Thursday, June 18, 2009

Fantasyland Media:

http://www.fantasylandmedia.org

News fashioned by the people in charge, the corporations and your government. Each week, we cover the stories that are just left out of the US propaganda machine.

---------

"The AMA does not represent me. It is a common misconception that this organization speaks on behalf of most American physicians but that is a misconception with very serious consequences at such a critical time in the health care reform debate. So long as the public, the media and our elected officials lump all physicians together as 'the AMA,' then we are guilty by association of a failure of our hippocratic oath to 'first, do no harm.'

In fact, the AMA represents less than one-third of America's physicians and half of those are retired. The American Medical Student Association endorses Universal Health care Reform.

The AMA's longstanding opposition to every effort to change health care financing, including Medicare in the 1960s, has resulted in decades of needless and countless morbidity and mortality."
CAROL PARIS, MD
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2009/06/15-0

-->The NY Times, in describing the AMA's opposition to the single payer health care reform option, makes no attempt to inform readers of these common misconceptions.

-------------------

"The White House and the Democratic Congressional Leadership are playing a very dirty game in their effort to ram through supplemental funding for the escalating US war in Afghanistan and continued occupation of Iraq. In the crosshairs of the big guns at the White House and on Capitol Hill are anti-war freshmen legislators and the movement to hold those responsible for torture accountable...

In order to block passage, 39 Democrats need to vote against it in the House. As of this writing, 34 reportedly are committed to voting against it. Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake has been doing great coverage of this issue, much of which can be found here. So too has David Swanson at AfterDowningStreet. This does seem to be one issue where phone calls and letters matter-tremendously."
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/15-11

-->But readers of the NY Times are being pretty much kept in the dark about the White House pressures to get antiwar legislators to vote for supplemental war funding. Maurice Hinchey is undecided. The great peace candidate, John Hall, is missing in action and has not come out against the bill. UPDATE: Very few NY representatives voted against the war funding. Hinchey, Hall, and Murphy were among the sellouts.

-------------------

"Spain honors International Brigade

If the Spanish ambassador was surprised to see a defiant and elderly fist thrust into the air in the elegant reception room of his Belgrave Square office today, he gave no sign of it.

The 96-year-old hand held in clenched salute belonged to Paddy Cochrane, who, along with six ­others, had traveled to the embassy to receive a Spanish passport as thanks for ­volunteering in the Spanish civil war more than 70 years ago.

The gesture had been prompted by the words of another International ­Brigade veteran, Sam Lesser, who recalled how the communist politician Dolores Ibárruri – La Pasionaria – had promised the foreign fighters in 1938 that they would one day return to find a peaceful, republican Spain.

'We've taken a while but now we've come home,' Lesser, 94, said in ­Spanish. 'We've come home. But there are those of us who did not come home, who sleep under the sun, the soil and the olive trees of Spain.'"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/09/spanish-civil-war-veterans

-->This is exactly the type of story the NY Times would never cover. Spanish Civil War? Honor war vets who happened to be Socialists or Communists? Never happen in the good old US media.