The plan includes many odious measures, including changes to Social Security that would cut benefits by $1,300 per year. It would institute caps on discretionary spending through 2015, and lays out the amount by which individual agencies need to reduce their budgets (without identifying particular programs).

But according to Coburn, it doesn’t really matter which programs get cut, because, as he told Al-Jazeera English, it’s only people who are “sucking off the program” that are going to feel any change:

COBURN: The point is where’s the efficiency in that? The actual service going to people isn’t going to decline, the people sucking off the program are going to be the ones that lose.

Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, states that the billions of dollars in cuts won’t actually effect the “service going to people”, but will only effect those terrible freeloading poor!

Over the last two and a half weeks, my host Sami and I have visited a number of medical facilities in Iraq: the public hospital in Najaf, a prosthetics and orthotics center, and the public hospital in Nasriyyah. All confirmed the disastrous human cost of the Iraq War.

Since 2003,  at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the U.S.-led war. Some estimates put the number at over 1 million. Iraq’s “health has deteriorated to a level not seen since the 1950s,” seventy percent of children suffer from trauma-related symptoms, and there are perhaps five million orphans in Iraq–almost half of the country’s children.

During my first week in Najaf, Sami and I visited As-Sadr Hospital, the public hospital in Najaf. A number of doctors at the hospital will travel to Minneapolis this fall as part of the Sister City relationship between the two cities. Sami’s brother-in-law, Dr. Amer Majeed, met us at the hospital x-ray room.

The hospital was crowded. It is one of 18 hospitals that Saddam built across the country–one in each of Iraq’s 18 provinces. After 2003 it was renamed from “Saddam Hussein Hospital” to “As-Sadr Hospital.” Like all public hospitals in Iraq, treatment at the hospital ...

Civil society groups say they want to have a stronger voice in setting the development agenda ahead of a key global summit on aid effectiveness later this year. Civil society organisations, or CSOs, gathered in Siem Reap, Cambodia in late June in what was the conclusion of a two-year consultation process to develop principles on how such groups can take a larger role in making development meaningful. The Global Assembly of the Open Forum for CSO Development Effectiveness aimed to consolidate the position of civil society groups ahead of high-level international aid meetings in Busan, South Korea, later this year. "There is an increasing recognition of civil society as an essential actor in healthy and vibrant development agendas," said Lun Borithy, executive director of the Cooperation Committee for Cambodia, which co-hosted June’s CSO meeting. "There is an increasing self-realisation that we as civil society must also hold ourselves to be ever more responsive, effective and accountable if we are to help bring positive and lasting change to our world." Borithy said civil society groups have an essential role to play in their countries’ development. "CSOs are indeed concerned about assuring development that achieves positive and sustainable changes for the poor and vulnerable people," Borithy explained. "And this concern requires CSOs as well as donors, government and aid recipients to work efficiently and collaboratively." Until recently, major donors and governments in developing countries have largely dominated high- level consultations on aid effectiveness. CSOs say they want to play a more robust role. The upcoming summit, dubbed the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, marks the first time CSOs will come to the table as equal partners with government ministers, donors and other players, advocates say. During the June consultations in Cambodia, CSOs finalised a key document that will be used to guide civil society groups ...

The most important moral and intellectual voices within a disintegrating society are slowly discredited when their nonviolent protests and calls for justice cannot alter intransigent and corrupt systems of power. The repeated acts of peaceful civil disobedience, efforts at electoral and political reform and the fight to protect the rule of law are dismissed as useless by an embittered, dispossessed and betrayed public. The demagogues and hatemongers, the purveyors of violence, easily seduce enraged and bewildered masses in the final stages of collapse with false promises of vengeance, new glory and moral renewal. And in the spiral downward the good among us are reviled as naive and ineffectual fools.

There is no shortage of courageous dissidents in America. They seek to thwart the imperial disasters, looming financial insolvency and suicidal addiction to fossil fuel. They have stood in small knots on street corners week after week, month after month, year after year, to denounce the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have occupied banks, shut down coal-fired power plants, attempted to halt mountaintop removal, interfered with whaling ships and walked in blustery weather to the White House, where they were arrested. They are struggling to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza on a ship called the Audacity of Hope. But because the corporate state and the two major political parties are indifferent to principled calls for reform, and because the mass of the public still buys into the myths of globalization and the American dream, the plundering and destruction continue unimpeded.

When most Americans face the nightmare before us, when they realize the irreversible devastation unleashed on the ecosystem and the economic misery from which they cannot escape, violence will have a broad and terrifying appeal. Those of us who demand a return to the rule of law and remain steadfast to nonviolence will find ourselves cast aside—the useful ...

On Wednesday, June 29th, Fatin al-Jumaily and her husband Wathiq drove from Karbala to Sami’s house in Najaf to pick me up. I met Fatin last August when she came to Minneapolis as a featured Iraqi artist in the exhibit, The Art of Conflict. Her paintings and presentations in Minneapolis focused on the experience of women in the Iraq War. She and Wathiq came to pick me up in Wathiq’s brother’s car, a 2007 Hyundai, because it has air conditioning and their’s doesn’t.

On the way to Karbala we were stopped at one check point. The army officer asked about me and Wathiq said I’m an American Muslim going to visit the shrines in Karbala. I’m not Muslim, but the army officer let us pass without further questions. Later that evening I saw that people from all over the world, including some from the West, come to Karbala to visit the shrines.

We arrived at Fatin and Wathiq’s house around 6 pm. They are poor and have a very humble house, but Fatin prepared snacks (we ate dinner much later) and they had gifts waiting for me–a set of headphones and a planner with a calendar and maps of Iraq. We talked about Fatin’s students (she’s an art teacher at a public school close to their house) and her hope to continue her education in art history. A couple of years ago her students sent letters and art drawings to a school in Minneapolis as part of the Letters for Peace program of the Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project.

After about an hour we left the house to visit the shrines. Fatin and Wathiq live about 5 minutes from the shrines by car, but the two neighborhoods are very different. The streets near Fatin and Wathiq’s house, like many streets in Karbala and Najaf, are broken, bumpy, and narrow. Often there are large obstacles in the middle of the road, such as a pile of dirt, that must be avoided. Garbage and rubble line the ...

My first day in Iraq was marked by warm welcome after warm welcome. (And not because the temperature was 110 degrees.)

I flew out of Amman, Jordan at 1 am on Sunday morning, June 19, and arrived in Najaf an hour and a half later. My host, Sami Rasouli, was waiting for me. The airport staff was polite and curious: Where are you from? Welcome to Najaf, hope you enjoy our city! What are you doing in Najaf? Where did you learn Arabic? Ma’a Salaama (with peace/goodbye)!

After I gave the visa officer my documents, it was a quick process to approve my entry into Iraq.

Sami’s brother-in-law picked us up and drove us through Najaf to Sami’s house. It was early morning after a sleepless night, but it was a first chance to catch up with Sami (I last saw him in snowy Minneapolis during his visit there this winter). Sami is charismatic and warm with a hearty sense of humour, and I quickly felt at ease. He pointed out new construction, Kufa University (which has an official relationship with the University of Minnesota), government buildings, roads to Karbala and other nearby towns, and places where our mutual friends live. We reached Sami’s home at 5 am.

After a few hours of sleep, we woke up for breakfast with Sami’s family. Sami’s wife Suaad had prepared eggs, bread with cheese or honey, rolls, tomatoes and cucumbers, fruit, and tea. Though more reserved than her husband, Suaad also welcomed me with a big smile and impeccable hospitality. She is very patient with my broken Arabic and careful to make sure I have everything I need.

Sami and Suaad have two sons, Redha, 9, and Omar, 3. Redha is quiet and can speak good English when he chooses. On my second day in Najaf we played a game of Candy Land that I brought with me as a gift. Almost every card he drew sent him ahead only 1 or 2 spaces or back to Gumdrop Mountain or Candy Cane Forest, but he didn’t complain. Omar is the most energetic 3-year old I’ve ever seen. I made the mistake of ...

The global nuclear industry and its allies in government are making a desperate effort to cover up the consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. “The big lie flies high,” comments Kevin Kamps of the organization Beyond Nuclear.

Not only is this nuclear establishment seeking to make it look like the Fukushima catastrophe has not happened—going so far as to claim that there will be “no health effects” as a result of it—but it is moving forward on a “nuclear renaissance,” its scheme to build more nuclear plants.

Indeed, next week in Washington, a two-day “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held involving major manufacturers of nuclear power plants—including General Electric, the manufacturer of the Fukushima plants—and U.S. government officials.

Although since Fukushima, Germany, Switzerland and Italy and other nations have turned away from nuclear power for a commitment instead to safe, clean, renewable energy such as solar and wind, the Obama administration is continuing its insistence on nuclear power.

Will the nuclear establishment be able to get away with telling what, indeed, would be one of the most outrageous Big Lies of all time—that no one will die as a result of Fukushima?

Will it be able to continue its new nuclear push despite the catastrophe?

Nearly 100 days after the Fukushima disaster began, with radiation still streaming from the plants, with its owners, TEPCO, now admitting that meltdowns did occur at its plants, that releases have been twice as much as it announced earlier, with deadly radioactivity from Fukushima spreading worldwide, and with some countries now changing course and saying no to nuclear power, while others stick with it, a nuclear crossroads has arrived.

“No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima,” the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, flatly declared in a statement issued at a press ...

“Remember, we can change the world. Or at least Long Island,” Nora Bredes, former executive director of the Shoreham Opponents Coalition, just wrote on her Facebook page. With her message was a New York Times article about a massive demonstration 25 years ago this month protesting the Shoreham nuclear plant.

“More than 600 protesters were arrested here today after 15,000 demonstrators gathered,” the piece began. The headline noted it was “One of the Largest Held Worldwide” against nuclear power.

Because of demonstrations, legal challenges, political initiatives and other actions by organizations and individuals, and work by Suffolk County, state and local officials, the Shoreham plant was stopped.

Two months before that June 1986 demonstration, the Chernobyl nuclear plant catastrophe occurred in the former Soviet Union clearly showing the deadliness of nuclear power, despite the claims of nuclear promoters—including on Long Island—that it was safe.

Now, the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants in Japan has again proven the lethality of nuclear power. A baseline for how many people will likely die from Fukushima radiation is provided by a 2009 book published by the New York Academy of Sciences, “Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment.” Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, a team of eminent European scientists concludes that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from Chernobyl. And the Fukushima disaster involved not one but a cluster of nuclear power plants and is ongoing with radioactivity still streaming out and spreading worldwide.

But the nuclear Pinocchios are still at it.

Last week, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, held a press conference in Washington at which it issued a statement asserting: “No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at ...