Every chance President Obama gets he busily boasts about America's "exceptionalism," as if to convince himself of its truth by simply repeating the same lie over and over again. His speech a month ago at West Point was one big "I/we are so great!" Even the West Point cadets sat in subdued silence and bewilderment. Obama's foreign policy speech convinced no one of America's grand world leadership but only made a bigger fool of the US president than ever before.

Obama is still feebly trying to capitalize on America's past glory, merely resting on its laurels and onetime greatness. Americans have traditionally embraced the notion that they are special and exceptional as the most well endowed, gifted nation on earth. After all, the US was the only superpower left on the planet after the dissolution of the Soviet Union more than two decades ago. Indeed over the last century Americans have been proudly raised to believe that their nation is the richest on earth, possesses the world's most powerful military fighting machine, and sentimentally, nostalgically and historically has always fashioned itself as the land of the free, a land of milk and honey with unlimited opportunity and freedom, and always considered the best country in the world to live in.

But that was then and this is now. Now America's milk is contaminated with Monsanto fed toxins and the bees are fast disappearing due to Monsanto's fed flowers. After waking up from its patriotic pipedream that at this point in time amounts to no more than wishful thinking and delusions of grandeur, Americans today are nervously realizing that the United States is far from what it has been cracked up to be. In fact, its ever-widening, very glaring cracks in such falsely smug notions as exceptionalism, shameless self-promotion and near invincibility belie the cold hard reality that now casts a long and dark foreboding shadow over the once great land. America today is not the greatest nation on earth and it turns out Americans are not nearly so exceptional as Obama would have us believe.

America is dead last in both healthcare and health and well-being of its people in a study that compares the US with ten other developed nations that include Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. As the only developed nation without some form of universal healthcare, Americans spend two to three up to ten times more on various healthcare services than all other nations. We spend $2.3 trillion annually on healthcare, about 18 percent of our Gross Domestic Product and way more than twice as much as other advanced countries.

The Health at a Glance 2013 report of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that the US lifespan that was 41 years ago ahead of the developed world's average longevity by a full year now is more than a full year shorter than the average lifespan, rising from 70.9 to 78.7 while the rest of the developed nations rose from 70 to 80.1 years. People live longer than Americans in 25 other nations including all of Western Europe along with Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Canada. Among developed nations, in 2009 an estimated total of nearly 50 million Americans were unable to even afford healthcare insurance despite the so called Affordable Healthcare Act.

The black-clad fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, sweeping a collapsing army and terrified Iraqis before them as they advance toward Baghdad, reflect back to us the ghoulish face of American empire. They are the specters of the hundreds of thousands of people we murdered in our deluded quest to remake the Middle East. They are ghosts from the innumerable roadsides and villages where U.S. soldiers and Marines, jolted by explosions of improvised explosive devices, responded with indiscriminate fire. They are the risen remains of the dismembered Iraqis left behind by blasts of Hellfire and cruise missiles, howitzers, grenade launchers and drone strikes. They are the avengers of the gruesome torture and the sexual debasement that often came with being detained by American troops. They are the final answer to the collective humiliation of an occupied country, the logical outcome of Shock and Awe, the Frankenstein monster stitched together from the body parts we left scattered on the ground. They are what we get for the $4 trillion we wasted on the Iraq War.

The language of violence engenders violence. The language of hate engenders hate. "I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn," W.H. Auden wrote. "Those to whom evil is done do evil in return." It is as old as the Bible.

There is no fight left in us. The war is over. We destroyed Iraq as a unified country. It will never be put back together. We are reduced - in what must be an act of divine justice decreed by the gods, whom we have discovered to our dismay are Islamic - to pleading with Iran for military assistance to shield the corrupt and despised U.S. protectorate led by Nouri al-Maliki. We are not, as we thought when we entered Iraq, the omnipotent superpower able in a swift and brutal stroke to bend a people to our will. We are something else. Fools and murderers. Blinded by hubris. Faded relics of the Cold War. And now, in the final act of the play, we are crawling away. Our empire is dying.

Egypt's military-dominated government has delivered a humiliating, public slap in the face to John Kerry, the US secretary of state, by sentencing three al-Jazeera journalists to long prison terms only hours after Kerry personally expressed his deep concern about the case in high-level meetings in Cairo. The snub represents a disastrous beginning to Kerry's already fraught Middle East tour, which took him to Baghdad on Monday for crisis talks about the Islamist extremist uprising.

The verdict, by a court responsive to government wishes, will also be seen as a deliberate, crude signal to President Barack Obama, who criticised Egypt's deteriorating human rights record after the former general, Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, seized power in a coup last year. Sisi has since had himself voted president. His elected predecessor, Mohammed Morsi, and thousands of his Muslim Brotherhood supporters remain in jail while hundreds of others have been killed.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Monday it had eliminated chemical weapons from its arsenal despite difficult security circumstances caused by its ongoing civil war.

It credited the "firm political will of Syrian President Bashar Assad and the initiative of the President Vladimir Putin" to give up the arsenal under the supervision of the United Nations Security Council.

"This significant achievement is further evidence that Syria adheres to its international commitments," the Syrian statement said.

Syria's government agreed to surrender its arsenal last fall when the U.S. threatened punitive missile strikes after a chemical attack on a rebel-held suburb of Damascus believed to have killed more than a thousand people.

What Megyn Kelly should have asked

The former vice president got his comeuppance on Fox News last Wednesday, producing a minor news story.

Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz had published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal advocating renewed U.S. military involvement in Iraq to prevent a seizure of power by the al-Qaeda spin-off ISIS (or ISIL) and opining, "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many."

Citing this comment, Fox anchor Megyn Kelly unexpectedly snapped, "But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well sir." She referred specifically to the false accusation about weapons of mass destruction used to sell the Iraq War. A flustered Cheney fumbled his interrogator's name ("Reagan, um, Megyn") before declaring, "You've got to go back and look at the track record." (As though Megyn were doing something other than precisely that.) "We inherited a situation where there was no doubt in anybody's mind about the extent of Saddam's involvement in weapons of mass destruction ... Saddam Hussein had a track record that nearly everybody agreed to."

In other words, the unfortunately mistaken but universal belief in Saddam's WMD preceded the Bush-Cheney administration, was part of its heritage but in no way its invention. Everybody was honestly mistaken. Thus he utterly rejects personal responsibility for crediting, promoting it, and using it to justify a war he badly wanted.

He is lying, of course. There had been much skepticism towards the Bush-Cheney claims. I for one was convinced by a talk I attended by former weapons inspector Scott Ritter that it was unlikely Saddam retained any usable WMDs. And by the embarrassing episode in January 2003, when George W. Bush falsely asserted that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger (only to be refuted by the IAEA almost immediately, when the documents Bush had cited were revealed as crude forgeries).

All Ukrainian leaders, former and current, are responsible for the current events taking place in the country, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said. "We cannot but be alarmed by the events happening there. And what is happening there? Unfortunately, it is virtually a civil war," Medvedev said at a meeting with regional assets of the United Russia party.

"In my point of view, unfortunately, the main blame for what is happening in Ukraine today, is on those, who made decisions, how Ukraine itself should develop and how to create the state," the prime minister said, Interfax reports.

Medvedev said he did not refer to certain individuals in this case.

"So all Ukrainian leaders are responsible for what is happening in Ukraine today. Former and current ones. And those, who instigated the events in Kiev and assisted revolts which took place in early 2014, have a considerable share of responsibility as well," he said.

Hillary Clinton's minions are hard at work assembling a political machine and fine tuning it for another go at the White House. Mrs. Clinton is doing her part preparing for a run as well, churning out a bland memoir about the "hard choices" she faced as secretary of state and coyly positioning herself (again) as the inevitable nominee of the party. But after the troubled beginning to her book tour, we're beginning to see the reasons why Hillary may eventually decide to pull the plug on a 2016 presidential run. Here are five:

1) She's just not that good at campaigning. If the last two gaffe-prone weeks have reminded us of anything about Hillary, it's that she's a mediocre politician at best. Her shortcomings are significant: she can be stiff and wooden in public; she lacks the aura of a natural politician; she's not a great public speaker, and she can come across as politically flat-footed and tone deaf -- as she did with her "dead broke" response to a rather benign question about relating to the financial challenges of the average voter. People still seem to believe that the Clinton name is synonymous with political skill, but that assumption is only half-true: If Hillary possessed even half of Bill's political talent and acumen, she wouldn't have lost to Barack Obama in 2008.

It is time for the European Union to stop calling the people of southeastern Ukraine "separatists," said the Russian Foreign Ministry in a statement on its website. "The EU still prefers to brand the population of southeastern Ukraine as 'pro-Russian separatists' and leave all our explanations unnoticed, Russia has repeatedly explained the purpose behind a number of our armed forces being near the Russian-Ukrainian border," the document said.

"We consider the persistent attempts by Brussels to punish the residents of Crimea and Sevastopol, for their fair and clear declaration in a referendum on the peninsula's fate, to be absolutely unacceptable," the Foreign Ministry said in regard to a Council of Europe statement on Ukraine passed on June 23, Interfax reports.

"If the EU is indeed interested in playing a serious positive role in resolving the Ukrainian crisis, it is time to start reconsidering its approach. It needs to adapt to the real situation and not fear inertia within the EU," the Russian Foreign Ministry said.


The Ministry described the statements adopted at the Council of the European Union on June 23 biased as far from reality. "Moscow has pointed out the 'conclusions' on the situation in Ukraine adopted at the session of the Council of the European Union on June 23," the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a report posted on its website on Tuesday.

"We have to state again that the evaluations given by Brussels of events in Ukraine and the continuing silence on facts that are 'inconvenient' for the European Union are biased, politically motivated and far from reality and the accusations made against Russia are ungrounded, if not clearly falsified," the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

Examples of extreme inequality are becoming easier to find. Progressive leaders have us thinking about revolution. If a revolution is to take place, Americans - especially young Americans - need to know the facts, and they need to know how they're getting cheated, and they need to get angry. The following should help.

1. $1,000,000,000,000,000 in Sales. Not One Cent for Sales Tax

The trading volume on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) reached an incomprehensible $1 quadrillion in notional value in 2012. That's a thousand trillion dollars. In comparison, the entire U.S. GDP is $17 trillion.

On that quadrillion dollars of sales CME imposes transfer fees, contract fees, brokerage fees, Globex fees, clearing fees, and contract surcharges, many of them on both the buyer's and seller's side. As a result, the company had a profit margin higher than any of the top 100 companies in the nation from 2008 to 2010, and it's gotten even higher since then.

But not a penny in sales tax for the taxpayers who provide publicly-funded infrastructure, technology, systems of law, and security to help them process billions of financial transactions.

On the same day last month, airline pilots trying to land at two of the nation's busiest airports got on their radios to report the unnerving sight of small rogue drones buzzing at high altitudes.

In the first incident on May 29, the pilot of a commercial airliner descending toward LaGuardia Airport saw what appeared to be a black drone with a 10-to-15-foot wingspan about 5,500 feet above Lower Manhattan, according to a previously undisclosed report filed with the Federal Aviation Administration.

In the second, two airliners separately approaching Los Angeles International Airport soared past what they described as a drone or remote-controlled aircraft the size of a trash can at an altitude of 6,500 feet, FAA records show.

The records do not name the airlines involved or say how close the aircraft came to the drones when they flew past. FAA officials said their inspectors could not track down the unregistered drones or determine who was flying them. "In many cases, radar data is not available and the operators cannot be identified," the agency said in a statement.