Afghanistan doesn’t present the kind of “false choices” that President Barack Obama, by nature, habitually rejects. The choices are real and awful, and no amount of reframing and rephrasing will make them go away.
The first major federal civil rights law protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, passed last week, was attached to a measure funding ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For decades, Lebanese journalism has been applauded as the freest, most outspoken and most literate in the heavily censored Arab world. Alas, no more. The Lebanese media are being hit – like the rest of the world – by the Internet and falling advertising revenues. But this is Lebanon, where politics is always involved. Is something rotten in the state of the Lebanese press?
Slashing bonuses at bailed-out companies is like arresting jaywalkers while ignoring the bank robbery that’s happening in broad daylight down the block.
European allies have tired of America’s cries of “wolf! wolf!” in Iraq (yesterday), Afghanistan (today), and (I fear) Pakistan or Somalia or Kashmir tomorrow.
Peter Richardson’s new book about the groundbreaking Ramparts magazine says the rag changed America. Truthdig arts and culture editor Kasia Anderson asks the author and former Ramparts Editor Robert Scheer, Truthdig’s editor-in-chief, why the magazine’s impact isn’t better remembered and what will take its place.
It can be shown that the patterns of military sex crimes are old and widespread—for generations, military service has transformed large numbers of American boys into sexual predators. So it seems reasonable to ask whether perhaps there is something about military culture or training or experience that can be identified as causative, and then, perhaps, changed.
Anyone infuriated by the grossly inflated compensation of the masters of finance should check out the incredible earnings of the top executives in the health insurance business.
Who are these people? I am not referring to the pathetic parents of “Balloon Boy,” whose fake drama I have been unable to escape while on the treadmill this week, thanks to my gym’s insistence on tuning its flat-screen TVs to Wolf Blitzer’s nonstop self-parody.
Now we know the answer to one of the vexing questions of the modern age: Evidently, there is nothing at all that some people won’t do to get on television.
It’s now clear that health care “reform” is a bonanza for the insurance companies. But these acquisitive businesses want even more. Their efforts to increase their profits are at the center of the clandestine Senate and House negotiations currently shaping the health bill.
Will the young and hopeful abandon the political playing field to older voters who are angry? That is the quiet crisis confronting President Obama and the Democrats.
The oil and natural gas industry, the coal industry, arms and weapons manufacturers, industrial farms, deforestation industries, the automotive industry and chemical plants will not willingly accept their own extinction. They are indifferent to the looming human catastrophe.
Given the Western world’s obsession with al-Qaida, it’s remarkable that public discourse makes little mention of the fact that the terror group is going out of business.
Still Doing God’s Work on Wall Street
