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By Anne Boston
$11.16
$17
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John McCain was dignified and gracious in the face of overwhelming defeat Tuesday night. Barack Obama embraced his moment in history with yet another incredible speech. It brought tears to Jesse Jackson’s eyes and to countless others around the country.
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By Marie Cocco — The line for early voting wound up one side of a corridor in the Loudoun County voter registration office and down the other. Those in line were, collectively, the face of change in Virginia that could tip the state into the Democratic column for the first time since the LBJ landslide of 1964.
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By Eugene Robinson — I know there’s a chance that the first African-American to make a serious run for the presidency will lose. But that is precisely what’s new: I’m talking about possibility, not inevitability. For African-Americans, this is nothing short of mind-blowing.
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AP photo / Kevork Djansezian
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By The Rev. Madison Shockley — The thousands of same-gender couples who have married in the few months since the California Supreme Court cleared the way are in fact married. The notion that a majority vote by people who are not party to these marriages of love, commitment, care and family will have the power to impose a divorce on these couples is flatly repugnant.
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AP photo / Jose Luis Magana
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By Chris Hedges — Tomorrow I will go to a polling station in Princeton, N.J., and vote for Ralph Nader. I know the tired arguments against a Nader vote. But there is little disagreement among liberals and progressives about the Nader and Obama campaign issues. Nader would win among us in a landslide if this was based on issues.
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AP photo / LM Otero
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — A good politician triumphs by adapting to the times and taking advantage of opportunities as they come. A great politician anticipates openings others don’t see and creates possibilities that were not there before.
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us.penguingroup.com
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An insightful book discloses how a confidence game combined pride and cunning and stupidity to bring America to the brink of catastrophe.
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AP photo / Al Grillo
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By G.W. Schulz, Center for Investigative Reporting —
When Sarah Palin brags about the self-reliance of her state, she doesn’t mention the mobile command communications vehicle, bought with federal dollars to help keep her home town of 7,028 safe from terrorism. Thanks in part to an anti-terrorism bonanza, Alaska is one of the greatest per-capita beneficiaries of federal funding among the 50 states.
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By David Sirota — John McCain and Barack Obama have made the race’s final weeks an ideological proxy war between two presidential icons who still loom larger than them: Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt.
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Amanda Jone’s father encouraged her to vote. That wasn’t always an easy feat in Texas, but she did her best, paying poll taxes to vote for FDR and others. Now the 109-year-old daughter of a former slave has voted for the man who could become the first black president and she says, “I feel good about [it].”
Posted on Oct 30, 2008
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By Marie Cocco — For a steel sculpture of migrating salmon, amongst other goodies, Ted Stevens—one of the lions of the Senate—was willing to forfeit the kingdom.
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By Ellen Goodman — Have you noticed that the spookiest colors of the season are not orange and black but red and blue? As Halloween slips into Election Day, the race for the White House has scared more grown-ups than any trip to the haunted house.
Posted on Oct 30, 2008
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tickertapedigest.com
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The Dow shot up 889.35 points on Tuesday, a welcome respite from Wall Street’s month of plunges. Things could still get a lot worse: While some buyers snapped up what looked like bargain stocks, others said they expected a major drop before things get better.
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Wikimedia Commons / edited for effect
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By Chris Hedges — The old assumptions and paradigms about capitalism and free markets are dead. A new, virulent populism, still inchoate, is slowly and painfully rising to take their place. This populism will determine the future of the country. It is as likely to be right-wing as left-wing.
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A new book investigates the illicit trade in antiquities and raises uneasy questions over cultural patrimony, the fevers of nationalism and the imperial ambitions of museums.
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By David Sirota — Is John McCain stupid, or does he believe we are? That’s the question as he criticizes Barack Obama for allegedly trying to “redistribute the wealth” with a plan to lower taxes on the middle class and raise them on the super-rich.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — A candidate is supposed to rally the base during the primaries and reach out to the middle at election time. John McCain got it backward, and it’s hurting him.
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By Ellen Goodman — A cohort of entrepreneurs and scientists is the cutting edge of the Personal Genome Project. In an act of altruism and/or exhibitionism, the PGP-10 have put their medical records, traits and genetic codes on the Web where all the scientists, paparazzo and peeping Toms can see them.
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By William Pfaff — It did not take the clash between Russia and Georgia to reveal that relations between Russia and the West have taken a bad turn. They have been deteriorating since the mid-1990s, when the decision was taken to expand NATO to include the former Warsaw Pact states.
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AP photo / Seth Perlman
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Truthdig asked Demitrious C. Sinor, an inspirational educator, to sound off on the state of our schools. He warns that unless the No Child Left Behind regime ends soon, America’s classrooms could unravel. It’s a reality that neither presidential candidate seems to fully understand, but one he sees every day, from where he sits.
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AP photo / Henny Ray Abrams
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By Chris Hedges — Our oligarchic class is incompetent at governing, managing the economy, coping with natural disasters, educating our young, handling foreign affairs, providing basic services like health care and safeguarding individual rights. They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of the common good.
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eitb24.com
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An acclaimed Spanish judge has ordered the unearthing of some of the unmarked graves of the tens of thousands who were killed during the first two decades of Gen. Francisco Franco’s fascist rule of Spain, formally declaring the repression by Franco and associates as a “crime against humanity.”
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — John McCain’s debate performance almost certainly did him good among those whose votes he already has: very conservative Republicans who share Joe the Plumber’s view that Obama is some kind of socialist.
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By Amy Goodman — The 2008 presidential election may see the highest participation in U.S. history. Voter-registration organizations and local election boards have been overwhelmed by enthusiastic people eager to vote. But not everyone is happy about this blossoming of democracy.
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AP photo / Jim Mone
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Are we witnessing the re-emergence of the far right as a power in American politics? Has John McCain, inadvertently perhaps, become the midwife of a new movement built around fear, xenophobia, racism and anger?
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By Marie Cocco — The essential fallacy of the 401(k) has been exposed. It took a historic market collapse—one that threatens to impoverish workers already in retirement and those who are nearing it.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Chris Hedges — It is no longer our economy but our democracy that is in peril. Financial collapses lead to political extremism. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class, glimpsed at John McCain rallies, presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash.
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Two new books resurrect the seductions and corruptions of pre-revolutionary Cuba.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Each campaign has given voters ample notice about the inclinations, temperaments, habits, philosophical leanings and advisers they would bring to the White House. That’s enough.
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AP photo / Susan Walsh
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By Bruce Fein — Would the Republican VP nominee vote for herself? During her debate with Joe Biden, Sarah Palin said “we have to fight for” and “protect” our freedom, but her party and the policies she seems to support have crippled American liberty.
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AP photo / Jim Bourg, pool
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By Scott Ritter — Ralph Nader is right: The two-party system is failing America. There isn’t time between now and Election Day to create a viable third-party candidate, and so the sad reality is one of two deeply flawed men, the byproduct of a deeply flawed political system, will serve as president for the next four or eight years.
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By Amy Goodman — The reviews are in, and the latest U.S. presidential debate, the “town hall” from Nashville, Tenn., was a snore. One problem is that in a debate it is important for the debaters to actually disagree.
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AP photo
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By Mary Hershberger — Troubling questions hover over Lt. Cmdr. McCain’s actions in the catastrophic 1967 fire aboard the aircraft carrier Forrestal and the period immediately afterward. His later accounts of events following the accident also raise issues. American voters, after hearing so much from the senator’s campaign about his military record, deserve to know all the facts.
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By Arthur Blaustein — Many Americans believe, despite the current financial crisis, that Republicans are generally better at managing the economy. History tells a very different story.
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By Marie Cocco — To understand where the presidential campaign is heading in the four weeks still ahead of us, look back 20 years. The remarkable transformation John McCain has undergone since 2000 is itself an unsettling tribute to the lasting poison Lee Atwater poured into the political waters.
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AP photo / Susan Walsh
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By Chris Hedges — The passing of the $850-billion bailout pulled the plug on the New Deal. The Great Society is now gasping for air, mortally wounded, coughing up blood. It will not recover. It was murdered by the Democratic Party.
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Former Time correspondent Andrew Meier presents a riveting exhumation of the previously unknown story of Cy Oggins, an early American-Jewish communist who spied for the Soviets and was killed by them in 1947.
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By Marie Cocco — Americans are reluctant to make John McCain pay for George W. Bush’s sins, but with so many crises on so many fronts, the country can’t afford to cut him any slack.
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By David Sirota — In the late 1990s, Washington was in the throes of a deregulatory orgy. Many lampooned Rep. Bernie Sanders’ opposition to the grotesquerie, and his notoriety as the only self-described socialist in Congress. Nobody guessed that in a few years our country would become the United States’ Socialist Republic.
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AP photo / Manuel Balce Ceneta
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By Stanley Kutler — Wall Street will not trouble its collective consciousness with worry over the Constitution. But this bailout bill is virtually unprecedented in its assumptions and its reach for unchecked power.
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By Marie Cocco — The candidates heading into Friday’s scheduled debate should heed the politician who first conquered the format, John F. Kennedy, who believed that the images portrayed via TV were “likely to be uncannily correct.”
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propublica.org
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Assuming the administration’s $700-billion scheme is approved, the total price tag for bailouts this year—including Bear Stearns, AIG and Freddie and Fannie—will be roughly three times greater than all other U.S. bailouts ever. Because $1.015 trillion is a hard figure to wrap one’s head around, ProPublica puts the numbers in perspective.
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By Sam Harris — When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. “They think they’re better than you!” is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. “Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!” Yes, all too ordinary.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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While lawmakers debated exactly how to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at Wall Street, the Dow dropped 372 points on Monday. The price of oil, meanwhile, had a $25 surge that took many analysts by surprise.
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Flickr / scriptingnews
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The trailblazing atheist and Truthdig contributor takes on Sarah Barracuda in the new Newsweek: “When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. ‘They think they’re better than you!’ is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again.”
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Carolyn Eisenberg takes a close look at Melvyn Leffler’s “For the Soul of Mankind” to ask whether our current troubles are rooted in a history that continues to haunt us.
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By Joe Conason — With the markets in frightening turmoil and the public outraged by financial irresponsibility and excessive greed, John McCain has suddenly rediscovered the importance of strong, watchful government.
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By Eugene Robinson — What kind of person tells a self-aggrandizing lie, gets called on it, admits publicly that the truth is not at all what she originally claimed—and then goes out and starts telling the original lie again without changing a word?
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A new book by Brenda Wineapple sheds light on the little-known relationship of the reclusive genius poet with one of America’s most fervent radicals.
Posted on Sep 11, 2008
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