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By Marilynne Robinson
$24.00
By William Shakespeare
$35
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nytimes.com
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Voters in New York’s 20th District will have to keep waiting to find out who their representative in the U.S. House will be. After a special election, the Democrat led by just 65 votes, with thousands of absentee ballots still to count. The contest received national attention and was seen as a test of President Obama and his agenda, though the district skews Republican. Update: The lead shrinks.
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Mike Keefe, The Denver Post —
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AP photo / Dan Balilty
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There’s no putting it any better than Haaretz did: “The Knesset approved Benjamin Netanyahu’s return as prime minister last night amid allegations that his new government is bloated, convoluted and unprepared to deal with Israel’s many problems.” The newspaper surveyed the Israeli public and found that 54 percent already disapprove of the new regime.
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By Amy Goodman — A former police chief of Seattle—who directed the harsh action there against 1999’s WTO protesters—has changed his views on protests, as well as on drugs. The G-20 leaders meeting in London should heed his words.
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By William Pfaff — In respect to tradition, one would expect Obama to deliver Notre Dame’s commencement address in May, but a crowd of Fighting Irish have decided to try to keep the new president away from the hallowed campus for fear that some of his thinking might rub off on them.
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roamagency.com
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The “Democracy Now!” host talks about her book, the state of activism and why “the media are the most powerful corporations on Earth—more powerful than any bomb, more powerful than any missile.”
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roamagency.com
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The “Democracy Now!” host talks about her book, the state of activism and why “the media are the most powerful corporations on Earth—more powerful than any bomb, more powerful than any missile.”
Posted on Mar 31, 2009
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By Marie Cocco — The AFL-CIO spent $250 million in last year’s elections on behalf of Obama and other Democrats, yet a waffling president and a handful of senators have managed to kill the proposed Employee Free Choice Act, a cruel defeat for labor.
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By Eugene Robinson — The president is telling Detroit to shape up or die while at the same time politely asking Wall Street, whose recklessness and greed caused this economic crisis, if it would be so kind as to accept another heaping helping of taxpayer funds.
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youtube.com
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How will Sean Penn sleep at night knowing that Fox News’ own talking points champion, Bill O’Reilly, has declared that he will never see another one of Penn’s movies?
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White House / Pete Souza
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Although they’re allotted $100,000 to redecorate, Barack and Michelle Obama will spend their own money updating the White House. The first family has turned to Michael S. Smith for the task. The designer has worked for Steven Spielberg, Rupert Murdoch and former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, whose decorating habits have come to epitomize corporate greed.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — If there is a trend in democratic nations now, it is toward younger politicians who express disenchantment with the status quo, more by questioning past approaches than by offering fully worked-out alternative systems.
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Flickr / richardefreeman
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The Obama administration auto task force has sent both GM and Chrysler back to the drawing board, turning down requests for additional loans until the companies come up with more realistic restructuring plans. The government will prop up GM for two months while the automaker tries again. Chrysler has 30 days.
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Flickr / Anatoli Axelrod
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GM CEO Rick Wagoner resigned Sunday, apparently at the request of the Obama administration as part of a larger bailout agreement. The ouster of the man who gave us the Hummer wasn’t entirely unexpected. He spent the last eight years driving the world’s biggest car company into a ditch. Now if only we could apply this logic to the banking bailout. Update
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Matt Miller, a host of KCRW’s “Left, Right & Center,” has written a book full of necessary honesty and courage—a welcome effort to rid us of the nostrums and shopworn notions that cloud our thinking and constrain our politics.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The most significant moment of Obama’s news conference concerned taxes: his defense of proposed limits on the benefits that the well-off get for their charitable contributions and mortgage payments.
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By Ellen Goodman — There are now 1,100 square feet on the South Lawn of the White House being transformed into a kitchen garden. If Americans follow the first family’s lead, the seed pack will become the new stimulus package.
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U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Jon Soucy
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Mark Danner made headlines last week with his essay in The New York Review of Books on the CIA’s use of torture and a secret report from the International Committee of the Red Cross detailing such practices. Find out why he says, “Torture is for people with weak nerves.”
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Flickr / Ken Lund
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More than 2 million acres in nine states will be set aside as protected wilderness as soon as President Obama signs a bill just passed by Congress. Land in California, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia will be off-limits to development.
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Senat RP / Polish Senate
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Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek is currently the EU’s rotating president and, like a drunken sailor on karaoke night, he’s letting everyone know what’s on his mind. On President Obama’s economic policies, for example, he declared: “All of these steps, these combinations and permanency, is the road to hell.”
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Wikimedia Commons / John Regas
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Sen. Arlen Specter gave the proposed Employee Free Choice Act the shaft Tuesday, severely wounding legislation that would make forming unions significantly easier. Labor leaders were depending on support from moderates such as Specter, but, facing a primary challenge, the Pennsylvania Republican chickened out.
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Flickr / NCinDC
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Since the year 2000, National Public Radio has increased its audience by 47 percent, with an 8.7 percent jump in the last year alone. That might have something to do with the collapse of the news media over the same period. While newspapers try to compete with Craigslist, NPR has acquired more foreign bureaus—and a bigger morning audience—than the major network news divisions.
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By William Pfaff — The globalization of the international economy launched as an accidental policy of the Clinton administration has proved to be a destroyer of people, governments and wealth.
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AP photo / M. Spencer Green
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By Chris Hedges — The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. Our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Critics who argue that he is asking Congress to do too much are finding it far easier to talk about an overloaded system than to tell those without health insurance that they will have to wait a few more years.
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Flickr / epicharmus
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The Toxic Asset Relief Program was originally designed to save the banks from their bad bets by purchasing toxic assets, but has since evolved into something of a multipurpose slush fund. Now the Obama administration is getting back to the business of buying junk, elaborating on a plan that sent the Dow tumbling when it was first announced. Update
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By Eugene Robinson — The treasury secretary may indeed be the hardest-working man in Washington. But in order to survive, let alone succeed, he’s going to have to make a more convincing case that he’s part of the solution and not part of the problem.
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By David Sirota — In the 21st century Gilded Age, the blue-collar shower-after-work crowd is given the tough, while the white-collar shower-before-work gang gets the love, and never before this week was that doctrine made so clear.
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By Marie Cocco — If only the contracts entered into by shop-floor workers at auto plants were as inviolate as those secured by the incompetent pirates of the American International Group.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — We are at the beginning of a great popular rebellion against those who showed no self-restraint when it came to lining their own pockets.
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barackobama.com
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The good news: The United States now supports a U.N. statement urging governments everywhere to decriminalize homosexuality. The bad news: In the words of the State Department, “supporting this statement commits us to no legal obligations,” such as ending discrimination in employment, housing and the military in the U.S. itself.
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White House / Pete Souza
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Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has developed a bad reputation in his short time on the job. He appears to have the fortitude of porridge and a love of banks and the bankers who bankrupt them. Despite calls for Geithner’s ouster over the AIG bonus blunder, the president says he has “complete confidence” in his top economist.
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By Eugene Robinson — The last thing the surgeon said to me before they rolled me into the operating room was, “You know, if you and Obama had your way with health care, it wouldn’t be me doing this operation. It would just be some guy.”
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Flickr / VictoryNH: Protect Our Primary
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Michael Steele recently irritated his party by taking a tolerant view of abortion, but the RNC chairman is here to let everyone know that there’s plenty of crazy where that came from. While guest-hosting a talk show, Steele compared President Obama to Richard Nixon and argued that, science be damned, the Earth isn’t getting warmer—it’s getting colder.
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Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn
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By Chris Hedges — The Ten Commandments were for the ancients, and are for us, the core rules that, when honored, hold us together, and when dishonored lead to alienation, discord and violence. The worship of the free market has turned out to be an idol, and like all idols it has now demanded its human sacrifice.
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Benjamin Netanyahu has taken a step closer to the prime minister’s office by signing a deal with ultranationalist Avigdor Lieberman, who will become Israel’s foreign minister if Netanyahu is able to put the finishing touches on a governing coalition. The ascendancy of both men is a major blow to the peace process.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The House this week is expected to vote to expand civilian service, and the Senate will soon take up a similar bill. This issue holds the promise of producing that much prized but elusive Washington commodity: a large bipartisan majority.
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Beverly Gage’s new book exhumes a nearly forgotten tale of class warfare—call it 9/16.
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By David Sirota — Republicans insist that “competition solves health care,” and tell us that government programs are worse than private health insurance. So, don’t they welcome a private-versus-public competition, believing that the former will trump the latter? Well ... uh ... no.
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White House / Chuck Kennedy
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The Dow is up another 240 points, gaining 9.5 percent over the last three days, but the president doesn’t want you getting too excited about it—or too distraught when things inevitably swing the other way.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Obama speaks disdainfully of “ideology,” but there comes a time when first principles need to be articulated. Conservatives have entered this fight with guns blazing while progressives have hidden behind a Maginot Line armed only with the word pragmatism.
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White House / Eric Draper
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You may have heard about the scandalously overpriced presidential helicopters the U.S. had ordered from Italy, but did you know they may have been a payoff for forged intelligence used to sell the war in Iraq? It’s all a part of “a web of conspiracy and deceit,” says journalist Paolo Pontoniere.
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U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Adam Mancini
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The president will withdraw 12,000 troops from Iraq over the next six months, but where will he send them? Back to America? Ski trip to Aspen? Or perhaps he’ll just airlift the veterans to Afghanistan, where a similar number of reinforcements has been promised over a similar period.
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State Dept. / WikiMedia Commons
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Hillary Clinton’s media savvy was on full display Saturday during an appearance on the Turkish equivalent of “The View.” Dishing on family and fashion, Clinton was by all accounts a hit in a country where only 9 percent view the U.S. favorably. Update: Video
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Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery
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