Portside

A new Senate select committee is needed to investigate CIA-NSA-FBI wrong-doing - at home and abroad. Former chief counsel to the Church Committee calls for such a new committee and new investigation. As Senator Feinstein has revealed, the CIA will not only stall but even spy on Congress to impede its investigation of wrongdoing. The Church Committee found abuses and illegal acts going back to FDR's administration.

New poem from Marge Piercy, how the rich and the rich in Congress despise and hate the poor..."If they could push a button, if they could war on the poor here at home as they do abroad directly with bombs instead of legislation, think they'd hesitate?"

As written, this bill does not protect the rights of racial minorities against discrimination at the polls. The North Carolina State Conference of Branches of the NAACP is not willing to accept any legislation which does not mandate that North Carolina is designated as a covered jurisdiction.

Obamacare was conceived at the Heritage Foundation, and birthed in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney. Obama took Romneycare, a program designed to keep the private insurance industry intact, and improved some of its provisions. In deciding what course, the question for the new administration, which successfully ran a campaign with a large plank to make major changes to the health care delivery system, try to go around the existing insurance industry or through it?

The "Budget Deal." abandons the unemployed, while increasing the military budget, and ignores massive job creation. Reducing projected sequester cuts will save jobs, but half the mindless across-the-board sequester cuts continue in fiscal year 2014 and three-fourths in 2015. The deal provides relief from some destructive sequester cuts. But it sustains Washington's focus on deficit reduction and its commitment to austerity. Thanks to the Campaign for America's Future.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his friends in the Republican Party here in the USA want a war with Iran. There really is no other conclusion.