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By Margaret B. Jones
$16.47
$24
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White House / Archive / 2004
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Bubba will battle the Decider in a debate at Radio City Music Hall. MSG Entertainment is billing its salty showdown as “the hottest ticket in political history.” How hot? It’s $60 to $1,250, depending on how close you want to get. Don’t expect fireworks—ex-presidents tend to be chummy and WJC is practically BFFs with W’s daddy. Update
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By William Pfaff — When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits Pakistan this week, she will hear a lot about how fearful the Pakistan populace is, not of the Taliban and al-Qaida, but of the United States.
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AP / Karim Kadim
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Two explosions near Baghdad’s Green Zone on Sunday killed more than 132 people and injured at least 520 more, by the BBC’s count. The suicide attacks targeted the Justice Ministry and ... (continued)
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White House / Lawrene Jackson
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Afghanistan will hold a runoff election on Nov. 7 after a U.N. commission stripped President Hamid Karzai of his victory, citing rampant fraud. Karzai, under heavy foreign pressure, accepted the commission’s findings Tuesday and agreed to the runoff.
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Flickr / SEIU International
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Hillary Clinton is all the rage with American gays, but their Russian counterparts are disappointed that the secretary of state rubbed elbows with Moscow’s homophobic mayor, who, the AP reports, once said gays “can be described in no other way than as satanic.”
Posted on Oct 14, 2009
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bbc.co.uk
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A Taliban attack Sunday morning on Pakistan’s army headquarters has pressed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to warn about the waning authority of the Pakistani state in the face of violence by “extremists.” Security forces were later able to defeat the attackers and free 40 hostages.
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Whatever happened to President Obama’s campaign pledge to revoke the pesky “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that keeps gay and lesbian military members in the closet as they serve their country? Well, it seems the president has a little “too much on his plate” to confront that particular issue at the moment, as Jon Stewart has duly noted.
Posted on Oct 7, 2009
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pagetutor.com
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By Matt Bivens, TomDispatch —
In the 20th century, smallpox killed more people than all of that bloody century’s wars combined. It cost $300 million to eradicate the disease. What might have been achieved with the $4 trillion we gave Wall Street?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — All the Democrats running to replace the late senator are on a Be-Like-Ted ticket, but there are degrees of Ted-ness. Who will win the heart of this state that loves liberals, tradition and Kennedys?
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By William Pfaff — God’s specific instruction to the Jewish people to reoccupy Jerusalem and the Palestinian West Bank stands in the way of peace, but President Obama must get results—and fast—before the situation deteriorates.
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By Amy Goodman — Manuel Zelaya, the democratically elected president of Honduras, is back in his country after being deposed in a military coup June 28.
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By Ellen Goodman — For me, the real Obama moment of this back-to-work season wasn’t the speech before Congress or Wall Street. It was in the Virginia schoolhouse when a ninth-grader asked him a question that had nothing and everything to do with his presidency.
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AP / Jeff Chiu
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The former president has thrown his considerable political and fundraising heft behind San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom in the race to succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger. Newsom is up against California institution and former Gov. Jerry Brown.
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White House / Pete Souza
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From the creation of the White House Council on Women and Girls to the State Department’s global focus on women’s rights, President Obama is scoring points with feminists who worked against him in the primaries.
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By David Sirota — The “trigger mechanism” is gaining momentum after President Obama’s speech to Congress. Once again, lawmakers turn to legislative subterfuge to kill popular common-sense reform.
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Illustration courtesy of Adbusters
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Radical is too small a word to describe the extent to which the Supreme Court will turn our political system upside down if it decides to let corporations directly fund campaigns.
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Project on Government Oversight
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Much of the furor over the conduct of private embassy guards in Kabul appears preoccupied with what one whistle-blower describes as the “gay shit” rather than the exploitation of young Afghan women or the deteriorating security situation at the embassy. The latter, after all, was the major focus of the complaint that blew this story open.
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USMC / Staff Sgt. William Greeson
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Afghan President Hamid Karzai got an “explosive” talking-to by U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke, according to the BBC. The meeting, which reportedly covered vote fraud and the possibility of a second election, didn’t last very long.
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Air Force / Master Sgt. Cecilio Ricardo
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Hassan Nemazee has raised millions for Democratic candidates, including Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. He was arrested Tuesday for allegedly using bogus documents and phone numbers to try to sucker Citibank out of $74 million.
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White House
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CIA Director Leon Panetta might quit or get canned in the next year, reports ABC News. Anonymous officials said Panetta, who may have already threatened to walk, is unhappy with everything from his role in the hierarchy to some of the nasty things the agency is up to. Both the White House and the CIA vehemently deny the report.
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State Department / Michael Gross
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The Honduran Supreme Court just stuck its tongue out at the rest of the world, which has been waiting patiently for the country’s coup leaders to restore lawfully elected and promptly ousted Manuel Zalaya to the presidency. A carefully negotiated deal would have hit the reset button and called for early elections, but the court wasn’t interested. It doesn’t help that the U.S. has softened its position.
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AP / Yonhap
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Did Bill Clinton shake something loose during his recent visit to Pyongyang? No, Kim Jong Il’s overtures to his southern neighbors this week are the legacy of Kim Dae-jung, the former president and first modern South Korean leader to visit the North. Kim died Tuesday. He survived political persecution and attempted assassination to cross the neutral zone and step into history.
Posted on Aug 19, 2009
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AP / LM Otero
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With angry white men bringing their guns too close to the president, Josh Marshall writes: “Let’s be honest with ourselves: the American right has a deep-seated problem with political violence. It’s deep-seated; it’s recurrent and it’s real.”
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State Department
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Hillary Clinton’s presidential run thrived on her appeal to women. Now the secretary of state wants to give something back to the finer sex—and not just in America. Women’s rights will top her agenda everywhere she goes, and, in order to elevate them, everywhere she goes she’ll meet with women who “may not even be known by their own leaders,” she explains to
The Washington Post.
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By Marie Cocco — Red-faced people are now hurling the same falsehoods at the nonexistent Obama plan that they hurled at Clinton’s plan—and Harry Truman’s national health insurance proposal, and Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare.
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By Eugene Robinson — It’s true that politics is the art of the possible, but it’s also true that great leaders expand the scope of possibility.
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USMC / Staff Sgt. William Greeson
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By William Pfaff — It would be a great service to the American nation if Barack Obama would tell us what he himself thinks the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan are about.
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AP / Carolyn Kaster
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By Chris Hedges — “Something is broken,” Ralph Nader said when I reached him at his family home in Connecticut. “We are not at the Bangladesh level in terms of passivity, but we are getting there.”
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The North Korean dictator seems to be in control of both his government and his personal faculties, U.S. national security adviser James Jones said Sunday. Reports in South Korean media and elsewhere have suggested Kim’s health is failing, but Jones, referring to Bill Clinton’s recent visit to the Hermit Kingdom, said “obviously we didn’t have any time to make an assessment there. But he [Kim] seemed in control of his faculties.”
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AP / Markus Schreiber
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By Scott Ritter — Now that the remains of Navy Lt. Cmdr. Scott Speicher have been recovered from Iraq, Sen. Pat Roberts and other politicians will have to stop shamelessly exploiting his disappearance to sell their war agenda. Update from the author
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By Joe Conason — Why this obsession over Obama’s birthplace persists is a question that evokes disturbing answers.
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By Amy Goodman — Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, ousted in the middle of the night just over a month ago, enjoys global support for his return, with the exception of the Obama White House.
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AP / LM Otero
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By Chris Hedges — The most prominent faces of color, such as President Obama or Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr., mask an insidious new racism that, in essence, tells blacks they have enough, that progress has been made and that it is up to them to take advantage of what society offers them.
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By Ruth Marcus — The Supreme Court may soon allow an unlimited amount of corporate money into the political process. Imagine drug companies and banks running their own ads against legislators who vote against their interests.
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By Joe Conason — Perhaps the time has come, if it isn’t already too late, for President Obama to ask for help from President Clinton.
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By Ruth Marcus — If only Democrats and Republicans could get together and produce a health care bill that would expand coverage and control costs. But wait—there is such a proposal. In fact, there are two.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — It was not the soaring rhetoric that is Barack Obama’s signature, but he recently offered the sound bite that may define his presidency: “Don’t bet against us.”
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By Marie Cocco — The legacy of that administration’s anti-terrorism tactics cannot be washed away in a tide of feel-good rhetoric about moving on, nor will it fade eventually if we apply Obama’s spiritual wisdom that this should be a time for “reflection, not retribution.”
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Flickr / Center for American Progress Action Fund
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Break one lousy elbow and those gossipy Washington types are ready to pronounce you politically dead. Hillary Clinton has been taking it easy for a month while she recovers, opening the door for scrutiny as to her importance in the Obama administration. There are just so many heavies chirping in the president’s ear, they say. (More after the jump)
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — This week’s hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court represent the opening skirmish in a struggle to challenge the escalating activism of an increasingly conservative judiciary.
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AP photo / Carolyn Kaster
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Marie Cocco writes that Sarah Palin’s “intellectual emptiness” and “demonstrably poor judgment” should not excuse the “sexist cant that Palin ... has been subjected to since she burst onto the national scene.” Eugene Robinson, however, finds that the fear of “being painted as elitist and sexist” has perpetuated the myth that Palin is “a substantial figure whose presence on the national stage is anything but a cruel, unfunny joke.” Read on and decide for yourself.
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By Marie Cocco — None of Sarah Palin’s numerous shortcomings excuse the sexist cant that she, like Hillary Clinton before her, has been subjected to since she burst onto the national scene.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — As the president and centrist Democrats in Congress haggle over the deficit, they could usefully recall that the party’s inability to deliver on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign pledges, particularly on health care, led to a stunning defeat two years later.
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AP photo / Louis Lanzano
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By Robert Scheer — Bernard Madoff should be exhibit A in why the dark world of totally unregulated private money managers and hedge funds should be opened to the light of systematic government supervision. Instead, he is being treated as an aberrant menace.
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By Amy Goodman — The first coup d’etat in Central America in more than a quarter-century occurred last Sunday in Honduras. It was led by a graduate of the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, a military facility that has trained some of Latin America’s worst torturers, murderers and human rights abusers.
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AP photo / Bebeto Matthews
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By Chris Hedges — The modern world, as Kafka predicted, has become a world where lies become true. And facts alone will be powerless to thwart the mendacity spun out through billions of dollars in corporate advertising, lobbying and control of traditional sources of information. The lines between artists, social activists and journalists have to be erased.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The president has shied away from handing Congress his own plans on “stone tablets,” but if he doesn’t intervene in the health care debate, and soon, lawmakers are going to send him an unworkable monstrosity of a bill.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Joe Conason — Democrats who are talking down Obama’s health care initiative tend to have something in common—their abject dependence on campaign contributions from the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations fighting against real reform.
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