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By Baratunde Thurston
$24.99
By Michael Dirda
$21
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Flickr / Samory Santos
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By Marie Cocco — The challenge of our time is to re-create America as a middle-class nation. [This is Marie Cocco’s last column.]
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AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Marie Cocco — The votes of lawmakers are so routinely purchased by corporations that it takes a scandal of unusual proportions to generate news coverage.
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By Marie Cocco — The fevered urgency with which the bailout was pushed by the Bush administration and enacted by the Democratic Congress last year has been followed by dithering in the midst of the employment crisis.
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By Marie Cocco — If it wins an upcoming battle in the Supreme Court, the gun lobby is prepared to challenge every gun control law enacted at any level of government.
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By Marie Cocco — The Senate Finance Committee’s health care debate has given Michael Moore hours of footage for his next cinematic assault on the system.
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By Marie Cocco — Sen. Max Baucus’ health care plan would shift massive amounts of tax money away from traditionally blue states.
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By Marie Cocco — Finally, a health care proposal George W. Bush could love. Sen. Max Baucus’ idea to tax “Cadillac” insurance plans has been pushed by Republicans for years.
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By Marie Cocco — We are warned it is dangerously protectionist to enforce existing trade laws against China’s cheap tire surge, but Obama is obligated to do so—and for good reason.
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AP Photo / Toby Talbot
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By Marie Cocco — Overlooked in the health care debate is the recently reconfirmed fact that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are working better than ever.
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By Marie Cocco — Thousands of those who descended on lower Manhattan after the terrorist attack were not cops or firefighters, and didn’t have the safety nets those jobs provide.
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By Marie Cocco — It isn’t all in our heads. Americans are feeling the real effect of shrinking paychecks that can’t keep up with inflation.
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By Marie Cocco — A slim majority now says the Afghanistan war isn’t worth fighting. This is alarming, and inexplicable.
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By Marie Cocco — Ten summers ago, I asked Ted Kennedy’s office to provide an account of key legislation he had sponsored in what already was a long and distinguished career. I received a very humble 32-page fax.
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By Marie Cocco — The summer of disinformation seems to have accomplished its goal: to preserve for the private insurance industry an effective monopoly over how much most Americans pay for health care, and on what terms they can buy it.
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By Marie Cocco — The Secret Service says it is quite capable of protecting the president, but the rest of us don’t have armed guards.
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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 Marie Cocco — Medicare is where political posturing runs headlong into historical truth: It is, along with Social Security, the most successful government program that the United States has ever created.
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Collage: Flickr / david.nikonvscanon and Staples.com
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By Marie Cocco — The arithmetic of this recession still looks pretty dismal and the politics and psychology of it are starting to become disconnected from reality in a scary way.
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By Marie Cocco — Now that it’s gripped the imaginations of politicians and the media, the politics of the calendar has overtaken the plain truth that Congress already is moving—barely moving, and not necessarily to a triumphal finish—toward reform.
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By Marie Cocco — The greatest sorrow in marking Walter Cronkite’s death is the necessity of acknowledging that we have replaced his work ethic and wisdom with puffery and ideological pontification.
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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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By Marie Cocco — Unless Sotomayor suffers a “complete meltdown,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina predicted, she will be confirmed. The price, though, is barely coded race baiting that has been part of the assault on Sotomayor since her nomination was announced.
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By Marie Cocco — There’s a lot of argument in Washington about the economy, but if anyone’s looking for some clear voices, there are 650,000 of them just waiting to be heard. That is roughly the number of long-term unemployed who will begin losing their jobless benefits in September.
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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 Marie Cocco — The decline in contraceptive use may cheer those who have promoted faith-inspired school curricula, but now we have sad and clear evidence that political foolishness among adults is leading to foolish and harmful behavior among kids.
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By Marie Cocco — As the media trumpets sound for the pullback of American troops from urban areas in Iraq, the essential lesson of our involvement must be recalled: Nothing about our entanglement in Iraq has ever been as it seemed.
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By Marie Cocco — It’s all right to be just a bit defensive when you’re the addict in chief, but President Obama happens to be, hands down, the best possible spokesman for the new FDA regulation. He should embrace the role.
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By Marie Cocco — Amid the Web site’s trashy home videos and other uneven chronicles of pop culture is a memorable new look at America’s past that whets the appetite for more free fun. The National Archives, in celebration of its 75th anniversary, has posted 17 videos to YouTube.
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By Marie Cocco — At the moment, Republicans are gleeful and Democrats glum because of a Congressional Budget Office analysis—based on an incomplete and early draft of what is likely to be the most liberal-leaning health care proposal to emerge from the Senate—that shows the measure just won’t get the job done.
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By Marie Cocco — There are without a doubt links among the extremists who have opened fire in this spring of slaughter, but we tend to ignore the most obvious point: We have decided to let just about anyone have a gun.
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By Marie Cocco — The appearance of extreme political impropriety is sometimes just too extreme, according to the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in a case that shines a brutal light on the spiral of campaign contributions that threaten to compromise too many state courts.
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AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Marie Cocco — The public face of Congress is angry and outraged at all the bad behavior by banks, but in the other Washington, the financial industry continues to have its way.
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By Marie Cocco — The murder of Dr. George Tiller cannot be smoothed over with a speech. This is the lesson the Obama administration must learn from it.
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By Marie Cocco — So it’s health care overhaul this year—or bust. If this is the bet, right now I’d put my money on bust.
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By Marie Cocco — President Obama’s nominee said she hopes Americans “will see that I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences.” Ordinary people have had a difficult time of it before the current Supreme Court.
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By Marie Cocco — With their usual steely conviction, contempt for the rights and safety of others, and string of nonsensical arguments, gun supporters in Congress managed to push through a law to allow national park visitors to carry loaded weapons—openly or concealed—in the millions of acres of wilderness, scenic byways and historic sites.
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AP photo / Lynne Sladky
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By Marie Cocco — The partisan firefight over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s incendiary allegation that the CIA lied to Congress about its use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”—torture—is a blessing. It turns the compelling case for a public inquiry into the Bush administration’s policies toward terrorism detainees into an urgent necessity.
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By Marie Cocco — Not to ruin brunch, but Mom’s probably not doing very well. Not if she’s already retired, not if she’s a baby boomer approaching retirement, not if she’s a younger woman who hasn’t yet given retirement a thought.
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John Edwards 2008
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By Marie Cocco — I never understood John Edwards’ appeal. I therefore do not expect that Elizabeth Edwards’ new book, or the tiresome media blitz accompanying its publication, will bring a sudden change in my thinking.
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By Marie Cocco — This is how it ends. Or at least, this is how the latest, sad chapter in a story that has been ending for three decades is written.
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By Marie Cocco — History demands an investigation into U.S. torture. We have a contemporary model for how to conduct a politically sensitive inquiry properly, without undue theatrics and with respect for classified information. It is the 9/11 commission.
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By Marie Cocco — It is astonishing that someone who has proved in his memos to be so lacking in judgment and so ideologically twisted in his reasoning that he laid a blanket of legal immunity over those who wanted to torture now holds one of the most powerful and prestigious seats a lawyer can attain.
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By Marie Cocco — There is little anyone can do about the tax-protest rants except worry they will be believed by a wider public. So, on the theory that the truth will set us free, it is worth examining exactly what we’re all paying, and what for.
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By Marie Cocco — Once again we may be fooling ourselves into thinking that the buying and selling of paper assets is the same as the buying and selling of tangible goods made by real workers.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Marie Cocco — Indefinite and secret detention at the U.S. air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, was a fundamental breach of justice and morality when the Bush administration did it. It is made worse by the stench of hypocrisy when the Obama administration does it.
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By Marie Cocco — Afghanistan’s women are no longer in vogue. President Karzai has just signed a law that forces them to obey their husbands’ sexual demands and in general again consigns them to lives of brutal repression.
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By Marie Cocco — A court ruling offers a chilling compendium of accounts by doctors and other FDA professionals who were routinely thwarted as they tried to make the “morning after” pill available, especially to teenagers.
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By Marie Cocco — Obama needs to stop straddling and to threaten to veto any cockamamie tax scheme that emerges from Congress as retribution for the repulsive bonuses handed out at American International Group.
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By Marie Cocco — If only the contracts entered into by shop-floor workers at auto plants were as inviolate as those secured by the incompetent pirates of the American International Group.
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Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery
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