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By Steven Naifeh (Author), Gregory White Smith (Author)
Saul Landau $13.46
$18
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By Amy Goodman — He was assassinated while in church in Wichita, Kan., on Sunday, targeted for legally performing abortions. His death might have been prevented simply through enforcement of existing laws.
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 reformation-lutheran.org
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Dr. George Tiller was volunteering at his Kansas church Sunday when a gunman shot him dead. Republicans in Congress recently made a villain of Tiller when they stalled the confirmation of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to head the Department of Health and Human Services.
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 Flickr / Paul J Everett
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — There were many messages sent from South Bend on Sunday. Obama’s opponents seek to reignite the culture wars. He doesn’t. They would reduce religious faith to a narrow set of issues. He refused to join them.
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 AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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President Barack Obama attempted the impossible during his commencement speech at Notre Dame University in Indiana on Sunday: He asked those on both sides of the abortion debate to “join hands in common effort.”
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 UND / Ben Franske
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — You have heard the expression “more Catholic than the pope.” We now know that the reaction of right-wing Catholics to Notre Dame’s invitation to President Obama falls into this category.
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 White House / Pete Souza
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Just in time for swine flu, the Senate has confirmed Barack Obama’s pick to head the massive Health and Human Services Department, Kathleen Sebelius. Democrats were able to use the health scare to shake the upper chamber out of abortion-obsessed confirmation gridlock.
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By William Pfaff — In respect to tradition, one would expect Obama to deliver Notre Dame’s commencement address in May, but a crowd of Fighting Irish have decided to try to keep the new president away from the hallowed campus for fear that some of his thinking might rub off on them.
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 Flickr / VictoryNH: Protect Our Primary
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Michael Steele recently irritated his party by taking a tolerant view of abortion, but the RNC chairman is here to let everyone know that there’s plenty of crazy where that came from. While guest-hosting a talk show, Steele compared President Obama to Richard Nixon and argued that, science be damned, the Earth isn’t getting warmer—it’s getting colder.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — If President Obama’s primary task is to restore economic growth, he has also been waging a quiet, long-term campaign to ease the nation’s divisions around religious and moral questions.
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 governor.ks.gov
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Let’s try this again, shall we? Tom Daschle didn’t make the cut, but President Obama has a new contender for secretary of health and human services. Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who may be vulnerable to attacks on the abortion issue, faces a potentially challenging confirmation process.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — It took less than three weeks for the real Barack Obama to come into view. He turns out to be both a conciliator and a fighter. Update
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By Ellen Goodman — The president took his swing in the 25-year-old game of ideological pingpong known as the global gag rule, but he also made it clear he’d like everyone to put their paddles down.
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 AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — He is making trillion-dollar decisions that will cast the die for the rest of his promising agenda. Unfortunately, while he has already proved to be a brilliant agent of change in so many ways, in economic policy he has relied on the financial “experts” who helped get America into this mess.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Beneath the warm pledges of bipartisanship and the earnest calls for cooperation lurks an unpleasant fact: From the moment it loses power, the opposition party turns to the task of getting it back.
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 freechoicesaveslives.org
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In the next move of a partisan ping-pong game over women’s reproductive health, Obama is slated to reverse the despicable “global gag rule” that refuses U.S. aid to foreign health clinics that even mention the word that begins with an A. And sounds like “shma-shmortion.” It’s abortion.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — By inviting Pastor Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation, President-elect Barack Obama has alienated some of his friends on the left, but the choice also enrages conservatives who fear the breakup of right-wing dominance in the white evangelical community.
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 myspace.com
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Stressing the need “for Americans to come together” even when they disagree about particular issues, Barack Obama responded on Thursday to the outcry over his decision to give Pastor Rick Warren the honor of delivering the invocation at Obama’s upcoming inauguration ceremony.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Obama’s most urgent task is to repair an ailing economy. But one of his most important promises was to end the cultural and religious wars that have disfigured politics for four decades.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — With Obama’s victory, it’s time to hope that the era of racial backlash and wedge politics is over. Time to imagine that the patriotism of dissenters will no longer be questioned and that the world will no longer be divided between “values voters” and those without a moral compass.
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In a last-ditch attempt to derail Latino support for Obama, an anti-abortion crusader and an activist against illegal immigration have teamed up to send a retired Texas bishop’s message to nearly 3 million Latino voters by e-mail and to even more by radio.
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By Mike Farrell — “You really do hate America!” This was the parting shot from a man I had just debated on a television show shortly before the invasion of Iraq. Because he’s a notorious right-wing blowhard, I laughed it off as the raving of a crackpot in extremis.
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John McCain’s supporters are plenty scared that a secret terrorist-loving Muslim could take over the White House. Meanwhile, Barack Obama’s supporters think there’s nothing scarier than Sarah Palin. At last, fear has brought both sides together.
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 Wikimedia Commons / edited for effect
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By Chris Hedges — The old assumptions and paradigms about capitalism and free markets are dead. A new, virulent populism, still inchoate, is slowly and painfully rising to take their place. This populism will determine the future of the country. It is as likely to be right-wing as left-wing.
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 disaboom.com
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Why is it that liberals and the “gotcha media” so dislike Sarah Palin? Thank goodness the National Review’s Kevin Burke, who apparently holds an advanced degree in armchair psychology, is here to help us get to the bottom of this troubling issue.
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 groundspeak.com
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By Bill Boyarsky — What struck me during my week in Appalachian Ohio was how different this was from the America of the McCain-Palin campaign, a divided place where the Republicans pit one part of the country against another with vicious robocalls at the dinner hour.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Catholics, who are quintessential swing voters and gave narrow but crucial support to President Bush in 2004, are drifting toward Barack Obama. And this time, some church leaders are suggesting that single-issue voting—such as on abortion—is by no means a Catholic commandment.
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By Eugene Robinson — Grouchiness, twitchiness and haughtiness didn’t help John McCain in Wednesday’s debate, but what he said hurt him more than how he said it.
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The term “health of the mother” is a coded term used by extreme pro-abortionists to mislead the public about their nefarious intentions, as John McCain suggested during Wednesday’s presidential debate. Or it could just mean “health of the mother.”
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By Ellen Goodman — While gay marriage is losing its stigma, abortion is once again retreating to the closet.
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By Eugene Robinson — Can any Republican candidate claim with a straight face to represent the party of small government? For that matter, can any Republican candidate plausibly explain what the party is supposed to stand for these days?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The key to understanding how John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate was provided by The New York Times last weekend when it described an episode in which he “tossed $100 chips around a hot craps table.”
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 npr.org
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And to think that anyone thought James Dobson would sit out this presidential race. The Christian right leader and his advocacy group, Focus on the Family Action, are planning a multistate strategy to help elect McCain, and to prevent Democratic gains in Congress while they’re at it.
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By Ellen Goodman — The 44th president could replace as many as three of the four moderate and liberal justices of the Supreme Court. You do the math. If Obama is elected, the court will stay pretty much the way it is. If McCain is elected, Katie bar the door.
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Katie Couric asked Sarah Palin about a number of controversial topics during the latest installment of her interview—evolution, abortion, homosexuality—but the VP nominee appeared to have the hardest time when pressed to say what newspapers and magazines she has read: “Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.”
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By Sam Harris — When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. “They think they’re better than you!” is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. “Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!” Yes, all too ordinary.
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 npr.org/blogs/secretmoney/
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This latest report from the “Secret Money Project,” an ongoing joint project by the Center for Investigative Reporting and National Public Radio, follows the money trail to the sources behind independently funded political advertisements on hot-button issues like abortion and religion that are cropping up as the Nov. 4 election approaches.
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By Ellen Goodman — Three weeks after the nomination of the Candidate From Nowhere, one week after the robo-interview with Charlie Gibson and days after the “Saturday Night Live” skit, there is still a flood tide of women choking on the possibility that Hillary Clinton paved the way for Sarah Palin.
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On Friday, ABC aired another set of excerpts of the interviews of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin by the journalist her team picked to pose the questions, Charlie Gibson. In these clips, Palin appears slightly more relaxed than she was the previous day, but some of her answers still were fuzzy, especially when it came to whether her personal views on certain issues would influence her policy decisions.
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By Eugene Robinson — John McCain is no silver-tongued orator, as he proved in St. Paul, but it’s hard not to be stirred when he speaks of wanting only to serve a cause greater than himself—until you take a closer look and see that he’s running one of the most egocentric presidential campaigns in memory.
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 AP photo / Jose Luis Magana
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In Friday’s New York Times article about whether Hillary Clinton will go to the mat against Sarah Palin, a woman delegate at the GOP convention says, “I just bet Hillary was watching Sarah’s speech on TV Wednesday night and cheering, ‘You go, girl!’ ” Really?
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By Eugene Robinson — Talk about role reversal. The Republican Party, which scoffs at the nonsense of “identity politics,” has staked everything on the compelling life stories of its presidential and vice presidential candidates.
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John McCain’s wife, Cindy, sat down with CBS News anchor Katie Couric for an interview that aired Wednesday night, pledging to Couric that the VP vetting process was indeed thorough and sounding her enthusiasm for Sarah Palin. She said she agrees with the Alaska governor about the need to teach intelligent design in the schools but disagrees that abortion should be prohibited even in cases of incest or rape.
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By Marie Cocco — Here is what we have gotten with John McCain’s vice presidential selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, picked in part for her extreme anti-abortion credentials: an exquisite endorsement of the pro-choice argument.
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By Joe Conason — Families deserve privacy about family matters, but families that want absolute privacy should stay out of politics. The question that remains is what, if anything, Bristol Palin’s plight may portend for the rest of us.
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 AP photo / Susan Walsh
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As little as two days before he made his VP announcement, John McCain wanted to pick friend and Democratic turncoat Joe Lieberman, according to a report in The New York Times. But as in so many other decisions in his campaign, the alleged maverick caved to the far right of his party, which threatened to sink a McCain-Lieberman ticket at the convention. In the end he chose a woman he barely knew.
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 AP photo / Stephan Savoia
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Normally we try not to pay too much attention to what’s happening to the wombs of America’s teenagers, but Bristol Palin, 17, happens to be the daughter of John McCain’s VP pick. Sarah Palin thinks the government should meddle in the reproductive health of women, but in the case of her daughter, she asks for privacy.
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 gov.state.ak.us
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Mother of five, one-time Miss Congeniality, caribou hunter, pro-lifer, proponent of creationism: Alaska’s Gov. Sarah Palin is all of these things, rolled into one strategically advantageous package—at least in the eyes of the GOP higher-ups who backed her rise from relative obscurity to sudden political stardom as John McCain’s running mate.
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By Ellen Goodman — Democrats have provided nearly all the drama of this campaign season, an 18-month run, a narrative with two compelling leads, a race between two people to open the door of history. A door that could only admit one at a time.
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 AP photo / Alex Brandon
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Barack Obama’s first official foray into the public eye after his Hawaiian vacation was an unusual one, although not unimportant (like it or not): On Saturday, both Obama and John McCain met with the Rev. Rick Warren of the evangelical Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., to discuss their positions on abortion, morality, marriage and other hot-button issues before a select audience.
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By Marie Cocco — From the people who brought you the Terri Schiavo spectacle, the stem-cell research stalemate and the atrocious waste of tax money on abstinence-only sex education that has been shown not to work, comes a sequel: a proposal to redefine abortion to include some of the most common forms of birth control.
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