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By Linda Gordon
$23.10
By Janny Scott
$16.04
$22
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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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By David Sirota — The last time America found itself in a budget debate pitting domestic priorities against war expenditures, Richard Nixon was in the White House and David Obey was the youngest member of Congress.
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Ari Mintz
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By Chris Hedges — Theater, which at its best makes us more human and humane, has become increasingly mediocre, produced as spectacle or driven by the presence of Hollywood celebrities.
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By Amy Goodman — They called it “Operation Sea Breeze.” Despite the pleasant-sounding name, Israel’s violent commando raid on a flotilla of humanitarian aid ships, which left nine civilians dead, has sparked international outrage.
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AP / Hussein Malla
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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.
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Chinese swingers head to jail, Australia hunts down and grounds the founder of WikiLeaks, and David Lynch does Dior. All this and more on today’s list.
Posted on May 19, 2010
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Flickr / david55king (CC-BY)
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You may recall Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel’s letter urging President Barack Obama to lay off of Jewish settlements in Jerusalem. A group of prominent intellectuals who actually live in the city have written their own withering response, calling Wiesel’s letter a fantasy “replete with factual errors and false representations.”
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AP / Olivier Laban-Mattei
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By Chris Hedges — The traditional religious institutions are in irreversible decline. They have nothing left to say. And their aging congregants, who are fleeing the church in droves, know it. But don’t think the world will be a better place for their demise.
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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 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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British politicians waited 50 years to debate each other on television. Those clever Internet hooligans wasted no time mocking the results.
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Will the Goldman Sachs hearings really accomplish anything? Are the Democrats just showboating? What are the prospects for real financial reform? Robert Scheer answers these reader questions and more.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — No leftist polemicist could come up with as damning a description of contemporary capitalism as the contents of an e-mail that Goldman’s Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre sent to his girlfriend.
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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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Flickr / Chris Denbow (CC-BY)
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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.
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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.
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By Joe Conason — A serious debate on “constitutional issues” might reveal our fundamental differences: Republican extremists would use the Supreme Court to prohibit every social and political advance since before the Civil War.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — President Obama’s health care victory marked the beginning of a new phase in the administration’s political struggles, not a final triumph.
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Many in the Western media present Palestinian politics as a primitive, suicide-bombing expression of anti-Israeli anger. But nothing could be further from the truth. Watch a long-form debate between the two largest political factions, Fatah and Hamas, as they discuss reconciliation and the future of resistance.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, now the underdog in a tough Senate primary, longs for a political world that seems to have vanished.
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By Byard Duncan, AlterNet —
The winner of the second annual Izzy Award, named after muckraking journalist I.F. Stone, discusses independent media and this critical moment in journalism.
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By Ruth Marcus — No one really knows how such sweeping changes to the health care system are going to play out.
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AP / Jose Luis Magana
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The debate over the health care bill, which mercifully came to a close Sunday night, was not American conservatism’s finest hour.
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By Eugene Robinson — On Sunday, as comprehensive health care reform was becoming a reality, some people couldn’t bear what they saw.
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Flickr / laura padgett
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After a long day of dealing and debate, the Democrats passed health care reform by a slim vote of 219 to 212.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — There is a pathetic quality to our discussion of deficits and fiscal responsibility because we never face up to how much we need government to do.
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Is it fair to call this a meltdown? The war in Afghanistan—and the media’s lack of interest in it—is certainly a subject worth losing one’s temper over. Rep. Patrick Kennedy had trouble using his indoor voice during Wednesday’s debate in the House.
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AP / Jason Reed, pool
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Rep. Dennis Kucinich tells us why he isn’t buckling under pressure to vote for the president’s health care reform bill: “Every plan that’s put forth by our government ends up benefiting the health insurance industry.”
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AP / Jason Reed, pool
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Rep. Dennis Kucinich tells us why he isn’t buckling under pressure to vote for the president’s health care reform bill (“Every plan that’s put forth by our government ends up benefiting the health insurance industry”).
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AP
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By Joe Conason — If the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti carry any message for those of us fortunate enough not to live in those places, perhaps it is that government regulation could save your life—while right-wing ideology may kill you someday.
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Those aspiring screenwriters and novelists clogging up Starbucks may soon have more dramatic material from which to draw inspiration, as the coffee chain has become a reluctant battlefield in the culture wars. Gun enthusiasts and/or nuts have taken to arming themselves before overpaying for coffee. (continued)
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AP / Chris Carlson
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By Chris Hedges — The illegal wars and occupations, the largest transference of wealth upward in American history and the egregious assault on civil liberties, all begun under George W. Bush, raise only a flicker of tepid protest from liberals when propagated by the Democrats.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — If we learn nothing else in 2010, can we please finally acknowledge that our partisan divisions are about authentic principles that lead to very different approaches to governing?
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AP / Pat Sullivan
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By Yasha Levine and Mark Ames —
Ron Paul proté gé Debra Medina is shaking up the Texas gubernatorial race, but scratch the surface of this rising tea party star and you’ll find a Bush-style big-government hypocrite.
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By Ruth Marcus — President Obama’s health care fight is not with the Republicans, but with members of his own party, especially those in the House.
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By Eugene Robinson — Now that Obama has finally put a health care proposal on the table, the Democratic leaders in Congress have only one rational course of action: pass the thing, and quickly, or risk their party becoming the loyal minority.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — This week will determine the shape of American politics for the next three years. No, that’s not one of those journalistic exaggerations intended to catch your attention, although I hope it did.
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By Eugene Robinson — We’re the nation that put a man on the moon, so we can’t be stupid. We’re just pretending, right? We’re not really taking seriously the “argument” that the big snowstorms that have hit the Northeast in recent weeks constitute evidence—or even proof—that climate change is some kind of hoax.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — If you want to be honest, face these facts: At this moment, President Obama is losing, Democrats are losing and liberals are losing.
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By Ruth Marcus — The Senate, with its endless holds and 60-vote points of order, may be the epitome of a place that knows neither victory nor defeat.
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By David Sirota — For 30 years, Republicans and conservative Democrats have precluded factual debates about spending priorities for fear of antagonizing defense contractors, seniors and the wealthy.
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By Marcus Stern, ProPublica —
A transfer of billions of dollars in federal aid from public projects in Puerto Rico to one of the world’s largest liquor conglomerates over the next 30 years continues to move forward without any objection from Congress.
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By Fred Branfman — Should progressives hold themselves to a higher standard than the name-calling and intellectual violence that conservative bloggers routinely engage in? Much could rest on the answer to this question.
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AP / Elaine Thompson
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By Chris Hedges — Don’t blame the Internet. The bloodless and soulless journalism of the traditional media left newspapers on the wrong side of the growing class divide and their readers.
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By Eugene Robinson — President Obama’s first State of the Union address didn’t signal a political shift to the left or the right. It sounded more like a shrewd attempt to move from the inside to the outside.
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By Ruth Marcus — This won’t comfort Democrats mourning the loss of their filibuster-proof majority, but the existence of the filibuster is, on balance, a good thing.
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AP / Rich Pedroncelli
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By Arthur Blaustein — California now struggles with fiscal and social disaster because of a 32-year-old initiative that makes raising revenues and passing budgets nearly impossible.
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By Chris Hedges — Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost.
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After the jump: A comprehensive roundup of why the Democrats suck, the all-white basketball league and how classical music can be used as punishment for schoolchildren.
Posted on Jan 22, 2010
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Democrats should be worried about the trouble in Tuesday’s Massachusetts Senate race that forced President Obama to Boston on Sunday for a last-minute campaign rescue mission.
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Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery
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