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By Marc Cooper
By Wellford Wilms
$19.00 Buy direct from the publisher - Use Truthdig discount code TD35
$13
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 AP / Eric Gay
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Slight progress has been made in trying to remedy the ecological and corporate nightmare that the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has become: On Wednesday, the company reported that repair workers were able to shut off one of the three leaks responsible for the catastrophic mess.
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 AP / Charles Dharapak
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Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s political prospects took a sharp downward turn after he man-hugged President Barack Obama in February 2009. And the emergence of the tea party movement—not to mention the boost it has given Crist’s main rival for election to the U.S. Senate ... (continued)
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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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 Wikimedia Commons / Joint Pipeline Office
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If you thought “drill, baby, drill!” was only a right-wing slogan, think again. On Wednesday, President Barack Obama outlined a plan for doing a little drilling for oil and gas off a few sections of our nation’s coastline, including the East Coast, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.
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The attorneys general of Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington and Virginia are suing over the health care reform bill, citing state sovereignty and alleging federal overreach under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.
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By Ruth Marcus — If you are asking, as former President George W. Bush did jokingly the other day, “Who the hell is Marco Rubio?” you probably won’t be for long.
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 AP / Dave Martin
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Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based Christian conservative group, is really breaking its bank. The group announced it is buying 30 seconds of Super Bowl ad time during which it will air an anti-abortion message featuring former University of Florida star quarterback Tim Tebow.
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 Still image from the AP via the Orlando Sentinel
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On Friday, Jason Rodriguez, a 40-year-old engineer who had been fired from an Orlando, Fla., construction firm two years ago, went back to his former office and opened fire, killing at least one person and wounding at least five others before fleeing to his mother’s house, where he was tracked down and arrested.
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 washingtonpost.com
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Has the world gone mad or is Sarah Palin a trendsetter? Florida’s Republican Sen. Mel Martinez has announced he will step down after Congress’ August recess, claiming that his priorities of “my faith, my family and my country” suggest it’s time for him to retire from public life. Rumors are circulating that “family problems” are behind his premature exit.
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Former Florida Sen. Bob Graham says the CIA didn’t brief him about the use of waterboarding on suspected terrorists, and he has the records in his personal notebooks to prove it, as he points out during a timely book tour stopover on Wednesday’s “Colbert Report.”
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 AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — When Charlie Crist, Florida’s popular governor, announced this week that he would run for the U.S. Senate, it was the best news the Republican Party has had in an otherwise unpleasant year.
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 gawker.com
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While her husband is entering a decidedly less lavish living arrangement, it appears that Ruth Madoff is getting ready to live the Palm Beach life in her $9.4 million spread in Florida—a state known for property laws that protect owners from losing their homes even when other assets are seized.
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 AP photo / Lynne Sladky
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By Reese Erlich — A majority of Florida’s Cuban-Americans, including many former hard-liners, have come to oppose a U.S. embargo strategy that has proved futile over the decades.
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 White House / Paul Morse / Pete Souza
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By Robert Scheer — Congressional Republicans, with the exception of that embarrassingly shrunken contingent of three moderates, will rue their legacy of deep indifference at a time of true national emergency, one that makes George W. Bush’s far more costly war on terror now seem an absurdly irrelevant exercise.
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By Marie Cocco — The reason you are such a big story is that you’ve stolen our money. Or at least that’s how most of the country sees it. You think those auto executives looked bad when they flew into Washington on their private jets? Just you wait.
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By Marie Cocco — George W. Bush promised to restore “honor and dignity” to the White House, but he leaves with less honor and with lower public approval than any other president since Richard Nixon.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The Bush administration’s specific failures—in foreign and domestic policy and on matters related to civil liberties—are clear enough. Yet the deeper cause of the public’s disaffection goes beyond these specifics.
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The outgoing chairman of the Democratic National Committee fought to expand his party’s reach to the red states that Barack Obama won. His pioneering Internet fundraisers became Obama’s pioneering Internet fundraisers. He refused to budge on Florida and Michigan. So why is Howard Dean out in the cold?
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 Truthdig / Peter Scheer
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By Jeremiah Levine — A little-noticed California proposition could limit the kind of partisan gerrymandering that Republicans and Democrats have used to influence elections around America for decades. But is that a good thing?
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 senate.gov and Flickr / aflcio2008
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While Minnesota gets ready for a recount, it looks like one way or another the state’s U.S. Senate race will be decided in court. With bad memories of Florida, Al Franken and Norm Coleman’s campaigns are already arguing about whose vote should count and why.
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 imdb.com
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Here’s a solution to the energy crisis Americans are sure to love: A company called Geoplasma is building a plant in Florida that will vaporize garbage with a plasma torch, turning 1,500 tons of waste into 60 megawatts of the good stuff. It may not be as clean as solar, but hey, America is the Saudi Arabia of trash.
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 smh.com.au
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Long lines were one form of fun awaiting voters around the country as they made their way to the polls on Tuesday; early voters also reported troubles of a more potentially prohibitive nature in battleground states.
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 electoral-vote.com
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Both campaigns predicted the polls would tighten up on the approach to Tuesday’s election, but many of the states where the race is closest were won by George W. Bush in 2004. Those include North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Georgia, Montana and Florida.
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 nytimes.com
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As you head to the polls Tuesday, keep this thought in mind: A voter in Wyoming is three and a half times more influential than a voter in Florida. Thanks to the Electoral College, it’s possible to become president with only 16 percent of the population’s support. Yay, Democracy!
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 Reagan Library
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OK, so Ronald Reagan isn’t around to actually endorse anyone. But that doesn’t stop political operatives from invoking his presidency to boost their candidate. A new, liberal Colorado-based group called Progressive Future is bringing back the Gipper to put in a plug for Barack Obama, while the conservative Let Freedom Ring calls Obama the “anti-Reagan.”
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Patty Sharaf’s new documentary “Murder, Spies & Voting Lies,” featuring election integrity journalist Brad Friedman, tells the story of Clint Curtis, a computer programmer who says a prominent Florida Republican asked him in 2000 to create software that could be used to rig the vote. Al-Jazeera’s Riz Khan takes a closer look.
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 panhandleparade.com
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By Bill Boyarsky — Next Tuesday, don’t be shocked if the Republicans roll out their familiar tactics of intimidating Democratic voters, challenging their eligibility and subjecting them to long lines at polling places. If the election is close, these shady maneuvers might pay off.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Florida provides the appropriate closing metaphor for the 2008 campaign. If John McCain were on a clear path to victory, there would be no campaign here at all.
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During an interview with Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, Orlando’s WFTV news anchor Barbara West came right out with some familiar-sounding questions: Is Barack Obama ashamed of his close ties to ACORN? Isn’t Barack Obama kind of just like Karl Marx? Where could West have gotten these ideas?
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 Flickr / Josh Thompson
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A new report from Pew suggests that this election has the potential to make 2000 look organized. With new voter ID laws, record turnout, wrongfully purged voter rolls, new machines and more, it could be a tense night, even if the outcome is decided early.
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Two new books resurrect the seductions and corruptions of pre-revolutionary Cuba.
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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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 Collage: Flickr (seiu_international) and electoral-vote.com
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With the campaign headed into the final weeks before the election, new polls pop up every day, and they continue to show a strong trend in favor of Barack Obama. Depending on the survey, Obama is ahead or tied in as many as 10 states won by George W. Bush in 2004, including faux-purple Florida and ruddy Indiana. But just being ahead in the polls doesn’t mean Obama will win. Update
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The McCain-Palin campaign has been criticized for limiting media access to VP hopeful Sarah Palin, and now it seems some journalists are having trouble interviewing her supporters, judging by the situation at the Alaska governor’s campaign stop Monday in Clearwater, Fla.
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 collage: realclearpolitics.com / destination360.com
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With several new polls showing Florida breaking for Barack Obama, the state’s GOP leadership convened a secret meeting of top party and campaign officials. Florida GOP Chair Jim Greer, who organized the powwow, said, “It was just to ensure the ship is on its proper course. ...”
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 AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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Looks like John McCain and his camp have decided to cut bait in Michigan after their efforts to win over voters in the Midwestern state didn’t quite pan out as they’d hoped. Instead, as Politico reports, McCain’s team is focusing on other important states like Florida and Ohio.
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 npr.org
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And to think that anyone thought James Dobson would sit out this presidential race. The Christian right leader and his advocacy group, Focus on the Family Action, are planning a multistate strategy to help elect McCain, and to prevent Democratic gains in Congress while they’re at it.
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Comedian Sarah Silverman has released a video urging young Jews to schlep to Florida to get their grandparents to vote for Barack Obama. Seriously. We’ll let her explain.
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 AP photo: Charlie Neibergall / Charles Dharapak
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Hillary Clinton is doing another campaign push for Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, but she’s apparently being careful not to take on Republican VP hopeful Sarah Palin in any way that might signal “cat fight” to those media types watching for any hint of such a conflict between Clinton and Palin.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — John McCain’s campaign acknowledged this weekend that Sarah Palin is unprepared to be vice president or president of the United States.
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 AP photo / Lynne Sladky
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Jack Abramoff was given four years in prison by a federal judge Thursday—a sentence whittled down from a possible 11 years because he cooperated with investigators —for his part in the fraud and corruption scandal that jolted Washington and landed several other lobbyists and Capitol Hill players in trouble as well.
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Raymond Hunter Geisel, a 22-year-old aspiring bail bondsmen, is in custody for allegedly saying of Barack Obama, “If he gets elected, I’ll assassinate him myself.” Geisel soon made matters worse for himself, reportedly joking to a Secret Service agent that “if he wanted to kill Senator Obama he simply would shoot him with a sniper rifle.”
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 Flickr / Joe Crimmings Photography
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Now that he is assured of his party’s nomination, Barack Obama has asked the Democratic credentials committee to award full votes to delegates from Florida and Michigan. Those states held primaries in violation of party rules, and their disputed delegations became a major source of division between supporters of Hillary Clinton and of Obama.
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The “Daily Show” investigates Barack Obama’s alleged problem with Jews in Florida, where at least one crafty senior is on to the mock reporter’s funny business.
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 gawker.com
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With all the subtlety of a jackhammer, an enterprising right-wing artiste by the name of Mike Meehan has recorded an election-year anthem, “Please Don’t Vote for a Democrat,” and has launched a corresponding PR campaign via the Internet and billboard ads—like this one in noted liberal stronghold Orange County, Florida—in hopes of striking fear and indignation into the hearts of undecided voters.
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 Flickr / dsearis
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John McCain is hoping that Americans, particularly those living in coastal states, are so sick of high gas prices they won’t mind a little extra offshore drilling. That’s a risky assessment according to The Politico and the former head of the Florida GOP, who said that back before fuel costs skyrocketed it “would have been like pulling a pin on a grenade and rolling it into the state.”
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Rep. Dennis Kucinich filed articles of impeachment against President Bush this week, and he already has a taker: Barack Obama’s Florida campaign co-chair, Rep. Robert Wexler. According to Wexler: “A decision by Congress to pursue impeachment is not an option, it is a sworn duty. It is time for Congress to stand up and defend the Constitution against the blatant violations and illegalities of this Administration.”
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By Eugene Robinson — Crank up your iPods, everyone. Herewith, a musical guide to the endgame of the epic contest for the Democratic nomination.
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Harriet Christian’s total meltdown at the Democratic Party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting was outrageous enough to make it to the top of YouTube’s political charts. Her tirade illustrates some of the challenges facing the Democratic Party and the Barack Obama campaign as it woos Hillary Clinton’s more colorful supporters. This one, though, is probably a lost cause.
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It was clear who sided with which candidate on Saturday in Washington after Democratic Party officials reached a decision on seating delegates from this winter’s Florida and Michigan primaries—cheers and angry jeers erupted when committee members explained that they would seat the delegates from both states with half-votes.
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