DAVID HIMMELSTEIN STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER Himmelstein and Woolhandler are professors of medicine at Harvard University and the co-founders of Physicians for a National Health Program. Woolhandler said today: “Grassroots, single-payer activists successfully pushed the Democratic Party Platform Committee to propose ‘guaranteed health care for all.’ This is a huge improvement from their previous language that merely…

MICHAEL KLARE Klare’s most recent book is Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, and he is featured in the recently released documentary “Blood and Oil.” Klare said today: “The current conflict between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia has been widely viewed as a throwback to…

DIANA PEI WU Diana Pei Wu is a co-founder of Chin Jurn Wor Ping (Moving Forward for Peace), a San Francisco area network of progressive Chinese Americans. CHARLES KERNAGHAN Kernaghan is director of the National Labor Committee, which has just released a report titled “Olympic Sweatshop: Speedo Production in China Breaks Records for Worker Abuse.”…

ROBERT LIPSYTE “Jock Culture” correspondent for Tomdispatch.com, Lipsyte is author of several books on sports, most recently Yellow Flag, a novel about stock car racing. He said today: “The focus has unfairly been upon China rather than the true Evil Empire, the Olympic Nation-State, which from the beginning (the all-male, naked Greek games) has been…

The U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. On Aug. 9, it dropped another on Nagasaki and President Harry Truman delivered a radio address in which he falsely claimed: “The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in…

The New York Times today published a piece “Anthrax Evidence Called Mostly Circumstantial.” MERYL NASS, MD A leading expert on anthrax, Nass knew the government scientist Bruce Ivins who died in an apparent suicide last week. She has a web page and blog. Nass said today: “The Justice Department has failed to provide to the…

AP is reporting: “Exxon Mobil Corp. reported second-quarter earnings of $11.68 billion Thursday, the biggest quarterly profit ever by any U.S. corporation, but the results were well short of Wall Street expectations and its shares fell.” TYSON SLOCUM Slocum is director of Public Citizen‘s Energy Program. He said today: “Contrary to what Bush is claiming,…

DEBORAH JAMES Just back in D.C. from observing the WTO talks in Geneva, James is director of international programs at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and has been working extensively with farmers and trade unions. James said today: “Given what’s been on the table, no deal is better than a bad deal. A…

Today, President George W. Bush signed the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008. Last week, thousands of people lined up in Washington, D.C. to have the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America help them restructure their mortgages in the group’s “Save the Dream” event. The group, which has long criticized practices by Fannie Mae and…

PERVEZ HOODBHOY On a short visit to the U.S., the Pakistan-based Hoodbhoy recently wrote the piece “Anti-Americanism in Pakistan and the Taliban Menace.” He said today: “There was an attack yesterday in Pakistan by a U.S. Predator missile. The stories about that strike are running side-by-side in the Pakistani press along with Bush’s statements, made…