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By Eric Hazan
$19.77
Tom Chatfield
$18.45
$40
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — With Congress coming back this week, there’s a chance to limit the damage the Supreme Court has caused our democracy.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — President Obama decided this week to raise the stakes in this fall’s election by making the choice about something instead of nothing but anger.
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By Ruth Marcus — It has not been clear whether, or how, the tea party would seek to accommodate the religious aspect of the conservative movement. Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally illustrated one potential route.
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Glenn Beck is holding a rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s dream speech. Our friends at Brave New Films send this video lowlight reel to remind us why Beck shouldn’t dare stand anywhere near King’s legacy.
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AP / Alexandre Meneghini
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By T.L. Caswell — Catalonia has imposed a 2012 ban on the tradition, which is losing support throughout Spain. Could this toxic mix of blood lust and male preening finally be on its way out?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Republicans are in the midst of an insurrection. Democrats are not. This vast gulf between the situations of the two parties explains the year’s primary results.
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By Eugene Robinson — The faction that likes to portray itself as a bunch of John Waynes and “mama grizzlies,” it turns out, spends an awful lot of time cowering in the corner and complaining about how beastly everyone else is being.
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Flickr / slobug (CC-BY-SA)
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The former presidential candidate says opposition to building a mosque near Ground Zero “is all about hate and Islamaphobia” and that the “justification to ban the mosque is no more rational than banning a soccer field in the same place because all the suicide bombers loved to play soccer.” (Full statement after the jump).
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — In an election, a solid “no” usually beats an uneasy “yes, but.” That’s the heart of the problem Democrats and President Obama face this fall.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Joe Conason — Nothing tests a president like standing up against a wave of fear and prejudice, even at potentially great cost to his own party and prospects.
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dbking (CC-BY)
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First Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went all coward on us, now liberal darling Gov. Howard Dean wants the two-blocks-from-Ground-Zero Muslim community center moved. The worst part is, he seems to be getting his facts from Sarah Palin. (continued)
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Joe Conason — Expressions of racial hatred on the right are troubling, but not nearly as troubling as the behavior of conservatives who excuse, embolden or simply pretend to ignore the bigots surrounding them.
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By Joe Conason — No recent controversy has so plainly revealed the hollow values of the American right than the effort to prevent the construction of a community center in Lower Manhattan because it will include a mosque. It is a senseless attack on one of America’s most sacred traditions.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Rather than shout, I’ll just ask the question in a civil way: Dear Republicans, do you really want to endanger your party’s greatest political legacy by turning the 14th Amendment to our Constitution into an excuse for election-year ugliness?
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Photo illustration based on an image by Flickr user cometstarmoon (CC-BY)
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Can a nation remain a superpower if its internal politics are incorrigibly stupid? While we’re at it, does any other democracy have a powerful legislative branch as undemocratic as the U.S. Senate?
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Eugene Robinson — After the Shirley Sherrod episode, there’s no longer any need to mince words: A cynical right-wing propaganda machine is peddling the poisonous fiction that when African-Americans or other minorities reach positions of power, they seek some kind of revenge against whites.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — It’s rare to see a dry run for an election campaign. But over the next month, Australia will provide a testing ground for some of the core themes in this November’s American elections.
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White House / Pete Souza
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After it became painfully obvious that the White House had been played by conservatives, press secretary Robert Gibbs apologized to Shirley Sherrod on behalf of the administration. Sherrod was forced to resign because of a video edited by conservative bloggers to distort her remarks on race.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The titans of the private sector say President Obama is anti-business. Many progressives say he coddles business. How does the administration manage to pull that off?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Good for the NAACP. We need an honest conversation about the role of race and racism in the tea party. Thanks to a resolution passed this week at the venerable organization’s national convention, we’ll get it.
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AP / Carolyn Kaster
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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.
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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.
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By Joe Conason — We could easily slip into another Great Depression if our leaders continue to heed the chattering class on the deficit. But cutting spending is not just bad economics; it’s bad politics, too.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Here’s when you know something momentous has happened to our struggle over the Supreme Court’s role: When Republicans largely give up talking about “judicial activism,” when liberals speak of the importance of democracy and deference to elected officials, and when judges are no longer seen as baseball umpires.
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By Ruth Marcus — To hijack the horrors of the Holocaust and slavery in the service of a political campaign demeans the candidate and, worse, dishonors the victims. Decency demands that some comparisons be off-limits.
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U.S. Air Force / Tech. Sgt. Francisco V. Govea II
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By Robert Dreyfuss, TomDispatch —
Afghanistan is the place where theories of warfare go to die, and if the COIN theory isn’t dead yet, it’s utterly failed so far to prove itself.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — This week’s hearings over Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court will mark a sea change in the way liberals argue about the judiciary.
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U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. JoAnn S. Makinano
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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?
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By Eugene Robinson — Joe Barton is not alone. The Texas congressman’s lavish sympathy for BP—which he sees not as perpetrator of a preventable disaster but as victim of a White House “shakedown”—is actually what passes for mainstream opinion among conservative Republicans today.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Barack Obama’s campaign promise of change did not include a pledge to transform American conservatism. But one of his presidency’s major legacies may be a revolution on the American right in which older, more secular forms of politics displace religious activism.
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U.S. Department of Justice
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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.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — This week’s primaries should have been good news for Democrats. Instead, a stray comment from an Obama aide briefly threatened a civil war in the Democratic Party, which needs all the unity it can get.
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AP / Ariel Schalit
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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.
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Flickr / Mr. T in DC (CC-BY-ND)
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — It should become the philosophical shot heard ’round the country. In a remarkable speech that received far too little attention, former Supreme Court Justice David Souter took direct aim at the conservatives’ favorite theory of judging.
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By Joshua Holland, AlterNet —
The bill would cut the DoD’s budget and use that money to make the first $35,000 each American earns tax-free.
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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.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Brace yourself for several months of occasionally biting but essentially meaningless political theater over the nomination of Solicitor General Kagan to the Supreme Court.
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Conservative leader David Cameron, come on down. You may not have won an outright majority in the U.K.’s recent election, but her majesty the queen has this consolation prize: a fabulous stay in Number 10 Downing Street and a job administering her government until ... (continued)
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AP / Jon Super
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Britain produced an electoral earthquake all right, but not the one so many expected. The real lessons have less to do with two-party systems than with how economic change has challenged old strategies on both the right and the left.
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By David Sirota — “I Want My Country Back”—this ubiquitous tea party mantra belongs next to Nike’s “Just Do It” on Ad Age’s list of the most transcendent idioms.
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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?
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By Joe Conason — Within hours after the car bomb fizzled in Times Square, the nonstop noise resumed on Fox News and talk radio, warning that the Barack Obama administration is failing to protect us.
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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.
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By William Pfaff — The present crisis of the European Union was inherent in the creation of the institution itself.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Britain’s Conservative Party has found a winning brand by reaching out to the left, while conservatives across the pond alienate voters with angry rhetoric and fringe positions.
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By David Sirota — The true thinking behind Arizona’s immigration bill could be heard back in 2001, when the emotional aftermath of 9/11 momentarily removed politicians’ rhetorical filters.
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By Ruth Marcus — It isn’t easy being a caucus of one. Sometimes you don’t even agree with yourself. Just ask Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Democrats’ go-to Republican.
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By Chris Hedges — The difference between the tea party and the secessionist movement bubbling up in some two dozen states is that the tea party believes America can be fixed.
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Ambassador Tom and the Mortgaged Youth are sick and tired of your black president talking down to little girls and the Supreme Court. They just want their freedom back, America.
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Satire by Andy Borowitz —
According to a source close to Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, they have already drawn up a list of possible candidates for the additional two horsemen, a list which includes Limbaugh, Beck, Coulter and the entire Cheney family.
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How the IRS’ Nonprofit Division Got So Dysfunctional
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