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By Marc Cooper
E.J. Dionne $13.57
$40
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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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 AP photo / Alex Brandon
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By Chris Hedges — The failure by Barack Obama to chart another course in the Middle East, to defy the Israel lobby and to denounce the Bush administration’s inexorable march toward a conflict with Iran is a failure to challenge the collective insanity that has gripped the political leadership in the United States and Israel.
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By Nicholas von Hoffman — A new book by New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse argues that the plight of American workers, both white-collar and blue-collar, is growing worse, putting the American dream out of the reach of tens of millions of citizens.
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By Eugene Robinson — There will be plenty of time to chart Barack Obama’s attempt to navigate a course between the exigencies of the old politics and the promise of the new, between yesterday and tomorrow, youth and experience, black and white. For now, take a moment to consider the mind-bending improbability of what just happened.
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By David Sirota — American history is the history of populist uprisings. From the Revolutionary War to the coalfield wars, from labor organizers to anti-tax crusaders, from the New Deal to the current conservative era, backlashes to the status quo have defined every major political era.
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 The Economist
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The storied British mag is making no bones about it: America’s long primary battle, judging by the candidates it produced, was a major success. According to a new cover story, ” ... On the face of it, this is the most impressive choice America has had for a very long time.”
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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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 AP photo / LM Otero
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By Robert Scheer — What should be the most important issue in this election is one that is rarely, if ever, addressed: Why is U.S. military spending at the highest point, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than at any time since the end of World War II?
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Chris Hedges gave this keynote address on Wednesday, May 28, in Furman University’s Younts Conference Center. The address was part of protests by faculty and students over the South Carolina college’s decision to invite George W. Bush to give the May 31 commencement address.
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Eric Hobsbawm, one of our most celebrated historians, looks at what makes the American Colossus uniquely dangerous in its imperial overreach at the dawn of the third millennium.
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By David Sirota — Though he lost in the general election, Ned Lamont showed that representing the public’s anti-war sentiment and ignoring Washington’s self-appointed gurus wins national elections. And as the current campaign unfolds, the Lamont Lesson is resurfacing.
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By William Pfaff — Israel’s colonization and annexation of the Palestinian territories over the last 40 years, and opposition to the creation of an independent Palestinian state, have turned Israel into an Arab-Jewish state under Jewish control.
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By Amy Goodman — “Utah” Phillips died this week at the age of 73. He was a musician, labor organizer, peace activist and co-founder of his local homeless shelter.
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 HBO
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Leading election integrity journalist Brad Friedman reviews HBO’s portrayal of the 2000 Florida recount and wonders whether we’re not headed for another stolen election.
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Robert Scheer discusses his new book, “The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America,” with USC’s chair of history on the “Politics of Culture” radio show.
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By Joe Conason — Perhaps the senator hasn’t been paying attention for the past few decades, for he somehow seems to have surrounded himself with exactly the kind of Washington hustlers he professes to despise.
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 AP photo / Kevin Frayer
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By Allen McDuffee — George W. Bush’s attempt to juggle Israel’s 60th anniversary, Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and his hostility toward Iran means that Palestinians lose again.
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By Eugene Robinson — The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts has rejected a statue intended to stand at the memorial of Martin Luther King. The members expected a more passive depiction. Clearly the commission has some brushing up to do on American history.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Imagine what it would be like not to be able to marry the person with whom you want to spend the rest of your life. Then imagine how tens of thousands of gays and lesbians in California must have felt last week when the California Supreme Court declared that homosexuals have a right to marriage under the state’s constitution.
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 press.princeton.edu
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Sheldon Wolin’s new book offers a controversial but ultimately convincing diagnosis of how America’s democracy has succumbed to an unacknowledged totalitarian temptation.
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 commons.wikimedia.org
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While addressing the Israeli Knesset, President Bush referred to the willingness of “some” to speak with unsavory leaders such as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and he went on to compare them to those who sought to appease the Nazis before World War II. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton set aside their differences on diplomacy long enough to take objection to that statement.
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 Wikimedia Commons / AllyUnion
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By Scott Ritter — The Chicago City Council is debating a resolution urging the Illinois congressional delegation to oppose a war with Iran. Scott Ritter, who has been called as an expert witness on the matter, explains why the resolution should be supported—and not just by the citizens of Chicago.
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 commons.wikimedia.org
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By Chris Hedges — The New Atheist writers from Richard Dawkins to E.O. Wilson to Sam Harris have become the high priests not of science but the cult of science.
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In this first-ever biography of the religious leader many predict will take over Iraq after the Americans leave, Patrick Cockburn, one of the most respected correspondents in the Middle East, provides a dramatic look at a man Paul Bremer denounced as a “Bolshevik Islamist.”
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 AP photo / Maya Alleruzzo
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By John Cheney-Lippold — On the fifth anniversary of George W. Bush’s infamous stroll across the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, The New York Times asked a group of “experts” how they would accomplish the mission in Iraq. Unfortunately, the newspaper turned to some of the same geniuses who thought the war was a good idea in the first place.
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 commons.wikimedia.org
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Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus, argues for a more humane foreign policy and explains why American airstrikes in Somalia and elsewhere are about more than terrorism.
Posted on May 6, 2008
READ MORE
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By Eugene Robinson — That might be going too far for a show that still averages 28.7 million viewers, but ratings are down. In part, the cause is the presence of an even more exciting reality show on television, and it’s not even really a show.
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By Marie Cocco — There is a link between the horrific violence committed against the women of the captive Austrian family and the apparent abuse of teenage girls in Texas, and it is the same unbroken chord that connects them tangentially—but significantly—to Hannah Montana’s fall from grace.
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A star reporter for the Los Angeles Times has written a clear, even elegant anatomy of an economy that is much worse than you probably think.
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By Marie Cocco — Republicans have had great success in convincing Americans that “voter fraud” is a grave and growing threat to the republic, but the exact crime that they speak of is almost nonexistent.
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 Flickr / Joe Crimmings Photography
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By Chris Hedges — The corporate state is our shadow government. Candidates who aspire to higher office get corporate money if they promote corporate interests. Barack Obama’s campaign message, filled with lofty promises of change and hope, is also filled with repeated reassurances to the corporate elite.
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 Flickr / Jurvetson / World Economic Forum
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Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker quotes a Bill Clinton aide explaining why there has been so much tension between the former president and Barack Obama: “I think this campaign has enraged him. ... He doesn’t like Obama.” Why? Here’s one theory: While Hillary Clinton has adopted her husband’s legacy, Barack Obama has been assailing it.
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When the second plane hit the second skyscraper on 9/11, how many of us knew then just how radically our world would change?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Perhaps it was inevitable: The Democrats’ battle for the presidential nomination has now led us into the thicket of race and religion.
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By Joe Conason — Nobody with a functioning memory should be too quick to condemn Jimmy Carter for daring to speak with the leadership of Hamas, as nearly everyone along the American political spectrum suddenly has felt obliged to do.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The result of the 2008 election may come down to how voters decide to define Barack Obama. Is he Adlai Stevenson or John F. Kennedy? Updated.
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Was World War II necessary? In an exercise in literary hygiene, a distinguished historian casts a skeptical eye at an acclaimed novelist’s revisionist take on the “Good War.”
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By David Sirota — The state in which an infamous slaughter of labor organizers occurred in 1914 may not be killing unionists these days but its persecution of them continues.
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By Amy Goodman — Sen. Barack Obama is clearly a bad bowler. But it was not too long ago that African-Americans were not allowed in some bowling alleys. In Orangeburg, S.C., three young African-American men were killed for protesting against that town’s segregated bowling alley.
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What will history say about the implacable anti-imperialist and unrepentant revolutionary who has held power in Cuba for nearly 50 years? The publication of Fidel Castro’s and Ignacio Ramonet’s “My Life: A Spoken Autobiography” helps us understand the man and his myth.
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By David Sirota — A straight line can be drawn between the 1914 labor massacre in Colorado and today’s killing fields in Colombia. And one of the villains in both cases is the U.S. government.
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By Marie Cocco — The latest plot twists are stunners, even as they unfold against the scandalous backdrop of the Bush administration’s sorry regulatory record.
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By Eugene Robinson — Oh please oh please oh please. I know it’s undignified to beg, but please let John McCain pick Condoleezza Rice as his running mate.
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 White House photo / Paul Morse
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George W. Bush has said that history will determine the greatness of his presidency. According to an informal poll by George Mason University’s History News Network, 98 percent of historians polled rated Bush’s presidency a failure. Sixty-one percent ranked him last among presidents, while only 4 percent placed him among the top two-thirds.
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 AP photos / left: Gautam Singh / right: Uwe Lein
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By Chris Hedges — The battle under way in America is not a battle between religion and science. It is a battle between religious and secular fundamentalists. It is a battle between two groups intoxicated with the utopian and magical belief that humankind can perfect itself and master its destiny.
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 latimes.com
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The Swedish vodka company known for its memorable advertising has stirred a bit of controversy in the United States with an ad running in Mexico that shows what the two countries would look like “in an Absolut world.” Updated
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — In 1968, American liberalism suffered a blow from which it has still not recovered.
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By Eugene Robinson — Much has changed in the years since Martin Luther King Jr.‘s death, and yet many black Americans struggle now more than ever. We must acknowledge progress if we are to take up the work that is left incomplete.
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