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Lee's Link |
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3/31/10 The Yes Men call O’Keefe, Breitbart ’sad and pathetic’ for targeting ACORN The Yes Men seek to comfort the afflicted by actively afflicting the comforted. And that's the opposite of what anti-ACORN activists are doing, Bonanno purported. "By targeting ACORN, they're targeting people who are victims of a very nasty power dynamic. So, I think it's a mean thing to do." Sahil Kapur |
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3/30/10 German Firm Wins Right to Make Beer Called 'Fucking Hell' The European Union trademarks authority has permitted a German firm to register the brand name "Fucking Hell" for a new beer, much to the irritation of the Austrian village of Fucking. |
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3/29/10 Celebrating (Mourning) a Culture of Lies March 29th marks the thirty-seventh anniversary of America's withdrawal from Vietnam. You won't hear it celebrated in any mainstream media, though it should be. Or more precisely, it should be mourned. Vietnam is the first war America ever lost. Robert Freeman |
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3/28/10 Skeptic challenges guru to kill him live on TV When a famous tantric guru boasted on television that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers, most viewers either gasped in awe or merely nodded unquestioningly. Sanal Edamaruku’s response was different. “Go on then — kill me,” he said.
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3/27/10 India deploys world's hottest chilli to fight terrorism Ever since the Trojan Horse – and probably long before – men have bent their minds to developing the ultimate secret weapon. Now, at last, the Indian army just might have discovered it: the world's hottest chilli pepper. Stephen Bates |
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3/26/10 Netanyahu did one thing right in the Jerusalem debacle A revelation has come forth in Jerusalem: Most of it is a settlement. After decades in which we lied ourselves to pieces and rendered kosher that which was not - only to ourselves, not to any other country - the truth has been revealed. It has been revealed after years in which no one thought to call the residents of these giant neighborhoods settlers. Years in which Teddy Kollek, a Labor Party man and a man of peace, of course, was considered a "builder" and not the greatest of settlers. He settled more Jews in occupied areas than any settler leader. Years in which doubting the settlement enterprise was tantamount to heresy and treason. So of all people, this right-winger, Netanyahu, proponent of the Greater Land of Israel, has lifted the veil. Gideon Levy |
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3/25/10 Disputed Bay of Bengal island 'vanishes' A tiny island claimed for years by India and Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal has disappeared beneath the rising seas, scientists in India say. |
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3/24/10 Urine Containers, 'Space Boots' and Artifacts Aren't Just Junk, Argue Archaeologists California has named the remains of the Apollo 11 mission a state historical resource -- to the delight of the young profession of space archaeologists. They fear that the trash and equipment left behind by the United States' journeys to the moon could someday wind up for sale on eBay if they aren't protected. Philip Bethge |
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3/23/10 German Satellite to Help Detect Threats to Earth With a new satellite project, Germany's space agency is hoping to create an early warning system for potential asteroid strikes against the Earth. An asteroid impact may have contributed to the death of the dinosaurs, and scientists would like to be able to predict the next Earth-bound collosus before it hits. Christoph Seidler |
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3/22/10 There's no denying Obama's race plays a role in protests In the pre-dawn hours of last Nov. 5, while much of the nation celebrated Barack Obama's election as the nation's first black president, three white men in Springfield, Mass., doused the partially completed Macedonia Church of God in Christ with gasoline and burned it to the ground. Tony Pugh |
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3/21/10 I'm Not the Messiah, Says Food Activist... but His Many Worshippers Do Not Believe Him The trouble started when Raj Patel appeared on American TV to plug his latest book, an analysis of the financial crisis called The Value of Nothing. Bobbie Johnson |
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3/20/10 The Growing Movement for Publicly Owned Banks We the people have given away our sovereign money-creating power to private, for-profit lending institutions, which have used it to siphon wealth from the productive economy. Some states are moving to take that power back. Ellen Brown |
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3/19/10 The FBI Could Be Watching You on Facebook Social-networking sites have driven a seemingly insatiable need to share all sorts of information about ourselves in a very public way -- and law enforcement has caught on. Daniela Perdoma |
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3/18/10 Tampon-makers can't mention the V-word. Period. For years, advertising for tampons and "sanitary products" have been shrouded in nebulous euphemism. So what happens when a US tampon-maker drops the coy messaging and goes straight for the jugular (so to speak)? Its ad gets banned by the major US television networks for mentioning the word vagina. Richard Adams |
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3/17/10 Dog recovers after operation to remove football Bracken the labrador ended up with the deflated ball stuck next to his heart after munching it while out of sight of his owner John Grant and would have died without surgery. David Gunn |
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3/16/10 Zebra puts head in hippopotamus's mouth A zebra at Zurich Zoo appeared to be staring into the jaws of death when visitors saw it nose to nose with an open-mouthed hippopotamus. |
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3/15/10 Drones Are Lynchpin of Obama's War on Terror CIA drones are killing terrorists -- and civilians -- in Pakistan almost every day. The unmanned aircraft are becoming the weapon of choice in the fight against al-Qaida and its allies. But the political, military and moral consequences are incalculable. SPIEGEL ONLINE has investigated Barack Obama's remote-controlled campaign against terrorism. Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan |
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3/14/10 Why 'Life Had To Have Been Designed' Is a Terrible Justification for God's Existence A lot of arguments for religion are very bad indeed. A lot of arguments for religion aren't even arguments: they're deflections, excuses for why the believer isn't making an argument, bigoted insults, expressions of wishful thinking, complaints that atheists are mean bad people to even ask for an argument, heartfelt wishes that atheists would just shut up. Greta Christina |
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3/13/10 Let's Not Fire the Teachers When Students Don't Learn -- Let's Fire the Parents Yes, America has found its new boogeyman to blame for our crumbling educational system. It's just too easy to blame the teachers, what with their cushy teachers' lounges, their fat-cat salaries, and their absolute authority in deciding who gets a hall pass. We all remember high school - canning the entire faculty is a nationwide revenge fantasy. Take that, Mrs. Crabtree! And guess what? We're chewing gum and no, we didn't bring enough for everybody. Bill Maher |
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3/13/10 McDonald's Demands Franchise Applicants Reveal Intimate Details Those wanting to own a McDonald's or Subway franchise in Germany must be prepared to offer up intimate personal details, including health information. One German official says the questionnaires violate the law. |
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3/12/10 The sleepy town of Hardin, Mont., began its foray into the private prison industry in 2004, an adventure that would eventually saddle it with millions in debt and an empty, 464-bed prison collecting dust at the edge of town. Beau Hodai |
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3/11/10 Knut Should be Castrated, Animal Rights Group Says As if Berlin Zoo's polar bear star Knut hasn't had enough upheaval in his life, animal rights group PETA demanded on Tuesday that he should be castrated to avoid him inbreeding with his girlfriend Giovanna. The two apparently share the same grandfather. The demand is likely to outrage his many fans. David Crossland |
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3/10/10 I'm going to vomit if I hear the word "bipartisanship" one more time I am angry. I'm tired of pundits and know-nothing, media gasbags. I'm tired of snarky "inside politics" programming. I am sick of the bigotry and hatred of "birthers" and faux patriotic cranks and their GOP puppet masters. And I'm really pissed at the Democratic Party that confuses having a plate of limp noodles with having a spine. John Cory |
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3/9/10 Three films that would make Einstein blush An American physicist is calling for Hollywood producers to tone down the fanciful science in movies - and restrict themselves to just one scientific flaw per film. But which are the worst offenders when it comes to bad science films? Elizabeth Diffin |
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3/8/10 Always lost? It may be in your genes When it comes to navigation skills, some of us are homing pigeons. Others are mice in a maze. The sharp navigators are those who can figure out which way they need to go in an unfamiliar setting to get to their destination. No GPS needed to find their way around town. No always stopping for directions. Some folks, meanwhile, are hopelessly disoriented — the type that gets lost in a paper bag. Kavita Varma-White |
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3/7/10 Do Kinder People Have an Evolutionary Advantage? Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive. Yasmin Anwar |
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3/6/10 The Superconductor: SF Symphony's Michael Tilson Thomas The National Medal of Arts winner talks about James Brown, movie music, and how to get your kids to love practicing piano. Clara Jeffrey |
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3/5/10 Health Reform Truth Oozes Out: And It Is Not Just "Everything there is to say about healthcare has been said and just about everyone has said it," Obama said. "So now is the time to make a decision about how to finally reform healthcare so that it works, not just for the insurance companies, but for America's families and businesses." Not just... Donna Smith |
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3/4/10 Ever since deregulation caused a worldwide economic meltdown in September '09 and everyone became a Keynesian again, it hasn't been easy to be a fanatical fan of the late economist Milton Friedman. So widely discredited is his brand of free-market fundamentalism that his followers have become increasingly desperate to claim ideological victories, however far-fetched. Naomi Klein |
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3/3/10 Ryan Bingham, the character played with debonair finish by George Clooney in Up in the Air, is a perfect mirror of modern business and social trends: an airport nomad who travels all over the country firing people for a living. Bingham has no desire for a wife, kids, or permanent address. Instead he embraces a devil-may-care ethics of personal freedom. Emily Bauman |
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3/2/10 Former Prom King Now Living Anonymously Among Commoners GRESHAM, OR—Sean Fowler, the man once revered throughout the halls of Barlow High School as prom's one true king, has for the past several years lived a meager existence among the very peasants who used to tremble at the mere mention of his name, sources reported Monday. the ONION |
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3/1/10 Treasure Trove in World's E-Waste This week the United Nations released a report on the problems surrounding the recycling of electronic scrap, known as e-waste. Millions of tons of old computers and phones on the scrap heaps of the world contain more gold and silver than the average mine. What is needed is better and safer recycling. Axel Bojanowski |
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2/28/10 Commentators should not be dismissive of Pat Robertson when he says bad things that happen to others are because of their alliances with the Devil. There are few men of the cloth, with the exception of some Irish priests, who are more qualified to identify what acts are inspired by the Devil and his surrogates than Pat Robertson. Christopher Brauchli |
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2/27/10 6 Insane Coincidences You Won't Believe Actually Happened We're not going to bullshit you. Look hard enough, and you can find "amazing" coincidences anywhere. With a whole universe to work with, sometimes the stars are going to align just right. Jacopo della Quercia |
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2/26/10 Facts just don't mean what they used to mean To listen to talk radio, to watch TV pundits, to read a newspaper's online message board, is to realize that increasingly, we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth. We admit no ideas that do not confirm us, hear no voices that do not echo us, sift out all information that does not validate what we wish to believe. Leonard Pitts, Jr. |
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2/25/10 Since the early 1990s, much of the media have come to overrepresent women as having made it—completely—in the professions, as having gained sexual equality with men, and having achieved a level of financial success and comfort enjoyed primarily by the Tiffany’s-encrusted doyennes of Laguna Beach. At the same time, there has been a resurgence of dreck clogging our cultural arteries—The Man Show, Maxim, Girls Gone Wild. But even this fare was presented as empowering, because while the scantily clad or bare-breasted women may have seemed to be objectified, they were really on top, because now they had chosen to be sex objects and men were supposedly nothing more than their helpless, ogling, crotch-driven slaves. Susan J Douglas |
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2/24/10 Death of the corner shop as we know it REMOVING the display of sweets in shops and restricting the sale of high-calorie food near schools are among radical government proposals to make Scotland the first country in the world to successfully tackle obesity. Craig Brown |
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2/23/10 Man Indicted for Breaking Into Prison Prison walls were no obstacle for a man in western Germany who was being separated from his love. But breaking into her cell every night turned out to be a very bad decision. |
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2/22/10 No miracle as brain-damaged patient proved unable to communicate It seemed to be a medical miracle: the car crash victim assumed for 23 years to be in a coma who was suddenly found to be conscious and able to communicate by tapping on a computer. Denis Campbell |
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2/21/10 One Photographer's Look at Social Dislocation He was looking for adventure. But when the young Dane Jacob Holdt arrived in the US in the 1970s, he found a country deeply divided -- and spent the next five years photographing that divergence. His photos, now on display in Braunschweig, show a haunting America. Christoph Gunkel |
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2/20/10 Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up - and have you achieved it? A study run over the past 50 years has tested what helps childhood aspirations become reality. Sue Mitchell |
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2/19/10 Did the New Star of German Literature Steal from a Blogger? Bestselling 17-year-old German writer Helene Hegemann is being accused of plagiarism after it was revealed that her debut novel contains passages lifted from a blog about sex and drugs in Berlin's techno scene. She denies she did anything wrong. Tobias Rapp |
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2/18/10 Wall St. Sets Its Greedy Eyes on Shaking the Silver out of Hollywood If you thought the mortgage-backed securities and other complex financial instruments that crashed the economy were risky, you’ll love Wall Street’s latest brainwave: a new financial market in which players can gamble on whether upcoming Hollywood movies will be blockbusters or bombs. Nick Baumann |
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2/17/10 Claire Danes As Temple Grandin Claire Danes is revelatory as Temple Grandin animal behaviorist, best-selling author, autistic and expert in autism. This is a fascinating movie and I learned so much about this woman and about autism. Temple did not speak until she was four and if not for her mother would have probably ended up spending her life in an institution. What a loss that would have been. Melissa Silverstein |
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2/16/10 Texas Education Board Infusing Schoolbooks with Ultraconservative Ideology "The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation," McLeroy said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. "But we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan -- he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes." Mariah Blake |
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2/15/10 When the historian and political activist Howard Zinn died recently of a heart attack at 87, National Public Radio's All Things Considered ran a short obituary consisting of snippets of interviews from three people: the linguist Noam Chomsky, the civil rights leader Julian Bond and the radical right-wing provocateur David Horowitz. Eric Alterman |
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2/14/10 Our Founders were NOT Fundamentalists God forbid our children should know of American Christians who embraced the Sermon on the Mount and renounced the Book of Revelations...or natives who established democracy on American soil long before they saw the first European...or actual Founders who got drunk, high and laid on their way to writing the Constitution. Harvey Wasserman |
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2/13/10 Men At Work lose plagiarism case in Australia Larrikin Music had claimed the flute riff was stolen from Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, written by Marion Sinclair in 1934. |
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2/12/10 One thing that governors and mayors absolutely love to do is win a prize in the national game called "Corporate Welfare Roulette." It's a simple casino-style game in which politicos put down a big stack of taxpayers' money on an out-of-state corporation as an "incentive," hoping that their bet outbids other states and cities trying to lure that same corporation to move to their area and hire some people. Jim Hightower |
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2/11/10 Wal-Mart Cuts Over 13,000 Of What It Calls Jobs "Obviously, it is a sad day whenever we have to let go of any of the people we have dehumanized so thoroughly that we can barely muster the will to describe them as employees," Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke told reporters. "However, this is a business, and we must do what we can to stay competitive while still paying our existing workforce what we actually refer to with a straight face as wages." the ONION |
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2/10/10 Phishing Scam Cripples European Emissions Trading Sneaky cyber-thieves have made millions by fraudulently obtaining European greenhouse gas emissions allowances and reselling them. The scam has hampered trading of the credits, which are seen as an important tool in curbing climate change, in several European countries. |
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2/9/10 On Nov. 5, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, the House minority leader, took the podium at a Republican rally, waved a document defiantly and declared: "This is my copy of the Constitution, and I'm going to stand here with the Founding Fathers who wrote in the Preamble, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Christopher Dreisbach |
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2/3/10 While reflecting upon the “have a nice day” patter of the pundits who were heaping praise on Prop. 13, I recalled something that Albert Einstein had said: “There are only two things in this world that I’m fairly sure about. That E=mc2, and man’s capacity for folly. And I’m not that certain about the first.” Indeed, Prop. 13 was to become California’s Folly. Arthur Blaurstein |
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2/2/10 Al Jazeera: The Most Hated Name in News? In less than three years, Al Jazeera English has emerged as the dominant channel covering the developing world. As the first worldwide news station to be based in the "global South," it has an audacious mandate: to reverse the information flow that has traditionally moved from the wealthy countries of the North to the poorer countries south of the equator, and to be the "voice of the voiceless," delivering in-depth journalism from under-reported regions around the world. Deborah Campbell |
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2/1/10 Oregon Vote Shows Public Is Ready to Raise Taxes on Corporations and the Rich Conservatives have been crowing loudly about their victory in last week’s special election in Massachusetts, but voters in Oregon also “sent a message,” when approving two measures that imposed progressive taxes on earners making more than $250,000 per year and on large corporations. Joshua Holland |
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1/31/10 Pope John Paul II regularly whipped himself Pope John Paul II self-flagellated regularly to imitate Christ's suffering and signed a secret document saying he would resign instead of ruling for life if he became incurably ill, a book claims. |
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1/30/10 Reporter goes undercover after claims city is 'too tolerant' of beggars Taking up my spot outside the Balmoral, with nothing more than a flattened cardboard box for a seat, I adopted my downtrodden persona. I kept my head down, lest people guess that I was in fact well fed, well rested and pampered by the luxuries of a roof and a bed. Mark McLaughlin |
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1/29/10 As long as the wired Internet is dependent upon 13 closely guarded root servers it is politically controllable just as any other communications hub is. These servers are operated by the Pentagon and NASA as well as by private, mainly American corporations. Michael Naumann |
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1/28/10 An Auschwitz Survivor and Her New Rap Band "It is certainly a bit different from what we normally do," the diminutive, 85-year-old Bejarano told SPIEGEL ONLINE, referring to her group Coincidence, which includes her daughter Edna and son Joram and normally plays Jewish and anti-fascist songs. "But I know this hip hop stuff is popular among the youth. I thought if we worked together, then young people could learn more about what happened back then." Charles Hawley in Hamburg |
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1/27/10 McDonald's 'wrong' to fire worker over cheese slice The waitress was fired last March after she sold a hamburger to a co-worker who then asked for cheese, which she added. |
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1/26/10 Revisiting The Shock Doctrine in the Wake of Haiti Disaster Dozens of coastal villages were flattened by the wave, but unlike in Sri Lanka, many Thai settlements were successfully rebuilt within months. The difference did not come from the government. Thailand's politicians were just as eager as those elsewhere to use the storm as an excuse to evict fishing people and hand over land tenure to large resorts. Yet what set Thailand apart was that villagers approached all government promises with intense skepticism and refused to wait patiently in camps for an official reconstruction plan. Instead, within weeks, hundreds of villagers engaged in what they called land "reinvasions." Naomi Klein |
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1/25/10 Hawk hired to scare off Holyrood pigeons flies away for good Tweed, a Harris hawk, who was drafted in at a cost of £44,000 to scare pigeons away from the Holyrood building, has gone AWOL. David Maddox |
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1/24/10 Historic Bentley snowflake photos for sale in US Ten of the pioneering photos of snowflake crystals US farmer Wilson A Bentley began taking more than a century ago are to be sold in New York. |
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1/23/10 The Secrets of Looking Good on the Dance Floor Why do some clubbers shake it like a Polaroid picture while others prefer to perch on a bar stool? British psychologist Peter Lovatt, who has conducted rigorous field work in nightclubs, believes he can explain why some booty shaking is hot -- and some is not. It's all about your hormones. Birger Menke |
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1/22/10 New Basketball League For White Only A new professional basketball league called the All-American Basketball Alliance (AABA) sent out a press release on Sunday saying that it intends to start its inaugural season in June, with teams in 12 U.S. cities. However, the AABA is different from other sports leagues because only players who are “natural born United States citizens with both parents of Caucasian race are eligible to play in the league.” AABA commissioner Don “Moose” Lewis insists that he’s not racist, but he just wants to get away from the “street-ball” played by “people of color” and back to “fundamental basketball.” Amanda Terkel |
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1/21/10 World's 'most expensive' ham leg on sale in London The leg of Iberico ham, which costs £1,800, went on sale at the food hall in the retailer's flagship store in Oxford Street, central London. |
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1/20/10 It takes a strange frame of mind to believe that demolishing a wooded encampment of homeless immigrant men and evicting them onto the streets during one of the coldest weeks of winter can be an act of prudence and compassion. But that is how the town of Huntington, in Suffolk County on Long Island, describes it. |
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1/19/10 Can CO2 Catchers Combat Climate Change? While nations bicker about who should cut greenhouse gas emissions and by how much, scientists are dreaming up their own solutions to global warming. A German professor has created a filter which extracts more than a thousand times more carbon dioxide from the air than a tree. Samiha Shafy |
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1/18/10 A fourth novel that continues Mervyn Peake's classic fantasy series Gormenghast has been discovered. It was written by Peake's widow, the late Maeve Gilmore, and recounts the further adventures of Titus, the 77th Earl of Groan. Sebastian Peake |
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1/17/10 The State of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Dream in 2010 Over 40 years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, his words still speak to the social conditions that so many Americans face. Our unemployment rate is hovering at 10 percent, and the wealthiest 10 percent of us control over 70 percent of the nation's wealth. Economic inequality remains a barrier to greater racial equality. The national commemoration of King's birthday, therefore, is more for reflection than celebration. Dedrick Muhammad |
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1/16/10 Interview: Lemony Snicket - A fortunate event NO-ONE in Scotland has ever seen Lemony Snicket. If you're a truly obsessive fan (as most of his are), you might have seen a photo of him on the odd website or the very occasional newspaper interview, but they only ever show the back of his head, not his face. David Robinson |
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1/15/10 Moral Bankruptcy: Why Are We Letting Wall Street Off So Easy? We have created a society in which materialism overwhelms moral commitment, in which the rapid growth that we have achieved is not sustainable environmentally or socially, in which we do not act together to address our common needs. Market fundamentalism has eroded any sense of community and has led to rampant exploitation of unwary and unprotected individuals. There has been an erosion of trust-and not just in our financial institutions. It is not too late to close these fissures. Joseph Stiglitz |
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1/14/10 The Further Adventures of The Edge in Malibu My last dispatch from The Bu involved a dust-up on the mountain above Surfrider Beach just outside city limits, where the U2 guitarist known as The Edge wants to build not one, two, three, or four, but FIVE houses the size of aircraft carriers. And he's calling the project -- I'm not kidding here, by the way -- Leaves in the Wind. Steve Lopez |
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1/13/10 Having a big bum, hips and thighs 'is healthy' Carrying extra weight on your hips, bum and thighs is good for your health, protecting against heart and metabolic problems, UK experts have said. |
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1/12/10 Research finds Neanderthals enjoyed makeup For decades, our low-browed Neanderthal cousins have been portrayed as dim savages whose idea of seduction was a whispered "ug" and a blow to the cranium. Sam Jones |
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1/11/10 Amazon explorers uncover signs of a real El Dorado Spanning 155 miles, the circles, squares and other geometric shapes form a network of avenues, ditches and enclosures built long before Christopher Columbus set foot in the new world. Some date to as early as 200 AD, others to 1283. Rory Carroll |
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1/10/10 Absurd development in the national capital of reckless abandon: County officials in Las Vegas are putting their foot down about some nipples featured in a painted mural decorating the Erotic Heritage Museum. Evan James |
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1/9/10 The Ultimate Eco-Friendly Ride Carbon fiber and aluminum are so 2009. This year's best bicycling model is made out of bamboo and hemp. A new generation of manufacturers are coming up with some of the most environmentally friendly transport yet. Lighter, stronger, more comfortable and these bikes have also got a much smaller carbon footprint. Andrea Reidl |
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1/8/10 Plate weighing device 'can curb childhood obesity' A talking, computerised weighing device that tracks how quickly food is gobbled off the plate could be a solution to childhood obesity, researchers say. BBC |
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1/7/10 German Women's Magazine Ditches Professional Models German women's magazine Brigitte has declared it will no longer use professional models in its fashion shoots. But reaction to the first all-amateur issue has been mixed, with observers criticizing the magazine for not going far enough to fight anorexia. David Gordon Smith |
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1/6/10 'Avatar' arouses conservatives' ire To say that the film has evoked a storm of ire on the right would be an understatement. Big Hollywood's John Nolte, one of my favorite outspoken right-wing film essayists, blasted the film, calling it "a sanctimonious thud of a movie so infested with one-dimensional characters and PC cliches that not a single plot turn, large or small, surprises. . . . Think of 'Avatar' as 'Death Wish' for leftists, a simplistic, revisionist revenge fantasy where if you . . . hate the bad guys (America) you're able to forgive the by-the-numbers predictability of it all." Patrick Goldstein |
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1/5/10 Economists are often cheapskates Academic economists gather in Atlanta this weekend for their annual meetings, always held the first weekend after New Year's Day. That's not only because it coincides with holidays at most universities. A post-holiday lull in business travel also puts hotel rates near the lowest point of the year. Justin Lahart |
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1/4/10 How a puppy tamed my teenage boys Michael, my middle son, who is nearly 13, is so cruel that it's hard to bear, but he must be suffering too. His face is full of blocked anger and tears as he tells me I am not his mother, he wants another mother. He wants a proper house, not one joined to other houses, and proper clothes, not ones from chain stores and a proper car, not a tin can stuck out the front so that he's too embarrassed to bring his friends round. Sara Markham |
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1/3/10 Walls Never Work: In the Middle East or in Ireland The differences, of course, are legion. Protestantism, in its various Irish forms, aimed to convert or ethnically cleanse the Catholic Gaels. Judaism does not attempt to proselytise - quite the contrary - and Israel's illegal claim to West Bank Arab land is based on holy texts, not on a king's fiat. Robert Fisk |
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1/2/10 There’s something funny about the inherent excess of hosting a diamond extravaganza while Rome, in a manner of speaking, burns. The arts, however, go on flaunting sparkly objects in spite of Wall Street’s accountability deficit. Evan James |
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1/1/10 Good Riddance to Decade That Began With Theft of the Presidency The original sin of the good-riddance decade came in December of 2000, when the United States Supreme Court intervened to stop a complete recount of the votes in Florida and then declared George Bush to be the president. John Nichols |
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12/31/09 The Toilet Than Can Help Solve Our Water and Energy Problems Upwards of 3 million people die annually from diarrhea, dysentery, and parasitic diseases -- all for the want of clean water. Meanwhile, each year in the water-rich United States, 2.1 billion gallons of the world's most precious liquid are used, not to water thirsty crops or slake parched throats, but to flush human waste from home toilets to municipal sewers. While harvesting rainwater and recycling graywater are fine strategies, it's time to get to the seat of the problem. We need a Toilet Revolution. Gar Smith |
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12/30/09 Announcing the 2009 P.U.-Litzer Prizes WASHINGTON - December 22 - For 17 years our colleagues Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon have worked with FAIR to present the P.U.-Litzers, a year-end review of some of the stinkiest examples of corporate media malfeasance, spin and just plain outrageousness. FAIR |
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12/29/09 What Happens When We Can’t Trust the Verifiers? In 2008, the New York Times’ David Barstow reported that 75 retired military officers regularly appearing on television “have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.” David Sirota |
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12/28/09 Today, half the law students and medical students are female. But only 15 of the Fortune 500 companies have female CEOs. We had the first serious female candidate run for president ... and lose. We had a mother of five, a governor and a Title IX baby run for vice president ... as a conservative. Ellen Goodman |
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12/27/09 Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization. the ONION |
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12/26/09 The Nevada gambler, al-Qaida, the CIA and the mother of all cons The intelligence reports fitted the suspicions of the time: al-Qaida sleeper agents were scattered across the US awaiting orders that were broadcast in secret codes over the al-Jazeera television network. Chris McGreal |
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12/25/09 Vonnegut recounts for us his trials after capture by the Germans during their last great counter-offensive, in the chaos of the Battle of the Bulge just before Christmas 1944. Through the tragicomic alter-ego “Billy Pilgrim,” we learn about Vonnegut’s six months as an object deprived of free will. Gregory Sumner |
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12/24/09 The New World Order 'Is Already Underway' In a SPIEGEL interview, London banker and lay preacher Stephen Green, group chairman of HSBC, discusses the divide between his Christian faith and the pursuit of profit, the morality of being involved in the subprime mortgage business and whether he and his fellow bankers have learned anything from the financial crisis. Interview: Thomas Tuma & Beat Balzli, translated by Christopher Sultan |
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12/23/09 Kim Peek, the real Rain Man whose almost unimaginable powers of memory were coupled with severe disabilities and who inspired the Oscar-winning film role played by Dustin Hoffman, has died of a heart attack in his home town of Salt Lake City, aged 58. Ed Pilkington |
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12/22/09 Nader’s Utopia: The World According to Ralph Ralph Nader's new novel, "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us," is a window into the world the consumer advocate and independent presidential candidate wishes he could create. It is a world where the corporate state is dismantled, citizens are restored to power and the inequities and injustices meted out to the poor and the working classes are reversed. Nader describes his book as a "practical utopia." Chris Hedges |
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12/21/09 CSPAN footage of McCain blacked out When Senator Al Franken (D-MN) this week denied Senator Joe Lieberman's (I-CT) request for more time to make his points on health care reform, he was blasted by Fox news who called him an "angry comedian" and berated him for mistreating the "kind" senator from Connecticut. Conservative blogger Ann Althouse called it a "dick move," and columnist and Fox News correspondent Michelle Malkin railed against "Franken's little snit fit." Diana Sweet |
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12/20/09 Stephen King Meets the Estate Tax Imagine a story about tax policy created by horror writer Stephen King. A fictional Congress, divided between anti-tax ideology and fiscal responsibility, amends the inheritance tax on the very wealthy so that it disappears entirely one year and then returns at steeper rates the following year. Over the "zero year," death rates skyrocket in the nation's most affluent ZIP codes. Seemingly robust and healthy billionaires perish in mysterious accidents. Lexus wheels fall off from Bloomfield Hills to Scarsdale to Beverly Hills. Sailboats and yachts inexplicably crash in calm coastal and Caribbean waters. Tainted champagne wipes out clusters of prosperous alumni at class reunions from dozens of elite prep schools from Groton to Choate. Bill Gates Sr. & Chuck Collins |
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12/19/09 Octopus snatches coconut and runs Underwater footage reveals that the creatures scoop up halved coconut shells before scampering away with them so they can later use them as shelters. Rebecca Morelle |
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12/18/09 Has dark matter finally been detected? For 80 years, it has eluded the finest minds in science. But tonight it appeared that the hunt may be over for dark matter, the mysterious and invisible substance that accounts for three-quarters of the mass of the universe. Ian Sample |
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12/17/09 Chinese Nutcrackers Threaten Germany's Christmas Tradition Low-cost imports of nutcrackers pose a risk to the age-old woodcraft of eastern Germany's Erzgebirge region, famous for its Christmas ornaments. The Chinese-made replicas may increasingly look like the real thing -- but don't try cracking a nut with them, warns Germany's chief woodcarver. David Crossland |
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12/16/09 Joe Lieberman and the Health Care Train Wreck When last we heard from Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, he was throwing sand into the gears of the Democratic push for health care reform by declaring he would filibuster any legislation containing the so-called public option. "I feel so strongly about the creation of another government health insurance entitlement," said the senator back in November. "The government going into the health insurance business - I think it's such a mistake that I would use the power I have as a single senator to stop a final vote." William Rivers Pitt |
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12/15/09 Bush birth control policies helped fuel Africa's baby boom SIRAKANO, Uganda — At age 45, after giving birth to 13 children in her village of thatch roofs and bare feet, Beatrice Adongo made a discovery that startled her: birth control. Shashank Bengali |
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12/14/09 Ken Loach wins lifetime achievement honour at European film awards Grit, not glamour, proved the order of the day at the 22nd annual European film awards, which took place inside a former power station in Germany's industrial heartland, and handed a lifetime achievement award to the director Ken Loach. The leading light of social-realist British cinema seemed to relish his trip to the Ruhr region, a landscape dominated by smokestacks and coal-mines. "It reminds me that we used to have an industrial heartland in my country too," he enthused. "Until Margaret Thatcher stuck a dagger through it." Xan Brooks |
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12/13/09 The Religious Right's Potty Paranoia The next big culture war battle is about to be waged in an unlikely place: the restroom. After many years, Congress may finally have the votes to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. The measure, which the Obama administration views as key to advancing gay rights, would ban workplace discrimination against gays, lesbians, and transgendered people. But Christian right groups are fighting the legislation -- on the grounds that it would force businesses to allow transgendered and "transitioning" men and women to use opposite-sex restrooms or face lawsuits from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Stephanie Menciner |
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12/12/09 The Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) doesn't show a pattern of intentional and illegal behavior in undercover videos that conservatives shot of ACORN staffers. That's according to an independent, two-month review of ACORN released Monday. Mary Susan Littlepage |
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12/11/09 Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, berated the bankers for their failure to acknowledge a problem with personal rewards and questioned their claims for financial innovation. On the subject of pay, he said: “Has there been one financial leader to say this is really excessive? Wake up, gentlemen. Your response, I can only say, has been inadequate.”
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12/10/09 10 Signs the Failed Drug War Is Finally Ending 2009 will go down as the beginning of the end of the United States drug war. I have worked at the Drug Policy Alliance promoting alternatives to the war on drugs for 10 years, and I can say without a doubt that there was more debate and movement toward sensible drug policies this year than in the last 9 years combined! Here are 10 stories that contributed to the unprecedented momentum to end America's longest running war. Tony Newman |
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12/9/09 Copenhagen Climate Summit in Disarray after 'Danish Text' Leak The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations. John Vidal |
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12/8/09 When an Anti-Choice Catholic Woman Needed an Abortion at Dr. Tiller's Clinic The Andersons were devastated to learn their unborn child wouldn't live. Dr. Tiller showed them the compassion they so badly wished they had from their friends. Amanda Mueller |
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12/7/09 Why welfare reform fails its recession test When President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law, he didn't just end welfare as we knew it. For all practical purposes, it turned out, he brought an end to cash help of any kind for families with children in much of the country. While welfare reform was long ago declared a success in some quarters, it was deeply flawed from the beginning. The recession has shown how seriously unprepared it left us for hard times. Peter Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich |
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12/6/09 They Don’t Check Facts Like They Used To If you ever wondered why God invented the delete button, let me pass along the e-mail that arrived on the wings of various listservs directed at the mainstream media. Ellen Goodman |
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12/5/09 Investigators Still Piecing Together Weird-Ass Clues In Fucked-Up Tiger Woods Crash WINDERMERE, FL—A spokesman for the Windermere Police Department told reporters Thursday that investigators have gathered enough weird-ass evidence to officially classify Tiger Woods' recent car accident as pretty fucking strange. the ONION |
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12/4/09 What the FBI's Murder of a Black Panther Can Teach Us 40 Years Later December 4 marks the fortieth anniversary of the raid on a Black Panther apartment in which Chicago police shot and killed Fred Hampton in his bed. Hampton was the charismatic young chairman of the Chicago Black Panther Party, and under his leadership the party's membership and influence had increased dramatically. The party had instituted a popular and expanding Breakfast for Children Program and a police accountability project. At the age of 21, Hampton was able to reach and influence gang members and welfare mothers as well as college and law students. Under his tutelage, the Panthers formed a coalition with Puerto Rican and white activists. Jeffrey Haas |
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12/3/09 Tiger, don't say anything. Not another word. The future of civilization - such as it is - depends on it. Ruth Marcus |
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12/2/09 Corporate Scrooge Has Change of Heart This is a story about 1,200 workers in Honduras who were fired by their American corporate factory owner because they unionized. Then, something remarkable happened. They got their jobs back. Robyn Blumner |
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12/1/09 In 70 Predator strikes so far in Pakistan, 600-odd people have been killed, including 17 in the al-Qaeda high command. Turn it around the other way and imagine that Pakistan conducted similar strikes within the sovereign boundaries of the United States, causing a 600 to 17 ratio of what we callously call "collateral" damage. Our outrage quotient would quickly equal and surpass what we felt after 9/11. War would be declared on Pakistan so fast it would make our heads spin. Winslow Myers |
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11/30/09 Our Lives Are Filled With Worthless Crap That's Destroying the Earth As the middle-class daughter of a refugee mother and a Depression-era father, I grew up straddling two worlds. My parents could afford much more than they were willing to buy. Most things that broke could be and were repaired. My German grandmother’s aphorisms lingered in the air: “Waste not, want not,” “A penny saved is a penny earned,” “A stitch in time saves nine.” Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin |
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11/29/09 The Ethical Dilemma in Your Holiday Stocking This holiday season most Americans will spare little thought for the faraway factories, sprawling transportation networks and faceless workers that churn out many of the gifts we'll give and get this year. Thomas Mucha |
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11/28/09 Well, I suppose I had an advantage over most Americans in that many people who visited our apartment weren’t Americans. So, I was never likely to grow up as a narrowly nationalistic person, or as someone who believed that only Americans were worthy of respect. Robert Hirschfield |
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11/27/09 Santa Anita racetrack played a role in WWII internment A plaque near the entrance on the sprawling grounds of the Santa Anita racetrack is the sole reminder of the track's place in World War II history as the nation's largest assembly center for Japanese Americans on their way to internment camps. Alison Bell |
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11/26/09 Drink Some Booze, Smoke a Joint and Relax: How to Have a Hedonistic Thanksgiving You might not know this, but Thanksgiving is the best holiday of the year. You don't have to buy a gift for your most annoying family member or send your boss a cheese log. You don't have to pretend that the ten-year-old girl dressed up as Britney Spears is appropriate or deserving of a mini Snickers bar. You really don't have to fast. No, this is a holiday about three simple things: eating, drinking, and merriment. Ben Reininga |
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11/25/09 It’s the end of the world as we know it … again A brief history of socialist plots to end the American way of life. Matt Wuerker |
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11/24/09 Why Do Conservatives Love Sarah Palin? Because She Never Stops Whining At the end of this decade what we call “politics” has devolved into a kind of ongoing, brainless soap opera about dueling cultural resentments and the really cool thing about it, if you’re a TV news producer or a talk radio host, is that you can build the next day’s news cycle meme around pretty much anything at all, no matter how irrelevant — like who’s wearing a flag lapel pin and who isn’t, who spent $150K worth of campaign funds on clothes and who didn’t, who wore a t-shirt calling someone a cunt and who didn’t, and who put a picture of a former Vice Presidential candidate in jogging shorts on his magazine cover (and who didn’t). Matt Taibbi |
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11/23/09 The emergency room bill is enough to make you sick As a physician, he's well aware that emergency room treatment is very expensive. But knowing the true cost of the limited supplies and labor required to treat such a minor wound, he found the experience more than a little disturbing. Steve Lopez |
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11/22/09 C Street House No Longer Tax Exempt Previously, the house -- despite being home to numerous lawmakers -- had been tax exempt, because it was classified as a church. That arrangement had allowed the building's owner, the secretive international Christian organization The Family, to charge significantly below market rents to its residents. In recent year, Senators John Ensign (R-NV), Tom Coburn (R-OK), Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Jim DeMint (R-SC), and Reps. Zach Wamp (R-TN), Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Mike Doyle (D-PA) have all reportedly called C Street home. Zachary Roth |
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11/21/09 The word "Revenge" is scrawled in Hebrew on a Palestinian school in Hebron. The windows are covered with screens and the play yard obstructed with more screens tipped with barbed wire, to obstruct the stones regularly pelted down by Jewish settlers. The space between the school and the neighboring building is blocked off with large, wooden slabs, to ensure that Palestinian school children do not encroach into settler territory. Nearby checkpoints and cameras placed on rooftops serve as constant reminder that these kids' every movement is monitored and contained. Sarah Lazare & Clare Bayard |
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11/20/09 As the Senate takes up health care reform, we’re sure to be treated to yet more scenes of our elected officials bending over backwards to kiss the gold-plated butts of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. So far, just about every new turn in the health care battle is confirming what many have known for some time: The US health care system is run largely for the benefit of these corporate giants, rather than for the American people, and no piece of legislation is likely to change that fact. James Ridgeway |
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11/19/09 The Worthiness of Banker Charity Far from investing capital (including the trillions of dollars they took from us taxpayers) in companies and jobs, these financial whizzes continue to throw it into the global craps game of debt swaps and other speculative nonsense. The game enriches them and their super-wealthy clients, but it creates nothing whatsoever of social value. Jim Hightower |
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11/18/09 The collapse of the Palestinian Authority, the result of Israel's 42-year refusal to implement a two-state solution, leaves the Palestinians no option but to unilaterally declare an independent state. Israel acted unilaterally when it announced independence in 1948. It is the Palestinians' turn. It worked in Kosovo. It worked in Georgia. And it will work in Palestine. There are 192 member states in the United Nations and as many as 150 would recognize the state of Palestine, creating a diplomatic nightmare for Israel and its lonely ally the United States. Israel will face worldwide censure if it attempts to crush the independent state by force and very likely be subjected to the kind of divestment campaigns and boycotts that brought down the apartheid government of South Africa. Chris Hedges |
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11/17/09 The Fate of Cesar Chavez’s Dream In the midst of a searing heat wave in the summer of 2005, three Mexican-born California farmworkers succumbed to the relentless sun within a few weeks of each other. Outraged local community groups, some with roots in but no longer affiliated with the legendary United Farm Workers union, organized a protest march and rally in the gritty town of Arvin, in California’s Central Valley. Marc Cooper |
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11/16/09 The atomic bomb ended nothing, but led to an almost half-century-long nuclear superpower standoff/nightmare, to nuclear proliferation, and so to the possibility that, someday, even terrorists might possess such weapons. The electronic battlefield was incapable of staving off defeat in Vietnam. That impermeable anti-missile shield never came even faintly close to making it into our skies. Those "smart bombs" of the Gulf War proved remarkably dumb, while the 50 "decapitation" strikes the Bush administration launched against Saddam Hussein's regime on the first day of the 2003 invasion of Iraq took out not a single Iraqi leader, but "dozens" of civilians. And the history of the netcentric military in Iraq is well known. Its "success" sent Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld into retirement and ignominy. Tom Engelhardt |
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11/15/09 Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be "Our very way of life is under siege," said Mortensen, whose understanding of the Constitution derives not from a close reading of the document but from talk-show pundits, books by television personalities, and the limitless expanse of his own colorful imagination. "It's time for true Americans to stand up and protect the values that make us who we are." the ONION |
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11/14/09 Lies About Marijuana Drive People to a Much More Harmful Drug -- Booze In 1970, Congress established the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse to study marijuana and make recommendations about how to control its use. The Commission’s final report suggested removal of criminal penalties, noting, “The actual and potential harm of use of the drug is not great enough to justify intrusion by the criminal law into private behavior.” President Nixon ignored the Commission’s findings and launched and all-out war on marijuana users. Steve Fox |
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11/13/09 The Sleazy Advocacy of a Leading 'Liberal Hawk' The New York Times today details the unbelievably sleazy story of Peter Galbraith, one of the Democratic Party's leading so-called "liberal hawks" and a generally revered Wise Man of America's Foreign Policy Community. He was Ambassador to Croatia under the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s and, in March, 2009, the Obama administration (specifically, Richard Holbrooke, Galbraith's mentor) successfully pressured the U.N. to name Galbraith as the second-in-command in Afghanistan. In essence, this highly Serious man has corruptly concealed vast financial stakes in the very policies and positions he has spent years advocating while pretending to be an independent expert. Glenn Greenwald |
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11/12/09 As oceans fall ill, Washington bureaucrats squabble Off the coast of Washington state, mysterious algae mixed with sea foam have killed more than 8,000 seabirds, puzzling scientists. A thousand miles off California, researchers have discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling vortex roughly twice the size of Texas filled with tiny bits of plastic and other debris. Les Blumenthal |
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11/11/09 In Afghanistan and Iraq, the US and Britain have faced similar dilemmas. These wars were started by President Bush, with Tony Blair trotting along behind, in the expectation that they would be short and cheap. The initial military assaults were wholly successful, but the American and British armies were then caught up in prolonged, bruising, guerrilla wars. By then, too much prestige was at stake and too much blood had been spilt for a withdrawal. The puniness of the armed insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, in each case probably a few tens of thousands of fighters, makes the humiliation of retreat all the greater. Patrick Cockburn |
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11/10/09 Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Fairness Doctrine? Of all the Big Lies told by the pooh-bahs of talk radio - that our biracial president hates white people, that global warming is a hoax, that a public health care plan to compete with private insurers equals socialism - the most desperate and deluded is this: that the so-called Fairness Doctrine would squash free speech. Steve Almond |
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11/9/09 “EVERY day I was in Vietnam, I thought about home. And, every day I’ve been home, I’ve thought about Vietnam.” So said one of the millions of soldiers who fought there as I did. Change the name of the battlefield and it could have been said by one of the American servicemen coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan today. Wars are not over when the shooting stops. They live on in the lives of those who fight them. That is the curse of the soldier. He never forgets. Max Cleland |
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11/8/09 And the Catholic Bishops Endorse! Thank you, Planned Parenthood and NARAL, from the bottom of my heart, for sitting on your hands and enabling this shit. Hope you have fun at all those Common Purpose meetings, those cocktail parties at the Pelosi's. Jane Hamsher |
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11/7/09 Market-Driven Hysteria and the Politics of Death If we take seriously the ideology, arguments and values now emanating from the right-wing of the Republican Party, there is no room in the United States for a democracy in which the obligations of citizenship, compassion and collective security outweigh the demands of what might be called totalizing market-driven society; that is, a society that is utterly deregulated, privatized, commodified and largely controlled by the ultra-rich and a handful of mega corporations. Henry A. Giroux |
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11/6/09 Enough of this clown. He should be stripped of his Senate chairmanship and sent across the aisle to his boon companions on the right. He should be ignored out of hand on the matter of health care reform, and anything else he decides to address. He has raised being wrong, craven, untrustworthy and useless to the level of high art. Anyone with a full understanding of his record and reputation would know better than to trust him with a job as a crossing guard, and never mind as any kind of a leader on issues of major national and international import. The man is a living, breathing train wreck, and he has no business whatsoever being allowed in the same postal code as the decisions to come that will shape our lives. William Rivers Pitt |
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11/5/09 It's Time to Rebuild Our Passenger Railroad System For the moment, any suggestion that a railroad revival in America might be a good thing is generally greeted as laughable for reasons ranging from the incompetence of Amtrak, to the sprawling layout of our suburbs, to our immense investment in cars, trucks and highways -- motoring culture now overshadowing all other aspects of our national identity. James Howard Kunstler |
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11/4/09 "Restless Vagina Syndrome": Big Pharma's Newest Fake Disease The companies and clinics that narrow the range of sexual normality to porn industry standards suffer their own disease. Symptoms include: a compulsion to concoct illnesses and then develop drugs to treat them, and vice versa. Either way, the syndrome is typically accompanied by a rash of conflicts of interest. Terry J Allen |
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11/3/09 Congress Should Not Reject the Goldstone Report On Tuesday, November 3, Congress is poised to vote on H.Res.867, which calls on the “President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the `Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict' in multilateral fora.’” Michael Ratner |
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11/2/09 Right-Wingers in Congress Love Their Own Gov-Run Health Care, But They Hate Sharing It What these bellicose market-purists hope you don't discover is that they are closet socialists. As members of the congressional elite, they and their families are governmentally blessed with their very own gold-plated, taxpayer-financed, Washington-run health care system. And, they loooove it. Jim Hightower |
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11/1/09 Paul Haggis, the Oscar-winning film-maker, has resigned from the Church of Scientology in an explosive letter that damns what he calls the organization's "hate-filled" and "bigoted" opposition to gay marriage. Guy Adams |
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10/31/09 We Attacked the Bankers, but Took Our Eyes Off the Whole Rotten System Prince Andrew says that bonuses are minute 'in the scheme of things'. He is half-right. We must take the focus off individuals. Gary Younge |
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10/30/09 Phillies Hope To End 364-Day World Series Drought PHILADELPHIA—The last time the Philadelphia Phillies brought a World Series title back to the City of Brotherly Love, the nation's financial sector was in complete ruin, the cost of a gallon of milk was only $2.74, fans watched the Fall Classic while huddled around their slightly-less-streamlined high-definition television sets, and Philadelphia slugger Ryan Howard was just 28 years old. the ONION |
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10/29/09 Publish or Perish Academic Uses Feminism to Justify Fucking a Married Man Written by a feminist academic who had the (dis)pleasure of deliberately being “the other woman” in an ongoing affair, Cheating on the Sisterhood: Infidelity and Feminism explores Lauren Rosewarne’s personal struggles as a willing participant in an illicit relationship that resulted in another woman's devastation, as well as her own. It is a political look at the motivations that fuel situations of betrayal and the justifications one provides oneself from the inside. Mandy Van Deven |
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10/28/09 Anyone who remembers TV cop shows, like “Dragnet” and “Highway Patrol,” recalls dozens of bad guys hauled up “on suspicion” by Sgt. Joe Friday or Chief Dan Matthews. When I was a kid absorbing all this jurisprudence, I had no idea that “suspicion” was not an actual crime that could send you up the river. Even today, I don’t know if “suspicion” was the authentic argot of real cops in those innocent days. David Benjamin |
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10/27/09 Nation's Morons March On Washington State OLYMPIA, WA—With random cries of "Enough is enough," "Do something now," and "Huh?" thousands of the nation's biggest morons descended on Washington State this week, some 3,000 miles from their intended destination of the nation's capital. the ONION |
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10/26/09 The Freaky Science of SuperFreakonomics It is still nearly a week before the follow-up to Freakonomics—the award-winning pop economics tome by journalist Stephen Dubner and University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt—hits the shelves. Yet already the book is generating controversy. A chapter on climate change—a new subject for the authors—has attracted the ire of Joe Romm, an outspoken expert on the subject. But with the provocative title SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, perhaps that's what the authors intended. Corbin Hiar |
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10/25/09 Get Ready for Conservative Bible You may judge Conservapedia's own bias by reading its definition of liberal: ``someone who rejects logical and biblical standards, often for self-centered reasons. There are no coherent liberal standards; often a liberal is merely someone who craves attention, and who uses many words to say nothing.'' Leonard Pitts Jr. |
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10/24/09 A Corporation So Arrogant, It Thought It Owned the Word 'Monster' When the tiny Rock Art Brewery in Vermont decided to name its beer, "The Vermonster," they soon discovered hat a behemoth drinks company was trying to push them around. Jim Hightower |
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10/23/09 Pricey new U.S. Embassy in Iraq has 'multiple' flaws The $736 million new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, which American diplomats have occupied for 18 months, contains "multiple significant construction deficiencies" and the U.S. government should try to recover more than $130 million from the contractor who built it, according to a report to be released Thursday. Warren P Strobel |
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10/22/09 Wal-Mart and the high cost of 'cheap' Last month, a bevy of Richmond, Va., residents joined with preservationists in filing a legal objection to the proposed construction of a Wal-Mart Supercenter within firing range of the Wilderness Battlefield. About 30,000 American soldiers were injured or killed on that field 145 years ago, and while we hope no blood will be spilled in the eventual outcome of the skirmish, the stakes are still fairly high. Ellen Ruppel Shell |
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10/21/09 We’ve spent the last few decades shoveling money at the rich like there was no tomorrow. We abandoned the poor, put an economic stranglehold on the middle class and all but bankrupted the federal government — while giving the banks and megacorporations and the rest of the swells at the top of the economic pyramid just about everything they’ve wanted. Bob Herbert |
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10/20/09 Mystery Space "Ribbon" Found at Solar System's Edge In a discovery that took astronomers by surprise, the first full-sky map of the solar system's edge—more than 9 billion miles (15 billion kilometers) away—has revealed a bright "ribbon" of atoms called ENAs. Ker Than |
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10/19/09 The changes over the years were imperceptible enough that no one gave them much notice. There’s no way to pinpoint when we became a country that could build the biggest, most garish, most electronically equipped stadiums you could imagine, but almost nothing else. The changes over the years were imperceptible enough that no one gave them much notice. There’s no way to pinpoint when we became a country that could build the biggest, most garish, most electronically equipped stadiums you could imagine, but almost nothing else. Bob Herbert |
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10/18/09 Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis "in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth" is not a true translation of the Hebrew. Richard Alleyne |
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10/17/09 How to Have Sex Like a Virgin for Only 30 Bucks Purity has its price: it's $29.90. At least that's how much it costs to obtain the "artificial virginity hymen," a plastic baggie filled with mysterious red crap meant to resemble the chaste secretions of a recently deflowered virgin. Tana Ganeva |
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10/16/09 Back in the spring, Mother Jones published an issue with cover line “Who Ran Away With Your 401(k)?” and a series of articles about America’s broken retirement system. This week Time magazine has a cover story by Stephen Gandel that’s worth reading, even though by now it’s stating the painfully obvious: It’s called “Why It’s Time to Retire the 401(k)”: James Ridgeway |
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10/15/09 My Response to Rush: It's the Racism, Stupid Yesterday I was referred to on air as "scum" by Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh called me out by name on his radio show because, along with Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Drew Sharp of the Detroit Free Press, I challenged Limbaugh's efforts to own a NFL team, saying that his history of racial bombast should count against him. Dave Zirin |
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10/14/09 The Stupidity of Zero Tolerance NEWARK, Del. -- Finding character witnesses when you are 6 years old is not easy. But there was Zachary Christie last week at a school disciplinary committee hearing with his karate instructor and his mother's fiancé by his side to vouch for him. Zachary’s offense? Taking a Cub Scout utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. Allison Kilkenny |
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10/13/09 Why Conservatives Are Really Afraid of a Black President Ever the statesman, and often candid to a political fault, former President Jimmy Carter said recently that much of the animosity directed toward President Barack Obama is "based on the fact that he is a black man." Jonathan L. Walton |
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10/12/09 The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America When Barbara Ehrenreich went to be treated for breast cancer, she was exhorted to think positively; and when she expressed feelings of fear and anger, she was chided for being negative. Emily Wilson |
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10/11/09 Italian scientist reproduces Shroud of Turin ROME (Reuters) - An Italian scientist says he has reproduced the Shroud of Turin, a feat that he says proves definitively that the linen some Christians revere as Jesus Christ's burial cloth is a medieval fake. Phillip Pullella |
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10/10/09 Senator Franken Wins Bipartisan Support for Amendment In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad. She was detained in a shipping container for at least 24 hours without food, water, or a bed, and “warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.” (Jones was not an isolated case.) Jones was prevented from bringing charges in court against KBR because her employment contract stipulated that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration. Faiz Shakir |
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10/9/09 Demonstrations at CEO Mansions? Ho Hum All that happened was that on Thursday, Oct. 1, a moving van pulled up in front of the largest house in a Main Line neighborhood just outside Philadelphia—the home of H. Edward Hanway, CEO of CIGNA, one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies—and eight demonstrators from Health Care for America Now (HCAN) got out. One was Stacie Ritter, a former CIGNA customer whose twin girls were afflicted with cancer at the age of four. Their treatment left permanent damage. CIGNA refused to pay for the human growth hormones that her doctor prescribed to help her daughters grow properly. When her husband was briefly unemployed, they were bankrupted. Peter Dreier and Todd Gitlin |
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10/8/09 Every once in a while, a statistic just jumps out at you in a way that makes everything else you hear on a subject seem beside the point, if not downright absurd. That was my reaction to the recent statement of the president’s national security adviser, former Marine Gen. James Jones, concerning the size of the terrorist threat from Afghanistan: “The al-Qaida presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.” Robert Scheer |
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10/7/09 Last week, in response to the Defund ACORN Act, which seeks to prohibit federal funds to the community group, Minnesota Democrat Betty McCollum, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, introduced an ACORN act of her own. It is titled the "Against Corporations Organizing to Rip-off the Nation Act of 2009," also referred to simply as the ACORN Act. HR 3679 seeks to "prohibit the Federal Government from awarding contracts, grants, or other agreements to, providing any other Federal funds to, or engaging in activities that promote certain corporations or companies guilty of certain felony convictions." Jeremy Scahill |
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10/6/09 Wall Street Plans to Cash in When People Die The very same greed-fueled bankers who brought us the disaster of 2008's financial crash have created another exotic financial horror to replace their securitized subprime-mortgage packages that exploded all over us. Jim Hightower |
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10/5/09 Reminder: Roman Polanski Raped a Child Let's keep in mind that Roman Polanski gave a 13-year-old girl a Quaalude and champagne, then raped her, before we start discussing whether the victim looked older than her 13 years, or that she now says she'd rather not see him prosecuted because she can't stand the media attention. Before we discuss how awesome his movies are or what the now-deceased judge did wrong at his trial, let's take a moment to recall that according to the victim's grand jury testimony, Roman Polanski instructed her to get into a jacuzzi naked, refused to take her home when she begged to go, began kissing her even though she said no and asked him to stop; performed cunnilingus on her as she said no and asked him to stop; put his penis in her vagina as she said no and asked him to stop; asked if he could penetrate her anally, to which she replied, "No," then he went ahead and did it anyway, until he had an orgasm. Kate Harding |
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10/4/09 The anger of the festering fringe I've had these thoughts for some time, but have been reluctant to express them. Now so many others have voiced them that it's pointless to remain silent. I am frightened by the climate of insane anti-Obama hatred in this country. I'm not referring to traditional conservatives or Republicans. They're part of the process. I'm speaking of the lunatic fringe, the frothers, the extremist rabble who are sweeping up the ignorant and credulous into a bewildering and fearsome tide of reckless rhetoric. Roger Ebert |
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10/3/09 Let us take a trip back into history. Not ancient history. Recent history. It is the winter of 2007. The presidential primaries are approaching. The talk jocks like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and the rest are over the moon about Fred Thompson. They’re weak at the knees at the thought of Mitt Romney. Meanwhile, they are hurling torrents of abuse at the unreliable deviationists: John McCain and Mike Huckabee. David Brooks |
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10/2/09 The Powell Memo and the Teaching Machines of the Right-Wing Extremists The Powell Memo is important because it is the most succinct statement, if not the founding document, for establishing a theoretical framework and political blueprint for the current assault on any vestige of democratic public life that does not subordinate itself to the logic of the alleged free market. Henry A. Giroux |
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10/1/09 Banks Too Big to Fail? Break ’Em Up The Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy recently gave its first-ever "Golden Throne Award" to the president and CEO of the American Bankers Association, Edward Yingling. Dave Zweifel |
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9/30/09 It’s Not Just About Waterboarding Fayiz Al-Kandari is a Kuwaiti citizen detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He never possessed information known only to the "worst of terrorists" and he wasn't part of the Jack Bauer ticking time-bomb scenario often used to justify enhanced interrogations. Yet, he was still abused over the course of many years while in US custody. Lt. Col. Barry Wingard |
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9/29/09 Pointless research: top 10 Ig Nobel award winners for silly science The government has unveiled plans to allocate research funding according to how much “impact” the research has. The plans have come under fire from academics, who say that curiosity-driven, speculative research has led to some of the most important breakthroughs in scientific history, including penicillin, relativity theory and the theory of evolution. Tom Chivers |
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9/28/09 Congress Went After ACORN. Big Business Must Be Next! We are the Yes Men, two guys who dress up as powerful businessmen, propose horrible things to audiences of actual powerful businesspeople and film them cheerfully applauding our most outrageous -- and often illegal -- ideas. Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos |
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9/27/09 Kenya's slums attract poverty tourism For about £20, tourists are promised a glimpse into the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people crammed into tiny rooms along dirt paths littered with excrement-filled plastic bags known as "flying toilets," as one tour agency explains on its website. Xan Rice |
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9/26/09 He believed in capitalism, but also believed it had almost a genetic weakness. Modern finance, he argued, was far from the stabilizing force that mainstream economics portrayed: rather, it was a system that created the illusion of stability while simultaneously creating the conditions for an inevitable and dramatic collapse. Stephen Mihm |
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9/25/09 Pretty much by definition, a man who can be described as a cad is not a wholly admirable human being. There are, however, cads whose behavior shows a certain panache, an undeniable flair, a sense of humor and a genuine, if deeply flawed, humanity. Former D.C. mayor Marion Barry, I would argue, is one of these "lovable rogue" cads. Eugene Robinson |
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9/24/09 Fighting for the Right to Hang Your Clothes Out to Dry Using a clothes line instead of a dryer saves tons of carbon, yet some communities have banned the practice. Luanne Bradley |
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9/23/09 Outsourcing Housekeeping Creates a Real Mess Recently, housekeepers at three Hyatt hotels in Boston thought they were training new workers for vacationing staff. Managers asked the housekeepers to do this, and why not? They were experts at cleaning up the messes of strangers. So they taught the new workers everything they know. Connie Schultz |
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9/22/09 The inevitability of an American single-payer health system Amidst the ideological back and forth that is the health care reform debate of 2009, recent studies reveal a growing reality that each of us can easily understand, no matter what our ideological point of view. It will not be long until the private health insurance model will no longer work – for anybody. Rich Ungar |
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9/21/09 Sotomayor’s important statement about corporations Last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a “provocative comment” that probed the foundations of corporate law. The case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, involves whether federal campaign finance laws apply to a critical film about Hillary Clinton intended to be shown in theaters and on-demand to cable subscribers. Allison Kilkenny |
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9/20/09 It was a telling coincidence that two reports were issued on the very same day. The Geneva Initiative, a group of Israeli and Palestinian diplomats and technical experts, released its updated 400-page plan, spelling out the practical details of a reasonable two-state settlement. But Israeli newspapers barely noticed. They were too busy headlining the other report: a UN fact-finding mission's 575 pages of detail on war crimes committed by both Israeli and Palestinian forces during last winter's war in Gaza. Ira Chernus |
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9/19/09 Where was the Tea Party movement when the tax burden was shifted from the high end to the middle? Where were the patriots when Wall Street, backed in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, rewrote securities laws so that the wonder boys of Lehman and A.I.G. could reduce home mortgages to poker chips at a trillion-dollar table? Timothy Egan |
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9/18/98 Wall Street has only one prerogative and that is to maintain the illusion that it adds value so that it can charge spectacular sums for its services. It is tough to be an awesome leader when your primary job is to maintain a set of self-serving illusions. Roger Martin |
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9/17/09 Has anyone watched the English-language version of Al Jazeera lately? The Qatar-based Arab TV channel’s eclectic internationalism—a feast of vivid, pathbreaking coverage from all continents—is a rebuke to the dire predictions about the end of foreign news as we know it. Indeed, if Al Jazeera were more widely available in the United States—on nationwide cable, for example, instead of only on the Web and several satellite stations and local cable channels—it would eat steadily into the viewership of The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. Al Jazeera—not Lehrer—is what the internationally minded elite class really yearns for: a visually stunning, deeply reported description of developments in dozens upon dozens of countries simultaneously. Robert D Kaplan |
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9/16/09 Billionaires Thank Tea-Baggers at Glenn Beck's March on Washington “Health Care for Profit, Not for People!” “Let Them Eat Advil.” "Fear, Lies, Sedition! Pre-Existing-Condition!" Echoing through the streets of Washington on Saturday, the chants of a new political formation are sweeping the nation: The Billionaires for Wealthcare! Chuck Collins |
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9/15/09 Harvard, Heal Thyself (Why Journalism Matters) Harvard Medical School is exactly the kind of private institution on which the public welfare depends. The research and training it conducts have a ripple effect not only throughout this country but in much of the world. With its unmatched prestige and resources, however, come equivalent responsibilities. If the school allows its faculty to be corrupted by greed and payola, then society suffers as well. Eric Alterman |
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9/14/09 Over 100 Million Americans Have Smoked Marijuana -- And It's Still Illegal? The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has once again released their annual survey on “drug use and health” — you know, the one where representatives of the federal government go door-to-door and ask Americans if they are presently breaking state and federal law by using illicit drugs. The same survey where respondents have historically under reported their usage of alcohol and tobacco — these two legal substances — by as much as 30 to 50 percent, and arguably under report their use of illicit substances by an even greater margin. The same survey that — despite these inherent limitations — “is the primary source of statistical information on the use of illegal drugs by the U.S. population.” Paul Armentano |
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9/13/09 An infrastructure of Jewish terror Since the very beginning of the settlement enterprise, more than four decades ago, Israel has seized West Bank lands via an orchestrated, systematic and violent system. The victims of this process lose their agricultural fields, and thus their ability to lead a normal life. Their source of income is impaired, often leading to the spread of poverty and hardship. Roi Maor and Dror Etkes |
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9/12/09 A French newspaper declared "We Are All Americans" on September 12, but it was all downhill after that. By the first week of October, with a pall of poison smoke still hanging over New York City, Bush declared that, "We have to counteract the shockwave of the evildoer by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates," and the world threw up into its collective mouth. He took us to war; he took us to Hell, and we are still far, far from anything resembling recovery. William Rivers Pitt |
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9/11/09 The same old hawks recruit Palin to pressure Obama on Afghanistan, while ignoring their own past. David Corn |
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9/10/09 No Flies on SF's New Composting Law San Franciscans have six more weeks before they're required to toss their food scraps into green composting bins or face a fine - but apparently all the trash talk coming out of City Hall is already having an effect. Heather Knight |
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9/9/09 Mr. President, It's Time to Fight No one's ever conquered Washington politics by constantly saying "pretty please" to the guys trying to cut your throat. Bill Moyers |
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9/8/09 Afghanistan isn't worth one more American life The debate over our creeping military mission in distant Afghanistan grows ever hotter, and before we march even deeper into trouble, perhaps it’s time to dig out the old Powell Doctrine and answer the eight questions it poses. Joseph L Galloway |
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9/7/09 Gideon Levy, Haaretz’s man on the West Bank since 1982, is a throwback to the days when left-wing journalists put their lives on the line to report on epoch-defining struggles like the Spanish Civil War. He has had his car shot up by Israeli soldiers and U.S. tax dollar-funded weapons turned on him. The son of Holocaust survivors, Levy retaliates with words: “Israel is not asked ‘to give’ anything to the Palestinians. It is only being asked to return—to return their stolen land and restore their trampled self-respect.” Robert Hirschfield |
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9/6/09 The Lies of Texas Are Upon You A friend called to talk about his daughter being caught in the middle of one of the kinds of controversies that only happen in Texas. His daughter's teacher had sent an email that her school was not going to show the president's national address to students in their school. My buddy Marcus is African-American and Native American, holds two degrees, and does not very well countenance stupidity and hypocrisy. James Moore |
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9/5/09 How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? During the golden years, financial economists came to believe that markets were inherently stable — indeed, that stocks and other assets were always priced just right. There was nothing in the prevailing models suggesting the possibility of the kind of collapse that happened last year. Meanwhile, macroeconomists were divided in their views. But the main division was between those who insisted that free-market economies never go astray and those who believed that economies may stray now and then but that any major deviations from the path of prosperity could and would be corrected by the all-powerful Fed. Neither side was prepared to cope with an economy that went off the rails despite the Fed’s best efforts. Paul Krugman |
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9/4/09 Cameron Todd Willingham, who refused to accept a guilty plea that would have spared his life, and who insisted until his last painful breath that he was innocent, had in fact been telling the truth all along. Bob Herbert |
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9/3/09 Seven Points About Dick Cheney and Torture Cheney, clearly knowing that many "journalists" apparently wouldn't bother reading them, was all over the media claiming the documents absolve him and that torture worked. The problem is, they showed nothing of the sort and actually - upon a close read - indicate that techniques that did not involve torture produced better results. Some portions "actually suggest the opposite of Cheney's contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA's interrogations," as Spencer Ackerman observed in the Washington Independent. Jeremy Scahill |
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9/2/09 Feingold Gets Afghanistan Right Senator Feingold is expressing what many progressives now believe. Overall, 51 percent of Americans say the war is not worth fighting, including 7 in 10 Democrats. Yet too many top Democrats have become part of a poorly reasoned bipartisan consensus that threatens to entrap the US in another costly occupation. In contrast, progressives who want to see President Obama succeed see Afghanistan as a threat to his presidency -- especially to his domestic agenda, as resources, lives and political capital are lost in the "graveyard of Empires." (Much like LBJ's presidency was tarnished and defined by the Vietnam War.) Katrina vanden Heuvel |
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9/1/09 Do you think the wardens will let George Tenet wear his Presidential Medal of Freedom over the orange coverall? Perhaps he and Donald Rumsfeld will end up doing time together in one of the prisons also slated to host what Rumsfeld called "the worst of the worst" from Guantanamo. That would be poetic justice of a most ironic kind. And if the two former leaders do end up in prison they can count themselves fortunate for having dodged execution for their roles in a slew of capital offenses. Ray McGovern |
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8/31/09 The GOP's 40-Year Effort to "Pull the Plug" on Medicare During the health care fight this summer, the GOP has been warning seniors, in ominous tones, of the danger that Democrats might cut Medicare--conveniently forgetting that this has been the Republican party's official position for more than a generation. Brian Beutler |
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8/30/09 Judge: Homeland Security can’t require dependence on God A judge on Wednesday struck down a 2006 state law that required the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security to stress “dependence on Almighty God as being vital to the security of the commonwealth.” John Cheves |
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8/29/09 Whole Foods Looks and Acts More Like Wal-Mart It's a story about how a small, well-intentioned sustainable food company lost its way. It's a story of how that company went from a single natural foods store in Austin, Texas to industry juggernaut, with every intention of dominating the natural foods retail category, in the nearly-identical way its conventional competitors came to dominate their sectors, i.e., achieving massive scale through acquisitions, new stores and eliminating smaller competitors. Rob Smart |
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8/28/09 From dust to bust, America's poor take on a new type of monster The sharpest economic downturn of her 63 years stripped Johnnie Levy of her beloved job as a seamstress and unravelled her world until she found herself sitting in a church hall in the black end of Tulsa waiting to see a nurse with a syringe in one hand and a Bible in the other. Chris McGreal |
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8/27/09 A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses? Stanley Fish |
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8/26/09 The Entertainment Value of Snuffing Grandma Every day I get letters asking me to weigh in on the healthcare fracas. As if a redneck writer armed with a keyboard, a pack of smokes and all the misinformation and vitriol available on the Internet could contribute anything to the crap storm already in progress. Besides that, my unreasoned but noisy take on this issue is often about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit. None of which has ever stopped me from making a fool of myself in the past. So here goes. Joe Bageant |
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8/25/09 Screwing the Self Employed Out of Health Insurance The self employed are denied insurance on a regular basis due to preexisting conditions. When they're able to get health insurance, they pay more for premiums and their deductibles are higher than any other group. Even after a federal income tax deduction, the cost of health insurance is the equivalent of annual payments for a condominium, at the low end, or a medium sized home, at the top of the cost scale. Michael Collins |
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8/24/09 William Calley apologizes for My Lai massacre “There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” Calley told members of the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus on Wednesday. His voice started to break when he added, “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.” Dick McMichael |
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8/23/09 Believers Invest in the Gospel of Getting Rich Onstage before thousands of believers weighed down by debt and economic insecurity, Kenneth and Gloria Copeland and their all-star lineup of “prosperity gospel” preachers delighted the crowd with anecdotes about the luxurious lives they had attained by following the Word of God. Private airplanes and boats. A motorcycle sent by an anonymous supporter. Vacations in Hawaii and cruises in Alaska. Designer handbags. A ring of emeralds and diamonds. Laurie Goodstein |
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8/22/09 Seller, beware: Feds cracking down on garage sales If you're planning a garage sale or organizing a church bazaar, you'd best beware: You could be breaking a new federal law. As part of a campaign called Resale Roundup, the federal government is cracking down on the secondhand sales of dangerous and defective products. James Rosen |
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8/21/09 At the time, Robert Novak couldn't have know that, despite a half century of covering Washington, one little line would ignite the scandal that would come to dominate his legacy: "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." Following the conservative columnist's death yesterday at the age of 78, mentions of his role in outing the CIA operative were ubiquitous in the numerous obits commemorating his life. Daniel Schulman |
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8/20/09 "Barely Squeaking By On $300,000 A Year" I'm not going to take up text space going off about how absurd this all is, except to say (as I have before) that in a country where the recession is obviously most crushing the middle-class, I'm playing the smallest violin in the world for those making $300,000 a year (ie. the top 5 percent of the country) -- especially those who whine about their plight while refusing to cut back on their nannys and gardeners. David Sirota |
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8/19/09 Burning Questions for the Authors of 'Marijuana Is Safer' Marijuana is safer than alcohol in virtually every way that matters. First, marijuana is far less toxic. Alcohol, quite literally, is a poison. That is why excessive alcohol use often causes vomiting. The body is rejecting the poison. And, as most people know, consuming too much alcohol can result in an overdose death. Marijuana, on the other hand, is virtually non-toxic to healthy cells and major organs. In fact, the active components in marijuana - known as cannabinoids - actually mimic chemicals naturally produced by the body (so-called endocannabinoids) that are necessary for the maintenance of proper health. Paul Armentano and Steve Fox |
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8/18/09 Dear President Obama: A Modest Medicare Proposal I understand you're thinking of dumping your "public option" because of all the demagoguery by Sarah Palin and Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich and their crowd on right-wing radio and Fox. Fine. Good idea, in fact. Instead, let's make it simple. Please let us buy into Medicare. Thom Hartmann |
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8/17/09 The Brutal Truth About America’s Healthcare They came in their thousands, queuing through the night to secure one of the coveted wristbands offering entry into a strange parallel universe where medical care is a free and basic right and not an expensive luxury. Some of these Americans had walked miles simply to have their blood pressure checked, some had slept in their cars in the hope of getting an eye-test or a mammogram, others had brought their children for immunisations that could end up saving their life. Guy Adams |
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8/16/09 Billionaire Jewish philanthropist Charles Bronfman is worried that Israel's conflict with the Palestinians is hurting the country's relationship with young Jews in the Diaspora. "We turned from David to Goliath in 1982, with the invasion into Lebanon, and the Arabs became David," he told the Israeli daily Ha'aretz last week. "Now everybody's worried about the Palestinians. Now we're occupiers, oppressors, who live by the sword. That's what you see in the media, and it festers and has effects on the general population and on Jews as well." Peace, he said, was crucial to maintaining the bond between Israel and the broader Jewish world. Michelle Goldberg |
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8/15/09 Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book So Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí. Patricia Cohen |
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8/14/09 John Mackey is a right wing libertarian. He’s a union buster. He believes that corporations should not be criminally prosecuted for their crimes. He has just launched a campaign to defeat a single payer national health insurance system. And he’s the CEO of Whole Foods. Russell Mokhiber |
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8/13/09 Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? The city of New Orleans will be on the minds of many in the coming days and weeks. The four-year anniversary of the worst civil catastrophe in American history - one of the worst such catastrophes in all of human history - will soon be upon us. It was four years ago, the length of one presidential term, that a storm came, and the seas rose, and the levees fell and a city was, for all practical purposes, murdered right before our eyes. William Rivers Pitt |
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8/12/09 President Obama’s late mother, Ann Dunham Soetoro, was famous for the good cheer and optimism that she preserved in the face of a complex and challenging world. Her personality went hand-in-hand with her career as an anthropologist in Indonesia and Pakistan, where she studied and worked with village craftsmen, slum-dwellers and countless others. I knew Dr. Soetoro as a friend and colleague for many years before her death from cancer in 1995. Though I only met her son once, briefly at her memorial service, I’ve watched him as he’s taken on the hardest job in the world, and often found myself wondering how her worldview might have shaped him. Michael R. Dove |
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8/11/09 The Hidden Truth Behind Drug Company Profits This is the story of one of the great unspoken scandals of our times. Today, the people across the world who most need life-saving medicine are being prevented from producing it. Here's the latest example: factories across the poor world are desperate to start producing their own cheaper Tamiflu to protect their populations - but they are being sternly told not to. Why? So rich drug companies can protect their patents - and profits. There is an alternative to this sick system, but we are choosing to ignore it. Johann Hari |
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8/10/09 A McClatchy reporter reflects on what war brought to Iraq We called it a good day when only 10 died, but then there were the bad days. The day a friend died. The day when more than 300 lives were taken in minutes. The day a mother wept in my arms about her lost son, who'd been killed by a militia member, and his widow curled up in a corner of the empty room they'd shared. Leila Fadel |
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8/9/09 Sodini's final read: a book by sexist Fundamentalist Media analysis has so far ignored or glossed over Sodini's religious affiliations but the shooter's Internet diary suggest his last readings were the Bible and a book by a Texas evangelist, R.B. Thieme, Jr. who has written that husbands own their wives, as literal property and promoted an odd teaching that for each man on Earth there exists only one correct "right woman" in all creation. Bruce Wilson |
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8/8/09 Scientists doubt inventor's global cooling idea - but what if it works? Ron Ace says that his breakthrough moments have come at unexpected times — while he lay in bed, eased his aging Cadillac across the Chesapeake Bay bridge or steered a tractor around his rustic, five-acre property. Greg Gordon |
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8/7/09 Health insurance is a weird industry. Healthcare itself is provided by doctors, nurses, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, hospices, and device makers. Insurance companies do none of this. They don't do research, they don't perform surgeries, they don't change bedpans, and they don't make diagnoses. They're just middlemen. All they do is pay the bills after marking them up 30%. They don't do anything at all to make healthcare better or more efficient. Kevin Drum |
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8/6/09 On Aug. 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on my hometown, Hiroshima. I was there, and only 7 years old. When I close my eyes, I still see things no one should ever experience: a bright red light, the black cloud soon after, people running in every direction trying desperately to escape — I remember it all. Within three years, my mother died from radiation exposure. Issey Miyake |
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8/5/09 Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder A former Blackwater employee and an ex-U.S. Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life." Jeremy Scahill |
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8/4/09 The Electricity in Your Garbage Although the term biomass has several definitions, here it is used to mean piles or containers of organic matter that can be tapped for energy. The list of biomass materials is long—agricultural and food waste, wood chips, yard clippings, microorganisms, animal byproducts and many other things. T.L. Caswell |
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8/3/09 Bonner & Associates Has Long History of Shady Tactics A DC-based consulting firm has been exposed for forging letters in opposition to the American Clean Energy and Security Act. The letters, replete with letterhead and made-up identities, purported to be from Virginian minority organizations including the NAACP. Rep. Tom Periello (D-VA) received multiple letters pressuring him to vote against clean energy reform. According to Daily Progress, Periello staffers discovered that the letters were actually forged by Bonner & Associates. Going through past correspondence regarding ACES, staffers found at least six forged letters purporting to be from Cruciendo Juntos, a nonprofit hispanic group, and the NAACP. Victor Zapanta |
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8/2/09 Those polled were white non-Hispanic Catholics, white Evangelicals, and white mainline Protestants. A majority (54 percent) of those who attend church regularly said torture could be "justified," while a majority of those not attending church regularly responded that torture was rarely or never justified. Ray McGovern |
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8/1/09 How Leonard Peltier could leave prison by August 18 The relationship between Peltier and those who have followed his case over the decades can be intensely personal. His imprisonment has come to stand not only for five centuries of unjust violence waged against Native Americans, but also for the inhumane theft of the life of a man who has handled his 33 years in jail with epic dignity, effectiveness and grace. Harvey Wasserman |
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7/31/09 Wall Street's Private Judicial System Exposed as a Fraud Today, everything from Wall Street brokerage accounts, employment contracts, credit cards, mortgages, even cell phone contracts have routinely removed the individual's constitutional right to file a claim in court to seek redress of a grievance or fraudulent action. Instead, the individual's claim is forced into one of the privately run arbitration organizations where conflicts are rampant, discovery is limited, and the right to appeal is typically impossible because the arbitrators are not required to explain the rationale for their decisions in writing. Pam Martens |
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7/30/09 Will Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap Continue to Defy Selling Out to Corporate Culture? You can use it in a river. You can use it in the shower. You can lather up outside, and it doesn't hurt a flower! Yes, you got it. It's Dr. Bronner's magical soap. Richard Seireeni |
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7/29/09 Ain't Nothing Centrist About Them At this moment -- when 72 percent of the nation supports a public plan option and 14,000 people lose their healthcare every day -- the House Blue Dogs and conservative Democratic Senators are doing just about everything they can to cripple real health care reform. Katrina vanden Heuvel |
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7/28/09 Profiling CEOs and Their Sociopathic Paychecks Today's modern transnational corporate CEOs - who live in a private-jet-and-limousine world entirely apart from the rest of us - are remnants from the times of kings, queens, and lords. They reflect the dysfunctional cultural (and Calvinist/Darwinian) belief that wealth is proof of goodness, and that that goodness then justifies taking more of the wealth. Thom Hartmann |
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7/27/09 Sir Isaiah Berlin, political philosopher and historian of ideas, observed in his classic essay "The Fox and the Hedgehog" that a fundamental difference that may divide human thinking is that some people think like foxes, those cunning creatures who know many things, while others think like headstrong hedgehogs, those persistent critters who know one big thing. John W Dean |
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7/26/09 Palin's Faith, Instant Forgiveness and God-Ordained Prosperity From a Senate investigation of prosperity ministers to Sarah Palin’s New Apostolic Reformation movement connections, Pentecostalism and its progeny (Charismatic, Third Wave, Full Gospel and non-denominational churches) have multiplied rapidly, making it is difficult to discern what the original movement is and where the offshoots are. Anthea Butler |
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7/25/09 Not everything in American has to make a profit In the U.S. today, three giant for-profit conglomerates own close to 600 hospitals and other health care facilities. They're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. America's largest hospital chain, HCA, was founded by the family of Bill Frist, who perfectly represents the Republican attitude toward health care: it's not a right, it's a racket. Bill Maher |
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7/24/09 If the Taliban decide Bergdahl has information they want, they can waterboard him until he talks. They can compress his body and cover him with insects, they can rob him of sleep and deny him food, they can beat him and slather his body with his own waste, they can shove sticks into his rectum, they can rape him, and they can murder him. They can hand him over to representatives of another government and have him whisked away to some far-flung dungeon where "enhanced interrogation" has an even darker and more savage definition. For sure, they can deny him due process of any kind and never, ever, ever, ever let him go home again. William Rivers Pitt |
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7/23/09 A generally fecal-phobic society reacts to the thought with a mix of snickering interest and fearful aversion, all dispatched in a single flush. But Nance Klehm, 43-year-old urban forager and grower, transforms human excrement into nutritious soil one bucket at a time. Sisi Tang |
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7/22/09 A very small niche of America's uber-wealthy have pulled off what may well be the biggest con job in the history of our republic, and they did it in a startlingly brief 30 or so years. True, they spent over three billion dollars to make it happen, but the reward to them was in the hundreds of billions - and will continue to be. Thom Hartmann |
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7/21/09 Celebrating Cronkite while ignoring what he did Media stars will spend ample time flamboyantly commemorating Cronkite's death as though he reflects well on what they do (though probably not nearly as much time as they spent dwelling on the death of Tim Russert, whose sycophantic servitude to Beltway power and "accommodating head waiter"-like, mindless stenography did indeed represent quite accurately what today's media stars actually do). In fact, within Cronkite's most important moments one finds the essence of journalism that today's modern media stars not only fail to exhibit, but explicitly disclaim as their responsibility. Glenn Greenwald |
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7/20/09 Pat Buchanan Continues His Racist Attacks on Sotomayor What opponents of affirmative action like Buchanan fail to grasp is that this country was built on affirmative action -- for white males -- and you don't have to go back to the Founding Fathers to see this in action. Guy T Saperstein |
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7/19/09 Ten Things You Need to Know to Live on the Streets Picture the Homeless, a social justice organization founded and led by homeless people in New York City, has joined The Nation to come up with a list of things you need to know to live on the street--and ways we can all build movements to challenge the stigma of homelessness and put forward an alternative vision of community. |
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7/18/09 AIG and Goldman Get Bailouts and Second Chances, But If You're Poor You're on Your Own Tearyan Brown became a father when he was 16. He did what a lot of inner-city kids desperate to make money do. He sold drugs. He was arrested and sent to jail three years later for dealing marijuana and PCP on the streets of Trenton, N.J., mostly to white kids driving in from the suburbs. It was a job which saw him robbed at gunpoint and stabbed in the chest. But it made him about $1,400 a week. Chris Hedges |
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7/17/09 Whiz Kids, Wall Street Division The real successors to McNamara's whiz kids are the economic geniuses, the "quants," who figured out how to build a tower of investment on a dot of assets, arbitrage everything, and hedge any risk, except, of course, the ones that plunged us into a depression. Harold Meyerson |
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7/15/09 Getting Children Back to the Great Outdoors Children today are aware of global threats to the environment but their physical contact, their intimacy, with nature is fading. A child can probably tell you about the Amazon rainforest but not about the last time he or she explored the woods in solitude or lay in a field listening to the wind and watching the clouds move. Richard Louv |
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7/14/09 The insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the A.M.A., and the rest of the axis of evil opposed to meaningful health care reform have been working overtime. They are desperately trying to come up with reasons why people in the United States can't enjoy the same quality of health care as people in other wealthy countries at a comparable price. They want us all to believe that we will always have to pay two or even three times as much for care that produces no better outcomes. Dean Baker |
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7/13/09 Some Choice Words for "The Select Few" If you want to know what really matters in Washington, don't go to Capitol Hill for one of those hearings, or pay attention to those staged White House "town meetings." They're just for show. What really happens - the serious business of Washington - happens in the shadows, out of sight, off the record. Only occasionally - and usually only because someone high up stumbles -- do we get a glimpse of just how pervasive the corruption has become. Bill Moyers and Michael Winship |
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7/12/09 Civil rights group warns of neo-Nazis in the US military The appearance of 40 active-duty US soldiers on a social networking site known as the "fascist Facebook" appears to add credibility to a controversial government report released in April about extremism in the military. Presented to congressional committees Friday, the revelations by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) – covered in depth by the military-oriented newspaper, Stars and Stripes – also raises new questions about how serious the Army is about rooting out rank-and-file neo-Nazis – and their potential impact on morale and military discipline. Patrik Jonnson |
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7/11/09 Party of Franken, Party of Palin The new senator from Minnesota is a comedian, writer and actor who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and raised a lot of money from friends in Hollywood. The departing governor of Alaska is a hockey mom from a small backwoods town who likes to hunt and fish. Yet today, Al Franken looks wholesomely mainstream, while Sarah Palin seems headed for the tabloid fringe. Joe Conason |
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7/10/09 In May, at a point when congressional Republicans and their amen corner in the media were attempting to defend the Bush-Cheney administration's torture regime, their primary defense was: Pelosi knew. John Nichols |
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7/9/09 100,000 reasons to shed no tears for McNamara Beginning in 1965 and for nearly three years McNamara each year drafted into the military 100,000 young boys whose scores in the mental qualification and aptitude tests were in the lowest quarter — so-called Category IV's. Men with IQ's of 65 or even lower. Joseph L Galloway |
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7/8/09 Reading an obit with great pleasure Well, the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell. McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing. Joseph L Galloway |
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7/7/09 Meeting Michael Jackson in the mid-1980s was one of the creepier experiences of my life. I was an editor at The Daily News and had to present him with an award in a large room with just a handful of onlookers and a photographer at Madison Square Garden. Bob Herbert |
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7/6/09 Honduran Coup Shines Spotlight on US Military Training School As Facing South reported yesterday, two of the leaders of the Honduran coup -- General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, leader of the armed forces, and Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, head of the Air Force which transported the president to Costa Rica -- were trained at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the Americas. Chris Kromm |
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7/5/09 The increasingly florid religious practices of late-20th-century America were not at all visible from the vantage point of the mid-20th century—an era marked by a distinct disposition toward the Ecumenical. Ecumenism was originally conceived as a return to ancient Church unity, and to that end strenuous efforts were made to decrease doctrinal differences. What profound effect this had on the faithful, I have no idea, but as far as I am concerned, nothing perks up a place, even the smallest apartment (especially the smallest apartment), like a good decrease in doctrinal differences. Fran Lebowitz |
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7/4/09 The Still-Growing NPR 'Torture' Controversy NPR's "torture" ban and its Ombudsman's incoherent defense of it has now turned into a significant controversy for NPR -- and rightfully so. Yesterday, The Huffington Post trumpeted the controversy in a prominent headline all day, focusing on Shepard's refusal to be interviewed here. The media reporter Simon Owens wrote a column on Shepard's refusal to discuss her rationale with me despite my having been a primary critic of NPR's policy (the controversy that began several weeks ago when I noted the ample documentation from NPR Check of NPR's steadfast refusal to use the word "torture" and the embarrassing contortions it employs to accomplish that). Glenn Greenwald |
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7/3/09 The Great American Bubble Machine The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. Matt Taibbi |
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7/2/09 Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain Have you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer? David Robson |
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7/1/09 'Ugly' fruit back on sale in EU Curly cucumbers, crooked carrots and mottled mushrooms - odd-looking fruit and vegetables are making a comeback as 20-year-old EU rules are lifted. |
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6/30/09 The Truth Alone Will Not Set You Free The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The pernicious idea that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the freedom to accumulate vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others has collapsed. The conflation of freedom with the free market has been exposed as a sham. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out and people get a taste of Bill Clinton's draconian welfare reform. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance. Chris Hedges |
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6/29/09 SEIU Fights Banks Over Bonuses The letters demand a detailed account of how executive bonuses are calculated. The union argues that these bonuses—close to $5 billion since 2005—are out of line with the performance of executives, who in 2009 have lost nearly a half billion dollars from the pension fund. Tim Brown |
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6/28/09 Palestinian Violence Overstated, Jewish Violence Understated - Time to Change the Story It is hard for many of my fellow Jews to accept the painful truth that we are as capable of violence as the Palestinians, or anyone else. But this new narrative is gaining ground rapidly in the American Jewish community, where groups like J Street and Brit Tzedek v'Shalom are making well-organized efforts to promote it and act upon it. Ira Chernus |
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6/27/09 When Nestlé Waters North America, the world’s largest bottler of water, comes a-courting, promising jobs and increased tax revenues in exchange for local water rights, many small, rural towns get nervous. Jenny Tomkins |
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6/26/09 Fareed Zakaria's Manifesto: Capitalism Doesn't Rip Off People, People Rip Off People! When he mentions the objectionable behaviors that led to the loss of trillions of dollars in wealth and untold numbers of lost jobs and misery, he does so with distant, clinical language, like he’s describing something seen through a telescope, disappearing over the horizon. In fact his method of describing the “moral crisis” that led to the financial implosion was to begrudgingly admit that many people were less than nice. Matt Taibbi |
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6/25/09 George W. Bush crawled out of the puckerbrush last week to deliver a speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, in which he took a poke at President Obama. "I told you I'm not going to criticize my successor," he said, before doing exactly that. "I'll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don't believe that persuasion isn't going to work. Therapy isn't going to cause terrorists to change their mind." William Rivers Pitt |
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6/24/09 White Nationalists Find a Home in the Military A recent report issued - and later withdrawn - by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis warned of the possibility of an up-tick in violent activities by right-wing extremist groups. Bill Berkowitz |
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6/23/09 Goldman Sachs Issues Non-Apology for Destroying the World Economy This isn't really commerce, but much more like organized crime: it was a gigantic fraud perpetrated on the economy that wouldn't have been possible without accomplices in the ratings agencies and regulators willing to turn a blind eye. Imagine a meat company that bred ten billion rats, fattened them on trash and sewage, ground their bodies into chuck, and then sold it all as grade-A ground beef to McDonald's and Burger King, right under the noses of the USDA: this is exactly the same thing, only with debt instead of food. We're eating it, they're counting the money. Matt Taibbi |
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6/22/09 Thirst for Profit: Corporate Control of Water in Latin America In Cochabamba, after Bechtel was installed, it quickly raised rates by an average of 35% (and in some cases as much as 200%), which was far outside the budget of the city’s poor and would have left many without access to water. Licenses were even required for individuals to collect rainwater from their roofs, and people were charged for water taken from their own wells. Protests escalated to the point that the Bolivian government declared a state of martial law, and eventually the company was forced to abandon their operations in the country. Lisa Boscov-Ellen |
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6/21/09 Santa Ana locks its trash cans Somewhere along the line, the city and the neighbors lost sight of the fact that the scavengers targeted by their locking-bin pilot program aren't animals at all but a much more vulnerable species -homeless human beings, for whom discarded plastic and glass are a last-resort source of sustenance. |
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6/20/09 Union Busting Ended My Love Affair with a Beer It turns out that the company had petitioned for a decertification election to kick the union out of the brewery when the contract of the union expired. Dick Yuengling, the owner of Yuengling Brewery, gathered all the workers and told them that "the writing was on the wall." He said that if they didn't vote to kick the union out, he would close the plant, and ship the work to a non-union facility in the South. The workers, scared of losing their job in a region with high unemployment, voted to ditch their union and save their jobs. Mike Elk |
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6/19/09 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling it an "execution," wants the commander-in-chief to show a little more compassion to even "the least sympathetic animals." |
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6/18/09 Obama is right, it’s time for honesty Are we willing to leave the West Bank, land that is no less ancestrally Jewish and religiously significant than any other part of Israel? If we are committed to staying there permanently, for historical, theological or even security reasons, isn't it time just to say that? Or to annex it and stop pretending we haven't made that decision? Daniel Gordis |
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6/17/09 What If Ahmadinejad Really Won? One of the snap media judgments has been that Ahmadinejad’s “theft” of the election proves that hardliners in Israel and neoconservatives in the United States were right all along about the impossibility of dealing rationally with Iran, that President Barack Obama was the "big loser," and that force is the only option to employ against Iran. Robert Parry |
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6/16/09 Disease Profiters Fear Public Option Will Kill Their Ponzi Scheme Rarely has a political debate more starkly highlighted the philosophical question of whether in a democracy, the government should represent the people’s interests or an industry’s. Robert Parry |
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6/15/09 Michael Savage Threatens Alternet With a Lawsuit Michael Savage, right-wing crusader against gays, immigrants, Muslims, Barack Obama, Britain, women, (and possibly puppies), may have found a new object for his wrath: groups that have the temerity to publicize the vicious talk-show host’s connection to Rockstar energy drink -- and to call for a boycott by consumers opposed to Savage's hatemongering. Don Hazen and Tana Ganeva |
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6/14/09 Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. Paul Krugman |
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6/13/09 The "defensive war" was followed by a long list of popular deceptions: the "Nahal outpost," the "archaeological camp," decisions guided solely by "security needs." And on "state lands," as opposed to private property, there is no infringement on human rights - except those of a neighboring people: These expropriated lands encompass most of the West Bank. Yossi Sarid |
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6/12/09 Break the Banks, for the Good of the People With all the talk of "green shoots" of economic recovery, America's banks are resisting efforts to regulate them. While politicians talk about their commitment to regulatory reform to prevent a recurrence of the crisis, this is one area where the devil really is in the details - and the banks will muster what muscle they have left to ensure that they have ample room to continue as they have in the past. Joseph Stiglitz |
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6/11/09 Afghan Woman Knows Why US Policy is Failing There is much that can be done to help Afghanistan repair itself. There are smart aid and development initiatives -- many of them grass-roots based -- that can expand access to education for women and girls and that can build respect for human rights and democracy. But an occupation that serves the interests of the occupiers rather than the people of Afghanistan has created what Malalai Joya refers to as "a mafia state." John Nichols |
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6/10/09 See no evil: Mainstream U.S. media are fully complicit in the conspiracy The crime for which Green, Barker and Cortez have all been convicted -- and the only crime involving U.S. soldiers killing Iraqis that has resulted in more than a slap on the wrist or outright dismissal of charges -- is unbearable in its details. The three drunkenly conspired one day to rape and murder Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, a young woman who passed regularly through the checkpoint they guarded. They forced their way into her house; Green killed her mother, father and sister, then participated in the gang-rape of the 14-year-old, after which he shot her in the head, then set fire to her body. Robert Koehler |
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6/9/09 Debunking Canadian Health Care Myths As America comes to grips with the reality that changes are desperately needed within its health care infrastructure, it might prove useful to first debunk some myths about the Canadian system. Rhonda Hackett |
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6/8/09 Settlers Contribute Nothing to Israeli Society Has a renowned scientist blossomed from the communities across the West Bank? Has one important author? One captain of industry? Nothing. The real Israeli creativity can be found in Tel Aviv and among its natives. Nothing has yet to emerge from Bat Ayin, with the exception of violence. Gideon Levy |
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6/7/09 Boy chosen by Dalai Lama turns back on Buddhist order As a toddler, he was put on a throne and worshipped as by monks who treated him like a god. But the boy chosen by the Dalai Lama as a reincarnation of a spiritual leader has caused consternation – and some embarrassment – for Tibetan Buddhists by turning his back on the order that had such high hopes for him. Dale Fuchs |
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6/6/09 Tickling Primates To Learn About Laughter Do nonhuman primates have a sense of humor? Marina Davilla Ross and colleagues tickled baby gorillas, chimps, orangutans, bonobos and humans. Publishing in Current Biology, the researchers analyzed the sounds the primates made, looking for clues to the evolution of laughter. Nell Greenfieldboyce |
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6/5/09 On Thursday morning, President Barack Obama decided to see what happened when America and the Muslim world stopped being polite and started getting real. In an hour-long speech in Cairo, Egypt, Obama bluntly discussed seven of the most vexing problems facing the United States' relationship with Muslims. It was a veritable "house meeting"—Real World: Cairo?—for two forces that have frequently found themselves at odds in recent years. Nick Baumann |
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6/4/09 Beijing's Favorite Capitalists In explaining China's rise and America's decline, historians may well note that capitalism -- American capitalism, anyway -- far from spreading democracy, actually has played a key role in transforming China into an authoritarian superpower. The transfer of manufacturing from the United States to China -- driven by the rise of mega-retailers such as Wal-Mart that have been able to enforce a regime of low wages all along their global supply chains -- has diminished our middle class and expanded theirs. Harold Meyerson |
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6/3/09 Attacks on Reaganomics usually focus on rising inequality and fiscal irresponsibility. Indeed, Reagan ushered in an era in which a small minority grew vastly rich, while working families saw only meager gains. He also broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence. Paul Krugman |
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6/2/09 The crisis faced by combat veterans returning from war is not simply a profound struggle with trauma and alienation. It is often, for those who can slice through the suffering to self-awareness, an existential crisis. War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions. Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home. We are not a virtuous nation. God and fate have not blessed us above others. Victory is not assured. War is neither glorious nor noble. And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight. Chris Hedges |
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6/1/09 Behind the scenes, a war of words LA GRANDE -- A group of high school students, undaunted by censorship, cramped rehearsal quarters and 11th-hour wardrobe malfunctions, performed the Steve Martin comedy "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" in mid-May. Marty Hughley |
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5/31/09 Family see Jesus image in Marmite Claire Allen, 36, said she was the first to notice the image on the underside of the lid as she was putting the yeast spread on her son's toast. BBC News |
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5/30/09 How the Golden State Got Tarnished To understand why the woes of California's economy threaten the nation's, we must understand the state's road to insolvency. The Age of Reagan did not commence with the Great Communicator's inauguration in 1981. For its real beginning, we need to go back to June 1978, when Californians went to the polls and enacted Proposition 13. Harold Meyerson |
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5/29/09 Here is another way to deal with the slogans of the right: Expose the truth that lies behind them, and its hopelessness. Gideon Levy |
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5/28/09 Baucus 8 Charged: It’s an Outrage Outdone Only by Their Humanity The corporate interests in the for-profit health insurance industry that have doomed hundreds of thousands of Americans to ill health, financial ruin and unnecessary deaths continue to lead every health reform discussion. Donna Smith |
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5/27/09 America's poor are its most generous givers When Jody Richards saw a homeless man begging outside a downtown McDonald's recently, he bought the man a cheeseburger. There's nothing unusual about that, except that Richards is homeless, too, and the 99-cent cheeseburger was an outsized chunk of the $9.50 he'd earned that day from panhandling. Frank Greve |
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5/26/09 War Room is No Place for Bible Study That Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld supplied President Bush with Bible-laced Pentagon intelligence briefings might only seem like more Bush-era loopiness, but wait a minute. The deeper, and still current, question is: What in heaven (or, what the hell) is going on inside the US military? James Carroll |
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5/25/09 That didn’t take long. Less than two weeks have passed since much of the medical-industrial complex made a big show of working with President Obama on health care reform — and the double-crossing is already well under way. Indeed, it’s now clear that even as they met with the president, pretending to be cooperative, insurers were gearing up to play the same destructive role they did the last time health reform was on the agenda. Paul Krugman |
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5/24/09 Netanyahu's West Bank Nightmare - An Exclusive Video Report JERUSALEM -- I just spent the evening in a small park overlooking occupied East Jerusalem at a gathering of the Israeli settlement movement's most prominent figures. The settlers were there to cheer three of their leaders who would be presented with the Irving Moskowitz Prize for Zionism. Few of the ultra-religious attendees seemed aware that Moskowitz is a California casino baron who exploits cheap Mexican labor to fund the proliferation of radical settlements in the West Bank. None seemed to care. The fulfillment of Greater Israel, an ethnically cleansed Jewish homeland, was paramount. Max Blumenthal |
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5/23/09 HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM — There’s an exchange in “The Quiet American,” Graham Greene’s novel about the damage American good intentions can cause, that I’ve thought about a lot. It involves Thomas Fowler, the world-weary journalist-narrator of the book, confronting Alden Pyle, an American aid worker with a blinding zeal to stop Communism. Roger Cohen |
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5/22/09 Garrison Keillor's Prairie Torture Companion Garrison Keillor claims to be a liberal. He - and we - should know better. Keillor has just joined the already large and ever-growing list of allegedly 'liberal' media figures who either advocate or apologize for torture. Rory O’Connor |
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5/21/09 The Cayman Islands are well known to those seeking sun, sand and sea--and for their hospitality to US corporations seeking to escape taxes, launder money and use other discreet financial services. The islands' tax dodgers help multinational corporations move jobs offshore; they also give aid and comfort to terrorists, drug dealers and divorcing spouses trying to hide money. Honest taxpayers have to make up for the revenues lost through this offshore cheating in three ways: we pay more in taxes, we get fewer government services and we incur rising government debt. David Cay Johnston |
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5/20/09 The 19th century was dominated by the British Empire, the 20th century by the United States. We may now be entering the Asian century, dominated by a rising China and its currency. While the dollar’s status as the major reserve currency will not vanish overnight, we can no longer take it for granted. Sooner than we think, the dollar may be challenged by other currencies, most likely the Chinese renminbi. This would have serious costs for America, as our ability to finance our budget and trade deficits cheaply would disappear. Nouriel Roubini |
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5/19/09 The Health Care Industry's PR Scam: Will Obama Fall for It? It all adds up to a brilliant move, when you think about it. It makes the private health care companies look cooperative and proactive, rather than like the greedy obstructionists they really are. It gets these companies on the inside track with the administration, and creates common cause with the unions. In particular, it establishes a solid place at the table for the health insurance industry, the blood-sucking middlemen who ought to be kicked out of the health care system altogether. James Ridgeway |
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5/18/09 So I was making dinner, and on NPR I hear, to my amazement, a report by Robert Siegel and Michele Norris marking April 20 as Marijuana Observance Day. “We’re hearing more talk about legalizing marijuana,” noted Norris, “and not just from those who are lighting up.” Susan J Douglas |
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5/17/09 Anyone returning to the United States for the first time since Barack Obama's great victory cannot help immediately noticing the quiet revolution taking place there. The national agenda has changed, the public discourse is different, the neoconservative cynicism seems to have been erased from daily life, and George Bush's closed horizon has opened up. Therefore, it would be wise for Israeli leaders, from both right and left, to read Obama's autobiography closely. Zeev Sternhell |
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5/16/09 I know why this caged bird sang. He was terrified of the very real cage that could be waiting to swing open and swallow him up if the true nature of his torture directives became widely known. If the entire country comprehends the awful fact that women and boys were forcibly raped upon his specific orders, Dick Cheney's bets would all be off. William Rivers Pitt |
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5/15/09 William I. Robinson, a professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara, probably shouldn't have been surprised when he found himself in the news earlier this month. He had, after all, forwarded an e-mail to his students that juxtaposed images of Palestinians caught up in Israel's recent Gaza Strip offensive with Jewish victims of the Nazis. The e-mail included graphic photographs of dead Jewish children from the 1940s alongside similar photos from Gaza. In a cover note, Robinson called the images "parallel" and compared Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. Nicholas Goldberg |
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5/14/09 Civilians Pay the Price of War From Above Of course there will be an inquiry. And in the meantime, we shall be told that all the dead Afghan civilians were being used as “human shields” by the Taliban and we shall say that we “deeply regret” innocent lives that were lost. But we shall say that it’s all the fault of the terrorists, not our heroic pilots and the US Marine special forces who were target spotting around Bala Baluk and Ganjabad. Robert Fisk |
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5/13/09 I remember as a young deputy city editor at The Daily News attending my first "sked meeting," a large gathering of editors held every afternoon to consider which stories would go into the next morning's paper and how they would be played. I was sitting at the far end of a conference table from the editor who was conducting the meeting. The News had very seldom had a black person at those gatherings. Mine was the only black face in the room. Bob Herbert |
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5/12/09 Is Whole Foods Just Another Evil Corporation? Something sinister lurks beneath the surface of Whole Foods' progressive image. Somehow, Mackey has managed to achieve multimillionaire status while his employees' hourly wages have remained in the $8 to $13 range for two decades. With an annual turnover rate of 25 percent, the vast majority of workers last no more than four years and thus rarely manage to achieve anything approaching seniority and the higher wages that would accompany it. Sharon Smith |
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5/11/09 Pigcapitalists: What the Wall Street Meltdown and Swine Flu Have in Common Even if you don't dig on swine, it has become impossible to avoid them. If you're not pummeled by television reports about Wall Street oinkers, you're bombarded by talk-radio rants about congressional pork and newspaper dispatches about swine flu. David Sirota |
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5/10/09 Do You Know Why Mother's Day Was Started? Women know that war is SO over. We know it in our hearts, in our guts, in our wombs. We know that the madness in Iraq and Afghanistan has to end, that we cannot keep sending our children to kill the children of mothers across the globe. Last month at an appearance in Turkey, President Obama himself said “…sometimes I think that if you just put the mothers in charge for a while, that things would get resolved.” Jodie Evans |
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5/9/09 Memo to Jackass, the Credit Card Industry Doesn't Need Anyone Standing Up for It Of all the truly revolting political developments of the financial crisis age -- and there have been a lot of them -- probably nothing is more disgusting than the weirdly intense media backlash against "populist anger," anger that is inevitably described by media sages like Hiltzik as irrational, unfounded, and pointedly unhelpful. The public is depicted as a great dumb beast lashing out wildly at shadows and hallucinations, with the poor diligent hardworking members of the financial class (slaving away to pump much-needed capital into the bloodstream of international commerce) suffering the collateral damage. Matt Taibbi |
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5/8/09 Mechanisms of Self-control Pinpointed in Brain When you're on a diet, deciding to skip your favorite calorie-laden foods and eat something healthier takes a whole lot of self-control--an ability that seems to come easier to some of us than others. Now, scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have uncovered differences in the brains of people who are able to exercise self-control versus those who find it almost impossible. |
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5/7/09 The Faux Defense of Western Liberties from the Right One of the tactics endlessly used by America's right-wing warriors in their crusade against Islamic radicalism is the pretense that they are motivated by a defense of core Western freedoms, particularly free speech rights. Even the most cynical observer has to be impressed by how much martyrdom-mileage they've been able to squeeze out of Canada's petty and dangerous (though ultimately dismissed) formal proceedings brought against Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant for that duo's publication of anti-Islamic screeds. Glenn Greenwald |
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5/6/09 When I took an editing job at Bloomberg News in March 2000, my arrival coincided with the bursting of the Internet bubble. As once-hot IPOs tanked and the Nasdaq crashed. I would joke to other editors that what the U.S. economy needed was "to build a better bubble." Robert Parry |
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5/5/09 Winnemem Wintu Tribe Holds War Dance Arrayed in traditional regalia, over two dozen members of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe held a war dance along the banks of the American River the evening of April 19 and morning of April 20 to bring attention to decades of injustice and destruction of their cultural sites by the federal government. Dan Bacher |
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5/4/09 Among the many tragedies of the contemporary Republican party is that the partisans who will honor the memory of former Congressman, cabinet member and 1996 vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp have refused so consistently and belligerently to embrace the man's wisest political insight. Jack Nichols |
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5/3/09 Parrots Join Humans On The Dance Floor Two famous parrots and a bevy of YouTube videos have now convinced scientists that people aren't the only ones who can groove to a musical beat. Nell Greenfieldboyce |
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5/2/09 A Laughably Late Conversion to the Cause of Fairness What you need to know about these vultures is that their idea of fairness is throwing 100,000 people out of work and denying retirees their pensions and their health benefits just so they can liquidate the company and maybe squeeze an extra 15 cents on the dollar from their Chrysler debt. Steven Pearlstein |
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5/1/09 Let us pause the news cycle here and strip away the desperate delicacy of this language. The Gitmo intelligence crew was being told, from the highest levels of the Bush White House and the Pentagon - think Cheney, think Rumsfeld - to keep slamming these guys' heads against the wall, to keep pouring water down their throats, to keep tormenting them with dogs and insects, until they blubbered, in their pain and terror, a word or two that would justify the long-planned (and completely pointless) invasion of Iraq. Robert Koehler |
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4/30/09 Has Timothy Geithner ever had lunch with a non-megamillionaire who has lost his job or home because of the banking meltdown? I ask that question after reading the list of the treasury secretary's luncheon dates when he was head of the New York Federal Reserve, a list that the government was forced to provide in response to a lawsuit. Robert Scheer |
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4/29/09 How to Resolve the Debate on Torture The six lawyers and rightwing media personalities such as Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh should all be eager to be first [to volunteer to be tortured] given how patriotic they are. If nothing else, it would be an interesting experiment as it might determine if education affects attitudes toward torture. Four of the six lawyers have degrees from Harvard. All of the talking heads except O'Reilly dropped out of second- and third-rate colleges. Dennis Jett |
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4/28/09 Democrats' “Battered Wife Syndrome” In recent years, the Washington political dynamic has often resembled an abusive marriage, in which the bullying husband (the Republicans) slaps the wife and kids around, and the battered wife (the Democrats) makes excuses and hides the ugly bruises from outsiders to keep the family together. Robert Perry |
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4/27/09 FBI Weren't the Only Ones Objecting to Torture in 2002 - So Did the Army, Marines & Air Force There were already serious objections to the use of torture when the Bush administration made it legal in 2002 -- FBI chief Robert Mueller refused to let his agents participate in the CIA's "coercive interrogations" in June of that year, well before the Bybee memo made them legal on August 1. But it's not like the FBI was alone in expressing those concerns…. Jane Hamsher |
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4/26/09 God Makes Surprise Visit To Local Church FAYETTEVILLE, NC—Parishioners at the First Presbyterian Church were left stunned and in awe of His glory Sunday, when the Lord God Almighty dropped by their 11 a.m. service unannounced. the ONION |
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4/25/09 Rep. Jane Harman is fighting back with one helluva gambit. Late Sunday CQ broke the story--subsequently confirmed by the New York Times--that Harman, a California Democrat, was caught by NSA eavesdroppers telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would do what she could to reduce espionage-related charges filed against AIPAC officials and that this suspected agent promised in return to help her become chair of the House intelligence committee. David Corn |
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4/24/09 Pot vs. Booze: A Former Police Chief's Take As 5:00 p.m. rolls around my interior clock starts chiming. I'll have an ice-cold, bone-dry martini, thank you. Jalapeno olives and a twist. If the occasion calls for it (temperatures in the twenties, a hot political debate on the tube) I may substitute two fingers of Kentucky sour mash. Four-twenty? Doesn't resonate. But with the Waldos of the world just having celebrated up their favorite day of the year, it's not a bad time to consider, yet again, the pluses and minuses of alcohol vs. cannabis. Norm Stamper |
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4/23/09 Why We Should Banish Larry Summers From Public Life The criticisms of President Obama's chief economic adviser are well known. He's too close to Wall Street. And he's a frightful bully, of both people and countries. Still, we're told we shouldn't care about such minor infractions. Why? Because Summers is brilliant, and the world needs his big brain. Naomi Klein |
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4/22/09 Torturing Judge Bybee: Make Him Eat His Own Words If the day comes that Congress finally does its duty and begins an impeachment effort against 9th Circuit Federal Appeals Judge Jay Bybee, the former Bush assistant attorney general who in 2002 authored a key memo justifying the use of torture against captives in the Afghanistan invasion and the so-called "War on Terror," it would be fitting punishment to watch him squirm as his own words as a judge were played back to him. Dave Lindorff |
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4/21/09 Hopebroken and Hopesick: A Lexicon of Disappointment All is not well in Obamafanland. It's not clear exactly what accounts for the change of mood. Maybe it was the rancid smell emanating from Treasury's latest bank bailout. Or the news that the president's chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, earned millions from the very Wall Street banks and hedge funds he is protecting from reregulation now. Or perhaps it began earlier, with Obama's silence during Israel's Gaza attack. Naomi Klein |
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4/20/09 Nasal Irrigation Can Ease Allergy Symptoms For some, the neti pot, a nasal irrigator that resembles a small teapot, has become an alternative remedy. While it is not nearly as convenient as popping a pill or using a spray, several recent studies have found that nasal irrigation can reduce symptoms of allergies and other nasal problems. Anahad O’Connor |
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4/19/09 Mary McCarthy in Vietnam, Barack Obama in Afghanistan In 1967, outraged by the course of the Vietnam War, as well as her country's role in prolonging and worsening it, Mary McCarthy, novelist, memoirist, and author of the bestseller The Group, went to Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam, to judge the situation for herself. The next year, she went to the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi. William Astore |
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4/18/09 I have to say, I’m really enjoying this whole teabag thing. It’s really inspiring some excellent daydreaming. For one thing, it’s brought together the words teabag and Michelle Malkin for me in a very powerful, thrilling sort of way. Not that I haven’t ever put those two concepts together before, but this is the first time it’s happened while in the process of reading her actual columns. Matt Taibbi |
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4/17/09 Hardships Of Wall Weigh On Many Most every Palestinian in the West Bank says the biggest obstacles to a better economic life are the hundreds of military roadblocks and barriers that separate the West Bank from Israel. Israel's wall and fence project has dramatically reduced suicide bombings and other attacks inside the country. But the barrier, which will stretch some 450 miles when completed, also has had a severely negative effect on the lives of ordinary Palestinians. NPR's Eric Westervelt and David Gilkey traveled the length of the barrier to explore how it has affected the lives of people on both sides. |
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4/16/09 Israeli Settlement Seeks Protection Most every Palestinian in the West Bank says the biggest obstacles to a better economic life are the hundreds of military roadblocks and barriers that separate the West Bank from Israel. Israel's wall and fence project has dramatically reduced suicide bombings and other attacks inside the country. But the barrier, which will stretch some 450 miles when completed, also has had a severely negative effect on the lives of ordinary Palestinians. NPR's Eric Westervelt and David Gilkey traveled the length of the barrier to explore how it has affected the lives of people on both sides. |
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4/15/09 Palestinian Villages Separated By Barrier Most every Palestinian in the West Bank says the biggest obstacles to a better economic life are the hundreds of military roadblocks and barriers that separate the West Bank from Israel. Israel's wall and fence project has dramatically reduced suicide bombings and other attacks inside the country. But the barrier, which will stretch some 450 miles when completed, also has had a severely negative effect on the lives of ordinary Palestinians. NPR's Eric Westervelt and David Gilkey traveled the length of the barrier to explore how it has affected the lives of people on both sides. |
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4/14/09 Waiting To Cross No Man's Land Most every Palestinian in the West Bank says the biggest obstacles to a better economic life are the hundreds of military roadblocks and barriers that separate the West Bank from Israel. Israel's wall and fence project has dramatically reduced suicide bombings and other attacks inside the country. But the barrier, which will stretch some 450 miles when completed, also has had a severely negative effect on the lives of ordinary Palestinians. NPR's Eric Westervelt and David Gilkey traveled the length of the barrier to explore how it has affected the lives of people on both sides. |
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4/13/09 The ICRC Report on the Torture of 14 CIA Detainees The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has consistently expressed its grave concern over the humanitarian consequences and legal implications of the practice by the United States (US) authorities of holding persons in undisclosed detention in the context of the fight against terrorism. In particular the ICRC has underscored the risk of ill-treatment, the lack of contact with the outside world as a result of being held incommunicado, the lack of a legal framework, and the direct effects of such treatment and conditions on the persons held in undisclosed detention and on their families. |
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4/12/09 Panicked, Sweat-Covered Pope Reverses Longstanding Ban On Abortion VATICAN CITY—Overturning 2,000 years of religious doctrine, an out-of-breath and visibly flustered Pope Benedict XVI announced Sunday that the termination of unwanted pregnancies was now "completely and perfectly acceptable in the eyes of God." the ONION |
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4/11/09 Two Dozen More Bodies Found In Lake Wobegon LAKE WOBEGON, MN—Though local residents insist it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, MN, their hometown out on the edge of the prairie, state police officials descended on the small community Tuesday when another 24 corpses surfaced along its placid waterfront. the ONION |
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4/10/09 The world breathes a collective sigh of relief in Obama's wake As George W. gazes across the pond at events in Europe, surely even he can see how the rest of the world is going ga-ga over his successor, a truly presidential man who possesses all the gifts he so patently lacks: he's articulate, respectful, conciliatory, mature and calm. And, to rub salt in his psychic wounds, every ounce of the praise being heaped upon Obama by world leaders comes with a hidden jab at George W. Alan Bisbort |
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4/9/09 Wall Street's Best Investment - The Best White House Aide Money Can Buy The real-world effects of corruption can feel distant and hard to understand. But this week via White House aide Larry Summers, we got a very concrete, easy-to-understand example of how our pay-to-play political system really works. David Sirota |
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4/8/09 Ghosts of Tom Joad: Steinbeck's 'Grapes of Wrath' at 70 Homeless camps now sprawl instead of developments. Unemployment numbers are spilling off front pages into our lives. Employers are turning workers into modern-day sharecroppers (every man his own contractor). And next week, as if on cue, marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck's novel of foreclosure and dispossession in the 1930s. How timely. Pierre Tristam |
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4/7/09 Big Pharma Psychs Out the Shrinks Just about everyone by now knows how the drug industry works to poison the minds of American doctors-not that many of them have resisted drinking the Kool-Aid, which comes in the form of ego-tripping awards, junkets, dinners, research funding, and cash in exchange for endorsing or prescribing the latest and most lucrative drugs. But even against this backdrop of sleaze, the latest news on the ties between Big Pharma and Big Psych could take your breath away. James Ridgeway |
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4/6/09 People in every country want to see their soldiers as acting nobly. So perhaps it's no surprise that Israeli propagandists have tried to claim first place by calling the IDF the "most moral army in the world." The problem with this phrase is not just that it is risible in the case of the IDF, but that it implies the possibility of any army being moral. On the contrary, by virtue of how they are organized and what they inevitably do, all armies are moral failures. Michael Schwalbe |
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4/5/09 One striking truth to emerge from the Group of 20 meeting is the growing triumph, among global conservatives, of an enlightened form of conservatism and the isolation, defeat and coming end of the Republican style of greed-based conservatism. Compare Harper of Canada, Merkel of Germany and Sarkozy of France with Republicans in Congress, Palin of Alaska and Jindal of Louisiana. Brent Budowsky |
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4/4/09 Last year, former Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid made a great documentary for the PBS show Frontline titled Sick Around the World. Reid traveled to five countries that deliver health care for all - UK, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Taiwan - to learn about how they do it. Reid found that the one thing these five countries had in common - none allowed for-profit health insurance companies to sell basic medical coverage. Frontline then said to Reid - okay, we want you to go around the United States and make a companion documentary titled Sick Around America. Russell Mokhiber |
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4/3/09 The Republicans unveiled their alternative budget proposal on April Fools' Day. No, seriously, they did. One has to assume there was an enterprising young GOP congressional staffer with his head in his hands somewhere on Capitol Hill on Wednesday because he just got fired for not quite understanding the awful humor of the timing. William Rivers Pitt |
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4/2/09 The Obamas Kick Off a Victory Garden Movement - Who Will Join Them? Now that there's a White House veggie garden, what's next? Schoolyards, retirement homes, vacant urban lots, governors' mansions ... Kerry Trueman |
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4/1/09 Barack Obama: Nuancing the Stone. I have seen that much of the country, marijuana smokers AND non-smokers tired of the scam, reacted strongly to Obama's apparent "laughing off" of 3.5 million "online citizens" who voted up the question about legalizing marijuana for the purposes of helping the economy. xxdr zombiexx |
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3/31/09 Top Constitutional Scholar Says the Secret Bush Memos Amounts to Treason The memos lay the legal groundwork for the president to send the military to wage war against U.S. citizens; take them from their homes to Navy brigs without trial and keep them forever; close down the First Amendment; and invade whatever country he chooses without regard to any treaty or objection by Congress. Naomi Wolf |
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3/30/09 The Real Crime in the Bailout - Naked CDS Deals What doesn't make sense is for the insurance market to be many times larger than the value of all of the underlying assets combined. Well, it turns out there is a reason for that. It's called the "naked" CDS. These deals are not attached to any underlying asset. They are not collateralized. They are not attached to anything of real value. They are simply bets. As in wagers. As in gambling. Cenk Uygur |
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3/29/09 The much-married Newt Gingrich converts to Catholicism this weekend — and I’d pay a year’s salary to have been a bug on the wall during his religious instruction. Christopher Buckley |
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3/28/09 AIG Exec Whines About Public Anger, and Now We're Supposed to Pity Him? Yeah, Right Like a lot of people, I read Wednesday's New York Times editorial by former AIG Financial Products employee Jake DeSantis, whose resignation letter basically asks us all to reconsider our anger toward the poor overworked employees of his unit…. I have a few responses to those points. They are 1) Bullshit; 2) bullshit; 3) bullshit, plus of course; 4) bullshit. Lastly, there is 5) Boo-Fucking-Hoo. You dog. Matt Taibbi |
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3/27/09 Insurance Industry: The Parasite That Feeds on US Public Health System As the country contemplates a major reform and restructuring of the way we run our national health care system (if it can even be called that), it needs to be pointed out that the mammoth health insurance industry is nothing but a parasite on that system. Dave Lindorff |
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3/26/09 A new day for the morning-after pill The 40 studies were thorough and conclusive: The morning-after contraceptive pill is safe and effective, and teenage girls understand just as much as young women do about how to use it safely. Also well studied were the Bush administration's attempts to keep the pill out of the hands of American women and girls, at least for as long as it could. The conclusion, just as clear, in a 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office: The Food and Drug Administration abdicated its duty, overriding and overruling scientists so that it could delay and limit access to the pill and thus allay the concerns of religious conservatives. |
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3/25/09 These much maligned, fill-in-the-bubble reading tests are technically among the most reliable and valid tests available. The problem is that the reading passages used in these tests are random. They are not aligned with explicit grade-by-grade content standards. Children are asked to read and then answer multiple-choice questions about such topics as taking a hike in the Appalachians even though they’ve never left the sidewalks of New York, nor studied the Appalachians in school. E.D. Hirsch Jr |
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3/24/09 AIG is Chump Change - Let's Find Corporate America's Hidden Billions The popular urge to claw back the bogus bonuses paid by American International Group is irresistible and fully justified, but should the Treasury someday retrieve every single bonus dollar, that total of $165 million will make no difference to anyone except a few disgruntled traders. From the jaded perspective of the financiers, the uproar over the AIG bonuses may provide a welcome distraction from far more important (and lucrative) abuses in the world's offshore tax havens. Joe Conason |
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3/23/09 The Long and Sadistic History Behind the CIA's Torture Techniques In the 20th century, there were two main traditions of clean torture -- the kind that doesn't leave marks, as modern torturers prefer. The first is French modern, a combination of water- and electro-torture. The second is Anglo-Saxon modern, a classic list of sleep deprivation, positional and restraint tortures, extremes of temperature, noise, and beatings. Darius Rejali |
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3/22/09 Roy Bourgois Faces Excommunication The Catholic Church is threatening to excommunicate Father Roy Bourgeois for publicly supporting the ordination of women to the priesthood. George Fish |
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3/21/09 El Salvador Votes Away Its Bad Past Central America and the Caribbean have long been the United States' "back yard" more than anywhere else. The people of the region have paid a terrible price - in blood, poverty and underdevelopment - for their geographical and political proximity to the United States. The list of US interventions in the area would take up the rest of this column, stretching from the 19th century (Cuba, in 1898) to the 21st, with the overthrow of Haiti's democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (for the second time) in 2004. Mark Weisbrot |
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3/20/09 Lying Or Incompetent - Either Way, Geithner Needs to Be Fired I've never been a fan of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner - he's a Rubinite who has been too close to Wall Street, and too focused on using government power to protect private shareholders. This is the guy who told the Senate that his primary goal in bailing out the financial industry with public money was not to protect the economy or taxpayers, but instead to use our taxpayer dollars to preserve "a financial system that is run by private shareholders [and] managed by private institutions." Despite my strong disagreements with his ideology, only today have I gotten to the point where I think it's clear he needs to be fired. Why? Because today he proved he's either lying to the public or totally incompetent. David Sirota |
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3/19/09 Dems Introduce Vital Protections for Workers; Corporate America Responds With a Big Lie There's nothing more terrifying to corporate America than the prospect of dealing with its workforce on an even playing field, and, along with its allies in Congress, it's pulling out all the stops to keep that from happening. Joshua Holland |
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3/18/09 Obama Takes US Closer to Total Ban on Cluster Bombs The new law comes into force amid growing pressure from Congress for a complete ban on their use, even by the US military. International opposition to cluster bombs, which maim and kill civilians long after they have been fired during conflicts, has been hardening rapidly since the Israeli Defence Forces fired more than 1m into southern Lebanon during the 2006 war with Hezbollah. Last year, a treaty limiting their use was signed by 95 countries, including most of America's Nato allies - but not the US. Peter Beaumont |
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3/17/09 Conservatives Are Blind, Deaf and Dumb to Class Warfare David Brooks was upset. You can tell when this conservative and rather-professorial columnist for the New York Times gets upset, because his words almost sag with disappointment -- you can practically hear the tsk-tsks and the heavy sighs in each paragraph. When most commentators on the right see things that offend them, they get snarling mad; Brooks gets sad. Jim Hightower |
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3/16/09 Seymour Hersh Describes “Executive Assassination Ring” Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it's called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him.” Eric Black |
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3/15/09 Turn left, take ten steps, discover a better world 1) God doesn't exist, and never did. Belief in a Heavenly Father arose out of primitive ignorance and associated superstition. To think that an omnipotent old fellow with a white beard sits on a golden throne in the sky is wildly ridiculous. The only thing crazier is to believe said deity created us, governs our affairs, and deserves our blind obedience. Help stamp out witch-hunts and suicide bombings. Relegate God to the same dustbin of mythology where all ghosts, holy or otherwise, rightfully belong. Dennis Rahkonen |
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3/14/09 It's the end of the world as we know it and, while I can't say I exactly feel fine, it's all too easy to dwell on the downward spiral of our job prospects and 401(k)s. Even in the midst of economic collapse (possibly presaging political disintegration and ultimately social chaos), there's cause for optimism. And so, in the same spirit of contrarianism that drove me to declare the boom economy of the late 1990s a sham we'd all live to regret, here are nine good reasons not to kill yourself over the economic meltdown: Ted Rall |
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3/13/09 There are plenty of rich people to hate these days, starting with Bernie Madoff, who will face a judge Thursday as well as the possibility of spending his remaining years in a cell where he can think about all the lives he ruined. Timothy Egan |
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3/12/09 I know that Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer have been in a bit of a "fight" lately. Of course, it's not really a fight because Stewart isn't doing this to pick a fight with Cramer or because he doesn't like him. He's making fun of him - because that's what he does. Cenk Uygur |
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3/11/09 The Dittohead Party: Why the GOP Is Screwing Itself The "leader of the Republican Party" question has been thoroughly analyzed and debated. And after many days and many cable news roundelays, I think we can all agree that, yes, the GOP has been inextricably grasped within the meaty, sweaty mitts of that familiar planetoid of addiction, racism and self-indulgence known as Rush Limbaugh. Bob Cesca |
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3/10/09 Reading The Videos: Israel's Glamour v. Palestine's Despair Certainly no person aware of Israel's blockade of goods and services to Gaza, or Israel's devastating bombing of Gaza, would consider Gaza a vacation haven. Gaza is not a place of joy. It’s an overcrowded war-zone populated by more than a million terrified men, women and children. They subsist amidst the rubble caused by Israel's missiles that crushed their homes and killed their loved ones. They inhabit a tiny strip of land that can be driven across in two hours. They have no space for recreation. They have no scenic boulevards and tony cafes. Even their beach is a danger. Their lives are a daily challenge of fear, illness, hunger, anguish, poverty, joblessness, homelessness and physical and emotional wounds. Israel, on the other hand … Linda Milazzo |
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3/9/09 The Case for Giving Eli Lilly the Corporate Death Penalty If Americans are ever going to revoke the publicly granted charters of reckless, giant corporations -- well within our rights -- we might want to get the ball rolling with Lilly, whose recent actions appalled even the mainstream media. And with Lilly's chums, the Bush family, out of power, now might be the right time. Bruce E Levine |
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3/8/09 Martha Peace is here to help. Over the past two decades, the 62-year-old Georgia native and former nurse has written five books on biblical womanhood, conservative Christianity's answer to the women's movement. Among them are The Excellent Wife, now a classic in this burgeoning niche, and Damsels in Distress, a set of biblical solutions to female problems ranging from pms to depression to "feminist tendencies." It's common for a young Christian wife to rebel against home life as her primary ministry, Peace writes in Becoming a Titus 2 Woman, which lays out the principles of her ministry model. It's the role of older women to help her understand her priorities. Kathryn Joyce |
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3/7/09 What Newsrooms Can Learn from The Daily Show The most talked-about journalism of this week wasn't produced in the New York Times, CNN, Newsweek or NPR. It was Jon Stewart's epic, eight-minute takedown on Wednesday night's Daily Show of CNBC's clueless, in-the-tank reporting of inflatable bubbles and blowhard CEOs as the U.S. and world economies slowly slid into a meltdown. Will Bunch |
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3/6/09 LaVena Johnson: Raped and Murdered on a Military Base in Iraq The U.S. Army officially ruled her death a suicide, saying she shot herself in the head, case closed. But this is where the story begins. David A Love |
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3/5/09 What Bibi faces in liberated Washington Washington at the beginning of the Obama era has the feel of a city that has just been liberated from foreign occupation, or of a person who just snapped out of an inexplicable psychotic episode. The paranoia of the Bush days has passed. The world is no longer divided into children of light and children of darkness. Gershom Gorenberg |
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3/4/09 It's a staggering case; more staggering still that it has scarcely been mentioned on this side of the ocean. Last week two judges in Pennsylvania were convicted of jailing some 2,000 children in exchange for bribes from private prison companies. George Monbiot |
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3/3/09 For was this not the same Pope who actually visited Auschwitz and – to the understandable outrage of Jewish dignitaries who were present – blamed a Nazi “gang” for the Jewish Holocaust? Before this infallible pronouncement, an awful lot of people thought that the Nazi German nation was to blame for Auschwitz, but old Joseph apparently thought it was a mafia clique in Berlin that murdered six million European Jews. Robert Fisk |
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3/2/09 Over the course of a long career teaching English in community colleges, my most satisfying experiences were provided by the opportunity to work with returning students - those who had been away from education for five, 10 or even 20 years. Jaime O’Neill |
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3/1/09 Sex panics make for bad law. It could be said that they make for bad science, too, except that what has driven some of the most notorious legal cases to emerge from such panics has been more a masquerade of science, a belief tricked out in the language of medicine and social science to distract from the mumbo jumbo at its core. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is set to be the latest arena to test that belief, taking up the admissibility of "dissociative amnesia," or "repressed memory," in a case that some powerful interests no doubt hoped was as settled as the grave. JoAnn Wypijewski |
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2/28/09 Early this winter, the PBS "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" interviewed the medical director at a community clinic in Northern California. He recalled the sight of military equipment moving along railroad tracks next to his office. "I've joked with my colleagues," Dr. David Katz said, "if we could just get one of those Abrams tanks we could probably fund all the primary care clinics for a year." Norman Solomon |
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2/27/09 The GOP's Anti-Obama Propaganda Today’s Republicans are thumbing through Newt Gingrich’s worn playbook of 1993 looking for tips on how to blunt President Barack Obama’s political momentum and flip it to their advantage. In doing so, they also appear to have dug in to what might be called the secret appendix. Robert Parry |
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2/26/09 In past columns, I have asked without success for an explanation of why the United States should be at war with the Taliban, a violent sectarian Muslim reform movement of modest size in Afghanistan and Pakistan. William Pfaff |
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2/25/09 Guess what? The New Deal worked! The system the New Deal initiated kept us from experiencing a second Great Depression for nearly half a century. We are in our current mess in large measure because we dismantled that system. Republicans would have us be afraid of a new New Deal. But based on the track record of the original, a new New Deal is just what we need. Steven Conn |
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2/24/09 What Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman - and a staunch defender of free markets - actually said was, “It may be necessary to temporarily nationalize some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring.” I agree. Paul Krugman |
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2/23/09 Afghanistan: Think South Vietnam in 1965 President Barack Obama last week announced that he was ordering an additional 17,000 American troops to Afghanistan, more than half the reinforcements that ground commanders have been seeking for months. By providing that half a loaf, the new president hopes to buy some time to absorb and analyze new strategic studies of a protracted, long-neglected war that's been going south on us at an alarming pace. Joseph L Galloway |
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2/22/09 Jesus Would Be a Liberal Democrat, Right? You gotta love the far right. Now they are running an ad invoking Jesus in support of Herbert Hoover/George W. Bush economic policies. If they imply Jesus would support George Bush's tax cuts for the rich, do they believe Jesus would support Dick Cheney's policies of torture? Would Jesus support Abu Ghraib? How about the cover-up of Abu Ghraib? Would Jesus support that? How about insurance companies opposing healthcare reform? Brent Budowsky |
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2/21/09 Once You See What Truly Happened in Gaza, it Will Change You Forever As a Jew, an American and a mother, I felt compelled to witness, firsthand, what my people and my taxdollars had done during this invasion. Visiting Gaza filled me with unbearable sadness. Unlike the primitive weapons of Hamas, the Israelis had so many sophisticated ways to murder, maim and destroy-unmanned drones, F-16s dropping "smart bombs" that miss, Apache helicopters launching missiles, tanks firing from the ground, ships shelling Gaza from the sea. So many horrific weapons stamped with Made in the USA. While Hamas' attacks on Israeli villages are deplorable, Israel's disproportionate response is unconscionable, with 1,330 Palestinians dead vs. 13 Israelis. Medea Benjamin |
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2/20/09 Cross of Irony: Defense Spending of The Absurd "Down the long lane of the history yet to be written, America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. . . . Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose." Robert Koehler |
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2/19/09 Don’t Know Who Offends Me More, Blitzer or Trump You see, if Trump's businesses were held to the same standard as we were when trouble came, he'd have to drain every available source of money, be harassed by creditors, be unable to borrow any more money from anyone in his life - and certainly not a bank - and then he should get garnished. Finally, he should be put out of his home for being such a failure in terms of money management. That would be how Trump would see the world if our laws treated him as it does the rest of us. Donna Smith |
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2/18/09 In his inaugural address, he promised to reach out a hand to anyone willing to unclench their fist. The GOP responded not only with clenched fists, but with swinging clenched fists. It seems early to give up already, but facts are facts, and Obama needs to withdraw his hand and just wave these people off. William Rivers Pitt |
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2/16/09 Do We All Have the Capacity for Inhuman Cruelty? Between 1963 and 1974, Dr. Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments that would become one of the most famous social psychology studies of the 20th century. His focus was how average people respond to authority, and what he revealed stunned and disturbed people the world over. Liliana Segura |
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2/15/09 Do We All Have the Capacity for Inhuman Cruelty? Between 1963 and 1974, Dr. Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments that would become one of the most famous social psychology studies of the 20th century. His focus was how average people respond to authority, and what he revealed stunned and disturbed people the world over. Liliana Segura |
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2/14/09 Wall Street Mocked American Values The announcement last week that Trader Monthly magazine was ceasing publication was one of those moments when a chance arrow of history scores a perfect bull's eye on a deserving target. The current recession, brought on at least in part by Wall Street's bonus lust, has claimed countless innocent victims. But in this case it has finally delivered a comeuppance to our era's loudest, gaudiest, cockiest champion of Wall Street excess. Thomas Frank |
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2/13/09 Few Peacemakers in Israel's Knesset The deadlock has occurred because the Israeli political configuration has allowed a sizable minority of settlers and their sympathizers to block all past governments from making the necessary compromises. This deadlock, however, can be overcome if the international community, and particularly the US, assumes a more interventionist role. And while intervention may be conceived by some as anti-Israeli, particularly if such intervention includes sanctions, it is the only way to secure Israel's existence in the long run. Neve Gordon |
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2/12/09 In private industry, the borrower - especially a desperate borrower and one who is already bankrupt - does not get to dictate the terms of his bailout loan. If my company runs out of money, I don't get to go around telling people how they will give me a loan and how much money I will make going forward. No, they are the ones giving the money. They will set the rules. That's how capitalism is supposed to work. Cenk Uygur |
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2/11/09 By founding The Milton Friedman Institute, the university signals that it is aligning itself with a reactionary political program supported by the wealthiest, greediest and most powerful people and institutions in this country. Friedman’s ideology caused enormous damage to the American middle class and to working families here and around the world. It is not an ideology that a great institution like the University of Chicago should be seeking to advance. Bernie Sanders |
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2/10/09 If you stack a corporate board and its compensation committee with top executives from other firms, what you end up creating is a cross-corporate club that rewards its members with the stakeholders' money. If the stakeholders are either doing well enough not to object (such as shareholders during an asset bubble) or aren't doing well but lack the power to do anything about it (such as workers during a time of deunionization), then voilà: Your CEO ends up owning the Fifth Avenue flat, the Hampton beach house, the Aspen ski lodge, the Mayfair menage and at least two-thirds of the Senate Finance Committee, unless the public protests. Harold Meyerson |
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2/9/09 What allowed some people to see the financial crash coming while so many others missed its gathering force? I put that question recently to Nouriel Roubini, who has come to be known as "Dr. Doom" because of his insistent warnings starting in 2006 that we were heading into a global firestorm. David Ignatius |
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2/8/09 It's hard to believe, but there was a time not so long ago when charity was going to save the world. The right argued for a "compassionate conservatism" that would transfer the care and feeding of the poor from government to churches, while liberals, who saw government funds for good works shrinking, increasingly relied on the kindness of foundations and NGOs. Bill Gates, George Soros and other titans became masters of a burgeoning nonprofit universe, donating huge sums for healthcare, education, antipoverty programs and the bolstering--or creation--of "civil society" around the world. Bono was its troubadour and Slate, with its annual list of the sixty most munificent donors, was its scorekeeper. Bill Clinton, who famously proclaimed "the era of big government is over," was its impresario. Katha Pollitt |
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2/7/09 As a politician, Mr. Daschle often struck a populist note, but his financial disclosure report shows that in the last two years, he received $2.1 million from a law firm, Alston & Bird; $2 million in consulting fees from a private equity firm run by a major Democratic fundraiser, Leo Hindery Jr. (which provided him with the car and driver); and at least $220,000 for speeches to health care, pharmaceutical and insurance companies. He also received nearly $100,000 from health-related companies affected by federal regulation. James Ridgeway |
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2/6/09 Is the Entire Bailout Strategy Flawed? Let's Rethink This Before It's Too Late Then came the idea of equity injection, without strings, so that as we poured money into the banks, they poured out money, to their executives in the form of bonuses, to their shareholders in the form of dividends. Some of what they had left over they used to buy other banks -- to pursue strategic goals for which they could not have found private finance. The last thing in their mind was to restart lending. Joseph Stiglitz |
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2/5/09 It's hell being a celebrity, especially if you're young and find yourself at a party, where marijuana and cameras should never mix. Kathleen Parker |
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2/4/09 No longer the polarizing, racially tinged political issue it was when Ronald Reagan attacked "welfare queens," the welfare system today is dying a quiet death, neatly chronicled in the pages of academic and policy journals, largely unnoticed by the rest of us. Yet its demise carries significant implications. Among the most serious: the rise of what academics call the "disconnected," people who live well below the poverty line and are neither working nor receiving cash benefits like Social Security disability or tanf. Estimates put this group at roughly 2 million women caring for 4 million children, many dealing with a host of challenges from mental illness to domestic violence. "We don't really know how they survive," says Blank. Stephanie Mencimer |
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2/3/09 GOP Loves Limbaugh, Loathes Ledbetter The Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower exists now only as a nostalgic memory, an historic footnote. Any sense of moderation, inclusion and public service for the public good have been effectively purged from the party that now takes its strategic marching orders exclusively from a money-grubbing huckster and third-rate entertainer. Rush Limbaugh is the indisputable face and soul of the post-Bush Republican Party. Bill Gallagher |
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2/2/09 To these early movement conservatives, having "moral clarity" meant that you weren't the kind of weakling who would be deceived into negotiation with the Commies, or consent to arms control, or be duped into merely containing their relentless march across the globe. It meant that you had the intestinal fortitude (or pure enough vital bodily fluids, as you wish) to do whatever had to be done to permanently exterminate America's implacable enemies -- whether it was to send in the Marines or drop the bomb. Sara Robinson |
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2/1/09 German Far-Right Hails Holocaust Denier Williamson Germany's far right has welcomed the move by German Pope Benedict XVI to lift the excommunication of British bishop Richard Williamson, who denied the Holocaust in an interview last week. German Jewish leaders are appalled at the decision. Peter Wensierski |
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1/31/09 AUSTIN, Texas -- The question I have been asked most often during the last two years is, "What would Molly think about this?" Molly Ivins would have loved this election. She would have loved the beautiful sight of "We the People" finally stepping up to become the real deciders. She would have loved the drama, the comedy and the characters. Betsy Moon |
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1/30/09 Nadje Al-Ali's new book, What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq, analyses how Iraqi women have fared since the US invasion of March 2003. The news, unsurprisingly, is grim. Written with the political scientist Nicola Pratt, the book is based on interviews with 120 women, including Iraqi women's rights activists, NGO workers and international policymakers. The climate that they describe in Iraq is one of lawless "hyper-patriarchy", and with this evidence in tow, Al-Ali and Pratt take aim at a wide range of targets. These include the occupying powers, extremist Islamist militias, Iraqi leaders and "imperialist feminists" (those who claim solidarity with women from developing countries while stereotyping their cultures as barbaric). Sara Wajid |
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1/29/09 My Future As An Arms Manufacturer I remember reading an editorial in a magazine called Weapons Today that described how the industry had fallen on lean times. But "Cheer up!" the editor wrote, because now that Saddam Hussein has invaded Kuwait, things will start looking up, and in the future we in the arms industry can look forward to Islam replacing Communism to keep our order books full. Terry Jones |
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1/28/09 Two Santa Clauses or How The Republican Party Has Conned America for Thirty Years Wanniski decided to turn the classical world of economics - which had operated on this simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years - on its head. In 1974 he invented a new phrase - "supply side economics" - and suggested that the reason economies grew wasn't because people had money and wanted to buy things with it but, instead, because things were available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money. The more things there were, the faster the economy would grow. Thom Hartman |
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1/27/09 George W Bush's Sci-Fi Disaster In retrospect, George W Bush’s presidency could be viewed as a science-fiction disaster movie in which an alien force seizes illegitimate control of a nation, saps its wealth, wreaks devastation, but is finally dislodged and forced to depart amid human hope for a rebirth. Robert Parry |
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1/26/09 Tina Turner Burns Down Legs For Insurance Money LOS ANGELES—Police officers arrested Tina Turner this week on suspicion of arson, reckless endangerment, and insurance fraud, following allegations that the legendary R&B singer burned down her legs for financial gain. the ONION |
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1/25/09 As a Golani brigade commander explained, if there is any concern that a house is booby-trapped, even if it is filled with civilians, it should be targeted and hit, to ensure that it is not mined - only then should it be approached. Without going into the moral aspects, such fighting tactics explain why there were no instances in which there was a need to assault homes where Hamas fighters were holed up. Reuven Padatzur |
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1/24/09 Obama lifts ban on abortion funds The Planned Parenthood Federation of America hailed the president for "lifting the stranglehold on women's health across the globe with the stroke of a pen." BBC NEWS |
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1/23/09 Powerful Rest And Fluids Industry Influencing Doctors' Treatment Of Colds WASHINGTON—A two-year investigation conducted in five major cities has exposed a widespread campaign by the formidable Rest and Fluids industry to infiltrate thousands of doctors' offices and dictate how they treat minor illnesses. the ONION |
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1/22/09 It was a plain speech, like those of early American presidents, better savored in the reading than in the listening. The new president didn't pull out the rhetorical stops; he didn't try to score points. He just told the truth -- including the hard parts -- about where the country is and where it needs to go. He could not have said it more clearly: "What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them -- that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply." David Ignatius |
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1/21/09 The Stories of Torture Sounded Made Up. They Weren't. Standing in the granite halls of the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse and listening to one hush-hush account, I was skeptical, but scribbled down the details anyway. As I later talked over the rumored claims with my editors, they reacted with a mixture of jaundiced disbelief and caution. Carol D Leonnig |
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1/20/09 What's It Going to Take to Lock Up Drug Company Execs? Drug-company corruption of American medicine is of course not news. What is news is that such corruption has become so egregious, so transparent, and so embarrassing that the New England Journal of Medicine, perhaps the most influential American medical journal, is now stating that "drastic action is essential to preserve the integrity of medical science and practice and to justify public trust." Bruce E Levine |
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1/19/09 HNN Poll: 61% of Historians Rate the Bush Presidency Worst A Pew Research Center poll released last week found that the share of the American public that approves of President George W. Bush has dropped to a new low of 28 percent. An unscientific poll of professional historians completed the same week produced results far worse for a president clinging to the hope that history will someday take a kinder view of his presidency than does contemporary public opinion. Robert S McElvaine |
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1/18/09 Arab leaders, being politicians with fragile popular bases, like to posture at times. Saddam did so most recently. When their bluff is called, it is the Arab people who suffer – as the Palestinian people are suffering right now. Just as Zionists take the support of Jews for granted, expecting them to justify every crime committed in the name of a Jewish homeland, many Muslim leaders take the solidarity of the Muslim "ummah" for granted. I refuse to let these leaders – Jewish or Muslim – take my support for granted. I refuse to suffer for them or let ordinary people – Muslim or Jewish – pay the price of their juvenile politics. Tabish Khair |
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1/17/09 FISA Ruling: A Case Study in 8 Years of Lying and Ignorance Ever since The New York Times, on December 16, 2005, first reported that President Bush ordered spying on Americans without the warrants required by FISA, the clear illegality that was unveiled -- FISA said that X was a felony and Bush admitted to doing X -- was continuously obscured by a combination of deceit on the part of Bush followers and ignorance, sloth and confusion on the part of the media. Beginning within the first days of the controversy, Bush followers who literally had no idea what they were talking about offered factually false claims and even distorted quotations from the statute to justify what was done. Glenn Greenwald |
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1/16/09 Rewriting the First Draft of History The mainstream American news media is just as responsible for what has happened in Iraq as the Bush administration; they are as responsible for the lies they repeated as the ones who first told them, and are as guilty for what happened in Iraq as the Bush administration officials they enabled and covered for. William Rivers Pitt |
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1/15/09 Are Americans Ready to Put Cataclysmic Consumption and Hedonism Behind Them? There is something especially unsettling about visiting Las Vegas these days -- and it is not the town's lascivious culture. A voyage to Sin City in this moment of ecological and economic crisis is a journey to a giant concave mirror reflecting back the magnified -- and ugly -- truths about this epoch of cataclysmic consumption and hubristic hedonism. David Sirota |
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1/14/09 Obama Won't Have to Kiss AIPAC's Ring As we wait to see how this debate shapes up, it's worth revisiting what we know about Barack Obama. In his personal life, he has exposed himself to both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide like few other incoming presidents. At the University of Chicago, he cultivated a friendship with the Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi, through whom he also came to know the late Edward Said. He visited the slums of Ramallah in the West Bank on his own initiative, after which he told an audience in Muscatine, Iowa, “Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.” Alexander Zaitchik |
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1/13/09 At long last, sir, have you left no sense of decency? Even as President George W. Bush was packing up his knick-knacks and calling for the moving van, the White House spin machine was whirring along at Warp 6, doing its best to put a happy face on the sorry history of his eight years in the Oval Office. Joseph L Galloway |
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1/12/09 Let history be clear on one point when it comes to Bush's mismanagement of the economy: Since January 2001, the month George W. Bush took office, the number of unemployed people has increased more than 84 percent. Isaiah J Poole |
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1/11/09 What's happening in Gaza is not a natural disaster, an earthquake or flood, for which it would be our duty and right to extend a helping hand to those affected, to send rescue squads, as we so love to do. Of all the rotten luck, all the disasters now occurring in Gaza are manmade - by us. Aid cannot be offered with bloodstained hands. Compassion cannot sprout from brutality. Gideon Levy |
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1/10/09 There is no one Republicans were more determined to keep out of the Senate than comedian Al Franken. It wasn't just that Franken had ridiculed their misrule over the past eight years with a stack of bestselling books and a three-year stint on Air America radio. GOP bosses who listened to what Franken was saying as he challenged Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman came to recognize that while the Saturday Night Live alum knew how to get a laugh, he was also a policy wonk with a "great communicator" flair for getting to the heart of economic matters. Ultimately, it was that skill that allowed Franken--a smart critic of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's initial schemes for bailing out Wall Street--to overcome the brutal assault from Coleman and his corporate cronies. John Nichols |
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1/9/09 The Greatest Greatness of George W. Bush From a certain perspective, one could argue that you have been the most successful president the country has ever seen. Think about it, because according to your definition of "success," it's true. You came into office looking to make your friends richer, and to fulfill as best you could your most overriding personal belief: that government is the problem, so government must be damaged and denuded to the point of impotence. William Rivers Pitt |
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1/8/09 Amazing solar-powered fridge invented by British student Not only is the fridge solar powered, it can also be built from household materials - making it ideal for the Third World. Emily Cummins, 21, came up with the idea while working on a school project in her grandfather's potting shed. The fridge is now improving the lives of thousands of poverty-stricken Africans. Chris Brook |
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1/7/09 A $7 billion missile-defense system for the United Arab Emirates. An estimated $15 billion potential sale of Lockheed Martin’s brand-new fighter plane to Israel. Billions of dollars in weaponry for Taiwan and Turkey. These and other recent deals helped make the United States the world’s leading arms-exporting nation. Frida Berrigan |
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1/6/09 The political party Hamas was elected to power in January 2006 with 44% of the vote to Fatah's 41%, receiving 76 of 132 parliamentary seats, in the first democratic election held in the Palestinian territories. This was not what Washington wanted. Gary Leupp |
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1/5/09 The Right Wing's Latest Argument Against Public Health Care -- We'd Like It Too Much A common thread is emerging in the right-wing response to health care reform. Its opponents aren't claiming that public health care will be bad. Rather, they are terrified that the new system will be so good that no citizen would buy expensive private insurance -- or vote for politicians who wanted to take public insurance away. Lindsay Beyerstein |
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1/4/09 Did You Know 200,000 Vets Are Sleeping on the Streets? On any given night 200,000 U.S. veterans sleep homeless on the streets of America. One out of every four people -- and one out of every three men -- sleeping in a car, in front of a shop door, or under a freeway overpass has worn a military uniform. Some like Brantley have been on the streets for years. Others are young and women returning home wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan, quickly slipping through the cracks. Aaron Glantz |
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1/3/09 Was the 'Credit Crunch' a Myth Used to Sell a Trillion-Dollar Scam? Economist Dean Baker explains the situation in simple terms: The media, he argues, "are blaming the economic collapse on a 'credit crunch' instead of the more obvious problem that consumers just lost $6 trillion of housing wealth and another $8 trillion of stock wealth." It's a commonsense argument: much of the economic growth of the Bush era existed on paper only, built on the rise of a massive bubble in real estate values rather than growth in productive industries. When all that ephemeral wealth vaporized -- and with the economy shedding jobs like a dog with dermatitis -- consumers stopped buying, and businesses, anticipating a long slowdown, stopped seeking the loans that they might have otherwise tapped to expand their operations. Joshua Holland |
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1/2/09 Michigan University Puts Out Banned Words List DETROIT -- You can finally call it a "recession," thanks to President George W. Bush's recent use of the term to describe the fragile state of the U.S. economy. But word-watchers far and wide forbid you to say the pain has spread from "Wall Street to Main Street." |
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1/1/09 How NASA Became Massively Dysfunctional In recent weeks, the agency issued a slick, 215-page publication attributing success after success "benefiting society" to itself. Spinoff: 50 Years of NASA-Derived Technologies (1958-2008) blows the NASA horn for purportedly making enormous contributions to: highway safety, "improved" radial tires, land-mine removal, memory foam, enriched baby food, portable cordless vacuums, artificial limbs, aircraft anti-icing systems, and on and on. About all NASA doesn’t take credit for is curing the common cold. Karl Grossman |
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12/31/08 Palestine’s Guernica and the Myths of Israeli Victimhood In the most densely populated area on the planet, tons upon tons of explosives have been dropped. The first estimates of injured are in the thousands. Israel will claim that these are merely 'collateral damage' or accidental deaths. The sheer ridiculousness and inhumanity of such a claim should sicken the world community. Mustafa Barghouthi |
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12/30/08 A weary social worker writes: You Know Who We Really Hate? Our local social services department actually hired fraud investigators at the same time that it was laying off child protective workers demonstrating conclusively where our values lie and how genuinely mean spirited we are as a people. At the federal level Social Security routinely denies people eligible for benefits in the hopes that they will not reapply. Many people who receive benefits must hire a lawyer before social security will concede that they are indeed eligible. As the resources have become more limited, the level of scrutiny and inhumanity has risen accordingly. Jake T Snake |
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12/29/08 The neighborhood bully strikes again Once again, Israel's violent responses, even if there is justification for them, exceed all proportion and cross every red line of humaneness, morality, international law and wisdom. What began yesterday in Gaza is a war crime and the foolishness of a country. Gideon Levy |
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12/28/08 It's All God - Amen, Om, Whatever Eliezer Sobel bowed, chanted, nude wrestled, meditated, and overdosed on 'shrooms in a 40-year search to find God. But he still feels empty inside. Anneli Rufus |
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12/27/08 One Missing Word Sowed the Seeds of Catastrophe [United Nations Security Council Resolution 242] was passed in November 1967, after Israel had occupied Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Sinai and Golan, and it emphasises “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and calls for “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” The Israelis say that they are not required to withdraw from all the territories—because the word “all” is missing and since the definite article “the” is missing before the word “territories,” it’s up to Israel to decide which bits of the occupied territories it gives up and which bits it keeps. Robert Fisk |
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12/26/08 The Pentagon is muscling in everywhere. It's time to stop the mission creep. We no longer have a civilian-led government. It is hard for a lifelong Republican and son of a retired Air Force colonel to say this, but the most unnerving legacy of the Bush administration is the encroachment of the Department of Defense into a striking number of aspects of civilian government. Our Constitution is at risk. Thomas A. Schweich |
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12/25/08 Weed Delivery Guy Saves Christmas MADISON, WI—The holidays evoke images of carolers and hot cocoa, sleigh rides through the crisp country air, and chestnuts roasting on an open fire. But for the four residents of a drafty little apartment on Johnson Street, such holiday traditions seemed nothing more than fairy tales. For, through a combination of poverty, circumstance, and plain old bad luck, these young gentlemen nearly saw their holiday dreams shattered like so many fallen ornaments. the ONION |
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12/24/08 The financial services industry has claimed an ever-growing share of the nation’s income over the past generation, making the people who run the industry incredibly rich. Yet, at this point, it looks as if much of the industry has been destroying value, not creating it. And it’s not just a matter of money: the vast riches achieved by those who managed other people’s money have had a corrupting effect on our society as a whole. Paul Krugman |
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12/23/08 The Disciples of Hatred, in Their Own Words and Images Black American lives were viewed as expendable in the pre-civil rights South. The murderers who hanged, dismembered or burned black victims alive — before crowds of cheering onlookers — knew well that the law would not act against them. These savage rituals were meant to keep the black community on its knees. Brent Staples |
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12/22/08 LBO No Mo: Stop Speculators From Ruining Strong Companies Leveraged buyouts (LBOs) are Wall Street's solution to American capitalism's dirtiest secret and biggest problem: no one has any money. Really. Working as an investment banker during the 1980s, I was repeatedly astonished when deals would fall apart because would-be buyers of major corporations didn't have enough cash on hand to buy a house in the Hamptons. Many of the wealthiest people in the world, it turned out, have zero or negative net worth. According to The New York Times, for example, one of Donald Trump's biggest sources of income was his job hosting the TV show "The Apprentice." Those buildings with his name on them? He leased his name to developers who liked his brand. Ted Rall |
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12/21/08 Bailouts: The Ultimate Double Standard Imagine if the automakers had been offered the same kind of government assistance as the banks. Detroit's Big Three would each get new government capital totaling many tens of billions to replace their lost equity, as well as government guarantees running into the hundreds of billions. And government, oddly, would ask almost nothing in return. There would be no "car czar" to supervise Detroit's management, no wage and benefit cuts for employees, no review of product lines, and no government-mandated restructuring plan. A pretty sweet deal. Robert Kuttner |
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12/20/08 Bush makes a farewell tour. Good riddance We've been treated to a real spectacle this week as President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney limped into the home stretch of their Magical History Tour, employing distortions, half-truths and untruths in a final, desperate attempt to pervert or somehow prevent history from judging them accurately. Joseph L Galloway |
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12/19/08 $700 Billion Bailout Celebrated With Lavish $800 Billion Executive Party GEORGE TOWN, CAYMAN ISLANDS—Amid the bleak backdrop of imminent economic collapse, worried observers got some good news last October when executives from the nation's top 10 failing companies celebrated the historic $700 billion government bailout with an ultra- extravagant $800 billion party aimed at restoring confidence and bolstering their resolve. the ONION |
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12/18/08 Theory vs. Reality: Why Market Absolutism Fails Economists are no more inclined than the rest of us to live in a fantasy world – not, that is, as they go about the practical business of living their everyday lives. But when economists write technical papers and teach university courses, they often enter a theoretical realm of abstract concepts such as “economic man” (homo economicus) and “perfect markets,” articulated with virtuoso advanced mathematical manipulations. Very elegant, and very unreal. Ernest Partridge |
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12/17/08 How The American Health Care System Got That Way In 1942, the US set up a National War Labor Board. It had the power to set a cap on all wage increases. But it let employers circumvent the cap by offering "fringe benefits" - notably, health insurance. The fringe benefits created a huge tax subsidy; they were treated as tax-deductible expenses for corporations, but not as taxable income for workers. Tim Costello, Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith |
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12/16/08 Senate Report Links Bush to Detainee Homicides; Media Yawns The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report issued on Thursday -- which documents that "former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba" and "that Rumsfeld's actions were 'a direct cause of detainee abuse' at Guantanamo and 'influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques ... in Afghanistan and Iraq'" -- raises an obvious and glaring question: how can it possibly be justified that the low-level Army personnel carrying out these policies at Abu Ghraib have been charged, convicted and imprisoned, while the high-level political officials and lawyers who directed and authorized these same policies remain free of any risk of prosecution? Glenn Greenwald |
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12/15/08 How Hedge Funds and Private Equity Hurt Us One element in the disaster that has overtaken the American economy is the vast misallocation of capital by entities such as the private equity funds. They are not venture capital enterprises that made bad bets on what seemed like good ideas but free-market vampires. They have been able to take over healthy business organizations and ruin them for their own profit and the larger society's loss. Nicholas von Hoffman |
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12/14/08 The God Series: Because Religion Is the Battleground of the 21st Century The man with the most military power in the history of the world is reported to have said, "I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq ...' And I did." Larry Beinhart |
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12/13/08 Typically, few people turn to dead French poets for economic analysis, but Stéphane Mallarmé proved wiser than many a billionaire financial trader when he wrote, “A throw of the dice will never abolish chance.” Translated into the prosaic language of the global economic crisis, his epigram might read, “Even the sale of more than $60 trillion in credit default swaps will never abolish the risk of crummy loans.” David Moberg |
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12/12/08 There will come a moment when the most urgent threats posed by the credit crisis have eased and the larger task before us will be to chart a direction for the economic steps ahead. This will be a dangerous moment. Behind the debates over future policy is a debate over history - a debate over the causes of our current situation. The battle for the past will determine the battle for the present. So it's crucial to get the history straight. Joseph Stiglitz |
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12/11/08 Supreme Court Overturns Bush v. Gore In an unexpected judicial turnaround, the Supreme Court this week reversed its 2000 ruling in the landmark case of Bush v. Gore, stripping George W. Bush of his earlier political victory, and declaring Albert Arnold Gore the 43rd president of the United States of America. the ONION |
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12/10/08 Packs of Robots Will Hunt Down Uncooperative Humans The latest request from the Pentagon jars the senses. At least, it did mine. They are looking for contractors to provide a "Multi-Robot Pursuit System" that will let packs of robots "search for and detect a non-cooperative human." Paul Marks |
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12/9/08 Our Biggest Problem Is Bigness The visionary Leopold Kohr (in The Breakdown of Nations) got it right over 50 years ago: the problem is bigness, concentrated, centralized power, answerable to no one. Today we see a federal government that has far too often willingly, happily in fact, yielded to the power of bigness, at the expense of the legitimate rights and powers of individuals, families, regions, our liberties and our communities. Burt Cohen |
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12/8/08 The Kids Are Alright. But Their Parents ... Whatever you call them (I'll just call them early Xers), the numbers are clear: Compared with every other birth cohort, they have performed the worst on standardized exams, acquired the fewest educational degrees and been the least attracted to professional careers. In a word, they're the dumbest. Neil Howe |
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12/7/08 Reporter reflects: 'Their grief is my last remembrance of Iraq' I saw a lot of people cry while I was in Iraq, but I think of the hugging soldiers and the rocking civilian most often. Maybe it was the strangeness of seeing uniformed soldiers in tears. Maybe it's because they're the last sad scene I saw before I flew away. Or maybe it's the way they made me feel: guilty, because I got to leave. Corrine Reilly |
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12/6/08 Obama: Ratify the Women’s Convention Soon The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly, is often described as the international bill of rights for women. The United States remains the only democracy that refuses to ratify the treaty. Marjorie Cohn |
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12/5/08 Health-Care Reform Could Kill the GOP For decades Republicans have made policy with a higher purpose in mind: to solidify the GOP base or to damage the institutions and movements aligned with the other side. One of their fondest slogans is "Defund the Left," and under that banner they have attacked labor unions and trial lawyers and tried to sever the links between the lobbying industry and the Democratic Party. Consider as well their long-cherished dreams of privatizing Social Security, which would make Wall Street, instead of Washington, the protector of our beloved seniors. Or their larger effort to demonstrate, by means of egregious misrule, that government is incapable of delivering the most basic services. Thomas Frank |
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12/4/08 For the GOP, the Economic Meltdown May Have Happened Just a Wee Bit Early I think key officials inside the Administration knew that the financial system was swirling inside the economic toilet bowl and would eventuate in a massive meltdown; after all, there were numerous economists, inside and outside the government, who more than a year ago were warning about the housing bubble getting ready to burst, with disastrous impact on the availability of credit. But, in this scenario, the CheneyBush higher-ups believed that, with luck, denial and a helluva lot of deficit financing, they could delay the inevitable collapse until after the election. Bernard Weiner |
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12/3/08 Maryland Police Play Spies - And Look Like Fools For years, the Maryland State Police, eager to play anti-terrorist surveillance agents just like the big boys on TV, spied on suburban peace activists who may have been loud, but never posed the slightest threat to the nation or the state. Marc Fisher |
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12/2/08 An Interrogator Speaks: I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq I'm not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work. Matthew Alexander |
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12/1/08 One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex In the spring of 2007 a tiny military contractor with a slender track record went shopping for a precious Beltway commodity. The company, Defense Solutions, sought the services of a retired general with national stature, someone who could open doors at the highest levels of government and help it win a huge prize: the right to supply Iraq with thousands of armored vehicles. David Barstow |
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11/30/08 Bush's Recession, Rooted in Self-Interest While George Bush ran for President as a born-again Christian and "compassionate conservative," his behavior indicated he was guided not by the principles of Jesus but rather by a narcissistic morality of personal advantage. While making a revealing documentary about the 2000 Bush campaign, filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi asked the candidate why she should vote for him; Bush replied. "It's in your interests." Pelosi observed, "He didn't push my country's interest - but rather, my own." Bush's primary consideration was what's in it for me? Bob Burnett |
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11/29/08 Hollywood’s Closet Still Closed for Business On Nov. 27, 1978, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, was assassinated. Thirty years later, on Nov. 26, 2008, the film “Milk” will open, directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Sean Penn as Harvey Milk. Larry Gross |
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11/28/08 The Most Dangerous Woman in the World Aafia Siddiqui was once considered a brilliant scientist. Then the US government called her the new face of al-Qaida -- a Pakistani woman who ranked among America's top terrorism suspects. Now the MIT-educated mother of three is in custody, claiming her long disappearance was a wrongful abduction by the CIA. Juliane von Mittelstaedt |
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11/27/08 Worried About Thanksgiving Fights with Right-Wing Family Members? Oh, Lordy. It is that time again. Thursday is Thanksgiving -- the official kickoff event of the 2008 holiday season. For a lot of progressives, these festivities also mean that we're about to spend more quality time with our conservative relatives over the next six weeks than is strictly good for our blood pressure, stress levels, or continued sanity. Sara Robinson |
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11/26/08 Cavemen Control Mainstream Media: Look How Women Were Treated During the Election On Election Night, toggling among TV channels, I noticed it was nearly all guys on MSNBC, with only superb newcomer Rachel Maddow at the analysis table. Over on PBS, although Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff conducted interviews with insiders and observers, the main political analysis was provided, as it usually is, by David Brooks and Mark Shields, anchored by Jim Lehrer. This is a trio I respect but which should have been enlarged with women and minorities for that night especially, and at other points throughout the campaign. Sheila Gibbons |
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11/25/08 Guantanamo Justice After Seven Years Since the Bush administration began transporting men and boys to Guantanamo Bay in January 2002, it has tried to prevent them from presenting their cases before a neutral federal judge. Indeed, the naval base was turned into a prison camp precisely to keep the detainees away from impartial courts. The government argued that federal courts had no jurisdiction over men detained on Cuban soil. Twice, the Supreme Court rejected that argument, finding that the United States exercises complete jurisdiction and control over the Guantanamo Bay base. Marjorie Cohn |
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11/24/08 Kabul 30 Years Ago, and Kabul Today. Have We Learned Nothing? Almost 29 years ago, the Afghan "mujahedin" began a campaign to end the mixed schooling of boys and girls in the remote mountain passes, legislation pushed through by successive communist governments. Schools were burned down. Outside Jalalabad, I found a headmaster and his headmistress wife burned to death. Today, the Afghan Taliban are campaigning to end the mixed schooling of boys and girls - indeed the very education of young women - across the great deserts of Kandahar and Helmand. Schools have been burned down. Teachers have been executed. Robert Fisk |
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11/23/08 To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh. Kathleen Parker |
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11/22/08 The Fall of the Wall: Hard Times in Money World For many years, the area belonged quite literally to pigs, thousands of them, binging on garbage. Imagine that landscape then and picture the crime scene and symbol of greed that Wall Street has become. Danny Schechter |
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11/21/08 Shut the Doors on a Disgraced Military School The U.S. Army School of the Americas, renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001, has a long and shameful history of teaching torture, extortion and execution to infamous graduates like Manuel Noriega, the former dictator of Panama. Nearly 60,000 alumni have returned to Bolivia, El Salvador, and Nicaragua to suppress human rights leaders, political dissidents and innocent civilians swept up in the region's often violent struggles for social justice. Marie Dennis |
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11/20/08 Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue What we're talking about here is the torture of detained terrorist suspects in American custody in a grotesque violation of both our treaty obligations under the Geneva Conventions and our historic principles as a democratic nation. Joseph Galloway |
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11/19/08 Many of us believed that Vietnam was a catharsis, a moving beyond a point to which we could never return. It took only 28 years to get from Saigon to Baghdad. And we took the exact same road. Don't be too ashamed the trick we fell for was the same one Mark Twain warned of when he wrote, "Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor ..." "All you have to do ...," said Hermann Goering "... is tell them that they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." Marc Ash |
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11/18/08 Why the Economy Grows Like Crazy Amid High Taxes High taxes create an incentive to reinvest profits into long-term growth. With high taxes, the only way to retain the bulk of the wealth created by a business is by reinvesting it in the business -- in plants, equipment, staff, research and development, new products and all the rest. Larry Beinhart |
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11/17/08 Blackwater Busted? Six Guards May Be Charged in Iraq Massacre After more than five years of rampant violence and misconduct carried out by the massive army of private corporate contractors in Iraq -- actions that have gone totally unpunished under any system of law -- the US Justice Department appears to be on the verge of handing down the first indictments against armed private forces for crimes committed in Iraq. The reported targets of the "draft" indictments: six Blackwater operatives involved in the September 16, 2007, killing of seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square. Jeremy Scahill |
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11/16/08 The embassy is still not officially open, but Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq, hosted a party on the Wednesday morning after the election to celebrate the occasion of the election. One of the guests was Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq's foreign minister. He said: "The size of this embassy and the number of employees who will occupy it are a sign of the American government's commitment to democracy in Iraq." He got the bit about the size right. The embassy is as big as the Vatican. Christopher Brauchli |
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11/15/08 Predicting the Nature of Obama's Presidency Barber's predictive analysis of Bush - like many others of his uncanny calls -was more than prescient; it was spooky in its accuracy. Bush showed all the traits of Professor Barber's "active/negative" president: He is aggressive in pursuing the work of the president, and thus an "active president," but he finds very little personal satisfaction in that work, making him a "negative president." Using Barber's analysis, I wrote that no one should look for a reassuring second term from Bush. John W Dean |
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11/14/08 Keep Larry Summers as Far as Possible from the US Treasury Summers was one of the key architects of our financial crisis -- hiring him to fix the economy makes as much sense as appointing Paul Wolfowitz to oversee the Iraq withdrawal. And when you look at the trail of economic destruction Summers left behind in other crisis-stricken countries who sought his advice in the past, then "terror" might be a more appropriate word than "disappointment." Mark Ames |
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11/13/08 “Too Big To Fail” has an Easy Answer: Anti-Trust or Public Control From the moment the crisis first struck, with the near collapse of AIG, the mantra has been that companies like AIG, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Citibank, etc.--and more recently General Motors Corp. and Ford--are "too big to fail." That is, it is argued that these companies are so huge that if they were to collapse into the rubble they deserve to be, it would damage the nation irreparably. David Lindorff |
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11/12/08 Making matters worse, or more widespread throughout the economy, just as with mortgage debt, credit card debt is put into pools that are then resold to investment houses, other banks and institutional investors. About 45 percent of the nation's $900-plus billion in credit card debt has been packaged into these pools, and so many companies, not just a few, are at risk of being forced out of business by credit card debt write-offs. Danny Schechter |
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11/11/08 On Veterans Day, Don't Forget About the War The War in Iraq has disappeared from the headlines. The ongoing economic crisis has Americans looking inward, wondering if they can keep their homes and their jobs, with little interest in death and destruction half a world away. According to the Pew Research Center, media coverage of the war has plummeted from an average of 15 percent of stories in July 2007, to 3 percent this February, to just 2 percent of stories during the last week of October. Aaron Glantz |
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11/10/08 The 5 Most Wanted Rip-off Artists from Wall St to Washington This unbridling has been the long-sought goal of a cabal of deregulation ideologues who dwell in laissez-fairyland. During the past two decades, they have relentlessly pushed their economic fantasies into law. Their theory was that (to use Ronald Reagan's simple construct) "the magic of the marketplace" would create an eternal rainbow of prosperity through financial "innovation"--if only the market was unshackled from any pesky public regulations. What the dereg theorists missed, however, is that magicians don't perform magic. They perform illusions. Jim Hightower |
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11/9/08 Right after the 2004 election, a California college student started a website called sorryeverybody.com, "an apology to the world for the reelection of George W. Bush." He invited Americans to submit photos with messages to the world, and thousands did. In one photo, a man holds up a handwritten note: "Sorry World (We Tried). -- Half of America." Another note reads, "I'm Sorry World, I Miss You So Much." A third promises, "Dear World, It'll Get Better." Rosa Brooks |
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11/8/08 The Reagan Revolution was the formative political experience of my generation’s lifetime, like the Great Depression, the Second World War or Vietnam for those before us. And in its intellectual and moral paucity, in its eventual hegemony, these years shut down, for some of us, the ability to fully imagine another way. Judith Warner |
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11/7/08 This is the moment to let emotion speak and cynicism fall silent. This is the time to let go for a moment of all the anti-American feelings that have spread among many of us throughout the world for the past 10 years. A moment before the United States itself became the axis of evil - it was already very close - a moment before it became a hated and ostracized power, the American people proved to the whole world on Tuesday that there is another America. Gideon Levy |
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11/6/08 WSJ Defends Bush in Malodorous Tribute In one of the more asinine posts I have read lately the Wall Street Journal today ran an opinion piece titled "The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace," which I recommend to anyone needing a real howler to start the day after the stress and tension of a long and rancorous election season. Bob Higgins |
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11/5/08 They did it. They really did it. So often crudely caricatured by others, the American people yesterday stood in the eye of history and made an emphatic choice for change for themselves and the world. Though bombarded by a blizzard of last-minute negative advertising that should shame the Republican party, American voters held their nerve and elected Barack Obama as their new president to succeed George Bush. Elected him, what is more, by a clearer majority than one of those bitter narrow margins that marked the last two elections. Editorial, The Guardian |
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11/4/08 They’ve squandered lives, fortunes and our sacred honor Here’s to the American people, the electorate, for finally coming to their senses and voting for something different, for someone different and for a chance to fix the multitude of man-made disasters that confront us. Joseph Galloway |
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11/3/08 Back in the 1840s, there was a group called the Know Nothings. They were against immigrants and for real Americans. ("Real American" did not then, as it does not now, refer to Indians; it refers to descendants of English immigrants.) The movement was based on fear. Irish and German Catholics were going to take over. They would take orders from the Pope-in-Rome (one word). Their values were not "our values." They drank. Their nunneries were virtual brothels and when the nuns had babies they practiced infanticide. Larry Beinhart |
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11/2/08 McCain's Big Backfire: Majority of Americans Like the Idea of Spreading the Wealth John McCain and Joe the Plumber are campaigning for Barack Obama, and they don't even know it. The more McCain has ramped up his attacks on Obama as a "spreader of wealth," the more the country has lined up behind the Democrat's plan to spread the wealth. If McCain's economic agenda was a gun and his attacks on Obama's agenda the bullets, the old soldier would have shot both his feet clean off a long time ago. Alexander Zaitchik |
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11/1/08 The hedge fund industry coined a term several years ago for the idea that special people (i.e., hedge fund managers) could achieve above-average returns without taking commensurate risk. They called this investment nirvana "alpha," to distinguish it from the "beta" of average market returns available to ordinary investors who tracked, say, the S&P 500. David Ignatius |
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10/31/08 The glasses function as a device for the critique of ideology. In other words, they enable him to see the real message lying beneath the glossy, colorful surface. What would we see if we were to observe the Republican presidential campaign through such glasses? Slavoj Žižek |
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10/30/08 US Raids Ignore International Law While US officials continue to avoid discussing the weekend strikes that killed eight people in eastern Syria, Middle East experts have condemned the attacks as a violation of international law that threatens to further destabilize US-Syria relations. Matt Renner and Maya Schenwar |
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10/29/08 The Age of Triumphalism Is Over By cutting a deal with a charter member of the "axis of evil," President Bush has definitively abandoned the principles that he staked out in the wake of 9/11. The president who once defined America's purpose as "ending tyranny" is now accommodating the world's last authentically Stalinist regime. Although Bush still inhabits the White House, the Bush era has effectively ended. Andrew Bacevich |
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10/28/08 My settler colleague, Israel Harel, his community's champion at rolling his eyes, playing innocent and speaking with a honeyed tongue, is once again grieving and playing the victim. In a column published here last week ("Have we become Sodom?" October 23), he complained that the reason for what he termed destructive criticism of the settlers is hatred. And indeed, Mr. Harel, this time, you're right: Large segments of Israeli society do indeed hate. But this is not baseless hatred, not hatred for the sake of hatred, to use your words. It is hatred for your enterprise. You have earned this hatred honestly - the only honest thing about your enterprise. Gideon Levy |
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10/27/08 The former Fed chairman spent more than 20 years of his life as a disciple of the novelist-turned-barely-baked-philosopher Ayn Rand, whose concepts of "rational egoism" and "individualism" put the "R" in ruthless and have provided generations of gullible undergraduates an intellectual rationale for their lingering adolescent self-absorption. Has Greenspan lived through the same times the rest of America has recently experienced? Tim Rutten |
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10/26/08 Republicans Summon Ugly Old Ghosts They appeal to the worst remnants of racism that cling like kudzu to a dying magnolia. Their robot phone dialers intrude on millions of uneasy citizens with messages of hate and fear and envy and greed. Joseph L Galloway |
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10/25/08 Union Card or Master Card - How a Nation of Workers Became a Nation of Debtors Did not the Credit Card Masters of the Universe barefacedly testify before Congress that it was they who needed protection from irresponsible borrowers? And did not a substantial majority of the "people's" representatives from both political parties in Congress agree with them? (As the righteous Elizabeth Warren has pointed out, those very same credit card companies routinely troll bankruptcy fillings to get names of bankruptcy filers to whom they then send credit cards solicitations!) Frank Joyce |
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10/24/08 Final Text of Iraq Pact Reveals a US Debacle The final draft, dated Oct. 13, not only imposes unambiguous deadlines for withdrawal of U.S. combat troops by 2011 but makes it extremely unlikely that a U.S. non-combat presence will be allowed to remain in Iraq for training and support purposes beyond the 2011 deadline for withdrawal of all U.S. combat forces. Gareth Porter |
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10/23/08 The 35-year-old Merritt owns the Portland Beavers, a minor-league baseball team, and the Portland Timbers, a USL First Division soccer squad. While his father [Henry Paulson] is demanding $700 billion of our money to bail out the banks, Merritt wants his own little piece of our hide. He is insisting upon $85 million in public funds from the city of Portland to build a new sports complex for the Beavers and an upgrade on the Timbers' stadium. Dave Zirin |
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10/22/08 Iceland's Economic Meltdown Is a Big Flashing Warning Sign It turns out that Iceland, despite its coalition governments and Nordic social values, became a poster child for neoconservative economic policies inspired by Milton Friedman during the past decade. Friedman himself visited Iceland in 1984 and participated in what was described as a "lively television debate" with leading Socialists. This inspired a generation of young conservatives who came to power through the Independence Party in 1991 and have run its government through different coalitions since then. Toby Sanger |
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10/21/08 Peering fearlessly into the increasingly likely terror of a Democratic President with larger Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the Wall Street Journal editorial page sums up the stark horrors that could ensue. Robert Borosage |
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10/20/08 GOP Terrified of American Voters There's something in the psyche of the GOP base that needs to believe they are victims of some ill-defined but clearly treacherous group plotting against them and the country. How else can they explain the fact that they're losing? It can't be because they have proved themselves incompetent at governance, or that they have lost touch with the reality of life in 21st century America. There has to be some other reason, and if there isn't they'll invent one. Jay Bookman |
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10/19/08 There have already been variations of Zionism: general, revisionist, socialist, with or without quotation marks. Now we also have colonial Zionism, based on ethnic and religious inequality, which considers itself the exclusive emissary of Jewish history. The Divine promise and not the natural rights of human beings to freedom, independence and self-government is, in its eyes, the one and only source of legitimacy for the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel. According to this viewpoint, the land belongs not only to living Jews, but to all the past generations and those yet unborn; therefore, members of the present generation have no right to share possession of the land with members of another nation. Zeev Sternhell |
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10/18/08 Nouriel Roubini is one of the few economists who warned about the housing bubble and predicted the financial collapse before it occurred. His alarms - dismissed as extreme by Wall Street nabobs and most economists - turned out to be right. Now he details the scope - and the limits of the global financial rescue plan announced this week. Robert Borosage |
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10/17/08 Thinking Conservatives: MIAs of the GOP But enjoyable as it's been to watch conservatives flee from the GOP, something about all this leaves me feeling a little down. Because as the more respectable, literate conservatives distance themselves from the GOP, increasingly, the only ones left on the right are paranoid, rage-driven, xenophobic nuts. Bitter? You betcha! Twisted too! Rosa Brooks |
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10/16/08 As Economic Power Wanes, Does the US Lean Harder on the Military? When we hear about the consequences of the $700-plus Wall Street bailout, we hear a lot about inevitable cuts in other budget items. But the military budget - not to mention the supplemental budgets to continue fighting illegal and useless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - is somehow never on the list of those items that could be cut. Phyllis Bennis |
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10/15/08 ‘Collateral Damage’ Not Much Different From Targeted Killing An Afghan woman weeps as she holds photos of family members killed in a U.S. airstrike on Azizabad, a village in Herat province west of Kabul, in August. The U.N. reported as many as 90 civilians, many of them children, were killed in the attack. Robert Fisk |
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10/14/08 The Woman Greenspan, Rubin & Summers Silenced In 1997, Brooksley Born warned in congressional testimony that unregulated trading in derivatives could "threaten our regulated markets or, indeed, our economy without any federal agency knowing about it." Born called for greater transparency--disclosure of trades and reserves as a buffer against losses. Instead of heeding this oracle's warnings, Greenspan, Rubin & Summers rushed to silence her. Katrina Vanden Heuvel |
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10/13/08 Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: “William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention,” but it’ll have to do. Christopher Buckley |
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10/12/08 I am not a conventionally religious man, or even a very superstitious one, but I do wish George Bush would stop asking God to bless America. Every time he does, we seem to be visited with another plague, suggesting divine wrath over our president's evil ways. How else to explain the persistent calamity that has marked this administration: a pointless but very costly war over nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the devastating New Orleans flood, the betrayal of the nation by the money-changers-from Enron to Goldman Sachs-that Bush welcomed into the temple of the White House? Robert Scheer |
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10/11/08 On Ayers, Colson, and G. Gordon Liddy If he wanted to respond in kind, Obama could point to McCain's approval of convicted Watergate crook Charles Colson, now the eminent Christian conservative. According to a Slate article by David Plotz, during the Nixon era "Colson sought to hire Teamsters thugs to beat up anti-war demonstrators, and plotted to raid or firebomb the Brookings Institution," for which Colson did seven months in prison. Sherwood Ross |
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10/10/08 A Country in Shambles, Under the GOP There are few things that make political coverage more unbearable -- and more distorting -- than The David Brooks Syndrome: the extremely patronizing and ill-informed pretense, shared by media and right-wing elites alike, that they can study the Little Common Person like a zoo animal, and then translate and give voice to their simple-minded, good-hearted, salt-of-the-earth perspectives. Rarely has this mentality been so transparent as in the wake of the Biden-Palin debate, as pundits and right-wing polemicists like Brooks, Peggy Noonan and Rich "Starbursts" Lowry rushed forward to proclaim giddily that Regular Americans would love Sarah Palin and this love could even help McCain win, despite -- or, really, because of -- her vapid, content-free telegenic presence. Glenn Greenwald |
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10/9/08 Leahy Concerned About NorthCom’s New Army Unit On October 1, the Pentagon, for the first time ever, dedicated an Army force specifically to NorthCom, which is in charge of securing not some foreign region but the United States of America. The unit it assigned is the 3rd Infantry, First Brigade Combat Team, which has spent three of the last five years in Iraq. It was one of the first units to get to Baghdad, and it was active in retaking and patrolling Fallujah. One of its specialties is counterinsurgency. Matthew Rothschild |
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10/8/08 They’re Stealing from You and Me – Where’s the Outrage? Confident men took leave of common sense and bet on the idea of perpetual profit in the real estate market and crashed. But it wasn't their money. It was your money they were messing with. And that's why we need government regulators. Gimlet-eyed men with steel-rim glasses and crepe-soled shoes who check the numbers and have the power to say, "This is a scam and a hustle and either you cease and desist or you spend a few years in a minimum-security federal facility playing backgammon." Garrison Keillor |
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10/7/08 Who's Watching the Fox at Treasury? Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is expected to name fellow Goldman Sachs alum, Neel Kashkari, to oversee the government's $700 billion Superfund cleanup of Wall Street's toxic assets. The Wall Street Journal reports, "Paulson likes to surround himself with people he's comfortable with: people, mostly, from Goldman Sachs." And why not? Making personnel decisions based on maximizing one's comfort level has worked wonders for the Bush administration thus far. Katrina Vanden Heuvel |
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10/6/08 The New American Century: Cut Short By 92 Years The era of Superpower America is coming to an end. The financial crisis was the last straw. Whatever good faith was left, after the invasion of Iraq and the shrugging off of international treaties, is now gone. The United States has polluted the global economic system with worthless mortgage-backed securities and, by doing so, has pushed 6 billion people closer to a long and painful recession. That's not something that's easy to forgive. Mike Whitney |
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10/5/08 Wastewater Ski Slope on Sacred Land A coalition of six Native American tribes and three environmental organizations says it intends to file an appeal after an Aug. 8 ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals favored Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort, permitting the company to expand development and make snow from reclaimed sewage wastewater on a mountain that 13 tribes consider sacred. Sam Stoker |
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10/4/08 George W. Bush has grown old, erratic and rosy in the eight years of his presidency. Little remains of his combativeness or his enthusiasm for physical fitness. On this sunny Tuesday morning in New York, even his hair seemed messy and unkempt, his blue suit a little baggy around the shoulders, as Bush stepped onto the stage, for the eighth time, at the United Nations General Assembly. SPEIGEL Staff |
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10/3/08 How the Media Sold Their Souls to Wall Street While TV devotes 24/7 coverage to pretending that mudslinging Democrats and Republicans represent the full range of debate, while right-wing radio hosts scream socialism, and while pundits like Thomas Friedman implore Congress "to give them the capital and the flexibility to put out this fire," the American people are getting virtually no hard economic analysis about what the bailout would achieve or what the range of options are. Josh Silver |
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10/2/08 Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over. John Gray |
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10/1/08 America, Where It Pays To Fail In the current financial crisis, the model of US capitalism has imploded with a big bang. But the Bush administration is trying to douse the flames with yet more fuel instead of water, and it wants to see Wall Street's gamblers rewarded for failure. Gabor Steingart |
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9/30/08 Bailout Round II: A New Shade of Lipstick Speaker Pelosi is almost certain to dig deep in her purse for a different shade of lipstick she can smear on this pig in preparation for a re-vote, and it might be a deep Republican red. There were certainly some Republicans who voted No on Round One because the bill wasn't even worse than it was, because it didn't add further deregulation and/or tax cuts for the wealthy to the current catastrophe. Needless to say, Pelosi's first inclination will be to go after those members' votes. Dave Swanson |
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9/29/08 This mainly involves playing with ourselves, an idiom meaning masturbation in some languages, and thus a perfect metaphor for this "peace process" that must now be brought to an end. Snuff out this bonfire of vanities, this process of self-deception that pushes us ever further from any agreement. The time has come for decisions and actions - war or peace, annexation and a state of all its people, or dividing the land into two sovereign states. All this must take place during injury time; the 90th minute has long passed. Gideon Levy |
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9/28/08 The Power of Negative Thinking As promoted by Oprah Winfrey, scores of megachurch pastors and an endless flow of self-help best sellers, the idea is to firmly believe that you will get what you want, not only because it will make you feel better to do so, but because “visualizing” something — ardently and with concentration — actually makes it happen. You will be able to pay that adjustable-rate mortgage or, at the other end of the transaction, turn thousands of bad mortgages into giga-profits if only you believe that you can. Barbara Ehrenreich |
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9/28/08 Remember when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and Republicans claimed that Ronald Reagan's aggressive policies toward the Soviet Union had won the Cold War. In particularly they claim that Reagan's fabulously expensive "Star Wars" anti-missile system had forced the Soviets to spend so much on their own military projects that it bankrupted them. Stephen Pizzo |
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9/26/08 Stopping a Financial Crisis, the Swedish Way Sweden did not just bail out its financial institutions by having the government take over the bad debts. It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing checks. Banks had to write down losses and issue warrants to the government. Carter Dougherty |
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9/25/08 No more taking this administration on faith — and Paulson’s performance over the last few days has made it clear that yes, he is a Bush administration official, with the trademark inability to take responsibility for his own actions. Explain what you’re doing and why — or get out of the way, and let Chris Dodd and Barney Frank write the plan. Paul Krugman |
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9/24/08 Conservatism - The Elephant in the Room The problem with impoverishing workers to fatten your bottom line is that eventually you run out of consumers. If workers are not paid enough to meet their basic needs and have some left over for discretionary spending, there will be no discretionary spending! Yet, conservative economic theory insists that the way to prosperity is to make the already-prosperous more prosperous, even at the expense of the majority of the workforce. So, when we actually ran out of money a few years ago, the solution to keep the masses spending and keep the economy afloat, was to dangle credit in front of us, and force us into spending money we didn’t have after taking all the money we did have. Alicia Morgan |
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9/23/08 Rush Limbaugh Hates Mexicans (But in a Funny Way)! No, Rush didn't put one of those delightful "Just Hang in There" kitty- cat posters up in his "heavily fortified bunker." But according to a rather weepy piece in the Wall Street Journal, Rush is upset that the Obama camp is portraying him as being a bigot. John Ridley |
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9/22/08 Free Market Ideology Is Far From Finished During boom times, it's profitable to preach laissez faire, because an absentee government allows speculative bubbles to inflate. When those bubbles burst, the ideology becomes a hindrance, and it goes dormant while big government rides to the rescue. But rest assured: the ideology will come roaring back when the bailouts are done. The massive debts the public is accumulating to bail out the speculators will then become part of a global budget crisis that will be the rationalisation for deep cuts to social programmes, and for a renewed push to privatise what is left of the public sector. We will also be told that our hopes for a green future are, sadly, too costly. Naomi Klein |
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9/21/08 If religion is no longer the soul of capitalism, as Max Weber once taught us it was, we have to venture somewhere else to try to understand the continuing follies of the new Gilded Age. And so we travel just a few miles north of Wall Street to the House that Ruth Built. Yankee Stadium, as fabled a place to Americans as Ilium was to the ancient Greeks, is about to be demolished and replaced next year by a brand new ballpark. Bill Moyers and Michael Winship |
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9/20/08 Vice President Dick Cheney's Incredible and Deadly Lie Cheney turned Armey around on the war issue. Cheney did so by telling the House Majority Leader that he was giving him information that the Administration could not tell the public -- namely, that Iraq had the "'ability to miniaturize weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear,' which had been 'substantially refined since the first Gulf War,' and would soon result in 'packages that could be moved even by ground personnel.' In addition, Cheney linked that threat to Saddam's alleged personal ties to al Qaeda, explaining that 'we now know they have the ability to develop these weapons in a very portable fashion, and they have a delivery system in their relationship with organizations such as al Qaeda.'" John W Dean |
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9/19/08 Executive Pay and the 'Market Economy' It's pretty hard these days to justify astronomical executive pay. In 2007, the average CEO's pay of $10.5 million was 344 times higher on average than the average worker's wage, according to Executive Excess 2008, a joint report from the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies and Boston-based United for a Fair Economy. The top 50 private investment fund managers each took home more than 19,000 times the average worker's earnings. Mark Weissman |
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9/18/08 Wall Street as we know it is kaput. It is not just that Merrill Lynch agreed to be purchased by Bank of America or that the legendary investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy or that the insurance giant AIG is floundering. It is not even that these events followed the failure of the investment bank Bear Stearns or the government's takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest mortgage lenders. What's really happened is that Wall Street's business model has collapsed. Robert J Samuelson |
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9/17/08 Who Had Superior Economic Performance - the Democrats or the Republicans? A panel on Supply Side Economics in Washington on September 12, included statistics on the superior performance of the American economy under President Clinton compared to his Republican successor. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers gave some statistics that included Democratic versus Republican presidents throughout the postwar period. Jeffrey Frankel |
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9/16/08 Cubicle Mercenaries, Subcontracting Warriors, and Other Phenomena of a Privatizing Pentagon Ever more frequently, we hear generals and politicians alike bemoan the state of the military. Their conclusion: The wear and tear of the President's Global War on Terror has pushed the military to the breaking point. But private contractors are playing a different tune. Think of it this way: While the military cannot stay properly supplied, its suppliers are racking up contracts in the multi-billions. For them, it's a matter of letting the good times roll. Frida Barrigan |
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9/15/08 What if we had never gone to war? What if, after the shocking crimes of September 11, 2001, the United States had pursued a different course? What if all the blood which has been spilled in the name of justice still flowed in living veins; all the American, Iraqi and other lives shattered were still whole; all the homes destroyed or lost still standing, still occupied by families who never harmed us? Peter Dyer |
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9/14/08 "I think what was decisive for him was his own experience as a soldier, as an officer fighting the Vietnamese war. I think he came to realize that there are some wars that are not winnable in the conventional sense unless a democracy like the United States embarks on total national mobilization and then engages in total national annihilation of the enemy. And he knew that is the kind of thing a democracy would not do. And he saw some real parallels between his own experience in Vietnam, which made him increasingly critical of our war efforts, and the recent war, the ongoing war in Iraq, which he felt very strongly ought to be terminated as soon as possible," Brzezinski said. Sean Gonsalves |
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9/13/08 Why Sarah Palin Falls Short of Meeting the Implicit Constitutional Qualifications for VP Consider this parallel: Does anyone believe that if John McCain were president and had selected Governor Sarah Palin under the Twenty-fifty Amendment to fill a vacancy in the vice presidency, Congress would have confirmed her? Not likely. In fact, it is even less likely that McCain would have even attempted to do so, for he would have embarrassed himself. John W Dean |
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9/12/08 Slaughter, Lies, and Video in Afghanistan If no level of protection was too much for this White House, then no protection was what it offered civilians who happened to be living in the ever expanding "war zones" of the planet. In the Middle East, in Somalia, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, the war to be fought—in part from the air, sometimes via pilotless unmanned aerial vehicles or drones—would, in crucial ways, be aimed at civilians (though this could never be admitted). "Collateral damage," the sterile, self-exculpating phrase the Pentagon chose to use for the anything-but-secondary death and destruction visited on civilians, would be the name of the game in the President's chosen war almost from the moment the Vice President disappeared into his bunker. The Video Tom Engelhardt |
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9/11/08 What's the Difference Between Palin and Muslim Fundamentalists? Lipstick John McCain announced that he was running for president to confront the "transcendent challenge" of the 21st century, "radical Islamic extremism," contrasting it with "stability, tolerance and democracy." But the values of his handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers. On censorship, the teaching of creationism in schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God's will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts. Juan Cole |
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9/10/08 In the past several days, before the U.S. Treasury Department acted to seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, several people asked me if I thought it was a good idea for the government to "nationalize" the two mortgage giants. In virtually none of the coverage of the Bush administration's latest emergency action, did anyone bother to tell the back story. Fannie Mae, nee the Federal National Mortgage Association, (FNMA) began life as a government invention. It was born "nationalized"--and it worked beautifully until it was privatized. Robert Kuttner |
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9/9/08 Ten days ago, as the nation focused attention on the hurricane nearing the Mississippi delta, another storm was brewing far upstream in St. Paul, Minnesota — a storm far more dangerous, it turned out, but one by and large overlooked by the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM). Ray McGovern |
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9/8/08 The Republicans' nasty attacks on grassroots organizing reflect another longstanding tradition in American politics--the conservative elite's fear of "the people." Some of the founding fathers worried that ordinary people--people without property, indentured servants, slaves, women and others--might challenge the economic and political status quo. In The Federalist Papers and other documents, they debated how to restrain the masses from gaining too much influence. To maintain their privilege, the elite denied them the vote, limited their ability to protest, censored their publications, threw them in jail and ridiculed their ideas to expand democracy. Peter Dreier & John Atlas |
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9/7/08 Evolutionists Flock To Darwin-Shaped Wall Stain A steady stream of devoted evolutionists continued to gather in this small Tennessee town today to witness what many believe is an image of Charles Darwin—author of The Origin Of Species and founder of the modern evolutionary movement—made manifest on a concrete wall in downtown Dayton. the ONION |
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9/6/08 The Anti-Obama Hate-Fest The Republican Party, which has defined modern-day negative politics, was back at it again, bashing Barack Obama and the news media in an ugly display that rivaled the old days of Nixon-Agnew – or George W. Bush’s last convention where GOP operatives passed out “Purple Heart Band-Aids” to mock John Kerry’s war wounds. Robert Parry |
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9/5/08 Sarah Palin: The Face of Ugly Americanism What I saw on that stage was the personification of small-minded smugness, an utter lack of humility, a kind of self-righteous entitlement based on little more than puffed-up narrowness. She struck me not as plucky but, rather, as stunningly immodest--to the point of arrogance. Some people are arrogant and maybe deserve to be. They know it, and flaunt it, while everyone else thinks they are jerks. But there's another kind of arrogance, perhaps harder to spot at first, an arrogance that apparently doesn't even recognize itself as such, a sanctified, self-satisfied presumptuousness that flows from sheer naïveté about oneself and the world and manifests itself in giddy ambition. John Seery |
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9/4/08 Digital TV: A Giveaway to Corporate Media The FCC hopes the public won't notice its generous gift to corporate broadcasters: thousands of new channels on publicly owned spectrum. Digital TV means four to ten times as many channels for each and every broadcaster with no obligations to the public. The FCC quietly awarded broadcasters this colossal gift of public property worth $70-$80 billion during the Clinton administration back in 1996. Bruce Dixon |
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9/3/08 Preemptive Strikes Against Protest at RNC Since Friday, local police and sheriffs, working with the FBI, conducted preemptive searches, seizures and arrests. Glenn Greenwald described the targeting of protestors by "teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets." Journalists were detained at gunpoint and lawyers representing detainees were handcuffed at the scene. Marjorie Cohn |
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9/2/08 How Republicans Win As a party, the Republicans have not only refined the art of the political smear – with such memorable moments as the Willie Horton ads in 1988 and the “swift-boating” of John Kerry in 2004 – but they also have defined the concept of the October Surprise, manipulating late-breaking events to drive the electorate toward their candidate. Robert Parry |
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9/1/08 Massive Police Raids on Suspected Protestors in Minneapolis Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Glenn Greenwald |
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8/31/08 Theocratic Sect Prays for Real Armageddon Todd Bentley has a long night ahead of him, resurrecting the dead, healing the blind, and exploding cancerous tumors. Since April 3, the 32-year-old, heavily tattooed, body-pierced, shaved-head Canadian preacher has been leading a continuous "supernatural healing revival" in central Florida. To contain the 10,000-plus crowds flocking from around the globe, Bentley has rented baseball stadiums, arenas and airport hangars at a cost of up to $15,000 a day. Many in attendance are church pastors themselves who believe Bentley to be a prophet and don't bat an eye when he tells them he's seen King David and spoken with the Apostle Paul in heaven. Casey Sanchez |
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8/30/08 Bush’s Deal With Iraq: Time Bomb Set To Explode Democratic and Republican American policy-makers have greatly underestimated Arab outrage, both religious and nationalistic, against anything that smacks of the return of Western colonialism. Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah, and other Islamic radicals have consistently won support on "the Arab street" by opposing the presence of American and allied militaries in Islamic countries. Hopefully, we will never shape our foreign or domestic policies by what radical jihadists demand. But, unless we're suicidal, we had better learn to respond to what millions of their potential supporters want. Steve Weissman |
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8/29/08 The Great Pundit Cable Republican PUMA Fraud The "Hillary supporters will vote Republican" myth is a fraud, a figment of the imagination of Fox News, a fantasy of the Hillary-obsessed pundit class, and a mirage that will be shattered when the PUMA Republicans are revealed for the fraud they are and more than 90 percent of the Hillary supporters will vote against more war, against overturning Roe v. Wade and against the economic royalism of the oil company party led by John McCain, who opposes equal pay for women while he would privatize Social Security for the elderly. Brent Budowsky |
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8/28/08 One Teacher’s Cry: Why I Hate No Child Left Behind I’m a teacher. I’ve taught elementary school for eleven years. I’ve always told people, “I have the best job in the world.” I crafted curriculum that made students think, and they had fun while learning. At the end of the day, I felt energized. Today, more often than not, I feel demoralized. Susan J Hobart |
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8/27/08 Journalists and Their Good Friends in the White House In theory at least, White House press officials are the principal impediments to a White House reporter's being able to do his job. The core function of the White House press officials with whom Abramowitz loves to "hang out" and of whom he is obviously so fond is to manipulate his reporting in favor of the White House, to conceal or distort facts that are incriminating of the President, to disseminate narratives that promote the Government's goals. That's true in general, and particularly so for the most secretive and manipulative White House in modern American history. Glenn Greenwald |
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8/26/08 A Tale of Two Parties Anyone who insists there's no difference between our two political parties should be made to attend their conventions. Even the high-dollar wing-dings thrown by the same lobbyists and law firms at both conventions look and feel different depending on whether it's D's or R's who are knocking back the drinks. And when you're actually inside the convention halls, looking down on a sea of delegates, you never have a nanosecond's doubt, no matter what or how much you may have imbibed, about which convention you're at. That's because Democratic conventions are among the most integrated gatherings in America, and Republican conventions, not to put too fine a point on it, are all white. Harold Meyerson |
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8/25/08 The Right and Men Who Live Off Their Second Wives’ Inherited Wealth McCain himself isn't actually rich. He just lives off the inherited wealth of his much younger former mistress and now-second-wife -- for whom he dumped his older and disfigured first wife -- and who then used her family's money to fund McCain's political career and keep him living in extreme luxury (after insisting that he sign a prenuptial agreement, which would make McCain the first U.S. President to have one). Glenn Greenwald |
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8/24/08 Bush to Putin: "Get out now!" Putin to Bush: "Nyet!" When Vladimir Putin heard President Bush demand that Russian troops "leave Georgia territory immediately", he did what any sensible leader of a great nation would do; he yawned, scratched his belly and ambled over to the Kremlin frig to see if there were any left-overs from last night's imperial banquet with the French dignitaries. Mike Whitney |
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8/23/08 I Spent Years as a POW with John McCain, and His Finger Should Not Be Near the Red Button John McCain is a long-time acquaintance of mine that goes way back to our time together at the U.S. Naval Academy and as Prisoners of War in Vietnam. He is a man I respect and admire in some ways. But there are a number of reasons why I will not vote for him for President of the United States. Phillip Butler |
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8/22/08 $2M Settlement Is a Cop Wakeup Call Around 8 a.m. on the morning of April 7, 2003, Sarah Kunstler, daughter of legendary civil rights lawyer Bill Kunstler, joined a small protest in Manhattan against the fledgling Iraq war. "I was in law school at Columbia at the time," Sarah Kunstler recalled Tuesday. "I had my knapsack and books with me, and I thought the demonstration was early enough so I'd be able to get to class on time." She thought wrong. Juan Gonzales |
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8/21/08 Jerome Corsi’s Greatest Hits Corsi, like Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and other chickenhawks, staunchly supported the Vietnam War when he was draft age but he ducked military service with the excuse of being afflicted with "hereditary eczema." His love for the Vietnam War did not translate into love for the veterans who fought it, or else Corsi might have hesitated before Swiftboating vets who disagreed with his defamation of John Kerry's exemplary Vietnam War record. Joseph A Palermo |
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8/20/08 How Anti-Intellectualism Is Destroying America Americans are unwilling to look at how really bad our educational system is because we've all been propagandized with the idea that we're number one. That may have been true after World War II, but not anymore. The idea that we're number one and special and better than everybody else is a very powerful factor in American life, and it prevents us from examining certain respects in which we're not number one. Terrence McNally |
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8/19/08 The Plot Against Liberal America The Washington conservatives aim to make liberalism irrelevant not by debating, but by erasing it. Building a majority coalition has always been a part of the programme, and conservatives have enjoyed remarkable success at it for more than 30 years. But winning elections was not a bid for permanence by itself. It was only a means. The end was capturing the state, and using it to destroy liberalism as a practical alternative. The pattern was set by Margaret Thatcher, who used state power of the heaviest-handed sort to implant permanently the anti-state ideology. Thomas Frank |
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8/18/08 Protest over Use of the Word 'Retard' in Stiller's 'Tropic Thunder' Misses the Target Call me a curmudgeon, not to offend any members of the curmudgeon community, but at this point, I'll take satire over sincerity. Why? Well, for one reason, I was a John Edwards supporter and I bought into his 99 percent truth telling, personal mythology and seemingly selfless desire to lead the nation, so forgive me if I've grown suspicious of sensitivity. Annabelle Gurwitch |
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8/17/08 The Bush Doctrine Meets Reality. Reality Wins. Of course aggressors are going to make up some bullshit about terrorism or WMD or democracy! My god, what would we expect them to say? Everyone understands that you can't say you're going in for oil or money or real estate anymore. Especially when you are in fact going in for oil or money or real estate. David Michael Green |
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8/16/08 Hillary Clinton’s Original Sin Rather than take a moral stand, Clinton listened to her political operatives, whose only calculus was winning, not morality. Of the many great strategic and tactical errors her campaign made, the greatest one was believing that a vote for the Iraq war would be a strength. Stop and think of that for a moment: to win a political office, she was willing to live with the specter of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and a huge financial cost to our country, which, by one estimate, will be $3 trillion. Jonathan Tasini |
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8/15/08 Entire Refrigerator Rearranged To Accommodate Leftover KFC Bucket PIERRE, SD—After several unsuccessful attempts to insert a KFC bucket into his cluttered refrigerator Thursday, local man Jeremy Browning, 32, was forced to rearrange every item in the 24.5-cubic-foot cooling appliance to make the chicken container fit. the ONION |
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8/14/08 Charging the Victim: Who Should Pay to Rebuild Iraq? Let’s not look too closely at that “democracy” we’ve “delivered.” Let’s not ask to what extent bombed-out medical facilities have been restored. Nor to what extent Iraqis, after five years of beneficent occupation, now have electricity and potable water. Nor how many Iraqi jobs any U.S. reconstruction has generated. Nor how much of that $48 billion lined the capacious pockets of Halliburton et al. Nor how much of the “re-building” fund goes to building permanent U.S. military bases. Ed Kinane |
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8/13/08 Why You Want a Progressive to Be Running the Economy Growth also must be inclusive; at least a majority of citizens must benefit. Trickle-down economics does not work: an increase in GDP can actually leave most citizens worse off. America's recent growth was neither economically sustainable nor inclusive. Most Americans are worse off today than they were seven years ago. Joseph Stiglitz |
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8/12/08 Scapegoating Regulation Many progressives now believe the age of Milton Friedman may be drawing to a close. Their hope is the current financial crisis has shown the costs and dangers of inadequate market regulation, thereby discrediting the anti- regulation philosophy of Milton Friedman and his Chicago School colleagues. Thomas Palley |
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8/11/08 Politicians' Affairs, Double Standards, and Glass Houses Everywhere I have been a John Edwards fan ever since he wowed me with his "Two Americas" speech during his 2004 vice presidential bid. I never thought I'd find myself feeling thankful that John Edwards didn't win the Democratic nomination for this year's presidential election. But today I do, and not for the reasons you might think. Mary Shaw |
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8/10/08 The Tragic Last Moments of Margaret Hassan It was Margaret who took leukaemia medicines donated by readers of The Independent to the child cancer victims of Iraq back in 1998 after we discovered that hundreds of infants were dying in those areas where Western forces used depleted uranium munitions in the 1991 Gulf War. She was a proverbial tower of strength, and it was she - and she alone - who managed to persuade Saddam Hussein’s bureaucrats to let us bring the medicine into Iraq. The United Nations sanctions authorities had been our first hurdle, Saddam Hussein our second. It is all history. Like Margaret, all the children died. Robert Fisk |
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8/9/08 Who’s Really Running Iraq? The ability of America to make unilateral decisions in Iraq is diminishing by the month, but the White House was still horrified to hear Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki appearing to endorse Barack Obama's plan for the withdrawal of American combat troops over 16 months. This cut the ground from under the feet of John McCain, who has repeatedly declared that "victory" is at last within America's grasp because of the great achievements of "the Surge," the American reinforcements sent to Iraq in 2007 to regain control of Baghdad. Patrick Cockburn |
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8/8/08 Are Contractors in War Zones Above the Law? In January of 2008, Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, 24, was electrocuted while showering in his Baghdad barracks. His death prompted last week's congressional report concluding that defense contractor KBR, (until a year ago a subsidiary of the oil services giant Halliburton) was well aware that the electrical system in Maseth's complex was faulty. An accident like this, the report found, was bound to happen. But this report also now raises a larger and thornier question about military defense contractors: can they be held legally liable for their actions -- or inactions? Will anyone be held responsible for Maseth's death? Daphne Eviatar |
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8/7/08 The Partisan Injustice at Justice It wasn’t just that Goodling asked a question that would have been more at home on the cover of Tiger Beat. It was that she passed over a respected prosecutor with almost 20 years of experience for an important counterterrorism job because his wife was active in Democratic politics, hiring instead a Republican with three years’ experience. And that she denied one applicant on the suspicion - the “suspicion,” mind you - that she was a lesbian. Leonard Pitts, Jr |
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8/6/08 Follow This Dime Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we’ve come to expect from Washington. Thomas Frank |
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8/5/08 McCain: The Most Reprehensible Of The Keating Five You're John McCain, a fallen hero who wanted to become president so desperately that you sold yourself to Charlie Keating, the wealthy con man who bears such an incredible resemblance to The Joker. Obviously, Keating thought you could make it to the White House, too. He poured $112,000 into your political campaigns. He became your friend. He threw fund raisers in your honor. He even made a sweet shopping-center investment deal for your wife, Cindy. Your father-in-law, Jim Hensley, was cut in on the deal, too. Tom Fitzpatrick |
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8/4/08 Economic Freefall? The central bank tipped its monetary policy hard in one direction--favoring capital over labor, creditors over debtors, finance over the real economy--and held it there for roughly twenty-five years. On one side, it targeted wages and restrained economic growth to make sure workers could not bargain for higher compensation in slack labor markets. On the other side, it stripped away or refused to enforce prudential regulations that restrained the excesses of banking and finance. In The Nation a few years back, I referred to Alan Greenspan as the "one-eyed chairman" who could see inflation in the real economy--even when it didn't exist--but was blind to the roaring inflation in the financial system. William Greider |
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8/3/08 Abstinence-Only Sex-Ed Most Prevalent in the South As we looked into the programs and curricula in Kentucky, the first and most startling thing we found were the statistics on adolescent sexual health. The teen birth rate is nearly 20 percent higher than the national average. Most states have experienced declines in teen birth rates, but in a single year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports Kentucky's rate rose nearly 7 percent. The nationwide teen birth rate increased by less than half that in the same year. Catherine Morrison |
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8/1/08 Anti-Government Era Will End When Bush Leaves Office If you want to give a name to the coming era in American politics, you could call it the Return of Government. I think of the years between the time that John F. Kennedy told us to ask what we can do for our country and the aftermath of 9/11 when President Bush told us all to go shopping as modern historical bookends of sorts. Kennedy arrived at about the apex of people’s faith in the power of the state to make lives better. Bush arrived at its nadir. Robyn Blumner |
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7/31/08 End the Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan Afghanistan did not attack the United States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the United States after 9/11 or Bush would not have waited three weeks before initiating his October 2001 bombing campaign. The necessity for self-defense must be "instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation." This classic principle of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and the UN General Assembly. Marjorie Cohn |
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7/30/08 Provocateurs vs Defeatists The extremist yeshiva students gather by means of a communications network, they block roads, beat up passing Palestinians, snatch soldiers' weapons, burn orchards and plantations and throw stones - faced by defeatist, helpless defense forces. Haaretz editorial |
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7/29/08 We’re Losing the Ability to Think I’m talking about stupidity, which I define as an inability to analyze, draw conclusions from, or otherwise use information even when one has it. And stupidity is often characterized by smug indifference. When a CNN anchor drew Rinehart’s attention to his spelling errors, his reply was, ”I don’t necessarily care.” This is, I feel constrained to remind you, the elected representative of 220,000 people. Leonard Pitts, Jr. |
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7/28/08 No Love For Anyone In journalism, there is no room for love or loyalty toward candidates. Candidate love affairs begin when the press becomes desperate for access. When a candidate like John McCain grants the press unlimited access to his office, the press begins to behave like slutty cheerleaders around the Quarterback. They're just, like, so TOTALLY grateful!! Then, somehow they end up on their knees. They're not sure how. Allison Kilkenny |
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7/27/08 The Company We Keep Post 9/11, Mayer reports, "For the first time in its history, the United States sanctioned government officials to physically and psychologically torment US-held detainees, making torture the official law of the land in all but name." The late American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., she says, told her that "the Bush administration's extralegal counterterrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history…. No position taken had done more damage to the American reputation in the world - ever." Michael Winship |
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7/26/08 Fannie’s and Freddie’s Free Lunch M uch has been made in recent years of private/public partnerships. The US government is about to embark on another example of such a partnership, in which the private sector takes the profits and the public sector bears the risk. The proposed bail-out of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac entails the socialisation of risk – with all the long-term adverse implications for moral hazard – from an administration supposedly committed to free-market principles.Joseph Stiglitz |
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7/25/08 Visualize the Dow at 6000 Personal consumption is down, the labor market is softening, and food and fuel prices are soaring. Housing values are plummeting, wages have stagnated, and American households are more overextended, underpaid and stressed out than anytime in history. It's all bad. No wonder consumer confidence is at its nadir. Mike Whitney |
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7/24/08 Where Are All the Clotheslines? Clotheslines are a symbol of the working class and households without clothes dryers. There are a staple of rural settings, where no one seems to mind the sight of knickers waving like flags in the wind. But many believe clotheslines don’t belong in upper-middle-class neighbourhoods with no trees. They’re a thing of the past. They aren’t modern. They aren’t chic. What is chic, it seems, is living beyond one’s means, living on credit, having it all, taking it all and disregarding the environment. Jane Etherington |
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7/23/08 Evil As the Absence of Empathy Absence of empathy is the one characteristic that connects most of the immoral and misbegotten tenets of Bushism: that dogmatic mix of market absolutism, libertarianism, corporatism and simple greed that falsely describes itself as "conservatism," and which I choose to call "regressivism." "Absence of empathy" is the essence of evil which, if unchecked and unreversed, is certain to bring about the demise of the American republic as we know it, just as it led to the fall of the Third Reich. Ernest Partridge |
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7/22/08 Vicious Ideologue Renews Attacks on Social Security Billionaire investment banker Peter Peterson is back on the warpath. He just established a new foundation with a $1 billion endowment, the main purpose of which is to cut back spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. These programs, which provide an essential safety net to virtually the entire country, are hugely popular and will be politically difficult to cut. Nonetheless, $1 billion is a lot of money. Therefore, Peterson's campaign deserves to be taken seriously. Dean Baker |
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7/21/08 Economic Realities Are Killing Our Era of Fantasy Politics These fantasy elections we've been having -- overblown sports contests with great production values, decided by haircuts and sound bytes and high-tech mudslinging campaigns -- those were sort of fun while they lasted, and were certainly useful in providing jerk-off pundit-dickheads like me with high-paying jobs. But we just can't afford them anymore. We have officially spent and mismanaged our way out of la-la land and back to the ugly place where politics really lives -- a depressingly serious and desperate argument about how to keep large numbers of us from starving and freezing to death. Matt Taibbi |
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7/20/08 The Costs of War: A Parents’ Agony Every day for a parent of a person in the United States military is a long day, filled with concern for their daughter or son. Parents of nine US Army soldiers were notified of the deaths of their family members in Afghanistan this week. Ann Wright |
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7/19/08 Memo to Obama, McCain: No One Wins in War Yes, Al Qaeda — a relatively small but ruthless group of fanatics — was apparently responsible for the attacks. And, yes, there was evidence that Osama bin Laden and others were based in Afghanistan. But the United States did not know exactly where they were, so it invaded and bombed the whole country. That made many people feel righteous. “We had to do something,” you heard people say. Howard Zinn |
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7/18/08 The Real Legacy of the ‘Reagan Revolution’ McCain has long promised voters that he learned the hard lessons provided by his being one of the infamous Keating Five in the nefarious savings and loan scandal that cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet he chose as his campaign co-chair a former senator whose push for government deregulation facilitated the far deeper scandal we now are experiencing. Here is a man whose legislation created what financial guru Warren Buffett termed “financial weapons of mass destruction.” Robert Scheer |
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7/17/08 The Motivation for Blocking Investigations Into Bush Lawbreaking As we witness not just Republicans, but also Democrats in Congress, acting repeatedly to immunize executive branch lawbreaking and to obstruct investigations, it’s vital to keep that fact in mind. With regard to illegal Bush programs of torture and eavesdropping, key Congressional Democrats were contemporaneously briefed on what the administration was doing (albeit, in fairness, often in unspecific ways). The fact that they did nothing to stop that illegality, and often explicitly approved of it, obviously incentivizes them to block any investigations or judicial proceedings into those illegal programs. Glenn Greenwald |
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7/16/08 Is the Fourth Estate a Fifth Column? Our media institutions, deeply embedded in the power structures of society, are not providing the information that we need to make our democracy work. To put it another way, corporate media consolidation is a corrosive social force. It robs people of their voice in public affairs and pollutes the political culture. And it turns the debates about profound issues into a shouting match of polarized views promulgated by partisan apologists who trivialize democracy while refusing to speak the truth about how our country is being plundered. Bill Moyers |
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7/15/08 Iran Shows Its Cards One can never forget that, in war, the enemy gets to vote. On the issue of an American and/or Israeli attack on Iran, the Iranian military has demonstrated exactly how it would cast its vote. Iran recently fired off medium- and long-range missiles and rockets, in a clear demonstration of capability and intent. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, regional oil production capability and U.S. military concentrations, along with Israeli cities, would all be subjected to an Iranian military response if Iran was attacked. Scott Ritter |
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7/14/08 Suspect Soldiers: Did Crimes in US Foretell Violence in Iraq? Before Army Sgt. 1st Class Randal Ruby was accused in Iraq of beating prisoners and of conspiring to plant rifles on dead civilians, he amassed a 10-year criminal record in Colorado and Washington state for assaulting his wife and in Maine for a drunken high-speed police chase, for which he remains wanted. Russell Carollo |
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7/13/08 McDonalds Makes Jesus Cry There are billions and billions of reasons to hate McDonald's. They took the McRib away, for one, and that burns. (Sometimes I almost wish I'd never loved it at all.) There's at least one good reason to like McDonald's: They're being boycotted by the American Family Association. Chris Kelly |
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7/12/08 Disaster Capitalism: State of Extortion Invading countries to seize their natural resources is illegal under the Geneva Conventions. That means that the huge task of rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure–including its oil infrastructure–is the financial responsibility of Iraq’s invaders. They should be forced to pay reparations. (Recall that Saddam Hussein’s regime paid $9 billion to Kuwait in reparations for its 1990 invasion.) Instead, Iraq is being forced to sell 75 percent of its national patrimony to pay the bills for its own illegal invasion and occupation. Naomi Klein |
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7/11/08 Fox News Alters Photos of Journalists Who Criticized Last week, Fox and Friends aired digitally-altered images of New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg and editor Steven Reddicliffe after the paper reported that Fox News’ ratings are beginning to tank. A Fox spokeswoman responded by claiming that “altering photos for humorous effect is a common practice on cable news stations.” Faiz |
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7/10/08 The Free Trade Heretic When 99 percent of economists believe in free trade, it is easy to pretend that the 1 percent does not exist or that they are incompetent. With their numerical advantage, free-trade economists can always assert that professional consensus is on their side. Of course, if the numerical majority was always right, the sun would still be going around the earth and the earth would still be flat. David Sirota |
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7/9/08 Maliki Bombshell: US Should Set a Timetable for Withdrawal Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki raised the prospect of setting a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops as part of negotiations over a new security agreement with Washington. It was the first time the U.S.-backed Shi'ite-led government has floated the idea of a timetable for the removal of American forces from Iraq. Richard Dreyfuss |
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7/8/08 Embedded Photojournalist Fired "I thought, 'Nobody in the U.S. has any idea what it means when they hear that 20 people died in a suicide bombing.' I want people to be able to associate those numbers with the scene and the actual loss of human life. And to show why soldiers are suffering from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]," Miller told IPS. Dahr Jamail |
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7/7/08 US teacher is suspended for letting pupils read bestseller An Indiana teacher who used a much lauded bestseller, The Freedom Writers Diary, to try to inspire under-performing high-school students has been suspended from her job without pay for 18 months. Suzanne Goldenberg |
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7/6/08 Barack’s Pilgrimage Sometime in the weeks ahead, Jerusalem will receive the latest in a long line of American political pilgrims -- Barack Obama. Obama's entire overseas swing will be a tightrope act -- necessary, but unforgiving of a single stumble. Nowhere will the contradictory purposes of the trip be more constricting than in Israel. The visit he should actually make to prepare for the presidency is impossible. But it's worth imagining, if only as a yardstick to measure what politics allows him to do. Gershom Gorenberg |
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7/5/08 What John McCain Didn’t Learn in Vietnam Nobody has denigrated the service of John McCain or his suffering in captivity as a prisoner of North Vietnam, as much as his supporters wish to pretend that someone did. Nobody has denied that his valor in captivity offers insight into his character. But so far almost nobody has asked the most important question about McCain’s military experience, which is how his past might influence his future as president. Joe Conason |
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7/4/08 Hitchens Withdraws from Iraq in 11 Seconds Stop the presses! Christopher Hitchens just noticed that waterboarding is torture! Hitchens announced the news like he'd brought it down from Mount Sinai, in a Vanity Fair article. "Believe me," he told a waiting nation, "it's torture." Well, yeah. It usually is, when it happens to you. When it happens to somebody else, it's "extreme interrogation." John Dolan |
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7/3/08 GOP’s “Voter Fraud” Claims Are Fraudulent "As long as there are any expected close elections, and/or efforts on the ground to register and mobilize low-income voters, we should expect to see a propaganda campaign to blunt the effects," said Lorraine Minnite, a Barnard College political scientist who has written extensively on GOP claims of voter fraud since 2000. Steven Rosenfeld |
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7/2/08 The GOP's December Surprise Is the worst over? Are we on the road to recovery? Will the next president take office against a backdrop of economic improvement, as Bill Clinton did in 1993? Or has something deeper and more intractable gone wrong? James K. Galbraith |
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7/1/08 Barak Care vs John Care Senator Obama would build on the system that is already in place and offer people an additional option - buying into a Medicare-type public plan. By contrast, Senator McCain wants to get rid of the current system of employer-provided insurance and force everyone to buy insurance as individuals. Dean Baker |
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6/30/08 Preparing the Battlefield Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country's religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran's suspected nuclear-weapons program. Seymour M. Hersh |
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6/29/08 It Was About Oil All Along Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al-Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be ... the bottom line. It is about oil. Bill Moyers |
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6/28/08 Israeli settlement activity surges despite peace talks “What we're seeing is a classic example where a diplomatic initiative has the effect of accelerating settlement construction," Gorenberg said. “When there is a fear or suspicion that a diplomatic process might actually take place, however unlikely that seems to outside observers, there is a tendency among settlement supporters within the government to try to speed things up.” Dion Nissenbaum |
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6/27/08 Feminists for McCain? Not So Much In his four years in the House, from 1983 to 1986, McCain cast eleven votes on reproductive issues. Ten were antichoice. Of 119 such votes in the Senate, 115 were antichoice, including votes for the ban on so-called partial-birth abortions and for the "gag rule," which refuses funds to clinics abroad that so much as mention abortion. In 1999, the year he said he opposed repeal of Roe on health grounds, he voted against a bill that would have permitted servicewomen overseas, where safe, legal abortion is often unavailable, to pay out of their own pockets for abortions in military hospitals. Katha Pollitt |
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6/26/08 Paying More, Getting Less The United States has the most bureaucratic health care system in the world, including over 1,500 different companies, each offering multiple plans, each with its own marketing program and enrollment procedures, its own paperwork and policies, its CEO salaries, sales commissions, and other non-clinical costs -- and, of course, if it is a for-profit company, its profits. Compared to the overhead costs of the single-payer approach, this fragmented system takes almost 25 cents more out of every health care dollar for expenses other than actually providing care. Joel A Harrison |
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6/25/08 George Carlin: American Radical “The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.… They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.” John Nichols |
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6/24/08 Haditha victims' kin outraged as Marines go free Eight Marines were charged in the case, but in the intervening years, criminal charges have been dismissed against six. A seventh Marine was acquitted. The residents of Haditha, after being told they could depend on U.S. justice, feel betrayed. "We put our hopes in the law and in the courts and one after another they are found innocent," said Yousef Aid Ahmed, the lone surviving brother in the family. "This is an organized crime." Leila Fadel |
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6/23/08 The Poverty of Reaganism-Bushism Reaganism-Bushism Principle Number One is use the people's government to steal everything you can from them. Principle Number Two is to use deficit spending to steal from their children as well. (Can't you just see the commercial: "Why wait, when you can bilk it now?!") Principle Number Three is to destroy as much of the social safety net as you possibly can. David Michael Green |
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6/22/08 Lying for Jesus: The Evolution of Intelligent Design Lebo closely follows the story of how a handful of fundamentalists, pushing to include the teaching of creationism in school biology courses change their tack when the conservative Christian Thomas More Law Center gets involved. School board members suddenly stop talking about Jesus and creationism, denying statements they made to local reporters, and saying instead they were advocating the teaching of the so-called science of intelligent design. Onnesha Roychoudhuri |
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6/21/08 Exposed: Harvard Shrink Gets Rich Labeling Kids Bipolar Joseph Biederman: "A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful anti-psychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of this income to university officials, according to information given congressional investigators." Bruce E Levine |
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6/20/08 General Says Bush Officials Committed War Crimes The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account. The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices. Warren P. Strobel |
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6/19/08 Reverse Henry Fordism There are no sellers without buyers. That’s the first law of practical economics. Everyone knows this to be true, whether or not one has ever taken a course in Economics. Everyone except, apparently, a few Ph.D economists who seem to forget this rule when they are hired by the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, etc., from which they migrate, back and forth, between offices in Republican administrations and these right-wing think tanks. Ernest Partridge |
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6/18/08 Empire or Republic War doesn't pay, nor does imperial ambition. This proposition should be evident to anyone who has paid attention to the fivefold increase in the price of oil since George W. Bush took office. The principle of nonintervention is neither liberal nor conservative in orientation, and at the inception of the Republic it was accepted as a commonsense. Robert Scheer |
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6/17/08 The Republic on a Knife’s Edge There are two ways of looking at the landmark 5-4 Supreme Court decision recognizing the habeas corpus rights of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba: As a stirring victory for individual liberty over collective fear – or as a reminder that the one more right-wing justice could make George W. Bush’s imperial presidency “constitutional.” Robert Parry |
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6/16/08 America's Capital Markets Are Run by 29-Year-Olds Speculators -- and speculation bubbles -- have always existed, as a look back in history shows. What is new is the sheer volume of speculation, numbering in the billions, in recent years. This has something to do with modern financial markets and their instruments, known as derivatives, which major American investor Warren Buffet has rightfully described as weapons of mass destruction (more...). Spiegle International Online |
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6/15/08 Godless This Father’s Day, one of most popular pastors in America will open his megachurch to homosexual dads, an event that would usually signal an extreme weather alert from old guard Republican evangelical leaders. But by welcoming gay fathers into his Southern California flock, Rick Warren, author of the “The Purpose Driven Life,” is not just living up to the highest standards of Christian fellowship, he’s turning the page on a particularly embarrassing part of our politics. Timothy Egan |
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6/14/08 Time’s Right for Rail The biggest trouble, though, may still come from the White House. President Bush, who has attempted to dismantle the national rail system throughout his presidency, has pledged to veto the bill. Fortunately, both the House and Senate passed the funding by veto-proof margins. Unless Republicans switch because they don’t want to “embarrass” their president, Bush’s veto will be moot. Editorial, The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin) |
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6/13/08 This Land Is Their Land When nations are compared, inequality itself seems to reduce well-being, with some of the most equal nations--Iceland and Norway--ranking highest, according to the UN's Human Development Index. We are used to thinking that poverty is a "social problem" and wealth is only something to celebrate, but extreme wealth is also a social problem, and the superrich have become a burden on everyone else. Barbara Ehrenreich |
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6/12/08 Bush Seeks 58 Bases in Iraq The Bush administration’s demand for 58 permanent bases in Iraq — a near doubling of the current 30 bases — are causing Iraqis to warn that the status of forces agreement would be “more abominable than the occupation.” The administration is reportedly holding hostage “some $50bn of Iraq’s money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement.” Faiz |
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6/11/08 Hillary's Run: The Meaning Is In Her Hands And it really is up to her. If she lets Barack Obama twist in the wind, and sits the fall out, she elects John McCain — and we’ll know that she doesn’t really give a shit about ending the war, or staving off a financial crisis, or keeping the Supreme Court safe for reproductive rights, or anything else beyond getting her and her husband’s furniture back into the White House sometime in the next eight years. Matt Taibbi |
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6/10/08 DOD Contracts Out Contractor Oversight Based on the contract, Serco's duties include planning activities, managerial work, performance reviews, training and budget recommendations. According to an Army Sustainment Command news release last year, Serco is responsible for "analyzing performance contractors' costs," "working with the Army to measure contractor performance" and "recommending process improvements." The company also serves as a liaison between the other three contractors, and between the contractors and the government. Maya Schenwar |
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6/9/08 The Antiwar Plank Democrats were clearly seen as running on an antiwar platform in 2006, and they won big, grabbing control of both houses of Congress. The lesson should have been clear: when the party defines itself as antiwar, it wins. But after a year and a half of wrangling between Congressional Democrats and the Bush Administration over Iraq, that definition has blurred. So now, even as Democrats are poised to nominate a candidate who opposed attacking Iraq, key Congressional supporters of the likely nominee, Senator Barack Obama, and his chief challenger, Senator Hillary Clinton, are working together to craft a platform that bluntly positions the Democrats as the party that will bring the troops home and change the policies that sent them to the Middle East. John Nichols |
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6/8/08 Repairing the Damage, Before Roe I am a retired gynecologist, in my mid-80s. My early formal training in my specialty was spent in New York City, from 1948 to 1953, in two of the city's large municipal hospitals. There I saw and treated almost every complication of illegal abortion that one could conjure, done either by the patient herself or by an abortionist - often unknowing, unskilled and probably uncaring. Waldo L. Fielding, MD |
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6/7/08 The Carnage of Cluster Munitions Cluster bombs are notoriously inaccurate and indiscriminate munitions that scatter toy-like bomblets over wide areas. The bomblets have a high failure rate and can lie dormant but deadly for years. Unlike landmines, which are relatively predictable, cluster bomblets can be detonated not just by touch but also by slight movement of the ground around them. Chris Cobb |
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6/6/08 Power Q&A: Jamie Hyneman On the Discovery Channel's MythBusters, Jamie Hyneman slays urban legends with the greatest of ease. Since he's also a weird-energy enthusiast (he once powered a small rocket with a salami), we asked him to help us separate the big ideas from the duds on the energy frontier. Kiera Butler and Ben Whitford |
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6/5/08 Collateral Damage War is always about betrayal: betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics, and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal has seeped into the ranks of America’s Iraq War veterans. It has unleashed a new wave of disillusioned veterans not seen since the Vietnam War. It has made it possible for us to begin, again, to see war’s death mask and understand our complicity in evil. Chris Hedges |
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6/4/08 The Problem With Conservatism Is Conservatism In practice, virtually the only beneficiaries of conservative policies have been the same wealthy families and corporate executives who bankrolled the Republican Party and the conservative movement's elaborate anti-government network. Throughout a period of soaring economic inequality, Katrina, and so on, the government sat on its hands while hewing to the mantra that free markets work best. Those real-world failures now leaves them without an agenda that will plausibly deliver greater economic security, better health care, a cleaner environment, improved schools, and lower public-health and safety risks. Greg Anrig |
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6/3/08 Presidential Bloodlust “Kick ass!” [Bush] said, echoing Colin Powell's tough talk. “If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal. There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!” Thomas Engelhardt |
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6/2/08 Indefensible Spending Since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has been on a madcap spending spree on wars and weapons having little, if anything, to do with combating terrorism, nothing to do with the imaginary threat from China and everything to do with sustaining an enormously bloated defense industry threatened with extinction because of the demise of the communist enemy. The fact is, the end of the Cold War was a welcome development for everyone except for those in the military-industrial complex whose profits and jobs, as President Eisenhower famously warned, are rooted in every congressional district. Robert Scheer |
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6/1/08 When Free Speech Doesn’t Come Free Free speech is not without consequence. In the United States, for example, criticism of Israel is tantamount to heresy. Former President Jimmy Carter felt a societal backlash last year after the release of his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which condemned Israel's apartheid-style policies in the occupied Palestinian territories. Consequently, and without foundation, Carter was branded by many in the American press as a one-sided, anti-Semitic propagandist. Remi Kanazi |
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5/31/08 Foreclosure Phil Who's to blame for the biggest financial catastrophe of our time? There are plenty of culprits, but one candidate for lead perp is former Sen. Phil Gramm. Eight years ago, as part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown. Yet has Gramm been banished from the corridors of power? Reviled as the villain who bankrupted Middle America? Hardly. Now a well-paid executive at a Swiss bank, Gramm cochairs Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign and advises the Republican candidate on economic matters. He's been mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary should McCain win. That's right: A guy who helped screw up the global financial system could end up in charge of US economic policy. Talk about a market failure. David Corn |
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5/30/08 The Most Famous Journalist in the World Al-Hajj is a television cameraman from Sudan, and until this month he was a prisoner in the U.S. detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. For years, al-Jazeera followed his odyssey day by day. Al-Hajj became famous to the millions across Asia and Europe who watch the Arab satellite channel’s broadcasts and read its website, but he remained all but unknown in America. Most Americans never saw his photograph in mainstream American newspapers or heard about him on television. Sabin Willett |
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5/29/08 The Power of Bone Stupid Thirty or forty years from now, when the attacks on the Rachael Ray Dunkin Donuts ad is being cited as another example of stupid bigotry akin to kicking the Grubers’ pet dachshund to death during WWI, many of those who participated will, if they’re still around, be damned grateful they were doing it using pseudonyms. Pamela Troy |
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5/28/08 Getting Big Oil to Feel Our Pain Again, the oily executives of black gold told Congress it gouges Americans to the least extent possible. Again, senators and representatives wagged their fingers at them. Representative Maxine Waters of California told the executives to “share the pain.” Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida told them, “I’m a mom of three young children who filled up her minivan the other day for $68 . . . Maybe that’s not real money to the five people sitting here because $68 is like a nickel to you.” Derrick Z Jackson |
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5/27/08 US Subverts The Cluster Bomb Ban The United States is making no secret of its pressure on allies to weaken the treaty to serve its own interests. One official recently bragged that the United States had “spoken with” more than 110 countries about this treaty. It has told allies that it will not alter its military doctrine, structure, or deployments. It has also threatened that it will not remove its cluster munitions stockpiled in countries that do join the treaty - even though it did remove land mines stockpiled in countries that are part of the Mine Ban Treaty. Jody Williams |
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5/26/08 How we can really honor our veterans How strange that today in our country, in a time of war, battles are raging over the need for medical care, educational benefits, employment opportunities and assistance for those who've served honorably and come home to begin new lives in a nation they risked their lives to defend. The shameful thing is that most of those battles are being waged against the very government, the very bureaucracies, the very politicians who sent those young men and women to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe the right word here isn’t shameful, but criminal.Joseph Galloway |
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5/25/08 Daniel Berrigan: 40 Years After Catonsville Forty years ago this month, Father Daniel Berrigan walked into a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, with eight other activists, including his brother, Father Philip Berrigan, and removed draft files of young men who were about to be sent to Vietnam. The group carted the files outside and burned them in two garbage cans with homemade napalm. Father Berrigan was tried, found guilty, spent four months as a fugitive from the FBI, was apprehended and sent to prison for eighteen months. Chris Hedges |
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5/24/08 Money Changes Everything "Financial services" makes up 21 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, while manufacturing makes up just 12 percent. In other words, America's "wealth" is now built on sleight of hand con-artistry that does not produce anything tangible. The actual making of products — those things we use and consume in our daily life — has been shipped to other countries, even as our national debt and trade deficit approaches numbers that only the likes of Stephen Hawking can comprehend. Phillips notes, "'Risky' doesn't begin to describe this new focus in the American economy." Alan Bisbort |
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5/23/08 The Invisible War In every way, this president has tried to hide the war. The press chafes because photos of flag-draped coffins are forbidden. But that’s nothing compared to how this administration is trying to turn the public’s eyes away from the pain of the people who feel it most directly, the soldiers and their families. Timothy Egan |
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5/22/08 Propagandists First, Journalists Second In the United States, reporters consider themselves Americans first, journalists second. That means consulting the government before going public with a state secret. "When I was at ABC," James Bamford told Time in 2006, "we always checked with the Administration in power when we thought we had something of concern, and there was usually some way to work it out." Ted Rall |
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5/21/08 When It Costs Too Much to Support the Troops The comment was outrageous, but it was not the least bit surprising. A psychologist responsible for assessing returning war veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder—a psychological ailment that could entitle them to monthly disability payments—told staff members not to diagnose the illness because to do so would increase the government’s costs. Marie Cocco |
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5/20/08 Prosecuting George W Bush for Murder If Bush were impeached, convicted in the Senate, and removed from office, he'd still be a free man, still be able to wake up in the morning with his cup of coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice and read the morning paper, still travel widely and lead a life of privilege, still belong to his country club and get standing ovations whenever he chose to speak to the Republican faithful. This, for being responsible for over 100,000 horrible deaths? For anyone interested in true justice, impeachment alone would be a joke for what Bush did. Vincent Bugliosi |
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5/19/08 Profiteers Squeeze Billions Out of Growing Global Food Crisis Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry. Geoffrey Lean |
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5/18/08 I Would Say 'To Kill A Mockingbird' Captured The Most Interesting Part Of Our Lives As I get older and reflect on my life, my mind always drifts back to the time I defended handyman Tom Robinson against those trumped-up, racially motivated charges of rape. What a time it was. So much happened in that year and a half. Lessons were learned, innocence was lost, and a child put her fear of people different from herself behind her. There's no denying it was a narratively gripping time. Atticus Finch |
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5/17/08 A Return to the Tap It's a trend that is taking hold in the U.S., Europe and Canada: more people are switching from bottled water to tap. Call it reverse snob appeal. Bottled water once carried a certain European mystique. But these days, it's the tap water enthusiasts, concerned about the environment, who get to act self-righteous. Just like it has become cool to bring your own cloth bags to the grocery store and your own mug to the coffee shop, the reusable water bottle is the hip, new eco accessory. Melissa Knopper |
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5/16/08 60 Years After the 1948 War To Palestinians, 1948 was not about the "War of Independence," as Israelis call it, but the "Nakba," or Catastrophe. Here the story is not survival and re-birth, but dispossession and loss: more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven out of their homes during the fighting in 1948, including thousands of families forced by Israeli commanders to march in near-100-degree heat from the Arab towns of Ramle and Lydda (today the Israeli cities Ramla and Lod), on the coastal plain, toward exile in Ramallah and Jordan. They and their descendants now live in Middle East refugee camps, and in a global diaspora stretching from Dubai to London to San Francisco. Sandy Tolan |
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5/15/08 The Tortured Law on Torture Ah yes, those torture confessions have proved so useful. That, at least, was the claim of our president in justifying one of the most egregious assaults ever on this nation’s commitment to the rule of law. But now comes news that charges have been dropped against the so-called Sept. 11 attacks’ 20th hijacker, one of dozens so identified, because the “evidence” he supplied under torture and later recanted is not credible enough to go to trial. Robert Scheer |
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5/14/08 The Next War "There are no exit strategies." That's a line to roll around on your tongue for a while. It's a fancy way of saying that the U.S. military is likely to be in one, two, many Sadr Cities for a long time to come. This is Gates's ultimate insight as secretary of defense, and his response is to urge the military to plan for more and better of the same. For this we give the Pentagon almost a trillion dollars a year. Tom Engelhardt |
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5/13/08 Business as Usury Before Congress goes after bank misdeeds on Wall Street, let's stop the petty theft on Main Street. I mean the predatory mortgages and usurious loans. Had we protected the poor and the weak, the problems of our mighty banks might not be so great. Why don't we have a "National Usury Act"? Why, in the party of William Jennings Bryan, is there no one demanding an interest cap on our Visa cards and our MasterCards? Thomas Geoghegan |
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5/12/08 Collateral Damage Some readers resented The Washington Post for publishing an Associated Press photograph of a critically wounded Iraqi child being lifted from the rubble of his home in Baghdad’s Sadr City “after a U.S. airstrike.” Two-year-old Ali Hussein later died in a hospital. As the saying goes, the picture was worth a thousand words because it showed the true horrors of this war. Neither side is immune from killing Iraqi civilians. But Americans should be aware of their own responsibility for inflicting death and pain on the innocent. The Photo Helen Thomas |
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5/11/08 Anti-Choice Zealots Go After Patients' Private Medical Records The Center for Reproductive Rights, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, now represents the 2,000-some women patients in their efforts to halt the grand jury's access to their medical records. "This is nothing more than a fishing expedition spurred on by anti-choice zealots," says Bonnie Scott Jones, the Center's lead attorney on the case. "It has nothing to do with any legitimate investigation of possible crimes -- it is simply a gross and cruel intrusion on extremely private moments in the lives of these women and their families." Katherine Spillar |
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5/10/08 Washington’s Great “No Inflation” Hoax Billionaire California bond manager Bill Gross calls it "a haute con job." Bloomberg News columnist John Wasik describes it as "a testament to the art of economic spin." More and more shoppers and consumer simply disbelieve it. Americans are now beginning to understand that the Consumer Price Index has its own share of gimmicks not unlike a sub-prime mortgage or the six pages of fine print that accompanies your credit card agreement. Kevin Phillips |
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5/9/08 Apology Denied Even the embedded media, so valiant in their attempts to cast the American presence as well-intentioned and, you know, doing the best it can (under the circumstances), couldn’t help but convey, as they reported on the investigation of the Blackwater killings, the humanity of the grieving Iraqis. In so doing, the coverage hinted, unavoidably, at the truth about the occupation: that we are, to put it mildly, the bad guys, that what we’re doing there is barbaric, racist, insane. Robert Koehler |
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5/8/08 The Air Force Above All Our capability to deliver damage and death across the globe — at virtually no immediate risk to ourselves — gives extra meaning to the words “above all.” But with great power comes great responsibility, a tagline I learned as a teen from Spider-Man comic strips, but which is no less true for that. The problem is that our “global reach” often exceeds the grasp of our collective wisdom to employ “global power” responsibly. William J. Astore |
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5/7/08 The Bush Family’s Bad Latin Real Estate Investment Back in late 2006, it was widely reported in the Latin American media that President Bush, or perhaps his old man, had bought a 100,000-acre farm in a remote area of Paraguay. What struck people at the time was the choice of country. Paraguay, of course, has gained a certain Club Med status among the world's villains and criminal elements as the place to go when the law's on your tail. The country, ruled for six decades by the dictatorial and fascist Colorado Party of Gen. Alfredo Stroesser, an almost cartoon caricature of a Latin American dictator, has no extradition treaty with any nation. Dave Lindorff |
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5/6/08 Bubble and Bail Since the 1970s, the United States has redefined itself from a manufacturing nation to a financial economy built on debt, leverage, and a considerable ratio of speculation. Both political parties have been complicit in this, and the downturn now beginning will be unusual and potentially tragic. Kevin Phillips |
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5/5/08 KBR Ignores Warning In March, House Oversight Committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) announced that he was investigating the accidental electrocution of troops in Iraq and pressed Defense Secretary Robert Gates for uncensored details on at least a dozen deaths since 2003. Contractor KBR is at the center of the probe, with questions about whether it irresponsibly ignored wiring problems. Think Progress |
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5/4/08 Unlocking Bush’s Chastity Belt A backlash against abstinence-only programs may be brewing among young people themselves. Last October, 25 young people from the Washington, D.C.-based group Spiritual Youth for Reproductive Freedom visited Capitol Hill to lobby for equal funding for comprehensive sex education. Steve Yoder |
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5/3/08 Book Review: Catch 22 This novel’s world flourishes with characters moving about as an army of ants, running in circular logic from which they cannot step free, nor do many of them seem to care even if they were aware. Yossarian and Dunbar stand out almost as villains. Youssarian flows against the social current as the anti-hero; he recognizes the absurd logical loops by which others around him consider their lives perfectly normal. Mark Biskeborn |
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5/2/08 Brian Williams’ “Response” to the Military Analyst Story It has now been more than ten days since the New York Times exposed the Pentagon’s domestic propaganda program involving retired generals and, still, not a single major news network has even mentioned the story to their viewers, let alone responded to the numerous questions surrounding their own behavior. This steadfast blackout occurs despite the fact that the Pentagon propaganda program almost certainly violates numerous federal laws; both Democratic presidential candidates sternly denounced the Pentagon’s conduct; and Congressional inquiries are already underway, all of which forced the Pentagon to announce that it suspended its program. Glenn Greenwald |
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5/1/08 Bowling One, Health Care Zero The vigorous press that was deemed an essential part of democracy at our country's inception is now consigned to smaller venues, to the Internet and, in the mainstream media, to occasional articles. I am not suggesting that every journalist for a mainstream media outlet is neglecting his or her duties to the public. And I know that serious newspapers and magazines run analytical articles, and public television broadcasts longer, more probing segments. But I am saying that every analysis that is shortened, every corner that is cut, moves us further away from the truth until what is left is the Cliffs Notes of the news, or what I call strobe-light journalism, in which the outlines are accurate enough but we cannot really see the whole picture. Elizabeth Edwards |
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4/30/08 But Does Business Really Outperform Government? Every “expansion of government in business,” Herbert Hoover had said, “poisons the very roots of liberalism — that is, political equality, free speech, free assembly, free press, and equality of opportunity.” That was before the orgies Reagan, that value-added conservative, unleashed in the 1980s, and that his dry-drunk ideological godson George W. Bush managed to squeeze in between two recessions. That they used government to underwrite their upper-class orgies while calling government names is among those elitist ironies men-of-the-people like Reagan and Bush chose not to consort with. It helps to live in the world of slogans. Pierre Tristam |
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4/29/08 The Myths and Harsh Effects of Bush's Economic Class War The problem is that the government, the nation, and the individuals in our country have all taken on massive amounts of new debt. Without investing it anything productive. Even our conquests of Afghanistan and Iraq are not profitable (except for specific war profiteers), they are drains, endlessly creating more debts. Debts which are, bizarrely, kept off the books the way Enron used to do it, or more pertinently, the way George Bush used to do it when he was at Harken Energy. Larry Beinhart |
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4/28/08 Ike Warned Us “In the councils of government,” he warned, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” Nancy Grape |
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4/27/08 Men of the Cloth Child abuse. Sexual abuse. Women raised to be baby machines controlled by powerful older men in the name of God. These shockers--and many more--are flagrantly on offer in the spectacle unfolding around the 139 women and 437 children removed by Texas authorities from the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado. The visuals are riveting: women in pastel prairie dresses and identical pompadour-cum-french-braid hairstyles weeping for their children in state custody; skinny-necked middle-aged men insisting they had no idea it was illegal to marry and impregnate multiple 15-year-olds. Katha Pollitt |
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4/26/08 Is an Attack on Iran Imminent? George W. Bush is poised to order a massive aerial bombardment — possibly including tactical nuclear weapons - of up to 10,000 targets in Iran. The attack would be justified on grounds that Iran is interfering with U.S. efforts in Iraq and that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, a charge that was debunked last fall in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). Dan Hamburg |
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4/24/08 Impeachment Now or Apocalypse Later The political noose seems to be tightening on the key members of the remaining miscreants down in the White House bunker -- mainly Bush, Cheney, Rice, Addington and Mukasey. (Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Powell and Tenet were pushed out the door earlier.) But will the Democrats, having been provided with smoking gun-type evidence of these officials' high crimes and misdemeanors, take the next logical step to end this continuing nightmare of law-breaking at the highest levels? Bernard Weiner |
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4/23/08 Decoys, Countermeasures and Deception In Congress last week, Representative John Tierney, Chair of the House National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee, convened the latter in a series of hearings to examine the US missile defense program: "What are the Prospects, what are the Costs? Oversight of Missile Defense (Part II)." Here's the short answer – the costs are open-ended, the prospects suck, but the Bush Administration is still hell-bent on spending over $10 billion per year and compromising our national security in the process. Katrina Vanden Heuvel |
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4/22/08 Remember These Digits: 78-22 One Israeli anti-settlements activist puts it like this: "A settlement is never just a fortified group of red-roofed villas on the top of an occupied hill.... A settlement also means Israeli soldiers.... It means checkpoints, and roads connecting it with other settlements and with Israel itself. A road is not just land: it is an ever growing ‘security belt’ on both sides of it, belts of Palestinian fields and buildings swept by Israeli bulldozers.... The function of those ever-expanding by-pass roads is not only to serve the settlers but to cut off Palestinian towns and villages from one another, to cantonize the territories and split the Palestinians into minimal separate units..." MJ Rosenberg |
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4/21/08 Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand Five years into the Iraq war, The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation. These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated. Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.” David Barstow |
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4/20/08 Papal Pomp, Millions’ Misery If popes and priests and rabbis and imams had ever been seriously interested in ending global misery of the masses, ending war and violence, they would have done so long ago. Lord knows they are big enough and powerful enough and peopled enough, and they have siphoned off enough money from people of all economic strata and circumstances to have created world prosperity. But instead they have existed on creating misery. They are the leeches on world societies. They write the books, religious texts etched in stone, blessing the poor while fleecing them into wandering destabilized upheavaled desperate homelessness. Carolyn Bennett |
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4/19/08 The Ludlow Legacy At Home The Ludlow Massacre’s tiny monument off I-25 in Southern Colorado is easily missed if you don’t know where to find it. Though the nearby coal mine garnered international attention in 1914 after a government militia slaughtered union organizers there, the minimalism of the memorial is predictable. History books venerate Rockefellers — the union-busting mine owners — and disregard agents of progress like the labor movement. David Sirota |
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4/18/08 Dismissal and Prosecution of John Yoo John Yoo and the other Justice Department lawyers, including David Addington, Jay Bybee, William Haynes and Alberto Gonzales, are also liable for war crimes under the US War Crimes Act. They were an integral part of a criminal conspiracy to violate U.S. laws. In US v. Altstoetter, Nazi lawyers were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity for advising Hitler on how to “legally” disappear political suspects to special detention camps. The United States charged that since they were lawyers, “not farmers or factory workers,” they should have known their technical justifications for circumventing the Hague and Geneva Conventions were illegal. Marjorie Cohn |
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4/17/08 VA Creates Roadblocks to Voter Registration for Injured Vets On the same day the Pentagon's commander in Iraq told the Senate that new troop withdrawals could not considered for months, Secretary of Veterans Affairs James B. Peake told two Democratic senators that his department will not help injured veterans at VA facilities to register to vote before the 2008 election. Steven Rosenfeld |
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4/16/08 J Street On the Map Why are AIPAC and rightist attack groups like CAMERA (the Orwellian-named Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) alone in the U.S. political arena as "advocates" of Israel's interests? Why isn't there a liberal pro-Israel lobby, one that promotes United States involvement in achieving a two-state solution? As of today the answer to that question is: There is such a lobby. Gershom Gorenberg |
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4/15/08 Palestinians versus Tibetans - a double standard When one comes to the fight with hands that are collectively, and sometimes individually, so unclean, it is impossible to protest a Chinese occupation. Citizens of a country that maintains a military subjugation in its backyard that is no less cruel than that of the Chinese, and by some parameters even more so, and against which there is practically no more protest here, have no justification in denouncing another occupation. Gideon Levy |
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4/14/08 Seven Recommendations For Curbing US's Addiction To War One way to end needless American wars is to give those who make such policies a very personal reason for some serious and sober second thought. The next president should re-sign us up to the International Criminal Court, push for Senate ratification, and rip up all the bilateral exemption agreements. Then it might be time for an arrest or six to be made. What did you say is George Bush's address in Crawford? David Michael Green |
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4/13/08 Ben Stein: Front Man for Creationism's Manufactroversy Scientific controversy exists only when the jury of relevant experts is out on whether a new finding meets the standard of evidence. The debate and evidence gathering still are in process. A manufactroversy is when someone motivated by profit or ideology fosters confusion in the public mind long after scientists have moved on to the next set of questions. Think tobacco and lung cancer. Think Exxon and global warming. Now think Ben Stein and evolution. Valerie Tarico |
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4/12/08 Journalists As Truth-Tellers After my government experience, it took me a while to get my footing back in journalism. I had to learn all over again that what is important for the journalist is not how close you are to power, but how close you are to reality. I also had to learn one of journalism’s basic lessons. The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. We journalists are of course obliged to cover the news, but our deeper mission is to uncover the news that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden. Bill Moyers |
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4/11/08 Real Justice Remember the old story about Benjamin Franklin leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787? A woman asks him, "Well, Doctor, what have we got--a republic or a monarchy?" Recall Franklin's answer: "A republic, if you can keep it." John Yoo is the fellow who, at the first sign of trouble, gave it away. Brian Morton |
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4/10/08 Grains Gone Wild Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled, with much of the increase taking place just in the last few months. High food prices dismay even relatively well-off Americans - but they’re truly devastating in poor countries, where food often accounts for more than half a family’s spending. Paul Krugman |
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4/8/08 General Entrap-Us or General Entrapped? Five years ago, when American forces quickly dismantled Iraqi society, liberal as well as conservative pundits announced that it was up to our forces to restore "stability" - as if the Iraqis themselves had wrought the chaos from which we were to rescue them. Though the American military did most of the destabilizing in Iraq, this historical fact was set aside in favor of the hoary myth that America is invariably a force for good, uniquely dedicated and qualified to bring order out of chaos around the world. Ira Chernus |
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4/7/08 $3 Trillion May Be Too Low President Bush has tried to give the impression that the $3 trillion dollar estimate of the total cost of the war that we provide in our new book may be exaggerated. We believe that it is in fact conservative. Even the president would have to admit that the $50 to $60 billion estimate given by the administration before the war was wildly off the mark; there is little reason to have confidence in their arithmetic. They admit to a cost so far of $600 billion. Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes |
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4/6/08 The FundamentaList This week kicks off the Trinity Broadcasting Network's thrice-annual festival of greed, the "Praise-A-Thon," which features some of the biggest names in televangelism taking to the airwaves to beg viewers round-the-clock to give money to TBN -- a non-profit organization that lavishes its executives with enormous salaries and perks, and sits atop over $300 million in assets. In TBN's world, your gift to the network represents your obedience to God because it's really God's money, and if you keep it for yourself you're disobeying God. Sarah Posner |
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4/5/08 Rapid Withdrawal Is Only Solution Last year, General Petraeus wisely declined to promise a military solution to this political problem, saying that he could lower the level of violence, allowing a limited time for the Iraqi leaders to strike a political deal. Violence has been temporarily reduced but today there is credible evidence that the political situation is far more fragmented. And currently we see violence surge in Baghdad and Basra. In fact, it has also remained sporadic and significant in several other parts of Iraq over the past year, notwithstanding the notable drop in Baghdad and Anbar Province. William E Odom, lieutenant general, USA (retired) |
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4/4/08 Bush Administration Wastes Trillions in Worthless Weapons A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, and soon you're talking real money. But when it comes to reporting on what the Bush war legacy has cost American taxpayers, the media have been shockingly indifferent to the highest run-up in military spending since World War II. Even the devastating defense spending audit released Monday by the GAO documenting the enormous waste in every single U.S. advanced weapons system failed to provoke the outrage it, and five equally scathing previous annual audits, deserved. Robert Scheer |
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4/3/08 Fooling Ourselves Had Peace Now not published reports from time to time, it is doubtful anyone would have been aware of the continuing construction in the settlements. One might have assumed from the declarations by Ehud Olmert's government that construction had been suspended and that efforts were being made to reach a peace agreement to include withdrawal from most of the West Bank. From the complaints by the settlers' leadership as well, one might have concluded that there was a freeze on building and that the settler youth were really and truly homeless. Haaretz Editorial |
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4/1/08 The Dilbert Strategy Anyone who has worked in a large organization — or, for that matter, reads the comic strip “Dilbert” — is familiar with the “org chart” strategy. To hide their lack of any actual ideas about what to do, managers sometimes make a big show of rearranging the boxes and lines that say who reports to whom. Paul Krugman |
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3/31/08 The Decriminalization of Corporate Crime For 30 years, so-called centrist Democrats, anxious to shed any scarlet mark of liberalism, have eagerly sought consensus and accommodation with conservatives, largely by adopting their creed of small, cheap government—government that would fuel the private sector. Thus the seduction of “deregulation” and the accompanying creed of “privatization.” How and why they abandoned a faith that had served them and the nation so well and for so long is a mystery. Stanley Kutler |
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3/30/08 America’s Ruling Clique 99.9 percent of the people are being manipulated and cannibalized by a tiny but powerful minority. It is the interests of this powerful minority that are served by government and it is their interests that are defined as the national interest or as national security; and it is hardly benign. Robbing the poor to pay the rich causes irreparable harm to the victim. Charles Sullivan |
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3/29/08 Mainstream Medicine Has Endorsed Medical Marijuana A historic document from the 124,000-member American College of Physicians certifies the medical value of marijuana. In a landmark position paper released in February, these distinguished physicians are saying what many of us have been arguing for years: Most of our laws have gotten it wrong when it comes to medical marijuana, and it's time for public policy to get in step with science. Dr. Jocelyn Elders |
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3/28/08 Blue Collar, Bare Cupboards Of the nearly 40 million who fear going hungry, an estimated 11 million-plus Americans occasionally miss meals, according to the USDA. They include many adults in a family who sacrifice their own portions to ensure their children are fed. Throughout the United States, a startlingly raw form of poverty has entrenched itself within the bottom tier of the economy. Sasha Abramsky |
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3/27/08 Beyond the New Deal In today's climate of endless war and uncontrolled greed, drawing upon the heritage of the 1930s would be a huge step forward. Perhaps the momentum of such a project could carry the nation past the limits of FDR's reforms, especially if there were a popular upsurge that demanded it. A candidate who points to the New Deal as a model for innovative legislation would be drawing on the huge reputation Franklin Roosevelt and his policies enjoy in this country, an admiration matched by no President since Lincoln. Howard Zinn |
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3/26/08 Denouncing and Renouncing This denouncing and renouncing game is simply not serious. It is a media-staged theater, produced not in response to genuine concerns – no one thinks that Obama is unpatriotic or that Clinton is a racist or that McCain is a right-wing bigot – but in response to the needs of a news cycle. First you do the outrage (did you see what X said?), then you put the question to the candidate (do you hereby denounce and renounce?), then you have a debate on the answer (Did he go far enough? Has she shut her husband up?), and then you do endless polls that quickly become the basis of a new round. Stanley Fish |
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3/25/08 "We are living through another Hiroshima," Iraqi doctor says The U.S., Great Britain and Israel are turning portions of the Middle East into a slice of radioactive hell. They are achieving this by firing what they call "depleted uranium" (DU) ammunition but which is, in fact, radioactive ammunition and it is perhaps the deadliest kind of tactical ammo ever devised in the warped mind of man. Sherwood Ross |
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3/24/08 Gore Vidal Speaks Seriously Ill of the Dead Buckley was a world-class American liar on the far right who would tell any lie he thought he could get away with. Years of ass-kissing famous people in the press and elsewhere had given him, he felt, a sort of license to libelously slander those hated liberals who, from time to time, smoked him out as I did in Chicago, when I defended the young people in Grant Park by denying that they were Nazis and that the only “pro- or crypto-Nazi” I could think of was himself. Gore Vidal |
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3/23/08 Theocracy Rejected: Former Christian Right Leaders 'Fess upWhat happened? In interviews for this report, both Schaeffer and Whitehead described the factors that led them to move away from the Religious Right -- the constant emphasis on far-right politics, the refusal of Religious Right leaders to examine issues like poverty and care of the needy and the crude attacks on the arts. Rob Boston |
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3/22/08 Krauthammer, Carlson, Rev Wright & Other Racial ParanoidsIt's no secret to any of my readers that I despise Charles Krauthammer. I never liked his writing. He is a neocon. He's vicious (he ridiculed Christopher Reeve for giving seriously disabled people "false hope"). And his views of the Israeli-Palestinian are repulsive. He hates the Palestinians and would fight to the last Israeli to defeat them. MJ Rosenberg |
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3/21/08 Recruiting Spies in the Peace Corps“It flies in the face of what the Fulbright program is all about,” says John Alexander van Schaick, 23, a Fulbright scholar from Rutgers University, who says that last year, an embassy official instructed him to report on Venezuelans and Cubans living and working in Bolivia. “We’re supposed to be here to help with mutual understanding, not intelligence operations.” Jean Friedman-Rudovsky |
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3/20/08 Politics Unusual: Obama Abandons Blame Game Obama called on all Americans to recognize that even though the United States has experienced progress on the racial reconciliation front in recent decades (Exhibit A: Barack Obama), racial anger exists among both whites and blacks, and he said that this anger and its causes must be fully acknowledged before further progress can be achieved. Obama did this without displaying a trace of anger himself. David Corn |
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3/19/08 The Wages of Peace With just the amount of the Iraq budget of 2007, $138 billion, the government could instead have provided Medicaid-level health insurance for all 45 million Americans who are uninsured. What's more, we could have added 30,000 elementary and secondary schoolteachers and built 400 schools in which they could teach. And we could have provided basic home weatherization for about 1.6 million existing homes, reducing energy consumption in these homes by 30 percent. Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier |
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3/18/08 Clothesline Rule Creates Flap In New England States Homeowners’ associations, which enforce bans on clotheslines at thousands of residential developments across the country, say the rules are needed to prevent flapping laundry from dragging down property values. But in an age of paper over plastic, as people try to take small steps to protect the environment, more residents are chafing at the restrictions. Jenna Russell |
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3/17/08 Winter Soldier: America Must Hear These Vets' Stories These new Winter Soldiers look so young to me. They are my son's age. My daughter's age as well. The last time young soldiers like these tried to get Americans to listen they were ignored. And that can't be allowed to happen again. The message of Iraq Veterans Against the War came through clearly in every tortured testimony. This is an illegal war. It has cost us our peace of mind. The longer we are there, the more of us will be injured. Bring our troops home now. Penny Coleman |
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3/16/08 About Those New Seven Deadly Sins There's an absurd contradiction at the root of the Church's new emphasis on social sins. Of its more damaging enduring doctrines, the Catholic Church's stance on birth control has left generations of women in desperate straits. Human rights organizations for years have implored the Church to sanction birth control. Instead, the Vatican has continued to systematically condemn it. Given the easy availability of birth control (and abortion) to wealthy women in rich countries -- and the lack of sexual education, family planning resources, or access to abortion in poor Catholic countries -- wouldn't that be considered contributing to the broadening divide between rich and poor? Wouldn't the Church be guilty of its own mortal sins? Liliana Segura |
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3/15/08 Spitzer Bust Provides Warning Regarding NSA Spying We now know from yesterday's Wall Street Journal article that the spying Bush has been doing through the National Security Agency since early 2001 has included vast computer sweeps of not just internet and phone activity, but also bank and credit card transactions. These are sweeps of ordinary everyday people, with computers looking for odd transactions, or for codewords, or for transactions involving specific targeted organizations or addresses. David Lindorff |
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3/14/08 The Fall of the American Consumer Some people make stuff; other people have to buy it. And when we gave up making stuff, starting in the 1980s, we were left with the unique role of buying. Remember Bush telling us, shortly after 9/11, to get out there and shop? It may have seemed ludicrous at the time, but what he meant was get back to work. Barbara Ehrenreich |
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3/13/08 It’s the ‘Oh Shit!’ Moment on Iran Every horror movie has that “Oh Shit!” moment, when the hero or heroes are huddled in some creepy hideout, and suddenly something happens that tells you that the monster is just around the corner, or just about to attack. In “Jurassic Park” it was the pulsing ripples in a cup of water, heralding the arrival of a T-Rex. In “Jaws” it was the deep bass music, letting you know that a monstrous shark was about to attack. David Lindorff |
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3/12/08 The World as It IsI was in Gaza in 1993 after the Oslo peace accord was signed. It was as if, after years of suffocation, Palestinians and Israelis could breathe. But Oslo, in the hands of former Israeli Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, was strangled and thwarted. Peace eludes us in Palestine, Israel and Iraq not because people do not want peace but because we are governed by moral and intellectual trolls. Chris Hedges |
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3/10/08 Top Iraq Contractor Skirts US Taxes Offshore Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven. Farah Stockman |
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3/10/08 Tucker Carlson Unintentionally Reveals Role of American Press Presumably, the press should only do things that please the powerful so that the powerful keep talking to the press, so that the press in turn can keep pleasing the powerful, in an endless, symbiotic, mutually beneficial cycle. Rarely does someone who plays the role of a “journalist” on TV so candidly describe their real function. Glenn Greenwald |
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3/9/08 - McCain Resurrected They can't sell fiscal responsibility, they can't sell "values," they can't sell competence, they can't sell small government, they can't even sell the economy. All they have left to offer is this sad, dwindling, knee-jerk patriotism, a promise to keep selling world politics as a McHale's Navy rerun to a Middle America that wants nothing to do with realizing the world has changed since 1946. Matt Taibbi |
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3/8/08 - Election Madness I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth. But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Howard Zinn |
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3/7/08 - Justice Scalia's Two-Front War Despite lip service to "judicial restraint" Scalia has been waging a war against consumer product regulation as well as protections for workers, at both the state and federal level. As long ago as 1982, movement icon Antonin Scalia, then a University of Chicago law professor, warned members of the fledgling Federalist Society to shed such myopic nostalgia. Conservatives' underlying goal, he said, is "market freedom." Simon Lazarus and Harper Jean Tobin |
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3/6/08 - The Spectacular Wrongness of William F BuckleyWhat are we to make of a lover of democracy who called whites in the American South "the advanced race," entitled to prevail politically even if they were numerically inferior, and who even left the door open to using violence toward that end? Heck, for that matter, what can be said of someone so culturally perceptive that he could write, "The Beatles are not merely awful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music." David Michael Green |
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3/5/08 - The Gardens of The Devil, Still Sowing DeathThe first time I saw one, my first instinct was to pick it up. It shone in the sunlight, bright green, something new and fresh amid the dry grass of the south Lebanon hills. The little cluster bomblet seemed to have been made to hold in the hand. No wonder the little children died. Robert Fisk |
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3/4/08 - Self-Deception and ‘Restraint’ in IsraelImagine if the Palestinians were to kill dozens of Israelis, including women and children, in one week, as the IDF did. What an international outcry we would raise, and justifiably. Only in our own eyes can we still adhere to our restrained, forbearing image. All the talk about the ‘major operation’ is designed to achieve only one goal: to show it is possible to be even more violent and cruel. Gideon Levy |
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3/3/08 - Bush in Epic Battle to Cover His AssIf it ever comes out that their secret, illegal domestic wiretaps were not targeting al Qaeda, but Al Gore, the jig is finally up. The entire "trust us, we're hunting terrorists" rationale, as thin as it always was, will lose any residual integrity, and the GOP may never recover. And they know it. And maybe, hopefully, the Democrats finally know it too. Allan Uthman |
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3/2/08 - Vets Break Silence on War CrimesIraq Veterans Against the War argues that well-publicised incidents of U.S. brutality like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of an entire family of Iraqis in the town of Haditha are not the isolated incidents perpetrated by “a few bad apples”, as many politicians and military leaders have claimed. They are part of a pattern, the group says, of “an increasingly bloody occupation” Aaron Glantz |
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3/1/08 - Obama, Osama, Hussein - drop a name, bait voter Arab-phobiaThe FBI's one stroke of genius was to disguise the bribers as Arabs representing a rich, oily sheik. It worked. The public would forgive "policemen's presents," as Mark Twain called kickbacks. They'd never forgive consorting with Arabs. One senator, five congressmen and a few other lesser moths were convicted in what became known as the Abscam scandal (the FBI's front company was called Abdul Enterprises). Pierre Tristam |
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2/29/08 - Exxon Suxx & McCain DuxxNext month marks 19 years since the Exxon Valdez dumped its load of crude oil across the Prince William Sound, Alaska. A big gooey load of this crude spilled over the lands of the Chenega Natives. Paul Kompkoff was a seal-hunter for the village. That is, until Exxon's ship killed the seal and poisoned the rest of Chenega's food supply. Greg Palast |
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2/28/08 - Most Wanted List: International TerrorismThe more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while Arabs purposely kill people, the U.S. and Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their killings are just accidental ones, hence not at the level of moral depravity of their adversaries. That was, for example, the stand of Israel's High Court when it recently authorized severe collective punishment of the people of Gaza by depriving them of electricity. Noam Chomsky |
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2/27/08 - "Heroes"Last June, in the context of neocon apologist Fouad Ajami's characterization of convicted perjurer Scooter Libby as a "fallen soldier" in the Iraq War, I talked about the American right's strange choice in martyrs—specifically, Lieutenant William "Rusty" Calley, convicted by a jury his military peers of the murder of twenty-two women, children, and old men in the village of My Lai. One conservative minister proclaimed: "There was a crucifixion 2,000 years ago of a man named Jesus Christ. I don't think we need another crucifixion of a man named Rusty Calley." Rick Perlstein |
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2/26/08 - The Mass Murder Diamond HeistSierra Leone is a tiny West African country blessed with four and a half million people and cursed with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds. As soon as the glistening chunks of carbon were discovered by the British imperial occupiers in the 1930s, they became a locus of conflict as the desperate locals swarmed with picks and hammers to chip away their own fraction of the fortune. By the 1950s, De Beers - who had been granted exclusive rights to exploit the diamonds by the British - were paying private companies to litter the country with landmines to keep the natives out. Johann Hari |
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2/25/08 - Why So Many Films About Going It Alone?With at least one survey finding 75 percent of Americans feeling that our country is on the wrong track, the trend toward gloomy movies may seem to be a case of art imitating life. Yet as the ideology of hyper-individualism runs its dangerous course through our politics and culture, the American public may be drawn to entertainment that depicts the future we're desperate to avoid. Sally Kohn |
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2/24/08 - John McCain, Then and NowWay back in 1988 my co-authors and I were putting the final touches to our book, Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans when someone slipped us a plain brown envelop. Inside was a transcript of a meeting between thrift regulators and five US senators who had interceded on behalf of Arizona S&L owner Charles Keating. At the time the regulators were warning that Keating's thrift, Lincoln Savings and Loan, was dangerously insolvent and that Keating and his cohorts were robbing the federally-insured thrift blind -- or, more precisely, robbing the US taxpayers blind. Stephen Pizzo |
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2/23/08 - Elaine Chao’s Department of Anti-LaborThere has been little outcry to date over Elaine Chao’s numerous abuses of power and fundamental lack of oversight for workers. Unlike her cohorts in the Bush administration, Chao has escaped much-needed public scrutiny of her time on the job. Americans deserve a Secretary of Labor who can provide a well-balanced approach to the interests of both business and labor, not an ideologue with a blatant political agenda. Mary Beth Maxwell |
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2/22/08 - Mexican Border Wall Bypasses the Rich and ConnectedMost border residents couldn't believe the fence would ever be built through their homes and communities. They expected it to run along the banks of the Rio Grande, not north of the flood levees -- in some cases like Tamez's, as far as a mile north of the river. So it came as a shock last summer when residents were approached by uniformed Border Patrol agents. They asked people to sign waivers allowing Homeland Security to survey their properties for construction of the wall. When they declined, Homeland Security filed condemnation suits. Melissa del Bosque |
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2/21/08 - Castro and the ColossusThose hoping for a “freedom flotilla” of Cuban exiles returning to remake Havana in the image of 1959, threatening the very future of Las Vegas with legalized prostitution as well as gambling, are likely to be disappointed. Odds are that Castro’s successors, beginning with his rhetoric-weary brother, are likely to finally get serious, after decades of fitful starts and reversals, about ending the grip of a moribund statist economy. Robert Scheer |
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2/20/08 - Challenging Indian Land TrustsAcross Indian country, two things are never in short supply: rich natural resources and endemic poverty. That paradox is driving a longstanding battle between indigenous people and the government trust that holds money generated from their lands. Michelle Chen |
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2/19/08 - The Fall of a Corporate Crime FighterLawyers like Lerach who push the envelope in litigation under the guise of defending the little guy have had a ruinous effect on the integrity of the civil justice system. Large corporations have long argued that class action lawyers are nothing more than extortionists who shake down big companies every time their stocks fall, forcing them to settle or risk fiscal ruin from a big jury verdict. Given what’s known now about how Lerach operated his law firm, it's hard to say that the perception is only spin. Stephanie Mencimer |
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2/18/08 - Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from "American Idol," appearing on the Fox game show "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: "Budapest is the capital of what European country?" Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. "I thought Europe was a country," she said. Patricia Cohen |
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2/17/08 - The Next Great AwakeningA few years ago, a young union organizer asked me, “Which are the good churches and which are the bad ones?” He wanted a quick (and intellectually easy) way to understand which faith bodies would be the most supportive of workers’ rights. Kim Bobo |
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2/16/08 - Bush Administration Tries to "Cleanse" Evidence Obtained Through TortureThe Pentagon has deployed a novel strategy to legitimize the process and make it respectable again: take defendants imprisoned in an endless legal limbo and whose confessions have been tortured out of them and interrogate them again, this time asking nicely and without violence, to obtain the same evidence. A few months later, voila: You have a clean trial. Liliana Segura |
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2/15/08 - Without Us, They’d Just Fight and Eat out of CansImagine a world suddenly - very suddenly - without men. Planes would drop out of the sky as pilots disappeared. Cities would grow cold and dark as power generators stopped. No fire trucks would come to deal with the inevitable disasters. Legislatures would empty. Wars would end. Now imagine the flip side. Antonia Zerbisias |
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2/14/08 - Beware of Democrats Bearing CompromisePundits have asserted time and again that the Democratic candidates’ positions on issues do not diverge. They do. The differences are sparse, but provide a unique window into Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s respective governing styles unfettered by media lights. For lack of space, I provide only a few examples. The first is the United States’ use of cluster bombs in civilian areas… David Broockman |
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2/13/08 - Military-Industrial Complex Still Central to GOP War MachineThe Republican Party of the 21st century clings to the memory of Ronald Reagan's vastly overrated presidency while ignoring the wisdom and achievements of Dwight Eisenhower, the best two-term Republican president of the 20th century. All the Republican presidential hopefuls wrap themselves around Reagan, hoping to morph into the second-rate actor who read his lines well and used his superficial charm and relaxed manner to win elections. Bill Gallagher |
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2/12/08 - There’s Nothing Mainstream About the Corporate MediaAs we stumble toward another presidential election, it’s never been more clear that our political process is being warped by a corporate stranglehold on the free flow of information. Amidst a virtual blackout of coverage of a horrific war, a global ecological crisis and an advancing economic collapse, what passes for the mass media is itself in collapse. What’s left of our democracy teeters on the brink. Harvey Wasserman |
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2/11/08 - The Chicken Doves: Surrendered to BushQuietly, while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been inspiring Democrats everywhere with their rolling bitchfest, congressional superduo Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have completed one of the most awesome political collapses since Neville Chamberlain. At long last, the Democratic leaders of Congress have publicly surrendered on the Iraq War, just one year after being swept into power with a firm mandate to end it. Matt Taippi |
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2/10/08 - My Mother-in-law, Aborigines, Law, and the ElectionBad law is written by special interests for their own entitlement, justifying their preservation and enrichment at the expense of others. Chiefs who use their power to re-write law to save themselves when they have broken it, destroy community. They, the powerful, the entitled, are essentially cowards, and use their criminal power to persuade the people to be complicit in their hypocrisy. The powerful who consolidate their power by lying must necessarily make the wisdom in the law illegal, marginalize truth tellers to fenced in “free speech zones,” prosecute the honest as subversives. Robert Shetterly |
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2/9/08 - Outsourcing ZionismIn the past year, the state has handed over the management of at least five checkpoints to corporate warriors—working for such companies as Notari Zion (Guardians of Zion), Shmira Ubitahon (Guarding and Security) and Modi’in Ezrachi (Civil Intelligence). But the difference between Israel Defense Force soldiers and hired guns is that the latter operate within the gray areas of the law. They are Israel’s Blackwater. Neve Gordon & Erez Tzfadia |
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2/8/08 - White House defends interrogation methodThe White House on Wednesday defended the use of waterboarding, saying it is legal — not torture as critics argue — and has saved American lives. President Bush could authorize waterboarding for future terrorism suspects if certain criteria are met, a spokesman said. Jennifer Loven |
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2/7/08 - Rejecting feminism makes no senseThis woman sent me an e-mail Monday, and it got me thinking. See, in describing herself, she assured me she was not “a ‘women's libber’” -- the late 1960s equivalent of feminist. She also said she was retired from the U.S. Navy. There was, it seemed to me, a disconnect there: She doesn't believe in women's liberation, yet she is retired from a position that liberation made possible. Leonard Pitts Jr |
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2/6/08 - Wal-Mart's Brave New WorldFour of the richest ten people in the U.S. are heirs of Sam Walton, Wal-Mart's founder, and the Walton family has been among the largest contributors to the Bush campaigns, and to the Republican Party. That's no coincidence, as the wealthiest 1 percent of the nation enjoy huge increases in wealth under Republican leadership while the rest of the nation falls into ever-deeper neglect and disrepair. Jaime O’Neill |
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2/5/08 - Bipartisanship MisdirectionThere has been a lot of discussion recently about the urgent need to stop the "partisan bickering" in Washington, with elder statesmen gathering in groups to demand bipartisan cabinets and pundits wringing their hankies about government not "getting anything done." Glenn Greenwald wrote about the actual record of bipartisanship earlier this week and set forth a long list of recent legislative initiatives in which the Republicans voted as a bloc and Democrats crossed the aisle to pass legislation. It's quite impressive. Digby |
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2/4/08 - How Teenage Rebellion Has Become a Mental IllnessBig pharma has some new customers. Not complying with authority is now, in many cases, labeled a disease. For a generation now, disruptive young Americans who rebel against authority figures have been increasingly diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric (psychotropic) drugs. Bruce E Levine |
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2/3/08 - Blessed are the cheesemakersThere's an old adage: "Faith can move mountains." Whoever came up with that gem probably didn't leave the house a lot. In today's tumultuous times, faith can barely move bowels, let alone mountains. Yet, we are encouraged by presidential candidates to vote for them based on how super-duper their personal religious beliefs are. Ed Naha |
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2/2/08 - Disowned by the Ownership SocietyWell before the ownership society had a neat label, its creation was central to the success of the right-wing economic revolution around the world. The idea was simple: if working-class people owned a small piece of the market–a home mortgage, a stock portfolio, a private pension–they would cease to identify as workers and start to see themselves as owners, with the same interests as their bosses. That meant they could vote for politicians promising to improve stock performance rather than job conditions. Class consciousness would be a relic. Naomi Klein |
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2/1/08 - It’s Time to Hold Democratic House Leaders in ContemptThe Democrats in Congress cannot even get their own members together to defend the Constitution against a supremely unpopular executive who has essentially spit in their faces, eaten their lunch and the nation’s, and publicly called them out as powerless. Not to mention the fact that they are setting a precedent for the future that any executive can emasculate any Congress and defy any subpoena after having committed possibly any crime. Naomi Wolf |
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1/31/08 - State of the Union Came With a Signing StatementOn the day of the State of the Union, apparently hoping nobody would notice, President George W. Bush posted a statement on the White House website announcing his intention to violate major sections of the Defense Authorization bill that he just signed into law. David Swanson |
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1/30/08 - CSNY Speak Out and Listen In “Deja Vu”Death threats, loud catcalls and walkouts didn’t stop rock legends Crosby Stills Nash & Young from completing their fiercely anti-Bush reunion tour in 2006. Two years later, the band has reunited again to unveil its Sundance Film Festival closing-night film, “CSNY Deja Vu,” a documentary that isn’t so much a concert movie as a balanced examination of America’s fiercely divided opinions about the Iraq War. Gregg Goldstein |
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1/29/08 - The Truth About PovertyMy definition of poverty comes from experience and there are many levels: working poor, so poor you don't have a pot to piss in and dirt poor. I have been homeless as a kid, I have lived w/out basic luxuries like a refrigerator, I have received welfare and donated foods, I have dumpster dived and not for sport, I have tried to figure out how to make $10 feed me for a month, I have been poor in small towns (less than 3000 ppl) and the inner city, and now I find myself in the middle class and still living paycheck to paycheck. nadine mn |
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1/28/08 - Study Claims Lies Shaped Rush To War. Is The Same Type of Misinformation Influencing Economic Coverage?Keep in mind that old adage: truth passes through three stages. First it is denied. Then the people who raise it are demonized. And finally, when it is irrefutable, it is widely accepted usually with the proviso that everyone always knew it all along. Danny Schechter |
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1/27/08 - God's Profits: Faith, Fraud and the GOP Crusade for Values VotersIt is through revelation knowledge that the Word of Faith movement has created its alternate universe in which rational thought is rejected and where the media, intellectual thought, science, and any type of critical thinking are scorned. Drawing on the Pentecostal tradition of casting out devils, pursuits associated with the Enlightenment are denounced as the work of Satan. Sarah Posner |
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1/26/08 - Leading Dems Miss the Boat on Health CareAs the private insurance industry no longer finds growth in the employer-sponsored and individual markets, it has been shifting its sights to privatized public programs, including Medicare and Medicaid. Here it has found generous subsidies and little oversight from friendly conservatives in government. John P Geyman, MD |
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1/25/08 - The parable of the landfill rowboatIf your city is anything like mine, certain members of the routinely money-grubbing business class will suddenly get conscience pangs (or maybe just sense a useful public-relations opportunity) and arrange for a media event calling attention to the "plight of the homeless." Dennis Rahkonen |
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1/24/08 - How To Pull Out Of A Recession"Every billion dollars spent on the military results - directly and indirectly - in fewer jobs and lower quality jobs than a billion dollars spent on education, a recent analysis published by the Political Economy Research Institute showed. That is, the effects of military spending ripple through the economy with much less vigor than government spending on other programs. Plus, domestic spending has a longer lasting impact on the economy. A well-educated, healthy workforce, along with investment in infrastructure, will fuel the new industries of tomorrow." Matthew Rothschild |
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1/23/08 - Are US Policies Killing Women?For the past 24 years, except during the Clinton presidency, U.S. administrations have maintained a global gag rule against providing counseling or referrals for abortions at U.S.-funded clinics in developing nations. It's a rule that only thwarts safe abortions, while reducing the already limited availability of other family-planning services. The global gag rule has also led to a pullback in overseas delivery of contraceptives… Michele Kort |
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1/22/08 - Failure Is Now An OptionIn a stunning reversal of more than 200 years of conventional wisdom, failure—traditionally believed to be an unacceptable outcome for a wide range of tasks and goals—is now increasingly seen as a viable alternative to success, sources confirmed Tuesday. the ONION |
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1/21/08 - A memo to William Jefferson Clinton, from those of us with a memoryYour behavior so diminished the grandeur of the office of President of the United States that a half-wit blowhard like George W. Bush suddenly became electable. He wasn't electable because he offered solutions, vision or substance, but because he reassured voters he'd "restore dignity to the Oval Office." Stephen Pizzo |
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1/20/08 - What Does It Mean To Be the Pro-Israel Candidate?For the record, Rudy Giuliani gives me the very deep creeps, relieved only by his current poor electoral prospects. I mention this because some people think he is the most pro-Israel of candidates. If so, may God protect Israel from its friends.Gershom Gorenberg |
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1/19/08 - Bush’s Tragic Dream WorldThe President sat chummily beside the all-too-friendly monarch yesterday, enthroned in what looked suspiciously like the kind of casual blue cardigan he might wear on his own Texan ranch; he had even received a jangling gold “Order of Merit” – it looked a bit like the Lord Chancellor’s chain, though it was not disclosed which particular merit earned Mr. Bush this kingly reward. Could it be the hypocritical merit of supplying yet more billions worth of weapons to the Kingdom, to be used against the Saudi regime’s imaginary enemies? Robert Fisk |
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1/18/08 - A Prescription for PlutocracyImagine yourself the CEO in an industry that has been registering record profits year after year — mainly by overcharging consumers for products they feel they literally can’t live without. But suddenly you find yourself with a problem: Your products have simply become too costly for consumers to afford. So what do you do? You convince lawmakers to plow billions of taxpayer dollars into a program that will help consumers pay for your overpriced products. Problem solved. Sam Pizzigati |
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1/17/08 - First Came Katrina, Then Came HUDSince Katrina, the homeless population of New Orleans has doubled to more than 12,000 people. Despite what the New York Times on Dec. 2 called an “acute rental shortage,” HUD plans to spend $762 million to demolish public housing and replace it with only 744 new units of affordable housing. HUD will spend an average of $400,000 for each new mixed-income unit, while statements by HANO’S own insurance company have shown that many of the multiple-unit buildings to be demolished could be repaired for less than $10,000 per building. Lewis Wallace |
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1/16/08 - John Kerry Should Just Go Away!!John Kerry is the arbiter of bad judgement and the bastion of backing down. He's deluded himself into believing that Americans have forgotten his disastrous candidacy and forgiven him for it. This may be the case for some - but for those who value peace, social justice, and the moral standing of America, the mere mention of John Kerry is cause to recoil. Even the most cursory observation of America's decline since 2005 should rekindle disgust toward John Kerry. Linda Milazzo |
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1/15/08 - Financial Forces Run AmokWithout regulation, the invisible hand of the market is robbing us blind. For about the last 30 years, our nation has been traveling the deregulation highway, a road with no rules or direction. We have let enterprise be free, business go unfettered, the good times roll. And roll they have, but to where? One stopping point: the current mortgage crisis. Al Meyerhoff |
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1/14/08 - Bush, accessory after the factThe Israelis think they are fooling the world, but they are only fooling themselves. The outposts are the essence of the Israeli bluff. For 40 years now, Israel has been settling in the occupied territories while pretending that it is prepared to withdraw at any moment if only a chance for peace develops. With its own hands, Israel has been rendering the two-state solution irrelevant, while declaring to all and sundry that this is the only possible solution. Haaretz Editorial |
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1/13/08 - Six Years of Guantanamo: Enough is Enough!Six years ago, on Jan. 11, 2002, the first of 778 prisoners -- referred to as "detainees" and identified only by numbers -- arrived at a hastily erected prison in the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where, ever since, they have been subjected to a disturbingly lawless experiment. Andy Worthington |
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1/12/08 - Shut Up, Larry!O'Donnell attacks the only candidate in the race with explicitly progressive policy positions, and the only candidate in the race who hasn't accepted corporate money, and the only candidate in the race who understands how corporations are poisoning American politics and American life with their unrestrained power and influence. Jane Smiley |
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1/11/08 - Jonah Goldberg's Bizarro HistoryOf all the things we know about fascism and the traits that comprise it, one of the few things that historians will readily agree upon is its overwhelming anti-liberalism. One might as well write about anti-Semitic neoconservatism, or Ptolemaic quantum theory, or strength in ignorance. Goldberg isn't content to simply create an oxymoron; this entire enterprise, in fact, is classic Newspeak. David Neiwert |
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1/10/08 - License and (Voter) Registration, PleasePanelists pointed out that the U.S. Department of Justice had gone on a six-year wild-goose chase of an investigation into voter fraud that turned up exactly zero fraud cases but resulted in a major scandal for the White House over the politically motivated firings of U.S. Attorneys. Stephanie Mencimer |
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1/9/08 - What Is This ‘Iranian Provocation’ BS?Not one news story about this week’s latest chapter in the administration’s ongoing effort to gin up a crazy war with Iran–the so-called “provocation” caused by Iranian naval speedboats approaching within 200 meters of a US destroyer–mentioned that the US, which sits some 7500 miles away from Iran, has sent a whole fully-armed armada into the Persian Gulf just off Iran’s coast. Or that the Vice President actually flew out to an aircraft carrier that was part of that US armada, and threatened, from the flight deck, to have the US massively attack Iran. David Lindorff |
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1/8/08 - We Forget What It Was Really Like Under the ClintonsNAFTA failures; deregulation of banking and ENRON's rise; "Welfare Reform" that led to more poor people. This and more is what the Clintons gave us. David Morris |
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1/7/08 - No Child Left Behind Should Be ScrappedAmerica’s schools have fallen into a giant trap. This trap is epic in its dimensions, because the people capable of leading us out of it have been silenced, and the initiative that could help us is being systematically squashed. Policymakers and the public have been seduced by a simple formulation. No Child Left Behind posits that we have troubled schools because they have not been accountable. If we make teachers and schools pay a price for the failure of their students, they will bring those students up to speed. Anthony Cody |
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1/6/08 - A Hostile PresidentGeorge Bush is coming to Israel this week. He will take pleasure in his visit. One can assume that there are few prime ministers with a giant photo of themselves with the U.S. president hanging on the wall in their home, as our Ehud Olmert boasted last week that he does, to his exalted guest, the comic Eli Yatzpan. There are also few other countries where the lame duck from Washington would not be greeted with mass demonstrations; instead, Israel is making great efforts to welcome him graciously. Gideon Levy |
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1/5/08 - Studying Kangaroo Farts and Teflon-Coated FrogsScientists already know that kangaroo stomachs are more than just green. Instead of methane, they produce acetate, a chemical that improves digestion. Feed laced with kangaroo bacteria could give rise to livestock that is not only greener, but also faster-growing and more fertile. Independent UK |
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1/4/08 - Empires ArchitectureThe White House originally requested $1.3 billion to build the compound, but Congress allocated $592 million for the project in 2005. It was a hefty sum given that the United States didn’t pay a cent to Iraq for the four-square-mile stretch of land in Baghdad’s Green Zone, roughly the size of Vatican City. By comparison, the United States paid $22 million for land that was less than one-tenth that size for a planned new embassy in Beirut, which will now no longer be built because of security concerns over its proximity to a Hezbollah stronghold. Allen McDuffee |
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1/3/08 - Amnesia at the Multiplex"Is this admirable restraint or cold feet?" asks David Ansen in his Newsweek review. "Are they afraid of spoiling the feel-good uplift of Charlie's victory with the harsh downdraft of history? It's as if 'Titanic' ended with a celebratory shipboard banquet, followed by a postscript: by the way, it sank." Lakshmi Chaudhry |
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1/2/08 - Gauging the Fear Inside the Palace WallsA pretty reliable gauge of Establishment fear is how far away from factual reality its chief spokesmen stray at election time. With economic populism now driving both the Democratic and Republican presidential contests, professional political pontificators in Washington are attacking candidates for being crazed and angry - when in fact their own rhetoric shows it is the pundits who are the angriest of all. An uprising is on - one against the hostile takeover of our government by Big Money interests. And inside the walls of the Washington palace, the elite are freaking out. David Sirota |
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1/1/08 - Death By ElectionThere must be a Star Trek episode (if there's not, there should be) in which all the best minds in the leftist political opposition on some planet are diverted into an obsession with a virtual reality game, leaving all the right-wingers free to drive the planet into inevitable war and destruction. A game is a harmless thing when not put to such use. Elections are a fundamental pillar of democracy when not put to such use. David Swanson |
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