him directly, but only today at 3pm eastern. If you have lingering questions about what really happened on that day or would like one of your friends or family to hear it from the expert, you need to tune in... Today Thursday Sept 3rd, 3pm Eastern ---------------------------------- Phone # to Dial: 949-333-4806 Use Conf ID: 733552# Listen to the live stream and submit your questions at: http://www.republicmagazine.com/webinar ============================================ Since 9/11 is next Friday, make sure you get your copies of the new issue "911 :: Uncovering the Truth!" today. We need your help to get truth out there! Get Your copies: http://www.republicmagazines.com You can directly access the interactive digital flip version at: http://www.republicmagazine.com/magazines/issue16 Or get the pdf here: http://www.republicmagazine.com/magazines/Republic-Magazine16.pdf *In Freedom,* *Gary Franchi* *National Director* *Restore the Republic! * P.S. You will be able to listen to the recording afterward by visiting: http://www.republicmagazine.com/webinar/previous.htm P.P.S. Please get your copies now so we can get them into the mail to you immediately! http://www.republicmagazines.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com Thu Sep 3 14:33:33 2009 From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk) Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 11:33:33 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] The Government can ... Message-ID: <852849.35372.qm@web83804.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Funny (but true) parody song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO2eh6f5Go0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hal at drxyzzy.org Thu Sep 3 15:05:58 2009 From: hal at drxyzzy.org (Hal Snyder) Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 14:05:58 -0500 Subject: [CitizensTruth] The Government can ... In-Reply-To: <852849.35372.qm@web83804.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> References: <852849.35372.qm@web83804.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Thanks, Mike. Back at you: Why We Need Government-Run Universal Socialized Health Insurance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jng4TnKqy6A The topic is health insurance, but it could just as easily be public works, gearing up for sustainable energy, healing and protecting the environment, relocalizing our economy, dealing with peak oil/soil/ water etc. I think there are good reasons people shift toward either libertarian or liberal (or you could say anarchist vs. socialist to be inflammatory) poles. On Sep 3, 2009, at 1:33 PM, Mike Kirk wrote: > Funny (but true) parody song: > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO2eh6f5Go0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com Thu Sep 3 17:47:58 2009 From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk) Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 14:47:58 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] The Government can ... In-Reply-To: References: <852849.35372.qm@web83804.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <615927.9356.qm@web83815.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Hal, My primary opposition is sending more money to Washington - they seem to re-allocate it for other purposes (war, bailouts, foreign aid to dictators, pork projects) that I disagree with. If the states were to manage the healthcare option, then I would be more likely to support it - as the funds would have less chance for misuse. Some needed changes that could be achieved through legislation: - Laws requiring all health insurance to be non-profit only - Laws to prevent exclusion based on pre-existing conditions - Financially reward providers and patients (tax deductions) for taking early preventative healthcare measures to lower costs of catastrophic care. This might help to improve the problems with the current system - they are probably already there in some form. But, the three best doctors I know of are: Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet and Dr. Merryman. :-) Regards, -Mike P.S. Peter Schiff on cosmetic surgery. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uMh7MwLOpc Start at time: 05:30 min ________________________________ From: Hal Snyder To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Sent: Thursday, September 3, 2009 2:05:58 PM Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The Government can ... Thanks, Mike. Back at you: Why We Need Government-Run Universal Socialized Health Insurance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jng4TnKqy6A The topic is health insurance, but it could just as easily be public works, gearing up for sustainable energy, healing and protecting the environment, relocalizing our economy, dealing with peak oil/soil/water etc. I think there are good reasons people shift toward either libertarian or liberal (or you could say anarchist vs. socialist to be inflammatory) poles. On Sep 3, 2009, at 1:33 PM, Mike Kirk wrote: Funny (but true) parody song: > >http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO2eh6f5Go0 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com Thu Sep 3 18:58:42 2009 From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk) Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 15:58:42 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] New long-range tazer - more shock and awe Message-ID: <496158.3225.qm@web83814.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Just when you thought the Tazer couldn't get worse... http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327236.300-longrange-taser-reignites-safety-debate.html Battery powered 'shotgun-type' cartridge can deliver shock at 20 meters for 30 seconds to 5 minutes. -Mike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mincam2 at yahoo.com Thu Sep 3 20:31:48 2009 From: mincam2 at yahoo.com (Chuck Minne) Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 17:31:48 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] The Government can ... Message-ID: <797488.83484.qm@web36906.mail.mud.yahoo.com> When "Public Options" Serve the Public - and When They Don't Thursday 03 September 2009 by: Lawrence S. Wittner ? Dr. Wittner points out that there is a successful "public option" in place for fire and police protection. (Photo: Thomas Hawk / Flickr) ? ????Currently, there is nothing more controversial in President Barack Obama's health care reform proposal than the "public option." Much of the controversy, of course, has been generated by private insurance companies, determined to safeguard their hefty profits, and by Republican politicians, eager to destroy anything that might redound to the benefit of the Democrats. Even so, a little clear thinking on the subject of public programs might illuminate their advantages and disadvantages. ? ????In fact, there are numerous "public options" in American life, with many of them rooted deep in the nation's history. In the area of education, there are public schools; in recreation, public parks; in travel, public roads; in fire-fighting, public fire departments; in law enforcement, public police forces; in culture, public libraries; in transportation, public bus and train lines; in mail delivery, the post office; in sanitation, public water supply plumbing, and sewers; in energy, public power; in old-age security, Social Security; in nutrition, public school lunch programs. Where did the notion ever come from that public programs were somehow "un-American"? ? Continued at:? http://www.truthout.org/090309A?n ? Kucinich is for Single Payer, but he has also proposed letting the states go single payer if the Feds do not. His Health Care ideas are here: ? http://kucinich.us/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2806 ? ?"The hotly-debated HR3200, the so-called "health care reform" bill, is nothing less than corporate welfare in the guise of social welfare and reform. It is a convoluted mess. The real debate which we should be having is not occurring. "Removing the "public option" from a public bill paid for by public money is not in the public interest. What is left is a "private option" paid for with public money. Why should public money be spent on a private option which does not guarantee 100% coverage nor have any cost controls? A true public option would provide 30% savings immediately which would then cover the 1/3rd of the population who presently have no healthcare. "Unfortunately, under HR3200, the Government is choosing winners and losers in the private sector; proposing to spend public funds on subsidizing insurance companies who make money not providing health care. This process wil insure only one thing - the expansion of profits. Gone is the debate over cost. "As a result of current negotiations, the Medicare Part D rip-off will continue for another decade, further fleecing senior citizens. Drug importation has been dropped, so no inexpensive drugs can be accessed from other nations. "Instead we are told the pharmaceutical companies will accept a 2% cut in the growth rate of their profits - this they call cost control! " ? An older Kucinich page of DK info is here: http://www.ontheissues.org/2004/Dennis_Kucinich_Health_Care.htm ? Excerpted from: The Independent UK ? Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."? A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health corporations called Betsy McCaughey reportedly noticed a clause in the proposed healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to see a doctor and write a living will. They could stipulate when (if at all) they would like care to be withdrawn. It's totally voluntary. Many people want it: I know I wouldn't want to be kept alive for a few extra months if I was only going to be in agony and unable to speak. But McCaughey started the rumour that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to death. This was then stretched to include the disabled, like Palin's youngest child, who she claimed would have to "justify" his existence. It was flatly untrue ? but the right had their talking-point, Palin declared the non-existent proposals "downright evil", and they were off.?? It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favour of killing the elderly ? while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.?? These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS".?? This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed ? as one Republican congressman put it ? that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them. ? --- On Thu, 9/3/09, Mike Kirk wrote: From: Mike Kirk Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The Government can ... To: "Hal Snyder" Cc: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Date: Thursday, September 3, 2009, 4:47 PM Hal, My primary opposition is sending more money to Washington - they seem to re-allocate it for other purposes (war, bailouts, foreign aid to dictators, pork projects) that I disagree with. If the states were to manage the healthcare option, then I would be more likely to support it - as the funds would have less chance for misuse. Some needed changes that could be achieved through legislation: ?? - Laws requiring all health insurance to be non-profit only ?? - Laws to prevent exclusion based on pre-existing conditions ?? - Financially reward providers and patients (tax deductions) for taking early preventative healthcare measures to lower costs of catastrophic care. This might help to improve the problems with the current system - they are probably already there in some form. But, the three best doctors I know of are:?? Dr. Diet,? Dr. Quiet and Dr. Merryman.?? :-) Regards, -Mike P.S.? Peter Schiff on cosmetic surgery.? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uMh7MwLOpc? Start at time: 05:30 min From: Hal Snyder To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Sent: Thursday, September 3, 2009 2:05:58 PM Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The Government can ... Thanks, Mike. Back at you: Why We Need Government-Run Universal Socialized Health Insurance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jng4TnKqy6A The topic is health insurance, but it could just as easily be public works, gearing up for sustainable energy, healing and protecting the environment, relocalizing our economy, dealing with peak oil/soil/water etc. I think there are good reasons people shift toward either libertarian or liberal (or you could say anarchist vs. socialist to be inflammatory) poles. On Sep 3, 2009, at 1:33 PM, Mike Kirk wrote: Funny (but true) parody song:?? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO2eh6f5Go0 -----Inline Attachment Follows----- _______________________________________________ CitizensTruth mailing list CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth website: http://citizenstruth.info -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rmigalla at earthlink.net Sun Sep 6 12:23:44 2009 From: rmigalla at earthlink.net (Robin Migalla) Date: Sun, 6 Sep 2009 11:23:44 -0500 Subject: [CitizensTruth] The Government can ... Message-ID: <01CA2EE4.7FB267A0.rmigalla@earthlink.net> Hello Everyone, Mike, I really appreciate your sharing of your good doctors - Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet and Dr. Merryman. These truly are doctors who will do more to bring about health than any other that I know of. As Voltaire (1694-1778) once said, "The purpose of medicine is to amuse the patient until nature effects a cure." He also said, "Doctors pour medicines of which they know little to cure diseases of which they no less into humans of which they know nothing." I'm always amused at how I'm reminded that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Chuck, I especially liked the comments from Wittner about other "public options." I'm yet again reminded of my schizophrenic political leanings between very libertarian and very progressive. I guess I have a libertarian head and a socialist heart. I expect bridging the gap between these two extremes in myself will go a long way towards giving me some serenity. Someone recently shared with me what I believe the best evaluation of our current health care dilemma and a proposed solution that I have seen to-date. I share it below for your reading pleasure, but if you'd rather see it with all the formatting bells and whistles, here is a link: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care The article is from the September issue of "The Atlantic." It's long but, I believe, well worth your consideration. What I especially liked about the article was how well thought out it is. Being rather pragmatic myself, I love lots of facts rather than emotional rantings. I also really appreciated the links Goldhill draws between the big picture and the individual on a very personal level. After all, what good is it to talk about all this stuff if I can't get my head around how it is going to impact my small little life. I'd love to get lots of feedback on it. Here it is in its entirety... After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here's a radical solution to an agonizing problem. by David Goldhill How American Health Care Killed My Father Illustration by Mark Hooper Almost two years ago, my father was killed by a hospital-borne infection in the intensive-care unit of a well-regarded nonprofit hospital in New York City. Dad had just turned 83, and he had a variety of the ailments common to men of his age. But he was still working on the day he walked into the hospital with pneumonia. Within 36 hours, he had developed sepsis. Over the next five weeks in the ICU, a wave of secondary infections, also acquired in the hospital, overwhelmed his defenses. My dad became a statistic-merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another victim in a building American tragedy. About a week after my father's death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawande profiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost's solution? A simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization procedures. Hospitals implementing Pronovost's checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption. But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost's travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform. It was a heroic story, but to me, it was also deeply unsettling. How was it possible that Pronovost needed to beg hospitals to adopt an essentially cost-free idea that saved so many lives? Here's an industry that loudly protests the high cost of liability insurance and the injustice of our tort system and yet needs extensive lobbying to embrace a simple technique to save up to 100,000 people. And what about us-the patients? How does a nation that might close down a business for a single illness from a suspicious hamburger tolerate the carnage inflicted by our hospitals? And not just those 100,000 deaths. In April, a Wall Street Journal story suggested that blood clots following surgery or illness, the leading cause of preventable hospital deaths in the U.S., may kill nearly 200,000 patients per year. How did Americans learn to accept hundreds of thousands of deaths from minor medical mistakes as an inevitability? My survivor's grief has taken the form of an obsession with our health-care system. For more than a year, I've been reading as much as I can get my hands on, talking to doctors and patients, and asking a lot of questions. Keeping Dad company in the hospital for five weeks had left me befuddled. How can a facility featuring state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment use less-sophisticated information technology than my local sushi bar? How can the ICU stress the importance of sterility when its trash is picked up once daily, and only after flowing onto the floor of a patient's room? Considering the importance of a patient's frame of mind to recovery, why are the rooms so cheerless and uncomfortable? In whose interest is the bizarre scheduling of hospital shifts, so that a five-week stay brings an endless string of new personnel assigned to a patient's care? Why, in other words, has this technologically advanced hospital missed out on the revolution in quality control and customer service that has swept all other consumer-facing industries in the past two generations? I'm a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices-from long lines at the doctor's office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths-seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results-a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed. Like every grieving family member, I looked for someone to blame for my father's death. But my dad's doctors weren't incompetent-on the contrary, his hospital physicians were smart, thoughtful, and hard-working. Nor is he dead because of indifferent nursing-without exception, his nurses were d edicated and compassionate. Nor from financial limitations-he was a Medicare patient, and the issue of expense was never once raised. There were no greedy pharmaceutical companies, evil health insurers, or other popular villains in his particular tragedy. Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains-for someone to blame-has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation's health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care-from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies-work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that-most important-remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value. These are the impersonal forces, I've come to believe, that explain why things have gone so badly wrong in health care, producing the national dilemma of runaway costs and poorly covered millions. The problems I've explored in the past year hardly count as breakthrough discoveries-health-care experts undoubtedly view all of them as old news. But some experts, it seems, have come to see many of these problems as inevitable in any health-care system-as conditions to be patched up, papered over, or worked around, but not problems to be solved. That's the premise behind today's incremental approach to health-care reform. Though details of the legislation are still being negotiated, its principles are a reprise of previous reforms-addressing access to health care by expanding government aid to those without adequate insurance, while attempting to control rising costs through centrally administered initiatives. Some of the ideas now on the table may well be sensible in the context of our current system. But fundamentally, the "comprehensive" reform being contemplated merely cements in place the current system-insurance-based, employment-centered, administratively complex. It addresses the underlying causes of our health-care crisis only obliquely, if at all; indeed, by extending the current system to more people, it will likely increase the ultimate cost of true reform. I'm a Democrat, and have long been concerned about America's lack of a health safety net. But based on my own work experience, I also believe that unless we fix the problems at the foundation of our health system-largely problems of incentives-our reforms won't do much good, and may do harm. To achieve maximum coverage at acceptable cost with acceptable quality, health care will need to become subject to the same forces that have boosted efficiency and value throughout the economy. We will need to reduce, rather than expand, the role of insurance; focus the government's role exclusively on things that only government can do (protect the poor, cover us against true catastrophe, enforce safety standards, and ensure provider competition); overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results; and rely more on ourselves, the consumers, as the ultimate guarantors of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health-care spending and spending on all the other good things money can buy. These ideas stand well outside the emerging political consensus about reform. So before exploring alternative policies, let's reexamine our basic assumptions about health care-what it actually is, how it's financed, its accountability to patients, and finally its relationship to the eternal laws of supply and demand. Everyone I know has at least one personal story about how screwed up our health-care system is; before spending (another) $1trillion or so on reform, we need a much clearer understanding of the causes of the problems we all experience. Illustration by Stephen Savage Health Care Isn't Health (Or Happiness) "Money is honey," my grandmother used to tell me, "but health is wealth." She said "health," not "health care." Listening to debates over health-care reform, it is sometimes difficult to remember that there is a difference. Medical care, of course, is merely one component of our overall health. Nutrition, exercise, education, emotional security, our natural environment, and public safety may now be more important than care in producing further advances in longevity and quality of life. (In 2005, almost half of all deaths in the U.S. resulted from heart disease, diabetes, lung cancer, homicide, suicide, and accidents-all of which are arguably influenced as much by lifestyle choices and living environment as by health care.) And of course even health itself is only one aspect of personal fulfillment, alongside family and friends, travel, recreation, the pursuit of knowledge and experience, and more. Yet spending on health care, by families and by the government, is crowding out spending on almost everything else. As a nation, we now spend almost 18 percent of our GDP on health care. In 1966, Medicare and Medicaid made up 1 percent of total government spending; now that figure is 20 percent, and quickly rising. Already, the federal government spends eight times as much on health care as it does on education, 12 times what it spends on food aid to children and families, 30 times what it spends on law enforcement, 78 times what it spends on land management and conservation, 87 times the spending on water supply, and 830 times the spending on energy conservation. Education, public safety, environment, infrastructure-all other public priorities are being slowly devoured by the health-care beast. It's no different for families. From 2000 to 2008, the U.S. economy grew by $4.4 trillion; of that growth, roughly one out of every four dollars was spent on health care. Household expenditures on health care already exceed those on housing. And health care's share is growing. By what mechanism does society determine that an extra, say, $100 billion for health care will make us healthier than even $10 billion for cleaner air or water, or $25 billion for better nutrition, or $5 billion for parks, or $10 billion for recreation, or $50 billion in additional vacation time-or all of those alternatives combined? The answer is, no mechanism at all. Health care simply keeps gobbling up national resources, seemingly without regard to other societal needs; it's treated as an island that doesn't touch or affect the rest of the economy. As new tests and treatments are developed, they are, for the most part, added to our Medicare or commercial insurance policies, no matter what they cost. But of course the money must come from somewhere. If the amount we spend on care had grown only at the general rate of inflation since 1970, annual health-care costs now would be roughly $5,000 less per American-that's about 10 percent of today's median income, to invest for the future or to spend on all the other things that contribute to our well-being. To be sure, our society has become wealthier over the years, and we'd naturally want to spend some of this new wealth on more and better health care; but how did we choose to spend this much? The housing bubble offers some important lessons for health-care policy. The claim that something-whether housing or health care-is an undersupplied social good is commonly used to justify government intervention, and policy makers have long striven to make housing more affordable. But by making housing investments eligible for special tax benefits and subsidized borrowing rates, the government has stimulated not only the construction of more houses but also the willingness of people to borrow and spend more on houses than they otherwise would have. The result is now tragically clear. As with housing, directing so much of society's resources to health care is stimulating the provision of vastly more care. Along the way, it's also distorting demand, raising prices, and making us all poorer by crowding out other, possibly more beneficial, uses for the resources now air-dropped onto the island of health care. Why do we view health care as disconnected from everything else? Why do we spend so much on it? And why, ultimately, do we get such inconsistent results? Any discussion of the ills within the system must begin with a hard look at the tax-advantaged comprehensive-insurance industry at its center. Health Insurance Isn't Health Care How often have you heard a politician say that millions of Americans "have no health care," when he or she meant they have no health insurance? How has a method of financing health care become synonymous with care itself? The reason for financing at least some of our health care with an insurance system is obvious. We all worry that a serious illness or an accident might one day require urgent, extensive care, imposing an extreme financial burden on us. In this sense, health-care insurance is just like all other forms of insurance-life, property, liability-where the many who face a risk share the cost incurred by the few who actually suffer a loss. But health insurance is different from every other type of insurance. Health insurance is the primary payment mechanism not just for expenses that are unexpected and large, but for nearly all health-care expenses. We've become so used to health insurance that we don't realize how absurd that is. We can't imagine paying for gas with our auto-insurance policy, or for our electric bills with our homeowners insurance, but we all assume that our regular checkups and dental cleanings will be covered at least partially by insurance. Most pregnancies are planned, and deliveries are predictable many months in advance, yet they're financed the same way we finance fixing a car after a wreck-through an insurance claim. Comprehensive health insurance is such an ingrained element of our thinking, we forget that its rise to dominance is relatively recent. Modern group health insurance was introduced in 1929, and employer-based insurance began to blossom during World War II, when wage freezes prompted employers to expand other benefits as a way of attracting workers. Still, as late as 1954, only a minority of Americans had health insurance. That's when Congress passed a law making employer contributions to employee health plans tax-deductible without making the resulting benefits taxable to employees. This seemingly minor tax benefit not only encouraged the spread of catastrophic insurance, but had the accidental effect of making employer-funded health insurance the most affordable option (after taxes) for financing pretty much any type of health care. There was nothing natural or inevitable about the way our system developed: employer-based, comprehensive insurance crowded out alternative methods of paying for health-care expenses only because of a poorly considered tax benefit passed half a century ago. In designing Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, the government essentially adopted this comprehensive-insurance model for its own spending, and by the next year had enrolled nearly 12 percent of the population. And it is no coinci-dence that the great inflation in health-care costs began soon after. We all believe we need comprehensive health insurance because the cost of care-even routine care-appears too high to bear on our own. But the use of insurance to fund virtually all care is itself a major cause of health care's high expense. Insurance is probably the most complex, costly, and distortional method of financing any activity; that's why it is otherwise used to fund only rare, unexpected, and large costs. Imagine sending your weekly grocery bill to an insurance clerk for review, and having the grocer reimbursed by the insurer to whom you've paid your share. An expensive and wasteful absurdity, no? Is this really a big problem for our health-care system? Well, for every two doctors in the U.S., there is now one health-insurance employee-more than 470,000 in total. In 2006, it cost almost $500 per person just to administer health insurance. Much of this enormous cost would simply disappear if we paid routine and predictable health-care expenditures the way we pay for everything else-by ourselves. Illustration by Stephen Savage The Moral-Hazard Economy Society's excess cost from health insurance's administrative expense pales next to the damage caused by "moral hazard"-the tendency we all have to change our behavior, becoming spendthrifts and otherwise taking less care with our decisions, when someone else is covering the costs. Needless to say, much medical care is unavoidable; we don't choose to become sick, nor do we seek more treatment than we think we need. Still, hospitals, drug companies, health insurers, and medical-device manufacturers now spend roughly $6 billion a year on advertising. If the demand for health care is purely a response to unavoidable medical need, why do these companies do so much advertising? Medical ads on TV typically inform the viewer that a specific treatment-a drug, device, surgical procedure-is available for a chronic condition. Many also note that the product or treatment is eligible for Medicare or private-insurance reimbursement. In some cases, the advertiser will offer to help the patient obtain that reimbursement. The key message: you can benefit from this product and pass the bill on to someone else. Every time you walk into a doctor's office, it's implicit that someone else will be paying most or all of your bill; for most of us, that means we give less attention to prices for medical services than we do to prices for anything else. Most physicians, meanwhile, benefit financially from ordering diagnostic tests, doing procedures, and scheduling follow-up appointments. Combine these two features of the system with a third-the informational advantage that extensive training has given physicians over their patients, and the authority that advantage confers-and you have a system where physicians can, to some extent, generate demand at will. Do they? Well, Medicare spends almost twice as much per patient in Dallas, where there are more doctors and care facilities per resident, as it does in Salem, Oregon, where supply is tighter. Why? Because doctors (particularly specialists) in surplus areas order more tests and treatments per capita, and keep their practices busy. Many studies have shown that the patients in areas like Dallas do not benefit in any measurable way from all this extra care. All of the physicians I know are genuinely dedicated to their patients. But at the margin, all of us are at least subconsciously influenced by our own economic interests. The data are clear: in our current system, physician supply often begets patient demand. Moral hazard has fostered an accidental collusion between providers benefiting from higher costs and patients who don't fully bear them. In this environment, trying to control costs is awfully tough. When Medicare cut reimbursement rates in 2005 on chemotherapy and anemia drugs, for instance, it saved almost 20 percent of the previously billed costs. But Medicare's total cancer-treatment costs actually rose almost immediately. As The New York Times reported, some physicians believed their colleagues simply performed more treatments, particularly higher-profit ones. Want further evidence of moral hazard? The average insured American and the average uninsured American spend very similar amounts of their own money on health care each year-$654 and $583, respectively. But they spend wildly different amounts of other people's money-$3,809 and $1,103, respectively. Sometimes the uninsured do not get highly beneficial treatments because they cannot afford them at today's prices-something any reform must address. But likewise, insured patients often get only marginally beneficial (or even outright unnecessary) care at mind-boggling cost. If it's true that the insurance system leads us to focus on only our direct share of costs-rather than the total cost to society-it's not surprising that insured families and uninsured ones would make similar decisions as to how much of their own money to spend on care, but very different decisions on the total amount to consume. The unfortunate fact is, health-care demand has no natural limit. Our society will always keep creating new treatments to cure previously incurable problems. Some of these will save lives or add productive years to them; many will simply make us more comfortable. That's all to the good. But the cost of this comfort, and whether it's really worthwhile, is never calculated-by anyone. For almost all our health-care needs, the current system allows us as consumers to ask providers, "What's my share?" instead of "How much does this cost?"-a question we ask before buying any other good or service. And the subtle difference between those two questions is costing us all a fortune. There's No One Else to Pay the Bill Perhaps the greatest problem posed by our health-insurance-driven regime is the sense it creates that someone else is actually paying for most of our health care-and that the costs of new benefits can also be borne by someone else. Unfortunately, there is no one else. For fun, let's imagine confiscating all the profits of all the famously greedy health-insurance companies. That would pay for four days of health care for all Americans. Let's add in the profits of the 10 biggest rapacious U.S. drug companies. Another 7 days. Indeed, confiscating all the profits of all American companies, in every industry, wouldn't cover even five months of our health-care expenses. Somebody else always seems to be paying for at least part of our health care. But that's just an illusion. At $2.4 trillion and growing, our nation's health-care bill is too big to be paid by anyone other than all of us. In 2007, employer-based health insurance cost, on average, more than $12,000 per family, up 78 percent since 2001. I've run several companies and company divisions of various sizes over the course of my career, so I can confidently tell you that raises (and even entry-level hiring) are tightly limited by rising health-care costs. You may think your employer is paying for your health care, but in fact your company's share of the insurance premium comes out of your potential wage increase. Where else could it come from? Let's say you're a 22-year-old single employee at my company today, starting out at a $30,000 annual salary. Let's assume you'll get married in six years, support two children for 20 years, retire at 65, and die at 80. Now let's make a crazy assumption: insurance premiums, Medicare taxes and premiums, and out-of-pocket costs will grow no faster than your earnings-say, 3 percent a year. By the end of your working days, your annual salary will be up to $107,000. And over your lifetime, you and your employer together will have paid $1.77 million for your family's health care. $1.77 million! And that's only after assuming the taming of costs! In recent years, health-care costs have actually grown 2 to 3 percent faster than the economy. If that continues, your 22-year-old self is looking at an additional $2 million or so in expenses over your lifetime-roughly $4 million in total. Would you have guessed these numbers were so large? If not, you have good cause: only a quarter would be paid by you directly (and much of that after retirement). The rest would be spent by others on your behalf, deducted from your earnings before you received your paycheck. And that's a big reason why our health-care system is so expensive. The Government Is Not Good at Cost Reduction Every proposal for health-care reform has featured some element of cost control to "balance" the inflationary impact of expanding access. Yet it goes without saying that in the big picture, all government efforts to control costs have failed. Why? One reason is a fixation on prices rather than costs. The government regularly tries to cap costs by limiting the reimbursement rates paid to providers by Medicare and Medicaid, and generally pays much less for each service than private insurers. But as we've seen, that can lead providers to perform more services, and to steer patients toward higher-priced, more lightly regulated treatments. The government's efforts to expand "access" to care while limiting costs are like blowing up a balloon while simultaneously squeezing it. The balloon continues to inflate, but in misshapen form. Cost control is a feature of decentralized, competitive markets, not of centralized bureaucracy-a matter of incentives, not mandates. What's more, cost control is dynamic. Even the simplest business faces constant variation in its costs for labor, facilities, and capital; to compete, management must react quickly, efficiently, and, most often, prospectively. By contrast, government bureaucracies set regulations and reimbursement rates through carefully evaluated and broadly applied rules. These bureaucracies first must notice market changes and resource misallocations, and then (sometimes subject to political considerations) issue additional regulations or change reimbursement rates to address each problem retrospectively. As a result, strange distortions crop up constantly in health care. For example, although the population is rapidly aging, we have few geriatricians-physicians who address the cluster of common patient issues related to aging, often crossing traditional specialty lines. Why? Because under Medicare's current reimbursement system (which generally pays more to physicians who do lots of tests and procedures), geriatricians typically don't make much money. If seniors were the true customers, they would likely flock to geriatricians, bidding up their rates-and sending a useful signal to medical-school students. But Medicare is the real customer, and it pays more to specialists in established fields. And so, seniors often end up overusing specialists who are not focused on their specific health needs. Many reformers believe if we could only adopt a single-payer system, we could deliver health care more cheaply than we do today. The experience of other developed countries suggests that's true: the government as single payer would have lower administrative costs than private insurers, as well as enormous market clout and the ability to bring down prices, although at the cost of explicitly rationing care. But even leaving aside the effects of price controls on innovation and customer service, today's Medicare system should leave us skeptical about the long-term viability of that approach. From 2000 to 2007, despite its market power, Medicare's hospital and physician reimbursements per enrollee rose by 5.4 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively, per year. As currently structured, Medicare is a Ponzi scheme. The Medicare tax rate has been raised seven times since its enactment, and almost certainly will need to be raised again in the next decade. The Medicare tax contributions and premiums that today's beneficiaries have paid into the system don't come close to fully funding their care, which today's workers subsidize. The subsidy is getting larger even as it becomes more difficult to maintain: next year there will be 3.7 working people for each Medicare beneficiary; if you're in your mid-40s today, there will be only 2.4 workers to subsidize your care when you hit retirement age. The experience of other rich nations should also make us skeptical. Whatever their histories, nearly all developed countries are now struggling with rapidly rising health-care costs, including those with single-payer systems. From 2000 to 2005, per capita health-care spending in Canada grew by 33 percent, in France by 37 percent, in the U.K. by 47 percent-all comparable to the 40 percent growth experienced by the U.S. in that period. Cost control by way of bureaucratic price controls has its limits. Uncompetitive In 2007, health companies in the Fortune 1,000 earned $71 billion. Of the 52 industries represented on Fortune's list, pharmaceuticals and medical equipment ranked third and fourth, respectively, in terms of profits as a share of revenue. From 2000 to 2007, the annual profits of America's top 15 health-insurance companies increased from $3.5 billion to $15 billion. In competitive markets, high profits serve an important social purpose: encouraging capital to flow to the production of a service not adequately supplied. But as long as our government shovels ever-greater resources into health care with one hand, while with the other restricting competition that would ensure those resources are used efficiently, sustained high profits will be the rule. Health care is an exceptionally heavily regulated industry. Health-insurance companies are regulated by states, which limits interstate competition. And many of the materials, machines, and even software programs used by health-care facilities must be licensed by state or federal authorities, or approved for use by Medicare; these requirements form large barriers to entry for both new facilities and new vendors that could equip and supply them. Many health-care regulations are justified as safety precautions. But many also result from attempts to redress the distortions that our system of financing health care has created. And whatever their purpose, almost all of these regulations can be shaped over time by the powerful institutions that dominate the health-care landscape, and that are often looking to protect themselves from competition. Take the ongoing battle between large integrated hospitals and specialty clinics (for cardiac surgery, orthopedics, maternity, etc.). The economic threat posed by these facilities is well illustrated by a recent battle in Loma Linda, California. When a group of doctors proposed a 28-bed private specialty facility, the local hospitals protested to the city council that it was unnecessary, and launched a publicity campaign to try to block it; the council backed the facility anyway. So the nonprofit Loma Linda University Medical Center simply bought the new facility for $80 million in 2008. Traditional hospitals got Congress to include an 18-month moratorium on new specialty hospitals in the 2003 Medicare law, and a second six-month ban in 2005. The hospitals' argument has some merit: less complicated surgical cases (the kind specialty clinics typically take on) tend to be more profitable than complex surgeries and nonsurgical admissions. Without those profitable cases, hospitals can't subsidize the cases on which they lose money. But why are simple surgeries more profitable? Because of the nonmarket methods by which Medicare sets prices. The net effect of the endless layers of health-care regulation is to stifle competition in the classic economic sense. What we have instead is a noncompetitive system where services and reimbursement are negotiated above consumers' heads by large private and government institutions. And the primary goal of any large noncompetitive institution is not cost control or product innovation or customer service: it's maintenance of the status quo. Our Favored Hospitals In 1751, Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond founded Pennsylvania Hospital, the first in America, "to care for the sick-poor and insane who were wandering the streets of Philadelphia." Since then, hospitals have come to dominate the American medical landscape. Yet in recent decades, the rationale for concentrating so much care under one roof has diminished steadily. Many hospitals still exist in their current form largely because they are protected by regulation and favored by government payment policies, which effectively maintain the existing industrial structure, rather than encouraging innovation. Between 1970 and 2006, annual Medicare payments to hospitals grew by roughly 3,800 percent, from $5 billion to $192 billion. Total annual hospital-care costs for all patients grew from $28 billion to almost $650 billion during that same period. Since 1975, hospitals' enormous revenue growth has occurred despite a 35 percent decline in the number of hospital beds, no meaningful increase in total admissions, and an almost 50 percent decline in the average length of stay. High-tech equipment has been dispersed to medical practices, recovery periods after major procedures have shrunk, and pharmaceutical therapies have grown in importance, yet over the past 40 years, hospitals have managed to retain the same share (roughly one-third) of our nation's health-care bill. Hospitals have sought to use the laws and regulations originally designed to serve patients to preserve their business model. Their argument is the same one that's been made before by regulated railroads, electric utilities, airlines, Ma Bell, and banks: new competitors, they say, are using their cost advantages to skim off the best customers; without those customers, the incumbents will no longer be able to subsidize essential services that no one can profitably provide to the public. Hospitals are indeed required to provide emergency care to any walk-in patient, and this obligation is a meaningful public service. But how do we know whether the charitable benefit from this requirement justifies the social cost of expensive hospital care and poor quality? We don't know. Our system of health-care law and regulation has so distorted the functioning of the market that it's impossible to measure the social costs and benefits of maintaining hospitals' prominence. And again, the distortions caused by a reluctance to pay directly for health care-in this case, emergency medicine for the poor-are in large part to blame. Consider the oft-quoted "statistic" that emergency-room care is the most expensive form of treatment. Has anyone who believes this ever actually been to an emergency room? My sister is an emergency-medicine physician; unlike most other specialists, ER docs usually work on scheduled shifts and are paid fixed salaries that place them in the lower ranks of physician compensation. The doctors and other workers are hardly underemployed: typically, ERs are unbelievably crowded. They have access to the facilities and equipment of the entire hospital, but require very few dedicated resources of their own. They benefit from the group buying power of the entire institution. No expensive art decorates the walls, and the waiting rooms resemble train-station waiting areas. So what exactly makes an ER more expensive than other forms of treatment? Perhaps it's the accounting. Since charity care, which is often performed in the ER, is one justification for hospitals' protected place in law and regulation, it's in hospitals' interest to shift costs from overhead and other parts of the hospital to the ER, so that the costs of charity care-the public service that hospitals are providing-will appear to be high. Hospitals certainly lose money on their ERs; after all, many of their customers pay nothing. But to argue that ERs are costly compared with other treatment options, hospitals need to claim expenses well beyond the marginal (or incremental) cost of serving ER patients. In a recent IRS survey of almost 500 nonprofit hospitals, nearly 60 percent reported providing charity care equal to less than 5 percent of their total revenue, and about 20 percent reported providing less than 2 percent. Analyzing data from the American Hospital Directory, The Wall Street Journal found that the 50 largest nonprofit hospitals or hospital systems made a combined "net income" (that is, profit) of $4.27 billion in 2006, nearly eight times their profits five years earlier. How do we know whether the value of hospitals' charitable services compensates for the roughly 100,000 deaths from hospital-borne disease, their poor standards of customer service, and their extraordinary diseconomies of both scale and scope? Might we be better off reforming hospitals, and allowing many of them to be eliminated by competition from specialty clinics? As a society, couldn't we just pay directly for the services required by the poor? We don't know how many hospitals would even survive if they were not so favored under the law; anyone who has lost a loved one to a preventable hospital death will wonder how many should. You Are Not the Customer What amazed me most during five weeks in the ICU with my dad was the survival of paper and pen for medical instructions and histories. In that time, Dad was twice taken for surgical procedures intended for other patients (fortunately interrupted both times by our intervention). My dry cleaner uses a more elaborate system to track shirts than this hospital used to track treatment. Not every hospital relies on paper-based orders and charts, but most still do. Why has adoption of clinical information technology been so slow? Companies invest in IT to reduce their costs, reduce mistakes (itself a form of cost-saving), and improve customer service. Better information technology would have improved my father's experience in the ICU-and possibly his chances of survival. But my father was not the customer; Medicare was. And although Medicare has experimented with new reimbursement approaches to drive better results, no centralized reimbursement system can be supple enough to address the many variables affecting the patient experience. Certainly, Medicare wasn't paying for the quality of service during my dad's hospital stay. And it wasn't really paying for the quality of his care, either; indeed, because my dad got sepsis in the hospital, and had to spend weeks there before his death, the hospital was able to charge a lot more for his care than if it had successfully treated his pneumonia and sent him home in days. Of course, one area of health-related IT has received substantial investment-billing. So much for the argument, often made, that privacy concerns or a lack of agreed-upon standards has prevented the development of clinical IT or electronic medical records; presumably, if lack of privacy or standards had hampered the digitization of health records, it also would have prevented the digitization of the accompanying bills. To meet the needs of the government bureaucracy and insurance companies, most providers now bill on standardized electronic forms. In case you wonder who a care provider's real customer is, try reading one of these bills. For that matter, try discussing prices with hospitals and other providers. Eight years ago, my wife needed an MRI, but we did not have health insurance. I called up several area hospitals, clinics, and doctors' offices-all within about a one-mile radius-to find the best price. I was surprised to discover that prices quoted, for an identical service, varied widely, and that the lowest price was $1,200. But what was truly astonishing was that several providers refused to quote any price. Only if I came in and actually ordered the MRI could we discuss price. Several years later, when we were preparing for the birth of our second child, I requested the total cost of the delivery and related procedures from our hospital. The answer: the hospital discussed price only with uninsured patients. What about my co-pay? They would discuss my potential co-pay only if I were applying for financial assistance. Keeping prices opaque is one way medical institutions seek to avoid competition and thereby keep prices up. And they get away with it in part because so few consumers pay directly for their own care-insurers, Medicare, and Medicaid are basically the whole game. But without transparency on prices-and the related data on measurable outcomes-efforts to give the consumer more control over health care have failed, and always will. Here's a wonderful example of price opacity. Advocates for the uninsured complain that hospitals charge uninsured patients, on average, 2.5 times the amount charged to insured patients. Hospitals defend themselves by contending that they earn from uninsured patients only 25 percent of the amount they do from insured ones. Both statements appear to be true! How is this possible? Well, hospitals bill according to their price lists, but provide large discounts to major insurers. Individual consumers, of course, don't benefit from these discounts, so they receive their bills at full list price (typically about 2.5 times the bill to an insured patient). Uninsured patients, however, pay according to how much of the bill the hospital believes they can afford (which, on average, amounts to 25 percent of the amount paid by an insured patient). Nonetheless, whatever discount a hospital gives to an uninsured patient is entirely at its discretion-and is typically negotiated only after the fact. Some uninsured patients have been driven into bankruptcy by hospital collections. American industry may offer no better example of pernicious "price discrimination," nor one that entails greater financial vulnerability for American families. It's astonishingly difficult for consumers to find any health-care information that would enable them to make informed choices-based not just on price, but on quality of care or the rate of preventable medical errors. Here's one place where legal requirements might help. But only a few states require institutions to make this sort of information public in a usable form for consumers. So while every city has numerous guidebooks with reviews of schools, restaurants, and spas, the public is frequently deprived of the necessary data to choose hospitals and other providers. The Strange Beast of Health-Care Technology One of the most widely held pieces of conventional wisdom about health care is that new technology is relentlessly driving up costs. Yet over the past 20 years, I've bought several generations of microwave ovens, personal computers, DVD players, GPS devices, mobile phones, and flat-screen TVs. I bank mostly at ATMs, check out my own goods at self-serve supermarket scanners, and attend company meetings by video-conference. Technology has transformed much of our daily lives, in almost all cases by adding quantity, speed, and quality while lowering costs. So why is health care different? Well, for the most part, it isn't. Whether it's new drugs to control previously untreatable conditions, diagnostic equipment that enhances physician productivity, or minimally invasive techniques that speed patient recovery, technology-driven innovation has been transforming care at least as greatly as it has transformed the rest of our lives. But most health-care technologies don't exist in the same world as other technologies. Recall the MRI my wife needed a few years ago: $1,200 for 20 minutes' use of a then 20-year-old technology, requiring a little electricity and a little labor from a single technician and a radiologist. Why was the price so high? Most MRIs in this country are reimbursed by insurance or Medicare, and operate in the limited-competition, nontransparent world of insurance pricing. I don't even know the price of many of the diagnostic services I've needed over the years-usually I've just gone to whatever provider my physician recommended, without asking (my personal contribution to the moral-hazard economy). By contrast, consider LASIK surgery. I still lack the (small amount of) courage required to get LASIK. But I've been considering it since it was introduced commercially in the 1990s. The surgery is seldom covered by insurance, and exists in the competitive economy typical of most other industries. So people who get LASIK surgery-or for that matter most cosmetic surgeries, dental procedures, or other mostly uninsured treatments-act like consumers. If you do an Internet search today, you can find LASIK procedures quoted as low as $499 per eye-a decline of roughly 80 percent since the procedure was introduced. You'll also find sites where doctors advertise their own higher-priced surgeries (which more typically cost about $2,000 per eye) and warn against the dangers of discount LASIK. Many ads specify the quality of equipment being used and the performance record of the doctor, in addition to price. In other words, there's been an active, competitive market for LASIK surgery of the same sort we're used to seeing for most goods and services. The history of LASIK fits well with the pattern of all capital-intensive services outside the health-insurance economy. If you're one of the first ophthalmologists in your community to perform the procedure, you can charge a high price. But once you've acquired the machine, the actual cost of performing a single procedure (the marginal cost) is relatively low. So, as additional ophthalmologists in the neighborhood invest in LASIK equipment, the first provider can meet new competition by cutting price. In a fully competitive marketplace, the procedure's price will tend toward that low marginal cost, and ophthalmologists looking to buy new machines will exert downward pressure on both equipment and procedure prices. No business likes to compete solely on price, so most technology providers seek to add features and performance improvements to new generations of a machine-anything to keep their product from becoming a pure commodity. Their success depends on whether the consumers will pay enough for the new feature to justify its introduction. In most consumer industries, we can see this dynamic in action-observe how DVD players have moved in a few years from a high-priced luxury to a disposable commodity available at discount stores. DVD players have run out of new features for which customers will pay premium prices. Perhaps MRIs have too. After a long run of high and stable prices, you can now find ads for discount MRIs. But because of the peculiar way we pay for health care, this downward price pressure on technology seems less vigor ous. How well can insurance companies and government agencies judge the value of new features that tech suppliers introduce to keep prices up? Rather than blaming technology for rising costs, we must ask if moral hazard and a lack of discipline in national health-care spending allows health-care companies to avoid the forces that make nonmedical technology so competitive. In 2002, the U.S. had almost six times as many CT scanners per capita as Germany and four times as many MRI machines as the U.K. Traditional reformers believe it is this rate of investment that has pushed up prices, rather than sustained high prices that have pushed up investment. As a result, many states now require hospitals to obtain a Certificate of Need before making a major equipment purchase. In its own twisted way, this makes sense: moral hazard, driven by insurance, for years allowed providers to create enough demand to keep new MRI machines humming at any price. But Certificates of Need are just another Scotch-tape reform, an effort to maintain the current system by treating a symptom rather than the underlying disease. Technology is driving up the cost of health care for the same reason every other factor of care is driving up the cost-the absence of the forces that discipline and even drive down prices in the rest of our economy. Only in the bizarre parallel universe of health care could limiting supply be seen as a sensible approach to keeping prices down. The Limits of "Comprehensive" Health-care Reform A wasteful insurance system; distorted incentives; a bias toward treatment; moral hazard; hidden costs and a lack of transparency; curbed competition; service to the wrong customer. These are the problems at the foundation of our health-care system, resulting in a slow rot and requiring more and more money just to keep the system from collapsing. How would the health-care reform that's now taking shape solve these core problems? The Obama administration and Congress are still working out the details, but it looks like this generation of "comprehensive" reform will not address the underlying issues, any more than previous efforts did. Instead it will put yet more patches on the walls of an edifice that is fundamentally unsound-and then build that edifice higher. A central feature of the reform plan is the expansion of comprehensive health insurance to most of the 46 million Americans who now lack private or public insurance. Whether this would be achieved entirely through the extension of private commercial insurance at government-subsidized rates, or through the creation of a "public option," perhaps modeled on Medicare, is still being debated. Regardless, the administration has suggested a cost to taxpayers of $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion over 10 years. That, of course, will mean another $1 trillion or more not spent on other things-environment, education, nutrition, recreation. And if the history of previous attempts to expand the health safety net are any guide, that estimate will prove low. The reform plan will also feature a variety of centrally administered initiatives designed to reduce costs and improve quality. These will likely include a major government investment to promote digitization of patient health records, an effort to collect information on best clinical practices, and changes in the way providers are paid, to better reward quality and deter wasteful spending. All of these initiatives have some theoretical appeal. And within the confines of the current system, all may do some good. But for the most part, they simply do not address the root causes of poor quality and runaway costs. Consider information technology, for instance. Of course the health system could benefit from better use of IT. The Rand Corporation has estimated that the widespread use of electronic medical records would eventually yield annual savings of $81 billion, while also improving care and reducing preventable deaths, and the White House estimates that creating and spreading the technology would cost just $50 billion. But in what other industry would an investment with such a massive annual return not be funded by the industry itself? (And while $50 billion may sound like a big investment, it's only about 2 percent of the health-care industry's annual revenues.) Technology is effective only when it's properly applied. Since most physicians and health-care companies haven't adopted electronic medical records on their own, what makes us think they will appropriately use all this new IT? Most of the benefits of the technology (record portability, a reduction in costly and dangerous clinical errors) would likely accrue to patients, not providers. In a consumer-facing industry, this alone would drive companies to make the investments to stay competitive. But of course, we patients aren't the real customers; government funding of electronic records wouldn't change that. I hope that whatever reform is finally enacted this fall works-preventing people from slipping through the cracks, raising the quality standard of the health-care industry, and delivering all this at acceptable cost. But looking at the big picture, I fear it won't. So I think we should at least begin to debate and think about larger reforms, and a different direction-if not for this round of reform, then for the next one. Politics is, of course, the art of the possible. If our health-care crisis does not abate, the possibilities for reform may expand beyond their current, tight limits. A Way Forward The most important single step we can take toward truly reforming our system is to move away from comprehensive health insurance as the single model for financing care. And a guiding principle of any reform should be to put the consumer, not the insurer or the government, at the center of the system. I believe if the government took on the goal of better supporting consumers-by bringing greater transparency and competition to the health-care industry, and by directly subsidizing those who can't afford care-we'd find that consumers could buy much more of their care directly than we might initially think, and that over time we'd see better care and better service, at lower cost, as a result. A more consumer-centered health-care system would not rely on a single form of financing for health-care purchases; it would make use of different sorts of financing for different elements of care-with routine care funded largely out of our incomes; major, predictable expenses (including much end-of-life care) funded by savings and credit; and massive, unpredictable expenses funded by insurance. For years, a number of reformers have advocated a more "consumer-driven" care system-a term coined by the Harvard Business School professor Regina Herzlinger, who has written extensively on the subject. Many different steps could move us toward such a system. Here's one approach that-although it may sound radical-makes sense to me. First, we should replace our current web of employer- and government-based insurance with a single program of catastrophic insurance open to all Americans-indeed, all Americans should be required to buy it-with fixed premiums based solely on age. This program would be best run as a single national pool, without underwriting for specific risk factors, and would ultimately replace Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance. All Americans would be insured against catastrophic illness, throughout their lives. Proposals for true catastrophic insurance usually founder on the definition of catastrophe. So much of the amount we now spend is dedicated to problems that are considered catastrophic, the argument goes, that a separate catastrophic system is pointless. A typical catastrophic insurance policy today might cover any expenses above, say, $2,000. That threshold is far too low; ultimately, a threshold of $50,000 or more would be better. (Chronic conditions with expected annual costs above some lower threshold would also be covered.) We might consider other mechanisms to keep total costs down: the plan could be required to pay out no more in any year than its available premiums, for instance, with premium increases limited to the general rate of inflation. But the real key would be to restrict the coverage to true catastrophes-if this approach is to work, only a minority of us should ever be beneficiaries. How would we pay for most of our health care? The same way we pay for everything else-out of our income and savings. Medicare itself is, in a sense, a form of forced savings, as is commercial insurance. In place of these programs and the premiums we now contribute to them, and along with catastrophic insurance, the government should create a new form of health savings account-a vehicle that has existed, though in imperfect form, since 2003. Every American should be required to maintain an HSA, and contribute a minimum percentage of post-tax income, subject to a floor and a cap in total dollar contributions. The income percentage required should rise over a working life, as wages and wealth typically do. All noncatastrophic care should eventually be funded out of HSAs. But account-holders should be allowed to withdraw money for any purpose, without penalty, once the funds exceed a ceiling established for each age, and at death any remaining money should be disbursed through inheritance. Our current methods of health-care funding create a "use it or lose it" imperative. This new approach would ensure that families put aside funds for future expenses, but would not force them to spend the funds only on health care. What about care that falls through the cracks-major expenses (an appendectomy, sports injury, or birth) that might exceed the current balance of someone's HSA but are not catastrophic? These should be funded the same way we pay for most expensive purchases that confer long-term benefits: with credit. Americans should be able to borrow against their future contributions to their HSA to cover major health needs; the government could lend directly, or provide guidelines for private lending. Catastrophic coverage should apply with no deductible for young people, but as people age and save, they should pay a steadily increasing deductible from their HSA, unless the HSA has been exhausted. As a result, much end-of-life care would be paid through savings. Anyone with whom I discuss this approach has the same question: How am I supposed to be able to afford health care in this system? Well, what if I gave you $1.77 million? Recall, that's how much an insured 22-year-old at my company could expect to pay-and to have paid on his and his family's behalf-over his lifetime, assuming health-care costs are tamed. Sure, most of that money doesn't pass through your hands now. It's hidden in company payments for premiums, or in Medicare taxes and premiums. But think about it: If you had access to those funds over your lifetime, wouldn't you be able to afford your own care? And wouldn't you consume health care differently if you and your family didn't have to spend that money only on care? For lower-income Americans who can't fund all of their catastrophic premiums or minimum HSA contributions, the government should fill the gap-in some cases, providing all the funding. You don't think we spend an absurd amount of money on health care? If we abolished Medicaid, we could spend the same money to make a roughly $3,000 HSA contribution and a $2,000 catastrophic-premium payment for 60 million Americans every year. That's a $12,000 annual HSA plus catastrophic coverage for a low-income family of four. Do we really believe most of them wouldn't be better off? Some experts worry that requiring people to pay directly for routine care would cause some to put off regular checkups. So here's a solution: the government could provide vouchers to all Americans for a free checkup every two years. If everyone participated, the annual cost would be about $30 billion-a small fraction of the government's current spending on care. Today, insurance covers almost all health-care expenditures. The few consumers who pay from their pockets are simply an afterthought for most providers. Imagine how things might change if more people were buying their health care the way they buy anything else. I'm certain that all the obfuscation over prices would vanish pretty quickly, and that we'd see an end to unreadable bills. And that physicians, who spend an enormous amount of time on insurance-related paperwork, would have more time for patients. In fact, as a result of our fraying insurance system, you can already see some nascent features of a consumer-centered system. Since 2006, Wal-Mart has offered $4 prescriptions for a month's supply of common generic medications. It has also been slowly rolling out retail clinics for routine care such as physicals, blood work, and treatment for common ailments like strep throat. Prices for each service are easily obtained; most are in the neighborhood of $50 to $80. Likewise, "concierge care," or the "boutique" style of medical practice-in which physicians provide unlimited services and fast appointments in return for a fixed monthly or annual fee-is beginning to spread from the rich to the middle class. Qliance Medical Group, for instance, now operates clinics serving some 3,000 patients in the Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, areas, charging $49 to $79 a month for unlimited primary care, defined expansively. It's worth pausing over this last example. Many experts believe that the U.S. would get better health outcomes at lower cost if payment to providers were structured around the management of health or whole episodes of care, instead of through piecemeal fees. Medicare and private insurers have, to various degrees, moved toward (or at least experimented with) these sorts of payments, and are continuing to do so-but slowly, haltingly, and in the face of much obstruction by providers. But aren't we likely to see just these sorts of payment mechanisms develop organically in a consumer-centered health-care system? For simplicity and predictability, many people will prefer to pay a fixed monthly or annual fee for primary or chronic care, and providers will move to serve that demand. Likewise, what patient, when considering getting an artificial hip, would want to deal with a confusion of multiple bills from physicians, facilities, and physical therapists? Aren't providers likely to organize themselves to provide a single price to the consumer for care and rehabilitation? And won't that, in itself, put pressure on providers to work together as efficiently as possible, and to minimize the medical errors that would eat into their joint fee? I suspect we would see a rapid decline in the predominance of the fee-for-service model, making way for real innovation and choice in service plans and funding. And the payment system would not be set by fiat; it would remain responsive to treatment breakthroughs and changes in consumer demand. Many consumers would be able to make many decisions, unaided, in such a system. But we'd also probably see the rise of health-care agents-paid by, and responsible to, the consumer-to help choose providers and to act as advocates during long and complex care episodes. How else might the system change? Technological innovation-which is now almost completely insensitive to costs, and which often takes the form of slightly improved treatments for much higher prices-would begin to concern itself with value, not just quality. Many innovations might drive prices down, not up. Convenient, lower-cost specialty centers might proliferate. The need for unpaid indigent care would go away-everyone, recall, would have both catastrophic insurance and an HSA, funded entirely by the government when necessary-and with it much of the rationale for protecting hospitals against competition. Of course, none of this would happen overnight. And the government has an essential role to play in arming consumers with good information. Congress should require maximum transparency on services, prices, and results (and some elements of the Obama administration's reform plan would move the industry in this direction). We should establish a more comprehensive system of quality inspection of all providers, and publish all the findings. Safety and efficacy must remain the cornerstone of government licensing, but regulatory bias should favor competition and prevent incumbents from using red tape to forestall competition. Moving from the system we've got now to the one I've outlined would be complicated, and would take a long time. Most of us have been paying into an insurance system for years, expecting that our future health-care bills would be paid; we haven't been saving separately for these expenses. It would take a full generation to completely migrate from relying on Medicare to saving for late-life care; from Medicaid for the disadvantaged to catastrophic insurance and subsidized savings accounts. Such a transition would require the slow reduction of Medicare taxes, premiums, and benefit levels for those not yet eligible, and a corresponding slow ramp-up in HSAs. And the national catastrophic plan would need to start with much broader coverage and higher premiums than the ultimate goal, in order to fund the care needed today by our aging population. Nonetheless, the benefits of a consumer-centered approach-lower costs for better service-should have early and large dividends for all of us throughout the period of transition. The earlier we start, the less a transition will ultimately cost. Many experts oppose the whole concept of a greater role for consumers in our health-care system. They worry that patients lack the necessary knowledge to be good consumers, that unscrupulous providers will take advantage of them, that they will overspend on low-benefit treatments and under-spend on high-benefit preventive care, and that such waste will leave some patients unable to afford highly beneficial care. They are right, of course. Whatever replaces our current system will be flawed; that's the nature of health care and, indeed, of all human institutions. Our current system features all of these problems already-as does the one the Obama reforms would create. Because health care is so complex and because each individual has a unique health profile, no system can be perfect. I believe my proposed approach passes two meaningful tests. It will do a better job than our current system of controlling prices, allocating resources, expanding access, and safeguarding quality. And it will do a better job than a more government-driven approach of harnessing medicine's dynamism to develop and spread the new knowledge, technologies, and techniques that improve the quality of life. We won't be perfect consumers, but we're more likely than large bureaucracies to encourage better medicine over time. All of the health-care interest groups-hospitals, insurance companies, professional groups, pharmaceuticals, device manufacturers, even advocates for the poor-have a major stake in the current system. Overturning it would favor only the 300 million of us who use the system and-whether we realize it or not-pay for it. Until we start asking the type of questions my father's death inspired me to ask, until we demand the same price and quality accountability in health care that we demand in everything else, each new health-care reform will cost us more and serve us less. $636,687.75 Ten days after my father's death, the hospital sent my mother a copy of the bill for his five-week stay: $636,687.75. He was charged $11,590 per night for his ICU room; $7,407 per night for a semiprivate room before he was moved to the ICU; $145,432 for drugs; $41,696 for respiratory services. Even the most casual effort to compare these prices to marginal costs or to the costs of off-the-shelf components demonstrates the absurdity of these numbers, but why should my mother care? Her share of the bill was only $992; the balance, undoubtedly at some huge discount, was paid by Medicare. Wasn't this an extraordinary benefit, a windfall return on American citizenship? Or at least some small relief for a distraught widow? Not really. You can feel grateful for the protection currently offered by Medicare (or by private insurance) only if you don't realize how much you truly spend to fund this system over your lifetime, and if you believe you're getting good care in return. Would our health-care system be so outrageously expensive if each American family directly spent even half of that $1.77 million that it will contribute to health insurance and Medicare over a lifetime, instead of entrusting care to massive government and private intermediaries? Like its predecessors, the Obama administration treats additional government funding as a solution to unaffordable health care, rather than its cause. The current reform will likely expand our government's already massive role in health-care decision-making-all just to continue the illusion that someone else is paying for our care. But let's forget about money for a moment. Aren't we also likely to get worse care in any system where providers are more accountable to insurance companies and government agencies than to us? Before we further remove ourselves as direct consumers of health care-with all of our beneficial influence on quality, service, and price-let me ask you to consider one more question. Imagine my father's hospital had to present the bill for his "care" not to a government bureaucracy, but to my grieving mother. Do you really believe that the hospital-forced to face the victim of its poor-quality service, forced to collect the bill from the real customer-wouldn't have figured out how to make its doctors wash their hands? -----Original Message----- From: Chuck Minne [SMTP:mincam2 at yahoo.com] Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 19:32 To: Mike Kirk; citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The Government can ... When "Public Options" Serve the Public - and When They Don't Thursday 03 September 2009 by: Lawrence S. Wittner Dr. Wittner points out that there is a successful "public option" in place for fire and police protection. (Photo: Thomas Hawk / Flickr) Currently, there is nothing more controversial in President Barack Obama's health care reform proposal than the "public option." Much of the controversy, of course, has been generated by private insurance companies, determined to safeguard their hefty profits, and by Republican politicians, eager to destroy anything that might redound to the benefit of the Democrats. Even so, a little clear thinking on the subject of public programs might illuminate their advantages and disadvantages. In fact, there are numerous "public options" in American life, with many of them rooted deep in the nation's history. In the area of education, there are public schools; in recreation, public parks; in travel, public roads; in fire-fighting, public fire departments; in law enforcement, public police forces; in culture, public libraries; in transportation, public bus and train lines; in mail delivery, the post office; in sanitation, public water supply plumbing, and sewers; in energy, public power; in old-age security, Social Security; in nutrition, public school lunch programs. Where did the notion ever come from that public programs were somehow "un-American"? Continued at: http://www.truthout.org/090309A?n Kucinich is for Single Payer, but he has also proposed letting the states go single payer if the Feds do not. His Health Care ideas are here: http://kucinich.us/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2806 "The hotly-debated HR3200, the so-called "health care reform" bill, is nothing less than corporate welfare in the guise of social welfare and reform. It is a convoluted mess. The real debate which we should be having is not occurring. "Removing the "public option" from a public bill paid for by public money is not in the public interest. What is left is a "private option" paid for with public money. Why should public money be spent on a private option which does not guarantee 100% coverage nor have any cost controls? A true public option would provide 30% savings immediately which would then cover the 1/3rd of the population who presently have no healthcare. "Unfortunately, under HR3200, the Government is choosing winners and losers in the private sector; proposing to spend public funds on subsidizing insurance companies who make money not providing health care. This process wil insure only one thing - the expansion of profits. Gone is the debate over cost. "As a result of current negotiations, the Medicare Part D rip-off will continue for another decade, further fleecing senior citizens. Drug importation has been dropped, so no inexpensive drugs can be accessed from other nations. "Instead we are told the pharmaceutical companies will accept a 2% cut in the growth rate of their profits - this they call cost control! " An older Kucinich page of DK info is here: http://www.ontheissues.org/2004/Dennis_Kucinich_Health_Care.htm Excerpted from: The Independent UK Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital." A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health corporations called Betsy McCaughey reportedly noticed a clause in the proposed healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to see a doctor and write a living will. They could stipulate when (if at all) they would like care to be withdrawn. It's totally voluntary. Many people want it: I know I wouldn't want to be kept alive for a few extra months if I was only going to be in agony and unable to speak. But McCaughey started the rumour that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to death. This was then stretched to include the disabled, like Palin's youngest child, who she claimed would have to "justify" his existence. It was flatly untrue - but the right had their talking-point, Palin declared the non-existent proposals "downright evil", and they were off. It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favour of killing the elderly - while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives. These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS". This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed - as one Republican congressman put it - that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them. --- On Thu, 9/3/09, Mike Kirk wrote: From: Mike Kirk Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The Government can ... To: "Hal Snyder" Cc: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Date: Thursday, September 3, 2009, 4:47 PM Hal, My primary opposition is sending more money to Washington - they seem to re-allocate it for other purposes (war, bailouts, foreign aid to dictators, pork projects) that I disagree with. If the states were to manage the healthcare option, then I would be more likely to support it - as the funds would have less chance for misuse. Some needed changes that could be achieved through legislation: - Laws requiring all health insurance to be non-profit only - Laws to prevent exclusion based on pre-existing conditions - Financially reward providers and patients (tax deductions) for taking early preventative healthcare measures to lower costs of catastrophic care. This might help to improve the problems with the current system - they are probably already there in some form. But, the three best doctors I know of are: Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet and Dr. Merryman. :-) Regards, -Mike P.S. Peter Schiff on cosmetic surgery. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uMh7MwLOpc Start at time: 05:30 min From: Hal Snyder To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Sent: Thursday, September 3, 2009 2:05:58 PM Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The Government can ... Thanks, Mike. Back at you: Why We Need Government-Run Universal Socialized Health Insurance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jng4TnKqy6A The topic is health insurance, but it could just as easily be public works, gearing up for sustainable energy, healing and protecting the environment, relocalizing our economy, dealing with peak oil/soil/water etc. I think there are good reasons people shift toward either libertarian or liberal (or you could say anarchist vs. socialist to be inflammatory) poles. On Sep 3, 2009, at 1:33 PM, Mike Kirk wrote: Funny (but true) parody song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO2eh6f5Go0 -----Inline Attachment Follows----- _______________________________________________ CitizensTruth mailing list CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth website: http://citizenstruth.info << File: ATT00710.htm; charset = utf-8 >> << File: ATT00711.txt >> From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com Sun Sep 6 18:37:13 2009 From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk) Date: Sun, 6 Sep 2009 15:37:13 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] The Government can ... In-Reply-To: <797488.83484.qm@web36906.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <797488.83484.qm@web36906.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <656910.44447.qm@web83815.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Good article - Truthout is a good resource. -Mike ________________________________ From: Chuck Minne To: Mike Kirk ; citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Sent: Thursday, September 3, 2009 7:31:48 PM Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The Government can ... When "Public Options" Serve the Public - and When They Don't Thursday 03 September 2009 by: Lawrence S. Wittner Dr. Wittner points out that there is a successful "public option" in place for fire and police protection. (Photo: Thomas Hawk / Flickr) Currently, there is nothing more controversial in President Barack Obama's health care reform proposal than the "public option." Much of the controversy, of course, has been generated by private insurance companies, determined to safeguard their hefty profits, and by Republican politicians, eager to destroy anything that might redound to the benefit of the Democrats. Even so, a little clear thinking on the subject of public programs might illuminate their advantages and disadvantages. In fact, there are numerous "public options" in American life, with many of them rooted deep in the nation's history. In the area of education, there are public schools; in recreation, public parks; in travel, public roads; in fire-fighting, public fire departments; in law enforcement, public police forces; in culture, public libraries; in transportation, public bus and train lines; in mail delivery, the post office; in sanitation, public water supply plumbing, and sewers; in energy, public power; in old-age security, Social Security; in nutrition, public school lunch programs. Where did the notion ever come from that public programs were somehow "un-American"? Continued at: http://www.truthout.org/090309A?n Kucinich is for Single Payer, but he has also proposed letting the states go single payer if the Feds do not. His Health Care ideas are here: http://kucinich.us/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2806 "The hotly-debated HR3200, the so-called "health care reform" bill, is nothing less than corporate welfare in the guise of social welfare and reform. It is a convoluted mess. The real debate which we should be having is not occurring. "Removing the "public option" from a public bill paid for by public money is not in the public interest. What is left is a "private option" paid for with public money. Why should public money be spent on a private option which does not guarantee 100% coverage nor have any cost controls? A true public option would provide 30% savings immediately which would then cover the 1/3rd of the population who presently have no healthcare. "Unfortunately, under HR3200, the Government is choosing winners and losers in the private sector; proposing to spend public funds on subsidizing insurance companies who make money not providing health care. This process wil insure only one thing - the expansion of profits. Gone is the debate over cost. "As a result of current negotiations, the Medicare Part D rip-off will continue for another decade, further fleecing senior citizens. Drug importation has been dropped, so no inexpensive drugs can be accessed from other nations. "Instead we are told the pharmaceutical companies will accept a 2% cut in the growth rate of their profits - this they call cost control! " An older Kucinich page of DK info is here: http://www.ontheissues.org/2004/Dennis_Kucinich_Health_Care.htm Excerpted from:The Independent UK Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital." A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health corporations called Betsy McCaughey reportedly noticed a clause in the proposed healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to see a doctor and write a living will. They could stipulate when (if at all) they would like care to be withdrawn. It's totally voluntary. Many people want it: I know I wouldn't want to be kept alive for a few extra months if I was only going to be in agony and unable to speak. But McCaughey started the rumour that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to death. This was then stretched to include the disabled, like Palin's youngest child, who she claimed would have to "justify" his existence. It was flatly untrue ? but the right had their talking-point, Palin declared the non-existent proposals "downright evil", and they were off. It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favour of killing the elderly ? while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives. These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS". This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed ? as one Republican congressman put it ? that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars".The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them. --- On Thu, 9/3/09, Mike Kirk wrote: >From: Mike Kirk >Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The Government can ... >To: "Hal Snyder" >Cc: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net >Date: Thursday, September 3, 2009, 4:47 PM > > > > >Hal, > >My primary opposition is sending more money to Washington - they seem to re-allocate it for other purposes (war, bailouts, foreign aid to dictators, pork projects) that I disagree with. > >If the states were to manage the healthcare option, then I would be more likely to support it - as the funds would have less chance for misuse. > >Some needed changes that could be achieved through legislation: > - Laws requiring all health insurance to be non-profit only > - Laws to prevent exclusion based on pre-existing conditions > - Financially reward providers and patients (tax deductions) for taking early preventative healthcare measures to lower costs of catastrophic care. > >This might help to improve the problems with the current system - they are probably already there in some form. > >But, the three best doctors I know of are: Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet and Dr. > Merryman. :-) > >Regards, >-Mike > >P.S. Peter Schiff on cosmetic surgery. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uMh7MwLOpc Start at time: 05:30 min > > > > ________________________________ From: Hal Snyder >To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net >Sent: Thursday, September 3, 2009 2:05:58 PM >Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The Government can ... > >Thanks, Mike. > > > >Back at you: > > >Why We Need Government-Run Universal Socialized Health Insurance >http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jng4TnKqy6A > > >The topic is health insurance, but it could just as easily be public works, gearing up for sustainable energy, healing and protecting the environment, relocalizing our economy, dealing with peak oil/soil/water etc. > > >I think there are good reasons people shift toward either libertarian or liberal (or you could say anarchist vs. socialist to be inflammatory) poles. > > >On Sep 3, 2009, at 1:33 PM, Mike Kirk wrote: > >Funny (but true) parody song: >> >>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO2eh6f5Go0 >-----Inline Attachment Follows----- > > >_______________________________________________ >CitizensTruth mailing list >CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net >http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth >website: http://citizenstruth.info/ > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From garyfranchi at gmail.com Mon Sep 7 13:20:04 2009 From: garyfranchi at gmail.com (Gary Franchi) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 12:20:04 -0500 Subject: [CitizensTruth] YOU HAVE BEEN ATTACKED - a call to action Message-ID: <2c9e41bb0909071020v43e7130fh23f72e102333910a@mail.gmail.com> Dear Brother and Sisters in the fight for Truth and Freedom, It is with a heavy heart that I must share with you an article of such virulent poison that I am calling you and all members of the 9/11 Truth Community to take action. Columnist *James J. McClure* ( jimmcclure60 at aol.com, IrishRoverJim at aol.com ) from *Irish American News* ( http://www.irishamericannews.com ) has decided to label you and all members of the 9/11 Truth Movement "racist", "pitiful band of ignorant ideologues", "self-styled patriots" and a "low class of people". But he doesn't stop there... in his September 5th Column, "*9/11 Eyewitnesses Meet History, Lowlifes Shout Conspiracy*" he takes up the standard attack formation relating those who would question the government story of 9/11 and present indisputable scientific facts with those who deny the holocaust and question the moon landings. Having read articles that try to write off physics and science and standard FAA and military hijacking procedures, it is clear by McClure's article he has never objectively reviewed the mountains of physical and scientific evidence. McClure even made a veiled attempt at associating a Chicago based "patriot" publisher with antisemitism based on a youtube video where Silverstein is referenced. However, in the video in question, the Chicago based "patriot" publisher merely calls out Larry Silverstein and his infamous "Pull it" statement and never references Mr. Silverstein's race religion or ethnic origin. McClure makes a very poor attempt at smearing a fellow patriot by connecting dots that do not, nor ever existed. *I am calling on you to contact the editor and publishers of the Irish American News to immediately* print an apology to the men in uniform, the professionals, the scientists, the architects, the investigators, the victims families, the activists and all members of the 9/11 Truth community who have the courage to ask questions and demand answers of their servant government, then demand James J. McClure's column "The Irish Rover" be pulled from future publishing. *Then I ask you to contact James J. McClure directly and share with him the mountains of evidence* that he failed to research before he painted all members of the 9/11 Truth Community as pitiful, lowlife, racists, who "serve not their country". *Course of Action:* *Contact Irish American News:* Demand an apology statement be printed by the paper and McClure Demand McClure's column pulled Inform them you will be contacting their advertisers to inform them of the smear campaign. Inform them we will be holding a protest in front of their Oak Brook offices *Contact James J. McClure:* Educate him on the facts of 9/11 by sending him youtube videos, articles, and your thoughts on his article to his two email address *The Irish America News can be contacted at their offices: * *By Email:* http://www.irishamericannews.com/index.php/contact-us *By Phone:* 708-445-0700 *By Post:* Irish American News 7115 W. North Avenue #327 Oak Park, IL 60302 James J. McClure can be reached via email at: jimmcclure60 at aol.com and IrishRoverJim at aol.com James J. McClure's column, "The Irish Rover", dated September 5th, 2009, and titled: 9/11 Eyewitnesses Meet History, Lowlifes Shout Conspiracy can be read here: http://www.irishamericannews.com/index.php/people/social-circle/907-the-irish-rover-sept-2009 We will not stand for this type of smear campaign, join me in taking action and right this wrong that McClure and his publishers have initiated. Be sure to let him and his publishers know that the 9/11 Truth Movement is a peaceful and educated group who will not be labeled by people who refuse to review the facts for themselves. *Your friend in Truth, * Gary Franchi Founder Lone Lantern Society of America -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From snug.bug at hotmail.com Mon Sep 7 13:26:40 2009 From: snug.bug at hotmail.com (Brian Good) Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 10:26:40 -0700 Subject: [CitizensTruth] YOU HAVE BEEN ATTACKED - a call to action In-Reply-To: <2c9e41bb0909071020v43e7130fh23f72e102333910a@mail.gmail.com> References: <2c9e41bb0909071020v43e7130fh23f72e102333910a@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: Responding to Mr. McClure will only be an empty gesture unless the Truth movement completely repudiates Dr. Kevin Barrett and his "Jews did 9/11" and "Jews Run the World" nonsense. See his posts at his truthjihad blog over the last two weeks to see what I mean. Brian From: garyfranchi at gmail.com Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 12:20:04 -0500 To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Subject: [CitizensTruth] YOU HAVE BEEN ATTACKED - a call to action Dear Brother and Sisters in the fight for Truth and Freedom, It is with a heavy heart that I must share with you an article of such virulent poison that I am calling you and all members of the 9/11 Truth Community to take action. Columnist James J. McClure ( jimmcclure60 at aol.com, IrishRoverJim at aol.com ) from Irish American News ( http://www.irishamericannews.com ) has decided to label you and all members of the 9/11 Truth Movement "racist", "pitiful band of ignorant ideologues", "self-styled patriots" and a "low class of people". But he doesn't stop there... in his September 5th Column, "9/11 Eyewitnesses Meet History, Lowlifes Shout Conspiracy" he takes up the standard attack formation relating those who would question the government story of 9/11 and present indisputable scientific facts with those who deny the holocaust and question the moon landings. Having read articles that try to write off physics and science and standard FAA and military hijacking procedures, it is clear by McClure's article he has never objectively reviewed the mountains of physical and scientific evidence. McClure even made a veiled attempt at associating a Chicago based "patriot" publisher with antisemitism based on a youtube video where Silverstein is referenced. However, in the video in question, the Chicago based "patriot" publisher merely calls out Larry Silverstein and his infamous "Pull it" statement and never references Mr. Silverstein's race religion or ethnic origin. McClure makes a very poor attempt at smearing a fellow patriot by connecting dots that do not, nor ever existed. I am calling on you to contact the editor and publishers of the Irish American News to immediately print an apology to the men in uniform, the professionals, the scientists, the architects, the investigators, the victims families, the activists and all members of the 9/11 Truth community who have the courage to ask questions and demand answers of their servant government, then demand James J. McClure's column "The Irish Rover" be pulled from future publishing. Then I ask you to contact James J. McClure directly and share with him the mountains of evidence that he failed to research before he painted all members of the 9/11 Truth Community as pitiful, lowlife, racists, who "serve not their country". Course of Action: Contact Irish American News: Demand an apology statement be printed by the paper and McClure Demand McClure's column pulled Inform them you will be contacting their advertisers to inform them of the smear campaign. Inform them we will be holding a protest in front of their Oak Brook offices Contact James J. McClure: Educate him on the facts of 9/11 by sending him youtube videos, articles, and your thoughts on his article to his two email address The Irish America News can be contacted at their offices: By Email: http://www.irishamericannews.com/index.php/contact-us By Phone: 708-445-0700 By Post: Irish American News 7115 W. North Avenue #327 Oak Park, IL 60302 James J. McClure can be reached via email at: jimmcclure60 at aol.com and IrishRoverJim at aol.com James J. McClure's column, "The Irish Rover", dated September 5th, 2009, and titled: 9/11 Eyewitnesses Meet History, Lowlifes Shout Conspiracy can be read here: http://www.irishamericannews.com/index.php/people/social-circle/907-the-irish-rover-sept-2009 We will not stand for this type of smear campaign, join me in taking action and right this wrong that McClure and his publishers have initiated. Be sure to let him and his publishers know that the 9/11 Truth Movement is a peaceful and educated group who will not be labeled by people who refuse to review the facts for themselves. Your friend in Truth, Gary Franchi Founder Lone Lantern Society of America _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live: Make it easier for your friends to see what you?re up to on Facebook. http://windowslive.com/Campaign/SocialNetworking?ocid=PID23285::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:SI_SB_facebook:082009 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com Tue Sep 8 11:38:05 2009 From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk) Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 08:38:05 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] Obama's address to school kids. Message-ID: <436809.32707.qm@web83813.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> The real reason the Republicans don't want Obama to give his school address today: Terrorists! The last time a President spoke to school kids, our country was attacked.. :-) Have a great Tuesday everyone... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From garyfranchi at gmail.com Tue Sep 8 13:01:58 2009 From: garyfranchi at gmail.com (Gary Franchi) Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 12:01:58 -0500 Subject: [CitizensTruth] [ L I V E ] Webinar with Luke Rudkowski @ 3PM Eastern Join us! Message-ID: <2c9e41bb0909081001l1f9063e9u50448fa52621505a@mail.gmail.com> *We Are Change Founder Luke Rudkowski @ 3pm Eastern * ** Join me Today - Tuesday Sept 8th, 3pm Eastern We have Luke Rudkowski from We Are Change to discuss 9/11 and what you can do to be an effective activist. ------------------------------ ---- Phone # to Dial: 949-333-4806 Use Conf ID: 733552# Listen to the live stream at: http://www.republicmagazine.com/webinar ------------------------------ ----- If you've not yet read the new issue or forwarded it to others... You can directly access the interactive digital flip version at: http://www.republicmagazine.com/magazines/issue16 Or get the pdf here: http://www.republicmagazine.com/magazines/Republic-Magazine16.pdf TODAY!! TODAY!! TODAY!! Please get your copies now so we can get them into the mail to you immediately. http://www.republicmagazines.com There is still a good chance you will get them by or on 9/11, but you have to get them today! See you at 3:00... ** * * *Yours in Truth!* Gary Franchi RestoreTheRepublic! P.S. You will be able to listen to the recording afterwards by visiting: http://www.republicmagazine.com/webinar/previous.htm P.P.S. Check out the line up of speakers and activities taking place this year in New York this year organized by We Are Change: http://www.wearechange.org/91109/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From aroyboy44 at hotmail.com Wed Sep 9 13:53:40 2009 From: aroyboy44 at hotmail.com (andrew ritter) Date: Wed, 9 Sep 2009 17:53:40 +0000 Subject: [CitizensTruth] another 9-11? Message-ID: Hi Friends, I read this and thought I should pass it on. Hopefully just a rumor ------------------------- 9/11 Warning! A former US paratrooper who converted to Islam in Beirut in 1958 and then became a "freedom fighter" in Afghanistan, met Osama and became a trained terrorist, has a warning for Americans. He claims that on THIS 9/11/2009, terrorists, flying in small 2-seater aircraft will drop suitcase nuclear bombs over NYC, DC, LA, Las Vegas, Miami, Chicago and Houston. He said it was 8 years between the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World trade center, and now it is another 8 years. It is also the Muslim Ramadan holiday. he claims that "they" love symbolism. However, we know that the so-called terrorists do not use symbolism that way--only the Illuminati do. If anything occurs, it will be orchestrated by the 13 Families, NOT poor Muslims with no resources. There is also a rumor that Germany will be the next target of a 9-11-style attack next week. I can tell you all that having again been through Europe this Summer, security is almost non-existent, even in major cities. Anyone can bring anything across any border. So, be vigilante and stay in protection. I hope they are ALL wrong!! _________________________________________________________________ With Windows Live, you can organize, edit, and share your photos. http://www.windowslive.com/Desktop/PhotoGallery -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com Fri Sep 11 10:13:44 2009 From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 07:13:44 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] Fw: The 9/11 Conspiracy Message-ID: <153986.83883.qm@web83805.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Good commentary on this anniversary from The Resident (Lori Harfenist). Stay informed, stay safe... -Mike ----- Forwarded Message ---- From: The Resident Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 8:20:13 AM Subject: The 9/11 Conspiracy You might not like it, but here's my two cents on the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com Fri Sep 11 10:15:52 2009 From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 07:15:52 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] The 9/11 Conspiracy Message-ID: <163618.14075.qm@web83808.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Bad link below, use this one: http://theresident.net/seyret/political_videos_and_environmental_issues/the_911_conspiracy ________________________________ From: Mike Kirk To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 9:13:44 AM Subject: Fw: The 9/11 Conspiracy Good commentary on this anniversary from The Resident (Lori Harfenist). Stay informed, stay safe... -Mike ----- Forwarded Message ---- From: The Resident Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 8:20:13 AM Subject: The 9/11 Conspiracy You might not like it, but here's my two cents on the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mincam2 at yahoo.com Fri Sep 11 12:03:15 2009 From: mincam2 at yahoo.com (Chuck Minne) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:03:15 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] The 9/11 Conspiracy In-Reply-To: <163618.14075.qm@web83808.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <495337.78706.qm@web36904.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Watch this, then read below: ? Twenty Minutes with the President Introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyKR2-A0KPU Article: http://www.infowars.com/twenty-minutes-with-the-president/ Bibliography: http://www.prisonplanet.com/20_minutes_bibliography.html "We to this day don't know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us... It was just so far from the truth." --Thomas H. Kean, former 9/11 commission chairman and former New Jersey governor The CIA "obstructed our investigation." --Lee H. Hamilton, former 9/11 commission vice chairman and former Indiana representative "...I as a member of the commission cannot look any American in the eye, especially family members of victims, and say the commission had full access. This investigation is now compromised... This is `The Gong Show'; this isn't protection of national security." --Max Cleland, former 9/11 commissioner and former Georgia senator "The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. . . . This is not spin." --John Farmer, former senior counsel to the 9/11 commission and former New Jersey attorney general ?The North and South Towers of the World Trade Center almost certainly did not collapse and fall to earth because hijacked aircraft hit them. A plane did not hit Building 7 of the Center, which also collapsed. All three were most probably destroyed by controlled demolition charges placed in the buildings before 9/11. A substantial volume of evidence shows that typical residues and byproducts from such demolition charges were present in the three buildings after they collapsed. The quality of the research done on this subject is quite impressive.? --Bill Christison, former National Intelligence Officer and former Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis (29-year CIA veteran) ?If our government had merely [done] nothing, and I say that as an old interceptor pilot--I know the drill, I know what it takes, I know how long it takes, I know what the procedures are, I know what they were, and I know what they?ve changed them to--if our government had merely done nothing, and allowed normal procedures to happen on that morning of 9/11, the Twin Towers would still be standing and thousands of dead Americans would still be alive. My sisters and brothers, that is treason!? --Robert M. Bowman, former director of the Advanced Space Programs ?Star Wars? Development "It is quite plausible that explosives were pre-planted in all three buildings and set off after the two plane crashes--which were actually a diversion tactic. ... Muslims are (probably) not to blame for bringing down the WTC buildings after all." --Steven E. Jones, physicist, former professor of physics at Brigham Young University, and former principal investigator for the U.S. Department of Energy, Division of Advanced Energy Projects "Steven Jones' call for a 'serious investigation' of the hypothesis that the WTC 7 and the Twin Towers were brought down, not just by impact damage and fire, but through the use of pre-positioned "cutter-charges" must be the rallying cry for all building design experts to speak out." --Marx Ayres, mechanical engineer with 55 years experience, in charge of the design of hundreds of major building projects including high rise offices, former member of the California Seismic Safety Commission and former member of the National Institute of Sciences Building Safety Council "This afternoon I'll present to you the very clear evidence that all three World Trade Center buildings--the high rises, the iconic Twin Towers, and building 7--were destroyed--not by fire as our government has told us--but by controlled demolition with explosives." --Richard Gage, professional architect for 20 years who has been responsible for the production of construction documents for numerous steel-framed and fire-protected buildings for uses in many different areas, including education, civic, rapid transit and industrial use, member of the American Institute of Architects ?When you grow up in the United States, there are some bedrock principles that require concerted effort to discard. One is the simplest: that our leaders are good and decent people whose efforts may occasionally warrant criticism but never because of malice or venality... But one grows up. ... And with the lawyer?s training comes the reliance on evidence and the facts that persuade... After a lot of reading, thought, study, and commiseration, I have come to the conclusion that the attacks of 9/11 were, in their essence, an inside job perpetrated at the highest levels of the U S government.? --William Veale, former instructor of criminal trial practice at Boalt Hall School of Law, 11-year teaching career at UC Berkeley, 31-year career chief assistant public defender for Contra Costa County, California and many, many more... ? ? From: Congressman Kucinich on Health Care ? "The hotly-debated HR3200, the so-called "health care reform" bill, is nothing less than corporate welfare in the guise of social welfare and reform. It is a convoluted mess. The real debate which we should be having is not occurring. "Removing the "public option" from a public bill paid for by public money is not in the public interest. What is left is a "private option" paid for with public money. Why should public money be spent on a private option which does not guarantee 100% coverage nor have any cost controls? A true public option would provide 30% savings immediately which would then cover the 1/3rd of the population who presently have no healthcare. "Unfortunately, under HR3200, the Government is choosing winners and losers in the private sector; proposing to spend public funds on subsidizing insurance companies who make money not providing health care. This process wil insure only one thing - the expansion of profits. Gone is the debate over cost. "As a result of current negotiations, the Medicare Part D rip-off will continue for another decade, further fleecing senior citizens. Drug importation has been dropped, so no inexpensive drugs can be accessed from other nations. "Instead we are told the pharmaceutical companies will accept a 2% cut in the growth rate of their profits - this they call cost control! " ? An older Kucinich page of DK info is here: ? http://www.ontheissues.org/2004/Dennis_Kucinich_Health_Care.htm --- On Fri, 9/11/09, Mike Kirk wrote: From: Mike Kirk Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The 9/11 Conspiracy To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Date: Friday, September 11, 2009, 9:15 AM Bad link below, use this one: ?? http://theresident.net/seyret/political_videos_and_environmental_issues/the_911_conspiracy From: Mike Kirk To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 9:13:44 AM Subject: Fw: The 9/11 Conspiracy Good commentary on this anniversary from The Resident (Lori Harfenist). Stay informed, stay safe... -Mike ----- Forwarded Message ---- From: The Resident Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 8:20:13 AM Subject: The 9/11 Conspiracy You might not like it, but here's my two cents on the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories. -----Inline Attachment Follows----- _______________________________________________ CitizensTruth mailing list CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth website: http://citizenstruth.info -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Walterb306 at cs.com Fri Sep 11 15:40:29 2009 From: Walterb306 at cs.com (Walterb306 at cs.com) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:40:29 EDT Subject: [CitizensTruth] Joint Maneuvers Message-ID: All, FYI. Sending info sent me. Beverley GRANMA September 11, 2009 Pentagonasks for joint military maneuvers with Honduran coup regime http://www.walterli ppmann.com/ docs2653. html Googletranslation. Revised by Walter Lippmann. WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 .- The United States Southern Commandasked the Armed Forcesof the coup government of Honduras to participate in the maneuvers of the Allied ForcesPanamax 2009, although Washington a month earlier had announced its intention to suspend all cooperation military with the Central American country. Hondurasappeared in the list of 21 countries that naval exercises will be coordinated by the United States between 11 and 22 September, despite international rejection of the regime of Robert Micheletti referred Telesur. Several countries worldwide have demanded U.S. general Douglas Fraser. to suspend military cooperation with the Central American nation and its military forcesout of the military basein Palmerola Colonel Soto Cano. That facility was used as a bridge during the coup to remove President Zelaya of the territory, he admitted Command Chief South, Gen. Douglas Fraser. STUDENTS AND WORKERS TAKE UNIVERSITY OF HONDURAS TEGUCIGALPA, September 10.- Students and workers today occupied the National Autonomous University of Honduras, in protest against the coup and demanding the restoration of constitutional order, indicates PL. Spokesmen for the movement explained to Radio Globo that the protest is part of a 48-hour strike started on Thursday by the three trade unionconfederations also demanding the return of the constitutional president, Manuel Zelaya. They added that the action was coordinated with organizations of the National Pedagogical University, which has been occupied by students and workers on several occasions since the military coup last June. Original: http://www.granma. cubasi.cu/ 2009/09/11/ interna/artic10. html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dimension04 at sbcglobal.net Fri Sep 11 19:51:00 2009 From: dimension04 at sbcglobal.net (Connie Smith) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:51:00 -0500 Subject: [CitizensTruth] The 9/11 Conspiracy In-Reply-To: <163618.14075.qm@web83808.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> References: <163618.14075.qm@web83808.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I feel for her trauma on that day -- but who is she and why should we care whether she comments or not? Connie ----- Original Message ----- From: Mike Kirk To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 9:15 AM Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The 9/11 Conspiracy Bad link below, use this one: http://theresident.net/seyret/political_videos_and_environmental_issues/the_911_conspiracy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Mike Kirk To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 9:13:44 AM Subject: Fw: The 9/11 Conspiracy Good commentary on this anniversary from The Resident (Lori Harfenist). Stay informed, stay safe... -Mike ----- Forwarded Message ---- From: The Resident Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 8:20:13 AM Subject: The 9/11 Conspiracy You might not like it, but here's my two cents on the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ CitizensTruth mailing list CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth website: http://citizenstruth.info -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hal at drxyzzy.org Sat Sep 12 00:51:39 2009 From: hal at drxyzzy.org (Hal Snyder) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:51:39 -0500 Subject: [CitizensTruth] The 9/11 Conspiracy In-Reply-To: References: <163618.14075.qm@web83808.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <36AC3201-0EE3-42C8-B31B-FED09C61D0B2@drxyzzy.org> Resident floats the gratuitous generalization that "the government" is just crazy as if it is common knowledge, implying that anything the government does will be ineffectual if not malicious. I disagree. IMO this plays into the hands of those who are looting the planet and don't care a fig for ideology, except as it serves their interests - to keep the people from rising up with government agencies to rein in the abuses. There are actually politicians who work hard at their jobs to serve the people who elected them. Not enough of them maybe, but there are some. And there are people working in the public sector who make a genuine positive difference. On Sep 11, 2009, at 6:51 PM, Connie Smith wrote: > > > I feel for her trauma on that day -- but who is she and why should > we care whether she comments or not? > > Connie > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Mike Kirk > To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net > Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 9:15 AM > Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The 9/11 Conspiracy > > Bad link below, use this one: > > http://theresident.net/seyret/political_videos_and_environmental_issues/the_911_conspiracy > > From: Mike Kirk > To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net > Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 9:13:44 AM > Subject: Fw: The 9/11 Conspiracy > > Good commentary on this anniversary from The Resident (Lori > Harfenist). > > Stay informed, stay safe... > > -Mike > > ----- Forwarded Message ---- > From: The Resident > Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 8:20:13 AM > Subject: The 9/11 Conspiracy > > You might not like it, but here's my two cents on the 9/11 > Conspiracy Theories. > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > CitizensTruth mailing list > CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net > http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth > website: http://citizenstruth.info > _______________________________________________ > CitizensTruth mailing list > CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net > http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth > website: http://citizenstruth.info -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From futurenotwritten at yahoo.com Sat Sep 12 08:33:57 2009 From: futurenotwritten at yahoo.com (Jay Becker) Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 05:33:57 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] The 9/11 Conspiracy In-Reply-To: <36AC3201-0EE3-42C8-B31B-FED09C61D0B2@drxyzzy.org> Message-ID: <76431.64395.qm@web33503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Those who are looting the planet (and the vast majority of us living or trying to live on it) give a big damn about ideology. That's why they soak us in it 24/7 a la Glenn Beck, James Dobson, etc., etc., and you won't see much of the authors and culture makers we on this list respect and look to on MSM. I'd say we're actually living in a highly ideological era. I don't disagree that there are people working in the government to try to ameliorate some of these horrors, but intentions don't trump structures, and no government has ever been a neutral bureaucracy up for grabs, let alone an instrument to rise up against the very looters and destroyers who control it. The power of all that bureaucracy rests on armed might - guns and tanks and planes, and courts and jails, and rendition sites these days. And that power enforces the economic relations of exploitation and rampant blind competition to win out in the drive for more and more and more profits. I highly recommend "Views on Socialism & Communism: A Radically Different and Far Greater Vision of Freedom" by Bob Avakian at http://revcom.us/bob_avakian/views/index.htm to get to the reality of one of the biggest ideologies holding us back from stopping these looters and destroyers, which would be bourgeois dictatorship wrapped in the worn cloak of bourgeois democracy. Jay Stop thinking like an American, Start thinking about humanity! Read Revolution at www.revcom.us --- On Fri, 9/11/09, Hal Snyder wrote: From: Hal Snyder Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The 9/11 Conspiracy To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Date: Friday, September 11, 2009, 11:51 PM Resident floats the gratuitous generalization that "the government" is just crazy as if it is common knowledge, implying that anything the government does will be ineffectual if not malicious. I disagree.?IMO this plays into the hands of those who are looting the planet and don't care a fig for ideology, except as it serves their interests - to keep the people from rising up with?government?agencies to rein in the abuses. There are actually politicians who work hard at their jobs to serve the people who elected them. Not enough of them maybe, but there are some. And there are people working in the public sector who make a genuine positive difference. On Sep 11, 2009, at 6:51 PM, Connie Smith wrote: ??I feel for her trauma on that day -- but who is she and why should we care whether she comments or not??Connie???----- Original Message -----From:?Mike KirkTo:?citizenstruth at six.pairlist.netSent:?Friday, September 11, 2009 9:15 AMSubject:?Re: [CitizensTruth] The 9/11 Conspiracy Bad link below, use this one:? ???http://theresident.net/seyret/political_videos_and_environmental_issues/the_911_conspiracy From:?Mike Kirk To:?citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Sent:?Friday, September 11, 2009 9:13:44 AM Subject:?Fw: The 9/11 Conspiracy Good commentary on this anniversary from The Resident (Lori Harfenist). Stay informed, stay safe... -Mike ----- Forwarded Message ---- From:?The Resident Sent:?Friday, September 11, 2009 8:20:13 AM Subject:?The 9/11 Conspiracy You might not like it, but?here's my two cents?on the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories. _______________________________________________ CitizensTruth mailing list CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth website:?http://citizenstruth.info _______________________________________________ CitizensTruth mailing list CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth website:?http://citizenstruth.info -----Inline Attachment Follows----- _______________________________________________ CitizensTruth mailing list CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth website: http://citizenstruth.info -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From aroyboy44 at hotmail.com Sat Sep 12 15:46:00 2009 From: aroyboy44 at hotmail.com (andrew ritter) Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:46:00 +0000 Subject: [CitizensTruth] The 9/11 Conspiracy In-Reply-To: <76431.64395.qm@web33503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <36AC3201-0EE3-42C8-B31B-FED09C61D0B2@drxyzzy.org> <76431.64395.qm@web33503.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: yes I am confused about what exactly is good about her commentary? first she tries to lump truthers into a narrow shallow group of people who don't understand cause they weren't there or weren't directly affected by it - couldn't be further from reality then she says she assumes the gov. are probably involved on some level but oh well its just too personal to speak about. That is the sign of a coward in my book. She has no sense of justice. If this was traumatic for her wouldn't she be happy to see the perpetrators who actually did it exposed? so with her sense of logic - if my neighbor kills my child and I don't find out till years later that my neighbor probably did it I am supposed to keep quiet and not expose or talk or look into it because it is too emotional for me to speak about? Then she tries to justify her cowardice by saying that the bottom line is she doesn't try to expose crazy things the government does - that's not what she's about. Well, if you click on her other videos a bunch of them are exposing things that the government does. So she is a liar who doesn't want to face the reality of 9-11 because its too emotional for her. That's what is known in the psychology biz as denial. She can deny or ignore government complicity all she wants but doesn't change the fact that they did it and that they deserve to be exposed for what they did. And fine if she really doesn't want to speak about it why does she put up a video speaking about not speaking about it? why not just not speak about it? Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 05:33:57 -0700 From: futurenotwritten at yahoo.com To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net; hal at drxyzzy.org Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The 9/11 Conspiracy Those who are looting the planet (and the vast majority of us living or trying to live on it) give a big damn about ideology. That's why they soak us in it 24/7 a la Glenn Beck, James Dobson, etc., etc., and you won't see much of the authors and culture makers we on this list respect and look to on MSM. I'd say we're actually living in a highly ideological era. I don't disagree that there are people working in the government to try to ameliorate some of these horrors, but intentions don't trump structures, and no government has ever been a neutral bureaucracy up for grabs, let alone an instrument to rise up against the very looters and destroyers who control it. The power of all that bureaucracy rests on armed might - guns and tanks and planes, and courts and jails, and rendition sites these days. And that power enforces the economic relations of exploitation and rampant blind competition to win out in the drive for more and more and more profits. I highly recommend "Views on Socialism & Communism: A Radically Different and Far Greater Vision of Freedom" by Bob Avakian at http://revcom.us/bob_avakian/views/index.htm to get to the reality of one of the biggest ideologies holding us back from stopping these looters and destroyers, which would be bourgeois dictatorship wrapped in the worn cloak of bourgeois democracy. Jay Stop thinking like an American, Start thinking about humanity! Read Revolution at www.revcom.us --- On Fri, 9/11/09, Hal Snyder wrote: From: Hal Snyder Subject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The 9/11 Conspiracy To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Date: Friday, September 11, 2009, 11:51 PM Resident floats the gratuitous generalization that "the government" is just crazy as if it is common knowledge, implying that anything the government does will be ineffectual if not malicious. I disagree. IMO this plays into the hands of those who are looting the planet and don't care a fig for ideology, except as it serves their interests - to keep the people from rising up with government agencies to rein in the abuses. There are actually politicians who work hard at their jobs to serve the people who elected them. Not enough of them maybe, but there are some. And there are people working in the public sector who make a genuine positive difference. On Sep 11, 2009, at 6:51 PM, Connie Smith wrote: I feel for her trauma on that day -- but who is she and why should we care whether she comments or not? Connie ----- Original Message -----From: Mike KirkTo: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.netSent: Friday, September 11, 2009 9:15 AMSubject: Re: [CitizensTruth] The 9/11 Conspiracy Bad link below, use this one: http://theresident.net/seyret/political_videos_and_environmental_issues/the_911_conspiracy From: Mike Kirk To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 9:13:44 AM Subject: Fw: The 9/11 Conspiracy Good commentary on this anniversary from The Resident (Lori Harfenist). Stay informed, stay safe... -Mike ----- Forwarded Message ---- From: The Resident Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 8:20:13 AM Subject: The 9/11 Conspiracy You might not like it, but here's my two cents on the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories. _______________________________________________ CitizensTruth mailing list CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth website: http://citizenstruth.info _______________________________________________ CitizensTruth mailing list CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth website: http://citizenstruth.info -----Inline Attachment Follows----- _______________________________________________ CitizensTruth mailing list CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth website: http://citizenstruth.info _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/171222986/direct/01/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com Sat Sep 12 19:42:39 2009 From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk) Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:42:39 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] Mail (UK): Bin Laden dead for 7 years? Message-ID: <22556.18952.qm@web83807.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> UK press covers David Ray Griffin's new book: http://tinyurl.com/lhxg7q See reader comments as well - most agree. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com Sat Sep 12 19:46:49 2009 From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk) Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:46:49 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] Mail (UK): Bin Laden dead for 7 years? In-Reply-To: <22556.18952.qm@web83807.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> References: <22556.18952.qm@web83807.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <109302.23781.qm@web83801.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Daily Mail is UK's 2nd largest paper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail ________________________________ From: Mike Kirk To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Sent: Saturday, September 12, 2009 6:42:39 PM Subject: [CitizensTruth] Mail (UK): Bin Laden dead for 7 years? UK press covers David Ray Griffin's new book: http://tinyurl.com/lhxg7q See reader comments as well - most agree. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mincam2 at yahoo.com Sun Sep 13 10:18:39 2009 From: mincam2 at yahoo.com (Chuck Minne) Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 07:18:39 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] Riddle In-Reply-To: <109302.23781.qm@web83801.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <907599.25489.qm@web36906.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Riddle: What do you call a young adult cancer victim with health insurance? See answer at bottom. ? From:? http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/09/12/president_says_uninsured_ameri.html?hpid=politics President Says Uninsured Americans Are More Common Than You'd Think By Anne E. Kornblut President Obama, continuing to mount a fresh surge on health care, argued Saturday in his weekly address that nearly half of all Americans under age 65 will lose their health insurance within the next decade. ? "We're talking about middle-class Americans," Obama said. "In other words, it can happen to anyone." ? Treasury officials released the findings of a 10-year study that bolsters the president's case. Based on a sample of more than 17,000 respondents from 1997 to 2006, the study - "The Risk of Losing Health Insurance Over a Decade: New Findings from Longitudinal Data" - found that 48 percent of Americans are uninsured at some point in a 10-year span and that the number jumped, to 57 percent, when taking people under age 21 into account. ? In a conference call Friday with reporters, Treasury officials, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, repeatedly emphasized the universal nature of the danger - saying it is a "misperception" that the uninsured represent only a small slice of the population. In fact, they said, the report found that many more people, inclnuding in the middle class, went for stretches without insurance over the years. ? "If you're under the age of 21 today, chances are more than half that you'll find yourself uninsured at some point" over the next decade, Obama said in the address, prepared for radio and Internet broadcast. "And more than one-third of Americans will go without coverage for longer than one year." ? He continued: "I refuse to allow that future to happen. In the United States of America, no one should have to worry that they'll go without health insurance - not for one year, not for one month, not for one day. And once I sign my health reform plan into law - they won't." A link to the Treasury report is here, and a link to the audio of the president's address is here. Obama hits the road Saturday, heading to Minnesota to attend a health care rally. ? ? From: Congressman Kucinich on Health Care ? "The hotly-debated HR3200, the so-called "health care reform" bill, is nothing less than corporate welfare in the guise of social welfare and reform. It is a convoluted mess. The real debate which we should be having is not occurring. "Removing the "public option" from a public bill paid for by public money is not in the public interest. What is left is a "private option" paid for with public money. Why should public money be spent on a private option which does not guarantee 100% coverage nor have any cost controls? A true public option would provide 30% savings immediately which would then cover the 1/3rd of the population who presently have no healthcare. "Unfortunately, under HR3200, the Government is choosing winners and losers in the private sector; proposing to spend public funds on subsidizing insurance companies who make money not providing health care. This process wil insure only one thing - the expansion of profits. Gone is the debate over cost. "As a result of current negotiations, the Medicare Part D rip-off will continue for another decade, further fleecing senior citizens. Drug importation has been dropped, so no inexpensive drugs can be accessed from other nations. "Instead we are told the pharmaceutical companies will accept a 2% cut in the growth rate of their profits - this they call cost control! " ? An older Kucinich page of DK info is here: ? http://www.ontheissues.org/2004/Dennis_Kucinich_Health_Care.htm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com Sun Sep 13 18:54:10 2009 From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk) Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 15:54:10 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] VanJones resignation - a good thing for 9/11 truth? Message-ID: <189837.74428.qm@web83814.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Rabbi Michael Lerner calls for a new impartial 9/11 investigation. Van Jones's Resignation: Bad for the Country and Bad for Obama http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/13-7 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com Sun Sep 13 20:00:56 2009 From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk) Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:00:56 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] VanJones resignation - a good thing for 9/11 truth? In-Reply-To: <189837.74428.qm@web83814.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> References: <189837.74428.qm@web83814.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <493948.6334.qm@web83806.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Kevin Barrett interview on RT - discusses what VanJones should have done. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjxa4KzT52k ________________________________ From: Mike Kirk To: citizenstruth at six.pairlist.net Sent: Sunday, September 13, 2009 5:54:10 PM Subject: [CitizensTruth] VanJones resignation - a good thing for 9/11 truth? Rabbi Michael Lerner calls for a new impartial 9/11 investigation. Van Jones's Resignation: Bad for the Country and Bad for Obama http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/13-7 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Walterb306 at cs.com Mon Sep 14 18:24:28 2009 From: Walterb306 at cs.com (Walterb306 at cs.com) Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:24:28 EDT Subject: [CitizensTruth] Info Us in Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan Iraq Message-ID: All, FYI. In sent me. Beverley US special forces have landed in Somalia and are killing civilians. Also Pakistan was bombed by US aircraft overnight. On Saturday four US troops in Afghanistan were killed by the Taliban. Earlier today US troops in Iraq got in a firefight with insurgents.The US hasn't been at war in this many countries since World War 2. sources: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-forces-somalia-kill-saleh-ali-nabhan-commando/Story?id=8569619&page=1 http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ijQhVf-V5hHrgYBP-Z4cGhNMIEsA http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hwK_CSpBxsNuVUEaDuOwmSSCiqGwD9AN387O0 http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/09/12/afghanistan.us.troops.killed/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com Sat Sep 19 12:47:01 2009 From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk) Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2009 09:47:01 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] Unemployment in China - economic devastation at work Message-ID: <99696.23981.qm@web83813.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Interesting (sad) documentary on the economic condition in China (25 minutes) http://www.hulu.com/watch/91553/vanguard-outsourcing-unemployment -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com Sat Sep 19 12:59:08 2009 From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk) Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2009 09:59:08 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] The story of my shoe Message-ID: <895567.96433.qm@web83812.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Excellent editorial from the Iraqi who threw his shoe at President Bush. http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/zaidi1.1.1.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From richardfobes at hotmail.com Sat Sep 19 15:19:31 2009 From: richardfobes at hotmail.com (Richard Fobes) Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2009 14:19:31 -0500 Subject: [CitizensTruth] WTC 7 video Message-ID: This is a great analysis the NIST report on building 7. It's about 9 minutes long. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSv7jMKnU14 _________________________________________________________________ Microsoft brings you a new way to search the web. Try Bing? now http://www.bing.com?form=MFEHPG&publ=WLHMTAG&crea=TEXT_MFEHPG_Core_tagline_try bing_1x1 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com Wed Sep 23 13:33:36 2009 From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk) Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:33:36 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] Sibel Edmonds speaks out Message-ID: <44202.82595.qm@web83810.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> Her interview in Nov. 2009 American Conservative. http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/nov/01/00006/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com Wed Sep 23 13:42:22 2009 From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk) Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:42:22 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] War with Iran next? Message-ID: <395517.40107.qm@web83805.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> They recently switched to the Euro like Iraq did a few years ago. http://tinyurl.com/nzf3lf "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they?ll kill you." - Oscar Wilde -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com Wed Sep 23 20:08:25 2009 From: geri at thetwofacesofmoney.com (Geri Perry) Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:08:25 -0500 Subject: [CitizensTruth] PLEASE VOTE FOR ME for delegate to CC2009 ---TIME SENSITIVE Message-ID: <4ABAB879.8040700@thetwofacesofmoney.com> Hi all, Hope you can find time to vote for me by paper ballot which is due no later than October 10 if submitted in person and by October 5 if mailed in. Ballot and instructions are attached. Also note that, since there are only 2 polling locations in Illinois, you can mail in ballots - but they must be notarized. Many banks will provide free notary services provided you are a customer. I am one of ten candidates for Illinois who are running for one of two slots for delegate to what is called the Continental Congress of 2009. You can read my personal statement as well as information about each delegate by scrolling down this page and clicking on the appropriate link: http://givemeliberty.org/user/congress/Region.aspx?state=IL Many of the 2009 Continental Congress key issues are recognized by nearly everyone as crucial to the survival of the American dream. These include hand counted, precinct verified paper ballots (hence the mail-in, notarized ballots above), an end to U.S. militarism, repeal of the Patriot Act, the right to privacy and free choice in areas like food and internet dealings, and more. Some few goals will find less support depending on your personal "persuasion" or indoctrination, as the case may be. As my personal statement (linked above) indicates, I believe my research and writing will help me make a "unique" and somewhat different contribution to the goals which have been set out by the Congress. I hope you agree and will vote for me. Please forward to others if you can. This page explains the purpose and objectives of the Continental Congress: http://www.cc2009.us/about-cc2009/why-continental-congress-2009 FYI ---- My written statement for the candidate forum (which I could not attend due to schedule conflict) is as follows: The foundation of a functioning and moral society and a fair and just government lies in it's money system. Rampant and appalling levels of corruption, debauchery, selfishness and indolence are unavoidable, unmistakable symptoms of massive breakdowns in all three, making it painfully clear to all who care to look that the system as a whole is seriously broken. Unfortunately, too few of us understand that EVERYTHING flows from the money system that is set in place. Long term solutions to nearly all issues, whether it be health care or war or food choice - or even "administrative law" and an over-reaching government are inextricably tied to - and flow from - the money system and the manner in which money is created. Tragically, there are even fewer of us who fully grasp the two types of money creation, and what the founding fathers really had in mind when they allowed the original Continental Congress, through the Articles of Confederation, to create a national money - and later, through the Constitution, gave Congress the sole power and responsibility to "coin money and regulate the value thereof." With the American Dream now in serious jeopardy, we are called upon as responsible citizens and caring individuals to do what we can to turn things around and reclaim the unrealized dreams of our forefathers. So, thank you for your commitment to the promise that once was America. In addition, I believe that my years of research together with my book The Two Faces of Money will allow me to make a unique and valuable contribution to Continental Congress 2009. I pledge to do my best to make such a contribution if elected. I do hope you will consider me worthy of your vote. Geraldine Perry -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: cc2009-Illinois-ballot.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 18877 bytes Desc: not available Url : -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: CC2009-Illinois-Registration-Mail-In.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 45024 bytes Desc: not available Url : From r.gillam at comcast.net Wed Sep 23 21:38:44 2009 From: r.gillam at comcast.net (Ragen Gillam) Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:38:44 -0500 Subject: [CitizensTruth] PLEASE VOTE FOR ME for delegate to CC2009 ---TIMESENSITIVE In-Reply-To: <4ABAB879.8040700@thetwofacesofmoney.com> Message-ID: <20090924013807.BC1046C60D@six.pairlist.net> Hello; Thank you Geri, and I just wanted to make a minor correction: Please vote for 3 (not 2) nominees for delegate to the CC2009, and you may only vote for Geri if you reside in Illinois. If you live in another state, please go to www.givemeliberty.org and find your state and scroll down to see the candidates for your state. Continental Congress 2009 is NOT a Constitutional Convention. We want to "defend, not amend" the Constitution. We are NOT a political group, and do not endorse any political candidates. We have delegate nominees from all ends of the political spectrum, and the one thing we have in common is our belief that this is the appropriate next step for a free people, when our servant government has ignored the petitions of We the People for over 15 years. If you agree, cast your vote on October 10 at 1 of 2 voting centers in Illinois, or mail in your ballot with notarized registration form no later than October 3. Thank you for your patriotism. In Liberty, Ragen S. Gillam WTPC Illinois State Coordinator r.gillam at comcast.net "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." -Edmund Burke -----Original Message----- From: citizenstruth-bounces at six.pairlist.net [mailto:citizenstruth-bounces at six.pairlist.net] On Behalf Of Geri Perry Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2009 7:08 PM To: Citizens Truth Subject: [CitizensTruth] PLEASE VOTE FOR ME for delegate to CC2009 ---TIMESENSITIVE Hi all, Hope you can find time to vote for me by paper ballot which is due no later than October 10 if submitted in person and by October 5 if mailed in. Ballot and instructions are attached. Also note that, since there are only 2 polling locations in Illinois, you can mail in ballots - but they must be notarized. Many banks will provide free notary services provided you are a customer. I am one of ten candidates for Illinois who are running for one of two slots for delegate to what is called the Continental Congress of 2009. You can read my personal statement as well as information about each delegate by scrolling down this page and clicking on the appropriate link: http://givemeliberty.org/user/congress/Region.aspx?state=IL Many of the 2009 Continental Congress key issues are recognized by nearly everyone as crucial to the survival of the American dream. These include hand counted, precinct verified paper ballots (hence the mail-in, notarized ballots above), an end to U.S. militarism, repeal of the Patriot Act, the right to privacy and free choice in areas like food and internet dealings, and more. Some few goals will find less support depending on your personal "persuasion" or indoctrination, as the case may be. As my personal statement (linked above) indicates, I believe my research and writing will help me make a "unique" and somewhat different contribution to the goals which have been set out by the Congress. I hope you agree and will vote for me. Please forward to others if you can. This page explains the purpose and objectives of the Continental Congress: http://www.cc2009.us/about-cc2009/why-continental-congress-2009 FYI ---- My written statement for the candidate forum (which I could not attend due to schedule conflict) is as follows: The foundation of a functioning and moral society and a fair and just government lies in it's money system. Rampant and appalling levels of corruption, debauchery, selfishness and indolence are unavoidable, unmistakable symptoms of massive breakdowns in all three, making it painfully clear to all who care to look that the system as a whole is seriously broken. Unfortunately, too few of us understand that EVERYTHING flows from the money system that is set in place. Long term solutions to nearly all issues, whether it be health care or war or food choice - or even "administrative law" and an over-reaching government are inextricably tied to - and flow from - the money system and the manner in which money is created. Tragically, there are even fewer of us who fully grasp the two types of money creation, and what the founding fathers really had in mind when they allowed the original Continental Congress, through the Articles of Confederation, to create a national money - and later, through the Constitution, gave Congress the sole power and responsibility to "coin money and regulate the value thereof." With the American Dream now in serious jeopardy, we are called upon as responsible citizens and caring individuals to do what we can to turn things around and reclaim the unrealized dreams of our forefathers. So, thank you for your commitment to the promise that once was America. In addition, I believe that my years of research together with my book The Two Faces of Money will allow me to make a unique and valuable contribution to Continental Congress 2009. I pledge to do my best to make such a contribution if elected. I do hope you will consider me worthy of your vote. Geraldine Perry From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com Thu Sep 24 10:34:37 2009 From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk) Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:34:37 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] Official 9/11 Report was entirely untrue - says the author! Message-ID: <530871.41382.qm@web83811.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> New book by 9/11 Commission Senior Counsel, John Farmer http://www.salem-news.com/articles/september112009/911_truth_9-11-09.php >From the article: The 9/11 Commission now tells us that the official version of 9/11 was based on false testimony and documents and is almost entirely untrue. The details of this massive cover-up are carefully outlined in a book by John Farmer, who was the Senior Counsel for the 9/11 Commission. Farmer, Dean of Rutger Universities' School of Law and former Attorney General of New Jersey, was responsible for drafting the original flawed 9/11 report. Does Farmer have cooperation and agreement from other members of the Commission? Yes. Did they say Bush ordered 9/11? No. Do they say that the 9/11 Commission was lied to by the FBI, CIA, Whitehouse and NORAD? Yes. Is there full documentary proof of this? Yes. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dimension04 at sbcglobal.net Thu Sep 24 18:33:08 2009 From: dimension04 at sbcglobal.net (Connie Smith) Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:33:08 -0500 Subject: [CitizensTruth] "explosions BEFORE planes hit" published today! Message-ID: The big central Illinois daily newspaper, Peoria Journal Star, just published my words about that fact! (Link is below.) Explosions before the planes hit, along with the proof that there were explosions in the towers (not just the plane strikes) -- this is being seen by thousands of people in this region today! These are critical facts that the American public just forever has been deprived of in the mainstream news. (Not to mention the THOUSANDS of other facts that indicate 9/11 was committed by American traitors, for their power and profits -- and certainly not by "Muslim fundamentalists" -- who've only had everything to lose -- and they have! -- if they would dare attack the USA.) I still don't understand it -- IMMEDIATELY after 9/11, all the reports out of Florida about Mohammed Atta and gang consistently stated that neighbors and all other witnesses knew them as drinking, drugging, womanizers. They were not religious fanatics in any way. Allah would never allow such men into heaven. The many, many reports at the time made clear what they were really like. So what a shock to me that the "official story" right away blamed it on "Muslim fundamentalists." WHAT? Why was such a Lie being officially announced? Didn't many Americans already know that wasn't true? But sure enough, the accurate reports disappeared, and only the Lie -- and all the thousands of other Lies about that day -- became trumpeted, day after day after day after day... Shocked people somehow turned to George W. Bush, whom even avid supporters were beginning to think after only 9 months in office was the most inadequate man in the world -- yet somehow people turned to HIM for leadership in a crisis? A real leader would have addressed the glaring questions like, "We don't know how the Pentagon could be hit -- it's got the best defenses in the world, and New York was already on fire. "We don't know why our Air Force didn't intercept 4 commercial airliners that were obviously in trouble, when many times a year our fighter jets always intercept even small planes that have strayed. "We don't know why I got no 'be-on-the-alert' from our many intelligence services around the world -- (Oops, I actually did! Oops!! I hope I didn't just say that factualarity out loud...) Ahem. "We don't know these answers, but we're going to find them out with an all-out investigation right away -- (well, okay, years from now and very reluctantly, and very badly.) "Yeah -- I'm gonna look into all this, and when it comes to the American leaders who let us down on every front that day, well, their heads are gonna roll!" (NOT. Not even one. Some who were responsible for not doing their job, not stopping the attacks, even got promoted.) Nothing new here to the people I'm writing to -- but please do Forward this to those you know who PERSIST in irresponsibly not wanting to know. My letter-to-editor here is groundbreaking info in print in this region -- "explosions BEFORE the planes hit" -- we shall prevail! (Usually online there's an annoying video ad beside the letter -- just hit Pause on that so it will stop bothering you! If you look at the Comments section after the letter, be sure to look for "Bill" -- a great educator on 9/11 Truth.) Connie http://www.pjstar.com/opinions/x180657629/Forum-Time-to-learn-the-truth-about-9-11 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rmigalla at earthlink.net Sun Sep 27 11:11:28 2009 From: rmigalla at earthlink.net (Robin Migalla) Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 10:11:28 -0500 Subject: [CitizensTruth] FW: Broad Branch Farm - Chemical Drift Hearing On Sept. 30 Message-ID: <01CA3F5A.E0F687E0.rmigalla@earthlink.net> Hi Folks, Perhaps we are seeing a turning of the tides. PLEASE get a letter off to Senator Frerichs (see the attached message for details). Secondly, this site looks very promising to me: http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/knowyourfarmer?navid=KNOWYOURFARMER Cheers, Robin www.healthforlifecoloncare.com www.traditionalnutrition.org www.ppnf.org "Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food." --Hippocrates (460-377 B.C.) Just be careful how you define food ;-) "The purpose of medicine is to amuse the patient until nature effects a cure." -- Voltaire (1694-1778) "Doctors pour medicines of which they know little to cure diseases of which they no less into humans of which they know nothing." -- Voltaire (1694-1778) -----Original Message----- From: sigi [SMTP:sigiusa at yahoo.com] Sent: Sunday, September 27, 2009 08:35 To: Robin Migalla Subject: Broad Branch Farm - Chemical Drift Hearing On Sept. 30 robin see below on spraying Sigi Why not go out on a limb... that's where the fruit is...Mark Twain --- On Sat, 9/26/09, Sandra Kaptain wrote: From: Sandra Kaptain Subject: Fwd: FW: Broad Branch Farm - Chemical Drift Hearing On Sept. 30 To: "Sigi Psimenos" , "Jeff" Cc: "Jeanne Phelan" Date: Saturday, September 26, 2009, 8:59 PM Sigi, Jeanne Phelan said you might like to see this info. How about Robin? THanks, Sandy ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jeanne Phelan Date: Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 10:49 AM Subject: FW: Broad Branch Farm - Chemical Drift Hearing On Sept. 30 To: Sandy Kaptain Here's something that Sigi and those working on the food thing will want to know about. Jeanne Subject: Fwd: Broad Branch Farm - Chemical Drift Hearing On Sept. 30 From: dmoorman4 at comcast.net Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:13:47 -0500 To: bonnieoulman at comcast.net; joannejwilkins at yahoo.com; j_pirovano at yahoo.com; wholisticmama at gmail.com; doulman at comcast.net; lizz612 at gmail.com; emily.schleiger at gmail.com; stephencarrow at sbcglobal.net; lpaisley at sbcglobal.net; debradean at mac.com; JFgehrig at comcast.net; demp9477 at aol.com; jeannephelan at hotmail.com Broad Branch Farm sold organic food at the Naperville farmers market for a number of years but has morphed into a CSA with pickup in Naperville. Dave Begin forwarded message: From: Broad Branch Farm - Anita & Brian Poeppel Date: September 25, 2009 3:50:17 PM CDT To: dmoorman4 at comcast.net Subject: Broad Branch Farm - Chemical Drift Hearing On Sept. 30 Reply-To: brian at njoycom.net Broad Branch Farm, Ltd. RR #1 Box 44 Wyoming, IL 61491 Home: 309-695-2051 Cell: 309-231-9290 Email: soapsuds at a5.com www.broadbranchfarm.com Hello Folks, Over the last few years, there has been a tremendous increase in the amount of aerial spraying or crop dusting in Illinois. Planes are applying insecticides and fungicides to both corn and soybean crops. Brian and I, our children and our helpers spend a huge amount of time in our organic garden from early spring - late fall. We have witnessed a number of incidents where crop dusting is being done in high wind speeds and in weather conditions conducive to drift through actual droplets or vapor. We have smelled chemical in the air and have no idea what it is, where it came from or who sprayed it. The aerial applicators and supporters of chemical farming claim their industry is safe simply because they receive so few complaints each year. When people don't know who to call, who did the spraying, etc., it is very hard to make complaints. The subject of chemical drift is one that affects ALL of us whether we live and work in an urban or rural environment. It affects growers whether they are certified organic, certified naturally grown, or just trying to grow food and raise livestock without chemical. We have talked with people whose vehicles have been sprayed while driving down the road because the pilot did not shut off the spray in time. One of our workers, while driving home from the farm, was suddenly overwhelmed with chemical vapor in his car. He had no idea where the crop duster was, what was sprayed. He was simply driving down the road with his windows open. By the time he arrived home, he was dizzy and eyes watering. Two children were sprayed with a plane last year in Knox County and the pilot received no more than warning letter. There have been many phone calls, letters and emails to our politicians, newspapers, Department of Agriculture - anyone who will listen - trying to get some help with this growing problem. And finally our voices are being heard. This Wednesday, September 30, the Illinois Senate Ag Committee is holding a hearing to take comments from the public on the subject of aerial spraying.. This hearing will be the first step in getting some type of new regulation or enforcement of current regulations. This hearing will be help at 10 a.m. in Room 409 of the State Capitol building. But the members of the committee must hear from many people so they know this is a real problem and that support for local and organic food is STRONG in Illinois. Based on the response from this initial hearing, the matter will either move to the next level or fall to the wayside because we failed to prove a real problem exists. If you are a grower and are concerned about this issue affecting your livestock or crops, please either attend the public hearing OR send written comments to the email below: If you are a consumer and supporter of local organic food and want to see support for a local organic food system where growers have some protection and recourse for chemical drift, please show your support by attending the public hearing OR sending your written comments to the email below: Email your written concerns by 5 p.m. Monday Sept 28 to: State Sen. Michael Frerichs (D-Champaign), Chairman of the Illinois Senate Agriculture and Conservation Committee Mike at mikefrerichs.com Please take a minute, fire off an email to Senator Frerichs, and tell him your concerns about the aerial spraying. It doesn't have to be long or detailed - just get an email to him so your voice is heard. And forward this email to anyone you know who may be concerned about this issue. Print it and take it to the farmer's market tomorrow morning and hand it out to your favorite growers. We need lots of voices in Springfield! Thank you very much for your help. Anita & Brian Poeppel Broad Branch Farm This email was sent to dmoorman4 at comcast.net by brian at njoycom.net. Update Profile/Email Address | Instant removal with SafeUnsubscribe? | Privacy Policy. Email Marketing by Broad Branch Farm, Ltd. | RR # 1 Box 44 | Wyoming | IL | 61491 Lauren found her dream laptop. Find the PC that's right for you. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mjkirk12 at yahoo.com Sun Sep 27 17:56:57 2009 From: mjkirk12 at yahoo.com (Mike Kirk) Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 14:56:57 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] FOIA: OKC security videos were 'edited' Message-ID: <116605.39058.qm@web83809.mail.sp1.yahoo.com> How convenient...footage before the Murrah building blast is missing. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090927/ap_on_re_us/us_oklahoma_bombing_video -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From richardfobes at hotmail.com Sun Sep 27 22:10:06 2009 From: richardfobes at hotmail.com (Richard Fobes) Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 21:10:06 -0500 Subject: [CitizensTruth] Stand With G20 Protestetors In-Reply-To: <348617224.1254082934854.JavaMail.nobody@james0> References: <348617224.1254082934854.JavaMail.nobody@james0> Message-ID: Folks, The World Can't Wait has put together a letter to Homeland Security & Elected Officials & Law Enforcement in Pennsylvania. The letter demands: 1) Charges against people involved in political protest at the G-20 be dropped immediately. 2) A thorough investigation of methods employed by law enforcement, and directed by Homeland Security and Chief of Police, including the crowd control methods and mass arrests; the conditions of detention of those arrested; and any ongoing surveillance and interference with the rights of those accused, arrested, or involved in the protests are contrary to the expectation of the rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Such investigations must include public hearings, and a real search for the truth in what happened. 3) A public report, dissociating your city from those methods found to suppress speech and assembly, and guarantee to the people that they will not be used again. 4) Rejection of the use of military involvement, or the use of federal agents in future protests. Stand WITH the G20 Protesters, and consider signing on to the letter here: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1170/t/3716/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=2115 Then, please consider CONTACTING these officials: Luke Ravenstahl: Mayor of Pittsburgh 412-255-2626 Nathan Harper: Chief of Police, Pittsburgh 412-323-7800 Ed Rendell: Governor of Pennsylvania 717 787-2500 Tell them your thoughts about the actions and behaviors of the use of military force in Pittsburgh during the G20 meetings. -Rich _________________________________________________________________ Bing? brings you maps, menus, and reviews organized in one place. Try it now. http://www.bing.com/search?q=restaurants&form=MLOGEN&publ=WLHMTAG&crea=TEXT_MLOGEN_Core_tagline_local_1x1 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From richardfobes at hotmail.com Wed Sep 30 00:28:11 2009 From: richardfobes at hotmail.com (Richard Fobes) Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:28:11 -0500 Subject: [CitizensTruth] NYC CAN Decision For a New 9/11 Investigation Expected By End of Week In-Reply-To: <3efd1c1f914049e13c8a31c858466d9d@localhost.localdomain> References: <3efd1c1f914049e13c8a31c858466d9d@localhost.localdomain> Message-ID: Incredible stuff.. One excerpt - "The Judge proceeded to invite discourse on why an investigation was needed. When McMahon raised as an example the 9/11 Commission?s omission of the collapse of Building 7 from its final report, the Judge replied in puzzlement, 'Building what?' " Another excerpt - "With order restored, the Judge again asked Kitzinger if the City had done anything to investigate 9/11. Kitzinger flatly responded, 'No.' 'The City never did anything?' retorted the Judge in disbelief. Nothing, Kitzinger admitted." Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:23:42 -0400 To: richardfobes at hotmail.com From: tedwalter at nyccan.org Subject: Decision Expected By End of Week Decision On Petition?s Legality Expected By End of Week 9/29/09 Supreme Court Justice Edward Lehner has begun consideration of NYC CAN?s motion to reject Referee?s Louis Crespo?s recommendation that the NYC CAN 9/11 petition not be submitted to the voters on November 3. The petition would ask whether or not there should be an independent New York City investigation into 9/11. Responding to a motion brought by NYC CAN attorney Dennis McMahon, a hearing was held Tuesday September 29 at the New York State Supreme Court, and concluded with the understanding that the Court will likely render a decision on the petition?s legality by Friday, October 2. The City?s previously assumed deadline of September 30?spurred by the printing deadline for military absentee ballots?was brushed away by Judge Lehner as he suggested the printing of absentee ballots would likely not be ordered on Wednesday, September 30, since runoff elections were being held while the Court was in session. Even if the ballots were ordered on Wednesday, Lehner indicated, this should not prevent the referendum from being put before the vast majority of the electorate who would be voting in New York City. Judge Lehner?s postponement of the supposed deadline came after McMahon had requested that the Judge carefully consider both sides? arguments, rather than render a rush decision and fail to adequately contemplate NYC CAN?s legal arguments, as the Referee had done. Initially there was a question as to whether oral arguments would go forward as a clerical mishap resulted in the Judge not being presented with the papers on time. As a result of the snafu, the procedure for the Court to hear arguments was inverted, whereby oral arguments were heard first and served to orient the Judge. Over the next few days the Judge will go through both sides? legal memos, as well as the applicable statutes and case law. Surprisingly, the file forwarded from the Referee to the Judge did not contain NYC CAN?s legal memo, which McMahon told the Court seemed apropos, since the referee had barely considered the Petitioners? memorandum of law. The Judge proceeded to invite discourse on why an investigation was needed. When McMahon raised as an example the 9/11 Commission?s omission of the collapse of Building 7 from its final report, the Judge replied in puzzlement, ?Building what?? When asked by the Judge whether or not there has been an investigation into 9/11 by New York City authorities, Steve Kitzinger, the City?s lawyer, replied, ?It?s irrelevant?, to which the packed courtroom was loudly disdainful, some openly laughing in disbelief. At which point Mr. Kitzinger prevailed upon Judge Lehner to quiet the crowd, which the Judge did. With order restored, the Judge again asked Kitzinger if the City had done anything to investigate 9/11. Kitzinger flatly responded, ?No.? ?The City never did anything?? retorted the Judge in disbelief. Nothing, Kitzinger admitted. As part of his unrelenting attack on the NYC CAN petition, Kitzinger repeatedly alluded to the proposed commission?s intention to investigate national security matters beyond its jurisdiction such as ?intelligence failures?. A simple reading of the petition shows such assertions to be completely unfounded. Later, Judge Lehner seemed unimpressed by Kitzinger?s argument pertaining to the limited jurisdiction of New York City to investigate 9/11, on the grounds of inherent limits to a municipality?s subpoena power. ?You can investigate anything, can?t you?? the Judge asked rhetorically. ?Because somebody may have jurisdiction over certain witnesses doesn?t mean you can?t have a commission.? On the complicated question of the commission being a privately funded entity but still having subpoena power granted under the auspices of New York City government, the Judge made comments that gave the Petitioners hope for a favorable ruling. ?You want a law that says this private commission shall have the right to subpoena people?? To which McMahon assented. Offering similar examples, the Judge noted, ?A private lawyer can issue subpoenas? a lawyer issues [subpoenas] in connection with an action [during] litigation in court.? After the hearing, the consensus among NYC CAN members and supporters in attendance was that Judge Lehner is intrigued by the proposed referendum, and that he will give both sides? arguments due consideration. Near the end of the hearing, McMahon stated emphatically, ?The citizens are desperate. We want to find out what really happened on 9/11.? __________________________________________ March For Answers 9/27/09 See The March Daniel Sunjata's Rousing Speech RAW STORY Covers MARCH FOR ANSWERS Thinkers think and talkers talk. Patriots ACT. www.NYCCAN.org _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail? has ever-growing storage! Don?t worry about storage limits. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/Storage?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_Storage_062009 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mincam2 at yahoo.com Wed Sep 30 10:06:43 2009 From: mincam2 at yahoo.com (Chuck Minne) Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 07:06:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [CitizensTruth] What? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <482718.95184.qm@web36908.mail.mud.yahoo.com> From: http://www.examiner.com/x-12837-US-Headlines-Examiner~y2009m9d18-Unidentified-creature-resembling-alien-found-in-Panama-another-Montauk-Monstervideo-and-photos ? ? Unidentified creature resembling alien found in Panama, another Montauk Monster?(video and photos) ? ? September 18, 5:10 PMUS Headlines ExaminerCharisse Van Horn Not being one who looks for U.F.O.s or aliens, I must admit that this creature has me thinking. The story begins in Panama in a community known as Cerro Azul. There is no doubt that this unidentified creature looks as if it is straight out of 1977?s Spielberg classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.? Is it another Montauk Monster? Just what it is, however, no one knows; not the zoologists who are examining its corpse or the teens who state that they killed it when it came towards them. The organism looks unlike anything currently known to man, and the resemblance towards humankind?s depiction of aliens is uncanny. Could this have possibly been some form of life from another planet? Some think that it might be another Montauk Monster, another unidentified animal that surfaced in Montauk, New York in July 2008.? Others think it might be an animal that had lost its fur, and possibly one that was in the middle stages of decomposition; however, that doesn?t coincide with the teens' story that the creature was alive and moved toward them. According to the teens, last Saturday, while playing in a creek, they saw the creature and it began moving towards them. The teens became scared and began throwing rocks at it, and killed it. The story continues that the children threw the creature into the creek and left, but later returned to photograph it. Zoologists are unsure what it is, but have stated that it resembles a dead fetus. The truth to the mystery might be in whether or not the teens have exaggerated their story or not. Should the truth be that they came upon the unidentified creature?s corpse, it could easily be an animal in stages of decomposition. However, if their tale that the alien like creature was alive and moved towards them, and they killed the creature, that would be completely different. From the image, it is difficult to tell if there are signs of injuries that would have occurred from rocks. Whether or not Panamanian zoologists will perform DNA testing on the creature has yet to be announced. Undoubtedly, scientists worldwide are going to want to examine this creature?s DNA. ? Here is a link to another video that shows the unidentified creature, alien, or Montauk Monster in the Panama creek. ? Unidentified creature resembling alien found in Panama, another Montauk Monster?(video and photos) ? (There is also a different video at the site linked at the top.) ? ? We Can't Afford Health Care? You Lie! ? ????We see the spectacle of the US Congress unable to manage decent health care reform that will actually enable the American citizenry to join the rest of the industrialized world in having health care for all. The problems, it is clear, come from those who are lying. ? ????Death panels? That's true - we already have them. Insurance companies deny care to Americans, who then die as a result. It happens every day, Sarah Palin - but ascribing that to the Obama plan is untrue. In fact, those corporate death panels would be outlawed. ? ????Find the language in Obama's bill that says that illegal aliens are covered or admit it's a canard - God forbid we should help some migrant worker who is stricken by illness or accident while laboring in service to Americans. South Carolina's Joe Wilson is just the Tourette tip of a dissembling iceberg. ? ????We can't afford the plan? That is a whopper. It's all choice. ? ????If every child in America doesn't have health care, but we own more than 6,000 nuclear weapons, more than half of them on board a fleet of 18 extremely expensive Trident submarines ready to fight the Soviets (Hey! Where'd they go?), isn't it time to ask some fundamental questions? One is: Why spend $16.5 billion just on the Department of Energy nuclear weapons budget for FY 2010 with 50 million uninsured citizens? Does US Sen. Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) speak for us all when he calls health care a privilege (and presumably threatening life on Earth is a human right for the US military)? ? ????When our working poor are so often without either the money to pay for health insurance or the high costs of health care for ailing family members, and yet we somehow manage to justify spending in excess of $915 billion on the so-called War on Terror, shouldn't we engage in some national discussion about priorities? ? From: ?http://www.truthout.org/091609R ? ? ? --- On Tue, 9/29/09, Richard Fobes wrote: From: Richard Fobes Subject: [CitizensTruth] NYC CAN Decision For a New 9/11 Investigation Expected By End of Week To: "Citizen's.Truth" , "Daniel Allen" Date: Tuesday, September 29, 2009, 11:28 PM Incredible stuff.. One excerpt - "The Judge proceeded to invite discourse on why an investigation was needed.? When McMahon raised as an example the 9/11 Commission?s omission of the collapse of Building 7 from its final report, the Judge replied in puzzlement, 'Building what?' " Another excerpt - "With order restored, the Judge again asked Kitzinger if the City had done anything to investigate 9/11.?? Kitzinger flatly responded, 'No.' 'The City never did anything?' retorted the Judge in disbelief.? Nothing, Kitzinger admitted." Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:23:42 -0400 To: richardfobes at hotmail.com From: tedwalter at nyccan.org Subject: Decision Expected By End of Week ? Decision On Petition?s Legality Expected By End of Week 9/29/09 Supreme Court Justice Edward Lehner has begun consideration of NYC CAN?s motion to reject Referee?s Louis Crespo?s recommendation that the NYC CAN 9/11 petition not be submitted to the voters on November 3.? The petition would ask whether or not there should be an independent New York City investigation into 9/11. Responding to a motion brought by NYC CAN attorney Dennis McMahon, a hearing was held Tuesday September 29 at the New York State Supreme Court, and concluded with the understanding that the Court will likely render a decision on the petition?s legality by Friday, October 2.? The City?s previously assumed deadline of September 30?spurred by the printing deadline for military absentee ballots?was brushed away by Judge Lehner as he suggested the printing of absentee ballots would likely not be ordered on Wednesday, September 30, since runoff elections were being held while the Court was in session.? Even if the ballots were ordered on Wednesday, Lehner indicated, this should not prevent the referendum from being put before the vast majority of the electorate who would be voting in New York City. Judge Lehner?s postponement of the supposed deadline came after McMahon had requested that the Judge carefully consider both sides? arguments, rather than render a rush decision and fail to adequately contemplate NYC CAN?s legal arguments, as the Referee had done. ? Initially there was a question as to whether oral arguments would go forward as a clerical mishap resulted in the Judge not being presented with the papers on time.? As a result of the snafu, the procedure for the Court to hear arguments was inverted, whereby oral arguments were heard first and served to orient the Judge.? Over the next few days the Judge will go through both sides? legal memos, as well as the applicable statutes and case law.? Surprisingly, the file forwarded from the Referee to the Judge did not contain NYC CAN?s legal memo, which McMahon told the Court seemed apropos, since the referee had barely considered the Petitioners? memorandum of law.? ? The Judge proceeded to invite discourse on why an investigation was needed.? When McMahon raised as an example the 9/11 Commission?s omission of the collapse of Building 7 from its final report, the Judge replied in puzzlement, ?Building what?? When asked by the Judge whether or not there has been an investigation into 9/11 by New York City authorities, Steve Kitzinger, the City?s lawyer, replied, ?It?s irrelevant?, to which the packed courtroom was loudly disdainful, some openly laughing in disbelief.? At which point Mr. Kitzinger prevailed upon Judge Lehner to quiet the crowd, which the Judge did.? ? With order restored, the Judge again asked Kitzinger if the City had done anything to investigate 9/11.?? Kitzinger flatly responded, ?No.? ?The City never did anything?? retorted the Judge in disbelief.? Nothing, Kitzinger admitted. As part of his unrelenting attack on the NYC CAN petition, Kitzinger repeatedly alluded to the proposed commission?s intention to investigate national security matters beyond its jurisdiction such as ?intelligence failures?.? A simple reading of the petition shows such assertions to be completely unfounded. Later, Judge Lehner seemed unimpressed by Kitzinger?s argument pertaining to the limited jurisdiction of New York City to investigate 9/11, on the grounds of inherent limits to a municipality?s subpoena power.? ?You can investigate anything, can?t you?? the Judge asked rhetorically.? ?Because somebody may have jurisdiction over certain witnesses doesn?t mean you can?t have a commission.? On the complicated question of the commission being a privately funded entity but still having subpoena power granted under the auspices of New York City government, the Judge made comments that gave the Petitioners hope for a favorable ruling.? ?You want a law that says this private commission shall have the right to subpoena people??? To which McMahon assented.? Offering similar examples, the Judge noted, ?A private lawyer can issue subpoenas? a lawyer issues [subpoenas] in connection with an action [during] litigation in court.?? After the hearing, the consensus among NYC CAN members and supporters in attendance was that Judge Lehner is intrigued by the proposed referendum, and that he will give both sides? arguments due consideration.? Near the end of the hearing, McMahon stated emphatically, ?The citizens are desperate.? We want to find out what really happened on 9/11.? __________________________________________ March For Answers 9/27/09 ?See The March Daniel Sunjata's Rousing Speech ? RAW STORY Covers MARCH FOR ANSWERS? ? ?Thinkers think and talkers talk.? Patriots ACT. ? www.NYCCAN.org Hotmail? has ever-growing storage! Don?t worry about storage limits. Check it out. -----Inline Attachment Follows----- _______________________________________________ CitizensTruth mailing list CitizensTruth at six.pairlist.net http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/citizenstruth website: http://citizenstruth.info -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: