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By Kurt Vonnegut $17.82
By Lynne Joiner $27.32
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By Richard Reeves — Last week, one of the stars of the "soft" right, David Brooks of The New York Times, wrote a wake-up column with implications for readers who not only do not much like dark-skinned immigration, but are also hostile to such kindling issues as gay marriage and abortion. They seem incapable of understanding, once more, that these are family issues.
Posted on May 12, 2013
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — I disagreed with former President George W. Bush on many things. But on one issue, I admired him greatly: He was wise enough to marry a teacher and a librarian.
Posted on Feb 10, 2013
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 politicalhumor.about.com
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By Peter Z. Scheer — A new poll shows that Obama will likely win re-election thanks overwhelmingly to female voters. Fight a war with women and you’ll lose, because women have always had to fight harder.
Posted on Sep 27, 2012
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 Gage Skidmore (CC-BY-SA)
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Apparently being smart and having conservative values do not go hand in hand. At least, that’s what former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum said during a weekend speech at the Values Voter Summit in which he also criticized the media and libertarians.
Posted on Sep 16, 2012
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Jon Stewart is having difficulty telling the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions apart, thanks to some party role reversals this year.
Posted on Sep 6, 2012
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 AP/Biswaranjan Rout
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By Chris Hedges — The giddy, money-drenched, choreographed carnival in Tampa and the one coming up in Charlotte divert us from the real world—the one steadily collapsing around us.
Posted on Sep 3, 2012
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 Kim G. Appels (CC-BY)
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By Chip Ward, TomDispatch —
There were plenty of signs we took a wrong turn but we kept on going. Dumb, stubborn, blind: Who knows why we couldn’t stop? Greed maybe—powerful corporations we couldn’t overcome. It won’t matter much to you who is to blame. You’ll be too busy coping in the diminished world we bequeath you.
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 Gage Skidmore (CC-BY-SA)
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Lost in the hubbub over Herman Cain’s love affair with the number 9 during last week’s Republican debate were some compelling observations by Rick Santorum about “the breakdown of the American family” and its relationship to poverty.
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 Flickr / World Coalition Against the Death Penalty (CC-BY-SA)
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Family members, friends and hundreds of supporters flocked to Savannah, Ga., on Saturday to attend the funeral of Troy Davis, who was executed Sept. 21 in the murder of an off-duty police officer.
Posted on Oct 1, 2011
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 Mr. Fish
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By Mr. Fish — His name was Sam, no last name, and he wore no pants. He was lying on my little brother’s bed in a filthy orange T-shirt staring up at the ceiling, knees slightly bent, with blue eyes and curly blond hair and small pink lips that were frozen in a strange suckling of the air.
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By Ruth Marcus — Just in case his wife doesn’t take Sarah Palin up on her offer, I’ll say it: Rick Santorum is a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal.
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 Lelê Breveglieri (CC-BY)
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According to a new study, girls 11-16 years old who play video games with their parents are less depressed and, in the words of this Bloomberg report, “generally better behaved” than those who don’t. Apparently “Rock Band” creates Stepford children.
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By Ruth Marcus — Excuse me, Mary Fallin, did I just hear you say, “Woman up”?
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 Courtesy of the Arredondo family.
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By Chris Hedges — Crazed and distraught with grief, the father went into his garage and took out five gallons of gasoline and a propane torch. He walked past the three Marines in their dress blues and began to smash the windows of the government van with a hammer.
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 White House / Samantha Appleton
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By Ruth Marcus — As a political matter, the mother-daughter getaway to a five-star resort on the Spanish Costa del Sol was not a good idea. But I’d just as soon not have my First Family vacations determined by focus groups.
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 AP / Australian Maritime Safety Authority via the Sunderland family
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By T.L. Caswell — Abby Sunderland was ill served by the grown-ups around her. Had the talented sailor suffered just a bit more bad luck at sea, she might not be alive to anticipate her 17th birthday.
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 Flickr / katyhutch
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Scientists believe that a simple blood test could in the future be able to predict exactly when a woman will start menopause, a development that would be invaluable in helping women make reproductive decisions.
Posted on Jun 27, 2010
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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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 facebook.com
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Researchers at the University of Maryland have studied the consequences of 200 American college students unhooking from all media—cell phones, social media, Internet—for 24 hours, finding that many suffered symptoms of withdrawal similar to those in drug and alcohol addictions.
Posted on Apr 25, 2010
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 AP / Marco Di Lauro
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Indeed it is too soon, says actress Angelina Jolie, who has three adopted children, from Cambodia, Ethiopia and Vietnam. In the wake of allegations of child kidnapping and fears of child trafficking in Haiti, Jolie has come out to make the very uncontroversial assertion that “an emergency is not the time for new adoptions.”
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By Ruth Marcus — With 70 percent of children living in households where all adults are working, we need to reexamine the disparity that makes child care a luxury working families can’t afford.
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The British PM has announced a plan to spend the equivalent of nearly half a billion dollars providing free laptops and broadbrand Internet access to 270,000 low-income families. The program will need parliament’s blessing.
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 awkwardfamilyphotos.com
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Nests across America are getting less and less empty as adult children take shelter from a lousy economy. According to Pew, 11 percent of adults now live with their parents and 10 percent of adults between 18 and 34 say the recession ... (continued)
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 Flickr / apdk
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A Canadian couple have negotiated something called a Differentiated Homework Plan with their children’s school after learning that there is no guarantee that after-school toil does a lick of good. As a result, young Spencer and Brittany Milley of Calgary will not be judged on anything but their in-class performance. (continued)
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 Screenshot of "Telescreens" from the film "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
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With millions of cameras watching its citizens’ every move, Britain is already one of the world’s leading surveillance states. Now the government wants to go even further, putting cameras in 20,000 private homes “to make sure children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals,” reports the Telegraph. Update
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By Eugene Robinson — A century ago, when the NAACP was founded, black America was under siege. Some critics have wondered whether there is still a role for an organization like the NAACP. President Obama says there is.
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 thenewliberator.wordpress.com
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Despite Gov. Mark Sanford’s public mea culpas and hopeful Scriptural references, it seems that several prominent figures from South Carolina’s Republican ranks are putting the heat on him to devote himself fully to his family—and we all know what that political parlance means.
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 AP photo / Andy Wong
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By Chris Hedges — All efforts to save the planet will be useless if we do not cut population growth. By 2050, the planet will have between 8 billion and 10 billion people, according to a recent U.N. forecast. And yet studies, books and documentaries that deal with various crises fail to discuss the danger of all those billions of hungry people looking for a better life.
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The publication of Sontag’s early diaries provides a revelatory look at the self-inventions of the late writer.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — If President Obama’s primary task is to restore economic growth, he has also been waging a quiet, long-term campaign to ease the nation’s divisions around religious and moral questions.
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By Ellen Goodman — It turns out that the woman who recently gave birth to eight babies already had six in vitro kids at home, no spouse, no job and a pending bankruptcy. There’s a word for this achievement of medicine’s reproductive business: nuts.
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By Ellen Goodman — What will happen if Michelle Obama makes the personal her political issue? What would a serious work-and-family policy look like?
Posted on Jan 14, 2009
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By Eugene Robinson — If things get much more “interesting,” we might have a collective nervous breakdown. But along with the anxiety, there’s also a sense of rare opportunity—a chance to emerge better than we were economically, politically and socially.
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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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 notherapedocumentary.org
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Author and activist Alice Walker took a moment last week to write a note to Barack Obama, relaying a few requests and offering some advice, such as to find time to relax amid the challenges and changes that await him and his family.
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 AP photo / Kevork Djansezian
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By The Rev. Madison Shockley — The thousands of same-gender couples who have married in the few months since the California Supreme Court cleared the way are in fact married. The notion that a majority vote by people who are not party to these marriages of love, commitment, care and family will have the power to impose a divorce on these couples is flatly repugnant.
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If you can read this headline, you might be part of the audience that this No on Prop. 8 ad is targeting, with a little help from three key “Ugly Betty” cast members.
Posted on Oct 29, 2008
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 Obama for America
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Barack Obama will spend Thursday and Friday off the campaign trail in order to visit his ailing grandmother, Madelyn Dunham. Obama was raised in part by his grandparents, and has credited his grandmother with teaching him “values straight from the Kansas heartland.”
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By Ellen Goodman — Let us remember that Republicans had long targeted working mothers as the centerpiece of the culture wars. Now their heroine is the in-your-face governor who once said: “To any critics who say a woman can’t think and work and carry a baby at the same time, I’d just like to escort that Neanderthal back to the cave.”
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 gopconvention2008.com
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As governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin is entitled to bill the state for certain expenses she incurs on the job, such as travel (for herself and her family), food and lodging. That said, The Washington Post has delved into her records and discovered that Palin “billed taxpayers for 312 nights spent in her own home during her first 19 months in office,” charging per diem expenses intended to cover costs related to travel.
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 AP photo / Washingtonpost.com
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As governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, now the mother of a pregnant teen, cut state funds that would have helped house and support teenage mothers. This on top of the news that both Palin and John McCain have opposed teen pregnancy prevention programs.
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John McCain has found a theme he likes and he’s sticking with it: Barack Obama is popular and that’s bad. Much worse, apparently, than the Reagan-era economic philosophy the presumed Republican nominee is peddling.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — It would be unfortunate if Obama’s words were read only as an attempt to win white votes. It actually matters that a presidential candidate is taking the costs of fatherlessness seriously.
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Here’s a lengthy (run time: 23:49) video clip from Barack Obama’s Father’s Day speech at Chicago’s Apostolic Church of God on Sunday, beginning with his riff about too many fathers from the African-American community being “MIA.”
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 Flickr / bobster1985
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The California Supreme Court has ruled that gays and lesbians have a right to marry. Chief Justice Ronald M. George aptly explained the landmark 4-3 decision: “Even the most familiar ... traditions often mask an unfairness and inequality that frequently is not recognized or appreciated by those not directly harmed.”
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By Ellen Goodman — I always thought that genealogy was for people whose blood ran blue. It was for folks who traced their ancestry to the Mayflower or the American Revolution, not those who came over in steerage one step ahead of the Cossacks.
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By Ellen Goodman — Pregnancy is way cool on the big screen these days. Moviemakers seem to be reflecting a cultural tide that has shifted key positions on both the left and the right.
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By Marie Cocco — The turkey may share the table with lasagna or guacamole or Asian-style rice bowls. Welcome to America, Pilgrim.
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