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By Andrew Breitbart
By Mark Edward Taylor $28.00
$23
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By Eugene Robinson — There was a time when Republicans campaigned on their ideas, programs and values. This year—lacking ideas, programs or values—John McCain and Sarah Palin are running for the White House on an elaborate fictional narrative of victimhood.
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Just how dangerous are evangelical zealots? A new book by Jeff Sharlet takes a close and disturbing look at the group known as The Family and its disturbing and apparently widespread influence on mainstream political culture.
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By David Sirota — In the imminent confrontation over the Employee Free Choice Act, an almost embarrassingly modest proposal, corporations are actually billing themselves as the underdog—the poor, overmatched peasant David against the Philistine monster Goliath.
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By Eugene Robinson — Talk about role reversal. The Republican Party, which scoffs at the nonsense of “identity politics,” has staked everything on the compelling life stories of its presidential and vice presidential candidates.
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 AP photo / Ted S. Warren
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By Bill Boyarsky — In a speech that rose beyond the occasion, Sen. Barack Obama changed the dynamics of the presidential campaign. With fire in his eyes and politeness thankfully forgotten, he finally put Sen. John McCain on the defensive, most notably mocking the Republican’s claim that he’s best suited to be commander in chief.
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 news.aol.com
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By John Cheney-Lippold — The McCain camp’s announcement Friday morning that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will be the Republican vice presidential candidate is nothing more than a performance in the politics of cynicism, a cynicism that may prove to be somewhat of a strategic miracle for the Republicans as they try to follow the Democrats’ much-publicized rock concert, or national convention, in Denver this week.
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In Jonathan Mahler’s new book, George W. Bush emerges as the most lawless president in American history, the first to usurp the law as a matter of policy.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — In 1948, a young Minneapolis mayor electrified Democratic delegates gathered in Philadelphia with a bold endorsement of President Harry Truman’s civil rights policies and the “promise of a land where all men are free and equal.”
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By Eugene Robinson — “I cried on Monday when Michelle spoke,” Rep. John Lewis told me Wednesday at the Pepsi Center, “and I know that on Thursday night at the stadium I’ll cry again.”
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RJ Matson, The St. Louis Post Dispatch —
Posted on Aug 28, 2008
READ MORE
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RJ Matson, Roll Call —
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By Ellen Goodman — Democrats have provided nearly all the drama of this campaign season, an 18-month run, a narrative with two compelling leads, a race between two people to open the door of history. A door that could only admit one at a time.
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 AP photo / Rafiq Maqbool
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By Chris Hedges — Mounting bombing raids and widespread detentions of Afghans are rapidly turning Afghanistan into the mirror image of Iraq. But these very real events, which will have devastating consequences over the next few months and years, are largely ignored by us.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — In selecting Joe Biden, Barack Obama has signaled clearly what this week’s Democratic National Convention will be about: He intends to move aggressively to ease the problems that have worried so many Democrats in recent weeks—problems, it turns out, that Obama is worried about, too.
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In “One Minute to Midnight,” Michael Dobbs’ definitive book on the 1962 crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, the question of lessons learned and unlearned remains as acute as ever.
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 commons.wikimedia.org
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If there is any doubt that John McCain is gulping down the neocon Kool-Aid on Georgia, one need only read his new manifesto in The Wall Street Journal, where he once again flaunts his Wikipedia-sourced foreign policy expertise.
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By William Pfaff — History—not democracy—provides the explanation for the crisis in Georgia, in which the United States is recklessly involving itself.
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Census data project that in just 34 years, today’s minority groups together will make up the majority of the U.S. population, outnumbering “non-Hispanic whites.” Contrary to what Lou Dobbs and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps would have you believe, the change in demographics has more to do with procreation than immigration.
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 AP photo / Musa Sadulayev
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For those who never heard of South Ossetia before fighting between Russians and Georgians erupted there, the BBC’s Paul Reynolds provides some needed background and analysis, including this pearl of wisdom: “Do not punch a bear on the nose unless it is tied down.”
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What is it about the region that provokes intense sectarian passions, prompting seemingly endless vendettas? “Kingmakers,” by Karl Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, tells the story of British and American entanglement and how the modern Middle East was invented. It also offers an exemplary history of hubris.
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By Eugene Robinson — World attention, in addition to fixing on the spectacle of the Olympics and the Chinese economic miracle, will be cast on a record of human rights abuse and environmental degradation.
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By William Pfaff — The Chinese authorities’ anxiety that the Olympic Games will be a success reflects their need to find international confirmation of their general political and economic policies of the past 20 years.
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By Eugene Robinson — I’m confident that Sen. Lindsey Graham and the rest of John McCain’s front-line surrogates know full well what messages they’re sending about Barack Obama and race. On the off chance that they—or, more likely, some of the white voters they’re trying to reach—don’t know text from subtext from context, here’s a deconstruction.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Will the race issue go back into the closet for the rest of the presidential campaign? Of course not, so where do we go from here?
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 commons.wikimedia.org
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Forty-six years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he wants “to rebuild our positions in Cuba” by strengthening economic cooperation with the island nation. The push could be a retort to America’s resolve to build a missile shield on Russia’s doorstep.
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 AP photo / Hasan Sarbakhshian
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By Chris Hedges — An attack on Iran, which Israeli and Bush administration officials appear set to carry out if Iranian uranium enrichment is not halted, would ignite a regional war in the Middle East and lead to economic collapse and political upheaval in the United States.
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By Eugene Robinson — It’s awfully early for John McCain to be running such a desperate, ugly campaign against Barack Obama. But I guess it’s useful for Democrats to get a reminder that the Republican Party plays presidential politics by the same moral code that guided the bad-boy Oakland Raiders in their heyday: “Just win, baby.”
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 AP photo / Brennan Linsley
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By Scott Ritter — The war between the United States and Iran is on. American taxpayer dollars are being used, with the permission of Congress, to fund activities that result in Iranians being killed and wounded, and Iranian property destroyed. This wanton violation of a nation’s sovereignty would not be tolerated if the tables were turned.
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 Mr. Fish
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The renowned author sits down with Truthdig literary editor Steve Wasserman to tell stories about his books, the many loves of his life—including dinosaurs and Halloween—and his own starring role in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rise to fame.
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In “Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies,” Barbara Slavin, a leading Middle East reporter for USA Today, offers a refreshingly nuanced and revelatory taxonomy of power within theocratic Iran that sheds light on its leaders and their ambitions.
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By David Sirota — History books teem with six-word phrases, from the comforting (“Nothing to fear but fear itself”) to the inspiring (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”) to the embarrassing (“Read my lips, no new taxes”). But the six words “on the basis of union membership” could be more momentous than any of those.
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 commons.wikimedia.org
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A federal judge has ruled that the testimony of David Greenglass, who helped convict his sister in one of the most famous trials in American history, shall remain secret. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed 55 years ago for conspiracy to commit espionage. Greenglass has since recanted parts of his testimony.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — To win the presidency, Barack Obama needs only to battle John McCain to a tie on foreign policy and national security. That means Obama has no need for a great triumph during his trip this week to the Middle East and Europe. His goal is to look safe, sound and competent, and that’s how he’s playing things.
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 AP photo / Mark Lennihan
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By Chris Hedges — The decline of newspapers is not about the replacement of the antiquated technology of news print with the lightning speed of the Internet. It does not signal an inevitable and salutary change. It is not a form of progress.
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By Marie Cocco — Steven Wax’s new book provides an insider’s view of some of the most hideous practices our country has allowed since the 9/11 attacks. And that’s without giving accounts of torture and abuse of detainees.
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Are Keith Gessen and his posse really the voice of the Zeitgeist, the intellectual heirs to Norman Mailer and George Plimpton? Or just the highbrow version of Judd Apatow?
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 AP photo / Kevin Sanders, file
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By Chris Hedges — I survive the degradation that has become America—a land that exalts itself as a bastion of freedom and liberty while it tortures human beings, stripped of their rights, in offshore penal colonies, a land that wages wars defined under international law as criminal wars of aggression, a land that turns its back on its poor, its weak, its mentally ill, in a relentless drive to embrace totalitarian capitalism—because I read books.
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By Eugene Robinson — The fact that African-American patriotism is never simple doesn’t mean it’s in any way halfhearted; to the contrary, complicated relationships tend to be the deepest and strongest.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Barack Obama keeps trying to end the wars over culture and religion, and good for him. The 1960s are so 40 years ago. But Obama’s opponents, as well as some of his friends, won’t let him do it.
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By Eugene Robinson — George W. Bush’s presidency seems exhausted and irrelevant, but that’s a dangerous illusion.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — If the long conservative era that began with Ronald Reagan’s election is over, will the judges appointed during the right’s ascendancy be able to block, frustrate and undermine the efforts of a new progressive majority?
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By David Sirota — Books have survived radio and television for the same reason they will survive the Internet. Human life is simply too complex to be represented by a news spot or a blog post.
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 AP photo / Henry Arvidsson / United Nations
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As a former U.N. weapons inspector, Scott Ritter knows a thing or two about nuclear threats around the world. So when so-called experts go on television or appear in print to help make the case for war with Iran, it gets his attention.
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By Eugene Robinson — The question isn’t whether race will be an issue in the general election campaign between Obama and McCain. Race is already an issue, even if largely confined to the shadow world of implication and coded language.
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Satire by Andy Borowitz —
Republican presidential nominee John McCain officially kicked off his general election campaign today, promising to bring his race for the White House to “all 13 colonies.”
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Here’s a story, both chilling and inspiring: how prisoners at an Oklahoma prison in the aftermath of the Depression led a struggle to limit the practice of compulsory sterilization.
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 AP photo / Brennan Linsley
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By Stanley Kutler — John McCain and Barack Obama’s differences over the Supreme Court’s recent Guantanamo decision speak volumes about the two candidates and their competing visions for America.
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 AP photo / Dennis Cook
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By Stanley Kutler — For two centuries, selecting vice presidential candidates was at best a mere afterthought. Hardly anyone knew of the process, if indeed one existed aside from a brief huddle by the presidential candidate with a few advisers and friends. The presidential nominees usually settled on lesser-known figures, deserved obscurities in American history.
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For 50 years, Tom Hayden has been an indefatigable organizer on behalf of the disenfranchised, and now, with the publication of his “Writings for a Democratic Society,” we have a chance to trace the arc of activism of an American original who continues to make history.
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