CommonDreams.org

Yesterday, Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY), a lead single payer advocate in the House, said he would vote against Obamacare:

"At the highest level this bill will enshrine in law the monopolistic powers of the private health insurance industry. There's no other way to look at it."

Propagandizing sooner rather than later, a front group for the coal industry last week wrapped up its first "Let's Learn About Coal" class in a West Virginia elementary school. It's part of a project by the Ladies Auxiliary of the Friends of Coal that teaches kids the importance of coal, visits kids in hospitals to give out a stuffed puppy named Mr. Coal - who kills 24,000 Americans a year - and distributes coloring books with word games and messages like "Coal Gives Us Power We Can All Depend On!" and "Coal Mining Provides Jobs for Lots of People!" For more on Friends of Coal, go here. For a somewhat more objective view of Mr. Coal, go here.

"Than coal other cheaper is fuels!" – word game in the Friends of Coal coloring book.

Given the air of violence abroad in the land, it's hard to know how to respond to the angry freak show that was yesterday's "Superbowl of Freedom." The right-wingers, anti-Semites and name-callers seemed full of an inchoate rage. At what? Obama, Pelosi, Mao, Hitler, Woodstock, the media, the cultural train that left the station decades ago, the modest notion that people deserve health care – take your pick. What seems noteworthy is the willingness of Republicans to join their fevered ranks.

Understandably, Arab-Americans are already on the defensive in the wake of the Fort Hood shootings by a devout Muslim. Expecting a racist backlash that no doubt is zealously taking root across the right fringes of the country, the Association of Patriotic Arab Americans in the Military, formed after 9/11, has issued a response. It states the obvious. It probably won't help.

"In the aftermath of this terrible tragedy, it is more important than ever that we not make the same scapegoating and broad stroke mistakes that were evident in the aftermath of previous tragedies. The APAAM urges (Americans) to recognize that the actions of Hasan are those of a deranged gunman, and are in no way representative of the wider Arab American or American Muslim community."

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a special report from the BBC on the walls that still divide the world. A dozen countries tend walls - of concrete, wire, sand, guns - that keep out migrants, poor people, the fearful Other.

The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that under the GOP plan for the House health care bill, the number of uninsured Americans would rise, as would premiums. In fact, if taxpayers weren't paying the bill, GOP leaders could probably not afford insurance under their own proposal.

"The six men and one woman in the Republican House leadership have an average age of 52, and as a group are more susceptible to cardiovascular disease, different cancers, high blood pressure, and host of other chronic diseases. The Republican health alternative would allow insurers to discriminate against these conditions and price the Republican leaders out of the market."

Contrary to earlier reports, the suspected shooter at Fort Hood, Army Major Malik Nidal Hasan, 39, is alive and in stable condition. Hasan was a psychiatrist specializing in traumatic stress syndrome who was said to be unhappy about possibly being deployed to Iraq. 

Despite the pesky constitutional issue of separation of church and state, the tiny Oklahoma town of Wakita plans to open the country's first all-Christian prison, with a "Christ-centered" curriculum and all born-again staff. Town officials are all for it; Wakita taxpayers have yet to offer an opinon.

"It is a bedrock principle in American life that religion should pay its own way. No citizen should ever be taxed to pay for the religious indoctrination of another." - Americans United for Separation of Church and State.