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By Gore Vidal $17.00
By Elliot D. Cohen $67.45
$21
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By Marie Cocco — It is time to stop kidding ourselves. This wasn’t a breakthrough year for American women in politics. It was a brutal one.
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By Marie Cocco — It was nothing Bush did—no decision he made, no policy he pursued, no faith that he placed in ideological dogma—that he finds regrettable. Bush told a cable network, “I regret saying some things I shouldn’t have said” over the course of eight tumultuous years.
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By William Pfaff — “What am I going to tell the public,” one French official asked, “when there are 3 million people marching in the streets of Paris? That ‘we all made mistakes’? That no one was really responsible?”
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — With Obama’s victory, it’s time to hope that the era of racial backlash and wedge politics is over. Time to imagine that the patriotism of dissenters will no longer be questioned and that the world will no longer be divided between “values voters” and those without a moral compass.
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 AP photo / Jose Luis Magana
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By Chris Hedges — Tomorrow I will go to a polling station in Princeton, N.J., and vote for Ralph Nader. I know the tired arguments against a Nader vote. But there is little disagreement among liberals and progressives about the Nader and Obama campaign issues. Nader would win among us in a landslide if this was based on issues.
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 AP photo / LM Otero
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — A good politician triumphs by adapting to the times and taking advantage of opportunities as they come. A great politician anticipates openings others don’t see and creates possibilities that were not there before.
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 Wikimedia Commons / edited for effect
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By Chris Hedges — The old assumptions and paradigms about capitalism and free markets are dead. A new, virulent populism, still inchoate, is slowly and painfully rising to take their place. This populism will determine the future of the country. It is as likely to be right-wing as left-wing.
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 AP photo / Madalyn Ruggiero
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Life took an unexpected turn for Joe Wurzelbacher, or “Joe the Plumber,” when he became a kind of human talking point for John McCain and Barack Obama during their last debate, and now Wurzelbacher has apparently taken a shine to politics.
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This week’s Mosaic Intelligence Reports investigates John “Drill, Baby, Drill!” McCain’s claims about “good” and “bad” oil, energy independence and whether he played a little fast and loose with the oil talk during the final presidential debate,
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No more presidential debates (at least for a couple months or so)! Who won the last one, Barack Obama or John McCain? Tony Blankley, Matt Miller and Truthdig’s own Robert Scheer size up the candidates and their campaigns and discuss the latest developments in the economic arena on this week’s “Left, Right & Center.”
Posted on Oct 17, 2008
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — John McCain’s debate performance almost certainly did him good among those whose votes he already has: very conservative Republicans who share Joe the Plumber’s view that Obama is some kind of socialist.
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By Eugene Robinson — Grouchiness, twitchiness and haughtiness didn’t help John McCain in Wednesday’s debate, but what he said hurt him more than how he said it.
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The term “health of the mother” is a coded term used by extreme pro-abortionists to mislead the public about their nefarious intentions, as John McCain suggested during Wednesday’s presidential debate. Or it could just mean “health of the mother.”
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Here’s one way to liven up the political process.
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Warrantless wiretapping makes for a rollicking good time at the National Security Agency, according to moral crusader Stephen Colbert, who’s not above a little dramatic re-enactment of his own biblically inspired carnal fantasies (for illustrative purposes only).
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 AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Bill Boyarsky — After Wednesday’s big debate, McCain-Palin volunteers celebrated what they considered a big victory for their presidential candidate. But the real action was taking place in courts miles away.
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 AP photo / Madalyn Ruggiero
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Things really aren’t going well for John McCain, but then he has only himself to blame. Take Joe the Plumber, whom McCain mentioned more than 20 times in Wednesday’s debate. For the record, Joe’s name is Sam, and he’s not a plumber.
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 AP photo / J. Scott Applewhite
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Although the pundits were impressed with John McCain’s debate performance, the polls showed another win for Barack Obama, who once again kept his cool against an angry, negative opponent.
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By Ellen Goodman — While gay marriage is losing its stigma, abortion is once again retreating to the closet.
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Now we know where John McCain has been getting his campaign ideas: 1960s camp television. My friends, who is the Batman? And why is he always palling around with criminals?
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Satire by Andy Borowitz —
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin went on the attack today, claiming that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has long-standing ties to The Weather Channel.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Each campaign has given voters ample notice about the inclinations, temperaments, habits, philosophical leanings and advisers they would bring to the White House. That’s enough.
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 AP photo / Susan Walsh
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By Bruce Fein — Would the Republican VP nominee vote for herself? During her debate with Joe Biden, Sarah Palin said “we have to fight for” and “protect” our freedom, but her party and the policies she seems to support have crippled American liberty.
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During the first presidential debate, John McCain gave a high-profile shout-out: “I suggest that people go up on the Web site of Citizens Against Government Waste, and they’ll look at those projects.” The group quickly returned the favor—its political action committee is calling McCain a “taxpayer hero” in TV ads airing over the next two weeks in Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.
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Do we really know Michelle Obama? She thinks so, since, as she tells “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart, after 20 months on the campaign trail there have certainly been plenty of opportunities to check her and Barack Obama out.
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 AP photo / Jim Bourg, pool
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By Scott Ritter — Ralph Nader is right: The two-party system is failing America. There isn’t time between now and Election Day to create a viable third-party candidate, and so the sad reality is one of two deeply flawed men, the byproduct of a deeply flawed political system, will serve as president for the next four or eight years.
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What a difference a few weeks and a few polling points can make. Last April John McCain pledged to run a “respectful campaign”—a goal he restated on more than one occasion until around midsummer.
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 Composite: communicationcorner.com/wikimedia
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What on earth was John McCain referring to during Tuesday’s debate when he kept bringing up that mysterious “$3 million overhead projector” that Barack Obama ostensibly supported in Chicago?
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During a sit-down interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson that aired on Wednesday, Barack Obama talked about the economy and how he’d lead differently from President Bush before addressing the McCain-Palin campaign’s ramped-up attacks of late. “All these statements are made simply to try to score cheap political points,” Obama told Gibson.
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By Joe Conason — Nothing in the presidential campaign so far has been as instructive as its swift descent into the politics of personal destruction. Although voters have probably heard little lately that they did not already know about Sen. Barack Obama, they have learned something very important about Sen. John McCain.
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By Ellen Goodman — Uncertainty is the backdrop for a presidential campaign whose last month is being conducted over the shakiest terrain. What we didn’t know yesterday, last week, last month suddenly reshapes the contours of our lives.
Posted on Oct 8, 2008
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By Marie Cocco — In the second presidential debate, the questioners seemed to understand better than either candidate that we are in the midst of a national emergency as grave and possibly more far-reaching than the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
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 AP photo / Madalyn Ruggiero
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Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has pulled significantly ahead of Republican rival John McCain, taking an 11-point lead after Tuesday night’s presidential debate, according to the latest Gallup Poll.
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Penny for John McCain’s thoughts? Keep it, that’s what YouTube is for.
Posted on Oct 8, 2008
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By Amy Goodman — The reviews are in, and the latest U.S. presidential debate, the “town hall” from Nashville, Tenn., was a snore. One problem is that in a debate it is important for the debaters to actually disagree.
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Tuesday night marked the second debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, moderated by NBC’s Tom Brokaw at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn. While Brokaw struggled to stick to the script, the two candidates fielded questions about the current economic catastrophe and American foreign policy.
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 AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Bill Boyarsky — As was the case in the first presidential debate, Barack Obama emerged from Tuesday night’s confrontation with John McCain in Nashville, Tenn., in command of the situation. The Democratic nominee looked calm, confident and presidential as he won their second contest.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Tuesday night’s debate, a town-hall discussion dominated by economic questions, made it clear that John McCain’s effort to change the campaign’s focus to the culture wars of the 1960s is not going to work.
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By William Pfaff — There are only two real issues left in the foreign policy debate between John McCain and Barack Obama. Yet neither the Iraq nor the Afghanistan issue is within the power of any American president to resolve.
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 AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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Truthdig’s chief political correspondent weighs in on the week in politics. From “pallin’ around with terrorists” to Tuesday’s debate, Team McCain is “going for the gut,” but will it work?
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Truthdig is excited to collaborate with Capzles.com on a unique new way of telling a story – in this case, about VP hopeful (and, yes, possible president) Sarah Palin – using video, audio and text “moments” along an interactive timeline.
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Parody is the best policy, as evidenced by the boost that “Saturday Night Live” has recently enjoyed, thanks to Sarah Palin lookalike (and sometime comedy star) Tina Fey. We kid, but so do Fey, Queen Latifah and Jason Sudeikis—playing Republican VP candidate Palin, PBS’ Gwen Ifill and Democratic VP pick Joe Biden, respectively—in this clip from the show’s Oct. 4 episode.
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In the latest edition of “Left, Right & Center,” co-commentators Matt Miller, Robert Scheer and Tony Blankley (Arianna Huffington is still at large) give their expert analyses of Thursday’s vice presidential debate, inspecting Sarah Palin’s and Joe Biden’s arguments and self-presentation styles down to the smallest detail.
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“Mosaic Intelligence Report” host Jamal Dajani is distinctly unimpressed with the level of knowledge about the Middle East displayed by Sarah Palin and Joe Biden during Thursday night’s vice presidential debate.
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All right, now this is getting ridiculous. None other than Ryan Seacrest has managed to insert himself into the political mix by scoring a phone interview with Hillary Clinton on his radio show Friday. What’ll it be next, the Obamas and the Bidens sit down with the preternaturally perky Mary Hart on “Entertainment Tonight?” Oh, wait ... never mind.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The key to understanding how John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate was provided by The New York Times last weekend when it described an episode in which he “tossed $100 chips around a hot craps table.”
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By David Sirota — The marriage of American capitalism and democracy has always been a Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee affair—stormy and erratic since its hasty wedding. But during the debate over a Wall Street bailout this week, we watched that matrimonial knot unwind into a tangled tale of terror.
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Did they deliver? That was the question coming from the Democratic and Republican camps after Sen. Joe Biden and Gov. Sarah Palin did battle at the vice presidential debate in St. Louis on Thursday night. Here’s the full debate in video—tell us what you think about how the candidates handled themselves and represented their respective tickets.
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 AP photo / Don Emmert, pool
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By Bill Boyarsky — Gov. Sarah Palin survived Thursday night’s debate, much to the disappointment of Democrats who hoped she would crumble as she did in her interview with Katie Couric. But she ducked tough questions, gave canned answers, tried to smile her way out of tough spots and cheerfully distorted Sen. Barack Obama’s record.
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