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By Tom Segev
By Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark
$19.11
$23
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Wikimedia Commons
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By Chris Hedges — This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Business has been on the ropes since last fall’s financial collapse, but the first glimmerings of recovery are calling forth a capitalist counteroffensive.
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Two memoirs—Eve Pell’s “We Used to Own the Bronx” and Christopher Buckley’s “Losing Mum and Pup”—demonstrate, each in its own way, that all that glitters is not gold and that the price exacted by extreme social anxiety is very high indeed. A feast of the higher gossip and raw meat for social anthropologists.
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By Eugene Robinson — The white supremacist who allegedly took a rifle into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and killed a security guard is more than a bitter, demented old man. He is a known figure in the domestic hate industry and a reminder that words have consequences.
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By Joe Conason — Big insurance and pharmaceutical companies are lobbying frantically (and spending millions of dollars) to foreclose the possibility of the most promising aspect of health care reform: a public insurance option.
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AP photo / Vahid Salemi
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Iran’s rowdy presidential campaign shows no signs of boredom heading into Friday’s election. Perhaps feeling the heat from rival Mir Hossein Mousavi, sitting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused his opponents of “a return to Hitler’s methods” and collaborating with “Zionist entities.”
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AP photo / Ben Curtis
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By William Pfaff — Recent developments in the Middle East and Central Asia, from Iran’s raucous election to Pakistan’s tribal revolt against the Taliban, cast doubt once again on Washington’s basic assumptions and anxieties.
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Flickr / ivanx
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Here we go again. The Center for Public Integrity crunched the numbers and found that between 1998 and 2007, Defense Department personnel enjoyed “more than 22,000 trips worth at least $26 million, sponsored by an array of foreign governments, private companies and other groups which have business with the Pentagon.”
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AP photo / J. David Ake
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By Robert Scheer — You probably don’t know much about Sheila Bair, but she is looking out for you, and that is why the big guys on Wall Street and their allies in the Obama administration are out to get her.
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By Amy Goodman — Ken Saro-Wiwa and Alberto Pizango never met, but they are united by a passion for the preservation of their people and their land, and by the fervor with which they were targeted by their respective governments.
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Flickr / The TruthAbout...
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Some of the country’s major banks are prepared to pay back money they borrowed under the TARP program, but don’t get too excited. The initial repayment is expected to be a meager $50 billion, which Timothy Geithner wants to inject right back into other troubled banks.
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Flickr / dok1
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The Supreme Court has put the brakes on President Obama’s plans to bail out the auto industry, ordering a stay of the sale of Chrysler to Fiat. Before the ruling, the administration said blocking the deal would have “grave consequences” for Chrysler. Also, it could threaten the government’s plans for the much larger and more complicated GM. Update
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Keith Allison
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Starting July 1, every computer sold in China will come bundled with software designed to block access to pornographic sites and whatever else parents—and, critics fear, the government—want to keep at bay. As one of the software’s developers explains, “If a father doesn’t want his son to be exposed to content related to basketball or drugs, he can block all Web sites related to those things.”
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Mr. Fish
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By Chris Hedges — We may thrill to Obama’s rhetoric, but very few of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world are as deluded. They grasp that nothing so far has changed for Muslims in the Middle East under the Obama administration.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Remember the imaginary couple who appeared in the television ads that helped beat President Clinton’s health plan 15 years ago? That duo and the corporations behind them have switched sides in the debate, and for a good reason: 50 million new customers.
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AP photo / Damian Dovarganes
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By Scott Tucker — The right to rebel is my real subject here, but the misery of the law is not incidental. No good case can be made for rebellion as an unqualified good in itself. But the right to rebel also cannot be limited to the rebel causes that were won long ago and have passed over into our national mythology.
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Flickr / steve9567
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By Joe Conason — If right-wing broadcasters don’t want to be blamed when someone murders a person they have demonized repeatedly—as in the case of George Tiller, the doctor shot dead in his Wichita, Kan., church last Sunday—then they ought to moderate their rhetoric.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — A media environment that tilts to the right is obscuring what President Obama stands for and closing off political options that should be part of the public discussion.
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USAF / Staff Sgt. Bradley A. Lail
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By Fred Branfman — Gen. David Petraeus has proven the rule that past military victories do not guarantee future success. The general has made a mess of Afghanistan and Pakistan, yet he remains dangerously popular.
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By Marie Cocco — So it’s health care overhaul this year—or bust. If this is the bet, right now I’d put my money on bust.
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By William Pfaff — Next week President Barack Obama travels to Cairo to deliver what is expected to be a major statement on relations between the United States and the Islamic world, but informed skeptics predict his new approach to the region will resemble the late months of the Bush administration.
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By Eugene Robinson — President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court is a proud and accomplished Latina. This fact apparently drives some prominent Republicans to a state resembling incoherent, sputtering rage.
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By David Sirota — It seems government and investors are now engaging in damning honesty. With these outbursts of candor so brazen and self-explanatory, the press is being bypassed.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Republicans would be foolish to fight the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court because she is the most conservative choice that President Obama could have made.
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By Marie Cocco — President Obama’s nominee said she hopes Americans “will see that I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences.” Ordinary people have had a difficult time of it before the current Supreme Court.
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hartmaninstitute.com
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Feeling their power, Israel’s conservative parliamentarians are drafting laws that appear to target Arab citizens, causing both allies and civil libertarians to cringe. One measure would create a loyalty oath, while another would punish any “call to negate Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state” with a year in jail.
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AP photo / Keith Srakocic
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By Chris Hedges — Natural gas companies have managed to convince Congress and the EPA that millions of gallons of toxic water left underground or collected in huge open pits pose no threat to watersheds, yet wells in 11 states have already been poisoned.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — President Obama wants to build a new liberal majority and to do it he’s trying to charm everyone left of Rush Limbaugh. That strategy has led to some awkward moments.
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The debate over our 40th president’s role in ending the Cold War continues with the publication of James Mann’s “The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan.”
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By Marie Cocco — This is how it ends. Or at least, this is how the latest, sad chapter in a story that has been ending for three decades is written.
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Flickr / sarihuella
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With news of the first swine flu death outside of Mexico (U.S.) and the first infection of a patient with no connection to Mexico (Spain), the World Health Organization has reclassified the health scare one level short of a full pandemic and has urged governments to initiate emergency measures.
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By Amy Goodman — Back in the Watergate era, the Senate’s Church Committee exposed government abuses. Of course some people tried to block its work. You may have heard of a couple of them—Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Stanley Kutler — On what basis have the cable channels decided that President Obama’s first hundred days are the most important thing to happen in the history of the world? As in the case of FDR before him, much has happened in the beginning of the president’s first term—and there is much more to come.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — How many ironies can a single presidency engender? A cool man who has aroused both warm feelings of affection and a fiery opposition, Obama is seen as too moderate by parts of the left, but the right thinks he has a radical statist agenda.
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Flickr / be_khe
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The administration is taking the threat of swine flu seriously, as congressional Republicans’ main interest in the health arena seems to be roping the president’s nominee to head Health and Human Services into an abortion fight. The Centers for Disease Control and the Homeland Security Department issued an emergency declaration Sunday, while the World Health Organization and governments around the globe scrambled to confront the potential crisis.
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By David Sirota — Both parties are suddenly listening to “the people” instead of the Establishment. They know the political class, however offended, can no longer stop a voter backlash.
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Citing data obtained from an Iraqi government official, the Associated Press reported Thursday that 87,215 Iraqis have died due to violence since 2005—and that could even be a conservative figure.
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By Marie Cocco — The defenders of the health care status quo have been frantically arguing these past few weeks that any coming reform of the health insurance system cannot include a public insurance plan, even if that’s the whole point.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Because of the defeat of health care reform in 1994, there will be a temptation to treat every dispute as the first step toward the collapse of the process, ignoring the fact that times and minds change.
Posted on Apr 23, 2009
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By Amy Goodman — The door to bringing torturers to justice is open only a crack. Whether it is kicked open or slammed shut is not up to the president. Though he may occupy the most powerful office on Earth, there is a force more powerful: committed people demanding change.
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By William Pfaff — In 1935, Sinclair Lewis, the first American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize, wrote a novel entitled “It Can’t Happen Here” to influence the 1936 presidential election. He was off by about 66 years.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Eugene Robinson — (Editor’s note: Eugene Robinson is the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary.) It’s hard to argue with the results thus far from President Obama’s “no drama” approach to governing, but I think he should learn to chew a little scenery when the occasion demands.
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AP photo / Nam Y. Huh
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By Chris Hedges — Israel and the United States will together boycott the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Geneva. Racism, an endemic feature of Israeli and American society, is not, we have decided, open for international inspection. It’s times like this President Obama would do well to heed the sermons of his former pastor.
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NASA / U.S. Treasury
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President Obama has said he doesn’t want public money going into a “black hole,” but his administration’s bank bailout looks more and more like an abyss of cosmic proportions. Not only are the bailed-out banks lending less than before, the Treasury Department appears to be engaging in creative math to obscure the gravity of the situation.
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By Eugene Robinson — The cool, cerebral White House might logically conclude that Wednesday’s decidedly uncool, uncerebral “tea bag” protests were intellectually and politically incoherent, and therefore not worth a second thought. That would be a dangerous mistake.
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By David Sirota — As Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s posthumous infamy turns 10 on April 20, I wish I were surprised that Columbine-like shootings are still happening, or even that our national discussion about violence hasn’t yet matured past gun control and video games.
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By William Pfaff — American foreign policy is based not on what we can do, but what Washington wants to do, hence the blunders of Korea, Vietnam and even the Cold War, which the Soviets were kind enough to lose. Even now, the new president is extending the “Long War” on a still more ambitious scale.
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U.S. Army / Sgt. Kani Ronningen
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America promised to bring democracy to Iraq, but more than two months after provisional elections, things have gone from photo-op to fiasco. The New York Times reports on the “threats, intrigue, back-room deal-making, protests, political paralysis and, increasingly, popular discontent” that have come to characterize the Iraqi political process.
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By Marie Cocco — Once again we may be fooling ourselves into thinking that the buying and selling of paper assets is the same as the buying and selling of tangible goods made by real workers.
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By Eugene Robinson — In 10 trips to Cuba, I have met Afro-Cubans who told me with conviction of their opportunities under the Castro regime. But I’ve also heard bitter complaints about deep-seated racism that many black Cubans believe is getting worse.
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What Will Tighter Restrictions on Trade in Iran Do?
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