|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
$35
By Ellen Goodman, Patricia O'Brien
$18.85
$23
|
|
|
|
AP / Charles Dharapak
|
By Robert Scheer — When will the president give Lawrence Summers his pink slip? He can thank him for his years of service and use the excuse that his top economic adviser wants to spend more time with his family. I don’t care how he sugarcoats it.
|
|
By Ruth Marcus — It is taken as gospel among politicians of both parties that small business is the engine of job creation. Obama, McCain, Bush, Kerry, Clinton and Reagan have made that claim. Only one problem: The assertions are overblown and simplistic.
|
|
By Robert Scheer — The big cop-out in much of what has been written about the banking meltdown has been the argument by those most complicit that there was “enough blame to go around” and that no institution or individual should be singled out for accountability. “How could we have known?” is the refrain of those who continue to pose as all-knowing experts.
|
White House / Pete Souza
|
Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority could implode before they even get off the ground. Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell will have their chaperoning cut out for them, with the PA threatening to withdraw if Israel resumes settlement construction and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announcing a plan to do just that.
|
AP / Guillermo Arias
|
In an apparent mixing of official messages, President Obama has contradicted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by rejecting the analogy that Mexico is becoming more and more like 1990s drug-heyday Colombia, when 40 percent of the country’s territory was controlled by rebel groups.
|
AP / Charles Dharapak
|
For the first time in 20 months, Israeli and Palestinian leaders have agreed to resume direct negotiations, scheduled for Sept. 2 in Washington, to talk about such thorny things as Israeli settlement activity, the borders of a future Palestinian state, and the right of Palestinian exiles to return to their homeland.
|
AP / Mark Lennihan
|
By Steven Hill — Why have economists been so wrong so often? Certainly theirs is a tough job, since the global economy is a complex creature. Yet it turns out that their measuring sticks are woefully inadequate. Indeed, they aren’t even sure what to measure.
|
AP / J. Scott Applewhite
|
By Robert Scheer — The corruptions of journalism were on full display when CNN’s Fareed Zakaria turned to Robert Rubin this past Sunday for advice on how to fix the financial crisis that he, as much as anyone, caused.
Did you miss the live Q & A session? Listen to the podcast here.
|
Flickr / Richard Loyal French (CC-BY-ND)
|
A 10-year study of the influence business finds that the billions of dollars ($3.5 billion in 2009 alone, according to the Center for Responsive Politics) thrown at elected officials add up to a whole lot of nothing—that is, the influential spend a lot of time, energy and cash stalemating each other and keeping things the way they are.
|
White House / Samantha Appleton
|
By Ruth Marcus — As a political matter, the mother-daughter getaway to a five-star resort on the Spanish Costa del Sol was not a good idea. But I’d just as soon not have my First Family vacations determined by focus groups.
|
|
By Amy Goodman — “As we mark the end of America’s combat mission in Iraq,” President Barack Obama said this week, “a grateful America must pay tribute to all who served there.” He should have added “unless you’re gay.”
|
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American politics. This is not, as the now trivialized phrase has it, a “teachable moment.” It is a time for action.
|
AP / J. Scott Applewhite
|
By Norman Birnbaum — Walter Kendall Myers, a former Foreign Service officer, has been sent to prison for life for espionage on behalf of Cuba. Did he knew anything at all that could remotely be termed “secret”?
|
iroquoisnationals.org
|
The Iroquois nation may have invented lacrosse, but the national team wasn’t allowed into the U.K. to take part in an international tournament because British authorities insisted the Iroquois players use American or Canadian passports. Problem is the Iroquois don’t recognize the U.S. or Canada.
|
AP / Carolyn Kaster
|
By Robert Scheer — The flight from reason that now marks American public discourse came home for me last Friday when I found myself on public radio debating whether Barack Obama is anti-business.
|
|
By David Sirota — Though the Reagan zeitgeist created the illusion that taxes stunt economic growth, the numbers prove that higher marginal tax rates generate more resources for the job-creating, public investments that sustain an economy and create incentives for businesses to grow.
|
Flickr / CarbonNYC (CC-BY)
|
A U.S. district judge in Massachusetts decided in two separate cases that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act signed into law by Bill Clinton encroaches on the states’ right to regulate marriage and violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution.
|
Flickr / Wagner T. Cassimiro "Aranha" (CC-BY)
|
By Joe Conason — What would the wealthy nations of the West (and their rising rivals in the East) do if they actually wanted to prevent catastrophic warming? Here in Africa, the obvious answer is that they would find the ways and means to discourage deforestation.
|
U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. JoAnn S. Makinano
|
By Fred Branfman, AlterNet —
The immensity of Iraqi civilian suffering is incomprehensible. How can war’s cheerleaders like Christopher Hitchens claim to fight on behalf of the people whose lives they helped destroy?
|
U.S. Air Force / Master Sgt. Jerry Morrison
|
Early reports already chewed over the insults to Ambassadors Eikenberry and Holbrooke and National Security Adviser Jones, but there’s a lot more to the Rolling Stone article that could mean Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s ass. Here (after the jump) are 11 jaw-droppers, groaners and sigh-inducers.
|
White House / Pete Souza
|
America’s top general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, and his staff are quoted saying nasty things about Obama administration officials in a new Rolling Stone article, for which McChrystal apologized Tuesday. (continued)
|
U.S. Department of Justice
|
The Justice Department, as expected, has decided to file a lawsuit seeking to shut down Arizona’s SB 1070, a move that is likely to launch immigration even further into this year’s election debate as conservatives rally around anti-immigrant sentiment in scrounging for votes.
|
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Do Democrats honestly think that nickel-and-diming on stimulus now will either have a substantial impact on the long-term deficit or be of greater help to them in this fall’s elections than more robust growth?
|
Flickr / MichalFoto (CC-BY-ND)
|
By John Feffer —
Turkey has ambitions beyond the Middle East and the means to get there.
|
|
How Sarah Palin says she would have dealt with the oil spill, why white people in Santa Monica are dodging immigrant police, and why the EPA is after the Amish.
|
AP / Hussein Malla
|
By Fred Branfman — Whether in war or finance, the imperial mentality of elites is increasingly threatening the “unpeople” of the world, as Noam Chomsky writes in his latest book.
|
AP / Kent Gilbert
|
It’s been almost a year since the coup that ousted leftist leader Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, but disagreement over the legitimacy of the new government there continues as leaders of the Organization of American States gather in Peru.
|
|
Robert Scheer addresses reader questions and comments about his most recent column and Israel’s deadly attack on the aid flotilla.
|
|
By Ruth Marcus — The presidency is not a play in two acts. The disaster in the Gulf is not six characters in search of a leader. So why the coverage of President Obama and the oil spill as theater criticism?
|
AP / Ariel Schalit
|
By Joe Conason — The government of Israel is supposedly run by the Jewish state’s toughest and most ardent defenders, but so far they have inflicted worse damage on its security and its future than its enemies ever could.
|
|
On Thursday Robert Scheer responded to reader questions and comments about his column “Blame Clinton, Not Paul.” Scheer said, “both Democrats and Republicans have betrayed the interests of black and brown people and those who got stuck with subprime mortgages, and that’s the pressing civil rights issue right now.”
|
U.S. Marine Corps / Lance Cpl. Christopher M. Burke
|
Tensions between North and South Korea are spiraling out of control. The north has cut all ties, and Kim Jong-il reportedly ordered his forces to prepare to defend against attack. Seoul continues to push for satisfaction in the U.N. Security Council after the north allegedly torpedoed a South Korean warship. (continued)
|
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Enough with dividing the world between moral, family-loving Christians on the one side and supposedly permissive, corrupt, family-destroying secularists on the other.
|
|
By David Sirota — If progressive groups were anything but shills for the Democrats, they would be protesting President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee and demanding the firing of his interior secretary.
|
|
Why is a lefty excited by the thought of a Kentucky libertarian in Congress? Robert Scheer responds to reader questions and comments about his latest column.
|
|
By Ruth Marcus — In understanding the foibles of politicians, I’ve always found it is a benefit to have spent large amounts of time with toddlers.
|
AP / Carolyn Kaster
|
Relations between the U.S. and Afghan administrations have been less than cozy in recent months, but President Obama’s crew, headed by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, attempted to warm things up this week by giving visiting President Hamid Karzai the royal treatment in Washington.
|
|
By Joe Conason — The Kagan nomination reminds us that Barack Obama is the first president raised on feminist principles.
|
Flickr / Berkman10_220 (CC-BY-SA)
|
Much will be pored over and found and reported on Elena Kagan in the coming months. Right now the important bit is this: She’s Elena Kagan, former Harvard Law dean, current U.S. solicitor general and President Obama’s choice to sit on the highest court in the land. Oh, and Thurgood Marshall called her “Shorty.”
|
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Ever heard the one about the guy who hated government until a deregulated Wall Street crashed, an oil spill devastated the Gulf of Mexico, a coal mine collapsed, and some good police work stopped a terrorist attack?
|
|
By Ruth Marcus — Arizona’s bold election reforms just backfired. Public financing and an attempt to stop gerrymandering may be to blame for the state’s immigration law.
|
U.S. Air Force / Airman 1st Class Eboni Knox
|
By Chris Hedges — We are approaching a decade of war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq is in its eighth year. The peace movement, despite the heroic efforts of a handful of groups, is dead.
|
|
By William Pfaff — Large and firmly implanted bureaucratic organizations are almost impossible to kill, even when they have no reason to continue to exist, as NATO has not since the Soviet Union, communism and the Warsaw Pact all collapsed.
|
Flickr / Chris Denbow (CC-BY)
|
By David Sirota — Whereas former presidents typically devote their retirements to history-revising legacy preservation, Bill Clinton is laudably doing the opposite—and the nation will, hopefully, benefit.
|
|
Read a full transcript of Robert Scheer discussing with readers his latest column, the crooks at Goldman Sachs and the prospects of financial reform.
|
|
The trouble with “tweet seats,” Andrew Sullivan explains to the president why gays are hollering at him, and why a gutless YouTube is stifling free expression—and comedy.
Posted on Apr 22, 2010
READ MORE 
|
White House / Pete Souza
|
By Joe Conason — As approval ratings for Barack Obama decline at home, world opinion of the United States is rising steadily under his stewardship.
|
|
By Ruth Marcus — My approach on the filibuster is the same as Bill Clinton’s on affirmative action: mend it, don’t end it. Here are four and a half steps to a better filibuster.
|
|
If you missed Robert Scheer discussing his latest column, the financial meltdown and its enablers with readers or you just want to relive the excitement, you can read a full transcript right here.
|
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|
Real American Boy: How Our Byzantine Immigration System and Failed Economy May Have Made a Terrorist
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
