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By Joe Conason
$9.35
By Michael Goldfarb
$19.80
$22
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The well-off will pay more in taxes. And before the howling on the right gets too loud, consider that we have just gone through a long era involving a far less frank form of redistribution—upward.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Obama’s message was plain: The era of bashing government is over. So, too, is the folklore of a marketplace capable of producing abundance without regulation, oversight or public intervention.
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By Marie Cocco — For someone who spent much of the Democratic primary season running against the Clinton era, Obama sounds an awful lot like President Clinton.
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Flickr / Marcin Wichary
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More than 6,000 people died in Mexico’s drug war last year, far too many as a result of U.S.-purchased firepower. Though Mexico has strict gun laws, smugglers have no trouble legally purchasing military-grade weapons, such as AK-47 rifles, in the U.S., and then shipping them south of the border, where they are used with devastating effect.
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White House
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In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, President Obama acknowledged the dire state of the economy, but struck a hopeful tone as he expanded on his vision for recovery. Investments in energy, education and health care will be key, he said, as will an expanded bailout of the financial sector. (Summary, video and full text after the jump)
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By Eugene Robinson — It’s reaching the point where desperate measures—brutal honesty and complete transparency—may be the only way to bring the economy out of its kamikaze dive. If so, this won’t be pretty.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — After Obama began to campaign around the country for the stimulus, support for the package rose. Administration officials have taken notice. Count on this to be a road-trip presidency.
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Flickr / stan
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Uncle Sam already gave Citigroup $45 billion and promised to limit the bank’s losses on $300 billion in troubled loans, but executives at the ailing bank are now reportedly asking the federal government to sweeten the deal. One scheme has Washington exchanging preferred stock for common stock.
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Jeff Madrick’s new book insists that the anti-government ethos that is a treasured American prejudice is not grounded in the new economic reality. But is he fighting the last war?
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By David Sirota — It’s fitting that Barack Obama went to Denver to sign the stimulus bill. We’re just now starting to climb the challenging “Rocky Mountains” of this economic odyssey.
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By William Pfaff — Except for the brief NATO intervention in Kosovo and Serbia, all of the significant U.S. military expeditions since the Cold War have been fought against Asians, and we have lost nearly all of them.
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AP photo / M. Spencer Green
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By Bill Boyarsky — The national health care crisis, intensified by the recession, is so bad that nothing can be permitted to stop reform of the system, not even the implosion of the president’s health czar.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — It makes sense to prop up ailing carmakers. Allowing GM and Chrysler to go bankrupt could be a triggering event that might make a very bad economy much worse.
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By Joe Conason — Republicans congratulate themselves for remaining unified in defeat and whine about Obama’s refusal to capitulate—but in fact it is they who have failed in the initial episode of a confrontation that will certainly continue for four years.
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By Amy Goodman — As many as 5,000 children in Pennsylvania have been found guilty, and up to 2,000 of them jailed, by two corrupt judges who received kickbacks from the builders and owners of private prison facilities that benefited.
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By Eugene Robinson — Obama must deal with a new presidential role that he did not seek but cannot avoid: managing big chunks of the private-sector economy.
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AP photo / Petros Giannakouris
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By Chris Hedges — It turns out that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists. Just ask the new director of national intelligence, who warned that the deepening economic crisis could trigger a return to the “violent extremism” of the 1920s and 1930s.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — President Obama senses that fate has handed him opportunities few presidents ever get, and that his test will be whether he makes good use of his chance to bend history at one of its “inflection points.”
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At last, a revisionist takedown of our 40th president, portrayed as an empty suit too often lauded by the common people he betrayed.
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By William Pfaff — Of the possible political combinations that have emerged from the Israeli parliamentary election, none will bring the region closer to peace. Israel will continue to persecute the Palestinians, whose hatred will only grow.
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State Dept. / Michael Gross, cropped
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With his party holding 15 seats in the Knesset, Avigdor Lieberman of the ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu is poised to pick Israel’s next government. Lieberman would like a choice cabinet post in exchange for anointing the next premier, but he’s under investigation for allegedly laundering millions of overseas dollars.
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By Ellen Goodman — What wasn’t predicted was that women might finally reach the goal of equality less because they scaled the heights than because men slipped downward. But here we are.
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By Marie Cocco — Well, that didn’t work out. In pushing for a new financial industry bailout, Treasury Secretary Geithner came across like a banker trying to do a politician’s job. Obama owes us some hands-on involvement.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The Obama administration keeps having to learn that bland centrism is not pragmatic, it’s not helpful in resolving a big crisis, and it certainly doesn’t buy you any love.
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guardian.co.uk
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With a dearth of smiles in Zimbabwe on Wednesday, Morgan Tsvangirai was sworn in as prime minister by his political nemesis, President Robert Mugabe. The long fight to this moment, which included Tsvangirai’s exile and the death of many of his political supporters, has culminated in a power-sharing agreement between the two men and their parties.
Posted on Feb 11, 2009
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Flickr / World Economic Forum
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Tzipi Livni, leader of the centrist Kadima party, took a slight lead in exit polls and early returns after Israelis voted Tuesday in parliamentary elections. However, with Likud a close second and a splinter ultraconservative party set to win about 15 seats, conservatives may be the real winners. Update
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Flickr / david55king
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With world opinion soured by the recent events in Gaza, Israelis are headed to the polls to elect a new government that is widely expected to move further to the right. Pre-election polls put the conservative Likud in the lead. Labor was a distant fourth, behind even the ultraconservative Yisrael Beitenu, despite taking a hawkish turn.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Eugene Robinson — Bipartisanship is a cute idea, but with 600,000 Americans losing their jobs in one month, there simply isn’t time to be nice.
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radaronline.com
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A survey of stimulus coverage by Media Matters has found that watching TV news may actually shrink your brain. Well, that’s not fair, but it certainly won’t teach you much about stimulating the economy. That’s because the personalities that populate the airwaves—and not just Fox News—are given license to repeat untruths over and over again.
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Maan Images / Hatem Omar
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Be it a political gamble or a mix-up of epic proportions, Hamas is being accused of stealing humanitarian aid from U.N. trucks in the Gaza Strip. Due to the thefts, officials say, aid has stopped flowing into the battle-torn territory, where half the population depends on the U.N. shipments for food.
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Why does the Darfur violence arouse outrage but the slaughter of millions more in Congo does not? An indispensable new book by Gerard Prunier attempts an answer by combining cool analysis and scholarly dispassion without losing sight of the horror of its subject.
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By David Sirota — Only weeks ago, the political world was buzzing about a “team of rivals,” but instead President Obama has populated his administration with Bush yes-men and Wall Street kleptocrats whose discredited theologies cannot be killed.
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By William Pfaff — Barack Obama in Washington reminds one of Diogenes in Athens, with his lantern in search of an honest man.
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AP photo / Alex Brandon
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By Chip Fleischer — Now that Tom Daschle has withdrawn his name from the running to be health and human services secretary, President Obama should revisit the idea of nominating former Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean for the position, an idea he abandoned last November for all the wrong reasons.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Republicans have been winning the media wars over Obama’s central initiative. They have done so largely by defining the proposal by its least significant parts.
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By William Pfaff — John Kenneth Galbraith once warned that U.S. foreign policy suffers from institutional rigidity with a “strong commitment to error.” What better proof than the planned surge in Afghanistan?
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Lie Louis Périn-Salbreux
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By Eugene Robinson — Earth to Wall Street: It’s over, people. You had a terrific run, better than you deserved, but now you’d be wise to pay attention to those citizens outside, the ones with the pitchforks and the torches.
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By Marie Cocco — No need to fumble for words that sum up the stew of hypocrisy, arrogance and insiderism that is the unfolding saga of Tom Daschle. This is the audacity of audacity.
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AP photo / Nikolas Giakoumidis
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By Chris Hedges — The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis. Our empire is dying. How will we cope with our decline? Will we cling to the absurd dreams of a superpower and a glorious tomorrow or will we responsibly face our stark new limitations?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — President Obama’s outreach to Republicans is popular, but the coming week will test his resolve. Eventually, he’ll have to say “no” to the GOP, or lose what he’s fighting for.
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Hats off to the Scandinavians, who continue to make the world’s progressives green with envy. Even as Iceland faces economic catastrophe, the volcanic island nation has made history by naming the world’s first (for the most part) openly gay national leader. Johanna Sigurdardottir will become prime minister. (The New York Daily News says Norway briefly had an openly gay man as prime minister.)
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By Eugene Robinson — Unbeknown to the House Republicans who voted unanimously against President Obama’s stimulus package, we are in the midst of a rare fundamental shift in American politics.
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By Marie Cocco — After eight years of trickle-down tax cuts that pushed the prosperous up and left most everyday Americans sliding further down, the stimulus bill now moving swiftly through Congress is more than a reversal of political course. Let’s hope it’s not too late.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — President Obama’s visit with House and Senate Republicans this week was useful for setting a new tone and a refreshing break from the Bush administration’s habit of consulting almost no one. But it was a sideshow to the main battle over how to improve the economy, which is among Democrats.
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By Marie Cocco — There is absolutely no reason to create some newfangled and untested system to charge and try those few terrorism suspects whose legal fates present President Obama with an excruciating political decision.
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Wikimedia Commons / Presidencia de la Nación Argentina
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Timothy Geithner may be a tax dodger who helped funnel taxpayer funds to his banking buddies, but we need that kind of cunning right now. That’s the thinking on Capitol Hill, anyway. The Senate confirmed President Obama’s pick to head Treasury on Monday, over the grumbles of 34 senators.
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AP photo / Sebastian Scheiner
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By Chris Hedges — The assault on Gaza exposed not only Israel’s callous disregard for international law but the gutlessness of the American press. Nearly all reporters were, as during the buildup to the Iraq war, pliant stenographers and echo chambers.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Beneath the warm pledges of bipartisanship and the earnest calls for cooperation lurks an unpleasant fact: From the moment it loses power, the opposition party turns to the task of getting it back.
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Two recent books show how a man of reason and conservative temperament and a man of passion and radical disposition joined together, even before either knew it, to end slavery.
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By David Sirota — Though presidential festivities and media superlatives tried to numb any feeling other than happiness, it’s only natural to experience a twinge of anxiety while celebrating at the edge of an abyss.
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